Odin’s Child (21 page)

It was from these same shaggy hills, two centuries ago, that my ancestor, Thorolf Braggart, had sailed for barren Iceland. How he must have missed these great trees. For his descendent returning, the sight of them was astonishing.

Thus, I beheld my first forest, and prickling with anticipation, was about to set foot in my first town. Dead ahead, across the green-glass water, where the little River Nid spills into the fjord, lay Nidaros, the largest port in the district of Trondelag, and lately the royal capital of Norway.

The site had been virgin forest in Thorolf Braggart's day and for long thereafter. It was just thirty years ago that Olaf Tryggvason—not the
present King Olaf but his predecessor—had built his hall, his church, and his shipyard. His reign had been bloody and brief, but what he built had prospered, and by now, according to Stig, the site enclosed some hundreds of merchants, shopkeepers, shipwrights, sailors, and willing girls within its wooden palisade. The babble of all their voices carried to us across the water.

“Brodd, Starkad, drop the yard and secure,” I called, “the rest run out oars!” I held the tiller over, aiming for a clear bit of stony beach to run us up on. “What's that you say, Stig?”

“I said ‘peculiar' is all. In all the months I spent here I don't recollect a single day when there wasn't smoke rising from the roof of the king's hall yonder above the town. Winter or summer there was always meat roasting by this time of the day.”

“Well, I suppose he's off hunting or warring if he's any sort of king at all. Why should we care, anyway?”

Still with his face screwed into a frown, Stig moved away.

The harbor was a confusion of birds. Some filled the sky with their complaints while others sat motionless on the ridgepoles of the houses. Some flapped away, protesting, as I nosed us on to the beach.

In short order, we stood together on dry land, sucking in great breaths of pitch and pine, wet hemp, herring, and dried cod, while we gaped about in wonderment at civilization.

There was, first, the harbor itself.

Along a front of three hundred paces, fishwives shrieked and loafing sailors browsed the merchant's stalls or tumbled noisily through the doors of a dozen tiny alehouses. Here and there bales and sacks and casks in endless procession were trundled in and out under the watchful eyes of hawk-faced captains.

The town proper crawled up the hillside that rose from the wharf: acres it seemed, of thatched roofs, golden under the autumn sun, that gave the appearance from a distance of a mountain meadow all neatly mown and stacked. Narrow lanes ran down between the houses to the wharf, and here housewives and children, artisans, and farmers-come-to-town mingled with the harbor crowd.

“Just look at 'em all,” whispered Stuf, awestruck, “just look.”

“Well, Stig,” I said, glancing about, “what now?”

“Now is when the king's harbormaster must come and inspect us and
tell us where to unlade.” He peered into the crowd.

“That's him now.” I pointed out a beet-faced man who was struggling through the crowd in our direction.

“Not unless the king's taken to hiring drunkards.”

The perspiring red face with its plum-colored nose, framed with tufts of white hair above each ear, came to a wheezing halt in front of us and produced a series of gasps and gurgles like a man drowning.

I was ashamed to have mistaken this old ruin for the harbormaster, and so, in my sternest captain's voice, demanded of him, “Who is in charge here, fellow?”

With more desperate gasps he built up enough wind for a wheezy laugh: “In charge? Why, nobody's in charge, friend. They all do as they please nowadays. Name is Ketil,
Old
Ketil as I'm generally known, and I haven't got all day to stand here talkin' t' you, for I am a workin' man.”

“And what trade do you work at, Grandpa,” asked Starkad with a chuckle, “that can be carried on in a tavern?”

“
This
is what I'm working at, damn your eyes. You'll be wanting a snug hole to lay up in, won't you? Maybe you plan to winter over? There's not many sail home this late in the year. Well sir, a warm fire, plenty to eat, best ale in the town—”

“Come to the point, old man,” growled Brodd.

“The point is that the woman I work for keeps an inn for sailors and I'm supposed to bring 'em there—which is what I am trying to do, if you'd shut up long enough to let me say my piece!” With that long speech he ran out of air and was reduced again to wheezes.

Stig turned me aside and spoke softly. “I say maybe we sail on to Skiringssal or Birka. Something here I don't like the smell of.”

