Daughter of the Wind (13 page)

Hego reached the ledge, the gray-stone outcropping soiled with dung. The ewe bawled, even now, perhaps wondering why Hego had not clawed his way up the mountain with feed and water on his back.

“I'll carry you down, don't worry,” said Hego with a laugh.

It would not be easy.

The ewe bleated right into his face, the sheep's breath white in the chilly dawn.

“You poor beast,” said Hego, ruffling the animal's wool soothingly. “You're as stupid as I am.”

As he flung the sheep over his back, high on the hillside, Hego saw the skip appear around the bend in the fjord.

The tiny, beautiful vessel was too distant for the creak of the oar locks or the stirring of the water to be heard, but Hego recognized
Strider
, its bare mast white against the shadows of the fjord.

One man in the boat. Only one.

Hego's breath caught.

Unless either Gauk or Snorri was hurt, or asleep, curled in the prow. Perhaps the gods would heed the prayer of a fool with a sheep on his back. “Let them both be safe,” he murmured.

Hego hurried. He slipped and nearly fell on the sloppy ice, the sheep over his shoulders enduring this means of transport with an empty-headed patience.

Hego reached firm footing, still high above the village.

He lifted his voice in the half-chant, half-wordless call the villagers had used since Thor's hammer was forged—the song of a vessel returning home.

Twenty-seven

Gauk smelled the charred timbers while he was on the water, far from the village.

Unexpected fires were common among the Norse, thatch and timber constantly proving treacherous. And yet Gauk stopped rowing for a few beats and drew Whale-Biter to his side. This was not a still-smoldering fire, he sensed. The conflagration was dead—three days old, he estimated, but the flames had been great enough that the scent still drifted down the sheltered waters of the fjord.

He did not smell death. He nosed the odor of wood ash, and the familiar smell of livestock and humanity. And something else—the very faint, earthy smell of trampled field grass and mud.

His oar strokes stirred the fjord's surface, and the widening ripples gently touched the cliff sides and spread outward again. The wake of
Strider
was quiet, the reflection of the soaring cliffs gently blurring, lost.

Facing aft as he rowed, the young hunter had to cease his effort and turn around to see the slowly approaching village. It was no surprise to observe that the warships were gone—their launching had been anticipated when he and Snorri began their own voyage. Gauk could make out what was unexpectedly missing—the gap among the village roofs where the ale house had stood. There had been a battle. Again he breathed the smell of foot-punished meadow and tried to believe that a large group of men had struggled for the sport of it, wooden swords against woven shields.

Gauk could see men and women hurrying from the houses at the sound of Hego's distantly echoing song—there was no mistaking that voice. Perhaps the villagers slackened a little when they perceived that the boat was the lowly
Strider
, and stood quietly as they recognized that Gauk was rowing in solitude. But cries greeted him then, Astrid's voice, and the granite-lunged Old Gizzur, the veteran villager, calling out encouragingly, “Well done, Gauk!”

A voyageur's return required a ritual.

Even now no one dared break the tradition of welcome and tidings that a hunter's homecoming demanded.

There was a moment of recognition when Gauk climbed from the skip. Eyes widened, and words faltered. All of them knew what his new white-pelted garment portended.

Gauk could not bring himself to tell the painful and disturbing events that had brought him this new bear garment. He had not even allowed his mind to fully consider some of them until now. The seer had given Gauk the splendid fur, one Jarn said had been left beside a sacred spring by Odin himself while the god took his ease in the warm waters. It was a luxurious pelt, fastened over one shoulder, and Gauk kept the sun-seasoned paws he had cut for himself dangling from his sword belt. The seer had explained that he doubted at first that Gauk was an initiate of Odin, suspicious of a young man's claim of divine power. Many men bragged, and young men boasted as well as the old. The fight with Skall had been the seer's way of testing the youth, and the wise man had intervened just in time to save the house karl's life.

But as to the young hunter's future, the seer had said only, “Odin gives, and Odin takes.” It was this lack of promise, this failure to hear a word of reassurance, that had shaken Gauk so badly. Now Gauk's unhappy reverie was broken by a familiar voice, one that gave him joy.

