Sworn Brother, page 4
part #2 of Viking Series
The huntsman shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Three casts at a time is enough. Any more would be an affront to the Gods and, besides, the sun has set and now the hour is no longer propitious.’
Then his suspicions came back with a rush. ‘How do I know you’re not lying to me about the runes, like you lied about the gyrfalcon.’
‘There’s no reason for me to lie,’ I answered, and began picking up the wands, the master rod first and then the three shorter, calling out their names, ‘rainbow, warrior queen, firm belief.’ Then, collecting the longer ones, I announced, ‘The key-holder, joy,’ and taking the last one from Edgar’s fingers I said, ‘festivity.’
To establish my credentials even more clearly, I asked innocenctly, ‘You don’t use the wand of darkness, the snake wand?’
Edgar looked dumbfounded. He was, as I later found out, a countryman at heart, and he believed implicitly in the Saxon wands, as they are called in England where they are much used in divination and prophecy. But only the most skilled employ the eighth wand, the snake wand. It has a baleful influence which affects all the other wands and most people, being only human, prefer a happy outcome to the shoot, as the Saxons call the casting of the rods. Frankly I thought the Saxon wands were elementary. In Iceland my rune master Thrand had taught me to read much more sophisticated versions. There the wands are fastened to a leather cord, fanned out and used like an almanac, the meanings read from runes cut on both sides. These runes — like most seidr or magic - reverse the normal forms. The runes are written backwards, as if seen in a mirror.
‘Tell my wife what you just said about our daughter,’ Edgar announced. ‘It may comfort her. She has been grieving for the girl these four years past.’ He ushered me into the cottage — it was no more than a large single room, divided across the middle into a living area and a bedroom. There was an open fire at the gable wall, a plain table and two benches. At Edgar’s prompting I repeated my reading of the wands to Edgar’s wife, Judith. The poor woman looked pitifully trustful of my interpretation and timidly asked if I would like some proper food. I suspected that she thought that her husband had been treating me very unfairly. But Edgar’s loathing was understandable if he thought I was a Dane, like the raiders who had kidnapped his daughter and maimed his son.
Edgar was obviously weighing me up. ‘Where did you say you come from?’ he asked suddenly.
‘From Iceland and before that from Greenland.’
‘But you speak like a Dane.’
‘Same words, yes,’ I said, ‘but I say them differently, and I use some words that are only used in Iceland. A bit like your Saxon. I’m sure you’ve noticed how foreigners from other parts of England speak it differently and have words that you don’t understand.’
‘Prove to me that you come from this other place, this Greenland or whatever you call it.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know how to.’
Edgar thought for a moment, and then said suddenly, ‘Gyrfalcon. You said you come from a place where the bird builds its nests and raises its young. And I know that it does not do so in the Danes’ country, but somewhere further away. So if you are really from that place, then you know all about the bird and its habits.’
‘What can I tell you?’ I asked.
He looked cunning, then said, ‘Answer me this: is the gyrfalcon a hawk of the tower, or a hawk of the hand?’
I had no idea what he was talking about and when I looked baffled he was triumphant. ‘Just as I thought. You don’t know anything about them.’
‘No,’ I said ‘It’s just that I don’t understand your question. But I could recognise a gyrfalcon if I saw it hunting.’
‘So tell me how.’
‘When I watched the wild spear falcons in Greenland, they would fly down from the cliffs and perch on some vantage point on the moors, like a high rock or hill crest. There the bird sat, watching out for its prey. It was looking for its food, another bird we call rjupa, like your partridge. When the spear falcon sees a rjupa, it launches from its perch and flies low at tremendous speed, faster and faster, and then strikes the rjupa, knocking it to the ground, dead.’
‘And what does it do at the last moment before it strikes?’ Edgar asked.
‘The spear falcon suddenly rises, to gain height, and then come smashing down on its prey.’
‘Right,’ announced Edgar, finally persuaded. ‘That’s what the gyr does and that’s why it can be a hawk of the tower and also a hawk of the fist, and very few hunting birds can be both.’
‘I still don’t know what you mean,’ I said. ‘What’s a bird of the tower?’
