The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (12 page)

Easy enough to tell which was the Lady Aud; Aud the Deep-Minded, who had once been Queen to King Olaf the White of Dublin, by that rich gown and the fact that hers was the only chair. But Bjarni, standing on the threshold and looking in, felt that he would have known her in a room of women wearing the same gown and seated in the same chair.

The thrum of the spindle and the lazy chatter of women’s voices fell silent, and one of the hounds growled softly. Bjarni felt the vibration of an almost silent growl in answer pressed against his own leg, and gave a small jerk to Hugin’s leash. He could do without a dogfight at this moment.

‘Peace, Vig! Peace, Asa!’ said a voice, deep for a woman’s. The Lady Aud looked up, and Bjarni found
himself meeting the gaze of the darkest eyes he had ever seen, faintly slant-set in an old and beautiful broad-boned face. He had heard it said that the Lady Aud had skraeling blood, the blood of the far North, in her veins, and that was maybe where her wise-powers came from . . .

‘Come your way in, stranger, and tell the thing that brings you here.’

And keeping a light hold on Hugin’s collar, Bjarni advanced into the broad chamber to stand beside the hearth. ‘Lady, I am Bjarni from the ship of Heriolf Merchantman in the haven. It was told to me that I might find here someone with the skill and kindness to mend my dog of a wound to his paw that he took five days ago?’ He looked anxiously into her face. ‘He’s a good dog – worth the saving.’

‘As most dogs are to those that love them,’ said the Lady Aud, and her hand rested lightly for the moment on the head of the great brindled bitch beside her. She turned and looked up to the woman at the loom. ‘Muirgoed, leave the weaving, it is your skills in leechcraft which we need here.’

The woman let her shuttle fall and came to kneel beside the hearth. ‘Let you show me,’ she said, the faint lilt that she gave to the words showing that the Norse was not her native tongue.

Bjarni kept his hand on Hugin’s collar, watching anxiously as she took a little knife from her belt and began to cut away and fold back the stained rags. Hugin whimpered and tried to pull his paw away but made no attempt to bite, seeming to know that she meant no harm against him.

When the last fold of rag fell away she drew in her breath at the sight of the mutilated paw, hot and swollen and with an ugly weeping mess where the ends of the two midmost toes should have been. She
put her hand under Hugin’s chin and lifted it to look into his eyes. ‘
Mai, mai, mai,
here’s a sorry thing,’ she said to the dog alone; and then to Bjarni, ‘Keep him still, I will fetch the salve?’ Rising, she disappeared through a door behind the painted hangings that enriched the walls.

By the time she returned, the other women had drawn closer to watch. The three children had come in also, the youngest still clutching the saffron-striped kitten; and even the Lady Aud had paused in her stitchery and was leaning forward for a closer view.

‘Who did this?’ she asked as the woman Muirgoed dropped to her knees again, setting down her remedies and the bowl of water she carried, and fell to bathing Hugin’s hot and angry paw.

‘Onund Treefoot,’ Bjarni said.

‘So-o! Onund Treefoot. Was the dog chasing his deer?’

‘There’s not many deer on Barra.’

‘Why then?’

Bjarni was silent a moment, then he began carefully to try to explain. ‘There was a girl –’

‘And you wanted her?’ said the Lady Aud gravely.

‘No. She wanted me: and I grew weary of pretending not to see . . . It was at Onund’s bride-ale, and we were dancing.’ He wondered what in the name of all the Gods of Asgard had possessed him to try to tell the whole confused and ugly story to this unknown woman, simply because she had asked. But he ploughed on, trying to get the thing sorted out in his own mind as he went along; trying to tell it true. ‘She came at me out of the ring-dance, seeking to pull me in with her. I was drunk, I suppose. I pushed her on to the man beside me, and reached for another girl out of the circle to dance with, and she – the first girl – was daughter to the Odin Priest; later, I think
she told a lying tale of me to her father. There was thunder, and I think she put it into his mind that the Lord of Thunder was angry because there was no sacrifice on his altar – Odin and Frigga had the black ram and white ewe that wedding custom calls for – and that he demanded a black dog.’ Bjarni stumbled and checked for the moment; the story was growing confused, running out of hand, but having begun it he could not stop until the end. The woman Muirgoed had finished bathing Hugin’s paw and was spreading strong-smelling green salve on the wounds.

