Two Ravens Read online

  Bjarni fingered a black pawn. On the beach the wind stirred the racks of drying fish like silver leaves. A boy was running up the slope toward the chessplayers. Bjarni looked down at the chesspiece in his hand. The boy reached them, out of breath: Kristjan, Hoskuld’s stepson, Hiyke’s son.

  “Shall we anchor the ship out in the bay now? We are done with her.”

  “Haul her up onto the beach,” Hoskuld said. He pushed his finger into Kristjan’s face. “Tell them if her hull sees a rock I’ll mend their beards into the nets.”

  Kristjan ran off. His black hair tossed on his shoulders. Among the women on the beach, among the racks of fish, his mother might be watching him.

  “The Hebrides,” Bjarni said. “That’s away over the sea. How am I to get there?”

  Hoskuld smiled at him. “I will take you there. In Swan.” He put out both hands for the jug.

  The Hebrides Islands were far to the south, a long, complicated sail. Bjarni said, “How would you know how to get to the Hebrides?” Yet he knew of old rumors about Hoskuld, a murder, an exile spent aviking.

  His father said, “I’m not surprised you hesitate. I myself was somewhat younger than you when I sailed, but times were different then.” He pulled on the jug and smacked his lips, wiping his beard with his fingers, smiling at Bjarni. “Maybe you should stay here, and start calling me father.”

  “I will go,” Bjarni said.

  Hoskuld handed the jug to him. Bjarni thought, He is glad to be rid of me. While he raised the jug to drink, he looked down the slope toward the women, hanging up the fish in the sun.

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON Bjarni climbed over the hill path that led to the ocean and came to the hot springs. He stripped off his clothes and walked into the pool. At first the waist-deep water was icy cold. He stepped into a sulphurous eddy and a ribbon of heat curled around his legs. He sank down to his neck in the water.

  The north wind was blowing hard. Rain was coming. From the spring he could look down through a notch between two slopes of the hill and see the ocean in the distance. Catching the axe in the sea had been lucky. Thor was with him. Whatever Hoskuld intended with his sudden friendship, in the end it would all happen according to fate anyway. He was glad that he had named Thor first at the Sacrifice on Midsummer’s Day. The hot water soaked the ache out of his muscles. He sank down entirely under the water and swept his hair back with his hands.

  When he put his head up to the air again, a pebble rattled down the trail behind him. A footstep crunched. He turned and saw Hiyke coming down the steep path toward him.

  She came up to the edge of the spring. “This is a foolish, mad thing Hoskuld is planning. You are a grown man. Can’t you leave home by yourself?”

  “He wants to go.”

  “Would you change your mind if I told you that he is plotting some wickedness?”

  He frowned at her. “Some wickedness?”

  “He said you would never come back again.”

  She was standing at the foot of the path, her grey shawl over her head and shoulders and the ends crossed over her breast. A silver cross hung around her neck on a chain. Her skin was fine and pale as parchment, her face shaped hollow over the frail bones. He thought over what she had told him.

  “He is a vile man,” he said. “Why do you stay with him?”

  That angered her. She started back up the path, her skirts in her hands. Over her shoulder, she flung words at him.

  “Vile enough to father you, you shiftless lout. Get to the Hebrides in your own way.”

  She went foot above foot up the path. He watched her from the sour water until she disappeared over the hill.

  HOSKULD WENT over the mountains to another part of Iceland. Bjarni and Ulf fitted the ship Swan out for the voyage. Throughout two long days of rain Bjarni laid out all the cordage and sails; he worked so hard he did not stop to eat or drink.

  “Why are you in such a hurry?” Ulf said. “We can’t leave until Father comes back.”

  They were stowing away the sails in the bow. The deck awnings were rigged over the beached ship; rain drummed on the canvas. Bjarni shut the sail locker.

  “What if we did?” he said to Ulf.

  His brother’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Go without him. Is that what you mean?”

  “You and I are good sailors. We can take Hoskuld’s maps and sun-wheel.” Crouched down under the awning, Bjarni walked on bent legs back to the waist of the ship, where the awning opened. Ulf followed him. They jumped down to the gravel. The wind swept the long raindrops at them.

