Read Two Ravens Online

Authors: Cecelia Holland

Tags: #Historical Fiction

Two Ravens (16 page)

“Good.” Ketil clapped his shoulder and went off.

Standing on the Law Rock, the Lawgiver recited the laws of the Republic before anyone who was interested. Bjarni went through the crowded valley toward the booth where Sigurd was staying.

Gudrun’s father sat on a stool before a booth roofed in a striped sail. He had a piece of wood in his hand and was whittling on it, but he cut with the blade of the knife held toward himself.

“Cut downward,” Bjarni said. “It’s good luck.”

Sigurd did not look up. He said, “You heathen lump.”

“After your meeting with the Bishop, I thought you’d have learned humility. My brother married your daughter. Will you give us her dowry?”

“Is she here?”

“Yes—there across the way.”

Sigurd looked off across the Althing. His grey hair had faded to white. “Send her here, let me talk to her. I will give her what she is due.” He lifted his head toward Bjarni. “But to her and her husband, not a disinherited bastard.” He turned his back on Bjarni.

“Sigurd,” Bjarni said to his back, “at Fenby, that was I. I alone.” He went off across the stream of people coming up the valley from the lakeside.

He spent the next hour composing a poem and teaching it to three boys. Giving them each a mark, he sent them out around the Althing to recite the poem.

 

Sigurd came to Fenby

With eight longships

Bjarni called Lokj

Set him on the beach

Lokj thrashed his children on the beach

Sigurd turned his back and ran

From fires and Bjarni on the beach

 

After a little while he walked through the gathering again and heard people laughing over the poem, and Sigurd had gone inside his booth.

The Hoskuldssons were staying at Eirik Arnarson’s booth. Gudrun sat outside it talking to Andres. Bjarni came around the long side of the booth in time to hear her call to Hiyke to bring her a cup of water.

Hiyke was inside the booth with her sister. “Draw it yourself,” she said.

Andres brought Gudrun the cup of water. She was not satisfied with that. In a loud voice, she said, “There is a lazy old woman here who has forgotten she owes the roof over her head to me.”

Bjarni went over to her. “Your father is here—he wishes to see you.”

Gudrun went off, Andres at her heels like a lapdog. Bjarni went into the booth.

Hiyke’s sister was saying, “Is that how it is at Hrafnfell? Come live with us.”

“Hrafnfell is my home,” Hiyke said.

Her sister lifted her voice. “Well met, Bjarni Hoskuldsson. It is all over the west of Iceland that you have come back a rich man.”

He drew water from the crock in a cup and sat on the bench near Hiyke. “Appearances are deceiving, as Loki said to the Giant’s horse.”

Hiyke’s sister laughed heartily. Hiyke said, “You see he still traffics with demons.” She raised her eyes to him. “What had Eirik to say to you?”

“Nothing I wanted to hear.”
 

“Ah,” she said. “He is soft, that man, and gentle, and unjust.”

Bjarni drank the water in the cup. He sat listening to Hiyke talk to her sister.

 

BJARNI WENT TO WATCH the horses fighting, and Ulf came up to him.

“Did you spread that scurrilous poem about Sigurd?”

Bjarni had the jug of mead under his arm, and he pulled the stopper out and lifted it to his lips. His brother was very red in the face.

“If you did,” Ulf said, “you cost us Gudrun’s dowry. Sigurd is a rich man, too.”

“We have managed before this without his help,” Bjarni said.

“And why did you talk to him? Did I not tell you that we would let him come to us?”

Bjarni held the jug out to him. “Here. You sound unhappy sober.”

Ulf looked away. They stood a moment watching the horses maul each other. Bjarni was glad he had bet only a mark on the red stallion, which the dun stallion was driving to its knees. At last Ulf took the jug.

“Listen to me,” he said, in a whisper. “If it were up to me, I would never have taken Hrafnfell. I hate the work, you know—it’s all work, and no pleasure. Gudrun, now, she has taught me how to take joy in life. But Papa gave me the High Seat.”

“I do not blame you for what Hoskuld did,” Bjarni said.

Ulf put out his hand and gripped Bjarni’s arm. “I know you do not.”

“If you continue it, I will blame you.”

Ulf’s eyes narrowed. Bjarni walked away from him. Behind him a great cheer went up; and a stallion whistled.

The sun sank below the horizon but its light still streamed across the sky. Eirik Arnarson had a suit before the Althing. Bjarni with the rest of his family went to stand behind his chieftain. When Eirik had received the verdict, Bjarni left the others and walked off along the foot of the valley wall. He met eight other men and they climbed up to the top of the wall and walked across the lava flow.

The cold wind blew. The broken surface of the rock was flecked with volcanic glass. Spurs of frozen lava towered up over the men. Ketil Longheels led a horse along by a braided rope, and the others followed him in single file. There were boulders heaped and scattered over the plain. Ash crunched under their feet. They came to a great square rock heaped around with bones.

The nine men made a circle. They passed an old knife from hand to hand. Each as he touched it said the names of the gods. By chance Bjarni was ninth to touch it. He spoke the name of the Thunderer who had preserved him through everything.

He killed the horse. The others helped him cut it up and drag the pieces onto the flat top of the rock. Old bones littered the rock, and he kicked them off. Three ravens circled over him. Another joined them. Another came, and another. Bjarni laid out the flesh of the horse on the rock.

The birds screeched, their wings flapped all around him. They dropped down, tearing at the meat, pecking his blood-covered hands. He climbed down the side of the rock. The other men were standing silent in a circle among the bones. He took his place among them.

The old knife was still in his hand. Once it had killed men to the glory of Thor. He put his head back. He longed to drive the knife into his chest, to give the god his blood. The birds clamored and fought over the horseflesh. Blood dripped down the side of the rock.

