But Thormod laughed, and turned to the man with the flower in his neck-buckle. ‘Haki, how much have you in your pouch?’
‘Three gold pieces,’ said Haki. ‘I do not have to look; I know it all too well.’
‘Lend me two of them, and I’ll lend you my shield-thrall to clean your gear.’
‘See that you do, then.’ Haki felt inside his own byrnie, produced the two gold pieces, and tossed them across to Thormod, who caught them and tossed them up and caught them again.
‘You’re a shipmate worth the name! We’re still short – what about you, Eric? Tostig? No? Stinking fish, the lot of you!’
‘Three gold pieces short,’ agreed the dealer. ‘And I’ve not all evening to waste, my young Lordlings, if you have.’
I felt coldly sick. If the man in the wolfskin cloak left me here . . . I think I made some kind of panic movement, and again his eyes met mine.
‘Did I deny it? Wait, and you shall have the rest.’
One-handed, still holding the gold in the other, he freed the heavy silver brooch at the shoulder of his cloak, swung the heavy wolfskin free, and dropped it at the dealer’s feet. ‘There. It’s a good cloak, almost new, and the brooch alone must be worth upward of a gold piece.’ And he tossed the money down on top of it.
‘And what,’ demanded the man he had called Tostig, ‘will you do this winter, when the wind blows down off the mountains?’
‘Shiver,’ said Thormod cheerfully.
And so, as though half in jest, after a little more haggling I was bought for six gold pieces and a wolfskin cloak; and became shield-thrall to Thormod Sitricson of the Dublin Garrison.
4 The Amber Talisman
THE VIKING GARRISON of Dublin in those days – and like enough it’s the same today – were a motley and ever-changing pack. Some were men who had settled; who had made their home there, with their women and children in the town. But others were adventurers; men who had made their own land too hot for comfort; younger sons following wherever their swords led them. Sometimes a whole ship’s crew, taking service for a few months or a few years, their ships waiting in the boat-sheds until the next spring, or the spring after, should wake the old Viking fever in them once again.
They had their living quarters in the huddle of turf bothies behind the old King’s Palace, they and their ponies and their hounds, the thralls and on-hangers and camp women that they had gathered to them. It was like a kind of rough and ready town-within-a-town, with here and there a woman spinning in a doorway, and here and there a hound scratching for fleas; a wolfskin hung up to dry on a stand of crossed spears; and pigs and gulls alike scavenging among the garbage heaps.
Thormod and Haki and Tostig and Eric, all members of the same ship’s crew, shared one of the turf-rooted sleeping bothies between them. And my sleeping-place – tethered like a hound for the first few nights – was on a rug across the door-hole. I was Thormod’s shield-thrall, but Thormod was generous with his property, and so I was at the beck and call of all the rest as well. I did not greatly care. For a slave, lacking freedom in any case, it makes little difference whether he cleans armour and fetches beer for one man or four. Yet the knowledge that of the four, it was Thormod I belonged to, had a certain meaning for me, nonetheless.
As time passed, and the evenings shortened and the wild geese came down from the north at the nearing of winter, I began to know something of the strange half-Irish, half-Viking city. For speaking the British tongue, I could understand the Irish folk after a fashion, and make myself understood in return; and so almost wherever they went, Thormod and his mates got into the way of taking me with them. It was easier to have me to talk for them and tell them what other men said, than to try to learn the Irish speech themselves. I came to know the boat-sheds along the strand, where the long slim vessels, the Sea Swallow among them, waited like horses in their stables, for springtime to set them on the seaways again. The markets where the merchants and seamen of all the world met and chaffered over hides and corn and copper, and lumps of raw yellow amber from the Baltic, and hunting dogs and slaves. I came to know the narrow ways snaking between the huddled bothies that were some turf-and-timber built, some still roofed with spars and ships’ awnings; I knew, from the outside, the church of St Columba with its gable-end cross stark against the sky – for Cuiran the King was Christian and his city Christian, after a fashion, with him, though many of the Viking Kind still made their vows on Thor’s Ring in the little dark God-House with the blood-splashed doorposts, beyond the boat-strand. I knew the King’s timbered and painted Hall amid its byres and barns and outbuildings; and every ale-house and wine-shop in the sprawling length and breadth of the city.
