Odin’s Child (23 page)

I bought myself arms, too: a helmet whose visor was made fierce with scowling bronze eye-brows, a shield of lime wood, covered with three layers of bull's hide and painted in quadrants of red and black to match the colors of our sail, a ring-shirt of the finest make—supple and light, a bearded axe and a spear, both decorated with silver wire pounded into the steel. And a sword. Not that I despise Hoskuld's gift of Hrutsbane, it will have its use one day, but a man can own two swords, can't he? And what a sword this is! Of Frankish make, the armorer told me, the edge so hard it will split a helm in two and still draw blood from the wind. The mysterious name +
ULFBERH
+T is inscribed on the blade. There are only a few hundred like it in the whole world. I have scratched victory runes on it and call it ‘Wound-Snake'. I carry it in a scabbard of red leather, lined with oil-soaked wool.

What a figure I cut, swaggering down the wharf at Nidaros.
If only handsome Gunnar could see me now
! I thought.

†

Behold me swaggering along the waterfront…

Those carefree days came to an end one afternoon in our second week as Kalf and I browsed among the shops.

“What do you make of Stig these days, Brother?” I had gotten in the habit of calling him ‘brother,' as I truly felt he was. “Have we lost our steersman to his old love?”

“What? Sorry—did you ask me something?”

“Doesn't matter.”

A jeweler, smiling eagerly, spread out his stock of brooches before us—beautiful filigreed pieces set with glowing amber beads—and then moved away to tend to another customer. I wanted something to give Thyri, to whom I'd taken a fancy.

“Kalf, which one is your favorite?” I said carelessly.

“They're all well made.”

“I don't mean the brooches—which
girl
is your favorite? The Squealer or which?”

“No, not her. I don't know—none really.” He bent over the shopman's table, pretending to examine some ornament.

I was beginning to be sorry I'd begun this, but I was determined to see it through. I had planned this day for the two of us to be on our own and talk, which somehow we had not done in a long time.

“Kalf, look at me.” I held him by the shoulders. “Still in the same clothes you left home in. You wear a gloomy face all day long and go off by yourself for hours at a time. What ails you?”

“Odd, if only I could tell you.” There was a tightness in his voice. “I can't find the words. You do nothing nowadays but throw your money away, drink, and whore—not that I judge you. How could I? I'm no better. When the girls walk past me swinging their hips, when they touch me, I'm on fire—I can't help it. In the end, I roll with them like a dog in the straw, but I can't stand myself! Every morning I confess my sins, and every night I sin again, until even God's patience must surely be at an end. I'm damned, Odd. I'm bound for Hel!”

He broke off and started down the street away from me, walking fast, almost running, but I kept pace with him and wouldn't let him go.

“It's that priest, isn't it, Grimkel. He's bewitched you. By One-Eyed Odin, I'll have his heart out of him for this!”

“No, not bewitched. I was asleep, and he woke me. I never intended it, Odd—it's God's will.” He kept his eyes straight ahead of him as he
walked, while the words tumbled out in a torrent such as I never thought to hear from his lips.

“I went to the church that first day just to light a candle to the Virgin, only because—I don't know—it was her day, and I'd promised Grandfather to pray sometimes. The bishop was there. He took me aside and asked me who I was, where I was from, and where was I living.”

“You should've told him to mind his own business.”

“I told him everything. And he looked sorrowful and said the inn was a wicked place where the Devil rejoiced to see men and women acting no better than beasts, and that I oughtn't to stay there if I valued my soul. He begged me with
tears
in his eyes—with tears, Odd—to heed his words. “No priest—no man at all—ever spoke to me before like that. When I left the church I walked for hours, feeling heartsick, until, at last, I fell on my knees and promised God I would change my ways.”

“All right, then, Kalf, leave the girls alone. What difference does it make?”

“But that very night, God help me, I sinned again, and for days after that I couldn't find the courage to make my confession. When I did go again to the church, it was the hour of Mass and the bishop was preaching a sermon. Oh, Odd, if you could have heard him! ‘Put away drunkenness and gluttony and whoring,' he said. ‘War against the body, for it is there that sin enters.' He bade us live like the blessed monks and hermits, all alone in caves, on mountaintops or islands. Satan sends his army of demons to tempt them with visions of ale and meat and naked women, but they only pray harder, and the demons run away howling, burnt by their prayers.”

“Pah! You mean like those scrawny wretches who lived in Iceland when our forefathers arrived? We sent
them
away howling!”

“No, Odd, they have power. They heal, even raise men from the dead—not with witchcraft, but by the grace of God. Odd, I want to be one of them, and I
will
be! But oh, there is so much wickedness in me.”

He put his hands to his head as if he would pull out his hair. I thought I knew something about madness, but I had never seen the like of this. I didn't know him.

“Kalf Slender-Leg, it's all nonsense. Healing and raising the dead—how can you believe such stuff? Only the Valkyries of Odin can raise the dead, and maybe not even them anymore.”

“You see!” He turned on me with a look of triumph. “You doubt the power of the old gods yourself. Wake up, Odd, before it's too late. There is but one God. Believe in Him!”

Sudden fury took hold of me. “Why, Kalf? Why only one? This is what I cannot understand about you Christmen. Why must everyone be wrong but you? Maybe your bishop can cure souls, but surely the noaidi cured mine. There's room for all—your wooden Virgin, the wooden Thor that once stood on our land at home, and even Nunna's rough wooden fellows. With what right do your priests order us to turn our old friends out?”

