Odin’s Child (6 page)

We kept to ourselves and waited.

And at last the day came when it was time to ride to the Althing.

Jorunn bustled about the yard, ordering, haranguing, directing. “Daughter-in-law, set down the bedding and help me with the cooking things. Skidi Dung-Beetle, is this how you tighten a girth? Skin the man, must I do all?”

The fat-bellied horses shifted patiently under towers of sheepskins and tenting, cauldrons and tripods, clean clothes and weapons, while we scurried back and forth between house and yard.

Our caravan complete at last with everything needful for a week's camping on Thingvellir Plain, Jorunn called out with forced cheerfulness, “Husband, take your place in the lead.” She did not want to shame him in front of the thralls, who were gathered to see us off. He obeyed her like a sullen child, but it was Jorunn who gave the signal to advance. Looking, with all our baggage, like a family of tinkers, we lurched up the stony track that led from our home-field, out into the wild country beyond.

Our first destination was Hoskuldsstead.

Hoskuld Long-Jaws was my mother's brother, a widower who farmed at Hawkdale-by-Geysir, in the house where he and Jorunn had grown up. Not being designed by nature for an active life, he had devoted himself to the pursuits of farming and law. He had succeeded so far in both that his fifty milk cows and two hundred milking ewes were the fattest in southern Iceland, and his law-wit was sought after by many. Even powerful godis were not ashamed to take his advice in their lawsuits.

My mother wanted more than advice. She would ask him to be our advocate and plead our case at the Althing. Being fifteen years younger than he, she saw in him more a father than a brother, and her faith in him was boundless. She had already sent him word of our troubles, and it was arranged that we should break our journey at his house before going on together to the Althing.

And what had Black Thorvald to say about this? Not a whisper of a word. During the winter he had grown ever more listless and despondent, his energies so low he could seldom even rouse himself to a rage. He gave up washing and combing his hair, and very nearly gave up eating. By winter's end he had aged ten years.

For myself, I was determined to be hopeful, and so clung to my mother and Gunnar, whose optimism never flagged.

†

Our way lay northwest across an open heath ribbed with steep, stony ridges cut by swift rivers. We rode for hours, it seemed, before the great glittering rampart of Long Glacier began to grow large on the horizon. And meanwhile a ribbon of smoke curling up from Hekla's peak still smudged the sky behind us, as though the volcano were unwilling to let us go. The heath gave way to a stretch of watery meadow in which treacherous bogs lay hidden. Beyond the meadow, we came to a range of gray, stony hills that rose like whales' backs from the mossy earth. The track we followed wound between them and brought us suddenly to Gulfoss, a thundering cascade of water that spilled into the river below us. We broke our journey here, and while the women saw to supper, we men found a hot pool and soaked ourselves in the steaming, milk-white water.

Next morning, we traversed several miles of smiling farm land, passing any number of farmhouses along the way, until abruptly, as by a line drawn across a map, the tilled land ended and the great lava field began. Here stood pillars of black and twisted rock that were said to be the bodies of night-trolls caught and frozen by the sun.

Scrabbling up a hill of cinders, we saw spread out before us the red, cracked plain of Hawkdale, overhung with the pall of countless smokes. We kept tight rein on our mounts now, for they hated the sulfur stench
and shied at the spitting pools of hot mud and the roaring jet of Geysir.

More hours of riding brought us, at last, out of the reek of Hawkdale and to the edge of Hoskuld's fields. With the sun already slanting toward the hills, we straggled into his yard and slid from our horses.

My uncle was an elongated man: long of neck, long of nose, long of tooth, and his body, too, was put together of long, brittle limbs. He stood in the doorway, peering owlishly at us until he could discern our shapes and a little of our features, for he was nearly blind. He put out his arms as we approached and embraced us gravely, one by one.

“Sister,” he pronounced in his mournful bass—a single word as good as a speech—stern, tender, and reproachful all at once. Jorunn leaned against his chest and dabbed at her eyes. “Gunnar the Handsome,” he spoke over her head, “you look fit as ever. And Vigdis Sveinsdottir. He bent down for her to kiss his cheek. “Odd Tangle-Hair, what a black, hairy face you've gotten.” He held my chin in his big-knuckled hand, turning me critically this way and that.” And of course, Thorvald … welcome to my hall.”

