It was in the evening of the following day that I rolled out from my hiding place, driven in the end not by hunger or thirst -- they had been grinding at me for hours -- but by the need to shit. I was so stiff and cold that at first I could not stand. After falling twice I crawled up the beach into the trees. I crawled into a bush and relieved myself. Holding onto the trunks for balance, I tottered like a grandmother through the trees to where I could see the stead. The roof of the hall had fallen in, and was still smouldering in places. Some of the bothies, and the forge, had been gutted by fire. The yard was strewn with the bodies of cattle, dogs and men, many disemboweled so that yards of gut lay in the mud and slush. There was no sound, no movement. I waited for dusk, and crept through the gathering gloom as silently as my weary limbs would allow.
The yard was too dark, when I got there, for me to see anything clearly; but the only things that moved or called were the carrion birds, which would flap away a few yards as I came near. Part of the byre roof was still standing, and when I got in there I found a pile of hay, mysteriously unburned. I burrowed into it and slept, ignoring the sounds of the carrion birds, the foxes, the wild cats, squabbling over the charnel outside.
Bright morning sun, shining through the skeleton of the roof, woke me to the realisation that I was not alone in the byre. Ragna Trigvi's daughter lay not six feet from me. They had cut out the bairn she'd been carrying, and by her face I guess she had been alive yet when they did it. I stumbled out into the yard, and at once wished I hadn't. After retching (and thankfully, I had then little enough to retch), I found some meal, took an old pot from the remains of the forge, and went round the back of it to be upwind from the stench. I lit a fire and started to brew some porridge.
I suppose I must have been so overwhelmed by the horror as to be careless. In any case, my brother's bed slave had almost come to the fire before I even noticed her. I was shocked at the sight of her, and hoped I didn't look as bad as she did. Thinking back on it, I guess I must have looked worse. We ate the porridge together, using broken sticks for spoons.
After we'd eaten I went and stood in the trackway looking into the yard. To be truthful I had no idea what to do. There was no shelter, other than the steading, nearer than the summer pastures on the fell; there would be no food up there yet. I could see the plough hut across the head of the fjord, and it was burned to nothing. But we could not live in the stead. The heap of meat would soon attract wolves and bears. And disease. I didn't like the idea of leaving my friends and relatives there, unburied, for the scavengers, but the men at least were mostly at the bottom of the pile and we could not drag the slaughtered beasts off them.
I knew there were probably many things around the steading we would need. I didn't want to leave them all for the next passing traveller. I stood in the trackway and watched the ravens and the gulls.
It was Anna who found that the seaward door into the hall was still usable -- I was a fool not to have tried it. The roof had not completely collapsed at that end. The smoke inside was unbearable. The roof was still smouldering obstinately. I groped blindly along the back wall and found my father's bed place. His big kist was still there. I pulled up the lid and felt inside. And there, on top of everything else, was the famous sword.
I'm going to stop here for a moment and talk about that sword. The sword is much of a length with most that folk carried along that coast - which is to say that if you stood it upright, it would come about to my navel. It is not so big as the great swords the isle men use, and its hilt is short, so that you could use it only one handed. The blade is three of my thumbs broad, sharp -- very sharp -- along both edges, and grooved down the middle. The thing with a sword is that it is for killing folk. Every other weapon has another use. A spear you may use hunting, and a bow the same. An axe you may use for working timber, for boatbuilding, whatever -- though I'm not saying that those narrow-bladed battle axes would be much good. A knife everyone uses every day for cutting food. But a sword is for killing folk.
It is, as I've said before, a good sword. The blade had been made by an armourer. My father was a good smith by our standards, here in the North, but he could never make as good, for all he tried. It was made in Frankland, by Christmen. Not just ordinary Christmen, but the special holy kind who wear brown robes and swear poverty and won't touch women. These men who preach peacefulness and gentleness make the finest weapons. And for why do they make them? These men who preach poverty make weapons to sell for gold. I often think that if everyone behaved the way the christmen preach the world would be a pretty good place. But if everyone behaved the way the christmen behave, I wouldn't want to live in it.
My father had the sword off my Uncle Olaf, who went viking down in frankland, and raided the place the holy men were and killed them all. He brought back five swords from that trip, one which he kept, three which he sold at the fair that autumn, and that one.
My father had often told tales about his brother Olaf, how brave he was, how fierce, how generous. He always brought his little brother something home from his raids. The year before the sword, he'd brought my mother, also from frankland. There's no knowing whether she thought that generous. Anyway, the trip that won the sword was the last he ever came back from, which is often the way with men who live on the bread that other men planted.
