Heroes of the Valley (2 page)

S
VEIN WAS A BABY
when he came to the valley with the settlers. They'd been so long in the mountains, the sun and snow had burned their faces black. When they came down at last among the sweet green forests, they stopped to rest in a quiet glade. Baby Svein sat in the grass and looked about him. What did he see? Sky, trees, his parents sleeping. Also a great black serpent, winding from behind a log, fangs drawn back to strike his mother's throat. What did he do? He reached out his little hands and caught the snake by its tail. When his parents woke they saw Svein grinning at them, a throttled serpent hanging like rope between his fists.

Svein's father said: 'This portent's clear enough. Our son shall be a hero. When he's old enough, he shall have my sword and silver belt, and with them he shall never lose a battle.'

Svein's mother said: 'The valley will belong to him. Let's build our farm here. It's a place of luck for us.'

So it was. The other settlers spread about the valley, but our House, first and greatest, was built right here.

Halli Sveinsson was born shortly after noon one midwinter's day, when snow clouds hung low over Svein's House and the skirts of the hills could not be seen. In the very hour of his birth the drifts piled so high against the old Trow walls that a portion of them collapsed. Some people said this was a portent of great good in the boy, others of great evil; the man whose pigs the wall crushed had no opinion either way, but wanted recompense from the child's parents. He sought arbitration on the matter at the Gathering the following year, but the case was thrown out as unproven.

When he was older, Halli's nurse, Katla, drew his attention to the date of his arrival in the world. She clucked and whistled through her nose at the sinister implications. 'It is a dangerous day, midwinter,' she said as she tucked him tight into his cot. 'Brats born then have an affinity with dark and secret things, with witchcraft and the promptings of the moon. You must be careful not to listen to this side of your nature, else it will lead without fail to your death and the destruction of your loved ones. Aside from that, dear Halli, there is nothing to worry about. Sleep well.'

Despite the raging snowstorm, Halli's father took the blood and bits from the midwife as soon as the cord was cut, and set out up the hill. After a climb that left him frostbitten in three fingers, he reached the cairns and threw the gift beyond the stones for the Trows to feed on. It was considered that they must have liked what they ate because from the first the baby drank lustily at the breast. He grew fat and thrived, and the black creep did not touch him all that winter. He was the first of Astrid's children to live since Gudny's birth three years before, and this was a matter for great rejoicing among the people of the House.

In the spring Halli's parents held a feast to celebrate the latest in Svein's line. The cradle was set out upon the dais in the hall and the people shuffled past to pay their respects. Arnkel and Astrid sat together on the Law Seats and accepted the birth-gifts, the offerings of skins, cloth, carved toys and pickled vegetables, while little Gudny stood stiff and silent at her mother's side, her blonde hair immaculately braided into a dragon's tail. Halli's older brother Leif, heir to the House and all its lands, ignored the proceedings; he played with the dogs under the table, fighting with them for scraps.

Cradle-side comment was loudly complimentary, but at the corners of the hall, where Eyjolf and the servants had stacked the beer kegs, and the lantern smoke coiled thickly, opinions were less sure.

'The baby is a peculiar-looking creature.'

'There is nothing of his mother in him.'

'More to the point, nothing of his
father
. I see more of his uncle there.'

'A Trow is more likely! Astrid cannot abide Brodir; that's no secret.'

'Well, the boy has life in him, all the same. Listen to him cry!'

As Halli grew, his distinctiveness did not diminish. His father, black-maned Arnkel. was broad in shoulder and sinewy in limb, a tall, commanding presence in the hall and fields. His mother, Astrid, had fair tresses and the pinkish skin of her kin down-valley; she too was tall and slender, with a beauty strange and disquieting among the dark-haired people of Svein's House. Leif and Gudny mirrored their parents in miniature: both were considered slim, graceful and easy on the eye.

By contrast, Halli was from the first short in leg and broad in back, a cumbersome stump of a boy, with hands like ham joints and a low, swinging gait. His skin was swarthy even by the standards of men bred among the mountains. With a small snubbed nose, a defiant, protruding chin and wide-spaced eyes alive with curiosity, he glared out at the world from under an unruly mess of thick black hair.

