Swan's Path

by Asotir

  * * *

  AFTER THAT HE died and these gathered at the strand: Holmstein Codcatcher, his boys, and the nine women from the hut. Swanhild dragged herself out from beneath the body and stood. She did that weakly: her limbs shook. She went before Holmstein Codcatcher and said,

  ‘Now I know not what hand you had in all this. But I have felt in my hands and in my lap how the life broke out of Skarphedin’s body: there he lies slain, and so that blood-debt is paid. Now this I would know, if you will help see to him.’

  Holmstein answers that he would see a cairn raised over the body at whatever spot she thought best.

  ‘No cairn will cover him,’ Swanhild said, ‘nor will this land hold him. But this is my will, that we put him aboard that boat of Njal’s and give his body back to Rann.’

  ‘That is the loss of a good boat,’ says Holmstein.

  ‘Then will you get no peace here nights,’ answered Swanhild, ‘for he will ride your roof-ridge, and I will noise it about the district that Njal gave you silver to betray him.’ And that was the end of it, that Holmstein went back into his hut and shut himself up in there; but he bade his women and the boys do all that Swanhild would.

  Now they readied the boat and all things thereto. They laid Skarphedin’s body amidships, and put his arms over his chest, and in his hands they put that axe. They wrapped his body in his cloak; but first Swanhild put upon his finger Thorold’s ring. And the women stripped Hrap’s body and Njal’s man’s, and laid their goods in alongside Skarphedin; and the boys lay in driftage alongside, and straw as well. But the naked bodies of Hrap and those other two they cast out amidst the rocks for the birds and crabs.

  And now a fair breeze sprang up. The boys washed the sail in the waves, then hoisted it up on the boat. The women brought Swanhild a pot of coals. These she cast over the straw and driftage. The fisher-boys put the boat into the waves. The steering-oar they tied with rope, but the sail they held with a stick.

  So the breeze took the boat out, and it went up and down over the waves, and the fire sprang sickly up from it, but the smoke-reek blew out before it. The boat waxed littler and littler, and then it went beneath the brae of a swell and was lost. They saw the reek, though, for some while afterward.

  Swanhild said, ‘Now he will not come back ever again.’

  Then one of the women spoke a stave, and her voice croaked and crooned out across the waves.

  ‘Ale in Hall the hero-king

  Was served by Maidens ’neath Sword-woven roof:

  Sought he then the sea-wide plain.

  Dawn to dusk (then dead arise),

  Rings the steel, and rain the spears:

  Fight Einharjar in endless war,

  And Odin sits, and over-sees them,

  And fat grow Huginn’s feast, and Muninn.’

  The clouds broke beneath the wind; the blue sky shone through. Northaways the mist rose off the jokull and all of Katla might be seen. The air was full of the smell of the grass when the wind blew. But then, when there came a lull, the smell of the strand and the sea washed back upon the sands: and that was a strong smell and an ill.

  All overhead the skuas flew in great swarms, now this way and now that, for they saw the corpses there below and took them, maybe, for fishes; but as yet they feared to alight. Their cries filled the air. Only a few clouds were yet in the sky, and they were soft and high. The sun shone down off the billows and the black, volcanic sands, that glittered like glass. Beyond the sand the sea stretched out unending, like a waste.