Odin’s Child (31 page)

Nor, it seemed, was Stig brave enough. With a knowing glance at me, he advised Bergthora gruffly that our new friend was peaceful as a pig—so long as he was well fed and talked to gently. “Knew a man like him once,” he confided to us in a low voice. “It's something in the eyes, you know. You never forget it, once you've seen it. Good man in a fight, too—when he could remember whose side he was on.”

Bergthora asked him sharply what in the world he meant by that, but he would say no more.

†

During the month of Yule, the ale flowed freer at the inn than at other seasons of the year. The midwinter dancing and the chances it offered of getting their arms around some lassie's waist brought many men in from the countryside who one never saw at other times of the year, and quite a few of these had found their way to
Karl's Doom
.

By evening, forty pairs of skis leaned against the icicled wall outside, while inside the hall a merry crowd, most of them strangers to me, called for meat and beer and drank endless toasts to Saint Lucy on her day, and to Bergthora, their generous provider, and to the sun, to cheer him through this longest night of the year.

After dinner, while the Yule log smoked on the hearth, we chose our drinking partners for the evening and stretched our legs to the fire, sitting in pairs of man and woman, as the custom is; each pair sharing a big horn of the warm, thick ale, and each partner railing good-naturedly at the other for drinking too much or too little, too quickly or too slowly. I sat with Thyri, Stig, of course, with Bergthora.

Then Kalf hobbled over from his corner to join us, and was only a few steps away when one of the dogs ran between his legs, upsetting him. Before any of us could make a move, Glum bounded from the bench, caught Kalf in his arms, and set him down gently beside him. My heart shrank within me as they looked straight into one another's eyes. Yet not a flicker of recognition passed between them, not a sign that they had ever met before in less agreeable circumstances.

On the contrary, there seemed to spring between them a kind of instantaneous sympathy. I never understood it, but it was there from the first moment, and it endured. Whether Kalf's frailty struck a spark of tenderness in Glum, or whether the sorrowful look in the berserker's eye touched Kalf—they gazed at each other like fond friends before a word had passed between them. And soon Kalf was showing Glum his whistle, and Glum was trying to fit his huge fingers to the holes and chuckling. I almost laughed myself.

As the evening wore on, I could not keep from stealing sidelong glances at Glum, the werewolf, the berserker. Not in fear, but in fascination. During the whole night's conversation, which ranged from curses on the damned bloody Danes, to the weather, to the scarcity of provender and the price of cod, Glum never once opened his mouth, and yet accompanied our talk with an extraordinary dumb show.

If a man reported that his cow had sickened and heaven only knew what they would do now for milk, Glum frowned and shook his head. If another boasted of a shrewd bit of trading that had turned him a profit, Glum beamed and slapped his knees, and so on through an amazing repertoire of grimaces, shrugs, raised eyebrows, and head-wagging. It was
as though, at the center of this strange creature, was a void which could be filled only by an arrangement of bits and pieces borrowed from those around him—an expression, a posture, a tone of voice, a mood—and all of them registered, in their subtlest changes, with an animal's sensitivity.

Soon, all eyes were secretly on him and it became a sort of game with us, from which only Kalf refrained, to catch him in these grimaces and wink at one another.

Naturally, he was asked once or twice who he was and where he hailed from, but the story he had told me only that morning, he would not repeat now in front of a dozen men, until I almost began to think I must have imagined the whole thing.

†

At last, the hour grew late. Most of our group dispersed to their sleeping places, Bergthora went off to see to her other guests, and Kalf, too, rose stiffly and said goodnight. Stig started up to help him, but once again, Glum was quicker. Resting on that murderous right arm, Kalf retired to his corner.

Out of nowhere a great longing, tinged with melancholy, came over me. “Stig?” He had stayed by me, gazing into the fire, comfortably drunk and humming some tuneless melody. “Stig, if only I could see a little of my fate, only so much as to know where I will be this night a year from now, and what I'll have done that is worth anyone's remembering. My heart aches to know it.” It hadn't been in my mind at all to make this speech.

