Norseman Chief (17 page)

Part II – Kesegowaase!

1,021 – 1,022 A.D.

CHAPTER 8

The sun was nowhere to be seen.  It had been dreary for three or four days in a row as I sat on a sun-bleached log that had come to live on the beach from some distant shore.  It stopped raining that morning, but the sky spit for the rest of the day like a toddler learning to whistle.  Thankfully, that now ceased as well.

Etleloo tossed the gaming pieces a short distance into the air and watched intently as they tumbled over one another into the shallow, smooth bowl that sat between us.  “Ha!” he shouted.  “Three reds, three trees, and even the odd roll fell in my favor.  It gets no better than that!”  He bit his bottom lip and bobbed his head to show his enthusiasm.  In all the years he and I had played what he called the “moon” game, I don’t believe I ever won.  The counting and scoring was so complex that it was beyond my understanding so I usually let him keep score for both of us.  Even now, he etched this round’s score into the driftwood log with his stone knife.  He wore a triumphant smile.  I wrinkled my nose and mouth thinking that I needed the old Scottish thrall, Fife, to help me defeat this man.  That boy could work numbers.

I swept up the pieces with my weathered hands, cupping them together and shaking so that my entire body quaked.  I made it into a show, sticking my chin out to taunt my opponent before letting them fall into the basin.  A hoot escaped from my mouth as I jumped to my feet.  “I win!”  I strutted in the sand.

“Halldorr you didn’t win,” Etleloo mocked.  But I would have none of his goading.  My victory had been a long time in coming.  I laughed at him.  Yet he persisted, “No truthfully, you did not win.”  Now my anger flashed.

I pointed a finger at him, “Wait here.  Don’t touch those.  I know what I rolled.”  In a moment I was back with Rowtag, the most honest man I knew among the people.  Now I pointed at the game and all the countless scratching Etleloo had made on the wood.  “See?  I win, right?”

Rowtag pulled his hands out of his tunic where he kept them warm against the cool weather.  He stepped to where we played and didn’t even look at my most recent roll.  Instead his finger danced along the series of rolls we had made, adding and subtracting the numbers in his head.  The difficulty to me was that each new roll could carry a new meaning depending upon what came before it.  For instance, I could roll the same three reds, three trees, and the odd just as Etleloo had done, but its value might be different for me because of my last roll.  It was maddening.

The judge stood, stuffed his hands back against the warmth of his body, and proclaimed, “Whoever has his pieces in the gaming bowl now is the loser.”  He walked away before he could see me hang my head, completely deflated.

Etleloo gathered his game and stuffed it into a satchel while rising to commend my play.  “That is the closest you’ve ever come to winning.  Perhaps in a few years . . .”  Then he burst out laughing as he slapped my back.  I pouted.

“Oh come on friend, it is not right for a man of your years to act in such a way.”  Again, he gave a devilish laugh.

“By Malsum!” I shouted and wrapped my arms around his head, pulling it so that I squeezed it between my ribs and arm.  I turned and twisted, creating more than a little heat and spooling his ears on themselves.  He howled in pain, but still managed to laugh.

“Alright.  Alright.  It may be sooner than that.  You are close to winning.”  I dropped to one knee so that he was forced down as well.  Etleloo’s hands swatted backward, up at me, but never struck.  It would only be a matter of time before he got angry too and grabbed my manhood to escalate the fight so I dropped him into the sand.

He was up quickly for his age for he was probably at or over forty years old by then.  Etleloo chuckled while patting the dust from his clothing.  “It is true what you have told me.  Never cheat a Norseman in a game of chance unless you want to have no chance of ever hunting game again.”  I laughed at his paraphrasing of what I had told him many times, and we walked over to where the food was being prepared for our grand celebration.

The women had come out early that day in the spitting rain to dig long pits in the sand just above the high tide line of the sea.  While they dug, their children ran all around the area gathering any stray rocks or stones they could find and carried them to their mothers.  The women would smile enthusiastically at the prey the little ones brought and smack their behinds to send them off for more.  Soon the pits were dug, fully lined with stones.

Hurit was among these women.  She yet lived which was something that I could scarcely believe given my history with women.  I did not see her while she worked that morning because I was helping the men gather clams and mussels for our feast, but I know she would have chatted away with the other women, giggling about some joke made about one of their husbands or children.  My own child would have brought her countless tiny stones with which to line the pit and Hurit would have been doting, pinching a cheek before sending the child off holding the hand of Kesegowaase’s daughter, Kimi.  My child would have also brought back bits of bark, dead bugs, or a trampled bird’s egg to proudly give to Hurit.  My wife would have taken these items and playfully ridiculed the child for bringing the wrong items.

My child was three years old at the time of that clambake.  Two sons born of Hurit and me were long dead.  The first, born in the year Kesegowaase became chief of the people, was stillborn like some of the other babies born over the years.  I had come to expect this in my life and so accepted it without anger or sadness.  Hurit was saddened, but proved resilient, even talking about other subjects on our way back from burying the little body in the forest.  My second son, born two or three years later, survived his birth.  I thought about naming him Ahanu in honor of my old friend, but decided against it while thinking of what it would mean to the village if the great chief’s namesake died prematurely.  It was a wise decision and the boy’s name does not matter because he died at the age of one and one half along with several other children when a fever swept through the village after a group of captives from the northern tribes began to permanently live among us.

But my last child lived at the time of that clambake.  She ran screaming with laughter barefoot in the sand despite the cold.  She chased some other little urchin from the village who carried something of intense value – a stick.  My child’s hair was long and brown, almost a blending of Hurit’s hair and my own.  It flopped wildly while she ran, strands of it stuck across her face from sweat and grime.

