ashamed I had said it.
I told him then that I felt no pang about taking Bjarni's sword. Or the large amount of salt, or any of the other supplies I thought necessary. Fuck Bjornshafen. Fuck Gudleif and fuck both his sons.
My father grinned at that.
Taking Bjarni's sword was the worst thing, for a sword then was a thing not to be taken lightly. It was expensive and, more than that, it was the mark of a warrior and a man of substance.
The Greeks in Constantinople—who call themselves Romans, but speak no Latin—think all Northmen are Danes and that all Danes fight in mail and with swords. The truth is that most of us have only the seax, a kitchen knife the length of your forearm. With it, you can chop a chicken or gut a fish—or kill a man.
You get to be good with it, since mail is too expensive for most. Any good blow will kill you unless you avoid it and only if you must do you block it, so that the edge of your precious seax isn't notched away.
A sword, though, was a magical thing, a rich thing and the mark of a warrior, so not to be trifled with—
but I took dead Bjarni's sword out of spite, right off the hook in the hall, while Gudleif grunted and farted and slept. In the morning I was gone early, before he noticed it was missing.
Bjarni would notice but I made my peace with him on my own and prayed to big, bluff Thor to intercede.
Then I added a prayer to Odin, made wise by communing with the new-dead, who had hung nine nights on the World Tree for wisdom. And one to Jesus, the White Christ, who hung on a tree like Odin.
`That was deep thinking, right enough,' my father said when I told him this. 'You can never have too much holy help, even if this Christ-following lot are a strange breed, who say they will not fight yet still seem able to field warriors and sharp steel. As for the sword—well, Bjarni won't need it and Gudleif won't mind. Ask Einar for it. He will let you keep it after what you did.'
I stayed silent. How could I tell them what I had done? Pissed myself and run, leaving Freydis to die?
The first sight of those great bear pugs in the snow, maybe two weeks after I had struggled through to her hov, had set Freydis to barring doors and hunkering down. The night it came we had eaten broth and bread by the glimmer of the pitfire embers, listening to the creak of the beams and the rustle of straw from the stalls.
I lay down clutching Bjarni's sword. That, an old ash spear of her dead man's, the wood axe and Freydis's kitchen knives made the only weapons we had. I stared at the glowing embers, trying not to think of the bear, prowling, sniffing, circling.
I knew whose bear it was and, it seemed to me, it had come seeking revenge after all these years.
I woke to soft singing. Freydis sat, cross-legged and naked, the hearthfire glowing on her body, her face hidden by the long, unbound straggles of her streaked hair, one hand holding upright the ash spear. In front of her were . . . objects.
I saw a small animal skull, the teeth blood-red in the light, the eye-sockets blacker than night. There were carved things and a pouch and, over them all, Freydis hummed, a long, almost continuous drone that raised the hair on my arms.
I hung on to the sharkskin hilt of Bjarni's old sword while the dead crowded round, their eyes glittering in the dark holes of their heads, pale faces like mist.
Whether she called them for help, or called the bear, or tried to weave a shield against it, I don't know.
All I know is that when the bear struck the wall, the hall boomed like a bell and I jumped up, half-naked, sword in hand.
I shook my head, scattering memories like water drops. A last, brief flash of the curving swipe of paw and her head, spinning, flailing blood to the rafters. Had there been a smile on it? An accusing look?
My father rightly guessed the memories, wrongly assumed I was mourning for the lost Freydis and clapped my shoulder again, giving it a slight squeeze and a half-smile. Then he walked me slowly to the hall across the sun-sparkled snow. The eaves were dripping with melting spires of ice.
Everything seemed the same, but the thralls avoided my eye, keeping their heads down. I saw Caomh down by the shore, standing by a pole with a ball on it—one of his strange White Christ totems, probably.
Once a monk, always a monk, he used to say. Just because he had been ripped from his cloister didn't make him less of a holy man for the Christ. I raised a hand in greeting but he never moved, though I knew he saw me.
Gudleif's hall was dim inside, misted with cold light from the smoke hole. The hearth-fire crackled, breath coiled in wisps and the figures hunched on benches at the foot of the high seat turned to us as we came in.
I waited until my eyes had accustomed and then saw that someone else sat in Gudleif's high seat, someone with hair to his shoulders, dark as crow wings.
Black-eyed, black-moustached, he wore blue-checked breeks like the Irish and a kirtle of finest blue silk, hemmed in red. One hand leaned on the fat-pommelled hilt of a sheathed sword, point at his feet. It was a fine sword, with a three-lobed heavy silver end to the hilt and lots of workings round the cross guard.
The other hand clasped a furred cloak around his throat. Gudleif's furred cloak, I noticed. And Gudleif's high seat—but not his ship prows. I saw them stacked to one side and the ones that flanked the high seat now were the proud heads of an antlered beast with flaring nostrils.
Hard men, my father's oarmates, who thought highly of him because he was their shipmaster and could read waves like other men did runes. Sixty of them had come to Bjornshafen because he had wished it, even though he did not lead this
Einar the Black led them, who now sat on Gudleifs high seat as if it were his own.
At his feet sat others, one of them Gunnar Raudi, hands on his knees, cloaked and very still, his faded red tangles fastened back from his face by a leather thong. He looked at me and said nothing, his eyes grey-blue and glassed as a summer sea.
The others I did not know, though I half recognised Geir, the great sack of purple-veined nose that gave him his nickname wobbling in his face as he told the tale of finding me half-frozen and slathered in blood, the headless woman nearby. Steinthor, who had been with him, nodded his shaggy head in agreement.
They were cheerful about it now but, at the time, had been afraid when they found the great white bear dead, a spear in its brain and Bjarni's sword rammed in its heart. As Steinthor happily admitted, to the grunts and chuckles of the others, he had shat himself.
There were two other strangers, one of them the biggest man I had ever seen: fat-bearded, fat-bellied, fat- voiced—fat everything. He wore a blue coat of heavy wool and the biggest seaboots I had ever seen, into which were tucked the baggiest breeks, striped blue and silver, that I had ever seen. There were ells of silk in those breeks.
He had a fur hat with a silver end, which chimed like a bell when he accidentally brushed it against the blade of the huge Dane axe that he held, rapping the haft on the hard-packed hall floor now and then and going `hoom' deep in his throat when Geir managed a better-than-usual kenning in his story.
The other was languid and slim, leaning back against one of the roof poles, stroking his snake moustaches, which were all the fashion then. He looked at me as Gudleif looked at a new horse, weighing it up, seeing how it moved.
But no Gudleif, just this crow-dark stranger in his chair.
I am Einar the Black Welcome, Orm Ruriksson.'
He said it as if the hall belonged to him, as if the high seat was his.
I have to say,' he went on, leaning forward slightly and turning the sword slowly on its rounded point as he did so, 'that things turned out more interesting and profitable than when Rurik came to me with this request to sail here. I had other plans . . . but when your shipmaster speaks, a wise man listens.'
Beside me, my father inclined his head slightly and grinned. Einar grinned in return and leaned back.
`Where is Gudleif?' I asked. There was silence. Einar looked at my father. I saw it and turned to look at him, too.
My father shrugged awkwardly. 'The tale I heard was that he had sent you into the mountain snows to die. And there was the matter of the bear, which had not been settled—'
`Gudleif s dead, boy,' Einar interrupted. `His head is on a spear on the strand, so that his sons will see it when they finally arrive and know that bloodprice has been taken.'
'For what?' growled the large man, turning his axe so that the blade flashed in the dim light. 'It was done when we thought Rurik's boy was killed.'
