Odin’s Child (49 page)

“Torches here!” I cried.

We wrapped the savaged head in a cloak and, holding torches above our heads, ran to the hall. The Finns of both tribes followed us with wary looks. My men inside unbarred the door for us, then shut it again and held the women at bay while we prepared Ainikki's pyre.

We laid her head on Louhi's bed and around it heaped necklaces, rings, and brooches ripped from the hostages. Then setting fire to the bedclothes, we ran around the hall torching everything—hangings, rushes, thatch, woodwork.

When the Pohjolan women saw what we intended, their courage gave way and they commenced to wail, holding up their babies to us and pleading for their lives. We drove them back and slammed the door shut behind us, fastening it from the outside with a spear shaft passed through the wooden handle and wedged against the jamb.

The Pohjolan warriors groaned and the Kalevalans, with their weapons at the ready, shifted their feet uneasily. In an instant flames licked up through the thatch and billows of black smoke poured into the sky. The women shrieked and pounded on the door.

Hrapp appeared at my elbow, trembling in every muscle of his body. To see that hall burn, its savage guards helpless, its Mistress made pitiful! Not until this moment had he dared to think, to truly believe, that he was a free man.

His features twisted in hate, he leapt up and began to prance around Louhi, waving his arms and crying, “What'll you do for a house, old witch, old dog's vomit, old dog shit! Heh? What'll you do for a storyteller, old pig's slop, old puke!”

Disgust at this unseemly tantrum showed in Ilmarinen's honest face. His blade flashed up and down. Hrapp's shoulders gave one last, seismic shudder and delivered his head at Louhi's feet.

Meanwhile the women kept screaming and battering at the door. The roof was a mass of flame. The heat drove us back.

One Pohjolan warrior, unable to bear it any longer, broke from the others and ran at the door. A couple of Kalevalan arrows flew wide of him but Lemminkainen slashed at his legs as he went by, cutting his hamstrings and felling him. The Rover dropped on him and had the man's head off in an instant. Lemminkainen began a dance before the burning hall. In one hand holding up the Pohjolan's head by its yellow hair, and whirling his sword in the other, he leapt and twisted, and shouted, “Hai! Hai!”

Perhaps if he had not done that, I wouldn't have done what I then did.

In my mind's eye I saw Joukahainen dancing that same dance on the first morning of our enslavement, when he had cut down my six friends. And I saw also other men, who leapt and howled around a burning farmhouse far away on Rangriver-under-Hekla. In my nostrils was the stink of things burning that ought never to burn.

Glum stood nearby me with his broad-axe hooked over his shoulder. I snatched it from him and, leaning against the fierce heat, dashed in and swung at the spear shaft. The door burst open and bodies tumbled out in a cloud of smoke and cinders; choking, weeping, some crawling, some reeling and falling with their little ‘uns in their arms.

“Traitor!” Lemminkainen howled, shrill as a woman, and rushed at me from the side with his sword upraised. I watched him come like a figure in a dream, and I, the dreamer who wants to run but can't. I would not be alive now if Ilmarinen had not shot out an arm and caught him by the sleeve of his tunic, jerking him off his feet.

“Oh, proud one,” snarled the Smith, pulling the Rover to him by a fistful of shirt. “Oh, clever one. The viikinki's got more sense, by the gods, than you have. Burning the women! Not even for sweet Louhi's sake would these Pohjolans have stood still another minute, and then we should have had to fight our way out and lost everything.”

Lemminkainen was white with anger, but the Smith overmastered him as firmly as the Singer had done me.

Meanwhile, Louhi's fighters ran in to help their women get clear of the burning building.

“Quick,” cried Vainamoinen, “away to the boats!”

Ilmarinen hastened Lemminkainen in that direction with a firm hand between his shoulder blades, then again heaved the sampo to his shoulder and staggered toward the sea gate. Vainamoinen and Louhi followed. The
Kalevalan warriors closed around them, keeping their crossbows cocked and watching their enemies over their shoulders.

My lads started off, too, but halted and looked back at me puzzled. For I stood stock still, distracted by reproachful thoughts.
Sense or soft heart, Odd Thorvaldsson? When will you ever put on the hardness of a man? ‘Kill and kill,' Ainikki said—and meant it. And what have you done now but rob her poor ghost of the blood that was owed it?

