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.
They rode hard, halting only for a few hours in the darkest part of the night. They haltered the horses and turned them loose to graze. It was then, while they gnawed their way through their dry bannock, that Bjarni came out with the question that had been nagging at him since noon. ‘He must have come tracking us all the way. That time when the horses were restless for no reason . . . Why did he come so far? He cannot have been waiting his chance; there were other chances just as good. He must have followed us clear off his own hunting-ground so that the country was strange to him; which is why we got him, on the edge of a bog that he didn’t know was there.’
‘If it was Blood Feud,’ Erp said slowly, ‘a thing only between him and Red Thorstein, and having nought to do with the rest of his people, then he would have no wish to make war-fire in the heather again. He would do his killing well clear of his tribal territories.’
A light wind had begun to rise, hushing through the heather, and a spattering of rain blew into their faces. ‘That is what you would do?’ Bjarni said at last.
‘That is what I would do if I were free and taking vengeance for a brother slain.’
Well before dawn they had saddled up and were on their way once more. A low dawn and a day of worsening weather; and way past noon with a wind roaring down from the north-west and the rain-mist driving in great swaths across the hills, they came up the slope from the river marshes and in through the gap in the camp stockade, and dropped from their weary horses in the garth.
‘Where is the Lady?’ Bjarni demanded of a man who came to take the horses.
‘What news?’ the man demanded.
‘No news,’ Bjarni said, ‘until herself has heard it first.’ But his voice told well enough.
‘In the bower,’ somebody told them out of the gathering crowd. The air was full of urgent questioning, but no one asked again. Maybe because no one needed to.
In the Women’s House Aud sat beside the turf fire, stitching at a garment of dark green wool, Muirgoed also stitching beside her, and at their feet the two remaining grand-daughters squatted, spinning somewhat lumpy and uneven thread with deep concentration, Lilla, the youngest, with her tongue stuck out of the side of her mouth. They had all looked up, hearing someone coming, and for a moment as he checked on the threshold, Bjarni saw the whole scene caught like a fly in amber. Then Muirgoed said in a high chill whisper, ‘Did I not say I heard his voice in the wind, passing out over the sea? Aiee! Aiee! –’
And the two spinners dropped spindle and distaff and broke out into a frightened wailing.
‘Muirgoed, take the bairns into the sleeping place,’ Aud said very quietly, her lips scarcely moving. And when they were gone she spoke only one word, ‘Dead?’
‘Dead,’ Bjarni said heavily.
There was a moment’s pause, and he heard the wind and rain hushing across the thatch.
Then she said, ‘In battle? But of course in battle.’
Bjarni shook his head. ‘Not in battle, the fighting was over when we got to the Jarl’s camp. An arrow out o
f the trees on our way north again.’
Aud drew a long shuddering breath. But she was so used to being responsible for the well-being of men that when she spoke again, she said, ‘You are as two drowned men dripping on the threshold. Come you closer to the fire.’ And when they had done as she bade them, ‘Sit now, while you tell me what there is to tell.’
And they obeyed her, the warmth of the burning peat feeling good to their sodden and weary bodies. And with Erp, who had never in all his thrall years sat in the Lady’s presence before, putting in a word where needful from time to time, Bjarni stumbled through the whole dark story, of Jarl Sigurd’s death and howe-laying, and the Peace Fire afterwards, of Melbrigda’s head, and the two young Picts, his sons. Of the arrow out of the birch woods by the ford. ‘There is no more,’ he finished. ‘They are bringing him back – by tomorrow’s noon they should be here. But the Captain bade us ride ahead to bring you the word.’
A gust of wind beat like great wings across the thatch, and a flurry of rain spattered hissing into the fire. And the Lady Aud, who had remained silent, her eyes fixed on his face the while, gave a small shudder. ‘Cheerless lying he will have tonight,’ she said.
‘They will find shelter for him,’ Bjarni said. How stupid that sounded; but it was the best he could do.
And Erp with a kind of heavy gentleness said, ‘There will be many cloaks gladly given to shield him from the rain.’
The Lady Aud bundled up the green garment that she had been sewing, and got up. ‘Go now and get food and then sleep,’ she said as they lurched to their feet after her. And that was all.
But Bjarni remembered afterward how for that one instant she stood holding the bundled cloth in her arms and looking down at the dark green folds exactly as a woman holds a bairn in her arms and looks down at the small face turned against her breast . . . Then she turned and went to deal with the sounds of grief and fear beyond the curtain of the sleeping place.
Erp and Bjarni looked at each other a moment, then turned and went out into a wild grey world, to look for food and sleep as she had bidden them, and answer the demands for news of the men who came crowding round them.
Some while after noon on the following day the war-band returned, bearing Red Thorstein on his branch-woven litter in their midst.
The bare earth of the Hearth Hall floor had been strewn with fresh bracken, yellow-tipped with the first fires of autumn in readiness, and the Lady Aud his mother stood dry-eyed on the threshold to receive him. And there, with torches to light the gloom, and the storm still beating its wings about the roof, she and Muirgoed, the only grown women in the camp, did for him the ancient work of womenkind, making him fair and decent for his howe-laying.
And all the rest of that day, in his striped silken cloak and a great black bearskin over all, he lay by torchlight, with his hearth companions taking turns to guard him, while out on the hill shoulder above the camp where the land looked toward the sea, other men built his funeral pyre.
The rain had ceased, but it was hard to find wood dry enough for burning; and there was no lightning-struck tree to hand, as there had been for Jarl Sigurd, six days ago. They gathered drift-wood from the estuary, scoured the nearer fringes of the forest for dead branches and brushwood, and the open hillside for furze. Pitch they brought up from the boat-strand. And in the dark of the night Dungadr and a handful of his companions came riding over from the headland rath, with a couple of farm sleds piled with dried peats and great jars of the fiery rye spirit. News travels fast in the wilderness.