He stopped his humming and studied me over the rim of his ale horn. “Because you imagine you have a future. No end of heartache comes from that. Look at me. I've no future save what the morning breeze blows in. I come here, I go there. I make no plans, no promises, and I'm the happiest man alive.”

“But I have made a promise, Stig, to my Dead Ones, and I must keep it, somehow. But the how of it troubles me in the night.”

“A fool, Tangle-Hair, lies awake all night pondering his troubles. When morning comes he's worn out—and whatever was, still is. Give up trying to see so far. It can't be done.”

“I suppose,” I sighed. “You know, my father had second sight, or
claimed he did. He said that if he put his hand on his hip and someone looked through the crook of his arm, that person would see his fate before him as clear as day.”

“And did you do it?”

“No. Somehow we never did. Now I think of it, I don't suppose he knew his own fate either, or he might have managed things better. I imagine it was all just conceit, like the rubbish they talk about Olaf.”

“Captain.” Stig looked suddenly sober and gazed past my head at his distant horizon, as he always did when he had something important to deliver. “Captain, be careful what you say about that dead king. Mind you, I care nothing for him myself, but I say it for your own good. Don't be known as his enemy. Wherever his ghost is, I think he hasn't done with us yet. I feel it whenever I listen to these Tronders talk—that somehow we'll hear that dead man shout again.”

I was drunk and sleepy and for a moment, while he talked, had fallen into a reverie.
Hear him shout again
? I was drifting in the dinghy on the dark bosom of the fjord, half way between waking and sleep.

“One day, by God, you'll hear his shout…”

“Thorgils!” I said with a start.

“Who?” Stig watched me curiously.

“What? Oh, no one. No one you know.” I shook myself and stood up. “It's late, Stig. I'll say goodnight.”

“Good night, Captain.”

The coals glowed dully on the hearth and the smoke hole overhead was a faint circle of gray. Somewhere a cock crowed. Threading my way across the room—for the floor was littered with sleeping bodies in every position, as though they had been shaken out of a giant's hand—I peered into Kalf's dark corner. He was asleep, and next to him lay Glum, curled on his side, with his knees drawn up to his chest, like some monstrous baby. Or, was it only his husk that I saw and his spirit, at this very moment, was loping across the snowfields, a swift shadow against the moon? Who could conceive what thoughts whispered in that wolfish brain?

Bergthora was still up. Her boast was that she never slept so long as any of her guests was right side up. She sat at a table at the back with half a dozen sleepy-eyed farmers playing at draughts by the guttering light of a lamp.

As I passed them by, searching among the sleeping bodies for Thyri,
who had wandered off some while ago, the men pushed the gaming board away, scooped up their silver, yawned, and began to look round for their hats and mittens.

I found my girl in the larder, curled around the butter churn fast asleep. I gathered her up and slung her across my shoulder. She was more child than woman and slept like a child, profoundly. I went back through the hall to the ladder that led up to the loft and saw Bergthora's sleepy guests in the gray rectangle of the open doorway, winding their scarves around their heads. The cold draft on my back made me shiver as I put my foot on the rung.

“It's a chill morning, boys, and a long way home,” she was saying in the way she always bantered with her customers. “I've plump girls here aplenty to warm your bones….”

I hauled myself up through the trapdoor and lay Thyri down on the straw. Through the floorboards I could still hear Bergthora's voice and the shuffling of the men's feet.

“Everyone of 'em a beauty, or I wouldn't have 'em in the place. See if they aren't.”

And then a man's voice that answered her just before the door banged shut: “N-n-not tonight, thank you. Maybe an-n-n-nother time.”

“Wake up, Odd Tangle-Hair. Wake up!”

Ketil's grandson shook me until my eyes opened. The loft was dark except for the feeble light of his candle.

“Eh? What do you want, Toke? What hour is it?”

“Not yet cockcrow, sir, but you're to run down to the wharf just as quick as you can.” He said it particular, ‘as quick as you can.' He gave me another shake for good measure.

“Who says?”

