by Mark Coakley
7: A FATEFUL MEETING
Halfdan turned to look at the view. Since waking this morning with a hangover and worse, he had walked up a mountain overlooking Eid. He was wearing the berserker's boots and carrying his heavy ax.
From where Halfdan had climbed, there was a good view of the fjord and the lands surrounding it. Eid could be seen -- its two main streets going roughly north-south, seven smaller streets going east-west, dozens of grassy-roofed homes and other buildings, the royal farm-fields, all surrounded by the wood wall that Halfdan had scrambled over last night. Even from this distance, he could see that King Lambi's hall had been completely burned to the ground. There was a black-scorched, rectangle-shaped smudge where the famous hall had once stood.
Halfdan looked away from that painful sight and looked west, at the brown-and-white ridges of mountains marching in rough lines to the horizon. The blue-green water of the fjord snaked between the mountains, towards the Endless Ocean.
He started walking up again. Near the cold, windy top of the mountain was a patch of summer snow. His body ached from a dozen hurts, and he was getting tired of walking uphill. He scooped a few handfuls of the crunchy frost into his mouth to drink the melt. As he was doing so, he saw something from the side of his eye.
A stone's-throw away, a young woman was sitting on a rock with her face in her hands, her back to him, as her shoulders shook with sobbing.
As he approached her, an older, frowning woman stepped out from behind a rock outcrop, holding a bow. She pulled the arrow back to beside her ear and aimed it at Halfdan.
"Stop!" she shouted.
Halfdan dropped the ax to the rocky ground and put his hands in the air, saying, "I mean you no harm."
"Who are you?"
"Halfdan son of Gødrød, of the town of Os. Folk call me Halfdan the Black. I am one of King Lambi's fighters." After a pause, Halfdan said, "I mean, I used to be. Now I have no job."
"Why are you so dark?"
Halfdan briefly explained his parentage. (He did this almost every time he met someone new.)
The older woman said, "You said that Lambi is dead?"
"Yes."
The old woman's arrow was still drawn to beside her suspicious-looking face, pointed at Halfdan's chest. She said, "Who did it?"
Halfdan said, "The kings of Sogn and Førde. Their men trapped King Lambi and all of my blood-brothers inside the hall and burned the hall down. I was the only one to survive. Because I ran away."
Halfdan knew of the involvement of the kings of Sogn and Førde because when Halfdan had woken up this morning, the berserker lying on the cliff-side path had been still alive. Paralyzed, but alive and able to talk. After Halfdan had dragged him to the waterfall and held his head under a few times, the berserker from Sogn had spent his last moments of life answering Halfdan's questions.
"Why did you run away?" asked the old woman.
Was that a flash of contempt in her eyes?
Did she think he was a coward?
Was he?
After running away from the burning of his king, what was he?
Was he anything?
Nothing?
The old woman said again, "Why did you run away?"
Halfdan's face-muscles tightened. He looked at the old woman with irritation and said, "Either shoot me or put that thing down. I said, I mean you no harm."
"How do I know?"
"You don't. So shoot me."
"I might."
But after a few moments of silence, she lowered the arrow and relaxed the draw-string.
"I will trust you."
Halfdan picked up the battle-ax, saying, "Who are you?"
The older woman was called Siv, and her daughter was called Yngvild. The two of them lived together on a farm in the town of Starheim. Both were clever and proud and sometimes too sharp-tongued.
A rabbit-fur hood covered most of Siv's sparse grey hair. She wore a blue dress decorated with green glass beads, under a light blue apron held in place by oval-shaped wax-polished wood brooches at her shoulders. Dangling from her belt was a small knife and one of the small wood boxes in which women carried personal objects.
Yngvild was a few years younger than Halfdan and beautiful in looks. She was dressed like her mother, but with more attention to fashion, and from her belt hung a bronze key, which showed she was married. Yngvild was tall, with a strong jaw and bold eyes. Her grey-blue eyes matched her mothers'. A grey head-cloth was over her long and braided yellow hair. She also carried a bow and some hunting-arrows.
