Swords From the Sea (77 page)

At the long table the Berserks were listening now, with Leif's men.

"First we sight a coast," went on Leif, his mind going away from the hall, out somewhere beyond, "dark with forests, no island at all, but a mighty land, and this I name Mark-land. On we go then with the wind, and make our landfall on a coast sloping gently to the sea, with wide beaches and sand. Up a firth sail we, to fresh water. Yet, we find dew heavy on the long grass, and this dew tastes sweeter than other water."

"A marvelous thing," grunted Hrolf.

"So it is. Yea, no frosts kill that grass-strong it stays through the winter, and cattle would need no fodder there. Deer and fur beasts run free in the woods. And of wine casks we have no need, for wine berries grow on the vines there. So I name it Vine-land. If I live I am going back."

Hrolf emptied his drinking horn. "It is easy to tell of great deeds you have done, out of everyone's sight."

Leif's mind came back from beyond the sea and he looked at Hrolf. "My ressmates tasted those grapes," he said. "And the hewn trees of Vine-land we have brought in our ship's lading, to sell on this coast."

"If you are indeed Leif, Eric's son," said Hrolf, "you will have trouble selling anything on the coast of Norway. Because you are outlaws, whom no man has seen for long years."

"True." Leif nodded indifferently. He seemed to care less about this than about his voyage back. "As you inlaws say, my father was outlawed for manslaughter here. That is why we looked for a new country. We had no other."

"Then why have you ventured back?"

"To trade for a better ship."

Hrolf got up quietly, stepping down to his men at the long table. Brana, watching him, caught Leif's hand impulsively. "Open your eyes, fool," she whispered, "and take care for yourself. These men here are Berserks who kill when their anger is touched."

Leif looked at her with his head to one side. "I have seen Berserks before now, girl. Are you not with them?"

"No," she cried angrily. "Oh, you are simple in mind! This morning they killed Orn, my uncle, because he spoke a quick word to them. Do not cross them, but get you out of here."

Now Leif seemed to wake to his danger. Glancing down at where his score of followers sat among the greater number of weapon men, he called out: "Leif's men, get you to the longship. I hear the wind rising and you must take the oars and row up to a safer landing."

Without argument, his shipmates picked up their weapons and began to go out the door. Brana waited for Leif to follow, but he sat still, looking at her. Tears of helpless anger wet her eyes, and she tried to hide her face. Leif bent over to see her better.

"Don't cry, girl," he muttered.

Brana tried to get up from the high seat. His arm held her shoulders, and he frowned as if puzzling over something strange.

Hearing Hrolf's step, she tried to pull away.

"What a mighty thing-" his eyes shone at a new thought-"if you would come with me on the voyage."

Suddenly his arm went away from her, and Brana gasped. Hrolf's hand had caught him and thrust him back against the high seat. Hrolf was scowling at Leif, who looked down the hall. The last of his men had gone out.

"So you think yourself," Hrolf muttered, "to be as good a man as I am."

Hearing these words that had been spoken to Orn, Brana shrank back. Leif shook his head slowly.

"No," he said, "I am a better man."

From the table a tall man with one eye tramped up to his chief-Starkad, the foredeck leader of the Berserks, growling and pulling at his sword. Leif sat still over the empty horn.

"I hear you," Hrolf said between his teeth. "That is easy to say. Look at this!"

Drawing his sword, he tossed it into the air, and reached for Leif's ax. But the seafarer pulled it close to him. When he did not get the ax, Hrolf snatched Starkad's blade and hand ax and tossed them up with his own sword, so that he had three blades going in the air over his head. Fast and well he handled them, saying, "See how I am weapon-fast. Iron obeys me and will do me no harm."

Stopping the weapons, he offered them to Leif. With a shake of his head, the shaggy man refused them. "That was a small trick. I will do a greater one."

Starkad's teeth clashed. "Can you not see we grow strong with Ber- serksgang? At such times we pull trees from the earth."

Leif did not seem disturbed. "It would be a more remarkable feat to pull down this house. Aye, that would be something to boast of."

Hrolf snorted. "Eleven men lie out in the cattle pens because one said a hard, quick word to me."

"Eleven is a small number."

