Sworn Brother (22 page)

‘It’s
the
strength
in his arms that does it,’ said Thorstein Galleon to me two weeks later. Grettir and
I
had finally found a ship, an Icelandic vessel and at a bandit’s price, to take us to Tonsberg, where the three of us - Thorstein, Grettir and I - were now seated in the kitchen at Thorstein’s farm. ‘Look here, see my arm.’ And Thorstein rolled back his sleeve. ‘People would say that
I
‘m well muscled. But take a look at Grettir’s arms. They’re more like oxen’s hocks. And he’s got the strength in his chest and shoulders to back them up. We used to have contests when we were children, seeing who could pick up the heaviest stones or throw them the furthest. Grettir always won and by the time he was in his early teens people started taking bets on whether he could lift a particularly heavy boulder they selected. Yet to look at him you would never know how strong he is. Not until he takes off his tunic, that is. That is why people misjudge him so often. They get into a fight with him or an argument, and finish up the worse off. If Grettir was a big man, massive and fearsome to look at, he would not have half the trouble he seems to attract. People would steer clear.’

Grettir, as usual, was adding little to the conversation. He sat there, listening to his half-brother ramble on. I could see that there was considerable affection between them, though for the

most part it was unspoken. We were lazing away the day, waiting for the captain who had brought us to decide whether he would risk sailing onward to Iceland. My friend had announced that he had decided to go home, even if it meant breaking the terms of his three-year exile. He had confided to me that although his sentence of lesser outlawry still had six months to run, as far as he was concerned the matter was over and done with. He felt he had spent enough time abroad to cancel the blood debt to the Icelandic family of the man he had killed. Now that I knew him better, I realised that his unfinished sentence had become an attraction rather than a deterrent. He was thinking he would gain fame - or notoriety - as the man brave enough to adjust his time of exile out of a sense of self-justice.

When Grettir told Thorstein of his decision to return home, his half-brother pondered the matter for several moments, then said in his deep rumbling voice, ‘I doubt that your father will be too pleased to see you, or even speak to you. But remember me to our mother and tell her that I am well and prospering here in Norway. Whatever happens, I want you to know that you can always count on my support. And if worst comes to worst, and you get yourself unjustly killed, I swear that I will hunt down the killer and avenge you. This I pledge.’

Though Grettir had promised our avaricious captain that he would double his usual fee for the passage to Iceland, the skipper had already delayed his departure three times, not because he was fearful of Grettir’s bad luck, but because he was uneasy about running into a late winter gale. He was mercenary but he was also a good seaman. Even now he was aboard his ship in the little creek close below Thorstein’s farm, gazing up anxiously at the sky, watching which way the clouds were going, and offering up prayers to Njord, God of the winds and waves. He knew that an open-sea crossing to Iceland was not something to undertake lightly at that time of year.

Sailors give nicknames to their ships. I have sailed on ‘Plunger’, which pitched badly in the waves; ‘Griper’ was almost impossible to sail close to the wind, and ‘The Sieve’ obviously needed constant bailing. The ship we now expected to carry us to Iceland was known to her crew as ‘The Clog’. The man who had built her many years earlier had intended a vessel nearly twice the size and he had constructed the fore part of the ship before realising that he was running out of funds. Iceland has no ship-building timber, and the wood for her vessels has to be imported from Norway. The price of timber soared that year, and ‘The Clog’s‘ builder was already deep in debt. So he had truncated his ship, making her stern with whatever material he had left over. The result was that the bow of ‘The Clog’ was a fine, sea-kindly prow. But the stern was a sorry affair, stunted, clumsy and awkward. And it turned out to be nearly the death of us.

Her captain knew that he needed six days of settled weather to make his passage in ‘The Clog’, as she was such a slow and heavy sailer. ‘We could be lucky and have a week of favourable east winds at this season,’ he said, ‘but then again it can turn nasty in a few hours and we’d be in real trouble.’

