Paths of the Norseman, page 6
part #2 of The Norseman Chronicles Series
“Are you finished with your speech-making?”
“I am finished speaking, but I think you know I have work to do.”
“You are alone and I have a sturdy longhouse. I will simply retreat into the warm indoors and outwait you sitting on your cold ass in the snow.”
He already had his hand on the door when I said, “Aye, you could retreat. But I won’t wait. I will merely walk to Erik and confess my killings while telling him of your betrayal. I will be punished, but I’ve already said my fate is not my concern. You too will be punished, probably killed. Your only chance is to fight me now, win, and become the hero who killed the mad bear-man, returned from the outcast world.”
The dawn began to break behind the snow-capped mountains to the east. It spread just enough light so that we could see each other’s faces more clearly. Mine showed certainty. Behind my blood-streaked beard I smiled. He was worried. That was good. Frightened men make poor, impetuous decisions. He closed his eyes in resignation and removed his hand from the door, gripping the hilt of his sword with both hands. When Bjarni opened his eyes again they looked confident, prepared.
He shouted and ran to me with sword raised. Without drawing my sword I stepped to the side to avoid his strike and kicked him in the back. He fell to all fours, rolled up to his feet quickly. His face was not so confident. Bjarni whitened his grip on the sword and moved his feet beneath him into a stable position. I was overconfident, foolish really. I stood before him wearing an amused expression, with my weapons still sheathed. This angered Bjarni so he screamed, “I’ll not fight an unarmed man!”
“Yet you have no problem encouraging foreigners to attack unarmed women and children. You are more complex than I thought; a riddle really. But it will be as you wish.” I drew my father’s saex from my belt. It was foolish to fight with it, but I was sure of victory.
He quickly lashed out, but was careful not to show his back this time. I simply leaned out of the way while his sword whooshed in front of me. My arrogant attitude infuriated him, so he screamed yet again and ran with the point of his sword aimed at my belly. I parlayed the blow with my saex and let him crash into me. Both or our blades pierced the snow several feet behind where he had been standing. He was a soft, wealthy merchant; I had been fighting for fourteen years. I would win even without the weapon. But as we tumbled backward my head struck a rock jutting up from the hard snow. I saw lights like the mid-day sun before my clenched eyes while grabbing the wound which spilled blood into my hand. Bjarni rose to sit on my chest and he began rapidly striking my face with a balled fist. I put my forearms in his way to deflect the blows while he shouted, “Bergljot! Bergljot, help me!”
The bar promptly scratched open. The door flung wide, and light from the hearth spilled out the door onto the snow. His wife, Bergljot, and their son ran out in file. Bjarni screamed to them, “Get the blades! They’re somewhere in the snow behind me!” They ran to where we dropped them while I managed to shove Bjarni off me. I was on my knees ready to fall upon him when a sharp pain shot into my back. I screamed, turned, and saw his horrified boy holding his father’s sword with my blood on the tip. The polar bear hide and my chain mail prevented his weak thrust from doing more damage. I reached for the sword, but Bjarni’s blows started again on the wound on my head. I hit the snow on my belly while he repeatedly drove the palm of his hand onto the back of my head. He paused for a moment and I rolled to my back, only to face Bergljot pointing my saex at my eye and Bjarni holding his sword in a similar menacing fashion. The boy sucked a ball of snot from the back of his nose and spit it into my still face. I rested.
“You bastard!” screamed Bergljot. “Bjarni told me of you and you’re worse than even he said. You come and attack my husband? But what should I expect from a bastard son of a village whore!”
I looked at her in total confusion. I had never seen this woman until the Yule and yet she supposed to know about my mother. Bjarni could have told her something from Norway, but he was only several years older than I. He had no reason to know anything about my past.
Bjarni laughed merrily. I could have tried to attack him at that moment, but I was still processing his wife’s insults. “You don’t even know why I hate you and that bastard Erik Thorvaldsson, do you?” asked Bjarni derisively.
“You took Leif’s childish confrontation and my protection of him when you first came here as an insult,” I answered.