“Is it Gauk?” asked his mother, helped down the rocky shore by her friends.

“Yes, indeed, it is,” folk reassured her, “sound and happy.”

The blind, soft-voiced woman did not trust the news until she felt his features with her hands and took him in her arms. “You are not hurt?” she asked.

Gauk laughed, to show her, and all his other friends, that he was healthy. But his voice was rough, his laugh ragged.

She hesitated. “You've come back bear-coated,” she said, tension in her voice. To come wolf-pelted from a voyage meant that a traveler had met with honor in battle. To come back bear-pelted implied that the warrior had accepted a dangerous calling, one of long silences punctuated with battle frenzy.

Before he could say another word, she lifted her voice in a prayer of thanks to Freya, goddess of fertility and peace. This divinity, along with her brother Frey, was a provider of fertility and loving family life, peaceful endowments—compared with the double-edged gifts of Odin.

Twenty-eight

Halfdan, Snorri's father, fought to keep from weeping.

A soapstone pot seethed on the hearth, giving forth the odor of boiled pork. Sometimes a family would roast a goose, or skewer beef on a stick, but pork and mutton were village staples.

Gauk sat at the family table and told the truth tale he had rehearsed in his mind. This, too, was a time-honored tradition, the surviving seamen delivering sad news to the families of their shipmates. Outside, neighbors had gathered respectfully, with a quiet murmur of voices.

Sometimes this sort of news was not accepted peacefully. Gauk told the truth, or as much of it as the young man could bring himself to recite. But it already sounded like a legend, Snorri a part of the past, drinking in the Slain Hall with the long-fallen heroes—as though his friend had been killed a century ago.

Katla, Snorri's mother, tearfully praised Gauk for his friendship to her lost son. “You and he used to laugh so,” she said. She told the story of the game they used to play, pulling a cow skull around the village. They used to pretend that they were Thor in the famous poem, trolling the deep for a whale, an ox head for bait. When they pretended a whale had surfaced, they had great sport dodging the flukes of the imaginary prey.

Gauk laughed sadly, tears in his eyes. For a moment he could hear his friend's laugh again.

“You'll drink with us,” said Snorri's parents.

Gauk drank deeply of good, strong Spjothof ale, nothing equal to it in the world. The deep drinking was a necessary sign that Snorri's family welcomed him—and forgave him for surviving.

And then Gauk asked, “What happened here?”

Halfdan shook his head. Snorri's father was a cattle breeder, well known for the cheese his cows produced. The children of Spjothof were raised on cups of whey produced by Halfdan's herds. He was a short bull of a man himself, not given to speech, and gave a sorrowful snort in response to Gauk's repeated question.

“No one's willing to tell you yet?” said the mournful father at last. He wore a bandage around his right hand.

Spjotfolk did not like to give words to bad events. What was said, and what was not said, could alter the subtle balance of things.

“If you and Snorri had been here,” said Katla. “You and he would have stood proud and cut the Danes to the bone.”

Astrid met him at the village edge, where the streams parted, heavy with run-off from the snowy peaks. This was another part of the homecoming tradition, the hunter washing in the rushing waters of Spjothof, drinking his fill and, in the streams that flowed from the hot springs, taking the first of several long, leisurely soaks in the warm water.

Gauk pulled off his boots and stood up to his knees, laughing in the rushing brook. The warm water felt wonderful, soaking into the wool of his tunic. Astrid was radiant, clinging to his hand as though he might be swept away.

He climbed back onto the bank, and Astrid, after a moment of reluctance, pressed her face into the rich plush of the white bear pelt.

“I asked the gods for dreams of you,” she said.

“Did you see me shivering on the ice?” He wished his voice was not so hoarse.

She gave a gentle, troubled laugh, running her hands gently over the sun blisters on his brow, his lips. Her face was quick to color with emotion, and just now she was pale.

“I saw you clearly,” she said, her voice broken.

“I'm going to talk to your father,” he said.

Astrid's eyes were warm, but she said nothing.

“I'll tell him,” Gauk continued, “that by the time barley harvest is in, I'll have your bride price.”

