life a little, that Rurik had done his task of raising me as well as any father and better than most – but looking at this new man, this rawboned hard man from a boatload of hard men and realising he was the one who had left me in the first place, with no word since and no prospect of one, I grew so angry and twisted with it that I could not speak at all.
He took that for something else – the moment of our meeting, the horror of what had gone before with the white bear and the snow journey – and nodded, smiling.
‘Who’d have thought that bloody little bear cub would have caused such trouble,’ he mused, rasping his chin with horned fingers. ‘I bought it from a Gotland trader, who had it from a Finn, he told me. I thought to sell it in Ireland, to make a jarl’s cloak, or even a pet, but that nithing Gudleif let it go. Arse. Just look at what happened – I nearly lost my son.’
Gudleif had cursed his brother, that bear and, in the end, the one he suspected of letting it go. It had grown too big for its original cage, so had to be tethered loose and fed mountains of good herring; the thrall had grown too afraid to go near it.
There had been about an eyeblink of cheering when everyone saw it had gone, then blind panic that such a monster was loose. Gudleif and Bjarni and Gunnar Raudi had hunted it all that year, but found nothing and lost a good dog besides.
The words were queued up in me, fighting like drunks trying to get out of a burning hall. My father was breathtaking … not one word about where he had been, or why I had been left so long, or what had been my life in the five years before he brought me here. Or even that the bloody bear had been his fault all along.
It was infuriating. My mouth gaped and shut like a fresh-caught cod and he saw it, put it down to the emotion of the moment, of seeing his long-lost father, and made manly of it. He clapped me on the shoulder and said, gruffly, ‘Can you walk? Einar is in the hall and wants to see you.’
Fuck Einar, was what I wanted to say. Fuck you, too. Freydis is dead because of your bloody bear and the fact that you weren’t around to decide what to do with it before someone got tired of it and let it escape. Where were you? And tell me of me, my mother, where I am from. I know nothing.
Instead, I nodded and weaved upright, while he helped me into breeks and shoes and kirtle and tunic, me leaning on him, feeling his wiry strength.
He smelled of old sweat and leather and wet wool and the hair grew up under the neck of his own tunic, all around, curling wads of it, grizzled and darker than that on his head and chin.
And all the while the thoughts in me wheeling and screaming like terns round a fresh catch. The years between us and the wyrd of that white bear. How long was it free? Six years? Eight, maybe?
Yet this winter it had sought me out somehow, tracked me down and brought my father back to me with its death, like an Odin sacrifice.
The wyrd of it made me shiver – those three Norn sisters, who weave the lives of every creature, had started on a strange tapestry for me.
Finally, as I fastened and looped a belt round my waist, my father straightened from doing up my leg-bindings and held out Bjarni’s sword to me. It had been cleaned of all blood; cleaned better than it had been before, for there were fewer rot spots on it than when I had stolen it.
‘It isn’t mine,’ I said, half-ashamed, half-defiant, and he cocked his head like a bird and I laid out the tale of it.
It was Bjarni’s sword, he who had been Gudleif’s oarmate of long standing. He and Gudleif had taught me the strokes of it, and then Gunnar Raudi, unable to watch any longer, had picked it up, spat between his feet and shown me how to use it in a real fight.
‘When you stand in a shieldwall, boy,’ he said, ‘forget all the fancy strokes. Hit their fucking feet. Cut the ankles from them. Stab them up and under the shield and the hem of their mail, right into their balls. It’s the only bits you can see or reach anyway.’
And then he showed me how to use the hilt, my shield, my knees and elbows and teeth, while Gudleif and Bjarni stayed quiet and still.
It was then I saw they were afraid of Gunnar Raudi and learned later – from Halldis, of course – that Gunnar stayed at Bjornshafen because he had got both Bjarni and Gudleif back from a raid to Dyfflin that went badly wrong. Everyone thought them dead and then, two seasons later, in they sailed with a stolen ship, captured thralls and tales of Gunnar’s daring. They owed him their lives and a berth for as long as he breathed.
‘I stole it from Gudleif,’ I told my father, ‘when it was clear he wanted me to die in the snow on the way to Freydis’s hov.’
He rubbed his beard and frowned, nodding. ‘Aye, so Gunnar said when he sent word.’
That had been the day Gunnar had cracked my world, a day that began with Gudleif sitting in his gifthrone with his ship prows on either side and himself swathed in furs, trying to be a great jarl and managing only to look like a bad-tempered cat.
Bjarni had died the previous year and Halldis the year before that. Now Gudleif complained of the cold and avoided going out much. He sat, hunched and glowering, with only old Caomh close to his elbow, the thrall who had come back as a slave from a Christ temple in Dyfflin.
Nearby, the equally old Helga shuttled a loom back and forth and grinned her two last teeth at me, while Gunnar Raudi, just visible in the smoking gloom, worked on a leather strap.
‘I am not up to the journey to the high pasture this year,’ Gudleif said to me. ‘The herd needs to be brought down and some essentials taken to Freydis.’
It was an early winter, the snow curling off Snaefel, the colour leached from the land by cold, so that there were only black tree skeletons on grey under a grey sky. Even the sea was slate.
‘It has already snowed,’ I reminded him. ‘It may be too deep to drive horses down now.’ I refrained from reminding him that I had spoken of this weeks before, when it might have been easier to do.
There was no sound save for the clack-shuff of the loom and the sputter of a fire whose wood was too damp. Halldis would not have made it so.
Gudleif stirred and said to me, ‘Perhaps. If so, you will over-winter there and bring them in spring. Freydis will have prepared.’
It was not an attractive proposition. Freydis was a strange one and, truth to tell, most people thought her a volva, a witch. I had never seen her, in all my fifteen years, though her hov was no more than a good day’s walk up the lowest slopes. She tended Gudleif’s best stallions and mares on the high pasture and was clever at it.
I thought of all this and the fact that, even if she had prepared well, there would not be enough fodder to keep the herd fed through the hard winter it promised to be. Or, perhaps, even the pair of us.
I said as much and Gudleif shrugged. I thought Gunnar Raudi was probably best to go and said that, too. Gudleif shrugged again and, when I looked at him, Gunnar Raudi was busy beside the hearthfire, too concerned with his strap of leather even to look up, it seemed to me.
So I prepared a pack and took the sturdiest of the ponies. I was considering what best to take Freydis when Gunnar Raudi came to the stable and there, in the warm, rustling twilight of it, tore everything apart with a simple phrase.
‘He has sent for his sons.’
And there it was. Gudleif was dying. His sons, Bjorn and Steinkel, were coming back from their own fostering to claim their inheritance and I was… expendable. Perhaps he hoped I would die and solve all his problems.
Gunnar Raudi saw all that chase itself like cat and dog across my face. He said nothing for a while, still as a block of grindstone in the fetid dark. A horse whuffed and stamped; straw rustled and all I could think to say was: ‘So that’s where the faering went. I wondered.’
And Gunnar Raudi smiled a grim smile. ‘No. He sent word by the next valley up. The faering is missing because I sent Krel and Big Nose to row it to Laugarsfel, there to send word to Rurik.’
I