Blood Feud (6 page)

‘You are returned in a black hour, Thormod Sitricson.’

Thormod never looked at him. Whatever the trouble was, seemingly he did not want to hear it from that particular old man. He thrust the dogs aside and walked on towards the house-place. The dogs, suddenly fallen from their high spirits, followed him. So, with some idea of keeping close to him in case of need, did I.

Before the house-place, the women were bending over the long trestle boards, setting out platters of meat and bannocks and great jugs of ale. They also checked into that odd stillness at the sight of Thormod; and one of them, who seemed, young though she was, to be the mistress of the house, turned and called through the doorway into the darkness beyond it, ‘Sitric, it is Thormod come home.’

In answer, someone loomed into the doorway; a man somewhat like Thormod but a few years older, taller and darker, and of a blunter make. ‘Thormod, my brother! You have heard?’

They put their arms round each other’s shoulders, and pulled close a moment. ‘No, I am straight come from Thrandisfjord,’ Thormod said. And then, ‘Is it our father?’

‘It is our father.’

They went in together, and I – I followed still, much as a hound might have done.

They went down the long central aisle between the stalls where the cattle would be housed in winter. There was torchlight at the far end where it widened out into the family’s living space. No firelight, for the fire had been quenched on the hearth; and the torches burned at the head and feet of a dead man, who lay under a great brown bearskin in the midst of the place. The fur was pulled up to his throat; and Sitric stooped without a word, and drew it back a little way.

I had checked between the last of the cow-stalls, and saw nothing of what was beneath. But I saw Thormod’s back grow rigid, and his hands clench at his sides into quivering fists.

‘Who killed him?’

Sitric let the rug fall back. ‘Anders and Herulf Herulfson – either or both.’

‘Anders? Herulf? That’s madman’s talk!’ Thormod began shouting; then he checked and quietened. ‘What was the way of it?’

Sitric told him, in a dead level voice, standing over their father’s body. ‘We have had trouble with the wolfkind, this spring. Five days since, our father went hunting. He’d a new bow to try out, and you know what he was like with something new. He hunted late, and at dusk he saw what he thought was a wolf among the alder woods up the back. It was too dark to see properly, but he let fly . . .’

‘And it was not a wolf,’ Thormod said.

‘It was Herulf Blackbeard in his old wolfskin cloak.’

‘And so Anders and Herulf took up the Blood Feud.’

‘The Thing was summoned to try the case. I suppose as it was an ill-chance killing, the Lawman would have ordered that we pay the man-price, and that would have been the end
of it. But Herulf and Anders . . . They must have got him while he was out riding the lower sheep-run. Yesterday at first light they came across by Loud Beck and flung his body down by the Mark Stone, and shouted to Ulf, who was taking out the cattle, that they were not waiting for the Greybeards of the Thing Council, and that they set more store by blood than Wyr Geld, in payment for their father’s death. Then they rode off southward.’

‘What possessed Father to ride out alone along the lower run?’ Thormod said after a moment.

‘Maybe he thought they would wait for the Thing, and abide by its ruling.’

‘And maybe he knew that they would not; and thought that he’d had the best part of his life, and thought that his death, alone, would come cheaper than his death along with the rest of you, and the farm burned over your heads in the good old-fashioned way.’ Thormod did not speak accusingly, as though to say ‘Why did you let him go alone?’ but only as one stating facts. I come of a people who do not howl and cast ashes on their heads for the death of kinsfolk; but this was something that I had not met before.

And then in the same level, fact-stating tone, he added, ‘Herulfstead shall burn for this.’

‘In the good old-fashioned way? You’ll not find the young wolves in the lair.’

‘Where, then?’

I thought for a moment that Sitric was looking at me. Then I saw that his gaze had gone over my shoulder to someone coming up behind me; and a big man with a thrall-ring on his neck slouched past me into the torchlight. Thormod turned and saw him.

‘Ulf?’

The thrall swallowed harshly. ‘They shouted – Anders shouted to me before they rode off – to tell anyone who asked,
that the amber merchant must have some more good stories by now, and they were away to find him.’

Sitric looked at his brother. ‘Does that have any meaning for you?’

