Winter Serpent (13 page)

Thor, the Jarl sang, cast his fishhook into the glassy green sea and drew it out caught in the coils of the Midgard serpent, the serpent which lay wound about the earth. How the splotched, venomous monster stared with hatred in its glittering eyes at the Thunder God, his enemy! Dumbly and viciously it stared at him while Thor rained blows upon its head. Slash! Chop! Beat! Whack!

They shouted and pounded on the table and stamped their feet when he finished. Doireann could not find out, from Sweyn whether the battle had been won or lost. They did not know, or care.

Sweyn followed this with his memories of the sacred temples at Uppsala. Here the Northern tribes, it was told, gathered for their yearly sacrifices and auguries and meetings of the All Thing, the council of landholders. Sweyn told of the wooden temples with their painted idols of Odin and Frey. Many had been the sacrifices the year he had been there; the bodies of animals and men stretched for as far as the eye could see, dripping blood on the white snow. The skeletons of past years rattled their bones in the winter wind as signs of the gods’ favor. But all knew that Thor the Thunderer and Odin the One-eyed rumbled their anger against Charlemagne who forced them from the oak groves of Saxony. The gods were enraged, and the priests in Uppsala had laid about them with a heavy hand, to pacify them. The odor carried for miles.

“A man still stinks in cold weather, especially when the belly is soft and bursts,” Sweyn ended.

Doireann closed her eyes against his words, but the vivid pictures leaped before her. She saw the frozen trees with their whispering, stiffened corpses dangling from them.

The Jarl looked up.

“What is the matter?” he asked her. “Nothing,” she whispered. “I was sickened.” “Sickened? What is it?”

She shook her head. “Sweyn’s stories.”

They exploded into laughter, slapping the table. But when they had subsided the younger man studied the room and the men in it for a moment, then rose with such suddenness that those who had been laughing at some remark of Raki’s were left with their mouths hanging open. All the eyes of the room were upon him as he picked up a spear from the floor and held it balancing in his hand.

He looked down at them for a moment and held them by the fierceness, the lightning, which seemed to flow out of him.

“Who shall say where we shall now cast the spear,” he cried, “and where it shall land? In the country of the copper mines guarded by the savage Cymry? Or over the sea for the gold chase? In what fat land to be stripped of its wealth?”

He cast the spear down over their heads and it shot to its mark in the fire pit.

A shout from forty throats shook the wooden walls. “In Ireland!” they cried with one accord.

It was not the best season for voyaging. The winter storms were coming and if there had been any Viking ships pillaging the coasts of Eire this summer they had long since returned to the homeland. But the crews of the Viking longships were in high spirits. They counted on a swift crossing and attack and return to the shelter of Cumhainn in the land of the Scots.

Braggi was the steersman of Sweyn’s ship, and Gunnar Olavson, the Jarl’s cousin and brother of the famed Snorri Olavson, was the crew chief. Doireann had come to know these men well enough to pick them out from the Vikings who worked like demons to get the longships ready for the journey. Also part of Sweyn’s crew were Raki and a short stocky man named Arne Hammershield. Sweyn worked his men hard; he had a loud voice and the appearance of being in many places at once.

By contrast the Jarl was silent and imperturbable. His crewmen could be recognized by their granite imitation of him. Olav Forkbeard was one of these, the man who made the chieftain’s bed in the hall that first day, and Hallfreor was the Jar’s steersman. The others she did not know except by name: Horsa, Knut Broken Tooth, Eiric, and a sinister-looking Northman with three fingers on his right hand called Bengt Oddeson.

Thorsten Jarl did not lend himself to the rivalry between the two crews, but he was always ready to put his hulking back to any job requiring great strength. He seemed tireless. Doireann was amazed at this change from gloomy lounging about to seemingly inexhaustible energy. At night he lay like a log and snored.

Now that they were occupied with the preparations for the raid, there was little of the drinking and noisy quarreling which had marked the evening meals. Instead, there were speculations about the weather and discussions of the signs and portents of clouds and sky. The two steersmen argued the finer points of sailing by the stars. But on one thing they were in agreement. One good voyage of plunder, and the winter could be spent in comfort. They were excited at the prospects, and Raki felt called upon to give a declamation.