“Man what was just here, sir. Rouses me with rappin' on the door and gives me this message for you from One-Legged Gorm. It's your ship, Master Tangle-Hair. There's been a fire in the ship shed. You're to go and see for yourself what's to be done.”

“Hel's Hall!” I was up in a second and fumbling in the dark for my clothes. “Damn the man! He has six silver ounces from me to keep her dry over the winter and what does he do but burn her! Toke, fetch me a light.”

Throwing a sealskin coat over my shoulders, I scrambled after him down the ladder.

“When Stig wakes up, send him after me.”

“But can't I go along?”

“Do as I tell you.”

I lit a torch from the hearth and stepped out, shivering, into the starry night. The snow, which lay thick all around, was crisscrossed by deep trodden
pathways. I followed one that took me past rows of houses down to the square, where a black circle on the ground was all that remained of the Lucy fire that had burned itself out three nights before. Another path led around by the side of the cathedral and brought me to the waterfront.

By the time I reached it, a ribbon of gray lay along the horizon and the huddled shapes of sheds and warehouses were just creeping out of the darkness.

“Gorm!” I roared, as I slid and splashed ankle-deep through the salty slush that covered the wharf. “Gorm, you son-of-a-bitch, if my ship is ruined, I'll tear the other leg off you!”

One-Legged Gorm's shed, which was nothing but a broad shingled roof supported on squat posts, loomed ahead in the gloom, from under its eaves a glow of firelight. I rushed inside.

“Over here,” said a low voice. A torch flared in the dark, splashing its light against the curved hull of my ship and one of the props that supported it. The man who spoke stood with his back to me.

“Gorm, what's it all about? The shed's not afire—”

“N-no indeed.”

He spun and landed me a blow in the face that staggered me. At the same time, a pair of arms circled me from behind. He hit me a second time, and a third, until I sank down, unconscious.

A helmetful of icy slush in my face brought me to. I lay on the deck of my ship with my hands tied behind me and my eyes blindfolded. My jaw ached and my mouth was full of blood. What a fool I was to have walked into this childish trap—to have thought that the stammering man hadn't seen me at Bergthora's.

“S-s-sit him up.”

Rough hands rolled me over and shoved me up against the bulwark.

In the conversation that followed, I distinguished three men—the same who had been with farmer Thorgils that night at Stiklestad. Unable to see them, I named them to myself according to their voices. Stammer had done the talking so far. The second I imagined to be a fat man, because his voice was deep and he breathed heavily, and so I called him Rumble-Guts. The last one, from the way he talked high up in his head, I pictured with a good deal of nose on his face, and so named him.

“You know us, don't you?” whined Nose close to my ear.

“What d'you want with me?”

“Oho, we want a good deal. Yes, a great deal.”

His fist struck the side of my face, slamming my head against the gunnel, nearly making me black out again.

“That for Thorgils!”

“Hold off,” Stammer commanded, “he's n-no use to us dead.”

Nose whined again, “That farmer was worth a hundred of you, you heathen scum! When his corpse was found with knife wounds on the breast, we knew who was to blame.”

“Would it matter if I said he tried to kill me?”

“Shut up! What matters is the body we trusted him with. Shall I tell you whose body it was?”

“I know whose it was.”

“I expected you would. And did you bury it, heathen, or just fling it to the wolves when you murdered our friend?”

“We buried him.”

“So. For weeks we've tramped Thorgils' property searching for the grave, while his widow took us in and fed us, for we're Southerners and have no kin here. When the snow came and covered everything, we lost hope. But God sees all, and look what he has sent us”—he banged my head against the gunnel again—“you!”

“My friends will be here soon.”

“Your friends are hard d-d-drinkers and late sleepers,” said Stammer. “You see, we know all about you—who you are and w-what you are. It only took a f-f-few questions asked in the right places. And now you will tell us where to find our k-k-king.”

“So you can make magic with his rotting carcass? Splendid idea—and good luck to you. Now let me go.”

“Scum!” cried Nose again, trying to get at me with his fingers, but the other two, with scuffling and grunting, held him back.