Winter Serpent Read online

  Calum was well-prepared. He answered Donn’s speech with a few words and the spreading of his hands. What, he asked, was there for him to do in the matter? The girl had always been wayward.

  Donn was forced to shout to make himself heard over the din.

  “Well, if you will talk at one purpose and I at another, then I have made this trip for nothing,” he said angrily. “Whatever it is you want from this mess, I wish that you would settle it and be quick. It is my neck the blows are falling on!”

  Calum raised his eyebrows.

  “Who can tell a woman’s mind? The Picts report she seems happy and is not abused. She could send word through them if she wished help. As for the Northmen… last half-moon ago they beached a herd of pilot whales on Eileen nan Ron and sent most of the fat carcasses to me. You must have some. The meat is very good.”

  His brother reddened and started to speak, but Calum moved to him innocently.

  “How can I drive them out now?” he said. “They number more than the warriors of the Coire, and it would be useless to meet them in pitched battle. I have my plans, never fear. Let us wait until they go a-viking—raiding Eire, it will most likely be—and bring their plunder back to the camp. Then we will do something, and there will be much profit in it for us. Let us be clever. I have been waiting throughout the summer for them to move. They tell me the chieftain has been wounded and has been moping about instead of setting forth for Ireland as proper Northmen do.”

  “Suppose they choose to come to the Coire instead of making the journey across the sea to Eire?”

  Calum fingered his lower lip.

  “Well, that is to be considered. But they have seen this house and all that is in it, and I do not think them tempted. They want gold and women, and these are to be had best in Ireland.”

  “It is a great clever game you play,” Donn told his brother, “but a mad one. What of the girl? She has kinsmen yet in Dunadd, and the Ard-Ri licks his lips for a chance to get a foothold in the Coire.”

  Calum shrugged.

  “I have never understood,” Donn said heavily, “why you did not slit her throat long ago when it would have been a simple thing to do. Many children die young, especially orphans with a claim to the land.”

  The summer died slowly, the winds of autumn still warm and mellow from the sea. It brought the smell of apples and cut hay into the meadow, and Doireann hated it and the empty sickness which had come upon her. It was strange to be sick for so long. She had thought these spells would have been over by now, and it worried her that they attacked her still.

  Sweyn had come up behind her and had surprised her in the midst of her retching.

  “So! When will you tell him?” was his greeting. She shook her head vaguely.

  “You must tell him soon. It is not right for the others to notice this thing and know of it before the chieftain.”

  She lowered her hands. It was ridiculous that the Norseman had not taken note of the thing which had become most obvious to them all.

  “Why do you not bring him the good news?” she suggested. Sweyn looked irritated.

  “No, this is not proper. You must tell him yourself and not do anything foolish before the others. You must not expect a man such as the Jarl to be aware of such things as this, nor follow you about and listen when you scratch.”

  She put her head in her hand. If she must approach him she must think of a way to assault the man’s sullen brooding, his studied indifference to her. They had not exchanged words for some days. She served him at meals but even then he did not waste words on her; he signaled when he wished his cup filled by holding his hand around the base of the cup until she had fetched the ale. Other than waiting on him, she had small contact with his thoughts.

  Then there was the nighttime. But the man who held her in his arms rarely spoke, there being little need for words, for he knew her body as intimately as his own. Occasionally he muttered in his language and this served to remind her of the barrier that was between them, the captor and the captive. Yet it seemed to her that this time was the only time to approach him, and the darkness would make it easier for her.

  She waited until the fire had been banked and the hall was still. It was cool enough to draw the covers about them at night, for the hall was chill near morning. She lay with the plaid about her, listening, arranging her thoughts.

  He sensed that she was restless and did not turn away from her to sleep. She lay for a long time fretting, and had almost decided to leave it until some other time. But he turned over and spoke.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Her heart jumped, and the words she had composed in the Norse tongue fled from her. She struggled silently with the words.

  “It is difficult to sleep,” she said cautiously. He thought this over.

  “Why?” he said at last.

  “Because the child moves here.” She motioned with her hand. “In my belly, or whatever the word is,” she finished hastily.

  He was silent for so long that she grew afraid. She could hear no noise from him, not even the sound of his breathing.

  “How long has this been?” he said finally.

  “Almost five months now.” The Norse words had failed her and she answered in the Celtic tongue.

