The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (24 page)

‘When?’ he asked.

‘This evening after supper,’ Erp said lightly as though he spoke of some small and passing matter. ‘On the day
Seal Maiden
took to the water.’

‘And so you’re free from the Iceland faring,’ Bjarni said, an idea beginning in his head. ‘Your mother too?’

‘My mother will never leave the Lady Aud.’

‘But you,’ Bjarni persisted, ‘you’re free; we could head for Dublin or the like, together!’

Erp shook his head. ‘There could come a day . . . but meanwhile, free or no, I am the Lady Aud’s man still, while she has need of her own about her.’

And looking at him still in the glow of the watchfire, Bjarni was making a discovery, and his face cracked slowly into a smile. ‘You’re another of the fools who needs to follow your way for reasons of the heart within your breast!’ he said. And he thought, but did not say, You might be worth listening to, after all!

In the next few days, Bjarni thought a good deal on Erp’s advice, though he still lacked the thing that led the wild geese: he was still waiting for the wind to rise. But it was worth thinking of, all the same.

He was still thinking, two days later, as he came up the newly-cleared portage way towards the camp. The Lady Aud had wished word of some sort taken downriver to
Fionoula,
as she had wished it more than once during the winter when milder weather opened the forest ways each time, and as before, Brother Ninian, her chaplain, had gone as her messenger with a couple of the ship-carles to see him safely back again.

This time it was Bjarni and Orm Anderson. They had been late starting back, for Brother Ninian had been seized with the desire to pray with
Fionoula
’s crew, and when the need for prayer came upon Brother Ninian he lost all sense of the passing of time. So the day was fading fast, the still-wintry twilight lying like smoke among the trees, and the white water of the salmon leap was gathering a faint light of its own. The three men walked in hunting file, Brother Ninian in the lead, his head bowed and his crossed hands lost in the sleeves of his habit, probably still in prayer, Bjarni thought, following a little behind, and last of all, Orm, the biggest of the three, to cover their rear. They should have had Brother Ninian in the
middle, but the chaplain was, as he said himself, not a man to follow other men, but only the light of God. Well, as long as he did not fall into an ants’ nest, or blunder down the bank into the river . . .

The dusk was crowding in on them more closely now, the night-time sounds of the wildwood beginning to wake. At least, Bjarni hoped they were the ordinary night-time sounds of the wildwood; they sounded not quite the same out here as they did from within the stockade. The great forest of Caithness was no place for mortal men to be abroad in the night, for there were other and darker dangers than wild beasts among the trees . . .

The camp was not far now; once he thought he heard one of the hunting dogs bark on the farmost edge of hearing; but the bark did not come again to hold the other sounds at bay. It was good at least to hear the brush and tramp of Orm coming along behind him, and feel that there was someone at his back. Then a new thought came upon him, lifting the hairs on the back of his neck. How did he know that it was still Orm behind him, and not some nameless horror that had taken Orm’s place? Calling himself all kinds of a fool, he snatched a quick glance behind him. Difficult to see in the dusk and among the riverside scrub, but certainly the figure lurching along in the rear had the familiar large and slightly lumbering shape of Orm Anderson.

With a quick breath of relief, Bjarni turned face forward again. But almost in the same moment he heard a stumbling crash and a curse from the man behind him. ‘What’s amiss?’ he called back.

‘Broken my shoe-thong – keep going – I’ll catch up with you –’

Bjarni hesitated. A man stooping to mend a broken shoe-thong here would be open to any attack that
might come upon him. But Orm could look out for himself well enough – his task was to get the chaplain safely back to camp.

He went on, after the dark hooded shape that was beginning to blend into the twilight; listening all the while for the sounds of Orm coming up again behind. But all he heard was the faint panting sound that was the breathing of the forest itself – or his own fear.

Then with a kind of coughing snarl, a giant blackness arose from the undergrowth straight ahead. For a splinter of time it was just blackness without shape, one of the troll kind, the terrors of the wildwood, eaters of men and the souls of men. Then it reared up roaring, taller than a man, and showed its proper shape; the shape of a great forest bear, newly woken from its winter sleep, famished and savage and in red-eyed mood to kill anything that came its way; maybe heading for the salmon run, until men had crossed its track.

