The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (21 page)

And then, the light westering and the time drawing on toward evening, food was brought, and great jars of brown cloudy heather-ale. But before they set to feasting, the old chief in the deerskin cloak, who all along had acted as spokesman for the rest, looked up from the fire and said, ‘There is another thing.’

‘Aye,’ said Jarl Guthorm, ‘I was thinking there might be,’ and his tone had a guard on it.

‘Now that there is foster-kinship promised, and the bonds of friendship between our two peoples, let you give back to us the head of Mormaor Melbrigda.’

‘You are too late in that asking,’ said the Jarl after a moment. ‘The head of Melbrigda Tusk has already gone to the flames, and the ashes have been laid with all honour.’

There was a moment of crackling silence.

And into the silence Jarl Guthorm said, ‘But we can give back to you the body of his son who first came seeking it.’

The silence dragged on, full of the crying of shore birds and the hollow sounding of the tide, the stamping of a pony in the picket line; but in the heart of it, just silence, dragging on and on.

‘So-o,’ said the old chief at last. ‘That was the hunting trail that he would follow alone.’

Low-voiced, Erp translated.

‘Who killed him?’ the old chieftain asked at last.

And Red Thorstein, speaking almost for the first time, said simply, ‘I killed him.’

The chieftain took his gaze from the young Jarl. ‘Why?’

‘He made to kill the Jarl Guthorm, and my blade was the nearest.’

‘Sa, sa. It is a reason that holds water,’ the old man said, with an air of detached judgement. And he leaned forward and took a gobbet of meat from the dish that was cooling in front of him. ‘Yet it is glad I am that the friendship was sworn between us before this thing came into the open; for there are those, especially among my young braves, who might misunderstand.’ He took a piece of barley bannock to go with the meat.

Bjarni, setting another dish down in the ashes of the fire, guessed that he had deliberately waited until the oath-taking was over, before bringing up the matter of the Mormaor’s head.

THE ELDERS OF
the Painted People went back to their own place, carrying with them their dead, wrapped in skins and roped onto a hurdle drawn behind one of the horses. And next morning, leaving the new young Jarl and the new-made cairn behind them, Red Thorstein and his war-band headed north again.

Towards noon on the second day, they came down off high moors into a shallow wooded glen through which a burn ran in a chain of pools strung together by stretches of swift-running water. And there they halted, as they had done on the way south, to water the horses and turn them loose to graze.

The trees that grew down to the water’s edge were not the dense oaks and dark whispering pines of the wildwood, but birch and rowan and alder, thin leaves making a threadbare summer’s-end dazzle of sunlight and dapple-shade, and there were open spaces of coarse grass underfoot, so that the grazing was none so ill.

The air was shimmering with dancing midge-clouds; and Bjarni, itching from their stings on every bit of himself that was open to the air, strolled
upstream to above the pools where they had watered the horses, drawn by the idea of cold water on his burning skin: but coming on a small backwater just above the horse pool, and kneeling down to plunge his head into it, he saw something that made him forget his midge-bites. A fat brown trout was lying close under the bank, nose upstream, the current making ripple patterns along its flanks. Something to add savour to the evening bannock!

Careful not to let his shadow fall across the water, he slipped down full length along the bank, and with infinite care and slowness, slid his hand and then his arm into the cold peat-brown water. Time passed, while slowly, slowly, he edged his hand upstream, till his faintly curving fingers were almost under the fish. A little more, a very little more . . . No sound in the heavy noon-tide save the whine of the midge-clouds that he had forgotten, and the lap and purling of the burn. Once, for a moment, he was half aware of a moving darkness among the trees, but no sound; then it was gone. Probably it was no more than the faint web that one may see in certain lights out of the tail of one’s eye. He had not moved: already his fingers sensed the living flank of the trout. He was not even breathing now. Another instant . . .

And then, from somewhere downstream toward the noon camp, the silence was snapped by the twang of a released bowstring.

Bjarni whipped his hand from the water, the trout flicking away as he sprang to his feet. He was racing back toward the camp. Ahead of him there was a great stillness in the woods; a stunned stillness only just breaking into uproar as he reached the clearing, a snarling surge of voices and the snatching up of weapons, and in the midst of it Thorstein Olafson, a war-arrow flighted with red kite feathers between his
shoulders, lay coughing up his life into the coarse burnside grass.

Coming so quickly after the quietness of the trout in the backwater, the thing burst over Bjarni like a dream. In the dream men were running, and Bjarni was running with them, in the direction from which the arrow had come. The direction of that dark flicker among the trees. His dirk was naked in his hand, though he did not remember having pulled it from his belt. The tumult had sunk away and they ran in silence, spreading out, questing like hounds stubborn on a half-lost scent.

He had no idea how long the dream lasted, but afterwards he thought not long. In the dark shadows and crowding undergrowth of the wildwood the bowman would almost surely have got away; but here among the open woodland of wind-shaped birch and rowan and alder it was another matter; and afterwards Bjarni wondered if the man was really not much interested in getting away, once he had done the thing that he came to do . . .

There began to be a changed smell in the air, a chill rooty smell, and the trees were thinning out as the glen broadened, the hills on either side falling away; and suddenly before him was open country, coarse grass and furze, and beyond a rich and wicked greenness feathered with the white tufts of bog grass. And ahead, not more than a bowshot away, was the quarry.

Bjarni let out a shout with all the wind that was yet in him, to gather in the scattered flanks of the hunt and, free of the tangle, somehow lengthened his own stride.

