Odin’s Child (33 page)

“Sleepy,” he answered with a weary groan. “Always after I change shape.”

“Well, you can't sleep here. Come along now.”

Reluctantly, he helped me drag the bodies over to the trunk of a pine where we threw snow over them. They should stay well hidden until the spring thaw. In the meantime, Thorgils' widow, or anyone else who missed them, could mutter darkly about the Yulerei all they pleased.

I looked at them one last time and wondered at the force of the passion that had driven them. Was it conceivable that Kalf, as drunk on religion as any of them, could have done to someone what they had tried to do to me? I didn't like to think of it.

“Friend Glum,” I said, “I find no joy in these killings.”

The berserker only shrugged, as if joy or the absence of it had simply no meaning for him.

You will ask me if he really was a shape-shifter. The berserkers have all gone now, and people begin to doubt that there ever were such men. They never met Glum. He howled, ran, killed as a wolf does. He smelled like a wolf, and he dreamed a wolf's dreams. What more is required? And haven't we all some drops of the wolf's blood in us? Glum, at least, could put a name to his frenzy that carried some honor once. And that is something.

I turned my face toward Olaf in his grave.

“King,” I addressed him in a solemn voice, “you've only yourself to blame, you know. If you hadn't driven the heathens from your army that day, my friend Kalf would still be walking on two good legs and we would have launched our dinghy by ourselves and gone away, never meeting farmer Thorgils and these others, and your secret would still be safe. Something to think about during the long night, King. And farewell to you.”

When we had closed up his grave and spread the snow around, I put on my skis again and said, “Now you can rest, friend Glum. Stand up behind me and hold tight to my belt.”

With only the whisper of my skis hissing in the silent forest, we glided back to town.

The rest of that winter passed uneventfully.

I decided, for the time being, to say nothing about my adventure in the forest, and swore Glum to secrecy as well. And the three Norwegians, it seemed, had kept their mission a secret. No one else came to trouble me about King Olaf's sweet-smelling corpse.

The weeks wore on without bringing any change in our circumstances. Between Kalf and me there was still that coolness, those awkward looks and silences, which had continued for so long now that they went uncommented on.

Month after weary month, I nursed and cherished my anger. “Run away, Odd,” he had said. “Isn't that how you treat your brothers?”
Devil
and
coward
! he had called me. Whenever I felt myself weaken, I called it all up again as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.

As for Kalf, he spent all his time now conning Latin. He was laboriously translating a book lent him by Deacon Poppo about the Life of Saint Anskar, who had been a missionary to the Danes two centuries ago.

At night, Kalf would recite his translation to a circle of listeners, which at different times included Bergthora and her girls, and several of my crew, but always Glum. Long after the rest had drifted away, the berserker would still be found sitting at Kalf's elbow in rapt attention, with what sort of understanding, who could say? He was content just to be distracted, I think, from the puzzle of his existence.

It was bound to happen sooner or later that Kalf learned who and what Glum was—and did the most astonishing thing: kissed him on the cheek, forgave him, and renounced any act of vengeance to be taken in requital for his wound! Which puzzled the berserker mightily, but he took it in good part, even agreeing to wear a crucifix which Kalf hung around his neck.

There was even talk of preparing Glum for baptism, but when he was made to understand that this meant a dousing with the magic water, the same that Olaf had tried to force on him and his comrades at Stiklestad, he ran howling from the inn and stayed hidden for two days. Thereafter, it was pretty well agreed between Deacon Poppo and Bishop Sigurd that Glum's conversion, while being a victory for the Church greatly to be wished for, must be allowed to happen in God's own time, which might be a very long time indeed.

†

Through it all, the town of Nidaros, under its blanket of snow, seethed with rumor and report and smoldering hatred of the Danes.

It was on a bright morning early in the month of sowing that two boys out hunting noticed a sparkle of metal at the top of a snowdrift that had begun to shrink in the sun, and going over to have a look, discovered the crown of a helmet, and scooping away the snow with their hands, uncovered three fresh pink faces with beards as brittle as gingerbread and black ragged holes in their throats.

