Odinn's Child (13 page)

T
YRKIR ALSO TAUGHT
me the details of the mysterious prophecy which Gudrid had mentioned on that dismal day in Lyusfjord when she sat beside Thorstein's deathbed, and I had let slip that I had seen the fetches of the not-yet-dead. Tyrkir had been delayed late in his workshop, where he made and repaired the metal tools essential to our farming. Gudrid had sent me to take the little German his supper. 'She's a good woman, your foster mother,' Tykir said as he set aside the empty bowl and licked his fingers. 'Far too good to fall under the influence of those crazy White Christ fanatics. No one else can sing the warlock's songs so well.'

'What do you mean, the warlock's songs?' I asked. 'What are they?'

Tyrkir looked at me from under his bulging forehead, a momentary gleam of suspicion in his eyes. 'You mean to say that your foster mother hasn't told you about her and the Little Sibyl?'

'No, I've never even heard of the Little Sibyl. Who was she?'

'The old woman Thorbjorg. She was the Little Sibyl, the volva. She died four years ago, so you really never knew her. But plenty still do, and they all remember the night when Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir revealed herself.'

Tyrkir settled himself on the low stool near his anvil, and pointed for me to make myself comfortable on a pile of sacks that had held charcoal for his simple furnace. It was obvious that his story would be a long one, but he considered it important that I know the details about my foster mother. Anything which concerned my adored Gudrid was important to me, and I listened

so attentively that I still remember every detail of Tyrkir's explanation.

T
HE
L
ITTLE
S
IBYL
, Tyrkir began, had come to Greenland in the earliest days of the colony to avoid the turbulent White Christ followers who were causing such ructions in Iceland by insisting that everyone should follow their one true God. She was the last of nine sisters, all of whom had possessed the seidr skills, and being the ninth she had more of the gift than all the others. She could foretell the weather, so farmers planned their activities according to her advice. Their wives asked her about the propitious names they should give their babies and the health and prospects of their growing children. Young women quietly enquired about their love lives; and mariners timed their voyages to begin on the auspicious days the Little Sibyl selected. Thorbjorg knew the correct offerings to the Gods, the right prayers, the proper rituals, all according to the Old Ways.

It was in the autumn of the year that my foster mother Gudrid first arrived in Greenland that a black famine had gripped the colony. After a meagre hay harvest the hunters, who had gone inland or along the coast looking for seals and deer, came back with little to show for their efforts. Two of them failed to come back at all. As the cheerless winter months wore on, our people began to die of starvation. The situation became so bad that a leading farmer, a man named Herjolf, decided he should consult the Little Sibyl to ask whether there was any action that the settlers could take to bring the famine to an end. Herjolf arranged a feast to honour the Little Sibyl and, through her, the spirit world she would have to enter if she was to answer their plea for advice. Also, consuming their last reserves of food in such a feast was a signal to the Gods that the people placed their trust in them.

Herjolf supplied the banquet from his final stocks of dried fish and seal blubber, slaughtered the last of his livestock and brought out his stores of cheese and bread. Naturally the entire community was invited to attend the feast, not just for food to fill their aching bellies but to hear what the Sibyl would say. Herjolf’s wife arranged a long table running the full length of their hall. Crosswise at the head of the table and raised slightly above it where it could be seen by everyone, a seat of honour for the Little Sibyl was placed - a carved wooden chair with a cushion stuffed with hens' feathers.

While the guests were assembling, a man was sent to escort Thorbjorg from her home. When she arrived, it was immediately clear that the Little Sibyl had acknowledged the gravity of the emergency. Normally when called upon to practise seidr she arrived dressed in her everyday homespun clothes, and carrying only her seidr staff, a wooden stick about three feet long carved with runes and hung with withered strips of cloth. But when Thorbjorg was led into the great hall that evening she was dressed in clothes no one had ever seen her wear before: a long overmantle of midnight blue reaching almost to the ground and fastened across the chest with cloth straps worked with intricate designs in red and silver thread. The entire surface of the cloak was encrusted with patterns of small stones, not precious stones but pebbles, mottled and marbled and all smooth from lying underwater. They shimmered as if still wet. They were magic 'waterstones' said to contain the spirits of the river. Around her throat the volva wore a necklace of coloured glass beads, mostly red and blue. Her belt was plaited from the dried stalks of mushrooms and fungi, and from it hung a large cloth pouch, in which she kept her collection of dried herbs, charms and the other ingredients for her sorcery. Her feet were encased in heavy shoes made of calfskin, the hair still on them, and laced with heavy thongs with tin buttons on the ends. Her head was hidden within a dark hood of black lambskin lined with the fur from a white cat. On her hands were mittens also of catskin, but with the fur turned to the inside.