But they did not always take me with them. I was not with them when they strolled down into the town in search of amusement on Midwinter’s night – Christmas night – Yule. I had been to get myself some supper – there was always food for all comers, thrall or free, to be had from the cookshed behind the King’s Hall – and with a good meal of bannock and ewe-milk cheese inside me, I had come back and made up the fire on the bothy’s small central hearth, and settled to clearing up and tending the war-gear that they had left scattered when they came off duty. I mind sitting with Thormod’s war-cap on my knees, burnishing the iron rim; and hearing, behind the rub of the burnishing cloth and the flutter of the hearth flames and the quiet of the empty bothy, the surf-roar of Dublin keeping its Midwinter Festival.
Last year, we had lit the Midwinter Fires on the thorn-crowned hillock above the village as usual, to the fury, every year the same fury, of Aldred the Priest, who had every year the same things to say as to the lighting of pagan fires by his Christian flock, to help the Sun grow strong and bring the summer back. This year, too, the fire would be blazing, and Priest Aldred in the same fury, poor old man. And suddenly, achingly, I wondered where I would be, whose thrall I would be, the next time the Midwinter Fires were lit.
‘What will you do with him when the time comes for heading homeward in the spring?’ Tostig had asked, that first day down at the slave-sheds; and Haki had said, ‘Sell him off again.’ And come the spring and the seafaring weather, they would run the Sea Swallow down into the water and head for home. And for me, there would be the slave-sheds again, and a new master. The thought brought me up with a sickening jerk. Thormod was not a particularly kind master, but I had never known much of kindness, and it did not greatly matter to me. After that moment at the slave-sheds when I had thought that he looked at me as a man looks at a man, he had whistled me to heel like a hound: and like a hound, I had followed. Still, I knew that I could live as a thrall so long as I was Thormod’s, but to be anybody else’s would be beyond bearing.
I turned my thinking hurriedly aside, and reached for Thormod’s worn leather byrnie that lay across the foot of the sleeping-place. As I picked it up, something that had been caught inside it fell out. A lump of raw yellow amber, roughly hammer-head shaped, with a hole in one end, and trailing through the hole, a broken leather thong. I had seen it often round his neck, when he stripped off to sleep, or to scrub away the muck and stiffness of a day’s hunting. He always wore it inside his sark; so it must be that he wore it not for ornament, but for luck or for some private reason of his own; maybe for its shape. Many of the Northmen wore Thor’s Hammer carved in bone or hammered out of metal round their necks for a kind of talisman I knew, and this, being natural, would be all the more a thing of power. And I had never seen it off his neck until now. The thong must have worn thin, and somehow he must have caught it when he pulled off his war-gear.
I sat turning the thing over in my hand and looking at it in the light of the fire. It was the colour of honey that runs from the comb; almost clear in places, so that the firelight shone through it, clouded with a kind of milky shadow at one end, like the ghost of a fern frond caught in the liquid gold. It was beautiful; and as I sat holding it in my hands, it grew warm, and seemed to give off a curious feeling of liveness, after the way of amber, which
never forgets that it was once the sun-warm tears of a living tree.
I remember thinking, ‘This thing has power! Surely it has power of some sort! And if he misses it in the midst of such a night, he will not know where he lost it. And if he does not miss it, then it may be that without it, harm will come to him.’ That was a thought that would have angered Priest Aldred as much as the Midwinter Fires; but I did not care. Hurriedly I knotted up the broken ends of the thong, and thrust the amber into the breast of my rough tunic. I smoored the fire, and pulled out somebody’s spare cloak, for I had none of my own, and outside sleet was spitting down a chill north wind. I took Thormod’s hunting-knife from the shelf above his sleeping-place, and thrust it into my belt. Then I opened the door that creaked on its sodden leather hinges, and ducked out into the night.