The man had lost speed and there was an uncertainty about him. He swivelled as he ran, losing still more ground – it must be that he was off his own hunting run and had not known of the bog, or at least
was unsure of the ways across. Still in the dream Bjarni was aware of the rest of the hunt gathering to his shout close on his heels, breaking out of the woods on either side, but himself still in the lead. There were short throaty cries around him, the cries of the pack when it sights the game. Ahead of him the man had turned at bay; he saw the drawn bow and jinked to one side as he ran, and felt the wind of an arrow whistle past his cheek.

There was no time for another, or maybe no more shafts in the man’s quiver. He flung his bow aside and crouched, his knife in his hand, the bog behind him, as Bjarni hurled himself forward over the last short distance between. The ground was beginning to feel soft and hungry under his feet, but he was not aware of that; not aware of anything save the man waiting for him, dirk in hand, and the dirk in his own hand and the high red killer-singing inside his own head. Only the two of them in the dream; even the rest of the hunt had ceased to exist. For an instant he saw the bared teeth and widened eyes of the man who had killed Red Thorstein, his lord, as he dived in under the snake strike of the Pictish blade. He felt the dull shock, and grating of blade on bone as his own blade went in above the collar bones into the taut throat. And the thrust burst the dream and let in reality. Let in the faint shiver of cool air off the bog, and the sharp cry of a raven sweeping overhead – and the man still rocking on his feet for a moment before sagging to his knees, twisting over as he fell, so that he lay face up among the bog grasses.

And the face was the face of the young Pict he had seen three days since, hacked down beside Jarl Sigurd’s funeral pyre. Staring down at it, Bjarni felt the hair lift on the back of his neck, as old winter’s night tales of slain warriors returning from the dead
flickered through his mind. The same long narrow face, still almost beardless, the same dark hair springing back from the same warrior-patterned forehead, the same look in the wide eyes and snarling back-drawn lips. And then he saw that one thing was different; the twisted silver arm-ring above the right elbow, the same but worn on the other arm; and no white mark on the other, as there would have been if for any reason it had been changed. Brothers, maybe twins! The twin sons of Melbrigda Tusk. And the thing, which for a splinter of time had been nightmare, became Blood Feud.

There was a great deal of blood, pumping from the red gash in the man’s neck, then from other wounds on his breast and belly and flanks, as others of the hunt came crowding round, each fiercely eager to have a share in the kill. Bjarni, stooping to clean his dirk on a grass tussock, realised that his feet were half gone into black ooze, and hurriedly pulled up first one and then the other.

‘Best get him onto solid ground before we all stick in this putrid mess,’ he said, quite casually, as though it were a deer that they had brought down; but now that the dream was gone from him, his heart was lurching oddly over the cold sickness in his belly.

They hauled the body of the young Pict back from the salt ground, bound his ankles together with his own quiver strap for easy hauling – no particular point in getting back to the rest of the war-band looking and smelling more like a slaughter house than need be – and set out over their hunting trail, dragging him behind them.

When they got back, the noon camp was breaking up and making ready to move off, horses being saddled, men gathering up weapons and gear, and over all, tangible as brewing thunder, a sense of sullen
anger that was more than the anger of men whose lord has been slain, and in the midst of all, Thorstein Olafson lay wrapped close in his striped silken cloak, with Erp squatting beside him, with the remains of the arrow that he had drawn out still in his hands. Close by, the captain of the war-band stood watching the final lashing of a hurdle of saplings and branches that had been made ready.

He looked round when the hunters tumbled the hacked body of the young Pict at his feet, and said, ‘The hunting was good?’

‘The hunting was good,’ they agreed, breathing hard.

‘And it seems that the kill was the work of many.’

Bjarni was not going to claim it. He was not at all sure that he wanted to claim it. But Ottar Erikson, giving credit where it was due, said, ‘Bjarni Sigurdson was first blade at the killing.’

‘I am thinking he was kin to the man who came seeking Melbrigda’s head and would have slain Jarl Guthorm,’ Bjarni said in explanation, as though explanation were needed.

‘Aye,’ said Egil the captain, looking down at the battered body at his feet, ‘if yon’s the way of it, Blood Feud it would be.’

Bjarni said, only half in question, ‘So we turn south again to collect the blood price,’ and heard eager agreement from the young men around him.

‘Blood Feud, I said, and you, it seems, have already collected the blood price. But even if it were not so –’ Egil’s voice took on the weary growl of one who has said the same thing before, and more than once –’ still it is for us who are the war-band of Thorstein Olafson to hold on northward to raise the shield ring round the Lady Aud his mother in case of further trouble, and to follow her ruling in the matter afterwards.’

Then Bjarni understood the atmosphere of sullen resentment, of revolt only just held in check, that he had felt throughout the camp.

‘She is only a woman,’ Ottar Erikson spluttered. ‘It is not for her –’ and his protest was echoed by the rest of the hunters. Other men were gathering round them, men already leading their horses, men hot-eyed and sullen, fiddling with their weapons, as the thing that had been settled once began to unravel again like a frayed cloak.

Egil let out a roar like a mountain bear. ‘Name of thunder! She is the woman of Red Thorstein’s fleet and war-bands and settlements, whom men call the Deep-Minded, for the wisdom that is in her!’ He fetched a deep breath, and went on more quietly, ‘Hast forgotten that we came into Caithness not as raiders to fire a few farms and carry off the church gold, but to make new homes, new settlements when the fighting is over, which is a matter as much for the women as for the men? Therefore, whatever comes later, for this time we ride on north.’

And a short while later they rode on north, the huge body of Thorstein the Red, Thorstein Olafson, borne on its hurdle in their midst, and the body of the young Pict left lying behind them for the wolves and the hooded crows.

But Erp and Bjarni, riding two of the war-band’s fastest horses, were away ahead of them, their orders to make the winter camp with all speed, and carry the black news to Aud the Deep-Minded.