Sigurðr took to spending his evenings in the local tavern in an attempt to display his manliness, but try as he might to keep his eyes fixed on the breasts of the waitress, his gaze would invariably wander to the hairy knuckles of the bartender. From there, his eyes would go to the strong curve of Höðbroddr’s buttocks and then, always, they would settle upon one man, a little older, named Einarr Einarsson.
Einarr was a block of granite disguised as flesh, with a massive chest and thick forearms that could tame a man—or so Sigurðr liked to imagine. Einarr’s eyes reminded Sigurðr of the icy water into which he dove, and his flaming hair was like the passion in the younger man’s heart. Einarr was by trade a carpenter, but he was also a Viking.
The two men had a passing acquaintance, inevitable given the sparse population, but little contact until the evening that Sigurðr summoned his courage and headed over to talk. He stuck out his chest farther than usual, lowered the timber of his voice, and laughed only his most masculine laugh. Still, it did not take long for Einarr to see that it was not a man who sat before him, but a lost boy.
There was something about Sigurðr, so pitiful and yet so hopeful, that touched Einarr’s better impulses. He knew the boy had lost his parents, and he had seen him wandering the shores with bags of dead whale. Rather than dismiss the boy, he listened, and when Sigurðr said embarrassing things—and there were plenty—Einarr simply nodded. He saw no need to insult someone whose life was already difficult enough.
That evening in the bar was the first of many. Their relationship was a strange fit, but somehow a good one, because Einarr appreciated that aspect of Sigurðr’s character which his Viking companions lacked. The young man, though not particularly intelligent, had moments in which he longed for something better. Sigurðr did not want to destroy, he wanted to create—but he didn’t know how. He often spoke about how wonderful it must be for Einarr to build things from wood. While Einarr only grunted, inside he agreed—it was a good thing that he did for a living—and he also thought that perhaps this boy could do better for himself, if only he had a little guidance.
Soon Einarr proposed that Sigurðr assist him in the carpentry shop, and the offer was accepted with excitement. It would not be an apprenticeship, per se, because there was never any suggestion that Sigurðr would eventually set out on his own, but it would be a fine way to fill out his days. Sigurðr’s heart was beating more quickly than usual the first time he arrived at Einarr’s longhouse.
The dwelling was typical of the Icelandic style, constructed from the materials at hand. Rough stones had been laid in as foundation around upright posts of timber, and the walls were turf-sod with birch branches for infilling. Einarr proudly displayed one feature that was not common: in a corner of the longhouse, he had dug a trench that ran under the wall from a nearby stream. It was not even necessary to go outside to get clean water, because all one needed to do was lift the floorboards and dip in a bucket.
Every inch of the place was piled high with wood: some native to Iceland, some imported from Norway, and some that had washed up on the coast. All had to be kept inside so it was dry enough to work. On the walls hung dozens of irons, files, rasps, knives and chisels, and there were shelves to house the oils used to finish the woodwork.
Nearly all the benches, shelves, and even farming implements were carved with intricate designs. Sigurðr ran his finger gently along the twisting grooves of one such object, a cradle sitting near a wall. From the four corners of its body, posts extended upwards; each was a dragon’s neck with a head that fit perfectly into the parent’s hand so the child could be rocked to sleep.
“It is for my boy, Bragi.”
Sigurðr knew that Einarr was a father and that he was married. He didn’t need to be reminded of these facts. “It’s good,” he replied, then pointed to a barrel overflowing with thin wooden cylinders. “What are those?”
Einarr pulled one out and held it in front of his face, looking down its length, before handing it over.
“I have no particular skill with a bow, but tooling a shaft straight and true is another matter altogether.”
“Einarr is showing off, is he?”
A woman, cradling an infant sucking at her tit, had come into the house unheard. Her eyes were an even brighter blue than Einarr’s and her hair, swept back with a colorful headband, had streaks of bright blond where she had bleached it with lye.