The King’s forecourt was in almost as much of an uproar as the town below, and at Yule, no very careful watch was kept on the townward gate, or a thrall leaving the Garrison quarters after dark might have had to give account of himself. As it was, with the borrowed cloak hitched high to cover the thrall-ring round my neck, I got through easily enough, and plunged into the narrow winding ways where men surged to and fro with torches and jars of ale.
I made my way up one alley and down another, diving into ale-house after ale-house, peering into every shadowed or torchlit face I passed. Again and again I saw men from the Garrison, several times I came up with men of the Sea Swallow’s crew, but never a sign of Thormod. In a wine-shop down the boat-strand I even found Haki, but Thormod was not with him, having gone off on some business of his own.
By that time battles were beginning to break out in different parts of the town; and as I turned into the dark mouth of a wynd, heading back from the boat-strand towards St Columba Church, a small vicious fight was spilling out from an open torchlit doorway at the far end. I saw a struggling knot of men, and caught the wicked dart of a knife blade; and in the same instant, out of the snarling worry of sound, a voice pitched to carry from end to end of a small war fleet against a full gale sent up the shout – ‘Sea Swallow! Sea Swallow! To me!’
I had heard that kind of shout before. It was the recognized signal by which any member of a ship’s crew who ran into trouble could bring any and every shipmate within hearing racing to his aid. And I knew the voice. I’d have known it if it had come straight out of the Mouth of Hell.
I sent up the answering call – ‘Sea Swallow coming!’ – and headed up the alleyway, freeing the hunting-knife from my belt as I ran, to hurl myself joyfully into the fight. In the midst of it, Thormod had got his back to a wall and was holding off, as best he could, some half-dozen Irishmen out for blood. I dived in, flinging one man off with my shoulder, ducked between two more, and came up at Thormod’s side. Yelling faces were all about us. I felt Thormod’s shoulder where mine pressed against it, and the smell of blood came up into the back of my nose. I saw the flash of a knife and brought up my own to meet it, and felt the jar as the two blades rang together. But for me the fight was almost as short as my fight with the cattle raiders. I turned aside another thrust, and I think got in a glancing stroke of my own; and then someone hooked my feet from under me, and I went down among the legs of the battle. Somebody’s heel caught me on the old hurt on the side of my head. I was aware through a growing chaos of Thormod standing astride me, and above me in the reeling turmoil heard his voice lifted up in the great Viking war shout that I have heard since above half a score of battlefields, and then everything swam away into a buzzing mist. From somewhere a long way off, I was aware of a shout ‘Sea Swallow coming!’ and a rush of feet up the wynd; and then after a time of swirling and trampling tumult, everything was suddenly quiet, and I was swimming up out of a darkness that was not just the darkness of the night. I was sitting up with my back against the wall. Torchlight was still spilling through the open doorway, and by its yellow glow somebody was heaving a jack of ice-cold water over my head. I gasped, and fumbled up a hand, and felt the stickiness of blood in the old place, and for a moment was not sure whether this was a new fight or still the time of the shore-killing.
‘He’s coming back,’ somebody said.
And then Thormod’s voice, with a kind of raw edge to it that I did not understand, came cutting through the confusion in my head. ‘What in the Thunderer’s name are you doing here?’
‘Time enough for that later,’ said Haki out of the night and the flurrying sleet. ‘It’s too wolf-dark for comfort down here, and no knowing how far we’ve driven them off.’ He kicked something sprawling in the roadway, that groaned. ‘I’ve no wish for a knife in my back, if you have.’
And another voice said, ‘Up, you.’
I was already trying to scramble to my feet, but my legs seemed made of dough. Then Thormod’s arm came round me, heaving me up. ‘Here, Haki, take his other side, he’s as wankle as a wet sark.’
‘Poor shape for walking,’ Haki agreed, and added, only half in jest, ‘Well, if you think he’s worth it . . .’
‘I do,’ said Thormod. ‘And remember, if I lose my thrall, you don’t get your two gold pieces back.’