Now they must provide for the winter cold, he recited. This was the dead season coming upon them, the season of lashing hails and killing frosts, when the trees could be seen lashed by angry winds, and on the sea the ice floes drifting in the green water, seen perhaps by starving and frozen crews of unlucky longships. High in the mountaintops, the poem ended, would sit the winter ravens, in the topmost branches of the snowy pine, calling: Winter wretchedness, Winter wretchedness, until the spring should come again.

Toward the end of the week’s preparations, the Jarl made a forge of some rocks and Bengt Oddeson assisted him, fixing the charcoal and manning the bellows as they repaired the weapons. Stripped to the waist and sweating, the Jarl made a convincing smith and seemed to take a great satisfaction in it.

Doireann could not walk the beach without getting in the way of the loading and unloading of the smallboats brought from the warships outside the bar. There were water and rations to be ferried out and ship’s gear to be brought ashore to make room for the spoils. Each Northman carefully made ready his sea chest, which was to hold his share of the loot and serve as a rowing seat aboard ship.

Doireann was suffering from the winter complaint, a stuffy head and burning throat, and had decided to stay out of the wind and the way of the Viking, taking to a place by the fire where she was sure of being warm, her cloak drawn up over her head. Sweyn came upon her, paused, and looked at her in surprise.

“You will have plenty of time to sit when the winter is on us,” he said. “It is not good to become housebound so soon.”

Thorsten came into the hall then with a coil of leather line and a bailing scoop which he dropped on the pile of ship’s gear. Sweyn beckoned to him and said something in an undertone. The Jarl came to Doireann and stood over her, his hands on his hips.

“That is not the only thing to be considered,” he said in rapid Norse. Sweyn lowered his voice so that she could not catch their words, and ges-

tured vigorously. The Jarl shook his head.

“It is true,” Sweyn insisted. “I agree that those who will be left behind to guard the camp will be disgruntled, and there is also no denying they are woman-hungry.”

The Jarl said nothing.

“Well, then,” Sweyn growled, “leave only those you can trust. But it is an idle worry, seeing that she grows so big with the child.”

“When has this ever been a thing to stop a man if he burns with longing?” the Jarl said harshly. “She is still beautiful, for all her shape or lack of it. And I myself…” He swallowed his words.

“Well, it is your garden, and if someone should plow in it, at least they cannot disturb the harvest,” Sweyn snorted.

The Jarl appeared to freeze.

“I pick my cousin Gunnar to stay behind,” he said through stiff lips. “And

Olav Forkbeard, who was set to watch over her from the beginning.” “My crew chief? And the Forkbeard? Why must it be the best?”

“Why not? They also watch over my son.” The Jarl turned away, but
Sweyn lingered for a moment.

“How much did you hear?” he asked her. He waved his hand. “Never mind. Enough, I see, by the look on your face. So the Norse tongue is not so strange to you now, hey? Well, that is not a bad thing. But you might know this also, since you are so clever. The band is loyal to him above all men as is proper, and also they fear him. But women cause much trouble, It would not be the first time that men have broken their blood oaths over a woman.”

He pulled at his ear for a moment, studying her.

“You were my gift to him,” he said finally, heavily, “and before I would see him marred by any dishonor I would take my knife and cut your throat—” he gestured with his finger “—from here to here. Do you believe this?”

She nodded, wide-eyed.

At last all was secure aboard the ships, and they waited for a favorable wind with which to ride out into the Mull of Jura and then into the Irish Sea. A good easterly wind was needed to carry them swiftly beyond the watching Scottish coasts. Sweyn Barrelchest ordered a fire built of oak logs, and killed a sheep for sacrifice, burning the entrails and invoking the favor of Thor and Odin for a good wind and a successful voyage.

