Odinn's Child (43 page)

These were mysteries to which I could not be privy, and the steward kept hold of my arm to make sure that I did not double back to rejoin Eochaid. Instead my guide led me to where his own people were waiting. They were from the farthest of the federate tuaths and had set up their camp at a little distance from the crannog. My escort brought me into the circle where the families had gathered to celebrate the successful conclusion of the ceremony. They had lit a central bonfire with their sacred flame and were seated on the ground, eating and drinking and enjoying themselves. I was greeted with nods and smiles. Someone put a wooden cup of mead in my hand, someone else handed me a rib of roasted sheep, and space was made for me in the circle to sit down and join the feast. I started to gnaw at the tendrils of mutton and looked around at the ring of faces. This was the first time that I had been exposed to the society of the true Irish, the ordinary people from the remotest fringes of their island, at a time when they were most relaxed. Now I was a guest, not a war captive, or a slave, or a novice. I savoured the mood of the gathering. Abruptly I felt a shocking lurch of recognition. Seated about a third of the way around the circle was Thorvall the Hunter. I knew it was impossible. The last time I had seen Thorvall had been when he had left our Vinland settlement, angry with Karlsefni and Gudrid, and sailed off in our small boat with five companions to explore farther along the coast. We had never heard anything more of him, and presumed he had been killed by the Skraelings or drowned, though someone did say that Thor would never let someone drown at sea who was so robust in his belief in the Old Ways.

I
stared at the wraith. Not since I
had seen the fetch of Gardi the overseer in Greenland eleven years before had I
seen a dead man come back among the living. Thorvall looked older than when I had last seen him. His beard and hair were shot with grey, his face was deeply lined and his massive shoulders had acquired a slight stoop of age. But the lid of his left eye drooped as it had always done, and I
could still see the mark, much fainter now in the creases and folds of his ageing face, where the bear claws had left the hunting scar that had made such an impression on me as a child. A leather skullcap was pulled down on his head and pressed his hair over his ears so I could not see whether, like the Thorvall I knew from Vinland, he had also lost the top of his left ear. He was dressed in the clothing of an Irish cliathaire, laced leggings and a heavy jerkin of sheepskin over a rough linen shirt. Laid on the ground in front of him was an expensive-looking heavy sword. I tried to remain calm. I had taken to heart what Snorri Godi had warned me about: that when you experience second sight it is wiser to pretend that all is entirely normal, even though you are seeing something invisible to others. I continued to chew on my meat, occasionally glancing across at Thorvall and wondering if his ghost would recognise me. Then I
noticed the man seated on Thorvall's right turn towards him and say something. My flesh tingled. I was not alone in seeing the wraith. Others were aware of his presence. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I had let my imagination run away with me. The man seated on the other side of the fire was not Thorvall, but someone who looked very like him.

Getting to my feet, I
backed away from the circle, then walked round to where I could approach the seated stranger from one side. As I came closer, the more certain I
was that it really was Thorvall. He had the same big-knuckled, gnarled hands that I
remembered, and I glimpsed around his neck a necklace of bear claws. It had to be him. Yet how did he come to be seated among Irish clansmen, dressed like a veteran Irish warrior?

'Thorvall?' I enquired nervously, standing a little behind his right shoulder.

He did not respond.

'Thorvall?' I repeated more loudly, and this time he did turn round and looked up at me with a questioning expression on his face. He had the same pale blue eyes that I remembered staring at me in the stable all those years ago when I was first interrogated about my second sight. But the eyes looking at me had no sense of recognition.

'Thorvall,' I said for the third time and then, speaking in Norse, 'I am Thorgils, don't you recognise me? It's me, Leif’s son from Brattahlid in Greenland.'

Thorvall continued to stare at me with no reaction except for a slightly puzzled frown. He had not understood a word I said. People were starting to take notice of my behaviour and glancing curiously at me. I began to lose my nerve.

'Thorvall?'

My voice trailed away in confusion. The man gave a grunt and turned back to face the fire, ignoring me.

I crept back to my place by the fire, thoroughly embarrassed. Luckily the tide of mead was rising and my strange actions were forgotten in the general merriment. I kept glancing across at Thorvall, or whoever he was, trying to resolve my confusion.

'Who's that man over there, the one with the big sword on the ground in front of him?' I asked my neighbour.

He looked across to the man with the scar on his face. 'That's Ardal, the ri's champion, though he's had very little to do ever since we allied with the other tuaths,' he replied, 'Just as well. He's getting a bit long in the tooth to do much duelling.'

I remembered Eochaid's warning about not asking too many questions and decided that it would be better to wait till next day to consult the brithem about the mysterious clansman.

'King's champion?' Eochaid replied next morning. 'That's an old title, not used much today. He's usually the best warrior in the tuath, who acts as the ri's chief bodyguard. He also represents the ri if there is a quarrel between two tuaths which is to be decided by single combat between two picked fighters. Why do you want to know?'

'I saw a man yesterday evening who I thought was someone I knew long ago when I was living in the Norse lands. I was told his name was Ardal and that he is, or was, the king's champion. But I was sure he was someone else. Yet that seems impossible.'

'I can't say I know him. Who did you say he was with?' Eochaid asked.

'He was seated among the people who came from the farthest tuath, the one near the coast.'

'That'll be the Ua Cannannain.' Eochaid and I were standing in the mead hall of the crannog, waiting to say a formal farewell to the ri. Eochaid turned to the ri's steward. 'Do you know this man called Ardal?'