Eventually his weather sense, or perhaps his enthusiasm for our passage money, persuaded him that the right moment had come and we set sail. At first everything went well. The east wind held and we plodded west, passing through an area where we saw many whales and knew we had cleared the rocks and cliffs of Farroes. Though I was a paying passenger, I took my turn to prepare meals on the flat hearth stone at the base of the mast, and I helped to handle sails, bail out the bilges, and generally showed willing. Grettir, by contrast, sank into one of his surly moods. He lay about the deck, wrapped in his cloak and picking the most sheltered spots, where he was in the way of the working crew. Even when it was obvious that he was a hindrance, he refused to shift, and the vessel’s regular eight-man crew were too frightened of his brawler’s reputation to kick him out of the way. Instead they glared at him, made loud remarks about lazy louts and generally worked themselves into a state of rightful indignation about his idleness. Grettir only sneered back at them and called them lubberly clowns, no better than seagoing serfs. Being Grettir’s friend and companion I was thoroughly embarrassed by his churlish behaviour, though I knew better than to interfere. Anything I said when he was in that sullen mood was likely to make him even more obstinate. So I put up with the scornful remarks of my shipmates when they enquired how I managed to maintain a friendship with such a boor. I held my tongue and remembered how, without Grettir’s intervention, I would probably have ended my life in a Nidaros tavern brawl.

‘The Clog’ trudged along. Despite her age, she was doing all that was asked of her thanks to the hard-working crew and the good weather. Unfortunately, though, the weather proved a cruel fraud. The same east wind which was pushing us along our route so satisfactorily, gradually grew in strength. At first no one complained. The increase in the wind was by small degrees and easily handled. The crew reduced sail and looked pleased. ‘The Clog’ was now moving through the water as fast as any of them could remember and in the right direction. In the evening the wind strength rose a little more. The sailors doubled the ropes which supported the single mast, lowered the mainyard a fraction, and checked that there was nothing loose on deck that might roll free and do damage. The younger mariners began to look slightly apprehensive. During the third night at sea we began to hear the telltale sound of the wind moaning in the rigging, a sign that ‘The Clog’ was coming under increasing stress. When dawn broke, the sea all around us was heaving in rank upon rank of great waves, their tops streaked with foam. Now the older members of the crew began to be concerned. They checked the bilges to see how much water was seeping through the hull’s seams. The ship was labouring, and if you listened closely you could hear the deep groans of the heavier timbers in contrast to the shrieking clamour of the wind. By noon the captain had ordered the crew to take down the mainsail entirely and rig a makeshift storm sail on a short spar just above deck level. This storm sail was no bigger than a man’s cloak, but by then the wind had risen to such strength that the tiny sail was enough to allow the helmsman to steer the ship. Only the captain himself and his most experienced crewman were at the rudder because each breaking wave was threatening to yaw the ship and send her out of control. In those vile conditions there was no question of trying to steer our intended course, nor of heaving to and waiting for the gale to blow itself out. ‘The Clog’ was too clumsy to ride the waves ahull. They would roll her. Our best tactic was to steer directly downwind, allowing the great waves to roll harmlessly under her.

This was when the original failure of her construction began to tell. A deep-sea merchant ship, properly built to our favoured Norse design, would have had a neat stern, so she rose effortlessly to the following waves, as a sea-kindly gull sits on the water. But ‘The Clog’s broad, ugly stern was too ungainly. She did not lift with the waves, but instead squatted down awkwardly and presented a bluff barrier to the force of the sea. And the sea responded in anger. Wave after wave broke violently against that clumsy stern. We felt each impact shake the length of the little vessel. And the crest of every wave came rearing up and toppled onto the deck, washing forward and then cascading into the open hold. Even the least experienced seafarer would have seen the danger: if our vessel took on too much water, she would either founder from the added weight or the swirl of the water in the hold would make her dangerously unstable. Then she would simply roll over and die, taking all of us with her.