Hrolf stared, voiceless. Around him, the gray men pushed close to Leif and the girl, and still Leif did nothing but watch them, while she waited for the first to howl.

"I will tell you," Leif observed, "something worth hearing. My nature is more than berserk, for I am a hamrammir man. My guardian spirit is a bear, and in the time of darkness this bear's spirit is apt to enter my body."

He shook his head, glancing at the scars on his hands, and the eyes of the Berserks went to those scars. They listened, breathing heavily.

"So I rise up in the darkness with the bear's strength in me, but I crawl like a beast, seeking something to devour. Aye, at such a time my shape is changed to a beast. After the fit leaves me," Leif went on, "I am in my own shape again, but feeling weak."

While he spoke the light failed in the hall. Outside, the pale night of the north had begun, and some of the Berserks noticed this, whispering to Hrolf, who stared at the shaggy Leif silently. Around the high seat the shadows were closing in, and, wrapped in his bearskin, Leif's outline grew dimmer.

"Easy to say," replied Hrolf slowly, "but I would like well to see this happen."

Crouching on his seat, Leif said nothing.

"Starlight begins," went on Hrolf, "and so now we will go outside the house. We will know that you are indeed a hamrammir man if we hear after darkness the growling of a beast and see the shape of a bear come forth. That would be something to see."

He touched the quiet girl on the arm. "Come, Brana. No woman should see a hamrammir change his shape."

Some of the Berserks were moving toward the back door of the house, and some out of the front of the hall. They went readily enough, gripping their weapons and looking back.

Brana did not stir.

"Come you on," said Hrolf again.

"Aye," growled Leif. "Better for you to go, girl. I feel strength coming into me."

Stepping away from them, Hrolf looked back once. When Brana did not run after him, he went out the door, closing it behind him.

The two of them sat together in the empty hall, with the bones scattered along the ground, and the fresh oxhide flung into a corner. Leif sighed, drawing the drinking horn to him and looking into it. She saw his face change in the twilight. He looked thin and tired.

"Well?" she said softly.

"Not well." Leif shook himself restlessly. "Why didn't you go with the warfarers, Brana?"

She could not say why. She wanted to stay here at Leif's side, to feel him near her. Pouring beer from the jug, she offered it to him, but he pushed it away moodily.

"Perhaps a hamrammir man may not drink beer," she whispered.

Leif looked at her and went to the opening in the wall by the door. Already the glow of the cooking fire outside picked out the figures of the armed men in mail grouped in a half circle beyond the door, waiting. At the back he saw the same thing, only not so clearly.

"I thought so," he muttered. There was no other way out of the house. He stopped in front of the quiet girl. "Get out," he told her.

"No," Brana whispered. "While I am here, they will not slay you."

"If you are sure of that, it is more than I am," Leif grumbled. "Are you afraid of me, here in the dark?"

Brana shook her head. She came closer, to touch his arm, and felt his lips against her hair. "Outside there," he whispered, "they are no Berserks. Well do I know the Berserk rage. They go about in wolfskins spreading the tale of their anger, and plundering and slay as if they were true Berserks. Aye, Hrolf has hit upon a good plan. If everyone on this coast is afraid of his anger, he can get together a great treasure. He will go far."

"I know," Brana nodded, "but I cannot bear for him to touch me."

"He will do better than I."

"I know." Suddenly Brana laughed. "Much do you know of the spirit lore, Leif. But Ingiald told me years ago that a hamrammir never is conscious of changing his shape."

Leif sighed. "I thought I told a good lie. I wanted to get my crew away from these manslaughterers. It was the only way I could think to do it." He chuckled, remembering. "I think well that half Hrolf's men believed the tale."

Before long he stopped chuckling. A dull thumping sounded against both the doors-a thumping and a creaking. Listening to it, Leif went and pushed the narrow front door. Hard as he pushed, he could not move it. He stepped to the opening.

"Hrolf," he called. "Will you let the woman out of this hall?"

Although Brana could make out the gleam of Hrolf's arm ring where he stood among his weapon men, she heard no answer to this. The noise at the doors stopped but a faint stirring and crackling began.

