The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson
Read The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson Online
Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
Contents
15. The Shadow Among the Trees
16. The Ship and the Dark Woods
Also available in Red Fox Classics
Sword Song
is the swashbuckling story of Bjarni, a Viking swordsman. Banished from his home, as a boy, for a murder he didn’t intend to commit, Bjarni takes up a new life as a mercenary. He journeys to the islands off the west coast of Scotland and there his life is shaped for years to come. A life that will see him fighting among the clan chiefs in feuds as bitter and bloody as can be imagined. This enthralling novel was the last thing Rosemary Sutcliff wrote and was discovered in a drawer after her death. It is published here in paperback for the first time.
Throughout her working life my godmother and cousin, Rosemary Sutcliff, wrote each of her books in three consecutive drafts.
The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson
(later re-titled
Sword Song
) was two-thirds through its second draft when she died suddenly in July 1992. Since then, as her executor and chairman of the company which looks after her books, I have transcribed her manuscript, with the encouragement of her agent for some years, Murray Pollinger. Her long-time editor and friend Jill Black has edited the result. Many thanks are due to them.
In this, her final book, Rosemary returns to the Norse world she had so memorably portrayed many years earlier in
The Shield Ring.
Anthony Lawton
October 1996
Dublin on the Morning Tide
HALFWAY UP THE
Hearth Hall the man and the boy faced each other.
The man sat leaning forward a little, hands spread-fingered on the carved foreposts of the High Seat. The boy stood before him, stubbornly returning his accusing blue gaze with eyes that were just as blue under a thatch of barley-pale hair.
Bjarni Sigurdson was not much over sixteen; a tall raw-boned stripling whose voice, when he spoke, still sounded faintly rough at the edges, betraying the fact that it had broken not so many years ago.
‘He kicked my dog,’ said Bjarni Sigurdson.
‘Your dog having just attacked him.’
‘Her pups are no’ but three days old, her temper a bit shaken.’
‘And so you killed him.’
‘I was not meaning to – only the horse-pond was near-hand, and he cannot have had much hold on life to have drowned in the little time I held him under.’
There was a long silence. At the lower end of the Hall women were about their ready-making for the evening meal, with anxious glances towards the High
Seat. From outside came the sound of metal on wood and men’s voices as they worked; all the sounds of the young settlement; and beyond that the crying of the gulls. Beside the turf fire one of the hunting dogs was snuffling after fleas in his flank. Bjarni heard them all with great clearness; and yet he had the feeling of silence that went on – and on.
He had hoped, when he was summoned to stand before Rafn the Chief here in his Hall, instead of being held to appear before the Thing – the Law Gathering – on a charge of man-slaying, that nothing so very bad was going to happen after all. He had not meant to kill the old man in the long brown kirtle who had come to the settlement to tell them about his god, as though they had no gods of their own. Anybody could make a mistake. But looking into the unforgiving face of Rafn Cedricson he felt less hopeful as the moments passed.
‘How long since you came west-over-seas to join the settlement?’ the Chief asked at last.
‘Half a year,’ Bjarni said sullenly.
Half a year. It seemed longer than that, somehow, as though he had already begun to put down roots. Half a year since the Grandfather, too old to pull up his own roots, but wanting to get the young ones out of Norway (which King Harald Finehair was making too hot for those who valued their freedom to live as they chose) had sent him to join Gram his elder brother in the settlement of Rafnglas, which their own chief’s brother had made here on the north-west coast of the Angles’ Land.
‘Time enough to learn that in this land-take the men of the White Christ walk safe.’
‘I did not think – I had forgotten –’
‘Then listen,’ said the Chief, ‘and I will tell the thing over to you again. When I was a bairn, I was fostered,
according to common custom, on a friend of my father’s. His son and I grew together, closer than brothers-in-blood, as is often the way with foster-kin. In young manhood he came – no matter how – under the influence of folk who worship the White Christ. He left his own gods behind, and turned to theirs, and in time took the cowl and the shaven forehead, and became one of their holymen. So I lost my brother from the hearth fire and the shield-ring. But for his sake I swore on the Hammer of our god Thor that within my land-take and among men of my own following, the men of his kind should be safe.’
The silence came back. Bjarni said nothing. There seemed nothing to say.
‘Therefore you have made of me an oath-breaker, and that is a thing I do not lightly forgive,’ said the Chief at last. ‘But it is a thing between you and me, and not a matter for hearing out there at the Thing.’
And Bjarni knew that he was waiting for sentence just as surely as though he stood before the Law Gathering of the settlement, after all.
Rafn’s hands tightened on the foreposts, the carved heads of Odin and Frigga that made the High Seat the sacred place in any hall. ‘Kraka will give you a sword from the weapon kist. Take it and get out of my sight, out of the settlement until you have learned the meaning of an oath. Heriolf the Merchant sails on the morning tide.’
Bjarni stood while the words sank in. ‘Just – go?’ he said at last, his mouth feeling oddly dry.
‘Just go! A man with a sword need never lack the means of life – or death. If after five years you still live and you shall be free to return and take your place in the settlement again, it may be that I shall be able to stand the sight of you.’
‘If I still live when the five years are up, it may be
that I shall not wish to return to this boat-strand,’ Bjarni said.
The Chief let out a kind of moan. ‘Then – the seas are wide, and you may sail them until you fall off the far end, if you choose.’