'For the bear, Skapti Halftroll,' said Einar quietly. 'That was an expensive bear.'
`Was it Gudleif who killed it, then?' asked the slim one, stroking his moustaches slowly and yawning. 'I am thinking I have just been listening to Geir Bagnose recount the saga of Orm Ruriksson, the White-bear Slayer.'
`Was he then to weigh the cost when it came at him in the dark?' growled my father. 'I can see you count it up, Ketil Crow—but by the time you got your boots off to use your toes, it would have been your head split from your body, for sure.'
Ketil Crow chuckled and acknowledged the point with the wave of one hand. 'Aye, just so. I cannot count, that is true enough. But I know how many beans make five, just the same.'
Of course,' said Einar, smoothly ignoring all this, 'there is the woman, Freydis, who was killed. No thrall, that one. Freeborn and there's a price to be paid for that, since her death came because Gudleif let the bear go in the first place. Anyway, the bear was mine and worth a lot.'
My father said nothing about whose bear it was. I said nothing at all, since I had just realised that the pole with the ball Caomh had been standing near was a spear with Gudleifs head on it.
Einar shifted again and drew the cloak tighter around him, his breath smoking in the cold hall as he declared, 'In the end, you can argue in circles about whose fault it was—from Rurik bringing the bear here, to Gudleif letting it escape. And then there is why he sent the boy late into the mountain snow to that lonely hall. Perhaps he and the bear were in this together.'
It was half in jest, but Skapti and Ketil both warded off the evil with some swift signs and grasped the iron Thor's hammers hung round their necks. I realised, even then, that Einar knew his men well.
I said nothing, rushed with a fluttering of memories, like bats spilling from a hole in the ground.
After the bear had slammed into the wall, there was silence, though I swear I heard it huffing through the snow, paws crunching. Freydis droned. The two milk cows bellowed their fear and the bear answered, drove the animals mad and chilled me so much I found myself sitting on the floor, the lantern at my feet, my breath caught, my mouth glued with dryness.
`So Gunnar Rognaldsson, will you tell all this freely to Gudleif's sons when they come? Or, perhaps, you would like to come with us? We need good men.'
I shook back to the Now of it, but it took me a moment to realise that Einar was speaking to Gunnar Raudi. I had never heard his real name—he was always just Red Gunnar to us.
And in a dangerous position, I realised. Gudleif's man and a vicious and deadly fighter, he had been left alive so far because he had been the one to send word to my father about me.
Yet it was clear he and Einar knew each other—and that Einar didn't trust Gunnar and Gunnar knew it. I saw that Einar would not want Gunnar left to advise Gudleif's sons. Without him they would think twice about revenge.
Gunnar shrugged and scrubbed his grey-streaked head, as if considering—but the truth was that he had no choice. 'I had thought to berth here for good at my age,' he growled ruefully, 'but the Norns weave and we can only wear what they make. I will come with you, Einar. Coldward and stormward, eh?'
They grinned at each other, but it was the smile of wolves circling.
And you, Bear Slayer?' Einar said, turning to me. Will you join your father on the
He didn't have to say more. Gudleifs sons would revenge themselves on me if I stayed, for sure, and there was nothing for me here.
I nodded. He nodded. My father beamed. Skapti called for ale.
And so it was done. I joined the Oath-sworn—but there was more to taking the blood-oath than a nod and a wink, though I only learned that later.
I ate in Gudleif's hall for the last time that night. The partition hangings were ripped down (with some contempt, it seemed to me) to make room for all the Oathsworn to come in. It is the mark of a raiding jarl to have a whole hall and those who partitioned it were admitting they'd given up needing the men for raids and therefore the room for them. The Oathsworn held to the old ways and hated a hall with hangings.
We ate round the pitfire, me huddled and listening to the thunder of the wind on the beams. The fire flattened and flared as stray blasts hissed down the smoke hole and through the hall, while these growlers who had taken over Bjornshafen, just like that, fished mutton from the pot, blowing on their fingers and talking about such strange things and places as I'd never heard of before.
They drank, too, great amounts of ale, the foam spilling down their beards while they joked and made riddles. Steinthor, it was clear, fancied himself as a skald and made verses on the bear-slaying, while the others thumped benches or threw insults, depending on how good his kennings were.
And they raised horns to me, Orm the Bear Slayer, with my father, new-found and grinning with pride as if he had won a fine horse, leading the praise-toasts. But I saw that Gunnar Raudi was hunched and quiet on his ale bench, watching.
That night, as the men fell to talking quiet and lazy as smoke drifting from the hearth-fire, I fell asleep and dreamed of the white bear and how it had circled the walls and then fallen silent.
I turned to say to Freydis that her walls were well built; I was sure that we had weathered it, that the bear was gone. I was smiling when the roof caved in. The turf roof. Two massive paws swiped and the earth and snow tumbled in and then, with a crash like Thor's thrown hammer, the bear followed: an avalanche of white; a great rumbling roar of triumph.
Numbed, I pissed myself then and there. The bear landed in a heap, shook itself like a dog, scattering earth and snow and clods, and then got on all fours.
It was a cliff of fur, a rank, wet-smelling shriek of a thing that swung a snake neck with a horror of a head this way and that, one eye red in the firelight, the other an old, black socket. On that same side, the lips had been straked off, leaving the yellow tusk teeth exposed in a grim grin. The drool of its hunger spilled, thick and viscous.
It saw us; smelled the ponies, didn't know which to go for first. That was when I ran for it and so decided the skein of all our lives.
The white bear whirled at my movement—the speed of it, and it so huge! It saw me at the door, scrabbling for the bar. I heard it—felt it—roar with the fetid breath of a dragon; I frantically tore the bar off and dragged the door open.
I heard it crash, half-turned to look over my shoulder as I scrambled out. It had risen on hind legs and lumbered forward. Too tall for the roof, its great head had smacked a joist—cracked it—and tumbled it down into the fire.
I swear I saw it glare its one eye at me as it shrieked; I also saw Freydis calmly stand, pick up the old spear and ram it at the beast's ravening mouth. Not good enough. Not nearly a good enough spell, after all.
The spear smashed teeth on the already ruined side, snapped off and left the head and part of the haft inside.
The bear lashed out, one casual swipe that sent Freydis flying backwards in a spray of blood and bone. I saw her head part company from her body.
I ran stumbling through the snow. I ran like a nithing thrall. If there had been a baby in my way I would have tossed it over one shoulder, hoping to tempt the beast into a snack and giving me more time to get away . . .
I woke in Gudleif s hall, to a sour-milk smear of a morning and the sick shame of remembering, but everyone was too busy to notice, for we were leaving Bjornshafen.
Leaving my only home and never returning, I realised. Leaving with a shipload of complete strangers, hard men for the sailing and raiding and, worse yet, a father I hardly knew. A father who had, at the very least, watched his brother's head part company from the rest of him and not even shrugged over it.
I could not breathe for the terror of it. Bjornshafen was where I had learned what every child learns: the wind, the wave and war. I had run the meadows and the hayfields, stolen gulls' eggs from the black cliffs, sailed the little faering and crewed the hafskip with Bjarni and Gunnar Raudi and others. I had even gone down to Skiringssal once, the year Bluetooth buried his father Old Gorm and became King of the Danes.
I knew the place, from the skerry offshore where the surf creamed on black rocks, to the screaming laughter of the terns. I fell asleep at night rocked in the creaking beams as the wind shuddered the turf of the roof, and felt warm and safe as the fire danced the shadows of the looms like huge spiders' webs.
Here Caomh had taught me to read Latin because no one knew runes well enough when I could be pinned
