The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson Read online

  Back and back in disorder, unable as it seemed even to turn away, and huddling closer and closer to the Bute shore; at any moment Bjarni thought to feel the check and shock and lift, the grinding crash as Wave Rider ripped her bottom out on the rocks. Then they were close upon the ruined tower. Two – three more oarstrokes, and they were clear of the crumbling walls and the raiders yelling in pursuit were close beneath them. And in that same instant the jagged crest of the tower sprang to life with heads and shoulders against the drifting sky and a flight of jagged stones came whistling down upon the close-packed reivers beneath.

  They were not, for the most part, big stones, though one boulder went straight through the bottom of a smaller vessel so that she began instantly to fill and settle in the water, but coming from that height and with the throwers’ power behind them, they spread chaos on the rowing benches, crashing down on the oarlooms and the heads of the rowers, while on the narrow fighting decks men dropped to clog the feet of their sword-brothers. While the Barra men rested on their oars, looking on.

  Unable to pull clear for the force of the tide and their own reserves behind them, unable to thrust forward through the Barra fleet across their way, the pirate ships were caught like beasts in a hunter’s net. And still the stones came whistling down and from the trapped reivers the turmoil of furious shouting and desperate cries and screamed-out curses burst up and echoed to and fro between Bute and the mainland shore.

  Then the hail of stones thinned and stopped. ‘Out oars,’ came the order up and down the Barra fleet, and then, ‘Lift her! Lift her!’ In the stem of Sea Witch, there was a shifting and change of pattern and Arnulf the Steersman thrusting up beside Onund to take his place at the steering oar. And from his place among the Wave Rider’s fighting men, Bjarni, snatching a sideways glance between the forward-thrust of bodies and shield rims, saw the slight unmistakable figure of Onund Treefoot lurching sword in hand up the crowded, pitching length of Sea Witch to take his leader’s place among the champions on the forward fighting deck.

  To Bjarni, Thrond’s orders went for nothing. All he knew was that his place was with his lord as the two-sworded beast was going into battle. He slammed his sword into its sheath, having enough sense even in that moment, with the blood-smell rising in the back of his nose, to know that to swim with it in his teeth in clogged and flailing waters would be to go begging for death. He ducked out and back along the rowing benches toward the stem. Shouts and curses followed him but he never even heard them as he went over the side. He dived down into the rolling churn of water under the slow-beating oars, and struck out for Sea Witch. The two keels were scarce their own oars’ lengths apart, but he came within hailing distance of death twice all the same, once from being knocked on the head and drowned among the oar-thresh, once at the hands of the men in the stem of Sea Witch who mistook him, the first moment of his surfacing beside them, for one of the enemy. But a friendly voice from the rowing bench shouted above the tumult, ‘It’s that fool Bjarni Sigurdson!’ and the hands, turned friendly, hauled him in and dumped him all a-sprawl at the steersman’s feet.

  Almost in the same instant he felt the shuddering jar beneath him and heard the rising battle shouts above the general turmoil as the two fleets came together again. He lurched to his feet, shaking himself like a dog, and lurched off between the rowing benches, where the oars were being swung in, war-axes and swords drawn, weapons caught up as alternate rowers turned warrior, drawing his own sword as he went, thrusting his way through the press heedless of who he trampled on or heaved off balance and half overboard. But it seemed slow going, and he was still amidships when the shout went up from the heart of the press ahead of him: ‘Onund’s down!’

  Sick shock lurched in his belly. ‘He could have waited for me! He should have waited for me!’

  How he hurled his way through the last distance and arrived in the midst of the champions on the fighting deck he never knew. He only knew that as he arrived there, of all unlikely things, the sudden check and following roar of vengeful fury began to be shot through with a gale of laughter.

  On either side the rest of the Barra keels were locked in battle.

  ‘Wrong leg!’ somebody shouted, and he knew that it was Onund.