The sun was rising again. One by one the men stirred. Bjarni left the circle and wandered off onto the empty plain to collect himself. The rock was crowded with birds. With the other men he walked back toward Thingvellir.

Ketil came up beside him as they walked. Bjarni said, “This place has not been used for sacrifice in years.”

“Maybe not for a century,” Ketil said. It had been a hundred years since Iceland turned Christian. He added, “Maybe never again.”

“Why did you not ask my brother to join us?”

“Ulf?” Ketil shot a sharp look up at him. “Ulf kisses the Cross now, Bjarni. Did you tell him we were coming here?”

Bjarni shook his head. “Everything has changed.” He had guessed at what Ketil told him, but he had not believed it.

“Be careful.” Ketil pointed to Bjarni’s bloody hands. “You should wash that off, before anyone else sees you.” He walked away across the lava.

Bjarni hid his hands in his coat. He washed the blood away in a barrel of rainwater, behind Eirik Arnarson’s booth.

Hiyke was within the booth, kneeling by her chest. When she saw him, she came to him, and they stood in the doorway. She said, “Why did you make that poem? Now Sigurd is paying men to call you a pagan.”
 

“Is he?” Bjarni said.

She had her shawl in her hands, and she lifted it up over her head and folded the ends over her breast, so that her face was framed in it. She said, “Be careful. People are killed, sometimes, for making poems.”
 

“I will make another,” he said.

He went off around the Althing, putting the words together, and found men to speak the poem about.

 

Sigurd Green-Tongue

Talks and talks

He talks so much

Grass grows on his tongue

The sun shines

The dew falls

The shit accumulates

The grass grows on his tongue

 

That one went around so fast he heard people laughing over it ahead of him, as he went back to Eirik Arnarson’s booth.

Later there were horse-races on the lower part of the plain. He went there to watch and saw Gudrun and Sigurd standing together, deep in talk. He walked by close enough to let them know that he saw them, and went up on a rusty outcrop of lava to watch the races.

Ulf was still short with him. He could not bear Andres, who fawned on him like a dog now. Gifu was back at Hrafnfell, and Hiyke would not let him alone with her. He drifted by himself through the crowd, or sat in the sun by Arnarson’s booth door. In the late afternoon there was a brawl over a law-suit in which many people were involved, and the fighting spread from booth to booth as more and more men took sides. Bjarni kept out of it. He found himself standing near the Law Rock, with the great lava shelf behind him, and Eirik Arnarson and some other men nearby, all trying to avoid the fight.

They shook hands, and someone asked him about the English court. He told them of the richness and idleness of the men around the king, and of the king’s great-heartedness.

Eirik said, nervously, “That would make a fine poem, very uplifting.”

“Oh, Red William’s court is much uplifted,” Bjarni said, “nearly all the time. Don’t you like my recent poems, Eirik?”

“You are making trouble where none need be,” Eirik said. “Here, is that knife of English work?”

He showed Eirik the knife. They talked of England, and the men passed the knife from hand to hand.

One man said, “Is England a fair place, as it says in the old songs?”

“All forest and tilled ground,” Bjarni said.

“Bah. There is tilled ground in Iceland, too, but nothing ripens.”

Eirik lifted his eyes from the knife. “Is that true?”

One of the other men said, “This year I will have no harvest at all, and I put eighteen bushels of seed into the ground.”

Their voices changed, speaking of this; their voices hardened and saddened.

“No one will thresh grain this year. Last year we gathered only a hundred bushels in the whole province. And there was ice in Breidavik until Pentecost, and there is ice in Hvitafjord yet.”

“It’s the damned horse-eaters,” one of them said, “spitting in the face of Christ, so that God blights our land in vengeance.”

Bjarni put his dagger back in the sheath. His eyes moved from face to face. The men talked on.

“Did you hear that someone spilled blood for the ravens—here, right here, during the Althing?”

“I can’t give credit to it,” Eirik said. “They are not so bold.”

“They are a curse on us, all over Iceland.”

Eirik elbowed the speaker in the side. But the hot words came forth.

“They ought to be hanged, all of them.”

Eirik said, “Forebear.” He aimed his gaze at Bjarni.

One by one, they remembered; they turned toward him, their faces taut. Bjarni put his hands on his belt.

“Nothing grows in Iceland that you can make rope from, either,” he said. “But mark me. When more men spilled blood for the ravens here, we had good harvests in Iceland.”

He walked away from them. On the plain, the fighting had stopped, and the bells were pealing for another lawsuit.

 

THE ALTHING ENDED, and Bjarni and his family went back to Hrafnfell. The sea was flat-calm, and the air warm and gentle, yet Ulf made no mention of taking
Swan
out after the fish. He and Gudrun stayed abed until well into the day.

Gifu rode the grey mare across the hillside. Bjarni had spoken of going with her, but she had put him off. Awhile after she had gone, he saw Kristjan stealing away.

At the corner of the barn, he stood watching his stepbrother’s dark head hurrying away above the waving grass. He held down his temper. Gifu would do as she wished. Taking the axe, he went up to the woodshed to cut wood.

Late in the day, when the tide was coming in, he drove the sheep in off the rocks where they had been grazing on the seaweed. The sun was shining on the bulging cliff where the ravens nested. On Midsummer’s Day the sun rose behind that cliff. He climbed the hillside toward the farm hall. Already the days were shrinking, the sunlight dwindling, and thinking of it he felt something tighten in him. He began to hurry.

Ulf was sitting in the High Seat. He wore a fine shirt stitched with red rosettes. Bjarni sat down on the bench beside him.

“Where have you been finding the fish? We should go out tomorrow, if this weather holds.”

Ulf sat forward, looking angry. “I will decide that.”

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