Odin’s Child (54 page)

“I can ride,” the Unnatural Weed burst out in a truculent tone, “I can
sail, ski, shoot a bow, harp, and rhyme. And I take second place in these to no runny-nosed baby!”

I saw Dag's fist, lying in his lap, clench, and the knuckles turn white. I imagined I could hear him screaming to the young fool to shut up.

“Can you rhyme, then?” I asked pleasantly. I hadn't grown up in my father's house without learning how to manage those intimate family occasions that veered toward mayhem.

He looked at me sharply. “I said so.”

“Let me hear something.”

“Hear this then. I made it last winter, while I lay half-dead on that cottage floor.” He turned his eyes again on Ragnvald, and looking his fiercest, began:

There was I where shields were shattered
,

Blood ran red from murd'rous blows
;

Now in holes I hide me, hunted
,

without honor—yet, who knows

what wide word-fame my Luck will bring me
,

what pale terror to my foes?

“It's well-turned,” I said truthfully.

“You're skilled in such things?”

“As it happens, I am. My father, in his day—”

He shot out a line of verse and commanded, “Give it back using none of the same kennings.”

It was a line composed ages ago by Bragi the Old, where he refers to a warrior as ‘mast of the sail of the sword' because, as a mast holds up the sail, so a warrior holds his shield. Without hesitating, I gave him the line back, substituting a kenning made famous by Olaf's own skald, Thormod: “feeder of the swan of the crashing wave of wounds,” by which he means to say “feeder of the raven of the battlefield.”

“Not bad,” he conceded, cocking that one eyebrow of his which was higher than the other and casting his mocking expression my way.

“And shall I try you in turn?” I asked.

“If you like.”

I decided to give him a verse of my own—the knottiest I had ever composed. (My brother, Gunnar, had gotten in such a muddle when I tested him with it that he stamped off in a temper.) “Listen, then: the slinger of the fire of the storm of the troll of the protecting moon of the
boat house's steed! Interpret it.”

“Heh? You think I can't?” A smile spread over his face and he rocked backwards on the bench, his eyelids half closed in pleasurable thought, the anger of a moment ago apparently all forgotten. “The ‘boat-house's steed' is a ship—that much is obvious.” He touched one finger. “The ‘protecting moon,' that's the shield hanging on the gunnel, no? Now, the ‘troll of the shield' must be a sword—that's original, I like that—and, of course, the ‘storm of the sword' is battle. Then, the ‘fire of battle' is sword again, and the ‘slinger' is a warrior. Done!” He threw back his head and laughed.

After that we settled down to test each other in good earnest, and for a full ten minutes capped lines: ‘Sun of the deep' for ‘fire of the wave,' ‘corpse-sea' for ‘wound-dew,' ‘necklace tree' for ‘sewing Valkyrie,' ‘fjord-elk' for ‘sea king's ski'…

The room watched us in silence. Men who knew their poetry nodded and smiled. Dag was one of these. But the jarl, it seemed, was not. His eye swung back and forth between us, catching none of the fire.

Harald was good—he put me on my mettle—and as he warmed to the contest, I wondered if I could be looking at the same bragging bully who had sat there a moment before. In his place was only a boy, eager, quick-witted, and in love with the dance of the word-music.

Dag saw it, too, and looked at me thoughtfully along his eyes.

After a time, Harald said, “Enough of this playing at poetry, friend skald. Have you ever composed a poem for a high-born person?”

“No,” I replied, “for I've never met one.”

“You have tonight. Will you shape a verse in my honor?”

“Shall it tell how skillfully you guided the ‘Sea-king's ski' on the Neva two days ago?” I kept my eyes on his and waited.

His shoulders tensed. So did mine. And then he slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “Ha! Ha, ha! Christ, that's blunt enough! They say an Icelander will tell you the truth! So you've nothing to praise me for, eh? All right, fair enough. But one day, my friend,” he brought his face close to mine, “one day it might happen that you'll compose an ode that will honor us both.”

“It might,” I answered carelessly.