  Ulf gripped Bjarni’s arm. His face glowed red with excitement. “You mean to take Father’s ship?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Let’s do it. Oh, let’s do it.”

  They went up the slope toward the farm buildings. The grass was littered with thunderstones thrown out of the volcanoes. The wind keened on them. Bjarni kept his face down out of the rain. He wondered if there was anywhere else in the world like Hrafnfell. Ahead of Ulf he went in the door to the hall and down the three steps.

  The hall was much longer than it was wide. An open hearth ran down the middle of it. Only the logs at the far end were burning, where the table was and the High Seat. Bjarni and Ulf went down the room toward it.

  The High Seat was covered with a bearskin. Hiyke was Christian; she kept the black fur draped over the whole of the double chair, to hide the carvings on it. Jon and Andres were sitting at one side of the table, playing chess. No one else was in the hall. Bjarni put his hands on the table and leaned on his arms, his eyes on his younger half brothers.

  “I am sailing tomorrow in Swan for the Hebrides. Are you coming with me?”

  At once the two young men stood up in their places. Andres said, “Without Papa? What do you mean?” and Jon said at the same time, “Papa would flog us when we came back.”

  The door slammed at the other end of the hall. Bjarni glanced over his shoulder. Down the dark hall Kristjan was coming toward them, Hiyke’s half-grown son.

  Bjarni turned to his half brothers again. “I don’t mean to come back. Hoskuld’s friend in the Hebrides will welcome me much better if I bring a ship and its crew with me, even a little ship like Swan.”

  “That’s stealing,” Andres said. “It’s Papa’s ship.”

  Long-faced, and with his hands in his sleeves, Kristjan joined them. He was slight and dark, a changeling among the tall fair Hoskuldssons. He said, “You are stealing Hoskuld’s ship?”

  “Yes,” Jon said. “I’ll go. I hope I never see this place again, too. Or Papa.”

  “That’s well wished,” Ulf said.

  “It’s stealing,” Andres said. “It’s stealing.”

  “It was Hoskuld’s notion,” Bjarni said. “In part.”

  The door opened again at the other end of the hall and a step squealed. The men hushed their voices. Hiyke came toward them; she carried a basket on her hip. In their midst she stopped and looked from face to face.

  “What is this, now? You look like the bishops arguing over a filioque.”

  Bjarni said, “We are sailing tomorrow.”

  She put the basket down on the table and stepped up to him. “You mean that you are robbing us.” She spoke straight into his face. “That is vile, is it not?”

  “If you call it so,” he said. “I see no other way, aside from killing him.”

  “Bah.” She jerked away from him. Kristjan stood off to one side, alone. She said to him, “And you, good-for-nothing—you are going, too?”

  “I can do anything they can do,” Kristjan said.

  She walked away from them, going straight out of the hall. Ulf twitched back the napkin over the basket and a steamy fragrance rose from the bread stacked inside.

  JUST BEFORE DAWN, the firebell began to clang. Bjarni was sleeping in the loft of the barn. Barefoot, his shirt unlaced, he jumped down to the yard. The bell sounded in his ears.

  “The ship!” Ulf ran out of the sleeping booth, pulling on hi
s shoes. “The ship is on fire!”

  Bjarni sprinted down toward the bay. The sky was white with sunlight. The longship lay on its gunwale on the beach above the tide line. The canvas awning was all afire. Flames towered up out of the hold. He knew Hiyke had set it, to keep them there.

  Jon was already there, and was throwing water onto the fire from a little bucket. Bjarni reached the ship. The canvas was burnt away; fire billowed through the whole long hull. The ship was packed with straw. It was the straw that burned. Bjarni gripped the oar rail. The wood was heating from the fire.

  “Help me! Jon—”

  He flung his weight against the rail. Jon and Ulf sprang to help him. They rocked the ship up off her side onto her flat keelboard and skated it down the gravel beach. Other men reached them from the farm. They drove Swan down to meet the low waves of the bay.