Without being told, our crew - myself included — bailed frantically, trying to return the sea water to where it belonged. It was back-breaking, endless labour. We were using wooden buckets, and they had to be hoisted up from the bilge by one man to a helper on deck, who then crossed to the lee rail, emptied the bucket over the side, lurched his way back across the heaving and slippery deck, and lowered back the bucket down to the man working in the bilge. It became a never-ending, desperate cycle as more and more water came gushing in over ‘The Clog’s‘ ill-begotten stern. Our skipper did what he could to help. He steered the ship to each wave, trying to avoid the direct impact on the stern, and he ordered the now-useless mainsail to be rigged as a breakwater to divert the crests that leaped aboard. But the respite was only temporary. After a day of unremitting bailing, we could feel ‘The Clog’ beginning to lose the battle. Hour by hour she became more sluggish, and the man who stood in the bilge to bail was now up to his thighs in water. The previous day he had been able to see his knees. Our ship was slowly settling into her grave.

All the time, as we struggled to save the ship, Grettir lay on deck like a dead man, his face turned to the bulwark, soaked to the skin and ignoring us. It was difficult to credit his behaviour. At first I thought he was one of those unfortunates who are so seasick that all feeling leaves them and they become like the living dead, unable to stir whatever the emergency. But not Grettir. From time to time I saw him turn over to ease his bones on the hard deck. I found his attitude inexplicable and wondered if he was so fatalistic that he had decided to meet calmly whatever death the Norns had decreed him.

But I had mistaken my friend. On the fourth morning of our voyage, after we had passed an awful night, bailing constantly until we were so exhausted that we could scarcely stand, Grettir suddenly sat up and stretched his arms. He glanced over to where we were standing, our eyes red-rimmed with tiredness, muscles aching. There was no mistaking our expressions of dislike as we saw him finally take an interest in our plight. He did not say a word, but got up and walked over to the edge of the open hatch leading to the hold and jumped down. Silendy Grettir held out his hand to the man who was standing there, crotch deep in the water. He took the bailing bucket from him, waved him away, then scooped up a bucket full of water and passed it up to the sailor who had been emptying the bucket over the rail. Grettir made the lift look effortless even though he had to reach above his head. When the bucket was empty, it was handed back and Grettir repeated his action so smoothly and quickly that the full bucket was back on deck level before the startled sailor was ready to receive it. He staggered across the pitching deck and emptied its contents over the side, while my friend stood in the bilge and waited his return. Now Grettir caught my eye and gestured towards a second bucket lashed with its lanyard to the mast step. I saw immediately what he meant, so fetched the bucket and passed it down to him. He filled that bucket, too, and handed it back up to me so I could dump the water over the rail. Back and forth we went, the sailor and I, emptying our buckets as fast as the two of us could cross the deck while Grettir stayed below and went on scooping and filling our loads. When I was too tired to continue, I handed my bucket to a second sailor, as did my workmate. Grettir did not break his rhythm. Nor did he falter when the second pair of helpers had to rest, but kept on filling bucket after bucket with water from the bilge.

He kept up his amazing feat for eight hours, with only a short break after every five hundredth bucket. None of us would have believed such stamina was possible. He was tireless and kept pace with the crew as they worked in relays. The men who had glared and complained about his indolence, now looked at him in awe. Inspired, they found an endurance of their own and worked, turn and turn about, to win the race against the water level in the bilge. Without Grettir, they and their ship would be lost and they knew it. For my part, I knew that Grettir was saving my life for a second time and that I owed him my unswerving friendship.

‘The Clog’ nearly overshot Iceland altogether as she ran before that tyrannical east wind. When the gale finally eased, our shaken skipper managed to edge his ship into the lee of the land off the Hvit River and we found that, by ‘The Clog’s‘ lumbering standards, we had made a record passage. Our sailors went ashore boasting about their prowess, though their greatest applause was reserved for Grettir. He was the hero of the hour. The skipper went so far as to hand him back half our passage money and announced that Grettir was welcome to stay on board as long as he wished. After such a shockingly desperate voyage the skipper vowed that he would keep ‘The Clog’ safely at anchor until the proper sailing season.