  The ship chief was already coming up again from his sprawl among the feet of his champions, his arm across someone’s shoulder, his war-cap gone and his fox-pelt hair flying free, and on his face that white-lightning laughter covering a certain greyness beneath. Several of his carles had locked shields to cover him from the enemy. And Bjarni, looking down to see what was the damage, saw what the laughter was about; saw that Onund’s wooden leg was gone, splintered and cut through a little below the knee, and the light throwing-axe that had done it lying close by on the rocking and tilting deck. He kicked it aside as he charged in, thrusting the other men aside to come up into Onund’s armpit in his place.

  ‘Bring me my milking-stool!’ the ship chief was shouting.

  The baulk of timber with its carved dragon-knots was fetched up and thrust under Onund’s bent knee. ‘Hands off, you dripping seal-man,’ said Onund and Bjarni felt the other’s weight and balance go from him and took his arm away. Onund was his own man again, his sword, Skull-Splitter, ready in his hand. The whole incident could have taken only a few racing heartbeats of time.

  The covering shields parted as the fighting deck of Sea Witch, which for that blink of time had been held back like hounds in check within the shield-wall, defending, roared into battle.

  It was not Bjarni’s first experience of a sea fight, but he had never known anything quite like it before. The splintered wounds of the ships themselves as they joined and juddered together; men slumped broken or dead on the enemy rowing benches; and fighting men who had found death without even reaching an enemy to strike at before it came whistling out of the sky. He was not aware of the rest of the fleet at all, only Sea Witch and her nearest enemy, and the fight that was now swinging to and fro across the bulwarks, as Vigibjord’s men with despairing courage strove to board and, yelling with the rest, Bjarni hurled himself against them. He saw snarling, wild-eyed faces like the faces in a savage dream, and the wolf-glint of weapons in the morning light. He drove left-handed under someone’s shield, and felt the blade bite deep, and dragged it out, reddened halfway to the hilt, as the shield’s owner went over backwards with a surprised-sounding grunt to be lost across the side of his own ship. To and fro swung the fighting, war cries beating against war cries in a surge of sound under the screaming of the gulls. And in the midst of the weapon-storm Onund Treefoot stood like a rock swept by pounding seas, wielding his sword in great sweeping blows that kept open space before him.

  Bjarni, fighting grimly, well up among the champions, found the lurching deck growing slippery underfoot. A fresh wave of Vigibjord’s reivers came crashing in against them, swarming in over the sides, their dead and wounded made good by men pouring in from their reserves astern. At their forefront a huge man rose suddenly in their midst, war-cap wide-horned against the sky, the light glinting on the blade of his up-swung battle axe as he made for the place where Onund Treefoot stood to meet him – as though it were a meeting long arranged.

  The battle axe came swooping down. No sword could have turned the blow, but somehow, no one, not even Onund, knowing afterwards how it was done, the one-legged sea lord wrenched sideways without losing his balance on his one remaining leg, and the axe came whistling down to bed itself deep in the log of wood beside his knee.

  In the instant that the man was unarmed and struggling to drag the blade free, Onund brought Skull-Splitter crashing down in a great blow that took him between neck and shoulder, hacking his arm all but free of his body so that it hung only by splintered bone and a strip of flesh above a great hollow pumping red. Vigibjord crumpled on to his face, making a horrible sound, oddly thin and pitiful to come from that great bull throat, but rising above the fighting-roar like the scream of a hare in a trap.

  Onund stood, leani
ng on his sword, looking down with cool satisfaction at the man twitching convulsively against his foot. ‘So you never saw a man come to battle that could not come there on his own two feet,’ he said in that hard, high, carrying voice of his. ‘Yet having come there he might do well enough.’ And he laughed, spuming the great body with his sword. ‘At least one leg makes a better showing in the killing time than one arm does, I’m thinking.’

  But the twitching and the high whistling cry had ceased.