I never had any very clear idea of our journey back to quarters; but suddenly the warmth and shelter of the sleeping-bothy were about me, and Eric was kicking the smoored fire into a glow. I could stand alone, by that time, but the room still swam unpleasantly round me, and after a few moments, I collapsed by the hearth. Thormod dipped a pannikin into the ale crock in the corner and jolted it against my teeth, while Haki, who had a long shallow gash on one forearm, felt along the rafters for a wad of cobwebs to stop the bleeding.
My head was clearing, and I remembered the piece of amber, and began in sudden desperate haste to fumble in the breast of my tunic. It was still there. I pulled it out and held it to Thormod.
‘Your piece of amber – the thong’s broken and you must have pulled it off with your byrnie. I was afraid – I thought . . .’
I was no longer quite sure what I had thought.
Thormod took it, quirking an eyebrow. It was as if he said. ‘That harm might come to me without it?’ though he did not speak the words. ‘I’ll put a fresh thong on it in the morning, but this will serve for now.’ He slipped the thong over his head and stowed the great golden drop inside the neck of his sark.
I had got to the stage, that comes sometimes either with drink or a knock on the head, in which one has to make sure that everything is explained to the last detail. ‘But I could not find you. Even Haki did not know where you were. And then I heard you shout –’
‘Have another drink,’ said Thormod. ‘And so you came to my rescue.’
Eric snorted. ‘Rescue! He must have gone charging in as blind as a bull-calf! He was on the ground with you standing across him, when we arrived!’
Thormod’s sudden grin flashed across his face from ear to ear. ‘That proves one thing, at least, that he was the first to reach me!’
By that time someone had kindled the resin torch in its sconce against the roof tree; and by its smoky light, those of the Brotherhood who had taken some scathe in the fight, were cleaning up the damage. Haki looked up from the gash on his forearm. ‘Anyway, Thormod Sitricson, what were you doing, off on your own like that?’
‘Hunting,’ said Thormod.
‘A girl? And somebody else’s?’
‘Oh no, a snow bear. I always hunt snow bears through the streets of Dublin after dark; they show up better that way.’ Thormod threw the now empty pannikin at Haki’s head, and laughter took them all, and went roaring through the crowded bothy.
Later, lying huddled in my usual night-time place across the doorway, I woke in the dark with the thrall-ring rubbing my neck, and moved to find an easier position, and drifted off to sleep again. But in the moment between waking and sleeping, it was not the thrall-ring that mattered to me most, but suddenly and warmly, the remembered feel of Thormod’s shoulder against mine, mine against Thormod’s, in the dark wynd.
5 A First Time for Everyt
hing
THE YEAR CAME slowly up out of the dark and turned again towards spring, the alders along the River Strand were flushed with rising sap, then green-misted with leaf buds bursting; and the crew of the Sea Swallow set to pitching her sides and overhauling her gear and rigging. And working with them, I still did not know what was going to be the next thing for me. I hoped desperately that Thormod meant to take me with him; I was almost sure, but never quite. He had never spoken of the matter, and I had never been able to get the question – such a small, simple question – past something that seemed to strangle it in my throat.
And then the day came when Sigurd, the Ship-Chief, went up to the King’s Hall to claim the Farewell Gold, the final gift-pay that was due to them; and when he came back, they went down to the boat-shed as the custom was, for the share-out.
The Sea Swallow, almost ready for sea, lay out on the slipway in the early spring sunshine; but her mast, together with canvas and cordage and the like, was still stacked within the shed; and I have remembered always, when I think of that day, how the sunlight reflected off the water cast silvery ripple patterns into the darkness of the shed, over the faces of the men gathered there, wave-lighting, as though it were already at sea, the snarling fresh-painted dragon-head that would soon be shipped at the galley’s prow.
Sigurd Ship-Chief counted out the money, Irish gold and coins from all the trading world, on the head of a water cask; and each man came forward and took his share. And when the share-out was over, and each man stowed his gold in his pouch, Thormod took two coins from his own store, and tossed them over to Haki. ‘Here, I pay my debt.’
Haki caught them, but did not at once add them to his own pouch. ‘It could have waited until you’d sold him.’
It seemed to me that there was a sudden silence. I heard the water lapping against the slipway and the crying of the gulls, and the sudden drubbing of my own heart.