His father would sit the infant Halli on his lap at meal times and study him fondly, while chubby fingers explored the wiry bristle-comb of his beard and tugged it till the tears came. 'The boy is strong, Astrid,' he gasped. 'And mettlesome. Did Eyjolf tell you he caught him toddling in the stables? Right between Hrafn's hooves he went, and began to tweak his tail!'

'And where was Katla while our child risked death? Oh, I shall pull her silly hair for negligence.'

'Do not chide her. She is growing short of breath and is easily bewildered. Gudny can help guard her brother – eh, Gudny?' He ruffled his daughter's hair, making her flinch and scowl up from her needlework.

'Not me. He went prying in my room and ate my cloudberries. Get Leif to do it.'

But Leif was out in the moat meadow, throwing stones at birds.

In those early years the demands of hall and House kept Astrid and Arnkel from active involvement with Halli's daily welfare. Instead it fell to Katla, his ancient, white-haired, bark-skinned crone of a nurse to tend to his needs, just as she had tended Leif and Gudny's, and before them their father's also. Katla was stiff and bent as a gallows, a shuffling hedge-witch whose appearance sent the girls of Svein's House squealing to their doors. But her almond eyes were bright and her knowledge gushed unceasingly. Halli loved her without restraint.

In the mornings she brought the warm tub to Halli's room by candlelight and, after washing him, wrestled him into his tunic and leggings, combed his hair and led him to the hall for breakfast. Then she sat nearby, head nodding in the sunlight, while he played with wood shards on the rushes of the floor. Most days she dozed; most days Halli would promptly lever himself up and totter off to explore the private rooms behind the hall, or venture out into the yard, where the echo of Grim's anvil mingled with the whirring of the weavers' looms, and he could watch the men working far off on the hill. From Svein's House it was possible to see the ridges on both sides of the valley, and the little dark uneven stubs that ran continuously along the tops. They reminded Halli of Katla's teeth. Behind the cairns, hazy with distance even on a clear day, were the mountains, white-crested, flanks dropping precipitously out of view.

Often Halli lost himself down the lanes and side alleys of the House, strolling happily with the dogs among the workshops, cottages, sties and stables until hunger drove him back at last to Katla's anxious embrace. In the evening they ate apart from his family in the kitchen of the hall, a comfortable place full of hot, savoursome vapours, broad benches and pitted tables, with the glow of the fire reflecting in a hundred hanging pots and dishes.

There Katla would talk and Halli would listen.

'Without question,' she would say, 'your features come from your father's side. You are the image of his uncle Onund, who farmed High Crag when I was a girl.'

This was an unknowable gulf of time. Some people claimed Katla was more than sixty years old.

'Uncle Onund . . .' Halli repeated. 'Was he very handsome, Katla?'

'He was the ugliest of men, and had a difficult temperament to boot. By day he was amenable enough, and indeed something of a weakling, as you yourself may be. But after dark he gained greatly in strength, and was liable to ferocious rages in which he tossed men through windows and snapped benches in his hall.'

This awoke Halli's interest. 'Where did this magical strength come from?'

'Most probably drink. In the end an aggrieved tenant smothered him in his sleep, and it is a measure of the dislike with which Onund was held that the Council merely fined his killer six sheep and a hen. Indeed, the fellow ended by marrying the widow.'

'I do not think I am like my great-uncle Onund, Katla.'

'Well, you certainly do not have his height. Ah! See how your face corrugates sensually when you frown! You are Onund to the life. It is clear enough to look at you that you are prone to evil just as he was. You must guard against his darker impulses. But in the meantime you must eat those sprouts.'

It did not take Halli long to discover that, Onund possibly excepted, his lineage was a matter of importance to everyone at Svein's House. This was welcome to a degree, since every door was open to him: he could wander at will past the sour-smelling vats of Unn the tanner and lie beneath the drying racks, looking up at the skins flapping against the sky; he could stand in the hot blackness of Grim's forge. watching the sparks dance like demons beneath the crashing hammer; he could sit with the women washing clothes in the stream below the walls and listen to their talk of lawsuits, marriages and other Houses far away down-valley by the sea. There were some fifty persons at the farm; by the age of four Halli knew the names of all, together with most of their secrets and peculiarities. This valuable information came more readily to him than to the other children of the House.

