She stopped, the pink mouth freezing shut, and he pulled his hand back quickly and ended his singing. She lifted her head and began to laugh. The other two were laughing as well, laughing and pointing. He had seen such laughter before, and knew it was towards him. He pitched himself back and away from the girls. The boys now had joined them, and one of them thrust out his arms like wings and stretched his neck skyward. He saw the mouth round, the energy from the chest as some sort of sound came forth. Tindr leapt up to stand with them, reaching his arms out as well. If the girls would laugh at him he would play with the boys. He picked up his song again. But the leading boy turned on him and pointed at the geese, then at Tindr. He too was laughing. Tindr’s singing sounded like the honking of geese to them.
He stepped back, stung, and snapped his mouth closed. His cheeks were hot and he feared he might cry. All of them were before him now with arms outstretched, boys standing, the girls still sitting, prompting him, teasing him to sing again. The girls rose and flapped their arms, began to circle him. The flower crown they had made was torn by their feet. He felt unable to move, and knew tears had crept their way down his face. Then his father Dagr came, walking slowly but with fastened eyes out of his fishing shed, twining tool still in hand, glowering at the laughing children.
He could not call his parents when he needed them.
He could let out a bawl, or a piercing shriek, if he had hurt himself. But if he wanted his mother or father, he would resort to a honking bray. Tindr remembered their names, Nenna and Dadda, how these words felt in his mouth when he had called them when he was very little. But though he felt the force of his own lungs, his tongue moving, throat quavering, he could not hear himself try to form “Nenna” or “Dadda”. He saw by their faces how awful it sounded when he tried; his Da would drop his eyes to the ground, and the smile on Nenna’s face shifted, as if she were hurt.
So Da made him a little whistle, carved from the leg bone of a sheep. It had two holes drilled in it, and Da showed him how to blow through it, and how to vary the sound that came from it by closing one or the other hole with his finger. Tindr blew once with both holes open to mean his Da. And because he remembered the word Nenna so well, he blew twice for her: Nen-na.
He wore the whistle around his neck, at the end of a hempen cord. It was the first of many, for he would lose them climbing in the trees or break them tumbling in the grasses. But the bone whistle gave him a voice to call with.
Tindr spent part of every day, Winter or Summer, in the forest. Dagr took him hunting in Fall, taught him how to weave snares and handle a bow. His cousin Ragnfast, a few years older and bigger than he, sometimes walked down from his upland farm and joined them, spending a night or two as well. Tindr saw they looked almost like brothers, but Ragnfast’s eyes were not the strange blue-white of his own. They were a milder blue, and were often lit with his smile. He could make Tindr smile too, and did not care how his laugh sounded. Ragnfast was strong and good with horses, which his parents bred, and he taught Tindr how to ride. Ragnfast had sisters but no brothers, and with Tindr he could roughhouse and ride and hunt. He had been a part of Tindr’s life as long as both boys could remember; there at every Blót, every Winter’s Feast, every Summer Gathering.
Ragnfast recalled Tindr’s sister Hedinfrid well. They had both six Summers the last time he saw her; Tindr was no more than a toddling boy, and the other sister, Holmfrid, just a little older. It was Hedinfrid that Ragnfast sometimes saw in his dreams. Hedinfrid had straight pale yellow hair that curled at the tips where it fell over her shoulders and back. Her eyes were the blue of the brightest Spring flower, the blue-star. Her right cheek crimped into one deep dimple when she smiled. She liked to slip her small cool hand into that of Ragnfast when he came down with his folk from his upland farm to play. Ragnfast told her once that he would wed her, and Hedinfrid had smiled and nodded. Then she was dead.
Many young died that Spring, taken by the fever that had reddened the cheeks of Hedinfrid and her little sister. Ragnfast had been sick too, but unlike Tindr, had lost nothing to the heat burning inside him.
As Tindr grew Ragnfast came more often, to the pleasure of all at the sea-side house. Ragnfast was with them the first time they visited a snare that Tindr had set. It was laid at a well-known hare-run, where Dagr had snagged hares before. But this snare had been woven by Tindr, and set by him too. He had braided the sheep’s sinew himself, and tied the small loop that the larger one would hang from. He had struck down a long pine seedling with his axe, and bent it over the slight trail where the hares ran, and drove in the sticks to direct the hare to the waiting loop dangling a hand’s length above. That morning the three of them walked slowly through the leaf litter and fallen pine needles, past the browning and curled fern fronds to the bottom of the small ravine. There, nearly at the end of the run, where Tindr had set it, lay the caught hare.