Siv explained that she and Yngvild had been visiting friends in Eid for the past few days. Yesterday, Yngvild and Siv had spent the day up on the mountain-side, gathering magic plants -- Siv was a healer, and Yngvild training to become one -- until late in the night, when they had returned to the home of their friends, to find it full of horror and tragedy. Their friends both lay on the floor, dead, both of them covered with gaping cuts and stab-holes. Their serving-girl's body was tied to a bed, half naked and grossly mutilated.
Hearing violence from other houses, Siv and Yngvild had fled back up the mountain.
Yngvild was sobbing again while Siv finished telling Halfdan their story. They were in a hidden cleft of rock on the other side of the mountain, still near the peak, sitting around a small fire. Siv and Yngvild were sharing a blanket around their shoulders against the chill. That was all they had for warmth. The air was chilly so high up, especially in the shade.
Yngvild said, "Why would the kings of Sogn and Førde have their fighters kill folk who weren't fighters and not involved in politics?"
"I don't know," Halfdan said.
Siv said, "What do you know? What did the berserker tell you before you drowned him?"
"He told me that King Njal of Sogn and King Gunvald of Førde had tried to get King Lambi to join them in a raid on some new land to the west that is supposed to be very rich. When King Lambi refused to join them, the other kings worried that when they were off raiding this new land, Sogn and Førde would be left without much defence, and King Lambi might be tempted to invade and take them over. I had not heard about this, because King Lambi was not in the habit of talking about diplomacy with us regular fighters, but it makes sense. It was no secret that King Lambi lusted for a bigger kingdom. King Njal and King Gunvald had another reason to want King Lambi out of the way -- they wanted to use his ships for the raid. So, by bribing a few folk in Fjordane who loved silver more than their king, Njal and Gunvald managed to get groups of their men to Eid. They stayed in a hidden camp outside the walls, while a traitor inside Eid did their dirty-work. When I happened to be outside to piss, the traitor went to the hall, giving the dogs food to keep them quiet, and jammed the hall-doors shut, both front and back; I don't know how. Maybe magic. As he was leaving, he saw me and shot an arrow at me and left me for dead, going to a gate to let in the others. When I was running
away, King Njal's and King Gunvald's men surrounded the hall, to burn it with everybody trapped inside. That's all I know."
Yngvild said, "But why would they hurt innocent town-folk?"
Halfdan said, "Sometimes, when a raid goes well, the leader will reward his men by letting them go wild. The men are allowed to steal whatever they find, drink until their minds are gone, smash things for fun, kill civilian folk for fun. And do what they want with females."
Siv looked coldly at Halfdan and said, "You are a fighter. At least, you used to be. When you did a good raid, did King Lambi reward you that way?"
"Sometimes. I enjoyed the stealing and drinking. But I did not do much of the other stuff. When I was much younger, a few times I did the things that I saw my blood-brothers doing -- but, believe me, it has not been for many years. Now I know it is wrong. So I will not hurt either of you, in any way. I vow by Freya."
Siv looked slightly relieved; she had been glancing nervously between Halfdan and Yngvild for some time, as the sky was getting darker and the air getting colder as night fell.
Yngvild looked from Halfdan to Siv and said, "By Freya, what kind of healers are we? He is hurt! In all the excitement, I didn't even think about treating his hurts."
"I will do it," Siv said. She opened the box on her belt and took out a small clay jar. There was a picture of a bee painted on the jar-lid.
"As long as you don't try to bleed me," Halfdan said. "I have bled enough. No more."
"We don't use that method," Yngvild said.
First Siv cleaned his hurts with a cloth wet with melted snow, then she smeared on a smelly orange paste from the jar. The goo tingled on his hurt flesh.
"What is it?"
Yngvild told him, "Magic herbs mixed with honey."