Whatever, my father was wonderfully proud of his sword. He'd made the hilts for it himself one long winter, and the pommel of copper with Odin's ravens, Thought and Memory, set in it in black glass. I think he never used it -- I think he never in his life fought in a battle; he was not a fierce or warlike man. But a sword is for killing folk. A man who carries a sword is a warrior. It made him feel big; important; brave. It also frustrated him.
The nature of iron is this. If you make it carefully, and forge it carefully, and temper it carefully, then you get iron which will take an edge; that will make a good knife. But iron of that quality is brittle. If you strike stone with your knife -- if you strike it hard -- you'll notch the blade, or break it. But swords must not break.
If you forge your iron another way, and cool it slowly, it will be soft, and bend when you hit it. But swords must not bend. The armourers who made that sword had made it by beating the iron out thin, and folding it, and beating it out again, and folding it. They'd done this many times, that you could see. The iron of the blade was not an even grey, as the iron of a knife is, but marked with beautiful patterns like ripples on water at sunset. But when my father copied this, no matter how he tempered it, his blades didn't come as good. There must have been some secret to the making of it that he never discovered.
So. Well we rescued the sword, and some coin. We rescued a skillet and some cooking things. We rescued water flasks, knives, a sack of oatmeal. We rescued a lot of the lad's clothing -- Rognvald hadn't been more than an inch taller than me, and some of the boys clothes would fit Anna. I deliberately pulled some more of the roof down over the jars of pickled herrings. They were too heavy to move, although I guessed we'd want them later.
Then, loading myself and Anna with as much of the gear as we could carry, I started up the twisting path through scrub birch and larch woods towards the high pasture. It's a stiff pull up at the best of times. That awful day we climbed it again and again. I swear it's never felt longer or steeper.
The bothy was in its usual end of winter state, which is to say empty, cold and unwelcoming. The thatch had leaked during the thaw, and it was damp as well. In fact, the thatch wasn't much good: I knew my father had been planning to renew it the previous year, and it hadn't got done. We gathered fireings in the wood. We brewed another bowl of porridge between the pair of us. We chose the dryest of the bedplaces and curled up together in a heap. We slept. It may not sound much for a day, but it was more than enough for us.
I wanted to pray for the stranger to come, but in the end I was too shamed. How do you pray to the all father to send someone, when you're not sure if that someone is the allfather himself? How do you pray to the Christmen's god to send someone, when that someone may be the worst demon the Christmen know? I couldn't. I dreamed of him instead, and woke to find he wasn't there.
We woke late, in fact, and crawled bleary eyed to the doorway of the bothy, to find the morning bright and well advanced. Looking down over the trees to the head of the fjord there was more smoke. I felt empty and wrung out. It couldn't be more raiders...
I set off down the hill through the wood. When Anna started to follow I hissed at her to stay back, but of course she didn't understand. I waved her back, but still she followed. She was crying. I couldn't blame her. We crept ever more cautiously through the wood. At last we came to the edge of the trees and could see the houseplace. There weren't more raiders. It was just that the thatch, dried by two days of fine weather, had at last caught fire properly and started to burn.
The carcasses in the yard were beginning to stink. There were still things I had to search for. I hadn't found a bow, apart from one that had been broken. I'd found no arrows. I'd found no snares. We hadn't enough food, and we'd no seed grain. We'd no fish-hooks, although I found some wire in the wreck of the forge. If we were going to stay long, we'd need more furs for the bedplaces. It was a depressing morning. I found none of these things. Or rather, the things that I found were burnt or broken. Useless. Flies swarmed on the carcasses, and the stinking smoke from the burning thatch hung over everything.
Anna did nothing to help. I couldn't tell her what I wanted, and anyway she was so scared she hid in the trees all the time. The only good bit in the morning was when I started back. There was a whining from behind the remains of the byre. Kep -- my Father's youngest dog -- slunk out, shivering, his hair standing all ways. I ruffled his head. He started to relax a little, whining and wimpering.
We went back up the track to the bothy, pretty much empty handed, with the dog creeping at our heels. At the bothy, I had no energy to do anything more. I sat against the south wall in the sun, in the filth that those three awful days had made of my dress, stinking of piss and blood and burning. The dog lay beside me and shivered. Anna had disappeared into the hut. I sat, not so much because I was tired (although I was tired) as because I could not face doing anything else. And the afternoon drifted past. And I sat. And that's how the stranger found me.
Copyright © Simon Brooke
1992-1996
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