“You must be Sigurðr. It is good to meet you finally.”
“This is Svanhildr,” said Einarr. “My anchor.”
“Ah, your steadying influence, then?” asked the wife.
“No,” answered the husband, “that which is dragging me down.”
Svanhildr slapped him hard across the shoulder, and Einarr reached out his own hand—not to strike in return, but to cup the baby so its balance was not lost.
“The lucky little one,” said Einarr, “is Bragi.”
Svanhildr handed the child over to her husband, adjusted the treasure necklace around her throat, and closed her apron-dress. A chain of keys around her waist rattled in time with the many ornaments of her necklace and, as a result, her every movement was musical. She slapped her husband once more, tunefully, before taking the child back into her arms. From the look on her face, this was a woman pleased with her life.
The man and boy worked through the afternoon—mostly, Einarr demonstrated the uses of the tools—before Sigurðr returned home after declining Svanhildr’s invitation to dinner.
The following day, when Svanhildr answered the longhouse door, Sigurðr handed a sack to her. “I brought shark,” he said.
“How very kind,” she said, politely exaggerating the bag’s weight. “I will ferment it, and you will eat it with us when it is ready.”
In the pause that followed, Sigurðr blurted, “It’s good to find dead whales, but sharks are also useful.”
“Yes. Come in.” She kicked aside a stray piece of lumber. “That is, if you can find room among these logs. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a forest.”
Again the men spent the day together; this time it was the maintenance of the tools that was explained. When Svanhildr extended another dinner invitation, Sigurðr accepted. She served chicken stew with seaweed and, as the men ate, she rocked the dragon cradle until Bragi fell asleep.
They sat around the longfire until late in the night, smoke drifting through the vent in the ceiling. Svanhildr heated a small cauldron of ale and when the men’s frost-cups neared their dregs, she would dip the ale-goose into the cauldron to refill them. When Sigurðr commented on the brew’s excellent taste, Svanhildr explained her secret lay in the combination of juniper and bog myrtle. “It is often said that a man’s happiness depends on the quality of his food,” she explained, “but in Einarr’s case it’s more the quality of his alcohol.”
Einarr grunted appreciatively and took another gulp.
That night, as Sigurðr walked back to his own house, he absent-mindedly rubbed his fingers with the patch of sharkskin he had not given to Einarr. He had sliced it from the top fin because he knew it would make fine sandpaper, but somehow he had not found a good moment to hand it over. By the time he arrived at his own shabby dwelling, his fingers were so numb he didn’t notice they were covered in blood.
In the afternoons that followed, Sigurðr discovered that while he had no real feel for woodwork, he did have a talent for paints. He ground the pigments—blacks from charcoal, whites from bone, reds from ocher—and applied them to the finished work. Sigurðr was thrice pleased: by the new skill he was developing; by the colors themselves; and by the smile on Einarr’s face.
Einarr, too, was content. Not only did Sigurðr’s painting improve his work, but also the young man was a good companion—not quite a friend yet, but certainly not only a workmate. To recognize this fact, one day Einarr handed over a long package, wrapped in worsted fabric and tied with a leather string. Inside was a sword with an intricately carved dragon handle. “It would be good for you to
have a proper blade,” Einarr said, “not that fish-cutter you have now.”
Sigurðr nodded, because he didn’t know what else to do. Since his parents had died, this was the first gift anyone had given him.
“Now,” asked Einarr, “would you like to learn to use that?”
Einarr set about correcting the weaknesses in Sigurðr’s technique, and the pupil was quick to incorporate the suggestions. Einarr was impressed. “Your body naturally knows which way to move, and this is good. There are many things that can be taught, but a feel for the attack is not one of them.”
Sigurðr looked at his feet. He didn’t want Einarr to see the blush the compliment had brought to his face.
“You will need a name for that,” Einarr said. “I suggest Sigurðrsnautr. Because if you ever need to put your blade into a man, it will not be a gift that he soon forgets.”