It was still alive, panting in the flattened grass, one powerful thumper turned up to show the short fine dark hairs. The wedge-shaped head lolled out upon the dry grass. Tindr took it all in. Its eye looked like one of the glass beads his mother wore about her neck, a near-black bead with a spark of fire in its darkness. His father gestured him forward. A rabbit's heart can be stilled by pressing it with the fingers and so quickly ending its sojourn here on Earth, but a hare with its broader chest and forceful thumpers is best killed by the blade. Tindr drew his knife; he had seen his father kill hares many times, and knew he had to grasp the hind legs firmly and cut quickly at the throat.
The spilt lip of the hare trembled. Tindr had never taken any life before. The hare’s strong digging claws were sharp, and the long teeth pointed like one of his father’s chisels. Those teeth just showed now, as the hare turned its head as he neared it. Tindr wondered how long it had lain there, if it had in fact been caught just after dusk when they had left the snare. He thought of the savoury pot of browis his mother would make from it, and how she would praise him for carrying home fresh meat, her hand touching her heart in thanks. He thought of the soft blue-grey pelt that would be his to line his boots with. He thought that it was alive now, and would soon be dead, and by his own young hand.
In his line of sight he saw his father step forward and draw his own knife. Tindr awoke and stretched out his hand to his father’s arm. Dagr stopped, re-sheathed his knife.
You came from somewhere, Tindr said within himself as he closed his hand over the hare’s thumper. He pressed the leg to the second hind leg, and brought his knife forward. The Lady sent you, the Lady and the Lord, they that rule this forest.
He brought the fist that gripped his knife to his breast a moment. I give thanks for your life, he said, and plunged the knife tip into the soft hollow of the furred neck, wetting the dried grasses with its blood. I will remember you. You will run the forest again.
Tindr grew tall and lean, even as a boy. He was happy and good-natured, and after a few terrible weeks stopped looking for his lost sisters, pulling back their alcove curtains in hopes of finding them there. His lost hearing too he seemed to take in stride. He made himself known to Rannveig and Dagr by making signs with his hands. He was their teacher, and as he grew they made up signs together. Yet nothing had prepared them for his deafness; when he was little it was constant vigilance. He could not heed their shouted warnings that he had backed too close to the fire, the pan that held the bread was still hot, the knife sharp, the wood pile he clambered upon unstable and likely to roll. Tindr burnt himself, cut himself, fell from trees. He cried. He learned.
He tried too, to speak, not just the low uh, uh uh that he uttered when in play, but fully-voiced calls and cries. His desire to be understood was great, and if he could not make his needs known by his fluttering hands he would respond with the braying calls that were difficult for listeners to bear. It was just this that the other children scorned him for, mocking his sounds by miming animal movements. A few of them would try to gesture back to Tindr, learning to understand him, but ot
hers jeered and would not. Rannveig and Dagr knew that some folk along the trading road shunned Tindr and thought him an Idiot, though they knew he was bright.
Rannveig could scarcely bear the pain she saw in her son’s eyes, and helped him to say less, for that was the only way to still the taunts. But his laughter she welcomed, for she thought no one should have that stifled in their breast, and if it sounded like the geese the others claimed it did, they would have to bear with it, for it was Tindr’s own good heart and humour coming out.
She knew he sang in secret, too, to the household kine and hens, had watched him lay his long-fingered hands about the cow's neck, and thus feel her bellow and low; and Rannveig had listened as he sang back to her, varying his call in pitch and volume without being able to hear it himself. He felt it, she knew; felt the trembling in his own throat and chest, just as he did in the throat and chest of beasts or folk when he touched them.
