The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (14 page)

THE LADY AUD,
her granddaughter and Muirgoed were housed in the gull-grey stone beehive huts of the guest lodgings, a little apart from those of the Holy Brothers themselves, and the crew of
Fionoula
made their own camp under the ship’s awnings rigged in the lee of the white sand dunes that fringed the landing-beach. And there they passed the first of the four nights that they were to spend on St Columba’s Isle. The next day was a day of quiet before the fasting and the mourning of the White Christ’s Friday. For the Lady it was a day of retreat and prayer and quiet ready-making; for her crew a rest day of nothing much to do but sprawl in the long dune grasses or around the ship, telling stories and playing fox and geese with pebbles on a game-board finger-drawn in the sand. At noon they fed on salt fish and barley stirabout from the monastery kitchen, washed down with thin beer, and not much of it.

‘Best make the most of it,’ Verland told Bjarni. ‘It’s all tha’ll get today, and tomorrow will be leaner still.’

And another man, with his mouth full, added, grinning, ‘Doesn’t seem fair, does it, that you should go
empty-bellied for a god that’s none of yours, hanging on his tree.’ And there was a general laugh.

It was all perfectly good-natured; the men of Thorstein’s ships and settlements were too well used to the mingling of faiths to worry too much about it in these days when, if the Northmen raided a Christian holy place, they did it not because it was Christian but simply because it was rich.

But it made Bjarni feel shut out from their company, all the same.

‘Odin hung on a tree for nine days,’ he said to the world at large. Pushing his last bit of fish into his mouth, and chewing on the dry saltiness of it, he got to his feet, and strolled off to keep his own company.

He wandered southward along the coast until in a while he came down to a cove at what looked to be the southernmost end of the island. And there, for no good reason – he had passed other coves and inlets whose sand was as white and whose rocks were as warm in the sun – he sat down. There were small dark sheep, ring-straked and dappled, grazing on the
machair
behind him. He could hear the shrill bleating of a lamb, and the deeper call of its mother in answer. The dunes at his back kept off the wind, and it was warm in the sunshine. It was not always like this, he knew; lona had its fair share of wild weather. Haki, whose oar was next ahead of his, had told him how a couple of years ago a black squall had blown up just as they had lost the shelter of Mull, and the seas breaking over them amidships as they came in to land, so that it had been all they could do to get
Fionoula
safely beached, and the Lady and her women ashore, drenched but not actually drowned. But today the tide crooning and creaming among the rocks and fingering the sand was green glass in the shallows, deeply blue farther out. Kingfisher’s colours. And the light was
not quite like the light he had known anywhere else. Maybe such a light would lie on the Islands of the Blessed, far out towards the sunset, where the Old People believed that their souls went after death. Maybe over Groa’s isle with the trees of white birds, each singing like the evening star . . .

He was half asleep, when there came a flounder of feet and slipping sand over the dune slope, and someone in a brown habit sat down rather wearily beside him. Glancing round, he saw a thick-set man of middle years, his face broad and bony under the bald dome of his tonsured forehead: a warrior’s face, Bjarni would have said, rather than a monk’s, but with something extraordinarily peaceful in the gaze of the very blue eyes.

‘I saw you go by,’ said the newcomer, ‘but I was busy with the sheep. They’ll do well enough, now. You looked as if you had things to be thinking about. But you will have had a while for thinking and will not mind if I come to share the bay with you.’

‘It’s your bay, and none of mine,’ said Bjarni. He had not meant to sound so surly, but he was not yet in any mood for company.

‘It is nobody’s, and all the world’s,’ said the man, his gaze drifting out to sea. ‘This is the Bay of the Coracles, the place where St Columba and his few monks landed when first they came from Ireland.’

Bjarni had heard something of this holy man from Ireland who had brought the new god to Scotland, but he had not really listened. Now, in this place of quietness and light, he suddenly felt that he would only have to look up to see the monks landing on the sand, and the interest quickened in him. Not wishing any misunderstanding with the brown-clad man, he said, ‘I am one who holds by Thor and Odin, but on Mull I have heard much of this holy man, and of the
settlement he planted here. That would be a long time ago?’