Had it not been for her familiar seidr staff the guests would have found it difficult to recognise Thorbjorg. The staff was of pale honey-coloured wood, much worn and slick with handling, and the knob at the end was bound in brass and studded with more of the 'waterstones'. There were, it seemed, more ribbons than usual.

As she arrived, Herjolf, who had been waiting to greet her at the door of the long hall, was surprised to find himself looking at the back of her black hood. Thorbjorg was walking backwards. The entire assembly fell silent as her host escorted Thorbjorg down the length of the hall, still facing the main entrance door. Herjolf named each person who was present as they drew level. The Sibyl responded by peering out from under her black hood and into their faces but saying little, only giving the occasional sniff as if smelling their presence.

When the volva was safely settled on her high seat, the meal was served and everyone ate with gusto, though many kept glancing up at Thorbjorg to see how she was behaving. She did not eat with the everyday utensils, but pulled from her pouch a brass spoon and an ancient knife with a handle of walrus ivory bound with two copper rings. The blade of the knife was very worn and pitted, as if it had been buried in the earth a long time, and the onlookers noted the point was broken. Nor did she eat the same food as everyone else. She asked for, and was given, a bowl of gruel prepared with goat's milk and a dish made of the hearts of all the animals slaughtered for the feast.

When the meal was over and the tables cleared, Herjolf stood up. 'Sibyl, I hope that everything that has been arranged this evening has been to your satisfaction,' he announced in a voice that carried the length of the hall. 'We have all assembled here in the hopes that in your wisdom you will be able to tell us how long the famine will last, and whether there is anything we can do to end our difficulties.'

'I need to spend longer in this house,' she answered. Her voice was thin and wheezing as if she had difficulty in breathing. 'I have yet to absorb its spirit, to learn the portents, to feel its soul. It is too early to give any judgement. I will stay here on this seat, all an arch-pagan. Thorvall warned them that he would knock down any man who interfered with his Thor altar.

Karlsefni had assigned Thorvall to help the house-builders rather than hunt. His great strength was very useful when it came to lifting up the turf sods as the walls grew higher and higher. But everyone could see that Thorvall was itching to explore. Finally, when hunger was really pinching, Karlsefni gave Thorvall permission to go hunting, though most of us wondered how just one man could find and kill enough wild game to feed forty hungry mouths. Thorvall said nothing, but gave one of his unsociable grunts, gathered up his spear and made ready to leave. As he left the camp, he went first to his little altar, took off one of the polar-bear teeth from his necklace and laid it as an offering on the top stone. Then he walked off into the thick brushwood. Within moments he had vanished.

Thorvall was away for three days, and when he did not reappear Karlsefni and the other senior men began to worry. Once again there was talk of the Skraelings and speculation that they had captured or killed our hunter. Finally Karlsefni called for volunteers to join a small search party to look for Thorvall. Karlsefni announced that he himself would lead the searchers. They were to take weapons and be on the lookout for Skraelings as well as Thorvall. There was a certain amount of reluctance to join the search party because Thorvall was not a popular figure, particularly among the Christians. Some said that if the Skraelings had got the surly curmudgeon, then it was good riddance. Naturally Tyrkir was willing to look for his friend, so too were the two Scots, and I managed to attach myself to the little group because I could be spared from the house-building.