He doubled over as he cackled. This was my chance to escape from beneath the blades, but I did not take it. I wanted an explanation. “You are a bigger fool than I thought,” he said. “You may even be a bigger fool than your father!” His insult to me was immediately forgotten, but when he mentioned my father a new rage poured into my veins, feeding and bringing new life to my muscles.
I calmed myself asking, “Then why is it that you hate us so?” The blood flowing from the gash in my head was slowing since I rested it on the freezing cold snow.
Bjarni stepped on my right hand and indicated that both Bergljot and the boy were to do the same on my left. I did not fight them. He bent down and said, “It will be fun to tell you and then watch you die. You see, as Bergljot has said, your mother was a whore. She was pregnant with you, you little bastard. I don’t know who the father was. Maybe it was my father, maybe it was a town drunk, or maybe it was a goat. I don’t know. But she was fat with child and your foolish, impotent father agreed to marry the woman. Can you believe it? Such a fool.”
“So the whore was parading alone in the fjords of Rogaland one day when she came upon my uncle and asked him if he wanted to rut in the woods. Though she was a whore, I’ve heard your mother was pretty, so he said yes and pushed her onto all fours and made his way inside her. So your mother, I think I mentioned she was a whore, changes her mind and starts yelping. My uncle was intent on finishing what was rightfully his and did so. Just as my uncle finished, your limp father came along, saw the whore laying in the leaves crying with blood coming from her ass, and my uncle pulling up his trousers. Your foolish, weak father killed him by thrusting a dirty old saex into his back.”
This was crazy. He was just trying to torture me. Yet I asked, “How do you know all this?”
He gave another wicked laugh. “Because I was with my uncle that day. I must have been about six years old and watched the whole thing from the bilberry bushes. The whore died right there in front of me while she gave birth to you in the woods like an animal. I was very frightened that day, but, you’ll like this. When I was older I swore a blood feud on your cowardly family. By the time I was twelve, I killed your father and was pleased when Erik and his father, Thorvald, thought it was someone else. Erik and your father, Olef, had sworn a blood oath with one another so Erik and Thorvald killed the men they thought responsible and were banished from Norway before I had a chance to kill you, but now here you are.” He smiled broadly and the boy spit on my face again.
When I thought I could not take any more from a past I did not know, Bergljot screamed, “And I’ll see to it that Erik, your beloved adopted father, dies! He began a war with my family in Iceland and again was exiled before my family could do anything about it.” This was a contortion of the truth for, though Erik committed an awful mistake, I was old enough to remember what happened in Iceland. “Then when Erik and his family are dead, my husband will become jarl of Greenland.”
The boy sucked a third ball of snot from the back of his nose, but before he had a chance to spit it on my face I pulled both of my hands free by sliding out of the mittens I wore. I used the mail on my forearms to knock the blades away from my face and rolled backward onto my feet. My striking sword was in my hand before any of them reacted. Immediately its point was driven deep between Bergljot’s ribs while the boy crawled up my left arm like a wild animal. He pulled my hair and scratched at my eyes. With great force I struck him in the side of his head with the pommel of my sword as I withdrew it from his mother’s slumping body. The boy crashed to the snow on his back swearing all the while, “Bastard! Son of a whore!” I said a brief prayer of forgiveness in Latin that I remembered from my book and stabbed my sword into the boy and through to the snow underneath him, silencing his shouts all the while Bjarni stood looking like a dumbstruck oaf.
I left my sword quivering back and forth in the boy’s body, trudged to Bergljot, and picked up my saex but didn’t have a chance to use it. Bjarni’s eyes widened, then he ran for his door. I sprinted after him, tackling the man headlong into the sod wall of his house. I punched him several times in the face before he finally passed out, after which I continued punching him while the sun’s first direct beams rose behind me.
. . .
Bjarni awoke hours later with his hands tied to a post behind his back. His swollen eyes stopped bleeding long ago but now looked like slits while he used his wobbly head to peer around his longhouse. I stood over a large iron kettle of boiling water above the hearth. When his eyes locked on mine, I smiled and used wooden tongs to pull out a bone from his wife which had the flesh cooked completely off.