When Sigurðr returned home that evening, he turned the sword over and over in his hands. He liked the name—“Sigurðr’s Gift.” He carefully tied together the ends of the leather strap that had wrapped the package, and hung it around his neck. From that day forward, he was never without it, but he always made sure the strap was carefully tucked into his tunic. There was no need to display it; it was enough to know what had once been in Einarr’s fingers now constantly touched his skin. To think of the fact sometimes raised small bumps on Sigurðr’s flesh, the way a blast of the northern wind might.
When the inevitable day came that Einarr left for a series of Viking raids, Sigurðr expected this would mark a return to his lonely ways. But Svanhildr invited him for pancakes and ale each morning and—to his own surprise—Sigurðr kept showing up. Bragi was growing bigger and soon added a new phrase to his growing vocabulary. He knew mother and father and wood, but one day he looked at the man who had the mouthful of pancakes and said: “Sig Sig.”
Though Einarr may have built the supply chests in the home, it was Svanhildr who controlled them with her chain of keys. Not without careful planning could a Viking household make it through the brutal winters, and Sigurðr grew to appreciate her work. She knew all the methods for preserving meat—smoking, salting, pickling, and more—so her husband did not grow tired of the same meals. After a while, Sigurðr found himself helping her after breakfast, slicing the meat into strips while she prepared the brines in which they would soak.
Not once during her husband’s absence did Svanhildr mention a fear that he might not come home—but when word came that the ship had returned, Svanhildr rushed to the shore and jumped into Einarr’s waiting arms. She kissed him passionately, then punched him twice in the face, and then gently kissed the blood off his lips. Sigurðr wasn’t quite sure, but it almost seemed that when Svanhildr pulled back her fist, Einarr offered up his chin to receive the coming blows.
Sigurðr helped to carry the plunder back to the longhouse and was amazed by the volume of goods: precious metals and bags of coins, jewelry, tools snatched from foreign workshops, and the bottles of wine that had not broken on the return voyage. But for all this, it was clear that Svanhildr was waiting for something more. Then Einarr drew out a jeweled book mount he had ripped from the cover of an edition of Gospels at one of the English monasteries, and pressed it into Svanhildr’s hand. She admired it for a few moments before adding the bauble to her treasure necklace, and finally Sigurðr understood from where the great variety of her charms had come. Everywhere.
They drank ale and wine late into the night until Sigurðr, too drunk to stumble home, passed out on one of the benches that lined the walls. Here he lay, until awakened by the sounds of a fight—or so he thought, in the disoriented moments before he realized he was overhearing the coupling of his hosts.
Einarr thrust brutally into his wife from behind, his hands pulling back her hips. It appeared that Svanhildr was desperately trying to escape, and she was, but not really: it was part of their game. When she finally managed to break free, Einarr grabbed her kicking legs and flipped her over. When he entered her from on top, she dragged her fingernails across his back, carving streaks of blood into his flesh. She bit his neck so hard that he had to pull her head away by a fistful of hair. She barked in pain, then smiled wickedly and told her husband that he smelled like old fish and fucked like a girl. Einarr growled that she wasn’t going to be able to walk straight come the morning.
It took a long time for Sigurðr to fall back asleep.
When he woke again, it was clear that Einarr—teeth marks ringing his throat—had already washed the stench from his body in the nearest hot spring. Bragi was running around, reacquainting himself with his father, while Svanhildr—bruises running down her arms—implored the boy to keep his voice down as she patiently untangled Einarr’s hair with a whalebone comb. Every once in a while, she threw her arms around him from behind to whisper, “Ég elska Þig. Ég elska Þig. Ég elska Þig.” I love you. I love you. I love you.
When Sigurðr exaggerated a yawn to signal that he was awake, Svanhildr jumped up from her husband and went to get a bucket of fresh water so their guest could wash himself. Even before she had brought it over, Bragi had launched himself into Sigurðr’s arms. By now, his vocabulary had improved and he squealed with joy: “Uncle Sig!”