Bjarni saw the massive up-reared head and huge powerful forefeet raised. He saw Brother Ninian fling up his arms in a futile attempt to protect himself. He was not aware of whipping out his dirk, but it was naked in his hand as he sprang forward. He hurled the chaplain aside into a hazel bush, drawing back his arm to strike. The great head with gaping jaws towered above his own, the fetid stink of the huge brute was in his throat. The snarling roar seemed to shake the forest as he drove in the blade; and in the same instant, a blow from the huge forepaw on the side of his head sent him reeling, the curved claws raking down his cheek and shoulder. Bjarni, his head instinctively drawn sideways into his shoulder to protect the place where the life-blood runs through its channel close beneath the skin, heard through the furious roaring of the bear and his own yelling, Orm’s
voice behind him and the sounds of the other man crashing through the undergrowth. Next instant the mighty forearms were around him, and the life was being crushed out of him against the hot hairy body. Somehow he managed to drag his arm free, the dirk still clenched in his hand, and drove in a second blow. The creature’s roaring changed to a kind of coughing snarl – blood began to come out of its gaping jaws; then another dirk struck in beside his own, the crushing grip about his ribs slackened, and the whole hairy mass sagged forward like a mountain falling.

Bjarni was underneath the fallen mountain and its blackness was flowing up, up through him. There was blood everywhere, the smell of it hot and rank, his own or the bear’s, he did not know which. He did not know anything very clearly. But the great twitching weight was being heaved off him, and he was being dragged clear. He had no idea of time passing, nor of the order in which things happened, but he heard voices, Orm’s and the chaplain’s, without any idea of what they said. He felt the chill of river-water sluicing over him, and his shoulder being lashed up with strips from somebody’s sark, probably his own.

And then somehow he was on his feet on ground that lifted and fell under him like the deck of a galley in a swell, with his arms across other men’s shoulders so that they took most of his weight, which reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what. His head felt as though there was a swarm of bees in it, and he couldn’t think through the buzzing that they made.

‘The bear,’ he mumbled, ‘just a bear after all.’

‘The bear’s dead,’ someone said. ‘We’ll fetch it later if the wolves don’t get it first. The thing now is to get you back to camp.’

He had no clear remembrance of getting back to
camp at all; but a time came when he was back within the stockade, and there were faces around him in the light of a torch that someone had brought, and a smother of voices. And then the Lady Aud’s voice clear among the rest, bidding him be brought into the store-room behind the longhouse.

Then he was lying on piled skins in the midst of a pool of torchlight and Muirgoed, with her patient horse’s face bent close above him, was tending the gashes to his neck and jaw and shoulder, while Erp kneeling beside her held his arms tilted outward to keep the wounds open for thorough bathing. There had only been a kind of numbness in his shoulder, but now he felt as though he had been branded with hot irons, and quite suddenly the bee-buzzing in his head became booming darkness that swallowed up the torchlight . . .

The next thing he saw was the ash-coloured light of morning beyond the outer door-hole of the bothy. He had the kind of headache that came of drinking too much heather-ale, and breast and ribs and shoulder felt as though a galley had been launched across him. Exploring with his free hand, he found bandage-linen, and the memory of the bear came back, and close behind it the memory of Brother Ninian with his arms flung up against the huge darkness with the snarling jaws.

Something, someone, moved beside him, and for a moment his heart lurched into his throat. But it was only Muirgoed with fresh bandage-linen in her hands. ‘Brother Ninian?’ he croaked.

It was the Lady Aud, standing behind her, who answered. ‘It is well with Brother Ninian, and he is even now giving thanks to God for his preservation.’ A faint note of amusement crept into her voice. ‘I also give thanks to God for my chaplain’s life; but it is in
my mind that something of my thanks is due also to you.’

Bjarni mumbled something in reply, but scarcely took in what she said, leaving it, as it were, to be taken out and looked at another time.