The two men barely touched hands. There was no love lost here—not for these thirty years past, ever since Hoskuld took up the new religion and did everything in his power to get Jorunn to divorce her heathen husband. This was the one instance, as I have already said, in which she had disobeyed her brother.

As hirelings and thralls took our horses, we trooped through the door into the glow of Hoskuld's spacious hall, far larger than our own.

In honor of our visit, the wooden walls were hung with tapestries—fine stuffs crowded with scenes of warriors and sailing ships, which I never tired of looking at. On the wall-benches, thick fleeces were spread where we would sit to dinner and later sleep. Along one wall stood tubs of butter and barrels of milk and beer, and over the long hearth hung simmering cauldrons of meat that filled the air with its savory aroma. My uncle lived well.

“Towels to wipe away the dust of travel,” he ordered. They were brought promptly by the servants. “Ah, but don't sit down yet, kinsmen,” he said, “for we've still time before dinner to walk the farm.”

We always walked the farm. This was our ritual every spring upon arriving: to admire his new lambs, foals, and calves. Husbandry offered the only safe subject of talk between Hoskuld and my father.

Kalf Slender-Leg came in the nick of time to rescue me. Kalf was
Hoskuld's grandson and my closest friend—to tell the truth, my only friend, besides Gunnar.

“Odd, how goes it with you?”

“Pretty well, friend Kalf.”

We always began shyly like that. Months at a stretch passed between our meetings and we surprised each other every time by being taller, gruffer, hairier, different in a dozen small ways. He was half a year younger than me, gangling and lean, with curly red hair and eyes quick to smile. His whole nature was brisk and lively.

He had a sheaf of arrows in his belt and two bows. He handed me one.

“Heh, what's this?” said my uncle, frowning down on us from his great height. Even though he had a stoop, he was quite tall. He made some rumbling and expostulating noises but ended with the observation that, “Young dogs must go off on their own,” though, he warned, we should get no supper if we were late returning.

We were always ‘young dogs' to Hoskuld, which we took to be an affectionate name, for he was a kindly man at bottom, though inclined to be pompous.

Promising to be prompt for dinner, we raced out the gate, followed by Kalf's black-and-tan bitch and by an envious look from Gunnar.

“Hel's Hall!” I swore, punching him on the back, “it's good to see you!”

“And you, by Odin's crow!”

Kalf liked to imitate my speech, swearing roundly by Hel, Thor, and Odin, though he was a baptized Christman, as well as following my lead in every other way. I loved him for it, I admit it. I craved admiration, and Kalf Slender-Leg was one who gave it gladly and unstintingly, even when I had done nothing to deserve it.

Though this time, of course, I had. I had killed a man.

“With this?” he asked, touching my sword in its scuffed old scabbard.

“Aye.”

“Tell me everything.”

I had no intention of telling him how, when the fight was over, I had sunk down on my knees in the water, sick and shaking. But in the end I told him that, too.

“Yes,” he murmured, “it would be like that the first time.”

“The first time, but not the next,” I said in a hard voice. “The father and the brother still live.”

“You mean to kill them too?”

“If it comes to that.”

“Which it might, you know. You've never been to the Althing, have you?”

I shrugged, not liking to be reminded of the solitary life I was forced to lead.

“I've been lots of times with Grandfather. Thor's beard! The year before last, two families wrangled over a boundary stone, armed to the teeth and with all their supporters around them. When it was over eleven men were dead. It happens all the time.”

“So much the better.”

“Though I suppose Grandfather will get you through it all right, he's never lost a suit.”

“He's never had the sons of Black Thorvald for clients.”

Kalf knew me well enough to be cautious on the subject of my father. “Come on, Tangle-Hair, let's hunt!” He gave me a friendly push and raced away up a hillside, a fleet and tireless runner.

In a high boulder-strewn meadow we startled a brace of moorhens. They flew up with a beating of speckled wings, but one tumbled back instantly with Kalf's arrow through it. Then, seeing my shot go wide by a mile, he drew and loosed again. The second bird fell.

