Norseman Raider (The Norseman Chronicles Book 4) (3 page)

Words from a man broke my mind’s
peace.  I would have beaten whoever it was had I been able to move.  I turned my good eye toward the sound and saw that Godfrey was extending a hand.  His bloodied face showed great pleasure.  Of course it did!  His men had just spent the past day and night in near perfect revelry, drinking and carousing, drinking and thrashing Norse Greenlanders all the way through.

“Thor’s beard!” Godfrey said.  “I hope you’re still alive.  What a waste to have lost a specimen like you before I even took you into battle.”

“Aren’t you a Christian?” I mumbled.  “Shouldn’t you curse your own god?”

Godfrey laughed while crouching down.  In the dim light I could see that
one side of his face was swollen and blue.  The King of the Isles didn’t seem to notice any pain.  He clasped a hand around my upper arm and began hoisting me up.  His thumb accidentally found a bruise of which I was not aware.  I grunted, but let him sit me upright.  “Christian, yes.  I straddle the two worlds I must.  Many of my subjects are Christian.”  He spat out a wad of blood-laced phlegm onto the sod and wiggled a loose tooth with his tongue.  “Ireland is Christian.  England is Christian.  Much of the wealth sloshing around Man’s and Normandy’s ports is from Christian lands. If I want my isles to trade, to do business with Christians, I must show the steps to being a good Christian.  Many of their kings and even traders enforce such a prime-signing.”  He winked.  “I have become one.  I have my own priest.  My father dabbled in their faith.  There’s something to it, you know.”

My head was slowly clearing from
its battering.  I was starved, for I hadn’t eaten since the night before.  My belly was sour.  I moaned.  I was not prepared for a discussion of my old gods, let alone this new, One God.  I nodded to Godfrey and placed a hand on his shoulder while he steadied me.  With another tug, I stood on my feet.

The field was clearing.  Leif’s men were limping off after Godfrey’s. 
I saw that Greenlanders and Manx alike were chatting with one another.  Laughing split the late night air.  They relived their favorite parts of the game.  We had entered their society.

The maidens had left. 
Other than the dying torches, Godfrey and I were all that remained.  “
Their
faith?  Isn’t it yours?” I asked as I walked with heavy legs next to the king.  The village, tucked behind its palisade, was spread out before us.

“Yes,
but no.”  Godfrey’s eyes sparkled even in the darkness.  His mind always hid more thoughts than his words said.  “My father was the first in our line to become Christian.  He thought it would relieve the trouble he was having with the sons of Rollo and Longsword in Normandy.  My father wanted allies and thought it would help.  It didn’t help with that, for he still had to flee Bayeux.”  Godfrey gave a large sigh.  “It did help him win my mother, though.  She was Irish, which means that, of course, she was Christian.”  The king chuckled.  “My priest would tell me that my father’s marriage proves the goodness of God’s Providence.  It shows that gain can come out of any situation.”  Godfrey shrugged while we ambled.  “When my father died I thought more about his old gods, Thor, Odin.  I thought I’d give them a try.  Just because I’m a Norseman who’s never been to Norway, doesn’t mean I don’t think of home.”

“How does that work
, following both sides?”

“I’m a king, am I not?” he slapped my back on the spot where Loki had driven the end of his tr
és early in the game.  “The truth is that the men who follow the old gods are the best fighters.  They see the grandeur in the task itself.  There is no fear of death, for it brings with it endless revelry and war.  They want the silver and treasure, they want the women, too, but they understand that how they carry themselves in battle is the true prize.”  Godfrey abruptly stopped and tugged on my sleeve.  He examined my face.  “Now, you mustn’t repeat that to anyone.  I’ll deny I ever said this.  I’ve got Christians among my men who fight like their devil and I want to keep them.  But the Norse, the Swedes, the Danes, those men, especially those who follow Thor, fight.”  He looked ahead to the palisade that surrounded the village.  The open gate was guarded by two sentries.  Watchmen stood high on a raised platform behind the wall, pacing and looking to the sea and inland, but especially the sea, for that is where the danger forever lurked.  “They fight.”  He said the last as if he would choke up, but fought through his emotions and forced a smile.