‘Bad girl,’ said the bairn with the saffron kitten into the top of the little creature’s head. She seemed to find the story quite clear so far anyway.

Bjarni took a deep breath and struggled on. ‘After, when we had taken the bride home to Onund’s hall, the Priest came demanding Hugin – my dog – for a sacrifice. There was fighting. Onund came out to see with his sword. He did that to Hugin to settle the thing quickly’

‘I am thinking that Onund Treefoot was never one to waste time picking at knots,’ said the Lady Aud as though to herself. Then to Bjarni she said, ‘And after that?’

‘Nothing after that, Lady. You asked me why, and I have told.’

‘So now I ask you what happened after. Tell me how the bedraggled pair of you come to my threshold.’

‘After – Onund bade me go from Barra. I had sold him loyal sword-service through two summers. He said that himself, and gave it back to me with honour, to take elsewhere. Heriolf Merchantman was in the harbour.’

He made a small gesture of finish with his free hand across his knee. Then he added one thing more.
‘Heriolf said that after that night’s work, there’d have been but a short life left for me on Barra.’

‘I think Heriolf Merchantman may well have been right,’ Aud said gently.

The woman had begun to rebind Hugin’s paw with a clean linen rag. ‘Groa,’ she said to the eldest of the three bairns, ‘let you bring some milk, and a flask of the green fever-draught.’

The girl rose and slipped away through the inner door. When she returned Muirgoed had made fast the bandage. She took the wooden stopper from the flask and sniffed at it, then poured a little into the milk and held it under the dog’s nose. ‘Drink, Dark Brother.’ Hugin hesitated, then flicked his tongue into the milk, and having got the taste of it, dipped his muzzle and lapped until the bowl was empty. ‘That should cool the fever,’ the woman said, her hand on his head. ‘Bring him back to me here tomorrow.’

Then, as though suddenly remembering something, she looked up at the Lady Aud, who had returned to the cloak that she was mending. ‘I have your leave?’

‘Do you not always have my leave?’ said the Lady. ‘As one queen to another.’ Clearly that was a long-standing jest between them and Bjarni, getting to his feet, wondered what it was. Men had small hidden jests between themselves, but he had not known that women did.

Heavy steps came thumping up through the garth and something loomed like a bear in the doorway. Swinging round, Bjarni saw a big man broad-built and already inclined to paunch, and got the impression, though he could not see clearly against the yellow sunset light, of big blunt features and a badly broken nose amid a bush of fiery red hair – not the dark fox hue that was Onund’s, but a lighter, fiercer colour, almost the colour of molten iron.

He did not need to be told that he was looking at Thorstein the Red, sea lord of a great fleet and many islands and a man to carry fear with it along the mainland coasts.

He was grumbling as he crossed the threshold: ‘That moon-calf Kadir has let the brood mare out again.’

His mother cut the thread with the little knife at her girdle and held up the heavy folds of wolfskin and thick Roman-red cloth. ‘Has he? I make no doubt that Erp will have all things in hand . . . See, I have finished mending your cloak.’

The man came tramping round the hearth to take it from her; and brought a hand like Thor’s Hammer down on her shoulder by way of thanks.

And Groa, the eldest of the three children, standing with the empty milk-bowl in her hands, clearly felt that the newcomer amongst them was in danger of being forgotten, and put in a little breathlessly, ‘O my father, see – here is a stranger with us. He was with Onund Treefoot until his dog –’

Bjarni, standing by with his hand in Hugin’s collar, wondering how to make his own thanks and get away, or maybe get away without making them at all, grew rigid. Fool that he had been to tell! Now it was all going to be told again, and he had a sick feeling that Aud in her lovely kindness was going to offer his sword-service to this huge son of hers as though he were some stray bairn to be befriended. And if she did that, even if Thorstein would take him, he must refuse. Whether or not he wanted to, he must refuse, or know that yet again his life was being shaped for him by other hands than his own . . .