“What do they call you familiarly, Odd Thorvaldsson?”

“Tangle-Hair, and you?”

“Nothing. Not yet. When the time comes I'll choose a name that suits me.”

(And, of course, in time he did, for the world knows him as Harald the Ruthless.) Then he surprised me. “Odd Tangle-Hair, come with me to Novgorod!”

“Novgorod—what for?”

“Why d'you think? To be my skald, of course. A nobleman must have one and I have none. My brother had half a dozen. They all died at Stiklestad, singing his fame. How shall I have honor when no one sings mine. Will you come, Tangle-Hair? For I swear, you're the best fellow in all the world!”

I stared at him—longer than I should have—perplexed how to say that I would as soon lay my head on a chopping block as go off to Gardariki in the retinue of this noisy beggar boy.

“Well—? Is it every day you're offered the friendship of a king's brother?” His color began to darken. I dared not shame him here.

“Harald, I am by nature a fellow who chews things slowly, and this is too great a matter to decide on a moment's whim.” He's drunk, I thought. By tomorrow it will all be forgotten. “Let me call on you in the morning with my answer.”

But here Ragnvald broke in: “Tomorrow you will find us gone hunting. I would offer you a horse, but my stables are not large and, as you see…” His hand took in the room.

“But surely, Ragnvald,” Harald began angrily.

“Thank you, Jarl,” I said quickly. “I've had more than enough exercise lately. I'll find quieter amusement in the town.”

“I am sure you will,” he murmured. The voice was noncommittal, the words might have meant anything.

“In the evening, then,” said Harald to me, sounding none too pleased at being thwarted even in the smallest thing.

“In the evening. Jarl Ragnvald, Lady,” I said, standing up, “I thank you for my dinner. My time is never wasted when I learn some new thing, and tonight I have learned many.”

Ragnvald smiled sourly. “I'll send a man with you to light your way.”

But Dag was on his feet already. “Don't trouble your people, Jarl, I'll see him back. His father, you know….”

With a firm hand on my arm, he steered me toward the door.

The ground glittered with a dusting of snow as we walked through the icy night air. The sounds of feasting grew fainter as Dag and I picked our way down the path to the harbor.

“Odd, you never said how you came to be in Olaf's army.”

I was prepared for that question. For the most part I told him the truth—why shouldn't I? Except that I spared him my true opinion of his dead king, nor did I say anything about my accidental role in smuggling the saintly corpse away from the battlefield.

“And you saw Harald there? And me, too? By Christ, I wish I had known it, I would have invited you to fight at our side.”

I made a vague sound of agreement.

“Odd, how do you find Harald, now that you know him a little? Would you make him your friend?”

“I make friends only to lose them. I'm resolved to make no more.”

“Good God,” he laughed, “what a thing for a young fellow to say! And you sound as though you meant it, too. But make an exception of me, at least. I'm your friend, as your father was mine.”

We spoke a little then about Black Thorvald the viking. But he soon brought the conversation back round to Harald.

“I've known him from a baby, you know. He and Olaf had the same mother, Asta, my kinswoman, though she bore them twenty years apart. She's a strong woman and bred strong sons, but only Olaf was connected,
through his father, to the Ynglings, the old royal line of Norway, descended from the god Frey.”

“With the result that Harald was pushed into the background?”

“Quite. His own father, Sigurd Sow, cared little for him. He was raised with Olaf's brood of concubines' children and bastards. It drove him wild being lumped with the likes of them. I can remember once seeing him—he was just a little thing, if you can imagine that—playing with wood chips in the pond and pretending they were so many dragon-ships under his command. Olaf and Asta happened by and Olaf laughingly remarked to her that she was raising up another king. No doubt he soon forgot the incident. Harald never did. It has made him—hard to deal with.”

“And not helped any by his extraordinary size.”

“Yes, that too. It's forced him to play a man's part too soon. It makes him less sure of himself, not more, feeling that older and shrewder eyes are always on him. And so he must always be proving something.”

I replied that I'd had a taste of that already.