  “Swamp her,” Bjarni cried. Up to his knees in the water, he dragged Swan forward until he felt her floating. He pushed down with all his strength on the oar rail, and the ship rolled over.

  The fire drowned with a hiss. The men stood back from the hull, barely afloat in the bay’s soft waves. Swatches of charred straw fouled the water. They swam the overturned ship out into deeper water and turned her right- side up again.

  Bjarni waded toward the beach. In the shallows he passed by Ulf and Andres; he said, “Haul her in and see how badly she is hurt.” Without pausing he walked out of the water and climbed the slope toward the buildings.

  The sheep were clipping the grass around the black thunderstones. In tight bunches they hurried out of his way, their heads back. He went straight through the farmyard and into the hall.

  Hiyke was just stepping down from a stool she had put below the window; she had watched it all. He went across the room to her.

  “You did that,” he said. “You burned the ship.”

  “I would happily die,” she said, “if the funeral would keep you from leaving.” Her low voice trembled. “You are taking everything. It is not just—you will leave us with nothing—”

  As she argued she put out her hands, and he caught hold of her wrists. She twisted her arms to free herself. He held her fast. She gave a low cry, half of pain. He pulled her to him and kissed her.

  She fought. He pressed his mouth tight over her mouth. He held her close against him, both muffled in their clothes; he stroked his hand down over her loins. The door behind them banged open.

  “Mother!”

  Bjarni put her down. Wheeling, he faced her son coming down the room. Kristjan stopped still. He cast around him for a weapon and picked up the fire-iron from the hearth.

  “Leave my mother alone.”

  Wary of the fire-iron, Bjarni went toward him, his hands out. Kristjan tongued his lips. His eyes darted here and there. He stood fast until Bjarni was almost on him and then scurried backward down the hall, to his mother.

  “Go,” she said; she took the fire-iron from Kristjan’s hands. “I will manage this.”

  “Mother—”

  Bjarni straightened, his arms falling to his sides. Over the black fire-iron he met her fierce unflinching gaze. She thrust her head at Kristjan.

  “Go on—go out.”

  Kristjan bolted up the steps and out the door. Bjarni said, “Hiyke, listen to me.”

  “Take the ship,” she said. “Take everything you want. Take them all with you. I hope I never set eyes on you again.”

  She moved out of his way, the iron raised between them. He went out of the hall.

  THE SHIP WAS NOT BURNED; only the straw and the canvas had burned. They laid out fresh canvas for sails and new line for the rigging. The next day rain began to fall again. Bjarni could wait no longer; Hoskuld would be back soon. With Ulf he went up onto the headland above the ocean, at the mouth of the bay. On the rocks there he cut runes to charm the ship and its crew, to keep great Thor’s kindness on himself.

  Ulf sat in the lee of the rock, grumbling. He had his coat over his head to protect him from the rain.

  “We should go. Why are you wasting time here?”

  The soft rock yielded to Bjarni’s knife. It gave off a faint ashy smell. He kept the lines straight and even; ill-made runes brought bad luck. “You sound like a Christian,” he said.

  “I don’t see much difference between your magic and theirs.”

  Ulf was devout in nothing. Bjarni wiped his wet hand on his thigh. His gaze traveled the three lines of runes.

  Hammerer

  Keep safe the White Raven

  Her naked nestlings

  At the bottom he wrote:

  Guard Hoskuld’s son

  If Hoskuld came here and found the runes he would not mar them, since they carried his own name.

  “I’m never coming back here,” Ulf murmured. “Never again. Never.”

  “I am finished,” Bjarni said.

  They went in single file back down the thread of path, traveling the high edge of the cliff above the sea. Far below was the beach where the men of Hrafnfell cut driftwood for the fire. Ulf bundled his head and shoulders in his coat against the rain. Bjarni walked with his head hunched down. He turned his face inland, out of the rain. He looked over the bowl of the valley around the bay. Shreds of mist clung to the higher slopes, and the clifftops were lost in cloud. Never coming back. He dragged his gaze from Hrafnfell. The rain blew into his face.