After tossing it back into the pot I went to Bjarni with my saex. “I assure you that this blade has killed many men. Most by my hand, but the most justified killing it has ever done was in the hands of my father when it slipped into your uncle, the rapist.” Two of his teeth spit out at me while he tried to fashion a rebuttal. The words turned to screams as I pushed the blade into his thigh. He was still screaming while I slapped the side of the saex across his head. Then I punched him several more times until he passed out.
I stood and walked to Bjarni’s sleeping platform where I had thrown the polar bear hide. I held the fur in my hands. It was drenched with blood. For a moment I thought it was blood spilled out of justice, but then I cried. I had killed many men in battle or on the strandhogg, but never in cold blood like I had during those weeks. I felt angry and weak, not in any way vindicated. I gripped the fur tightly in my hands and some of the blood from last night’s killings was wrung out onto the floor. The fat, deep red droplets splashed into the hard-packed dirt and pooled in isolated semicircles. At last, I took the hide and threw it into the fire under the bubbling kettle. The melted snow amongst its hair sputtered from the heat while the drier parts immediately captured flame. I watched as it billowed smoke into the entire room, slowly curling and shrinking away into the fire.
The smoke made Bjarni cough awake again. I wanted to torture him for the rest of the day and through the next night, but instead I drew the saex again. I grabbed Bjarni by the messed hair on top of his head and jammed his head into the pole. With my nose pressing against his own, I said, “This is the end of your blood feud.” I slipped the saex under his mail shirt into his chest. He gasped quietly while kicking his legs behind me, then died.
I spent the rest of the day and night boiling away the flesh from his bones. Using my saex I etched Norse runes into the blackened timbers above his hearth:
“Thirteen dead for thirteen dead. The bear-man has perished.”
I didn’t know what else to write so stopped there. When the sun again was ready to pop above the horizon I left the Herjolfsson farm behind, walking to Erik’s Brattahlid. My mind was empty. I had been awake for two days and was ready for sleep. I felt nothing. No anger. No pain. No joy. No relief. Nothing.
As I walked past the slave house where the thralls and Tyrkr slept tightly packed inside, I saw Freydis emerge affixing one of her brooches at the shoulder of her tunic. She saw me, but paid me no attention and skittered off to my old house and to her husband. I again resolved to leave Greenland once the equinox came as I watched her sneak silently into her home.
Raised voices told me visitors were in Erik’s great longhouse, but I didn’t care, bursting in through the door. All eyes turned to see who walked in at this hour of the morning. Those eyes belonged to Erik, Thjordhildr, Thorhall, several other men, and the widows of the five men I killed two nights ago. Thorhall the Huntsman sized my wounds up quickly, “What happened to you?”
Before I answered, Erik added on, “And where have you been? We’ve had more attacks from the bear-man.”
“I killed him,” I said.
“Who?” asked Erik.
“Bjarni and his family are dead, but so is the bear-man. I laid him to rest.” None of what I just said was really a lie, but lies would come. “Two nights ago I had a vision that I should go out into the night alone. While I was out I found the bear-man. I followed him and when I reached him he was finishing the killing of Bjarni and his family. In fact, he was already boiling the bodies. I fought him for hours that seemed like days. He finally jumped atop Bjarni’s hearth and my sword found a home buried in the beast’s belly. Instantly the beast disappeared except for his hide which fluttered into the flames and except for his sword with the markings on the blade which now sat in my hand. I looked around and I saw some runes had magically been written in the timbers above the hearth, but couldn’t read them.”
Thorhall scoffed, “Halldorr, that’s quite a tale, but we have tragedy going on around us. These women have lost husbands. It’s not something to joke about.” Erik scowled and nodded his head in agreement.
“I can prove it,” and pulled my blade, the bear-man’s blade, from its scabbard. Everyone in the hall looked on in astonishment as I held the distinct blade described by all the witnesses under their noses.