As he grew it was the beasts that Tindr gave his time and care to. He fed the pigs, drew eggs from the hens, milked the cow, penned the geese each night. The goslings followed him about and the hens ran to him. The fat pig lifted her spotted snout and looked at him when he neared, and not only when he brought her the cabbage stalks. At milking time Rannveig thought he got more from the cow than she did. These were his chores, but he did them with an active pleasure and curiosity in the animals themselves. There were always thick-furred skogkatts, the half-wild forest cats, about his mother’s brew-house and its grain store, and he tamed these so that they dropped their half-eaten mice by the bowls of milk he set out for them each morning. Once he watched one worrying something in the under-leaves of the mugwort his mother grew, and lifted a spiked ball that was a frightened young hedgehog to safety. He kept close watch on it until its spines hardened and lengthened, and the skogkatts knew to leave it alone. This spiny, sharp-nosed creature became a favourite of Tindr, by owl-light waddling towards him for bits of cooked fowl.
No beast was too small to catch his eye and prod his interest. He followed trails of ants through the Summer grasslands and lay inches from their scurrying columns, breathing shallowly so as not to disturb their relentless advance and retreat. His mother kept a beehive at the edge of her herb garden, and from the time he was able to lift the straw skep himself he showed no fear of the buzzing creatures as they landed upon his hands or circled about his head. He sometimes would wrap his arms about the domed skep, feeling the activity of the hive through the woven plaited coils, the pulsing of so many minute bodies crawling and hanging and fanning their shimmering wings about the dim waxen cells. Tindr did well cutting out the dark yellow comb and drawing the thick honey, and the hive flourished. Soon his mother could brew mead from the comb-washings, and melt and dip precious beeswax tapers. His movements were quiet and calm, the way he ever acted when with animals, and in a few years the single hive had grown to eight, both about the sea-side house, and up in the woods behind Rannveig’s empty girlhood home at the end of the road. Rannveig and Dagr would look at their solitary child and see his true friends in the animals that surrounded him.
Chapter the Seventh: Ragnfast
DAGR saw his son was good with the bow, had watched him pierce a hare from five-and-twenty paces, and thought the boy, who spent so much of his spare time in the forest, had the makings of a true hunter in him. The boy’s blue-white eyes were keen as a falcon’s, and he could hold his narrow frame from all movement, and stand riveted in a glade with no flinching or restlessness. So Dagr built an archer’s target for Tindr out beyond the limits of the kitchen garden. He dug a narrow ditch, and set five broad wooden boards on end within it, then tamped the soil well to hold them upright. Tindr helped him do this, and when they were done Dagr sent his boy to fetch some cold charcoal from the kitchen yard.
The tops of the boards were almost as tall as Dagr, and far over the head of Tindr. They had set them as snug to the next as they could, yielding an almost unbroken surface, adze-smooth, and seasoned to a soft brown. Tindr ran back with his hands clutching two pieces of charred pine. Dagr stood back from the target wall, and taking up a piece of charcoal, looped a small oval at one end, joined by two nearly vertical downward lines. He then drew a big oval, describing the body of a deer. He stood back and looked at what he had drawn.
Tindr stood back too. Then he started to laugh, a light, snorting bray, his face bright with glee. His father dropped the charcoal and dusted off his hands by slapping them together. He put his hands on his hips in mock anger and stared first at Tindr, and then at his drawing. Dagr could not help but laugh as well. His deer looked like one small sack linked to a large one by two short lines. He waved his hand at the waiting wood, then touched his ear: Tindr do it.
Tindr set his tunic sleeve to the few lines his father had made and rubbed them out with his forearm. He knelt in the grass, and taking his knife from his belt, sliced quickly away at one of the pieces of charred pine. He took it up and stood before the upright wooden boards.
He too began with the head, but it was angled as a deer’s truly is, a chiseled muzzle, protruding eye, and flat cheek. A muscled neck swept down from this, the sinew drawn in to show the line of brawn a stag in rut carries there. He went on to the wither knob, then dropped to the breast and the rest of the body; powerful haunches, hocks bent as they should, slender legs, one of them raised, ending in cloven hooves. It took him some little time, and he paused to rub out some of his lines before he picked up again. Before he stopped he returned to the head, and there scribed a rack of antlers branching out above the ears. Then he turned back to his waiting father.
