Sworn Brother (24 page)

And I was certainly insignificant. Born illegitimate and sent away by my mother at the age of two to a father who had remarried and largely ignored me, I could offer neither support nor prospects to a wife. Nor would it have been wise to tell her that I was sworn brother to the most notorious outlaw in the land. So, instead, I kept quiet and let Snorri do the negotiating for me. I suppose his reputation as the foremost chieftain of the district was in my favour, or perhaps he had some hidden understanding with Gunnhildr’s father, Audun. Whatever the background, Snorri invited me to stay at his home while he arranged the details, and all went smoothly until the matter of mundur came up. Old Audun, a grasping and pompous man if there ever was one, asked what bride price
I
was prepared to pay for what he called his ‘exquisite daughter’. If Odinn had been kinder to me at that moment, I would have said that I was penniless and the negotiations would have collapsed. As it was, I foolishly offered to contribute a single jewel, but one so rare that nothing like it had been seen in Iceland. Audun was sceptical at first, then curious, and when I melted down the clumsy lead bird of my amulet and produced the fire ruby he looked amazed.

The greater impact was made on his daughter. The moment Gunnhildr saw that gem she had to have it. She was determined to flaunt it before her sisters. It was her way of paying them back for years of spiteful remarks about her frumpiness. And once Gunnhildr decided that she wanted something nothing would stop her, as her father well knew. So the last of old Audun’s objections to our marriage disappeared and he agreed to the match. My future in-laws agreed to provide Gunnhildr and myself with a small outlying farmstead as her dowry, while the gem was my mundur. At the last moment, either because the thought of parting with my talisman and its association with my life in England was so painful, or because of a premonition, I made Gunnhildr and Audun agree that if the marriage failed I would be allowed to redeem the jewel on payment of a sum which was the equivalent value of the farmstead. The price of the gem was set at thirty marks of silver, a sum that was to cloud my next few years.

Our wedding was such a subdued affair that it was barely noticed in the neighbourhood. Even Snorri was absent, having taken to his bed with an attack of fever and Gunnhildr dressed up only in order to display the fire ruby. I was taken aback to discover that the ceremony was to be conducted by an itinerant priest. He was one of those Christian holy men who had begun to appear in increasing numbers in the countryside, travelling from farm to farm to persuade the women to accept their faith and baptise their children, and railing all the while against what they described as the barbaric and heathen Old Ways. During the wedding ceremony I realised that my bride was a rabid Christian. She stood beside me, sweating slightly in her wedding finery, and calling out the responses in her unmelodious voice so devoutly and harshly that I knew she believed the priest’s every incantation. Now and again, I noticed, she fondled the fire ruby possessively as it dangled between her ample breasts.

The wedding feast was as skimpy as my father-in-law could get away with, and then my wife and I were conducted to our farmstead by a small group of her relatives, then left alone. Later that evening Gunnhildr made it clear that physical relations between us were out of the question. She had given herself to the White Christ, she informed me loftily, and close contact with a non-believer like myself was repugnant to her. It was a reaction which I did not care to challenge. On the walk to our new home I had been pondering on the fact that my marriage was probably the worst mistake I had yet made in my life.

Matters did not improve. I quickly learned that my in-laws’ wedding gift of the farmstead was self-serving in the extreme. The farm lay just too distant from their own home for them to work it themselves. My father-in-law had been too parsimonious to hire a steward to live there and run it, and too jealous of his neighbours to rent them the lands and pasture. By installing a compliant son-in-law he thought he had found his ideal solution. I was expected to bring the farm into good order, then hand on to him a significant portion of the hay, meat or cheese it produced. In short, I was his lackey.

Nor did Gunnhildr intend to spend much time there with me. Once she had acquired a husband or, rather, once she had got her hands on the fire ruby, she reverted to her previous way of life. To her credit she was a competent housekeeper, and she was quick to clean up the farmhouse, which had been left unoccupied for several years and make the place habitable in a basic way. But then she began to spend more and more time back at her parent’s house, staying the nights there on the excuse that it was too far to return to her marital home. Or she went off on visits to her gang of women friends. They were an intimidating group. All were recent and ardent converts to Christianity, so they spent a good deal of their time congratulating one another on the superior merits of their new faith and complaining of the coarseness of the one they now spurned.

I must admit that Gunnhildr would have found me a thoroughly unsatisfactory helpmeet had she stayed at home. I was completely unsuited to farm work. I found it depressing to get up every morning and pick up the same tools, walk the same paths, round up the same cattle, cut hay from the same patch, repair the same rickety outhouse and return to the same lumpy mattress, which, thankfully, I had to myself. To put it bluntly, I preferred Gunnhildr in her absence because I found her company to be shallow, tedious and ignorant. When I compared her to Aelfgifu I almost wept with frustration. Gunnhildr had an uncanny ability to interrupt my thoughts with observations of breathtaking banality, and her sole interest in her fellow humans appeared to be based on their financial worth, an attitude she doubtless learned from her money-grubbing father. To spite him, I did as little work on the farm as possible.

