Viking Warrior

by Judson Roberts

  Sigrid filled the horn a third time, and Gunhild placed it in my hands. I raised it high. All eyes were on me. I hoped my voice would not quaver or squeak from the fear I felt at speaking in front of so many people.

  “To all the Gods,” I said, “To Odin, the God of my father, and to the White Christ, the God of my mother, grant this ship a safe voyage.”

  I poured some of the mead onto the ground. Thankfully the horn was no longer full after my offering to the Gods, for my hands were shaking from my nervousness as I raised it again.

  “To Derdriu,” I said, “daughter of Caidoc, a king of Ireland. She was my mother, and a more loving mother there has never been. In this land, she was but a thrall. She will never be sung of round the fires at evening time when tales of courage are told. Yet she was as brave as any warrior who has carried shield and swung sword. She offered her own life so that I could be free and be acknowledged by my father as his son. And when the time came for her to meet her death, she embraced it willingly, with head held high. To Derdriu, to her courage and her love!”

  The men in the circle echoed their approval, shouting, “To Derdriu!” as I drank. I drained the horn, and offered it back to Gunhild.

  I realized that the warriors in the circle were still staring expectantly at me. Harald leaned over and whispered, “Your toast brought much honor to your mother. It was a fine thing you did. But you must also offer a toast to Hrorik. He was your father and our chieftain. If you fail to do so, you will dishonor him and yourself.”

  Sigrid poured more mead into the horn. I took it from Gunhild and again I held it aloft. I searched my mind for words to say, for my heart held no kind feelings for my father.

  “To Hrorik. I cannot praise him as a warrior or a leader, for I did not know him as such. I knew him only as a slave knows his master, until the last hours before his death. Then only did I know him for but a moment as a father. Yet I know this of Hrorik: Toward my mother, there was in him kindness and affection, and perhaps even love, so to this I raise the cup and toast him. To Hrorik!”

  “To Hrorik!” the circle echoed, though with muted enthusiasm. I supposed my toast did not sit well with all—certainly not with Gunhild, for her anger was evident on her face. I did not care. I refused to lie at my mother’s funeral, to honor the man who’d asked for her death.

  By now the death house was engulfed in flames. A dark column of smoke rose above it, carrying the spirits of my mother and Hrorik up into the sky. High above the hilltop, the wind caught the smoke and blew it out over the sea in an ever lengthening plume.

  Round and round the circle, the toasting horn passed. Long before the death house at last collapsed in upon itself in a shower of sparks, my head was spinning from the strong mead. By then the farthest reaches of the trail of smoke, and the spirit ship that sailed upon it carrying my mother and father, were far out over the ocean, lost in the deepening dusk. As I watched my mother’s spirit sail away from our shores, I did not feel as though I’d gained what I’d dreamed of all my life. I felt as though I’d lost everything.

  6 : Lessons

  I can remember few details of the feast following the funeral, even though it was the first feast I attended as a free man, and as such should have been a new and exciting experience for me. Harald insisted I sit by his side, and made certain my cup stayed filled. I think he believed it better that I had a spinning head than a grieving heart. His strategy worked well that evening, but the morning after was a different matter.

  I awoke fully dressed, sprawled across the bed in my mother’s bed-closet, with no recollection of how I came to be there. There was a pain in my head the likes of which I’d never known, and the first thought that came to me was to seek out my mother for a remedy. At that, the memories of the day before rushed in. I would never see my mother again. She was dead. Even her body was gone, consumed by the flames. The reality of it settled on me like the weight of a great stone pressing into my chest. Though I’d learned at a young age not to shed tears—it is a mistake for a thrall to be weak, but even more of one to let weakness show—that morning I wept, for her and for myself.

  I was still dressed in my new feast clothes. Today they seemed hateful to me, a symbol of the bargain my mother had made. I removed them and dressed in the stained, rough tunic that had clothed me as a thrall. I felt it was all I deserved.