I do not want you to think that I disliked the little girl, but I hadn’t been close to her then.  A part of me sulked, thinking that like all of my efforts to have a brood of children running around, this one more would likely end in death.  But I treated her well enough.  I would bring in a large icicle in the winter to show her.  She would cry and scream.  I would walk the doll of me in my cross tunic across her chest.  She would spit-up.

The girl caught the boy who carried the stick.  He was called Taregan.  Like a bear, she brought the boy down and swiped at him with her paw.  Her laughter switched to a frown as quick as lightning while she retrieved that stick.  She brought a large sheet of bark down on the boy who began crying.  I made the bark shield for her to carry around to pretend she was in the shield wall protecting my old king, Olaf.  She never met a king or saw a shield wall, but the girl wielded that bark with fury.  My daughter stood victorious, marching away to torture some other unsuspecting child with her game.  The boy went and cried to his father, who cuffed the side of his head for allowing a girl to get the best of him.  I chuckled.  My daughter’s name was Alsoomse.  I called her Skjoldmo.

Alsoomse was a melodic sounding name when the people said it in their tongue.  The men from the Huntsman’s crew yet living at that point chopped the sounds of the name, making it less beautiful and more ugly or coarse.  I had never known anyone by that name, but Hurit said that her grandmother was called by it.  The word means independent which was fitting because the girl was nothing if not free-spirited.  Skjoldmo means shield girl in my native Norse.  Why I branded her as such should be evident.

When we stood at one end of a long pit, with its steamy warmth wobbling the people and objects I saw in the distance, Etleloo asked, “How long?” to the nearest woman.

She was on her knees at the edge of the pit and reached a naked arm into the hole.  “Anytime now.  Here see for yourself.”  The woman tossed him one of the clams within her reach.  Etleloo worked quickly on the shell, biting out the meat from inside.  He showed his teeth while chewing sucking in air to cool his mouth from the intense heat.

Soon he smiled while nodding.  “Now.”

Like the young, starving men who had lived only fifteen years of their lives so far, the two of us scooped handful after handful of the assorted mussels and clams into our eating bowls.  In our wake we left a bare patch of the charred seaweed that had been placed upon the heated rocks while it was still dripping wet, fresh from the sea.  The seaweed had heated up and steamed open while cooking the feast we were now eating.  Before that, a great fire had burned for the entire length of the pit over top of the stones to bring them to an extreme heat, glowing bright red.  Groups of men and women had then scooped out the ash and coals so the seaweed could be set down.

Etleloo and I were fortunate that day because just as we threaded our way back to our driftwood seat, those young men I mentioned, those aged about fifteen years, noticed that the food was ready.  Like a battle cry, one of them announced it and they moved as a herd to the pit, forgetting the games of skill they left in piles at the forest’s edge.  Etleloo shook his head, likely thinking as I was, of our own younger days when the world was simple and we could live only to fill our bellies with food and hopefully fill our women with seed.

We passed Hurit who walked with Etleloo’s wife.  They had been talking about something, but they interrupted their conversation to look at their men.  Hurit said what they were both thinking.  “Husband, you are no longer among the boys who can pack away such amounts of food without it finding its way onto your belly.”

Etleloo frowned.  I said, “Well then after I am done eating all this, perhaps you shall ask some of the other women to come to our mamateek so that I may work it off.”  Hurit smiled, pulled my completely grey beard down and kissed my cheek before walking off to pile her plate high with shellfish.  Etleloo’s woman followed.

I plopped down on the log with Etleloo working on his second or third clam by the time his seat found its place.  We discarded our shells in a heap behind us.  The heap was already quite large as we were adding to something that was started years and years ago during a similar feast.  I sighed, looking around the beach at all the various piles of shells that had accumulated from these clambakes over the years.

Etleloo took a break from shoveling his mouth full.  “My woman will not be among those you bring into your home in order to work off your food.  I don’t want you to get any ideas.”

I looked toward his wife as she was stepping away from the pit.  A fine woman, I thought.  “I know she won’t be among them.  I’ve already asked her and she declined.  I suppose she does not want to be let down when she returns to your fire.”  Etleloo laughed and pushed my shoulder.

He was a fine man.  Prone to anger, but fair.  He had become my closest friend of the people since Ahanu died ten years earlier.  Over the years we grew inseparable, hunting, fishing, and going to war together.  He and I had led several battles against the Mi’kmaq village of the Pohomoosh in response to their stealth winter attack all those years ago.  He and I defended our own village against some of the Mi’kmaq retribution attacks.  We won most of these engagements, even when the Pohomoosh allied with other Mi’kmaq clans such as the Fish or the Eagle or the Skin Dressers, until after about two years, both sides tired of losing their young men and a truce – never a peace – was struck between Kesegowaase and the Pohomoosh chief called Luntook.  Both sides quickly returned to pilfering traps and taking the occasional deer on each other’s lands.  In other words, we returned to the same level of thievery that was tolerated before the war began.

Despite what we thought was a win in that war, we had lost many good men.  Thirty-six had died immediately during the various skirmishes.  Another twenty-eight died shortly after the battles from some festering wound they received.  At least a dozen walked around carrying fairly serious, permanent scars from the stone or wood of the Mi’kmaq weapons.

And the battles did not spare my old Norse brothers.  Three now sang their existences away in the mead hall with Odin, reciting the god’s poetry, after receiving terrible, blood-letting wounds during the war.  Thorhall the Huntsman was one of these men.  He died with a sword in his hand which is the way he wanted it to ensure his quick transportation to Odin.