I sighed and wondered
what I would do in a real, full-scale battle.  I had killed men who were lesser fighters than me.  That had always been in self-defense, in the normal scraps of life.  But how would I stand when the steel was truly thick?  I hoped I could make King Godfrey think of me the same way he had just thought of his men, with welling pride.  I sighed again and realized how tired I was.  I looked down to the quay.  “I’m going to the boat to sleep,” I huffed.

Godfrey slapped his hand on my back
again.  I winced.  “No, you’re not.”  The king suddenly had a resurgence of energy.  He marched off toward the gates.  “I’ve called a Thing. After we’ve decided whose chickens are whose and after we’ve said which oxen belong to this man or that, we’ve got an army to rebuild.  The Dal Riatans will pay.”  Godfrey disappeared into the shadows beneath the gate.

I limpe
d after the king.  “Who are the Dal Riatans?” I mumbled.

. . .

Though the Dal Riatans were foreign to me, I knew what a Thing was.  It was common among my ancestors and was as much a part of life as the hunt.  Two or three times a year free men and women gathered in a sacred place where a leader or the lawgiver guided us through the proceedings.  Disputes were solved.  My long dead father had taken me to them in Norway.  I had attended them along with Erik, my adopted father, in Iceland.  As a full free man in Greenland, I’d gone to the Thing that was, by then, led by Erik himself.  In fact, it was at such a meeting at Fridr Rock, Peace Rock, in Greenland that the skraelings attacked and killed the thirteen members of Eystribyggo, hence the thirteen years of banishment for Leif and me.  Their assault had been blamed on us for reasons that stray from this tale.

I say that
Things were held in sacred places: groves, glens, valleys, dales, mountains, stream sides, meadows, or forests.  It made sense that we did this because the spirits dwelt on such hallowed, natural ground.  How else could a man hope to resolve problems peaceably without the favor and active intervention of the gods?  Otherwise, man’s nature, certainly mine, was to thump a man, to rap him with my fist, a club, or to pierce him with a spear until he and his family relented.  When the last happened, a man could get what he wanted.  But inevitably such success unleashed the flood of the blood feud, a blood for blood, life for life, death for death exchange that spiraled on until one family overwhelmed the other or a larger, stronger family came into the picture to overwhelm the first two.  So I ask again, with such proclivities, how could we hope to end problems without first being in a sacred meadow?

In Iceland the Althing was held next to the River Axe, a strange name until you understand that men hurled
their axes into the flowing waters at the start of the assembly.  Weapons were not permitted and the act of throwing them into the river was a solemn promise that blood would not be shed during the discussions.  Heated debate often led to arguments.  Arguments mixed with ale and steel brought on blood.  Since there was no way to eliminate drink, long ago a wise man decided to forgo weapons.

The scoundrel-turned-jarl Erik mimicked this when he began holding a
Thing in Greenland.  Each year, he’d march from Fridr Rock to the pebble-strewn shingle and hurl a great war axe into the fjord that bore his name.  It was a peaceful, happy gathering, that is, until the last one with the skraeling attack.  But, I’ve said to you, that is for another time and another writing.

The men of Man were strange to me. 
To start, they called the assembly the Tynwald.  In practice it was a Thing which was why the king had said as much.  Why his followers called it Tynwald, I know not.  Beyond the odd name for the meeting, the men of Godfrey and the people he ruled appeared foreign in dress and custom.  They looked like me in most regards.  Many had blonde hair or red hair.  Many were fair of skin.  I wore baggy, woolen trousers.  Their men wore better fitting, lighter linen pants.  But as we walked to the Thing, Tynwald, I reminded myself, I could think of nothing else but how peculiar it was to head into town, rather than out.  I did not understand how a Thing could be held away from the trees and grasses of the gods but instead in a tightly-packed longhouse.