  Their leader down, the men who followed him began to give back across decks grown slippery with blood, and the men of Sea Witch were pouring after them, yelling as they went. It was the same to right and left as the tide-turn spread along the lines of the opposing fleets; but Bjarni had no awareness to spare for them, the bows of Sea Witch and the enemy bumping and grinding against her was his whole world just then. Onund’s hand had come down on his shoulder and Onund’s voice was in his ear, ‘Now, my hero, time for the two-sworded beast!’ And he had come up, his shoulder into his lord’s armpit, his lord’s arm round his neck, and they went forward with the wave of men, the two-sworded beast. One leg might be well enough in battle, but not so good for pursuing a desperate and fleeing foe across planks covered with blood and battle filth. But, three legs and two swords biting deep, they did none so ill. The enemy turned in the stern and put up a desperate fight against them, and with the yelling wave of Barra men around and behind them, the two of them swept the pirate longship from stem to stern, their battle yells changed to singing; the splendid and terrible singing of the Viking kind in the moment of victory.

  When evening came, the five longships of the Barra fleet lay above high-tide mark on the beach below the elbow of Bute where last night Vigibjord’s pirate keels had lain, and with them three captured ships, all sluiced down with sea water to be freed of the worst of the battle-fouling. Two of the pirate fleet had been sunk in the fighting, and one they had sunk themselves, with its cargo of dead men lying tangled among its oar-shafts and broken spars, as being too sorely damaged to be any further use. Two enemy ships, both of the reserve, had escaped in the final stages of the fighting, bearing away Vestnor, his own ship sunk by Thrond and the men of Wave Rider, and as many of the enemy reivers as could reach them and scramble aboard.

  The Barra men had made no attempt to give chase or hunt them down. ‘Vestnor has lost brother for brother and most of his fleet, and the feud-price is paid. Let him away to lick his wounds,’ Onund had said peaceably, sitting on his milking-stool with his sword across his knees and looking much as though he had just come out from a slaughterhouse.

  They had taken a few captives, not many, for the Dublin slave market, and they lay at a little distance, roped like cattle. A few survivors had reached the shore and disappeared into the high country of Bute or the mainland. The pirate wounded they had dealt with according to the usual custom, and tipped them overboard. There would be dead men all along the coast on the next few tides.

  They had dead of their own, and these they had tipped over likewise, though more gently and with much of their heavy war-gear still on them to keep them down. Their own wounded they had seen to as best they could, and the sorest scathed of them lay now beside the ships with sails rigged over them for shelter from the fine chill rain-mist that had set in with the dusk. All along the beach among the rocks the Barra men had kindled drift-wood fires and, gathered about them, they had supped well on captured stores and half-singed, half-raw meat – there were red deer for the hunting among the high moors of Bute. And sitting beside one of them on his gashed milking-stool which his men had brought ashore for him, Onund Treefoot was making himself a new wooden leg; replacing the splintered end of the old one with an oarloom from one of the captured galleys. Bjarni had cut it to the right length for him with a blow from somebody’s war-axe, and was squatting beside him steadying one end of it while his lord jammed the other into the boiled-leather cup with its dangling straps, and bound it in place with a length of fine sealskin cord.

  ‘That should hold until we come again to Barra and they can make a neater job of it in the ship-sheds,’ he said when he was satisfied, and began to buckle it on as another man might buckle on a piece of his war gear. He jerked the buckle tight on the last strap, the one that encircled his waist beneath his sword belt, and stood up to a cheer from the men about the fire.

  ‘Timbertoes is himself again.’

  He looked round at Bjarni, who had risen also with an odd feeling that he was being left behind, and his mouth quirked into its rare, fierce and fleeting smile. ‘Not but what I’m minded to keep it as it is to mind me of a day well spent and in good company.’

  6

  Bride-Ale in Barra

  THEY SPENT THREE days lying close under the elbow of Bute, patching up their own ships and the captured reiving vessels, before they swung out the oars again for Barra. They met squally weather in the open waters beyond Arran, but on the third morning the southernmost islets of Barra rose like faint cloud shapes out of the sea; and before evening they were nosing in past Vatersay toward the main island harbour.

  The sails had come rattling down and the crews had taken to the oars and Bjarni, pulling with the rest, saw only the tall graceful up-thrust of the stern post, and beyond, Wave Rider and Red Wolf, Reindeer and Star Bear and the three captives, with prize crews aboard them, following each in another’s wake, and beyond again the empty seaway that they had crossed. Onund was standing braced on his renewed wooden leg at the steering oar, bringing Sea Witch into harbour, leading home the fleet.