Naturally the other farmers in the area, who were hardworking men, thought me a good-for-nothing and shunned my company. So rather than stay and mind the cattle and cut hay for the winter, I went on excursions to visit my mentor Thrand, who had instructed me in the Old Ways when I was in my teens. Thrand lived only half a day’s travel away and, compared with white-haired Snorri, I found him remarkably little changed. He was still the gaunt, soldierly figure whom I remembered, plainly dressed and living simply in his small cabin with its array of foreign trophies hung on the wall. He greeted me with genuine affection, telling me that he had heard that I was back in the district. He had not attended my wedding, he added, because he found it difficult to support the prating of so many Christians.

We slipped back easily into the old routine of tutor and pupil. When I told Thrand that I had become a devotee of Odinn in his role as traveller and enquirer, he suggested I memorise the Havamal, the song of Odinn, ‘Let the Havamal be your guide for the future,’ he suggested. ‘In cleaving to Odinn’s words you will find wisdom and solace. Your friend Grettir, for example: he wants to be remembered for what he was, for his good repute, and Odinn has something to say on that very subject,’ and here Thrand quoted:

‘Cattle die, kinsmen die,

you yourself die,

But words of glory never die

for the man who achieves good name.

‘Cattle die, kinsmen die,

you yourself die.

I know one thing that never dies,

the fame of each man dead.’

On another day, when I made some wry comment about Gunnhildr and her disappointing behaviour, Thrand promptly recited another of Odinn’s verses:

‘The love of women whose hearts are false is like driving an unshod steed over slippery ice, a two-year-old, frolicsome, badly broken, or like being in a rudderless boat in a storm.’

This led me to ask, ‘Have you ever been married yourself?’

Thrand shook his head. ‘No. The idea of marriage never appealed to me, and at an age when I might have married, it was not allowed.’

‘What do you mean “not allowed”?’

‘The felag, the fellowship, forbade it and I took my vows seriously.’

‘What fellowship was that?’ I asked, hoping to learn something of Thrand’s enigmatic past, which the old soldier had never talked about.

But Thrand said only, ‘It was the greatest of all the felags, at that time at least. It was at the height of its glory. Now, though, it is much reduced. Few would believe how much it was once admired throughout the northern lands.’

On occasions like this I had the feeling that Thrand sensed that the beliefs he held, and had taught me, were in final retreat, that an era was drawing to a close.

‘Do you think that Ragnarok, the great day of reckoning, is soon?’ I asked him.

‘We haven’t yet heard Heimdall the watchman of the Gods blow the Gjallahorn to announce the approach of the massed forces of havoc,’ he answered, ‘but I fear that even with his wariness Heimdall may overlook the closer danger. His hearing may be so acute that he can hear the grass growing, and his sight so keen that he can see a hundred leagues in every direction by day or night, but he does not realise that true destruction often creeps in disguise. The agents of the White Christ could prove to be the harbingers of a blight just as damaging as all the giants and trolls and forces of destruction that have been foretold for so long.’

‘Can nothing be done about it?’ I asked.

‘It is not possible to bend fate, nor can one stand against nature,’ he replied. ‘At first I thought that the Christians and the Old Believers had enough in common to be able to coexist. We all believe that mankind is descended from just one man and one woman. For the Christians it is Adam and Eve, for us it is Ask and Embla, whom Odinn brought to life. So we agree on our origins, but when it comes to the afterlife we are too far apart. The Christians call us pagans and dirty heathens because we eat horseflesh and make animal sacrifice. But, for me, a greater filthiness is to dig a pit for the corpse of a warrior and put him in the ground to be eaten by worms and turned to slime. How can they do that? A warrior deserves his funeral pyre, which will send his spirit to Valholl to feast there until he joins the defenders on the day of Ragnarok. I fear that if more and more warriors take the White Christ faith, there will be a sadly depleted army to follow Odin, Frey and Thor at the great conflict.’

Throughout
that
summer
and autumn I heard reports of my sworn brother Grettir. His exploits were the main topic of conversation among the farmers of the region. Whenever I called

on my father-in-law, Audun, to discuss my progress with the out-farm, I was regaled with the latest episode in Grettir’s deeds. Audun’s gossip made my visits bearable because I was missing my sworn brother, though I was very careful not to reveal that
I
knew that ‘cursed outlaw’, as Audun called him. I learned that Grettir had succeeded in visiting his mother without alerting anyone else in the household. He had called at her house after dark, approaching the farmhouse along a narrow ravine that led to the side door, from where he found his way along the unlit passage to the room where his mother slept. With a mother’s intuition she had identified the intruder in the darkness, and after greeting him had told him the dismal details of how Atli his older brother had been murdered by Thorbjorn Oxenmight and his faction. Grettir had then hidden in his mother’s house until he was able to confirm that Thorbjorn Oxenmight was on his own farm and accompanied by only his farm workers.

‘And do you know what that scoundrel Grettir did then?’ said Audun, snorting with indignation. ‘He rode right over to the Oxenmight’s place, in broad daylight, a helmet on his head, a long spear in one hand and that fancy sword of his at his belt. He came on Oxenmight and his son working in the hayfields, gathering up the early hay and stacking it. They recognised Grettir at once and knew why he had come. Fortunately they had brought their weapons with them to the meadow, and so Thorbjorn and his lad devised what they thought was an effective defence. Oxenmight would confront Grettir to distract him, while his son armed with an axe worked his way round behind the outlaw and struck him in the back.’