  Though it was long past dawn, most of the household still slept, recovering from the feast. A few thralls moved quietly about the longhouse, cleaning up the wreckage and leavings from the previous night’s celebration. I stopped at the hearth and helped myself to half a loaf of bread, a pot of soft cheese, and a large wooden tankard, which I filled with cool water from a waterskin hanging from one of the roof-posts. Then I staggered out into the bright sunlight and made my way up onto the hilltop.

  Inside the stone boundary of the death ship, all that remained of the death house was a large pile of ashes, speckled with scraps of dark charcoal and the charred stumps that marked where the corner-posts had stood. Somewhere among the ashes were the charred bones of my mother and Hrorik, and the beasts who’d been sacrificed at their bier.

  Fasti, Hrut, and Ing were already at work, covering the ash heap with the loose earth they’d excavated two days ago. Though the thralls had shared in the feast honoring Hrorik and Mother, and each had even been given a single tankard of ale, that was yesterday. Today they were back at their toils again, for work is the only life a thrall knows. I gave them a wide berth, for I felt no desire for human contact that morning.

  I walked back to where the grassy hilltop met the edge of the forest, and sat in the edge of the tree line. The food and water soothed my stomach and dulled the pain in my head a little, but my heart felt like it would break. My mind tormented me with visions of my mother. Too late, my thoughts were filled with things I wished to tell her—with all I should have thanked her for.

  Shortly before midday, Fasti and the others completed their work. They laid the strips of cut turf over the earth-covered ash heap, forming a low grassy mound in the center of the death ship. Not long after the thralls left the hilltop, Harald climbed into view and walked over to where I sat.

  “I have been looking for you,” he said. “Fasti told me I could find you here.”

  “She’s gone,” I told him, “and her death was because of me.”

  Harald sat on the ground beside me, looking out toward the death ship, and the sea beyond it.

  “You do Derdriu honor by grieving her loss,” he said. “But you take honor from her by blaming yourself. The decision she made was hers alone. It was her wish that you come into your birthright and become the son of a chieftain. It was her choice to give her own life to achieve that wish. Her death will be meaningless if you do not seize what she has given you.”

  I pondered Harald’s words and saw there was truth in them. Though I now regretted Mother’s choice, it would be wrong to rob it of meaning. I’d been wishing I could say more to her—could tell her how much I loved her—now that it was too late. My actions would have to speak for me now. I could only work to make myself what she’d wanted me to be: the son of a chieftain, and, perhaps, some day a man of note in my own right. I hoped that somehow, in the afterworld, she would know.

  “What must I do?” I asked Harald. “How do I seize my mother’s gift?”

  “In truth,” he answered, “we have a difficult task ahead of us. All your life you’ve been a thrall. Now you must become a warrior—and quickly. You are far behind. By your age, most young men have been practicing the skills of war for many years. It is fortunate you have me to teach you, or you might never catch up.”

  I looked at Harald. He was everything I’d ever secretly dreamed of being. He was tall and handsome, possessed of a cheerful disposition, and was a great and fearless warrior. Almost everyone, men and women, loved Harald, and he in turn was friends with all, except those few who were foolish enough to insult his honor. Those men, of course, he killed.

  Stran
gely, I felt no anger or resentment toward Harald for killing my mother. I understood that he’d done it out of kindness. Her doom was set when she’d made her bargain with Hrorik. Harald had only eased her passage, by giving her as swift and painless a death as possible. How could I resent it? I believed it was an act of love.

  “Do you resent me?” I asked him suddenly. He looked puzzled by my question.

  “Why should I?” he asked.

  “You’ve been forced, by Hrorik’s charge to you, to accept a thrall as your brother.”

  Harald pondered my words for a time before he answered. “In truth,” he said, “I had not thought of it that way. My father, on his deathbed, told me he wished for you to be raised up, and for me to care for you and train you. I would be dishonored if I did not obey my father’s dying wish.”