Time to be going, said I to myself, when the news of this got around. For I had settled in my mind that I would turn viking for a while.

Calling my crew together, I opened my plans to them. Stuf, Otkel, Starkad, and Brodd agreed to ship with me for another year and try their luck at the viking life. But Stig shook his spiky head, no.

“Looting's a young man's game,” said he, “and I've grown fat and comfortable here, I won't bother to deny it. I'm content to be a tavernkeeper.”

“But Stig, it was only last year you looked forward to buying a farm in Iceland—you said as much to Hoskuld.”

“Did I really? No, not the thing at all for old Stig. Too hard on the back. No, this is the life for me.”

Bergthora, standing behind him with her hand on his shoulder, allowed herself a smile of triumph. Her wandering bird was safe in the nest at last!

“But I'll tell you boys something,” he went on, “if you'll take an old thief's advice. You want a sleeker ship to sail in than Hrut's fat-bellied tub. A sow can't be a fox, try as it may, and you're liable to end up as the dinner on someone else's plate. Now, if I was you, I'd pay a visit to Ake the shipwright and see what he has on hand.”

“Steersman,” I urged, trying him one more time, “what good will a ship like that do me without you to hold the tiller?”

“Pah! In all my thieving days I never handled a dragon like the one you want. What there is to steering one of those, old Stig can't teach you.” He looked at me severely. “That you must learn where the spears and arrows fly.”

†

A little ways beyond the wharf, the music of hammers and the odor of pitch and pine proclaimed Ake's shipyard.

Here Glum labored. I spied him at once, standing a-straddle of a pine trunk, working along it with his axe. I hallooed and went toward him over a carpet of shavings.

“How goes it today, friend Glum?”

“Not so badly,” he sighed, peeling off a long curlicue of bark with a swipe of the half-moon blade, “but not so very well, either.” His face wore a particularly woebegone expression. “It's soon time that I walked home to Sweden, and yet here I am with my fortune still unmade. I expect a scolding from my aged father and nothing but raillery from my brothers.”

“Well, Glum, this
is
a coincidence. You see, I've made up my mind to go a-viking this summer. Now, I think our victims would shower us with their wealth if only you were to growl at 'em. What d'you think? And afterwards, if you like, we'll set you down on the coast of Sweden and you'll go home a far richer man than you left. Would that suit you?”

His little bow mouth stretched itself into a wolfish smile.

“It might suit.”

“Agreed then! We'll talk more about it later. Right now I'm in search of a ship for us—a sleek one and fast. Show me to your master.”

Nearby, a dozen men swarmed over the skeleton of a ship while the master builder stood back, cocking his head first to one side, then the other, measuring the curve of her hull down to a finger's breadth with only his sharp eye.

He was a rope of a man, with knotted muscles on his long arms and big knuckles on his fingers. We talked over the clack of axes and the chink of hammers.

“A ship?” said Ake. “A ship is like a tool, they come in every shape and size, each right for its purpose—and what might yours be?”

I told him.

“Aha! Then cast your eye over this very one we're building.” And taking me by the arm, with Glum following behind, he led me ‘round her.

“She's a karfi—a small dragon, seventy-six feet from stem to stern, seventeen in the beam, and mounts sixteen pair of oars. Add a steersman and you can sail her with a crew of just thirty-three, though you could cram a dozen more in her if need be.

“Now, a trim little craft like this one, while she's got the fast lines of a big dragon-ship, can hold her own in rough water better than one of those, for they're all too narrow in the beam for the length of 'em. She handles better, too. In a pinch, a good steersman could spin this ship around on the head of a pin. And she'll draw but three feet of water. You can run her up on a beach, strike, and be off again before they ever know what's hit 'em.”

He reached a long arm up to the gunnel, hauled himself up and over, and dropped down into the hollow of the hull, where the deck planking had not yet been laid. Glum and I followed.

“Solid oak,” he said, thumping the mast block with his fist. “Oak won't grow this far north, as you know, but this ship was a special commission—no expenses to be spared. We had timber brought up from the south for mast-block, keel, stem, stern, and ribs.”