While they slept the wind changed, and the sea watch came in to waken them. Doireann went to the door of the log hall and watched the smallboats pulling away from the shore into the darkness, and she was cold, but colder still with the thoughts of the Irish who lay unsuspecting before the onslaught. Not once did she give thought to their possible failure or the welfare of the father of her child.

6

On the noon of the twelfth day of waiting, the returning Viking ships were sighted putting into the anchorage by the island of Eileen nan Ron. Within the hour the smallboats had put across the bar and beached on the sandy cove, the men stumbling

ashore from them hollow-eyed and spent. In answer to Gunnar Olavson’s and Forkbeard’s eager questions, they could only point to the laden boats lying low in the water, crammed with the loot of raiding. There was livestock lying trussed upon mounds of clothing and church vessels; there were sacks of barley and grain, and a Northman with a mangled foot whom they carried ashore. They had thrown what first came to hand into the small-boats, they said, room being made for the injured; it would take many trips to bring back the rest of the crews and the treasure from the ships outside the bar.

The first group of Northmen carried their personal loot with them. Doireann noticed Bengt Oddeson with a large silver cross cradled in a crimson silk cloak in his arms. Some among the Viking were so weary they lay down upon the beach, curled around their possessions to guard against stealing, and fell asleep.

Sweyn had come ashore to look after the unloading. He was red-eyed and haggard, and stumbled with tiredness in the soft sand. They had had, he told Doireann, nothing but adverse winds to and from Ireland, and had rowed without ceasing for three days. He attended to the penning of the animals and, when this was finished, threw himself down by the guard fire and stretched out, groaning.

On the third journey the smallboats brought the Jarl and his steersman, and Raki, who limped and held his hand to his side when he waded ashore. In the stern seat of the boat were two women, silently hunched over themselves. Thorsten helped to pull the boat onto the beach. He was without headgear and covered with dried blood but seemingly uninjured. When he was through he went and sat down beside Sweyn and silently began to draw off his boots.

Arne Hammershield of Sweyn’s crew had brought one of the women, a red-haired girl of fifteen or sixteen, ashore in his arms, following his chieftain’s instructions to let those who had been left behind have the women first. But Ulf of the Red Ax who had been waiting impatiently at the water’s edge, caught the girl’s arm, arguing loudly that it was he, Ulf, who had found her and who had brought her to the longships. Arne swung her away, but Ulf would not release his grip and the girl was dragged from Arne’s arms. Arne caught her leg as she fell, and between them they hauled the helpless girl back and forth, shouting angrily. The girl’s hysterical screams rent the air, and those Vikings who were still awake rose on their elbows to watch.

Ulf drew his sword.

“Then Gunnar and Olav Forkbeard shall have their half and I shall have mine,” he shouted, preparing to bring the sword down on the girl’s backbone.

Sweyn, who was near, did not attempt to interfere, but watched, grinning. Ulf did not make good his threat, although consumed with rage. The stubborn Arne, who was half a head shorter, would not release the girl, and some of the men who were unloading the boats stopped to watch and
shout encouragement.

“If you do not put her back on her feet,” Raki called, “and get her head out of the water, you will have little to argue over.”

They saw the sense in this, and righted the half-drowned girl who was almost out of her wits with terror and choking. Arne had her by the ankle, and had to bend as they righted her. Ulf raised his arm to strike at the other’s bent head, but Thorsten stepped up to them.

“He who strikes at Arne Hammershield when he carries out my wishes shall then have to strike me,” he said calmly. The laughter died, and the group which had formed began to drift away at once. Ulf, his face knotted with rage, lowered his sword.

“It is no dishonor to allow that I would not raise my sword to the berserkr,”
he faltered. Yet there was hatred in his eyes.

Gunnar Olavson ran forward to claim the Irish girl who by now could only whimper. He waved his hand generously to Sigurd Tyrrson, the sea watch, and they started away down the beach. The sounds of the girl’s weeping and her pleading voice came back on the wind, but the rest of the Vikings were indifferent to the spot where they could see her captors holding her. She began to shriek. After a while the shrieking ceased and it was replaced by male laughter.