“Nunna! When I think of that deviltry we did with him, the sacrifice. Oh, Christ, I want to cut off my right hand. God breathed on my neck when I picked up the knife. I felt Him, but I did it anyway because it was you who asked me, and because I hadn't even Otkel's courage to walk away from it. Oh, I'm far worse than you, Odd. You're unbaptized and in darkness, but I denied Him knowingly. And God help me, I still do. The pure will have eternal life, Odd. But for me, there is the Fire.”

“Damn you, don't speak to
me
of fire! I've
been
in a fire, and I know the good Christmen who set it, too.”

“Odd, it was a sign, that fire, a warning of what you must suffer hereafter. Heed it.”

“Why must I fear anything hereafter? Why must anyone burn for the love of women and ale and every other good thing? These starving fools of yours on their islands and mountain tops will pine someday for what they've missed when it's too late to enjoy it.”

I struggled to hide my anger, but could not. How could my truest friend—who followed me in everything, who had twice saved my life, and to whom I had sworn brotherhood—how could
he
, knowing what the Christmen had done to me, turn on me like this?

“Slender-Leg,” I forced myself to smile, “you're too sensible a fellow for this rubbish. That priest has done you some mischief, but you'll soon be yourself again. Come now, and let's not quarrel. Aren't we brothers? Come back to the inn with me, and we'll pour down a horn of ale together.”

He stopped suddenly and faced me. We had been walking all this while, talking too loudly and drawing stares from passers-by. He took my hands in his, and tears shone in his eyes. “No, Odd, you come to the church with me, and we will kneel together and beg God's forgiveness for
our sins. I ask it on my knees, Odd. Unless we become brothers in Christ, we can never be brothers at all.”

I hit him so hard that he staggered back against the wall of a shop, upsetting a pyramid of wooden bowls. We stared at each other in dumb pain.

Just then, from somewhere in the next street there came the whinny of a horse and a man's voice shouting. Next instant, horse and rider burst around the corner, the horse's hoofs scrabbling on the slick paving planks. They pounded up the street toward us—the animal was lathered and snorting, the man mud-spattered from helmet to boot. A pig leapt squealing over a wattle fence, and a flock of terrified geese flew straight up in the air, making the horse rear and nearly flinging the rider off. He kicked it savagely, yanked its head around, and came on again.

With the other human traffic, I pressed up against a house wall to give him room as he thundered past. Everywhere, people poured out of shops and houses to run after him up the street toward the cathedral square. Glad to turn my back on Kalf, I ran with them.

In his right fist, the rider brandished the war-arrow, and in his mouth was the name of Olaf, the king.

Of course, we knew by now why smoke rose no more from Olaf's royal hall. His history, as I gathered it from Bergthora and others, was, this:

Norway had had kings since time past remembering but had never submitted to them easily. Jarls and yeomen alike preferred the pleasures of lawlessness.

After Olaf Tryggvason died, unlamented, in the year 1000, the throne remained vacant for the next fifteen years. In the meantime, southernmost Norway fell subject to the Danes while the rest of the country reverted to a patchwork of petty ‘kingdoms', none larger than a single fjord or valley.

One of these was ruled by a certain Harald, who could claim a distant connection to the ancient royal line of the Ynglings. His son was Olaf.

At the age of twelve, Olaf went off a-viking, plundering the coasts of Frankland and England. And sometime during these years he turned Christman—not one of your starving and meditating sort of Christmen, but rather of the fierce variety, in keeping with his character. At the same time, he decided to make himself ruler of Norway.

In the year 1015, he sailed for home with a force of one hundred and twenty men in two leaky tubs. He was met, at first, with little enthusiasm, except in the more populous and Christianized south, where his own people came from. But before the year was out, he had defeated the most powerful of the northern jarls and was able to sail along the whole coast of Norway, hailed everywhere as king. He was just twenty-two years old.

Like his predecessor, Olaf Tryggvason, this Olaf made the northern town of Nidaros his capital, despite—or maybe because of—the fact that his popularity was thinnest there. And also like that earlier Olaf, he set about to convert the region to his new religion, even if he had to shed an ocean of blood to do it.

In that same year, oddly enough, another twenty-two year old viking gained a throne. This one was fated to be Olaf's doom. His name was Canute and he became, upon his father's death, king of Denmark and soon thereafter, of England, too.

Even an ignorant Icelander like me had heard the name of Canute the Rich, who bestrode our northern world as no king before him ever had, and whose ambition was as boundless as his luck. It was inevitable that Canute and Olaf would collide.

Olaf began it by attacking Denmark in 1028. But Canute's double kingdom was immensely richer, and his power far better founded than his rival's. His spies reported the restlessness of the Norse jarls, especially those of Trondelag, and a judicious use of silver did the rest.

When Canute's splendid long-ships—each one mounting on its prow a great gilded bull's head whose horns flashed in the sun—approached the Norwegian coast, Olaf found himself suddenly deserted. Without striking a blow, this stern, intolerant king was forced to flee over the mountains to Sweden—and, in time, much farther than that, as I will tell in its place, though nothing was known about these other adventures then.

Like plucking an apple from a bough, Canute added Norway to his empire. He was hailed as king everywhere he went—and nowhere more enthusiastically than in the eight shires of Trondelag. After appointing Jarl Haakon of Lade to oversee the country for him, he went home to London. The Tronder jarls were well pleased with their obliging absentee ruler.

But Jarl Haakon, the overseer, drowned in a shipwreck the very next year, and word of this somehow reached Olaf in his distant exile. In the autumn of 1030, he re-crossed the mountains with a hired army to take back his throne.

The jarls were alerted. A fast ship, no doubt, was already speeding the news to London, just as gallopers, brandishing the war arrow, were carrying it to every Norwegian village and farm. Olaf was encamped at a place called Stiklestad, at the head of Trondheimfjord. The jarls called
upon every able-bodied man to oppose him and his army of Swedish freebooters.