‘A bird that towers or waits on, as we say. Hovers in the sky above the master, waiting for the right moment, then drops down on its prey. Peregrine falcons do that naturally and, with patience, gyrfalcons can be taught to hunt that way. A hawk of the fist is one that is carried on the hand or wrist while hunting, and thrown off the hand to chase down the quarry.’
Thus my knowledge of the habits of the wild gyrfalcon and the art of divination rescued me from the ordeal of those noxious dog kennels, though Edgar confessed some weeks later that he would not have kept me living in the kennels indefinitely because he had recognised that I did not have the makings of a kennelman. ‘Mind you, I can’t understand anyone who doesn’t get along with dogs,’ he added. ‘Seems unnatural.’
‘They stink exceedingly,’ I pointed out. ‘It took me days to wash off their stench. Quite why the English love their dogs so much baffles me. They never stop talking about them. Sometimes they seem to prefer them to their own children.’
‘Not just the English,’ Edgar said, ‘That pack belongs to Knut, and when he shows up here half his Danish friends bring along their own dogs, which they add to the pack. It’s a cursed nuisance as the dogs start fighting amongst themselves.’
‘Precisely,’ I commented. ‘When it comes to dogs, neither Saxon nor Dane seems to have any common sense. In Greenland, in times of famine, we ate them.’
By the time of that conversation I was being treated as a member of Edgar’s family. I had been allocated a corner of their cottage where I could hang my satchel and find a sleeping place, and Judith, who was as trusting as her husband had been initially wary, was spoiling me as if I was her favourite nephew. She would fish out for me the best bits of meat from the stewpot that simmered constantly over her cooking fire. I have rarely been fed so well. Officially Edgar was the royal huntsman, an important post which made him responsible for arranging the hunts when Knut came to visit. But Edgar also had a neat sideline in poaching. He quietly set nets for small game — hares were a favourite prey
— and would come back to the cottage in the first light of dawn, his leggings wet with dew, and a couple of plump hares dangling from his hand.
As spring turned to summer, I realised that I was very privileged. July is the hungry month before the crops have been harvested, and normal folk must live on the sweepings of their storehouses and grain bins. They eat hard, gritty bread made from bran, old husks and ground-up peas. But in Edgar’s house our stockpot was always well supplied, and with the hunting season approaching Edgar began to take me into the forest to scout for the biggest game of all - red-deer stags. This was Edgar at his best — quiet, confident and willing to teach me. He was like Herfid explaining the skald’s techniques, or the monks in Ireland when they taught me French, Latin and a little Greek, and how to read and write the foreign scripts, or my seidr master Thrand in Iceland as he tutored me in the mysteries of the Elder Faith.
Edgar took me with him as he quietly followed the deer paths through the forest of oak and beech, and smaller thickets of alder and ash. He showed me how to judge the size of a deer from the size of the hoof prints, and how to tell whether the stag was walking, running or moving at a trot. After he had located a stag large enough to be hunted by the king’s pack, we would return again and again to note the stag’s regular haunts and observe its daily routine. ‘Look closely,’ he would say to me, pulling aside a bush. ‘This is where he slept last night. See how the grass and weeds are flattened down. And here are the marks where his knees pressed the earth as he got to his feet at dawn. He’s a big stag all right, probably twelve points on his antlers, a royal beast … and in good condition too,’ he added, poking open one of the stag’s turds. ‘He’s tall, that one, and holds his head well. Here’s where his antlers scraped the tree when passing.’
Nor was Edgar confused when, as happened, the tracks of two stags crossed in the forest. ‘The one we want is the stag who veered off to the right. He’s the better one,’ he told me quietly. ‘The other one is too thin.’
‘How do you know?’ I whispered, for the size of the tracks looked the same to me.
Edgar made me kneel on the ground and sight along the second line of tracks. ‘See anything different?’ he asked.
I
shook my head.
‘Observe the pattern of the slots’ - this was his name for the hoof marks - ‘you can see the difference between the fore and back feet, and how this stag was running. His hind feet strike the ground in front of the marks made by his fore feet, and that means he is thin. A well-fed, fat stag is too big in the body for his legs to over-reach in this way.’