'Only by reputation,' he replied. 'A man of very few words. Not surprising. He was half dead when he was washed ashore and it was thought that he would never live. But he was nursed back to health in the ri's own house and became a servant there. Then it turned out that he was so good with weapons that he eventually became the king's champion. Quite an advancement for someone who was fuidir cinad o muir.'

It was a phrase I had never heard before. A fuidir is someone half-free or ransomed, and cinad o muir is 'a crime of the sea'. I was about to ask the steward what he meant, when the man added, 'If you want to meet Ardal, it will have to wait till next year. Early this morning most of the Ua Cannannain set out to return to their own tuath.'

Eochaid looked at me. 'What makes you think that you knew this man Ardal previously?'

'He and his friend, a smith named Tyrkir, were my first tutors in the Old Ways,' I replied, 'but I thought he was dead.'

'He may well be dead,' Eochaid observed. 'We are now in

Samhain, the season when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and those who are no longer with us can pass most easily through the veil. What you saw may have been your friend who has returned briefly to this world.'

'But the steward said that he had been in this land for several years, not just at this season.'

'Then perhaps you were imagining your friend in the form of this man Ardal. It seems an appropriate name for the king's champion. It means someone who has the courage of a bear.'

A berserker, I thought or was it because of the bear-claw necklace? And this thought distracted me from asking what the steward meant by a fuidir cinad o muir.

I never solved the mystery of Ardal because on the next celebration of Samhain I fell sick during the six-day walk to Cairpre. I developed a shivering fever, probably caught from too many damp days spent in Eochaid's forest retreat during what was a very wet summer, even by Irish standards. Eochaid left me in the care of a roadside hospitaller, whose wife fed me — as he had instructed — on a monotonous diet of celery, raw and in watery broth. The cure worked, but it gave me a lasting dislike for the taste of that stringy vegetable.

TWENTY-ONE

I
WAS NOW
in my nineteenth year, and my situation in the company of a forest-dwelling brithem, offered little opportunity for contact with the opposite sex. My heartbreak over Orlaith had left its mark, and I often wondered what had become of her. A sense of guilt for what had happened made me question whether I would ever achieve a satisfactory relationship with a woman, and Eochaid's attitude towards women only served to increase my confusion.

Eochaid regarded women as subject to their own particular standards. There was the day when two women appeared before him for judgement after one had stabbed the other with a kitchen knife, causing a deep gash. They were both wives of a minor ri, who had exercised his right to have more than one wife. When the two women were brought before Eochaid, he was told that the wounded woman was the first wife and that she had initiated the affray. She had attacked the new wife a few days after her husband had married for the second time.

'How many days afterwards?' Eochaid asked gently.

'Two days later, when the new and younger wife first came into the home,' came the reply.

'Then culpability is shared equally,' the brithem stated. 'Custom wife provided it is non-fatal and it is done in the first three days. Equally, the second wife has the right to retaliate, but she must limit herself to scratching with her nails, pulling the hair, or abusive language.'

An assault with words was, in brithem law, as serious as an attack with a weapon of metal or wood. 'Language,' Eochaid once said to me, 'can be lethal. A tongue can have a sharper edge than the best-honed dagger. You can do more damage by inventing a clever and hurtful nickname for your enemy than by burning his house or destroying his crops.' He then cited a whole catalogue of verbal offences, ranging from the spoken spells of witchcraft uttered in secret, through hurtful satire, to the jibes and insults which flew in a quarrel. Each and every one had its own value when it came to arbitration. 'If the monks ever told you that the drui used spells and curses,' he said to me on another occasion, 'they were confusing it with the power of language. A drui who aspired to be a fili ollam, a master of words, was striving for the highest and most difficult discipline, to deploy words for praise or poetry, irony or ridicule.'

That was the day he told me about his own time as a monk. We were seated on a log outside his forest hut after returning from an expedition to net small fish in the stream, when a blackbird burst into full-throated song from somewhere in the bushes. Eochaid leaned back, closed his eyes for a moment to listen to the birdsong and then began to quote poetry,

'I have a hut in the wood, none knows it but my Lord;

an ash tree this side, a hazel on the other,

a great tree on a mound encloses it.

The size of my hut, small yet not small,

a place of familiar paths; the she-bird

in its dress of blackbird colour sings

a melodious strain from its gable.'

He stopped, opened his eyes, and looked at me. 'Do you know who composed those lines?' he asked.

'No,' I answered. 'Are they yours?'

'I wish they were,' he said. 'They were spoken to me by a Christian hermit in his desert. He was living here, on this very same spot, when I first came across these woods. It is his hut which we now occupy. He was already an old man when I found him, old, but at peace with himself and the world. He had lived here for as long as he could remember, and he knew that his time would soon be over. I met him twice, for I came back a couple of years later to see how he was getting on and to bring him some store of food. He thanked me and rewarded me with the poem. The next time I came back he was dead. I found his corpse and buried him as he would have wished. But the poetry stayed echoing in my head, and I decided that I should go to the monastery where he had been trained, to visit the place where the power of such words is nurtured.'

Eochaid had enrolled at the monastery as a novice and within months was its star pupil. No one knew his brithem background. He had shaved his head completely to remove his distinctive tonsure, telling the monks he had suffered from a case of ringworm. With his phenomenal trained memory, book learning came easily to him and he quickly absorbed the writings of the early Christian authors. 'Jerome, Cyprian, Origen and Gregory the Great . . . they were men of acute perception,' he said. 'Their scholarship and conviction impressed me profoundly. Yet, I came to the conclusion that much of what they wrote was a retelling of the far earlier truths, the ones in which I had already been schooled. So in the end I decided that I would prefer to stay with the Old Ways and left the monastery. But at least I had learned why the Christianity has taken hold so easily among our people.'