“Fair bit of shooting, Kalf.”

“Well,” he flashed me a grin, “it's a poor fellow who isn't good at something.”

After that, we joked, wrestled, ran with the dog, and came to rest at last, out of breath, on a grassy hillside. We threw ourselves down and stared into the blue sky.

“Odd.”

“Hmm.”

“You remember the cliff?”

We always talked about that.

Two summers ago we had hiked from Hoskuldsstead all the way to the coast at Reykjanes and gone climbing on the cliffs with ropes and long-handled nets to gather puffins' eggs. The coast-dwellers pursue this dangerous activity from childhood. We, being inlanders, had never tried it before.

On the portion of cliff we selected, there happened to be a girl—a
plump little thing about our age, who sat in the sling of her rope, with her skirt around her thighs, and swung from cranny to crag, with a great deal more confidence than we felt. Once we had secured our ropes with pegs and lowered ourselves down the sheer cliff side, she began to tease us and then to fling eggs at us, which seemed to amuse her greatly.

I could think of nothing better than to curse her, but resourceful Kalf climbed back up to the top of the cliff, saw where she'd pegged her rope, and cut it half way through. He lay on his belly with his head and shoulders over the edge so she could see that only his thin arms—which were stronger, fortunately, than they looked—were keeping her from falling to the rocks below. She screamed her head off, but there was no one about to hear. After a good long time, he and I together hauled her up.

She called us filthy names for a while and then we became friends. Her name was Thorgrima, she said, the daughter of a local fisherman. We spent a happy afternoon together exploring the caves in the neighborhood. Along the way, we explored Thorgrima, too. It was Kalf's first time with a girl.

“I went back there last month,” he said.

“Not looking for our little friend, were you? Nobody could be that lucky twice.”

“No, no. Just to watch for ships and talk to the crewmen. I can't stick it here much longer with only Grandfather and my sister Katla for company.”

“Old Long-Jaws isn't a bad sort.”

“I suppose not, though I never seem to profit from any of his advice.”

“I can't say as much for your sister….”

“God, how I want to leave this island! In my own ship or another's, it wouldn't matter, only to be gone.”

He spoke with such sudden passion that it made me sit up and look at him. But I understood. It was something we shared. Just as I had, so had Kalf a viking father, the only difference being that, while mine lived on as a squeaking ghost, his was gloriously dead.

Flosi Hoskuldsson had been a fierce pirate, the owner of two sleek dragons, and had gone on many a foray in Irish waters. In 1014 he joined the army of King Sigtrygg Silk-Beard of Dublin in his war against the Irish rebel, Brian Boru. Things turned out not as they wished. At a place
called Clontarf, the Norse were routed and Flosi, who stood his ground to the last, was taken prisoner.

It was told later, by men who got away, how the Irish slit his belly and marched him round and round a tree until his guts were all unwound. Still he had smiled, they said, up to the very end.

Flosi had been Hoskuld's last child and his favorite. Four other children and his wife had all been carried off by fever years before. When word was brought to him of his son's death, the old man shut himself up in his bed-closet without food or drink for five days and never afterwards would speak Flosi's name or allow it to be spoken in his presence. Flosi's wife, who was pregnant at the time, came to live with him, and there she was delivered of Kalf and his twin sister Katla—dying in the process.

“Grandfather will never let me go,” Kalf said bitterly. “Whenever I bring it up, he turns his face to the wall and reminds me that I'm his eyes. But it's not so. Katla can lead him as well as I. The truth is, he's afraid that someday they'll come and tell him
I'm
dead. But, One-Eyed Odin, what sort of a life do I have here? One day I will sail away and not come back, I swear it.”

“Kalf Slender-Leg, one day I'll go with you.”

Just for a moment, we looked in each other's eyes and understood why we were friends.

The sun touched the distant hills, where it would hang throughout the endless day-night, and our stomachs told us it was dinnertime. Tying the moorhens to our belts and whistling up the dog, we turned our steps toward Hoskuldsstead.