  All along the rowing benches men were beginning to snatch glances over their shoulders as the coasts slid by. And Bjarni, glancing back also as he swung to his oar, saw the high-pitched gables of the ship-sheds above the gull-grey shingle of the landing-beach that had been stranger-strand when first he came that way, but grown familiar as the months went by until the sight of it brought with it a sense of homecoming.

  The next glance snatched over his shoulder showed him the whole landing-beach and the rough grass slopes beyond freckled with people. Clearly they had been seen from afar – a look-out on Vatersay maybe – and the whole of the mainland settlement had come crowding down to see them return in triumph. Eight war keels returning, where they had seen five away.

  Onund’s voice quickened in the rowing chant, ‘Lift her! Lift her!’ and Sea Witch leapt forward like a mare that scents her own stable and is eager to be home. Onund put over the steering oar and she came round in a sea-swallow curve, the others following in the white oar-thresh of her wake. The water was green now in the steep shallows, and they were heading straight in through the broken water where the weed-grown jetty thrust out to give shelter from the storms and the swinging tides.

  ‘Now! In oars! Out rollers! Run her in, my heroes!’

  They unshipped the oars and swung them on board and caught up their rollers from their places under the thwarts. They were out over the sides, belly-deep into the icy water, running her up through the shallows, the rest following after. The people at the settlement came plunging out to meet them, set their shoulders to the ship’s sides and helped with the rollers as they ran her up the sloping shingle, shouting and cheering as they went.

  The whole settlement seemed to be there, old men and boys, women and bairns and the usual flurry of dogs. Bjarni was still shin-deep when the black and joyful shape of Hugin was thrashing about his legs, trying to leap up on him, adding his frenzied showers of barks to the general tumult. Bjarni thrust him off with one foot; but only a few gasping moments later, with Sea Witch safely stranded, he was squatting on his heels to receive the loving onslaughts of the great black dog. All around him men were greeting their women, tossing up their bairns, joyful reunions all along the ship-strand, save where a woman here or there stood looking for her husband or son who had not come back with the rest. Here and there were girls who had kilted up their kirtle skirts and came running down to meet the returned ships; and among them, Thara Priestsdaughter. S
he passed close by Bjarni, slanting her eyes at him and holding her shoulders back to make the most of her little round apple breasts. But he never saw her, because his face was buried in Hugin’s neck and his hands were up, working into the warm hollows behind the great hound’s ears.

  Later, when the longships had been run up the beach and tended like hard-worked horses brought back to their stables, when the reunions were over and the evening meal had been eaten, the captured booty was brought up to the broad garth before the Hearth Hall and the crews gathered to the share-out, with most of the rest of the settlement looking on. The harvest, by now gathered in by the thralls and the womenfolk, had been a poor one, thin in the ear and storm-battered, but this other kind of harvest would help to see them through the long lean winter. Daylight was fading, and torches had been brought out and here and there the flamelight through the smoky dust struck out blinks of coloured light from the growing piles of booty as the wicker sea-kists and the sail-cloth bundles were opened and their contents flung out on the beaten earth.

  Bjarni, squatting among the rest of Sea Witch’s crew, watched the coming to light of the fruits of a whole summer’s raiding; fine weapons and rapiers of narwhal ivory that would be sold in the south as unicorn’s horn. Furs and enamels and good stout copper cooking pots. He saw a thick russet woollen cloak that might be a prosperous farmer’s best, and sea-spoiled striped silks from foreign parts; a hacked silver cross, and a painted picture of a woman with a golden straw hat on the back of her head and a babe in the crook of her arm, also damaged by sea water, which he knew by now probably came from a God-House of the White Christ. There were hangings worked with writhing dragon-knots that must have been torn down from a chieftain’s hall; horse harness and five hide ropes; bags that spewed gold and silver and copper coins and small broken-up bits of metal, whose value, like that of the coins, would be by weight. There was even a carved wooden manikin dressed in a wisp of soaked cloth and a string of blue beads, that must have been a bairn’s toy before it took the fancy of some freebooter with maybe a bairn of his own to take it home to.