It was not long after that Einarr, for the second time, extended an offer that would change Sigurðr’s life: this time, to join the Viking crew. As Einarr explained, the long voyages were boring and he missed his life back home; perhaps the company of a friend would help ease that.
The offer was not without appeal, because Sigurðr often feared he was not enough of a man. In the mornings, he jumped into water and scavenged for dead animals; in the afternoons, he worked as an assistant; when he felt lonely, he helped another man’s wife with domestic chores. Sigurðr only promised to think about it but he already knew that he would accept the offer, and not least of all because Einarr had called him friend.
Sigurðr soon found himself being considered by the Vikings. There was some dissent—whispered rumors that Sigurðr was fuðflogi, a man who flees in horror when faced with the prospect of sexually servicing a woman—but no one wanted to offend Einarr. When one’s existence depends upon the longboat, it is inadvisable to upset the master carpenter. Besides, the Vikings believed there was nothing inherently wrong with queer feelings in any case, so long as one was the aggressor. The man who would submit himself to another in sex might also do so in other matters, like battle, but there was no evidence that Sigurðr had ever surrendered to another man, only the suggestion that he might not mind doing so. After a few tests of Sigurðr’s strength and skill with weapons, he was accepted on a trial expedition down the English coast.
The ship was an imposing thing, with cowhide shields and woolen sails, at its head a fierce carved serpent. They steered by the sun and the stars, the Vikings sitting on empty chests that would be full by the time they came home. It was clear that there were members of the Viking crew who relished the fight to come. They would prepare for the siege with chants, by slapping each other across the face, by cutting their own skin to whet their blades’ thirst for blood. Some would even imagine themselves as possessed by animal spirits, and aided the process by taking large mouthfuls of berserkjasveppur—berserker mushrooms—before hitting the English shore.
Einarr advised Sigurðr not to bother. He had used the mushrooms on his first raid, but they only disoriented him. However, he did confess he sometimes used them back in his workshop when he lacked inspiration for his carving. After a few mushrooms, he said, it was easy to envision the flowing designs that elude a man while sober.
Sigurðr soon discovered that the fighting came easily to him and that it was a simple task to overpower the English; they would mostly just hand over the loot in an effort to have done with it, especially the monks. The raids were a great success and Sigurðr, with Einarr’s help, acquitted himself well. He was invited for a second run, then a third, and after that he became a regular crew member. For the first time in his life, Sigurðr felt that
he belonged. He’d moved from having no family to having two—Einarr’s, and a fraternity of brothers—and he believed that his newly earned manliness would, at the end of his days, allow him to enter Valhalla.
So it went for years. In the intervals between the raids, Sigurðr and Einarr practiced their weapons and improved their woodworking partnership. Einarr’s carving became ever more imaginative, perhaps because of the ale he sipped with increasing regularity or the mushrooms he took when in particular need of inspiration. Sigurðr’s skill with paint likewise progressed. The men spent most days together and, usually, on each new day they liked each other better than they had on the previous one.
It was inevitable, of course, that Sigurðr fell in love with Einarr. It was no longer simply lust’s first bloom, but something deeper and truer and better. It was equally inevitable that Einarr knew, but he had become an expert at pretending not to notice Sigurðr’s occasionally lingering looks. This is how they dealt with it: by acting as if it didn’t exist. Nothing good could come from talking about it, so they didn’t, and it hung between them like a long night with a dawn that never came.
As for Svanhildr, her love for Einarr also grew with each year; however, the excitement of his Viking way of life gave way to the harsh reality of his absences, and she became moody in the weeks leading up to each raiding expedition. Then came one time that was worse than any that had come before. She snapped whenever Einarr asked for a refilled frost-cup, berated the gods for no apparent reason, and even broke down into tears when Bragi scraped his knee while playing with a toy sword.
When Einarr could no longer stand it, he grabbed her shoulders and shook her until she gave up her silence.