The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (32 page)

‘Except the ducks,’ said Angharad on a sound between a laugh and a whimper.

‘Grief is on me that we could not save the ducks. We have saved Swallow.’ To his own surprise he put out his left hand, a little clumsily, and set it over hers. ‘I will take you back to your nunnery if you’d have it that way. If you’re not for the Holy Sisters, then there’s not much you can do but come back to Rafnglas with me.’

Until that moment he had not thought what he was going to do with Angharad, where he was going to take her, only that he had to get her away from the burning farm; and he heard his own voice saying the words as though they were not quite his own, and he was as surprised as it seemed that she was. She pulled her hand from under his and looked at him with her brows up. ‘And what makes you think that I would marry with a blue-eyed barbarian?’

Anger and hurt took Bjarni by the throat. ‘Who spoke of marriage? You have not even a dowry!’

For a moment they looked at each other, on the verge of a scene that might have put bitterness between them for all time. Then Angharad said, with a hand going to the marred side of her neck in a familiar gesture, ‘Nor any beauty to take its place.’

And the moment tipped over into something else, and Bjarni swallowed his own hurt and anger to take hers from her. ‘Tha’s bonny enough for me, though,’ he mumbled awkwardly. And suddenly he was realising something that he had not realised before; that while he came of a people who could uproot easily, whose home was as much the sea as the land, she was of another kind. And save for the nunnery years she had known no home, no familiar place, but
the valley and the farmstead that now lay in black ruin behind her. She was flung out into a strange world that held nothing familiar, a cold place; he could feel the cold in her. He was the only thing she knew in it; and though they had worked together through the summer, and come close in many ways, he was still a stranger to her in others.

He searched around in his weary mind for the right thing to do, the right thing to say. He was not practised in love talk, but suddenly his arms were round her and his face buried in the side of her neck, speaking softly where the red flare was.

‘I have done something that I never did before. Last night I ran from a fight for your sake. Because I would not see you killed.’

And this time she did not draw away. Instead she put her arm round his neck, and he felt the beginning flicker of warmth, of life in her. ‘I
have
a dowry to bring,’ she said with a kind of weary laughter. ‘I have a horse and a ring that cures warts.’

‘And that’s a fine dowry after all,’ Bjarni said as they slipped down into the growing warmth of the streamside grass.

IT WAS LATE
in the autumn when Bjarni brought them all down to Eskdale and turned seaward down the long winding drift-way that linked the older and lower steadings of Rafn’s settlement. The journey behind them had not been so long, as journeys go, but they had made slow travelling across high moors and through forest land so dense that even when they had the firmness of a Redcrests’ road underfoot, it was as though no mortal had ever passed that way before them. They had travelled slowly, trapping game and tickling trout for food as they went, sometimes stopping for a whole day to rest Swallow; once, in vile weather, claiming shelter from a solitary holy man, though of what faith even he did not seem quite sure. Once a shuffling brown bear came out of the forest too near to the camp fire, setting Hugin raving, which they had to drive away with a flaming branch. More than once driven eastward by mountains or unfordable rivers, they had seemed to lose the sea – the only thing that Bjarni really knew about his way back to Rafnglas was that he must keep in touch with
the sea always on the left – and he almost doubted whether he was going to get back at all.

Yet here they were at last, towards evening on a day with drifting skies, with the wind booming through the woods, the burn that they followed swimming yellow with fallen birch leaves, coming down into Eskdale.

Most of the way they had walked, leading Swallow, occasionally riding and then never more than one of them at a time. But at the first boundary-stone of the in-take, he mounted the old horse and took Angharad up before him, being minded to ride home as a man should do who had been away five years making his fortune. He had the feeling Angharad understood this and was laughing at him, but when he looked down at her, her face was perfectly grave.

Grave still, she pulled off the old stocking cap and let her hair fall free, shaking it out over her shoulders. She too had an entrance to make.

And so they rode down into Rafnglas.

At that time of day there were not many to see them pass, for the men were still away in the in-take fields about their daytime work, and the women within doors making ready the evening meal. But once or twice an old woman spinning in a doorway, a child playing in the dust, a man with a bundle of faggots on his back, the smith with a plough-share on his anvil in the mouth of the wayside forge, looked up to see them go by; a tattered and journey-stained young man riding on an old horse, with a woman dressed like a man mounted before him in the curve of his bridle arm, and a huge black hound slightly lame in one paw loping beside them. The settlement had grown in five years, and there were faces that were strange to him. Others that he knew had grown; but none of them knew him. For a while he had
somewhat the feel of a ghost returning to the place where he had lived long ago. He did not attempt to make himself known even to them; there would be time for all that later.

The rowan tree with the double trunk still stood beside the foreporch of his brother’s house-place, and below its branches, Gram was working grease into a new ox hide. He looked up when Bjarni reined to a halt beside him and for a moment they looked at each other. ‘You don’t know me?’ Bjarni said.

And saw the other’s eyes light slowly as the knowledge came. ‘The beard makes a difference,’ he said.

Gram got up, rubbing his greasy hands on the seat of his breeks. Suddenly as Bjarni dropped from Swallow’s back, he let out a shout. ‘Bjarni! After all this while!’

They had their arms around each other, beating each other about the back and shoulders. ‘Five years! It’s been five years, and we thought you were drowned!’

‘I thought so too, one time,’ Bjarni said. ‘But here I am, back again. It’s good to see you, big brother.’

But he was taller now than Gram.

Angharad also had dropped to the ground, and stood holding Swallow’s bridle and looking on. Bjarni reached back for her and drew her forward. ‘I bring home with me Angharad, my woman.’ He felt her stiffen slightly and remembered that she was not his woman as yet, not in the eyes of other men and women; well, that could be set right in the next few days. His hands tightened over hers.