Einar Tree-Foot roused me with a jab in the ribs. Stig was calling to us from the sea-gate to hurry.

“Right,” I said, giving myself a shake to clear my head, “let's go before the Kalevalans leave without us.”

When we reached Stig, I threw an arm around his shoulder and said, “Well done, Steersman. I had a bad moment when I saw Pohjolans running to the sea-gate. Did they press you hard?”

“Not a bit. Where you and your Finnish friend dropped the crossbeam, a blind man couldn't have missed it. So we carried it down the beach a little ways and threw it in the water where the tide took it out. Then we just laid low and listened to them run around looking for it until the Kalevalans were on top of 'em.” The corner of his mouth turned up. “Saw something else out there—on the beach. Care much for surprises, do you, Captain?”

The others who had been with him nudged each other and snorted.

“I'd say I've had my ration for the day—what now?”

“Guess.”

“Damn it, Stig, as you hope to live, what is it?”

“Just step this way, Captain, out the gate.”

“The Sea Viper!”

Beached at the far end of the strand, where we never could have glimpsed her from inside the walls or from the fields.

“All this time!” I cried, thumping my forehead with my fist. “The bloody bastards sailed her here and had her all along.”

Laughing and crying, we ran—thirteen scarecrows, with our clothes flapping on us like flags, limping, hobbling, holding one another—down the beach.

We stood close around and drank in the sight of her. It was like wine and willing women to our spirits.

Stig said, “We went aboard her for a quick look-see. The chests and
stores are all broken into but the oars and tackle look right enough. We can put to sea in her.”

But could we? She was high and dry on the beach and the tide ebbing fast. We flung ourselves against her and pushed until we sank gasping on our knees. Meantime the Kalevalan boats were putting out, with never a backward glance at us, and the Pohjolans with wild cries were streaming out the gate behind them.

“Odin,” I cried, “Christ and King Olaf!” (I was ashamed of myself later, of course.)

Then Starkad said, “Look there! The filthy whore's sons—they've crippled her. She'll never go like this.”

We followed his gaze up to her serpent's head: each of her white eyes bristled with poisoned darts. They had blinded her because they feared the spirit in her.

“Bengt, can you shinny up from the fo'c'sle?”

He was up in no time, with his legs hooked around her neck, leaning far out to reach the darts.

“Once again boys, with all your might!”

Slowly, slowly she rocked and slid, scraping and grating, over the mossy stones, gathering speed, moving with her own will. Her stern floated free, then her bows. We swarmed aboard her and, standing on her deck again, grinned like fools.

“Run out a dozen oars,” I ordered. “Einar, you take the helm and put her alongside the Kalevalans.” The Jomsviking could manage the tiller well enough with his one hand. Stig and I were of more use at the oars.

I looked back along the beach.

The Pohjolans, men and women, were crowded down to the water's edge, watching the five Kalevalan boats pull away. In one sloop, Ilmarinen and Vainamoinen stood together, gripping the sampo and Louhi, their hostage.

For us, it was hard work at the oars, being only a third of our full rowing strength, but we made way slowly to intercept the Kalevalans. We were a good bow-shot out from shore by the time we came alongside them.

What happened next I cannot well describe. I, myself, rowing on the far side, saw only the aftermath of it. As for what others claim to have seen, I leave it open. But we all heard the piercing cry, and it
was
like the scream of a bird. And Vainamoinen, when seconds later I saw him standing empty-handed in the stern of his sloop, bore telltale marks upon him—his beard spattered with blood and red gashes on his face and hands.

Some of my crew swear they saw black wings beating around his head and talons ripping at him. On the other hand, I remember that wicked knife that she carried concealed under her shawl. Who can say?

By the time we came alongside, they were dragging Ilmarinen back in. And Louhi, her thin hair plastered against her face and her shawls floating out behind her, was making frantic motions toward the shore, where already the Pohjolans were racing to their boats.

In the boats of Kalevala there was silence and blank despair. Because, sunk in the sandy bottom of the bay, deeper than an oar's length beneath their keels, was the sampo. I suppose that Ilmarinen made a grab for Louhi—whether in bird form or human—and lost his grip on the thing, nearly capsizing the sloop and spilling him into the water.

They stared dumbly at the spot where it had disappeared. Gone without hope of recovery. The sampo might spread its wondrous seed in the fields of the sea, but nevermore in theirs.