‘More than three hundred years.’

‘And there have been holy men following after him here, all that while?’

‘Almost all that while: there have been times when the raiders came, and afterwards for a while there was no one here but the sea birds. Once, more than a lifetime ago, the relics of St Columba, which had lain here since his death, were taken back to Ireland for greater safety than we could give them here and housed for a while in our mother abbey of Kells. But later, we brought him home. We have had quieter times of late with the cloak of Thorstein Olafson for our shelter. But there is a savage wind blowing among the islands, a restlessness that can be felt even here – a load of good land for the taking in Ireland – the Northmen have ever been a folk with their eyes on any farther shore.’ He sat silent a few moments, trickling white sand through his fingers. ‘One day Thorstein will be gone from us, in one way or another, and then the raiders will come again.’

‘So what will you do when that day comes?’ Bjarni asked, thinking in terms of underwater stockades and maybe even a bought bodyguard of men like himself. Everybody said that the abbey was rich, despite the brothers’ simple way of life.

‘Die, as our brothers died before us,’ said the man beside him, the monk who looked like a warrior.

Bjarni opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it again.

And the man brushed the last of the sand from his fingers, and turned toward him with a wary smile. ‘But all this can have little interest for you. Tell me of yourself, how you who follow Thor and Odin come to be one of the Lady Aud’s rowers this Easter faring?’

From some people it might have seemed too probing, but from this man Bjarni took it for honest interest, and did his best to answer truthfully. ‘I think the Lady Aud hopes that you – the brothers – this place – might make a Christian of me.’

The monk sat thoughtful a few moments, then asked, ‘And how would that seem to you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Bjarni told him. ‘Sometimes I feel one way, sometimes the other. Sometimes I still feel in my belly that I am Thor’s man, Odin’s man, sometimes I feel that they are finished with me and I am finished with them.’ Trying to explain, he found himself telling the old story yet again, to another total stranger – and when the story was done, sitting with hands round updrawn knees, staring at a small yellow sand-flower, and wishing that he had not told it. Because now of course the man would try to show him that his old gods were not good for following, and drag him over to the faith of the White Christ, and something in him flinched from that as from some kind of invasion that he had left himself open to.

But seemingly the man knew it: for he said only, after a long pause, ‘Remember it was not Thor who demanded the life of your dog, but his priest. Priests are but men. This one was a man with a daughter, foolish and vengeful but probably much loved.’

And there was a trace of a smile in the voice, though his face was grave when Bjarni looked round at him. ‘Surely you are not like most of your kind? I thought that you were supposed to hate the old gods, not defend them.’

The man returned his look, the smile that had been in his voice creeping into his eyes. ‘The thing is not so plain as that. I made my prayers to Thor in the God-House when I was a boy, before I followed my foster-brother west-over-seas. We came to raid, and
stayed awhile as raiders sometimes do. I fell sick, and so came under the hand of a solitary holy man who had healing skills . . . I had hopes that my foster-brother would stay, too; but he went back to Norway and his own kindred, his own gods who were no longer mine. Yet when we parted, he swore for my sake that all followers of the White Christ would be safe within his boundaries for all time; so there was something gained after all.’

Bjarni had an odd feeling in the belly as though something had jolted him there. Yet he had no sense of surprise. In this island of the clear light, nothing, no wonder, could be really surprising. ‘What name was he – your foster-brother?’ he asked.

‘Rafn – Rafn Cedricson. I have often wondered what the pattern of his life has been.’

Bjarni was silent a short while, looking down at his linked hands. Then he said, ‘This much I can tell you. He is – two years ago, when I last saw him – he was Chieftain of a settlement far to the south of here, where the three great rivers of the Lake Country come to sea.’

He was aware of a sudden great stillness beside him, but he did not look round, feeling that whatever he might see in the face of the man beside him was no affair of his. ‘Your settlement,’ the monk said quietly, out of his stillness; and nothing more.

‘Yes,’ Bjarni said, and was silent. There was a long, slow-passing silence, while the knowledge grew in him that he must tell this story also. ‘Until two years ago,’ he said at last. ‘Then – there was a holy man – not like you. He kicked my dog – that was another dog – and I tipped him into the horse-pond and held his head under for a while to teach him the unwisdom of that. He was old, and I suppose I held him under too long.’