“I saw you vividly in my dreams,” she said, “and more than once.”

Gauk wanted to speak about feasts and song, dancing, and the long years ahead. But he asked what Astrid had dreamed, fearing the answer. Odin teases with nightmares, Gauk knew. He probes human beings with lush images, feasting, laughter, and gratified desire, all the while holding off true fulfillment.

She did not want to put words to her dreams, but Gauk insisted.

“Birds were eating your body,” she said.

Gauk's voice was a whisper. “You dreamed I was dead?”

“No, you were alive.”

Gauk laughed, relieved. “And I am indeed!”

“Great black ravens were eating your body—and you were happy.”

Gauk tried to laugh, the way Snorri would have, and make light of Odin's power to stir the psyche.

“Their black beaks,” said Astrid, barely able to continue, “plunged between your ribs, and plucked your eyes—and you were laughing.”

“Tell me,” said Gauk, when he could speak, “about the Danes.”

She was the first to tell Gauk about Hallgerd, about the jarl's grievous injury, and about Hego's surprising courage and good luck.

The tidings filled Gauk with anger that was deep and cold.

Gauk and Astrid went to the place where pine planks were stacked, pegs already carved, ready to begin the rebuilding of the gutted ale hall. Within the warm welcome and the age-old requirements of homecoming, Gauk had perceived the sorrow. And something worse than sorrow.

Some emotion that Gauk could not name made the villagers' eyes downcast, their features shadowy.

Astrid lifted her voice in a saga lilt, the tone with which mournful or glorious tidings must be recited. Villagers gathered. Each man and woman fell silent as the beautiful young woman put her voice to the events no one else could bring themselves to describe. The beauty of the time-honored tune made it possible to put into words the painful events. Ordinary speech could not have borne the message.

“Are we certain who they were?” Gauk asked, looking around at the mourning ring of faces when Astrid was done.

No one could answer him.

“Do we know for a fact,” Gauk persisted, “that these were Gudmund's men?”

Hrolf, the veteran warrior of legend, escorted Gauk to the door frame of Sword's-Rest, the jarl's longhouse.

Gauk was wearing his sword, and carrying Whale-Biter. The young hunter took the old fighter's arm as the door swung inward. “When are we sailing?” he asked.

Hrolf gave a sad smile, and to Gauk's surprise pretended not to understand what the younger man was asking. “Still wanting another hunt, after all your adventures?” said the house guard.

“When are we setting out after Hallgerd?” Gauk insisted.

“When the fighting men return again,” said the veteran swordsman. “With ships and shields.”

“But
we
are fighting men,” said Gauk.

“And who'll defend the village when we leave?” queried Hrolf, “with every sword chasing south after an army?”

Despite the sound reasoning behind the seasoned warrior's query, Gauk recognized at last the character of the feeling that weighed down his old friends and neighbors.

It was shame.

Twenty-nine

A fire was snapping in the hearth, the smoke rising through the vent in the roof.

The firelight reflected off the features of the feverish jarl. Rognvald, Hallgerd's father, opened his eyes, but merely searched the roof timbers above. He beheld none of the reassuring faces bending over him. Fresh linen swathing around his head seeped blood. A Thor amulet, a silver hammer, was pinned on the blanket over his heart, and he wore a gleaming silver arm-ring to bring him strength.

“Gauk offers his respects,” said Hrolf formally, emotion straining his voice as he gazed down at his master. “He is home from the ice.”

The jarl parted his lips, his tongue darting, and he strained to raise his body from the pillows. No healthy man played host to another while lying on his back, but Gauk knelt and said, “Rest yourself, sir, I pray you,” speaking as formally as possible. “I'll have an ale-worthy story to share when you are sound again.”

Rognvald's hand found Gauk's. The great man's clasp was moist and weak. Even so, the proud jarl formed Gauk's name with his lips and made every effort to find the young man with his fever-clouded gaze.

The jarl lay under the finest blankets of woven wool. The family heirloom sword was at his side on the bedding—everyone knew that the battle with Death Herself was the only war that never ended. Even Thor had once wrestled Death, in the cave of the gods, and for all his divine strength he did little more than bring her panting to one knee.