Dropping to his haunches alongside the keel, he ran his fingers over the smooth-planed strakes.

“I'll show you something else. Only a landlubber thinks that a ship floats on the water. A well-joined ship swims in the water like a fish. Look here.” He tugged at a length of pliant root that was knotted over one of the ribs where it passed in front of a strake. “All nine strakes below the water line are tied to the ribs with these. Without nails, they're free
to move, and when you stand on her deck in a rolling sea you'll feel her ripple under you as she fits herself to the waves.

“The upper strakes we nail, as you see the lads doing now, then we caulk her with braids of horsehair dipped in pitch, give her bottom a coat of tar—and she's ready for the water.”

“She hasn't got her figurehead yet,” I said.

“Ah, that comes last. When we give her her head and tail, we say goodbye to her because she's alive then and wants to swim. The heads are carved separate. I've a shed full of 'em and any one you like can be fitted on.”

“Hold on, Master Ake, you talk as if I'm to buy this ship, and I wish I were, but you said she was promised to another.”

“Died of the cough this winter, poor man. But I will finish her just the same. She won't go looking long for an owner.”

“And how much might you be asking for her?”

“What—with sail and tackle and oars and all?” He stared into space for a while, moving his lips, then named a price that fairly knocked me over the side. I shook my head sadly.

“Not so fast,” he said. “You've a sea-worthy merchantman, haven't you? I know where I can sell one of those and no questions asked about where she came from.” He said this with a wink, for it was pretty well known around the harbor that we'd lifted the ship. “That'll take a good bit off the price, and for the rest—why, I'll give you until we finish her to find it. Young pirate like you shouldn't have any trouble grubbing up a bit of silver.”

And how long, I asked, until he finished her?

“Oh—I should say two weeks if we don't have a lot of rain.”

“Do it in one and you'll have your price.”

“Heh? You're an eager one. All right. Done.”

We sealed the bargain with a handshake. As I left the shipyard, I turned back for one more look, seeing her in my mind's eye slicing through an ocean swell or nosing up a wooded creek, hunting for a village. Oar-Steed … Surf-Dragon … Fjord-Elk. I recalled all the timeworn kennings by which we poets signify a ship, trying each one on my tongue. But this newborn creature deserved a new-minted name. I thought some more and finally hit upon the name of Sea-Viper, because the viper's a small creature, but she has a wicked sharp tooth.

†

That afternoon, I brought the lads down to have a look at her, for I calculated that it would take all the silver we had left amongst us to buy her. The rest of that day we spent in going out to our caches, and in the evening we came together at the inn to count our wealth—each one spilling his hoard of coin and hack-silver onto the table. Starkad, his moustache twitching with excitement, weighed it out on Ogmund's little scales and I notched the sums on a stick.

And when we had tallied it all up, we looked at each other dumbly across the table, not knowing what to say. Where had it gone? Was it possible we had drunk and whored and eaten so much, spent so much on cloaks and swords and girls?

“Odin!” I struck the table with my fist, making the coins jump.

There was a long silence and then—

“But you haven't asked me for my contribution yet.” Kalf had been watching all this time from his corner. He dragged himself towards me on his crutch. “My life has been less costly than yours. I think you'll find enough in my cache to make up the difference.”

“No thank you, Kalf,” I answered sharply, not looking at him. But when the others protested, I added, “You must save something for yourself to live on.”

“He'll live here for nothing as long as ever he likes,” Bergthora spoke up.

“All the same, I will not take his money.”

“Odd Tangle-Hair, have pity on me! No, don't look away this time, brother, don't leave. I've tried a hundred times to say this and each time you've cut me off. Now I will speak—and in front of all.”

“Kalf, don't.”

“You are cruel, Odd. Like the Hebrew children in the Scriptures, you are a proud and stiff-necked man. Unbend. Don't drive me away. Let me make my poor amends. Brother, as I forgave Glum, forgive me. And take, at least, my money—for what else can I give you but my prayers, and those you scorn.”