Presently one of the Pohjolan boats came close and fished Louhi from the water. She lay in the bottom like a heap of wet wash while her warriors stared stone-faced. They had lost all, and they knew it.

The same loss was written on Kalevalan faces, but to my mind, wrongly. What did they want with that foul thing? Vainamoinen singing them to sleep at dusk should have been magic enough for them—but of course they would not have heard this kindly from the lips of the viikinki.

Floating to the surface of the water as the glue that held them dissolved, were bits of the colored cloth and gold foil that had decorated the sampo's tip; and these the Kalevalans, reaching out with oars and hands, were trying to salvage. Vainamoinen directed the operation while gruffly fending off those who wanted to bandage his gashes and wash the blood from his face.

Old Vainamoinen. What was it Lemminkainen had said?
No one remembers when he wasn't old
. I suspected he would be old for many years—for many ages—still to come. He was everything to them.

And not like you and me.

I wanted a word of parting with him and, leaning over the gunnel,
called his name three or four times. But he made no sign that he heard me, nor Ilmarinen either.

The Rover heard, though.

He stood stiffly in the prow of his tossing boat, surrounded by his foresters, many of them wounded and bleeding. He turned his hard face to me. Our eyes met and held each other.

Between us, most of all—between us two, who loved the same dear girl—there should have been some word. But for a long moment neither of us spoke.

At last he clapped his right fist to his heart, held it a moment, and let it drop.

“Hyvasti, Odd.”

I had grown so used to being always called ‘Viikinki' by them, that the sound of my own name came strangely to my ears—stranger still, in the mouth of that man.

“Hyvasti, Lemminkainen,” I answered. “May we meet again in happier times.”

Vainamoinen's voice rang out just then, bidding them make haste for home. And so they turned their prows to the south and their little boats melted into the mist.

Behind us, Louhi's house fell in with a crack and a roar, sending clouds of embers whirling up into the air. And with them Ainikki's little shade, flying from its pyre. I hoped she would think kindly of me sometimes and forgive me for releasing the Pohjolan women. Surely Pohjola's ground was blood-soaked enough already.

And dimly through the haze of smoke beyond the hall, the Copper Mountain squatted, its cold womb ripped and empty.

Vengeance was satisfied.

“Pull!” I cried, bending to my oar, suddenly desperate to be away. “Einar, take her out among the skerries.”

Was I a fool to have thought I could ever have a home among the Finns or to have believed that Ainikki could love me? Well, it made no difference now. Of one thing, though, I was certain. Just as Vainamoinen had said, it would be a fair length of time before ever I sailed these waters again.

On the poop, by Einar's feet, sat the casket of silver. And being Einar, he couldn't wait. Dropping the tiller, he fell on his knees, fumbled open
the lid and dug his hand deep into the heap of coins and rings, scooping them up and watching them fall between his fingers.

“Heh, look ‘ee! Ha, ha!” he crowed. “Did Einar Tree-Foot say he would make you rich or did he not? Come on—who have you got to thank for it all, heh? Who's to be thanked?” Cackling, he looked from one of us to another—then frowned and gave a peevish tug to his beard. “Well, I mean to say, why do you look at me so?”

I glanced at Stig and he at me, shaking his bristly head and wearily smiling.

Running before a smacking breeze, we skimmed the wave-tops and put miles of green sea between us and Pohjola. I stood at the helm once more, my hand upon the tiller, and felt the Viper's lithe body roll under my feet.

Skerries lay all around us—many just barren rocks, humped and gray like whales' backs, where sea-birds flocked in their thousands, others shaggy with fir, birch and alder. On the leeward side of one of these we found a sheltered inlet and went ashore, making our camp where a rivulet of cold water ran down from a cleft rock.

What a sad remnant we were.

Thirty-three men sailed out of Jumne Town on a spring morning. It was now the end of autumn and we were thirteen. Besides myself, Stig, Starkad and Brodd were all that remained of the Iceland crew. From Nidaros came Glum, young Bengt, and three others—Halfdan, Ivar, and Svein—all brave and capable men. And from Jumne, besides Einar, were Bolli, Lambi, and Swarozyc, of whom the first were a pair of brothers who quarreled constantly, and the last was a Wend who was never, during the whole time he served with us, overheard to say a single word.