After all this, finding Thorvall was very easy. Haki and Hekja ranged ahead, quartering back and forth through the undergrowth like a pair of hounds, and to all our surprise returned on the third day to say that they had found Thorvall on a nearby headland, but he had refused to come back with them. Thinking that Thorvall might be injured, we fought our way through the underbrush and arrived, exhausted and scratched, to find Thorvall lying stretched out on the ground on the flat crest of a small headland overlooking the sea. To the fury of the Christians, and the relief of his friends, Thorvall was in good health. Indeed, he looked remarkably relaxed as he lay on his back, gazing up at the sky and apparently talking to himself, occasionally itching himself rudely. For a moment I thought our hunter had leave of his senses or had got hold of some alcohol and was drunk. One of our group, a Christian named Bjarni, began shouting angrily at Thorvall, demanding what on earth he was playing at. Thorvall rose to his feet, and scowled at his interrogators.

'There's nothing to hunt here,' he told them, 'at least, not enough to feed forty people in a hurry. Just some small animals and birds. Maybe later, when I've more time to explore the land, I'll find the places where I can set traps for the larger animals. So I composed a poem to Thor's honour, and was reciting it for him, and asking him to provide for us.'

'Thor! You heathen!' yelled Bjarni. 'How do you imagine that your blundering oaf of a God can help us. You might as well pray to the sea to give us some food.'

'Maybe he will,' Thorvall replied gruffly.

We all walked back to the camp and Thorvall received black looks from many of the settlers. Several of them turned their backs on him. I heard a number of comments that he was a cantankerous fool, riddled with superstition, too lazy to go hunting properly, and had been idling away his time, while others had been doing all the hard work on the house-building.

Next morning one of the men went out along the strand to gather driftwood for our cooking fires and came stumbling excitedly back into camp.

'Everyone, bring your knives and axes. There's a dead whale lying on the beach,' he shouted. 'It must have been washed up in the night. There's enough meat there to feed us for a couple of weeks!'

Thorvall, who had been sitting near the campfire, raised his shaggy head and let out a great roar of triumph. 'There, you White Christ fanatics, Old Red Beard liked his praise poem and he's sent us food from the sea. Now go and fill your envious bellies.'

We all hurried along the beach and were soon hacking up the whale. It was perhaps twenty-five feet in length, and of a type that none of us had ever seen before, not even Karlsefni, who had seen many different types of whale during his travels as a merchant. But the carcass cut like any other whale's, with a good three-inch-thick layer of blubber which we peeled away in strips to get at the rich, dark red meat. It was a magnificent find. The blubber we would use as fat for cooking or eat salted, while the dark red meat we grilled and ate straight away - it tasted like well-hung beef. Thorvall took his chance to gloat over the Christians, teasing them about how Thor had turned out to be more generous than their Christ. Eventually they became so exasperated that they said that the meat was cursed and that it gave them stomach cramps and we should throw away the profane flesh. But I noticed that they ate a full meal before they made a gesture of throwing some of the offal into the tide.

The stranded whale ended our famine because over the next few weeks the land began to reward us with her bounty. Leif had sited his cabins on the lip of an estuary, where two small rivers merged before emptying into a shallow tidal estuary. Both rivers teemed with fish. One of my earliest tasks was to dig a series of trenches in the sand shallows at low tide. Shoals of halibut and other flat fish regularly came swimming into the lake on the high tide to feed and as the water receded were left stranded in my trenches. For variety I also picked up clams and mussels on the wide curve of the beach, or helped the adults set nets for the magnificent salmon and sea trout which swam up the rivers. By our Greenlandic standards nature was extraordinarily bountiful. The meadows by the river mouths were covered in tall wild grasses and gave good pasture for our cattle, which usurped the deer whose tracks we could clearly see on the river banks. The most travelled of our colonists had never laid eyes on such stands of trees, mostly softwoods, but with some trees completely unknown. One yellow tree, very like our birch, provides timber as tough as our native oak, and another tree with a three-pointed leaf gives a beautiful ingrained wood that Tyrkir gloated over, turning and polishing it so that it glowed with a deep honey colour. As a timber-starved people, we scarcely knew what to do first: whether to cut down small trees to make our houses or to fell the larger ones and set them aside to season so that we could take a precious cargo across to Greenland.