  They went straight down the hillside. There was no need to go back to the buildings; all their gear was stowed away in the ship, at anchor just beyond the breakers. The heads of the other Hoskuldssons and Kristjan showed above the oar rail. They would not get far today, in the rain. Still it would be far enough. Bjarni lengthened his stride toward them.

  HOSKULD HAD MEANT to swell his crew with men from the neighboring farms. Because Bjarni was not coming back to Iceland he had to sail along the coast from farm to farm, asking at each place for sailors, until he found oarsmen enough.

  Swan carried nine oars to the side. When he had eighteen men aboard, he filled the watercask amidships and turned the bow of the ship to the east, to row out of the strong current that stirred the sea around Iceland. The weather had cleared. In a sunny dawn they raised the sail and put Iceland behind them over the horizon.

  Bjarni had his father’s sun-wheel and two charts. By the sun-wheel he could tell his northing, but he had no way of finding Swan’s position by east and west. The sun set for only a few moments each night, and the sky never darkened enough to steer well by the stars. Therefore Bjarni determined to sail as far as possible within sight of land. He sailed due east; he followed Hoskuld’s chart and measured the height of the sun with Hoskuld’s wheel. On the second day after Iceland slid into the sea behind them, a mountainous coast loomed up over the eastern line. The chart foretold it; Bjarni began to trust it.

  A north wind was blowing. Swan ran before it with the mountains of Norway just in sight to the east. High-spirited, the Icelanders nagged and argued with Bjarni to sail in to Norway; they pictured it stocked with loose women and heaped with treasure. Bjarni tended the chart, marking down everything he saw: the color of the sea, the flights of birds. The chart said that he would raise islands in the southwest by sailing down this coast. His eyes turned constantly toward the horizon.

  The islands appeared on the third day after they turned south. He sailed Swan down past them and stood out to the southwest, and other islands pricked up into the sky farther south. The chart said that he could follow these islands to the Hebrides.

  “In the old days,” Ulf said, “we would have carried shields on our benches, and that would have been a serpent’s head.” He pointed to the curled prow of the ship.

  They talked of Eirik Bloodaxe and the raids of Hastein and Harald Hardrada. Jon and Andres came back into the stern benches to listen. Later Kristjan joined them, off by the edge of them, as he always was. Bjarni was cutting runes into the blade of his oar, and Ulf told stories.

  After a while, Andres said, “This is pagan talk. We should not be lis
tening to this.”

  “Don’t listen to it, then,” Ulf said.

  “What he means is that we should not be saying it,” Bjarni said.

  “That’s the law,” Andres said.

  “My mother,” Ulf said, “should never have started listening to priests. Well, she did not womanize me. I still know what a man does.”

  “I don’t see we are such heroes,” Jon said. “We took Papa’s ship away just before the herring fishing. We left him and Stepmother with no one to cut wood or haul water—”

  “Yes,” Andres said. “They can’t do all the work by themselves.”

  Bjarni rubbed his thumb over the runes he had made in the wood of the oar-blade. He looked up at the sun. He had marked Jon and Andres talking earnestly together earlier in the day. The other men in the ship were watching them covertly.

  “They don’t have to feed us all, either,” Ulf said. “Swan was battered on a rock last year, and we all fished from one of Eirik Arnarson’s boats. Papa can do that again.”

  “It isn’t fair,” Jon said.

  “Bah. Which of us has he not struck unfairly?”

  “He has never struck me,” Kristjan said.

  “Because if he did your mother would hit him over the head with the axe,” Ulf said.

  Jon laughed.

  “Or a fire-iron,” Kristjan said. He gave Bjarni a dagger of a look.

  “I think we should go back,” Andres said. “We can take Bjarni to this Sigmund—”

  “Sigurd,” Bjarni said.

  “There, and we can go back to Iceland.”

  “Missing two oars,” Ulf said. “Because I am not going back.”

  “I think we ought to go home now,” Andres said. “All of us.”

  “We would look like fools!”

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  Jon said, “He can’t thrash us all, not all at once.”

  “Bjarni,” Andres said. “What do you think?”

  Bjarni had finished cutting the charm into the oar. He slid the long shaft down under the bench and stowed it along the keel with his foot.