Dagr grinned in acknowledgment, and clapped his hands together a single time: Good. He knew the boy could draw; he did so in the dry dust with the end of a stick, or in the smoothed ash of the cold cook fire. There was a woman, Álfhildr, upcountry, famed at scribing runes, and Dagr thought Tindr could one day do as well, and was teaching them him one by one, at least the ones he knew to draw himself. But this fine deer surprised him. It could only have been drawn by one who had spent much time looking, one who had truly seen a hart as it raised its head in a clearing, one who had noted the sharp planes of the head, the sweep of a neck taut with muscle, the ripples of flesh along the haunch, the impossible fineness of the tendons. One who had watched and studied deer, and begun to understand the truth of the beast.
Tindr’s round cheek coloured at his Da’s praise. The charcoal had crumbed to dust between his fingers, and his right hand was black with it. Heedless of his mother’s laundry chores, he wiped it on his legging. His father picked up a sliver of charcoal, and drew two crosses on the deer.
“Here, at the heart,” he told his son, crossing strokes over a point of the barrel just behind the front legs, “and here, the lungs.” The second cross lay further behind the shoulder. Tindr nodded gravely. He had seen the deer his Uncle Rapp, Ragnfast’s Da, had downed with one arrow at just these points. His own Da was not a bowman. Dagr found it hard to spend half the morning crouching beneath shrubby growth, or standing stock-still behind a tree, waiting for prey to wander into view. On his boat all he need do was follow the currents and swooping sea birds to see where he could drop his nets with profit.
But they both took up bows now, with a dozen arrows sitting upright in a wooden bucket between them, and Dagr let fly a few. When all twelve stood bristling from the new target, he tousled Tindr’s light brown hair with his calloused hand and waved him forward, gesturing that he not forget the afternoon milking of the cow. Tindr nodded and grinned, then strode to reclaim the arrows. Not all had hit the charcoal deer, but one of his had come closer to hitting the marks his Da had drawn than even Da’s had.
Not long after this Ragnfast came for the day, riding his new horse, a gift from his father Rapp. The horse was a roan gelding, and man-sized, not the small mare he had ridden since he was Tindr’s age, and he wanted to show him off to his cousin. It was high Summer, and after the two boys worked together to finish Tindr’s chores there w
ere still many hours of daylight left. Ragnfast re-saddled his horse, which he had staked in the tall grasses behind the house to graze, and after he climbed up Tindr swung up behind him. The older boy felt almost grown-up as he touched the gelding’s barrel with his heels and started down along the pounded soil of the trading road. The roan was well-built, full of spirit, yet with none of the female moodiness that made Ragnfast’s mare, small as she was, sometimes a challenge to handle.
Tindr had one arm about Ragnfast’s waist, but the gelding’s gait was steady and Tindr already had a good seat upon a horse. Many of the stalls along the road had closed for the day, but the few people they passed nodded their heads or called out cheerily to the boys in greeting. The sea to their left looked as blue as the late afternoon sky, with only the slightest of cream-coloured foam ripples, and the slanting sun cast a towering four-legged shadow trailing behind them. Tindr grunted once and made his cousin turn in the saddle to see it, and chortled with Ragnfast when he felt his cousin’s laugh with his arm.
They rode to the end, past the last stall, that of an old woman who sold braided linen wicking for oil cressets and tapers. She drowsed on a bench before her rolled up awnings, but snapped awake when the gelding snorted. Her brown face creased into a hundred lines as she grinned at the boys, and they grinned back. Everyone bought from her, and she knew the boys and their families well. Above her head they could see into the dimness of her tiny space, spot the bound coils of white wick which faintly gleamed in the dusk within.
Then they went a short distance beyond, to where the mighty carved image of Freyr stood staring out at the endless-seeming sea. He had just been repainted at Mid-Summer’s Day, his green cap and tunic, brown face, and yellow braided beard still shiny from it. On a horse Tindr’s eyes were almost level with the God’s, and he found himself dipping his head after looking into the painted orbs of Freyr. This was the God of horses, of all running beasts, and he and his sister Freyja ruled the forests and marshes of the island. His Nenna and Da had told him much of these wild siblings. Freyr was a skilled sailor too, and Tindr had come here Spring and Fall with Da to leave an Offering at the start and end of each fishing season.
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