Later in the day, when Muirgoed had tended his raked flesh and fed him barley-gruel with something bitter-tasting in it, and he had slept again, he woke again to a feeling of great quietness not unlike the quietness he had known that last morning on Iona. There was a small seal-oil lamp burning in the corner of the bothy, and beyond the door-hole the dusk was blue, with a first star hanging above the dark shape of the wildwood. A wonderful blue, deep and yet translucent as though the light were shining through it from the other side. Bjarni had never seen such blueness, and yet – it reminded him of something – somewhere – a long time ago. He lay wondering what it was: and then suddenly he had it – his blue glass dolphin that he had left in the glen where he had buried it, five years ago. Every detail of the glen, the birch trees and the narrow brown brawling beck, was suddenly clear to him. Five years, and at either end of them a holy man, one dead because of him, one alive because of him. And now the quietness; and the blue beyond the store-shed door . . .

Afterwards he wondered whether it was because he had quite nearly been dead himself such a short while ago that he had the quietness and the feeling of one skin less than usual between him and the next life; and of having come to the place for staying quite still for a breath of time and then making a fresh start. But most men came close enough to being dead a few times in their lives: more likely it had been something in the gruel that Muirgoed had given him. At the time he did not wonder about it at all, but just accepted it.

Sleep took him back again; and the next time he awoke, the world had returned to its familiar everyday self. But he did not quite forget . . .

He lay in the store-shed for four days, sleeping a good deal of the time, tended by Muirgoed and by Erp, while the last preparations for the Iceland faring went on all about him. He began to sleep less, the claw marks on his cheek and shoulder were healing cleanly, and the raging headache he had first woken with had faded to an echo of pain somewhere just inside his skull. On the fifth morning he began to be restive and started demanding his spare sark so that he could get up. ‘Not yet,’ Muirgoed said. ‘Bide one more day.’

And Bjarni subsided, grumbling. Later he would be alone, then he would get up and wrap the sealskin rug around his nakedness and go and find his spare sark for himself. But maybe Muirgoed, who had nursed other young men in her time, recognised the rather too sudden giving-in, and knew what it meant. At all events, Bjarni found himself very seldom left alone in the hours that followed. Some while after noon, men arrived from Thorstein’s settlement, and Aud must go to welcome them and discuss the matters that had brought them there, with Muirgoed to get food and drink for them, while Erp was away seeing to some trouble amongst the sled horses. Bjarni, gathering something of what was happening, was just about to take his chance when the small figures of Lilla and Signy appeared through the door-hole, and squatted down on their heels side by side at the foot of his makeshift bed. They had been in and out a few times in the past days, bringing his food and holding the wound-salve for Muirgoed when she came to dress his shoulder, for they were of an age now where
they must become used to such things. But this was different. This time they had come to stay.

Bjarni glowered at them. ‘And what is it that you do here?’

‘Muirgoed and our grandmother bade us come,’ Signy, the elder of the two, explained clearly and kindly. ‘We are to bide here until someone comes back, to make sure that you do not get up – because you are to bide still one more day, Muirgoed said.’

‘And if I get up all the same, you will stop me?’

‘But you will not do that, will you?’ Signy said.

And Lilla put in beseechingly, ‘Please, let you not – because you are in our care.’

Bjarni drew his knees to his chin under the sealskin rugs, and sat looking at them while they sat and looked back. For the moment it was in his mind to get up all the same. But to do that would make the bairns look small and foolish, not able to carry out the task that had been given to them. And fool that he was, he couldn’t do that – which was exactly what the Lady Aud and her bower woman were relying on.

Lilla, who had something bundled in her arms, pushed back the folds of her cloak and took out a harp. ‘We brought this. We thought maybe you would tell us a story or make us a song, to pass the time,’ and she leaned forward and propped it against his knee.

Anything, Bjarni thought, would be better than sitting and staring at each other until rescue came. He took up the small well-worn instrument and settled it as well as he could onto his knee and into the hollow of his good shoulder. He could handle a harp as well as the next man, no better, but as well as most; and even with one arm not much use to him, he could probably make some kind of strumming. But any song
or story that he knew they would have heard over and over again.