  He sat up suddenly, and she was frightened enough to cry out. She could see him as a dark shape over her.

  “Show me,” he commanded.

  “There is nothing to see,” she said hurriedly, but she pulled back the cover and he placed his hand on her warm skin.

  “It moves sometimes,” she added. “It does not move now,” he said. “No,” she whispered.

  “Are you not supposed to be large?” She could not understand him.

  “Big. Fat. Swollen,” he insisted.

  “I do not know. I am bigger when I stand up. My belt is tight.”

  “I had not noticed it.” He seemed struck by his words and sat for a moment, thinking. “That is a true thing,” he murmured. “I had not noticed it.” He drew her to a sitting position and held her so that he could peer at her face in the darkness.

  “So now I shall have a son. By the beard of Thor, this is a thing to think on!” His hand was in her hair, twisting it about his wrist softly.

  “So you would not tell me for a long time!” he said. She shuddered but did not answer.

  “It is all right,” he murmured. His hand was on her shoulder, stroking it. He bent toward her.

  “I will be… careful with you,” he said.

  When autumn had at last settled on them for good, Sweyn came to Doireann as she sat alone in the hall and gave her the little ivory boat he had spent some months completing. He had outfitted it with a wooden mast and crossarm from which was hung a miniature leather sail. It was a perfect replica of the Jarl’s Viking ship down to the crude outline of the bear on the sail.

  “This is for your son,” he told her.

  He showed her how the mast could be dismantled and the sail folded for storage.

  “Do not be sad,” he told her. “All women feel thus and are occasionally given to fretting and despair. But he will be a fine, strong child and a great hero even as his father and his father’s father before him.”

  “I know nothing of his father’s father. Nor does it matter to me.”

  “Do not talk so. It matters greatly.” He looked thoughtful. “It is not seemly for me to tell a man’s secrets. Once I have sworn loyalty to the Jarl, his mind and mine are one. But this is not to say that I may not entertain you by telling you a story. Mind you, this is not to say that this story is true. It is only a story to while away the time and make you smile, eh?”

  She was sure that Sweyn was making an effort to be enormously clever. “Ah,” he began, scratching feverishly at his chest, “ah… once in the

  olden days there was a great lord of the Inglinga name, a great and noble lord descended from the old gods. This would not be known to you, but it is enough to say that the Inglinga, who were once kings in Upp
sala, were of the line of Frey, a great god, and still worshiped by many. Well, this lord I speak of, his name was…” He stopped suddenly. “His name was… I forget his name.”

  “Inglinga?” she suggested.

  “No, no, I speak of given names. Well, let us call him Eiric, since we must have a name. This Eiric was a great man.”

  “You have said that.”

  He appeared annoyed and hurt.

  “I will tell you this story some other time.” She put her hand on his arm.

  “No, tell me now. I will not interrupt you.”

  “Well…” He paused. “Well, this Eiric was a great man. A very great man. It is perhaps difficult for you to know how great. Among noble men he was the noblest, and of great stature was he, round about and tall as the towering pine that grows on the peaks by the fjords.” His voice was reminiscent. “A head taller than most men and with the strength of an ox. All day could he fight and not tire. Once he fought in a swamp in the mire to his knees, and many men threw themselves upon him at one time so that they might bear him to earth, but he would not fall; like the pine tree he stood and shook them off while other brave men came crashing down around him. A fearless man he was, and a resolute sailor who could take his men to hunt whales and seal in the white ice cliffs of the far northern sea, and bring them safely home through starvation and much peril, by his steadfastness and strength which alone bore them through the journey. In his old age he was covered with scars and glory, and in his hall men sang songs of his deeds in the same breath with the old sagas, for indeed he had become a living legend. At his side were his two sons… well were they sprung in his footsteps. Red Eric, the older was called, and a great seaman and lawmaker like his father. And the younger was called Jut. Here was the image of the old man again, taller than most and like a rock, and bravest beyond all brave men. But this Jut quarreled with the elder son in his jealousy and envy and love of the old man. And great was his sorrow. For he turned his hand against his brother and slew him as one would a beast. When he came into the hall of his father he wore the skin of a bear, for he was among those wild warriors who take the shape of a bear in battle. This skin he wore was the pelt of the bear he had slain with his own hands, and he had sworn many strange and terrible oaths upon it, and the sign of the bear was his magic. When he was in the hall of his father… lo, he assumed the body of the bear and the bear fell upon the old man and in its madness would have killed him, but the old man, still seated, wrenched out his sword and struck him.