“That silly business! I'm sorry—if I had been there—”

“Weren't you?”

“No indeed. I came over from Sweden a month ago to—ah—sniff the air, so to speak, before Harald's arrival. One can learn only so much from informants.”

“And what have you learned?”

“That we must step lightly—but let's say no more about that just now. Harald, of course, bragged to me about what happened between you two in the river. Odd, there's a kind of person who is willing to die to prove a point—even a very small point. Harald is one. He fought at Stiklestad, you know, because Olaf ordered him back. Trying to run you down when you wouldn't make room for him was just more of the same.”

“Meaning that because he comes to Gardariki with his cap in his hand we must all clear out of his way?”

“Something like that.”

“Men like that are dangerous, if they don't kill themselves first.”

“Aye,” he answered, “they are that. They may also grow to greatness. Do you know that the crewmen talk of nothing else. They idolize him for the sheer reckless stupidity of it, even though he might have stove in his own hull as easily as yours and sent some of them to the bottom.”

Why, I thought with a pang, can't my men idolize me for being equally
a fool? I said, “That's what worries you, Dag Hringsson, isn't it? That he's too much for you. That you can't govern him.”

He gave out a laugh and threw a friendly arm round my shoulders. “You're quick to seize the point, Odd Tangle-Hair, I knew you would be. Let us say that it gets daily more difficult.”

“Well, I wish you luck with him.”

“But that's what you and I must talk about.” He was instantly serious. “Won't you take his offer of a place in the hird? To be a royal skald, Odd! A skald does more than just praise his lord. He shares his perils, performs missions in his name, and most important of all, advises him. He is his lord's right hand. The skald of a great king is a great man himself, and his words live forever on the lips of poets. That must excite you!”

“Maybe. Why me?”

“Because he likes you. Dammit,
I
like you. I confess I had my doubts when you challenged us this morning—that was reckless. But the way you handled him tonight! There would have been murder done in another minute and ruin for us all. I couldn't see how to stop it, but you did. Not many have that gift. Be his advisor, Odd. I and all the older heads were Olaf's men before now, not his. He resents us. But his own man, someone nearer his own age—he'd listen to you.”

“I'm no courtier. He'd profit little from my advice.”

“The advice would, of course, be—weighed ahead of time.”

“Ah. Then I wouldn't be precisely
his
man…?”

“We needn't press the point too hard.”

“I see. I'm sorry Dag Hringsson, your offer is kind but my present life—”

“Don't be an idiot!” he rounded on me with a violence that startled me. “I do nothing from kindness. The stakes are very high. I mean the crown of Norway.”

“Norway belongs to the Danes.”

“For the moment. You said yourself that they're hated, while Olaf's fame grows. The only question is who will pick up Olaf's banner and drive them out—little Magnus the bastard, or Harald the half-brother? It must be one or the other, for Olaf fathered no sons with his queen. I've chosen to bet on Harald and I advise you to do the same. Don't underestimate him just because he boasts—that's the boy talking. There's solid stuff underneath. He's got Olaf's energy without Olaf's scruples.
Where he begs today, tomorrow he'll command—if, as you say, he lives long enough.”

“All right, let it be so. Why should an Icelander care who rules Norway?”

“Because you hope to go home someday with your outlawry lifted and your lands restored.”

That brought me up short.

“Odd, do you know what year this is as Christmen count them?”

I thought for a minute. “One thousand and thirty?”

“Thirty-one, actually. Time passes, Odd, by little and little, though we don't notice it all at once. We live no more in the world of lawless chieftains and freebooters that your father and mine grew up in.”

“So I've heard,” I said, remembering how Einar had laughed at us the night we told him that we wanted to be vikings.

“All that is passing. This new world is a world of kings, and Christian ones at that—the Church being a friend to kings for good reasons of Her own. I spent years enough at Olaf's court, as hirdman and friend, to learn that lesson. Ragnvald understands it, too, and the rest will learn it sooner or later.”

I looked at him slyly and said it was a pity no one had explained that to the Tronder jarls.