“You worry too much,” I replied. “You don't mind the smell of silver, do you? There's plenty of it here, from what I can see. Anyway, we need to get drunk. We'll stay a day or two and look the place over.”

I turned back to our friend, but he had already started off, head down and listing dangerously to port, without a backward look, as if the matter of our staying was settled. With a word to Brodd to do his drinking near the ship—his rough manners would keep the wharf rats at bay—the rest of us set off in pursuit of Old Ketil.

The narrow street wound up through the town. The place still had a raw, new look, it being only a generation old. But a generation's filth had
accumulated in ripe, rotting piles in every alleyway. It came to me with the shock of a brand new thought, that people close together will make a mess.

“It's like living at the Althing the whole year round,” said Starkad. “You wonder how they stand it.”

“But wouldn't it be fine,” said Kalf, “if there was a place like this at home!”

“That there never will be,” answered Stig. “Two things make a town—kings and timber. Iceland doesn't want the first and hasn't enough of the second.”

He was right about the timber, anyway. The main thoroughfare from the harbor was paved with logs laid crosswise; the houses, too, were mostly log-built, and in the kitchen gardens behind each one, mountainous stacks of cordwood stood heaped up against the coming of winter.

Our way took us through the center of the town where, in a square formed by the crossing of its two principal streets, stood the cathedral.

Who would have thought wood could play such tricks? I had once seen a church in Iceland that Snorri-godi had built, but that was nothing to compare with this. It was six stories high from its square foundation to its slender steeple. The walls were of split logs, cunningly carved, and the sloping eaves were shingled so as to resemble the scales on a dragon's back.

Old Ketil was glad of a minute to stop and catch his breath. “Saint Clement's,” he gasped. “King Olaf Tryggvason built her when there was nothing here but a clearing in the woods. When the workmen come to the top, it baffled 'em how to put up the steeple.”

“How did they?” asked Stuf.

“Hah! Troll come along, took that steeple in both his arms, like this,”—he made a circle of his arms—“and set it on for 'em, easy as you please.”

“But trolls hate churches. Leastways, they do at home.”

“Well, this were a
Christian
troll, dammit!”

Otkel had his mouth open to reply, but his words were drowned by the sudden pealing of the bell. Swinging high up in the steeple, it sent its iron voice out over the town—over the hills and over the dark green water. Its name was ‘Glad,' said Ketil, and it was the gift of Olaf Haraldsson, the present king. To my ear, its voice was harsh and heavy—a voice meant to
afright the ancient spirits of the land.

As the bell tolled, a procession marching two-by-two filed into the square.

“Curse me for a sinner!” Ketil suddenly cried. “Assumption Day morning and me laid up in the alehouse drunk! Here she comes. Here comes Our Lady, bless her!”

Borne above the crowd, a palanquin swayed. On it, under an arch of flowers and fruits, stood a painted and gilded wooden statue.

Stuf's mouth gaped open, and he seized hold of his cousin. “That's God's mother, Otkel, as they're always talking of. I'm sure of it. Look, ain't she a beauty, heh? What a beauty!”

“Takin' her round the fields to bless the crops before harvest. And me laid up drunk again,” Ketil lamented more. He bent his knee and made fervent crosses as the palanquin swayed past us.

The procession concluded with a gaggle of shaven-headed priests and a troop of boys, singing in clear high voices, and after them the townspeople, jostling and milling, until the square was entirely filled with them.

In this great throng, I couldn't see their leader, at first. I saw him now, though: a man of middle age with a smooth-shaven face and deep-set eyes, robed in red and white. As he passed, knees bent and hands reached out eagerly to touch his robe.

“Bishop Grimkel,” wheezed Ketil reverently, nudging us and pointing, “Holy Bishop Grimkel!”

He passed close by us, his right hand upraised to make the cross over us, his left—a strong, big knuckled hand—holding a tall gilded staff, crooked at the top.

There's his magic rod, for sure, I thought, backing away from it in spite of myself. I could have had no inkling then what a long shadow that rod would cast over my life.

He went in through the cathedral's open doors, and the shuffling line of worshippers filed slowly after him.