‘And so he drowned,’ said the man beside him.

Bjarni nodded. ‘I had been only a few months there. I did not know – or I had forgotten, it did not seem a great matter – about the Chieftain’s oath. So I made him an oath-breaker. He gave me a sword and bade me out of the settlement for five years, until he could bear to see my face again.’

A sea bird swept close above their heads, its wings warmed with sunlight, and they both watched it bank, and swing out over the bay.

‘When the five years are up and you go back, tell to your Chieftain that Gisli his foster-brother forgives him the oath-breaking,’ the monk said simply.

‘I will tell him,’ Bjarni said; and surprised himself by asking, ‘But what for me?’ scarcely knowing what he meant.

‘For you? The five outlaw years shall have earned you your quittance.’

Far off, borne on the wind, Bjarni caught the faint shepherd clang of the church’s bell, and Gisli drew his legs under him and got up. ‘It is time for Vespers. I must go my way.’

When he was gone, Bjarni sat on, arms crossed on updrawn knees, gazing out over the white sand and the creaming shallows, thinking more deeply than ever he had thought in his life before. He had come on this Easter faring with half an idea at the back of his mind that he might do as the Lady Aud would have him. Now he took the idea out, looked at it and was not so sure. It was the sensible thing to do. At least going halfway and getting prime-signed was the sensible thing to do; many of the merchant kind and the mercenaries had found that. Once prime-signed by a Christian priest you were accepted into the following of the White Christ, which made life much simpler if for instance you wanted to take
sword-service with a Christian chief; but you were still free to turn back to your own gods in time of real need. It was a thing quite easily done. At least, he had thought so. But now suddenly he was seeing it as something that could not – should not – be easily done at all. This whole matter of which gods one held to . . . In his inner eye he saw Rafn and Gisli tearing their lives apart from each other over it. A thing that mattered as much as that . . .

After a while he got up and turned back to the camp by the boat-strand, still thinking.

He went on thinking a good deal through the days that followed; the day of fasting and mourning, the day of waiting, the day of rejoicing. He had no part in any of it, but he went hungry with the rest on God’s Friday, there being nothing to eat anyway, and with the gathering of
Fionoula’
s crew before the open door, watched what went on in the little stone and wattle church bloomed with the light of honey-wax candles on Easter morning. And, watching and listening, he learned more of the White Christ to add to what he had learned already during the months on Mull.

And then in the midst of the night after Easter, the last night that they would spend on lona, he woke quickly and quietly as a man wakes to the old hunter’s trick of a thumb pressed below his left ear, but there was no one near him. He had rolled out from under the ship’s awning, and now lay staring up at the sky of dappled cloud, pearl-coloured, drifting across the moon, hearing the sounds of a calm sea and the breathing – snoring – of the other rowers under the awning. He had an odd feeling of having arrived somewhere that he had been searching for. As though in his sleep all his confused thinking of the past few
days had sorted itself out, and now he could be still and see where it had got him.

He knew quite clearly that despite the night when the priest had called in Thor’s name for the death of Hugin, he was not ready to leave his old gods yet. Maybe he never would be. Yet something in him reached out to this other god, who was Brother Gisli’s, and Erp’s and the Lady Aud’s. But the step was too great to be taken with loyalties divided. Brother Gisli had shown him that. He could not go all the way. But he could go part of it . . . He found that he was thinking of prime-signing no longer as just a sensible thing to do, but as a kind of threshold: and surely the White Christ, who knew the ways of men’s hearts because he had been a man himself, and died for other men, would understand if he could only come as far as the threshold.

In the first green light of morning with the shore birds crying, he went in search of Brother Gisli and found him in the home pasture behind the grain store, squatting with a cade lamb between his knees, which he was feeding with milk from a leather bottle. He squatted down also, and waited until the little one was full fed and, with the alder teat plucked from its milky muzzle, had gone wobbling away. Then Brother Gisli looked up at him with his slow quiet smile. ‘A fine morning, and a fair wind for the Lady’s homeward faring.’