All that night and the day after, preparation for the Chief’s last rites, his arval, went on, while Thorstein lay in his Hall with a dish of salt on his still breast and torches burning at his head and feet; the pyre growing high on the hill shoulder, the hunting parties out in the woods after deer and boar for the cooking pits that were already heating behind the Hall.
At evening on the third day, they bore the chief from his Hall, up the open hillside to where the fire-stack waited for him. The sea wind blew his red beard all one way and made zigzag partings in the fur of the black bear as they lifted him up to the flat top. There were no beasts for sacrifice this time, but Brother Ninian, the Lady Aud’s Priest, standing out at the head of the pyre in his brown habit with his bell and his staff, speaking words for a Christian burial. Bjarni did not hear the words; he was thinking, ‘Two pyres in nine days. This is an ill harvest time.’
The torches were thrust deep into the base of the pyre, and the flame ran hesitatingly at first in threads of brightness among the stacked peats. Bjarni watched a red tongue licking round a pitch-daubed branch, delicately as though savouring it, then bursting into a greedy rush of flame. The fire began to crackle as the flame took hold, and the smell of burning pitch rolled inland in a choking cloud, flecked with flying sparks. Somebody shouted and pointed, and Bjarni, looking that way with the rest, saw across the wild swinging waters of the Pentland Firth, fire on the high headland of Hoy, answering theirs like a beacon, and knew that Orkney, left without its own Jarl, was sending a wordless message.
In the grey dawn with the shore birds crying all about them, the pyre fell in over its own glowing heart. And when the heart had ceased to glow, they raked in the speckled ash, and began to pile stones and rocks and turf over the fire scar on the hill shoulder, so that here too, as above that other firth away to the south, there should stand a sea-mark for passing ships in the years to come.
In the open garth of the winter camp other fires were burning as the day drew in to the long northern twilight. But these were fires for the living. All day the arval had been going on, as men trailed back from building the howe for a draught of ale and something to eat, and then went back to add a few more stones to the growing pile. But now the cairn building was over for that time and men were gathering more and more thickly to the space before the makeshift Hall. The cooking pits had been opened and the fatty reek of baked meat filled the air. A pile of peats had been made into a seat for the Lady Aud before the entrance to the Hall, and she sat there on a spread silver sealskin. Lilla and Signy sat huddled against her knees and Muirgoed, her bower woman who had been a queen herself in her day, in her usual place in the shadows behind her.
Dungadr and his companions had gone, back to the headland fort and his new young bride. Bjarni had thought to see her with her sisters; but her place was at her husband’s hearth now, and no longer at her father’s. He thought it might have been a kindness all the same, both to her and the Lady Aud, even more of a kindness than sled-loads of peats and rye-spirit.
He said as much to Erp, but Erp had said only, ‘Other peoples, other ways. It would have been the same in Argyll.’
The night was far spent, the feasting was over and eyes were growing brighter and tongues looser as the ale went round. Laughter woke and spread through the crowd, mingled with boasts of vengeance and of mighty deeds in the past or not yet actually done – here and there the sudden spitting flare of a quarrel that for the most part died away as quickly as it had risen. Here and there a man reached for the Hall harp as he felt a song coming upon him – whether or no anyone wanted to listen was beside the point, the thing that mattered was the urge to give tongue.
Then Egil the Captain rose in his place, his ale-horn in his hand; and the men nearest to him drew closer to listen, then others beyond them, and so on, until the whole camp – and those of the war-bands still sober enough to know what was in the wind – were shifting, closing in through the firelit dark.
The Captain looked about him, then drank off his ale-horn and shook out the last drops upon the ground. Then he began in a loud sing-song voice, the storyteller’s voice, to tell the death-tale of Red Thorstein Olafson. He had told it all before, briefly and level voiced to the Lady Aud, but this was another thing, this was the Death Telling without which no chieftain should be howe-laid, the telling which later would be reshaped and enriched by the harpers and woven into the sagas of the folk.
Better it would have been
if Thorstein had died in battle and not of an arrow loosed from hiding, but Egil did his best with the story. And the Lady Aud listened, her eyes unwavering on his face, as she had listened to Bjarni, four days ago.
When it was over, she said, ‘That was a fine telling, Egil, and from my heart I thank you for it.’
But there had begun to be a murmuring among the crowding warriors, and their Captain, still standing with his empty ale-horn in his hand, said, ‘Lady, there is another thing.’
‘Speak it then,’ said the Lady Aud; and there was a faint bracing of her shoulders, a tightening of all the lines of her face, to tell that she knew – and had known for four days – what thing it was.
‘There are those among us, the younger men for the most part,’ Egil said, ‘who were for turning south again at once, to exact the wergild, the blood price, for Thorstein Olafson in split skulls and burned thatch.’
‘Yet you held on north,’ said the Lady. ‘That was well done.’
‘We came to bring the Chief’s body back for howelaying, and to form the shield ring for his mother and his bairns if need be. We came also, Lady, for your ruling in this matter.’
There was a raw, rebellious muttering here and there. The Lady Aud was the Mother of the Folk, but this was man’s work, and she was only a woman, after all.
The Lady heard it, and rose a little stiffly to her feet and stood confronting them in the firelight; and little by little the muttering died away.
When she had the war-band silent, she spoke to them, partly as though she were a man herself – she had always had a man’s eye for the shape of events, and a man’s ability to weigh one thing clearly against another – partly as though she were the mother of them all.