  I was not satisfied with his answer. “But what do you feel in your heart?” I asked. “For though your honor ensures you will act towards me as a brother, your heart might still resent having to treat a former slave as your equal. All my life you have known me as a thrall. Will you not always, in the back of your mind, think of me that way?”

  “Ubbe and Gunhild manage this estate,” Harald said. “I’ve always left the management of our thralls to them. If you had been a bad thrall, lazy or insolent, I might have noticed you more. Perhaps then, as you say, in my heart I would not welcome you. But as far as I can recall, you’ve always been industrious and well-mannered.

  “It was the Norns who spun your fate and made you born into slavery, and now they’ve changed the weave of your life and you have become a free man. No man chooses his own fate. We do not have that power. We can only react to what our fates lay before us. Why should I think less of you for a fate you could not control?

  “And there is another thing. My mother died when I was very young. I have few memories of her. Your mother, Derdriu, raised Sigrid and me, and she was as loving to us as though we were her own children. I loved her. You are her son and Hrorik’s. I am glad you are my brother.”

  Harald was a good man. My heart was not as open and generous as his. I was glad he’d never concerned himself with the management of the estate and its thralls. I was glad he’d never beaten me as a thrall, for had he, I did not think I could forget it. I knew I would never forgive Gunhild for all her acts of cruelty towards me and my mother. Though I was now her equal and we must, by necessity, act with politeness toward each other, anger still burned secretly in my heart over the thrashings I’d received at her hand or direction.

  “Do you think I can do it?” I asked Harald.

  Harald looked puzzled again. “Do what?” he replied.

  “Be the son of a chieftain. Become a warrior. I am just a thrall.”

  “It is the fate the Norns have now given you,” Harald replied. “The fates that the Three Sisters weave for us are sometimes strange and twisted. Derdriu was born the daughter of a king, yet she lived much of her life as a thrall, and died as one. You were born a thrall, yet now you’ve been raised up and acknowledged as the son of a chieftain. Noble blood fills your veins. Your mother’s father was a king of the Irish, and she was a princess. Your father was a great chieftain among the Danes. That for a time you were a thrall was just a quirk of fate woven by the Norns. You have more right to call yourself of noble blood than most who were born free.”

  Harald stood and stretched, then extended his hand to me. I took it, and he pulled me up. As I stood I swayed a little and winced at the throbbing that surged anew in my head. I grimaced and squinted my eyes at the pain.

  “Mead is sweet in the cup at the feast table, but can be bitter in the morning,” Harald said, noticing my expression. “We will start your lessons as a warrior tomorrow. This afternoon we’ll take one of the small boats out on the fjord. I, too, need the wind and salty air to clear my head after last night’s feast. And while we sail, I’ll tell you the memories I have of Derdriu from when you were but a babe and she was mother to Sigrid and me.”

  Harald did not boast when he’d said I was fortunate he was to be my teacher. Most Danish free men—even chieftains like Hrorik—were farmers, and generally they farmed more of the year than they raided. Though no man was a more avid warrior when battle called than Hrorik had been, he’d also enjoyed the physical labor of wresting the fruits of a harvest from the land and, when at home, could often be found working in the fields alongside the thralls.

  Harald, by contrast, did not enjoy the labors of a farmer. Though he would join in the work at times, such as harvest when all were needed, his true loves were weaponcraft and war, and he practiced their arts constantly. Although he was but twenty years of age, he was unquestionably the finest swordsman in the district, and some opined he was one of the finest in all of Denmark. He’d already fought and won five duels—more than most men fight in a lifetime. In three of them he’d killed his opponents, two of whom had been berserks—dangerous killers of men.

  My first lesson, Harald informed me, would be to learn the correct way to cut with a sword. Inwardly I groaned, though I didn’t show my frustration on my face. If I was to make up for years of missed training, surely I needed to begin somewhere further along in the process. I was certain I knew full well how to cut, for I was already skilled with an axe—I could chop through a seasoned oak log faster than many grown men. Surely, I thought, oak wood was far harder to cut than flesh. I expected my first lesson to be brief.