Thormod nodded. ‘Aye. Because it was meant for me.’

‘So? What meaning, then?’

‘That Anders and Herulf knew that I also would not settle for the Wyr Geld. They have set out for Miklagard.’

‘It’s not like those two to run,’ Sitric said.

‘Who spoke of running? No man sits twiddling his thumbs waiting for death under his own blazing thatch, if he can play the game another way. And they also had kin to think of. But they leave me word where to meet them.’

‘They leave
us
word,’ Sitric said, troubled but staunch.

‘Na, the message was for me. You are the eldest, and you have a wife; it is for you to bide here and hold the steading together. Our grandfather did not in-take it from the wild, that we should both take the road to Miklagard and leave it to go back to the wild again.’

Sitric Sitricson was silent a moment, looking down at the stark face above the bearskin rug, as though he were uncertain. He would always be a little uncertain, I thought, one who needed time to make up his mind. ‘Aye well, we can quarrel as to that later,’ he said at last. ‘They are gathered to the Arval in the garth, and we should go out to them.’

They turned towards the entrance aisle. Ulf was already gone, and I slipped out ahead of them quickly into the fading daylight, where the pine-knot torches had just been lit and were making a black resin-scented smoke that curled away sideways on the light wind, and folk were already crowding to the food and drink, while a blind harper who had wandered in from somewhere with his dog beside him, sat on the end of a bench, tuning his harp.

Somewhere near at hand a cow was lowing, for it was past
milking-time. And feeling myself a stranger among all these folk who were Thormod’s folk and none of mine. I turned in search of the cattle fold that was something familiar in an alien world.

I was leaning over the hurdle gate, snuffing the warm comforting smell of the beasts, when I heard Thormod’s great shout raised above the voices and the harpsong behind me. ‘
Sea Swallow! Sea Swallow
! To me!’ And knew the call was for me.

So I left the friendly cattle and went back into Thormod’s world, into the crowd and the flare of torches before the house-place door.

And then Thormod’s arm was across my shoulders, and Thormod was swinging me round to the torchlit faces, saying, ‘Here he is – Jestyn, my shoulder-to-shoulder-man – come back with me from West-over-seas!’

AFTERWARDS, THROUGH THE
fog of next morning’s headache, I had very little memory of that funeral feast. Only one thing I remembered clearly: and that, when the night was already worn on a good way, was Thorn, the blind harper, getting to his feet, saying, ‘Now I will make a new song – a song for the two who go out from here with the mark of the Blood Feud on their foreheads. Two brothers against two brothers, who will not turn back before all be finished, and the Death songs sung for those who are to die.’ And I was vaguely wretched, and took no heed of the song at all.

That day, the Master of Sitricstead was howe-laid among his kin, and the folk from other farms all went away. And in the dark of the following night I woke in the loft above the cattle stalls, and found Thormod missing from his hollow in the hay beside me.

At first I thought that he had gone out to make water, and would soon be back; and I lay watching a white line of moonlight that slipped through a chink in the thatch, and waiting. But the white line moved to pick out a bent grass-stem, to a dry cloverhead, casting its tiny clear shadow below it; and he did not come. And then fear came upon me. I had taken it as a settled thing that I was going with Thormod on the road to Miklagard, but as it had been when the
Sea Swallow
was made ready for the homeward way, so it was now. No word actually spoken between us. And Dark Thorn had sung of two brothers . . . But that did not really fit, because it had been settled that Sitric was to bide with the steading . . . I was too much afraid to think straight, or I might have taken comfort from that.

How if Thormod had sought to avoid all farewells by
slipping away in the night and leaving us simply to wake in the morning and find him gone on his lonely road? If I had stopped to look about me, I would have seen that his few belongings were still where he had left them. But fear had me by the throat.

I had lain down to sleep in the usual way in breeks and under-sark, and had only to pull on my raw-hide shoes and rough wadmal tunic, and stick in my belt the hunting-knife that was my only possession, and I stood ready to go.

Then, torn between the need for speed and the need for silence, I slid over the edge of the loft floor, felt with my feet for the edge of the cattle stall beneath, and dropped as lightly as I could into the central aisle.