Then a thrall had taken charge of Swallow and they were crowding into the house-place, the familiar house-place grown strange after five years, and Ingibjorg grown strange after five years too, her face startled now as she looked up from her cooking pot,
grown heavier with a downward droop to the mouth. Bairns too, one still in a cradle, one sitting almost in the fire playing with a little wooden horse, making it gallop on the warm hearthstone. Dogs too. He looked among them for Astrid, but she was not there. Well, it was five years and more; very old, she would have been.

Gram was saying, ‘Ingibjorg! See what the tide has washed up on shore.’

‘I see,’ Ingibjorg said through the steam of the crock she was still stirring. ‘The gods’ greeting to you, Bjarni, my husband’s brother. And this that the tide has washed ashore with you?’

Angharad spoke up for herself, carefully in the Norse tongue, ‘I am his woman, and Angharad is my name.’

‘Angharad, that is surely no name of our Norse tongue.’

‘No,’ said Angharad. ‘I am of an older race than the Northmen.’

‘She does not speak our tongue freely as yet,’ Bjarni said.

‘So, a woman of the British, then?’

‘Aye, from Wales. The Danes burned her house over her head.’ He was going to have to lie about Angharad’s story anyway, so he might as well make the lie a good one and well fleshed out.

The two women looked each other up and down, taking stock, much as Hugin and the two hounds who had risen from the hearth were doing, hackles a little raised.

‘Ingibjorg – go you and bring drink for our home-comers.’ And when she had risen and gone into an inner chamber, Gram drew stools to the fire, and they sat looking at each other with suddenly five years of silence between them.

‘We never thought to see you again,’ Gram said after a few moments. ‘Heriolf thought that you had drowned.’

Bjarni leaned forward eagerly. ‘Heriolf? He has been here?’

‘Aye, back in early summer. He told how
Sea Cow
had come near to shipwreck on Orme’s Head in the great storm. He told how you were on board heading back to Rafnglas even then, and a black hound with you – this one?’

‘Aye, this one.’

‘And how the dog went overboard, almost among the breakers, and you after him. And nothing that he or his crew could do about it, save try to keep
Sea Cow
off the rocks . . .’

‘But they got clear?’ Bjarni said, with a great gladness in him.

‘They continued to beat round the point, and at last found shelter to make good their storm damage in Conway Bay. But you they gave up as lost – yet they left your sword and sea-kist here for you if ever, against all odds, you should come back to claim them.’

Bjarni looked around him as though expecting to see it propped in a corner. ‘My sword? I might have known it would be safe with Heriolf. But I grieved for him dead as he did for me. You have it here?’

‘Na, na, he left blade and kist together with the Chieftain.’

Ingibjorg had returned with a leather jack of buttermilk that she gave first to Bjarni and then to Angharad, saying as custom demanded, ‘Drink and be welcome.’

She had brought dried meat and oatmeal back with her too, and made to add it to the bubbling contents of the pot, but checked a moment before doing so.
‘You will share the evening meal with us? It will be ready in a while and a while.’

‘They will share more than the evening meal with us,’ Gram said, and to Bjarni, ‘This was your hearth before you went on your wayfaring; it is yours again, and your woman’s. Our roof is yours, little brother, until we can build on a further bothy; and add to our land-take – and so, we shall do well enough.’

But Bjarni saw the anxious look in his eyes, saw Ingibjorg’s mouth tighten. And he was glad that he had made other plans. ‘Nay, big brother, the offer is a kind one; but I am minded to make my own land-take and build my own hearth for my woman and me, somewhere further up the dale.’ And he saw relief begin to take the place of anxiety in his brother’s eyes. Gram had never been any good at covering what he was feeling; and a faintly sour thought woke in Bjarni. ‘We will come back to share the evening meal with you, and gladly. For the rest – I shall find a sleeping place up at the Hearth Hall. If you will give Angharad shelter while she makes her bride-cake and a gown to be wedded in, there is no more that I ask.’

And ignoring their somewhat thin protests, he got up. ‘For now I must find Rafn. I have a sword to claim back, and a message for him that he will fain hear.’

He turned to Angharad. The older child had already climbed into her lap, and as she made to move it, he said, ‘Na na, leave the bairn be.’ He lifted a wing of her hair and leant to place a kiss under it on her neck, rather as though sealing her for his own in sight of family.

He laid his free hand kindly on Gram’s shoulder in passing. ‘Keep the good stew hot for me.’ He whistled quite needlessly to Hugin, who had already sprung up and come to his heel, and together they went out into the thickening last of daylight.

He ran Rafn the Chief to earth on the boat-strand, overseeing repairs to the figurehead of his ship which it seemed had suffered damage in one or other of the past summer storms.

In the shoreward part of the way, one or two among the faces that Bjarni remembered had remembered him; greetings there had been, and word of his coming had run on ahead of him; so that when he came down to the boat-strand, the big grey-gold man sitting on balks of timber in the mouth of the boat-shed turned from the work of the shipwrights without surprise.

‘Bjarni Sigurdson!’ he said, and then, ‘Aye, Bjarni Sigurdson and not his weed-dripping ghost. We had scarce thought to see you in these parts again.’

‘I was in my brother’s house-stead as I came by,’ Bjarni said. ‘He told me that Heriolf Merchantman was here in the summer, and thought me drowned, as I thought him and all
Sea Cow’s
crew.’

‘Aye, but before that, five years before, on the day you sailed with
Sea Cow
for Dublin, I think that you had little thought ever to return.’

‘Not until my fortune was made, at all events,’ Bjarni said. ‘But many things may change in five years, and I have a woman to build a hearth for, when she has baked her bride-cake.’