The faces of Hrolf's men stood out more clearly in the half light of the sky, and they seemed to be growing red. Their mouths hung open, their hands moved restlessly, holding shields and weapons. Suddenly Hrolf's sword struck his shield with a clang of iron.

"Loud growls the man-bear," he chanted, making a song, "caught in the trap. Now feels the man-bear the sting of his death."

The red glow shone brighter on the men waiting expectantly outside.

"He sings well enough," Leif muttered, as the clanging of iron grew louder, "but it is a sham and a counterfeit song. Your inlaws yonder have no wish to hear what we may say. They have it in their minds to do more than manslaughter."

"What?" Brana asked, her throat choking. Something bitter caught at her nostrils.

"Something that will be hard for you to endure, girl." Leif thought about it and nodded. "Hrolf has murdered your uncle Orn. Now have you the right to speak against him and demand atonement. So he will slay the two of us, and my shipmates will not be here to bear witness against him. Yea, he will say that he killed only a hamrammir man. He has thought out more clearly than I have what he must do."

Leif sniffed the air, and looked up carefully at the thatch of the roof on the great crossbeam over their heads. The sound of crackling and snapping came from up there, at the front. Then red sparks dropped down, and Brana knew that the men outside had set fire to the thatch on that side.

Her house was burning over her head, while those men in wolfskins waited, and she thought that after the burning there would be no evidence against Hrolf, and no voice to speak against him. She caught Leif's hand, holding it tight.

"You do not weep now," Leif said.

She gripped his hand tighter, for comfort. He was shivering, sweat shining on his face. An ember stung her bare arm and she pressed herself against him.

All at once Leif cried out, as if his body had been wrenched. His shaggy head thrust down between his shoulders, and the wood of his ax haft creaked when he picked it up. Smoke rolled down on them, and Leif hacked with his ax at the window opening. At the second blow of the ax a spear clanged through the opening, past Leif's shoulder.

Then he stopped working at the wall. Crouching, he glared up through the smoke. It seemed to the girl that this was not the flesh-and-blood Leif of a moment ago, but a man gripped by some other strength. Tears flowed out of his staring eyes down his cheeks, and quick groans came from inside his body. He did not seem to know that he was crying.

Embers dropped with black soot along the front of the hall, and the flames hissed overhead. Leif was staring up at the great center beam when he leaped back. Straining, he shoved the long table back against the far wall.

Here, in the smoke, he jumped up on the table and began to chop at the end of the heavy beam where it met the wall. Fast and skillfully, his ax edge bit into the wood, and long chips fell.

"Come here," he croaked, and Brana stepped close behind him.

His ax smashed up into the shaking beam. Bits of burning thatch dropped down around him. The beam cracked loud, and Leif smashed at it with the butt of his ax.

With a splintering sound the end of the beam came down, breaking the table. Leif jumped clear, moving with frantic haste. Catching up the wet oxhide from the ground, he threw it over Brana's head, gripping it close around her.

The roof was falling in now.

Flaming thatch rattled down, and hot air seared Leif's throat. He kept moving. Over one shoulder he swung the roll that was Brana in the bloody oxhide. Holding fast to his ax, he stepped up on the beam's end where it lay in the wreck of the table.

The beam sloped up to the front wall where fire smoldered. Above that upper end, he could see a dark patch of the sky. At that point the burning thatch had fallen down to the floor of the hall. And up the sloping beam Leif was hurrying, balancing with the ax and Brana, his chest straining not to breathe in the air that would strangle him.

Stepping on the top of the beam, he gave a yell and leaped out.

Now Hrolf and his men, watching with satisfaction, beheld this shaggy figure leaping down in the smoke and the fire glare, with a mass of oxhide upon him. And for a second astonishment held them still. They heard a faint echo of the yell.

The figure landed on its feet and rolled, and the oxhide rolled away from it. They saw then it was Leif, with Brana in the hide.

Starkad, the one-eyed, stepped toward him, swinging high his sword. Leif saw the iron coming down, and whacked with his ax at Starkad's knee joint. The ax blade cut away half Starkad's leg, and Leif rolled to his feet, pulling up his ax.

His face was twisted out of human semblance. Tears streaked his cheeks.

"Berserksgang!" a weapon man shouted, watching him.

"Fools!" Hrolf shouted.