In the living-place at the far end, I could just make out the red glow of the smoored fire. One of the dogs stirred and growled a little, though not much for they were used to night-time comings and goings, and Sitric cursed him without properly waking up, from the big box bed. I checked, holding my breath, and the dog subsided, grumbling; and I went on. The door was on the snib, as Thormod must have left it, and I opened it as silently as might be, and slipped out and across the sleeping steading-garth. The hurdle gate had been hauled aside. Thormod had certainly gone that way, but would he have left it open if he were not coming back? Doubt began to creep in beside the fear within me, but I had to know. I had to know.

So I too stepped out on to the track, my moon-shadow running beside me. There was no one on the track so far as the ford or on the rising slope beyond it. But just across from the steading gate was the apple garth, the trees just breaking into blossom, small and wind-shaped, bent all one way. The kind whose apples are scarcely worth eating at harvest but withered and yellow and honey-sweet at Midwinter. The moon filled the place with dapplings and stripes of black and
silver, and markings of a wildcat’s hide. Almost anything could have been among those trees, so long as it did not move. Then something, someone, did move, on the path that skirted the trees on its way down from the fellside. A moment more, and I saw that it was Thormod. He checked and looked back the way he had come, up towards the dark hummock on the open fell, where we had howe-laid the old Master of Sitricstead that morning. Then I knew that he had indeed been about his farewells; taking leave of his father, now, rather than in the daylight before the eyes of other men. Taking whatever vows he had to take, apart from the customary vows of vengeance that he had taken, half drunk, and bragging of its bloody splendour, at the Arval the night before. There are things that a man needs to do by himself, and I knew then that I should not have come. I was turning back, but my foot caught a loose stone in the side of the track and sent it rolling; and Thormond swung round.

‘Who? Jestyn, you again!’

‘I – it was a mistake –’ I stammered. ‘I’ll away back –’

‘No, but why did you come?’ Thormod came out on the track, and touched his breast, where the piece of amber hung beneath his sark. ‘I did not leave it behind me this time. Did you think I needed your shoulder against mine in this also?’

‘I was afraid you had gone without me.’ I sounded like a child in my own ears.

‘Do you think I would do that, not even telling you?’ he said, seriously.

‘I – no – but I woke and you were gone. Maybe I’m still stupid with ale – I’ve never had so much before. But –
I come with you!
’

There was a moment’s pause, and I heard the faint stirring of wind through the apple boughs. Then Thormod said. ‘Do you? I take up the Blood Feud for my father’s death, but there is no call for you to follow the same road.’

‘Your road is mine also. Two against two makes a fair fight.’

‘“Two brothers against two brothers.” So said Blind Thorn.’

‘I had all but forgotten that,’ I said.

‘Never forget what Thorn says. The eyes of his body do not see as other men see, but he has another kind of seeing.’ Thormod held out his hand. ‘You have your knife on you? Give it to me.’

I pulled the knife from my belt, and he took it and turned his left hand palm upward. In the white fire of the moonlight I saw the paler skin inside his wrist, and the place where the blue veins branched as the veins of an iris petal. He drew the point of the knife across, leaving a line like a dark thread in its wake. A few beads of blood sprang out, black in the moonlight; and he gave me the knife. ‘Now you.’

I made the same cut across my own wrist, and we rubbed the mouths of the two cuts together. A few drops spattered down and were lost in the long grass, and the thing was done.

‘Now we are one blood, you and I,’ Thormod said. ‘Two brothers against two brothers. Now the sign of the Blood Feud is on your forehead also, as Dark Thorn saw it, and my road is your road, to Miklagard and beyond.’

So I took up the Death Feud, the Blood Feud for a man I had never seen living.

And we went back to the warm darkness of the hayloft for the rest of the night. And next morning Thormod took leave of his kin, and we set out. We rode a couple of scrub ponies; and for the first time in my life I felt the slap of a sword against my thigh, the pull of the sword-strap over my shoulder. It was an old sword from the weapon kist, the wolfskin sheath worn almost bare in places, the wooden grip darkened by other men’s sweat, but the blade oiled and keen. I wondered how long it would be before the grip felt familiar in my hand, and the blade answered to my will.