On the other hand his status resulted in much unwanted attention. As Arnkel's second son, his life was valuable: should Leif succumb to creep or marsh fever, Halli would be heir. It meant that he was frequently prevented from carrying out important activities at the most inconvenient moment. Vigilant bystanders plucked him from the Trow wall as he began to navigate its teetering brink; they stopped him sailing the goose pond on an upturned trough with a pitchfork for an oar; most often they pulled him away from older, bigger boys just as they came to blows.

In such cases he was brought before his mother, where she sat sewing and reciting genealogies with Gudny in the hall.

'
Why
this time, Halli?'

'Brusi insulted me, Mother. I wished to fight him.'

A sigh. 'How precisely did he insult you?'

'I do not wish to say. It doesn't bear repeating.'

'
Halli
. . .' This was spoken in a deeper, more dangerous voice.

'If you must know, he called me a fat-thighed marsh imp; I overheard him as he spoke with Ingirid! Why are you laughing, Gudny?'

'It's just that Brusi's description is so delightfully apt, little Halli. It amuses me.'

'Halli,' his mother said patiently, 'Brusi is twice your age and size. Admittedly his wit is wearisome, but still, you must ignore it. Why? Because if you fight, he'd hammer you into the ground like a short, squat tent peg, which would not be appropriate for a son of Svein.'

'But how else am I to protect my honour, Mother? Or of those close to me? What about when Brusi calls Gudny a thin-lipped, preening little sow? Must I sit back and ignore this matter too?'

Gudny emitted an incoherent noise and put down her stitching. 'Brusi said
that
?'

'Not yet. But it is surely only a matter of time.'

'Mother!'

'Halli, do not be insolent. You have no need to protect your honour with violent acts. Look to the wall!' She pointed up into the shadows above the Law Seats, where Svein's weapons hung muffled in the dust of years. 'The days are long past when men made fools of themselves for honour. You must set an example as Arnkel's son! What if something should happen to Leif ? You would become Arbiter yourself, as – as what number in direct line from our Founder, Gudny?'

'Eighteenth,' Gudny said instantly. She looked smug. Halli made a face at her.

'Good girl. As eighteenth in line, after Arnkel and Thorir and Flosi and the others going back in time, all of whom were great men. In your father's case he is so still. Don't you aspire to be like your father, Halli?'

Halli shrugged. 'I'm sure he digs excellent beet fields, and turns manure with a deft technique. In truth his example does not over-thrill me. I prefer—' He stopped.

Gudny glanced up slyly from her work. 'A man like Uncle Brodir. Isn't that so, Halli?'

Blood came to the face of Halli's mother then. She banged her fist upon the table. 'That's enough! Gudny, not a word more! Halli, be gone! If you are troublesome again I shall have your father beat you.'

Halli and Gudny had learned early that mentioning their uncle Brodir was a reliable method of upsetting their mother deeply. She, who as Lawgiver dealt imperturbably in the hall with the rankest murderers and thieves, found the very name distasteful and hard to stomach. At some level her brother-in-law offended her, though she never spoke the reason.

For Halli, this curious power only added to Brodir's allure, a fascination that had begun in early childhood with his uncle's beard. Alone of all the men of Svein's House, Brodir did not shape the hair upon his face. Halli's father, for instance, in a ritual of great solemnity, regularly stood above a hot tub, staring through the steam at a polished reflective disc, methodically shaving his cheekbones and his lower neck, before trimming the rest with a small bone-handled knife. His moustache was carefully curled, his beard kept to the length of the first knuckle on his forefinger. His example as Arbiter was followed by the other men of the House, save Kugi the sty-boy, who though a man was hairless on his chin – and Brodir. Brodir never touched his beard at all. It bloomed out like a gorse thicket, a nest for crows, an ivy entanglement strangling a tree. Halli was entranced by it.