But the Lady Aud had dropped her spool of thread, and was commanding, ‘Groa, help me rewind my thread, your fingers are so neat.’ And then over the bent red-gold head to Thorstein, ‘Heriolf
Merchantman is in the haven, maybe you have seen him? Bjarni Sigurdson here is with him, but his dog has an injured paw, and he has brought him here for Muirgoed’s tending.’

And a wave of relief and gratitude broke over Bjarni.

Thorstein was looking at him out of a pair of tawny golden eyes, the kind that having met their gaze, it is hard to look away from. ‘You do not look like the merchant kind.’

Bjarni shook his head. ‘I leave that to Heriolf. He has fine silks and good hide ropes – the usual. Oh, and a jewelled cup with a cross on it that he thinks may interest the Lady Aud.’ This with a glance toward the mistress of the house, who looked up from her grand-daughter and her spilled thread to meet it with a smile.

‘For myself I have only my sword-service for sale.’

SO BJARNI BECAME
Thorstein’s paid man as he had been Onund’s and he was well enough content, though still there was an ache in him somewhere like the ache of an old wound when the wind is from the east.

And with Hugin also, all was well. With Muirgoed’s salves his paw mended cleanly and before the next moon had waned and the yellow birch-leaves were falling, he was running on four paws again, and only limped on three when suddenly he remembered to.

The gales blew up from the west and the year darkened towards winter. In the sheltered crop-lands the ox-ploughs were busy and the winter wheat was sown. The bees which could not be kept through the black months were turned out of the hives, and the woods rang with the sound of axes felling timber for the raising and mending of farm buildings and the slim war-keels down at the ship-strand.

For the most part the farm work of the settlement was done by thralls, while the free men of the Kindred, the ship-carles and hearth companions, threw in their lot with the shipwrights, and rode hunting red deer and wild pig, for the most part
not so much for pleasure as for meat to add to the slaughtered cattle for the winter salting down. But at times – harvest, sheep-shearing, the round-up when the horses were brought down from the summer pastures – thrall and free, farmers and seamen and warriors (they were mostly the same thing), came together, working side by side.

On the evening of one such day, a day of flying cloud and changing lights in which Ben Mhor, the Great Mountain as the Gael folk still called it, would be clear enough one moment to pick out the high corries and the screes scarring its sides, and the next time one looked it would be gone into empty sky and trailing storm cloud, Bjarni was standing with his elbows propped on the long wall of the colt-garth, watching the ragged, slender two-year-olds, whom he had been all day helping to get in for their breaking. Hugin sat pressed against his leg with lolling tongue and half-closed eyes. And beside him, also watching the colts, leaned a man whom he had seen often among the horses, but never spoken with or met eye-to-eye with before now; a tall young man with a quiet face, not unlike a horse himself, and the glimpse of an iron thrall-ring showing at the neck of his rough wadmal sark.

The colts were uneasy, the wind setting their manes and tails flying as they wheeled and fidgeted with wide eyes and up-flung heads. The young man spoke to the nearest in a tongue that Bjarni guessed was no tongue known to men, and the mealy-muzzled colt swung its head to look at him and whickered softly as one horse greets another before it remembered its fear and arched away.

‘Were you born in a stable, that you talk to the horse kind in their own tongue,’ Bjarni said, ‘with a mare
for a mother, who could cast her skin like a seal-woman?’

‘No stable of Red Thorstein’s, anyway,’ said the other and, glancing round, Bjarni saw that he had turned his head from the colts and was gazing away south-easterly along the dim blue line of the mainland, with the look of someone seeing beyond the range of mortal sight.

‘From that way?’ he said.

The man nodded. ‘From Argyll – a land of the horse people. But that was long ago. My mother too. She is Muirgoed, chief among the Lady Aud’s bower-thralls.’