A great fi
re burned outside Godfrey’s hall.  Its light illuminated a kind of town square in the middle of the walled city.  The face of the remarkable hall formed one edge of the square.  The king had paused and I was slowly catching up to his shadowed back.  Separately, we looked at his hall’s short side, with the peak of its long, thatched roof running away from us, away from the village square.  The gable end, or rake, was adorned with long planks that formed an ‘X’ at the peak and extended up into the dark sky like the antlers of a great beast.  Along the surface of the planks, carvings of swirling, vine-like designs adorned.  I had seen the motif before on the Isle of Man and had become used to it, though Godfrey’s hall was the only one in the town that resembled any of the styles of building with which I was familiar.  His was constructed of timber.  The rest were made of stone, something foreign to my original homeland of Norway.

What struck me that night was not Godfrey’s hall.
  What was truly weird was the combination of disparate images that made up the right and left sides of the square.  On my right was a Christian church.  In the middle of a community made of former Norsemen, Danes, and Swedes was a building honoring the One God.  The One God!  Many of my new brothers-in-arms were Christians but it was clear from the church’s prominence that Godfrey paid not a waving tribute to the new faith, but actively supported it.

“A church?” I asked dumbly while I limped around the fire.

Godfrey was having fun at my naivety.  Glancing over his shoulder, he laughed at me as he had a half dozen times since I met him.  “How can I, a Christian or a raider king as the case may be, attack and steal from churches in Wales, Scotland, England, and Ireland while I pay for one right here?”

“Uh, huh,” I grunted while scanning the boring stone building.
  There were no animals carved anywhere.

Godfrey stopped and pointed to a dark, shadowed area in the corner of the square between his hall and the church.  “Do you see those markers there?  They are graves.  The men of Man haven’t burned their dead for many centuries.  Do you see the markers?  No
, look.  They are Christian crosses.  Some of those men died four or five hundred years ago and do you see?  They were Christians.  I support this church because as I told you I’m a Christian, mostly, well sometimes.  But my people, the natives of this island, too, are Christian.”  He began strolling to the doors that sat closed at the end of his hall.  “And my men, my army, what’s left of it, Christian or not, do not mind one bit if we take treasure from someone else’s church to enrich our own.  It’s a world where the strongest will kill or enslave the weakest.”

The
truth of his last sentiment, I knew to my core.  Life was a constant struggle until a man died and entered Odin’s hall, where the warrior-poet god would entertain him.

Godfrey
puffed out his strong chest and plunged into his hall where the sound of a hundred men’s voices echoed off the walls.  I stayed behind and studied the church and her cemetery.  It was a strange faith, I thought.  Admittedly, I knew nothing of it at the time.  It was foreign and I never considered for a heartbeat that I would one day be a Christian, helping another zealous king convert his subjects to the One God.  Yet those days would come, later.  That night, I teetered my way around and looked at the side of the square opposite the church.  Across from the church were images I could understand.

Someone had erected a tall, flat stone
in front of a small grove of misplaced trees.  I say misplaced because, though they grew from the ground like all life, to have them inside the walls of a palisade was odd.  The rock was turned so that I could see an edge and part of one face where the square’s firelight danced across it.  The edge had the familiar thin etchings that were Norse runes.  I knew each of the letters, but I could not read then, not even my own language.  So I didn’t know what great man’s name was carved from one side, up and over the rectangular top, and down the other.  I only knew that those letters formed words.  The image I could see in the light was immediately recognizable.

It was Odin, his one, good eye staring out at me. 
His presence would mean that the small grove of trees behind the stone was a sacred place, artificial, perhaps, since it was in town, but one where the power of the old gods could be found.  There was comfort in that.  On Odin’s shoulder sat one of his messenger birds. I thought it might be Hugin, the raven of thought, though why it could not be Munin, the raven of memory, I do not know.  From where I stood, it looked like the pair, Odin and Hugin, was under a square roof of some sort.  I hobbled closer and saw that in one hand the chief god had a spear and was thrusting it down into a wolf.  Aha!  It was Fenrir, the wolf of the Ragnarok, the finale of the world.  At the end of the gods’ time, the world would finish in a fiery furnace of destruction, with the sun and gods themselves disappearing.  As I meandered closer, a sense of pride welled up inside my chest.  Though I knew that the mighty Odin and Thor and all the gods I loved would meet their deaths at the Ragnarok, seeing Odin fight off the beast Fenrir, who had already swallowed a part of his leg, was an inspiration. To lose a battle while struggling valiantly was no disgrace.