“Old Ketil,” I said firmly, “enough standing about. Lead on to this inn of yours, for we are thirsty men.”

We skirted the crowd of spectators who loitered in the square. Some of these were singing and some were on their knees. But there were others, I saw, and not just a few, who looked on with cold eyes.

“Odd,” said Kalf, “I'll stay for just a bit.”

“What? Don't be silly, you'll never find us again. Come on.”

As we walked, Stig plied Ketil with questions about King Olaf, whose absence from church on such a holy day struck him as especially strange, but the old fellow, having hardly enough wind in his sails to navigate, could say nothing intelligible.

Our way brought us at last to the edge of the town. There, shouldering itself in between the rampart and a straggle of mean huts, was the inn.

It was a sprawling, ramshackle affair of sun-bleached timbers and old thatch. A small brew house, a bath house, and a dairy stood near it, all joined together with wattle fences to enclose a dirt yard where chickens pecked and an ugly dog barked at the end of its tether.

Ketil ushered us into the hall's cavernous interior—dark but for the glow of a few candles flickering in the corners and a dusty sunbeam that fell through the smoke hole high above. It was a moment before my eyes could pick out details: an enormous copper cauldron hanging above the hearth, a row of nail-studded sea chests along one wall, and four men leaning over their ale horns at one of the scarred tables, laughing with a couple of girls.

But what caught my eye, almost at once, was the carved and painted dragon's head, all white teeth and round, red eyes, that overhung the doorway where we entered.

“Ketil? Have they thrown you out of the tavern, then, you useless old fool? Don't think to creep back here and drink up the wages you haven't earned.” It was a voice that might crack a stone, and it came from a woman who advanced on us from one of the side doorways. “I haven't had a lick of honest work from you in an age, and I … Suffering Christ, it's Stig! What ill wind blows
you
here?”

Stig grinned all over his ugly face and rolled his eyes. “You've gotten a might older, Bergthora Grimsdottir.”

“Well, the devil skin you, you've grown no prettier yourself!”

She swooped at Stig, nearly knocking Old Ketil off his wobbly legs, threw her arms around his neck, and planted a kiss full on his mouth. He pried himself loose and they stood back to look at one another.

She was a raw-boned, long-legged, angular woman, with a good deal of beak and a good deal of neck—altogether something like a stork. In age, not young, as Stig had been so unkind as to notice, probably about
forty, give or take.

She was dressed like a proper housewife, in a long tunic of dark blue wool whose sleeves were rolled up to the elbow and an apron, none too clean, that was pinned on at the shoulders with plain brooches. A housewife's scarf covered her hair except for one straw-colored lock that clung damply to her forehead.

Yet she would have stuck out strangely in any Iceland farmer's kitchen. There was an air of the town about her. She had a man's eyes, and when she spoke, she ran her words together like a sailor.

“Bergthora and I are old friends,” Stig explained over our laughter. It's been … how long? Three years?”

“Five, you whore's son,” she shot back.

“Has it really? Well, let's not speak of that, my love. It pleases me to see you've come up so far in the world. You were ever a friend to Icelanders, and I hope you're one still.”

She noticed the rest of us now. “Stig, are you the captain of this bunch?”

“I am not. Here is our captain. Don't be fooled by his young looks. Odd Tangle-Hair's his name.”

“Why should I be? I've known boys half his age to go a-viking. How d'ye do, Tangle-Hair.”

I introduced the others.

“Seen worse.”

I liked her at once.

“And as for how we come to be here,” Stig resumed, “well, I'll tell you the truth, my girl. We borrowed a ship in Iceland, you see, which just happened to be loaded to the gunwales with cargo. Believe me now, the first person I thought to share my bit of good luck with was you. And me being the navigator, why—here we are.”

She replied to this speech with a word that I'd never heard a woman use before.

Sitting us down, she called to one of the girls to fetch a bucket of ale. “Wash the salt out of your whiskers with that,” she said, filling our horns for us. “‘Friend to all Icelanders' indeed. I was a friend to only one, and how does he serve me, but runs off one day with not as much as a by-your-leave.”