  We started early in the morning, tramping across the fields until we reached an area at the edge of the woodlands where many small saplings grew, as the forest tried to reclaim the cleared land. The mature trees had seeded heavily here. Their numerous offspring ranged in diameter from a single finger to as large as a man’s wrist.

  Harald was carrying a battered-looking sword in a rough scabbard.

  “I took this from the body of a dead Frank in Frisia,” he explained. “The hilt and the scabbard are finished roughly, but there’s good steel in the blade. It takes and holds a sharp edge. I use it for practice. Never,” he continued, his voice and expression serious, “cut wood, even saplings, with a fine sword. Swords are not made for such work, and over time the shock will shake the handle loose, and may damage the blade.”

  Unsheathing the sword, Harald used its edge to scrape a small patch of bark off of a sapling at a height slightly above my shoulders. Then he handed the sword to me.

  “This tree is an enemy facing you,” he said. “That mark is his unprotected neck. With one blow, strike off his head.”

  I’d never held a sword before. I shifted the handle until it felt comfortable in my hand. Eyeing the mark, I drew the sword back at shoulder height, much as I would have drawn back an axe, and gave it a full, hard swing with all the strength of my arm and shoulder. The blade hit just above the mark Harald had made and stuck, embedded halfway through the sapling’s trunk. The force of the blow left the blade vibrating and jarred my arm.

  If it had been an axe, I told myself, the weight of the blade would have cut the sapling through. I began to suspect that the sword was an overrated weapon.

  “The sword,” Harald said, “is a weapon of skill and precision. Its blade is thin and sharp. It will give poor service if used with naught but brute force, like a wood-cutter’s axe. Did you feel the shock in the blade?”

  I nodded.

  “A proper cut will not shock your arm or the sword. You swung the sword with all your strength, did you not?”

  Again I nodded.

  “Had you missed, the force of your blow would have carried your arm far out of position, and your foe could have killed you before you recovered. A properly struck blow will do more damage, with less force, than one such as you struck. Your blows must be powerful enough to kill if they land, but light and quick enough so you can recover and defend yourself, or strike again quickly, if you miss.”

  Harald reached up and grasped the sword’s grip. He worked its blade free from the trunk of the sapling.

  “Another thing,” he
added. “If you aim your cuts into your target at an angle, rather than swinging straight on as you did, and if you pull the sword ever so slightly back toward you as it strikes, its blade will be far more likely to slice through your target rather than merely chop at it.”

  As he spoke these last words, Harald positioned himself in front of the sapling, his left foot forward, his body slightly turned, and his right foot back. His left arm was in front of his body, as if it supported an invisible shield. He held the sword loosely in his right hand, its blade pointed upright, the hilt held close to his body and slightly above his waist.

  Suddenly, as if it moved of its own accord, the sword’s blade leapt up and swept down diagonally across the sapling, shearing at an angle through the trunk exactly where the bark had been scraped away. Scarcely had the blade cleared the wood than Harald whipped the blade in a loop, bringing it back overhead then down again, striking the sapling from the opposite side, again slicing cleanly through the trunk at an angle, a hand’s length below the first cut. The top of the sapling had just begun to topple sideways toward the ground as, halting the downward swing of his blade, Harald whipped his wrist and the sword backward and up in a rising backhand cut. He slashed through the sapling’s trunk a third and final time at thigh height.

  I stared awestruck as the sections of the sapling dropped around its stump on the ground.

  “Do you see now the importance of learning the proper way to cut?” Harald asked.

  I nodded silently. Harald grinned.

  “There is another thing you must understand about the sword—and cutting with it: A sword’s edge must be thin and sharp to cut through clothing, flesh, and bone. A sharp edge can cut very well, but it is not intended for anything else.