“How do we know you’re not the bear-man just trying to exact revenge for Bjarni’s part in encouraging your exile for your invitation of the skraeling attack?” asked a disbelieving Thorhall.
Thjordhildr came to my aid, “It couldn’t be Halldorr. He was ill for all of the first attacks last month.”
“He’s not sick now though is he?” asked Thorhall rhetorically.
“Thorhall, you’re right that I have reason to hate Bjarni. But you have no idea why. If you’d like to blame me for his death or the death of his men, I do not care, an assembly can decide. It was Bjarni who killed my father and now that he is dead, I can revel in the payment of vengeance.”
Erik was frustrated now, “Halldorr, you must be dazed. Bjarni would have only been about twelve years old when your father was killed. I already avenged your father, my friend Olef’s death. Now quit talking nonsense and let’s go to Bjarni’s farm and see if what Halldorr says is true.” While the group draped their coats over their shoulders, I collapsed onto my bed and fell asleep.
CHAPTER 3
By the spring equinox Freydis was, at last, with child. Her oblivious husband, Torvard, was pleased that a son could soon be his. My pity went out to the man. I and the thralls, who were forced to listen to her lust-filled moaning beside them at night, suspected the baby would resemble Tyrkr. I remember wondering for a moment if, when the baby spoke its first words, he would have a German accent like his true father. The thought made me chuckle then as it still does today.
Early that spring Leif and Thorgils were out hunting beyond Fridr Rock when they came upon the rotting body of a polar bear stripped of its hide. Leif swore that the beast appeared to be part human and even had two dead cubs with it, also stripped of their hides. To eliminate all vestiges of the old gods and their retribution, whatever it was for, from Greenland, the two burnt the remains on the spot. So the last strip of evidence that could implicate me in the winter killings was gone.
Leif was busy carrying out the promise he made to King Olaf. He would see to it that the rest of the Norse men and women began to receive and accept the new faith this year. The Eastern Settlement, Eystribyggo, where we all lived had come to believe in the One God at Yule with Leif’s and Torleik’s speeches and his mother’s consent. As soon as the waters again became navigable, Leif sent out Haki and Haekja, the Scottish thralls, with several of the more zealous converts from our settlement to the Western Settlement, Vestribyggo, where young Thorstein ruled with his wife Gudrid. I had served Olaf so long and observed his more forceful method of converting the populace that I questioned the wisdom of Leif’s passive approach then. Now as an old man, I acknowledge his good judgment. Olaf had been motivated by speed and action – by converting massive numbers quickly. It worked to some extent, but he didn’t have their hearts. Leif was going for the heart.
Erik’s wife, Thjordhildr, was busy that spring as well. She had become so infected with the new faith that she demanded her husband build a church on his estate. The two still had not reconciled their differences enough for her to allow Erik the pleasures of her body, but he did begrudgingly agree to the project. He was fervently opposed to the new faith for himself. I think, however, that allowing the church was his way to demonstrate to Thjordhildr his commitment to her. He did love the woman, despite his past transgressions. Erik also desperately wanted to be allowed beneath her dress once again.
The structure of Greenland’s first church was tiny; eight feet wide by twelve feet long. To protect against the bitter cold in winter, the walls were made of stacked turf. At the base of each long wall, the turf was about two ells wide, slowly tapering until the short wall met the roof. For the supporting walls inside the turf and for the roof we used split wood that was imported from Norway’s thick forests the previous year. The planks on the roof were finished by covering them with a layer of turf so that from the outside of the church the only wood that could be seen was the vertical siding on either end.
Erik hired a skilled craftsman from the fjord to carve animal designs in two long planks which crossed each other on each end of the roof as they extended past the peak. Reindeer, bear, and whales danced their way across the timbers. The ends of these planks which reached toward the sky were shaped to look like horns so that the tips pointed toward the heavens. Beneath them, the same woodworker fashioned a simple cross with bell-shaped or flared ends that was affixed above a short door. The frame around the door received a similar set of carvings as those on the roof edge. With all the laborers from Brattahlid working on the tiny project, it was completed in just two weeks.