  “Although it is known that for those who take the sign of the bear neither fire nor iron will smite them… yet was the bear struck, and turned into this young man, who fell at his father’s feet. But his magic prevailed and the wound was not fatal, though it would have split in two the skull of an ordinary man. His warriors, who were among the noblest and most brave, bore him to his longboat and sailed away with him. And accursed was the young warrior by his father’s tongue, and also those men who followed him.”

  He patted her knee.

  “Sad is the telling of these things, yet it is said that the sons of the young man will be strong and brave and his children will be many in a new land.”

  “And the Jarl,” she said, looking at him guilelessly, “is he not called

  Thorsten Eiricsson?”

  “Who has called him that?” Sweyn exclaimed. “Not I! Forget now what I have told you. Remember this, if you must have something to think on: many times have I seen those who longed to call themselves the berserkir, the sons of the bjorn. But the true berserkir are not easily found. Their magic is great. It is true, neither fire nor iron can hurt them. I myself have seen, and yet I do not understand.”

  His voice sank to a soft rumble.

  “I know this thing. Alone are they, apart from other men, and their lives are not our lives. Their only true brothers are the beasts.”

  So entranced was she by his tone that she was startled when he rose. He looked down at her.

  “The berserkr’s hand knows no friend, no kin—father, brother, or wife—but only enemies, when he is in his madness. It is well to fear the mark of the bear.”

  With this he left her.

  Now that she was growing large with the child, she had much time to spend by the fire and think on Sweyn’s cryptic tale. It was obvious that the berserkr of the story who attacked his own father was the Viking Jarl; this would explain the hasty flight from Scandia and the necessity for such a desperate thing as making a camp in Cumhainn. As it was not certain the chieftain would live with his cleft skull, the Vikings had built the log house and Sweyn had come among the Scots to find a healer. And she was this healer. Only a stroke of luck, or, as they would say, fate, had kept him from dying, and she had had little to do with it. Yet death had sat on the man in the bearskin when first she saw him, and it was a wonder he had not died, in all truth.

  Doireann could find little to do for herself or her coming child. There was no excitement attendant on her first labor here among the Northmen as there would have been in the Coire, nor even a piece of linen and thread she could put her hands to in order to prepare proper clothing for the baby. She tried not to think of these things, to put them in the back of her mind, as she had the greatest consideration of them all… how she was going to bear the child alone and unaided except for the foreign men.

  The weather was kin to her brooding thoughts. The men were now confined for long periods while the storms swept out of the west, and the wind, ever restless, whistled down the long funnel of the inlet like a banshee in the night, their sleeping and waking done to the accompaniment of its moan. In the long evenings Doireann would fill Thorsten Jarl’s cup and listen to the talk which lightened the Northmen’s idleness. Her knowledge of their slurring tongue was growing, but she was baffled by any rapid speech and the difficult forms of the eddas, the songs they told. The men were fond of these tales although there was a running complaint among them that no one knew how to declaim them properly. She also listened to the personal narrative, which was simpler and required only a great talent for boasting.

  The Northmen were as much as students of genealogy as the Irish, and could count back lines of descent for many hundreds of years. These facts always went before a tale of any importance and she found them dull and uninteresting, as, she had to admit, they would undoubtedly find those of the Celts.

  Raki would sometimes take her harp to himself and sing in a reedy voice, for he fancied himself something of a poet. She could not understand much of what he sang and she saw the others were not much more appreciative. But she did come to see the things which they admired most in themselves… courage in the face of danger, wooden fearlessness before certain death, and unlimited patience in difficulty.

  The Jarl listened attentively. He drank a great deal, but seemed clearheaded enough. At night he lashed restlessly about the narrow bed.

  One evening he took the harp from Raki in the middle of a song. He stood behind the table, fingering it awkwardly, thinking, and then without the usual preamble launched forth into a tale of Thor and the Midgard serpent. The first words were greeted by delighted shouts, and Braggi, the steersman of Sweyn’s ship, pounded the table to keep the rhythm.

  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 p
ainted 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?”