It was on one of these scouting trips into the forest that Edgar came close to treating me with deference, a far cry from his earlier harassment. He was, as I had noted, someone who believed deeply in signs and portents and the hidden world which underlies our own. I did not find this strange, for I had been trained in these beliefs through my education in the Elder Faith. In some sacred matters Edgar and I had much in common. He respected many of my Gods, though under slightly different names. Odinn, my special God, he knew as Wotan; Tiw was his name for Tyr the War God, as I had noted; and red-bearded Thor he referred to as Thunor. But Edgar had other gods too, and many of them were entirely new to me. There were elves and sprites, Sickness Gods and Name Gods, House Gods and Weather Gods, Water Gods and Tree Gods, and he was forever making little signs or gestures to placate them, sprinkling a few drops of soup on the flames of the fire, or breaking off a supple twig to twist into a wreath and lay on a mossy stone.
On the day in question we were moving quietly through beech forest on the trail of a promising stag, when his slots led us to a quiet glade among the trees. In the centre of the glade stood a single, great oak tree, very ancient, its trunk half rotten and moss-speckled. At the base of the oak someone had built a low wall of loose stones. Coming closer I saw that the wall protected the mouth of a small well. Edgar had already picked up a small stone and now he took it across to the trunk of the tree and pushed it into a crevice in the bark. I saw other stones tucked away here and there, and guessed that this was a wishing tree.
‘Newly married couples come to ask for babies,’ Edgar said. ‘Each stone represents their desire. I thought a stone put there might help to bring my daughter back.’ He gestured to the well itself. ‘Before girls marry they come here too, and drop a straw down into the well, to count the bubbles that rise. Each bubble represents one year before they find their husband.’
His remark touched a raw spot in my feelings. I broke off a twig and leaned over to drop it into the well. Not far below, I could see the dark reflection of the black water. My wish, of course, was not to know my marriage date, but when I would next see Aelfgifu, for I had been pining for her and did not know why I had not heard from her. On every possible occasion I had taken the chance to go from Edgar’s cottage up to the burh in the hopes of glimpsing her. But always I had been disappointed.
Now, as I leaned forward over the well, and before I dropped the twig, something happened which was totally unforeseen.
Since I was six or seven, I have known I am one of those few people who are gifted with what others call the second sight. My Irish mother had been famous for it and I must have inherited it from her. From time to time I had experienced strange presentiments, intuitions and out-of-body sensations. I had even seen the spirits of those who were dead or the shadows of those about to die. These experiences were random, unexpected. Sometimes months and even years would pass between one occurrence and the next. A wise woman in Orkney — herself the possessor of the sight — had diagnosed that I only responded to the spirit world when in the company of someone else who already had the power. She said that I was some sort of spirit mirror.
What happened next proved her wrong.
As I leaned over to drop the twig, I looked down at the glint of black water and suddenly felt ill. At first I thought it was that sensation which comes when a person looks down from a great height, and feels as if he or she is falling and is overtaken by sudden faintness. But the surface of the inky pool was hardly more than an arm’s length away. My giddiness then changed to a numb paralysis. I felt an icy cold; a terrible pain shot through me, spreading to every part of my body, and I feared I was going to faint. My vision went cloudy and I wanted to retch. But almost as quickly my vision cleared. I saw again the silhouette of my head in the water below, framed by the rim of the well and the sky above it. But this time, as I watched, I saw — quite distinctly — the reflection of someone moving up behind me, holding something up in the air about to strike me, them a metallic flash, and I felt a terrible presentiment of fear.
At that moment I must have fainted away, because I came back to my senses with Edgar shaking me. I was lying on the ground beside the well. He was looking frightened.
‘What happened to you?’he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I had a seizure. I went somewhere else.’
‘Woden spoke to you?’ he asked, awe in his voice. ‘No. I heard nothing, only saw an attack. It was some sort of warning.’
Edgar helped me to my feet and guided me to a fallen log where I could sit down.
‘Here, rest for a while. Is that the first attack you have had?’
‘Like that one, yes.’ I replied. ‘I’ve had visions before, but never in a calm, quiet place like this. Only at times of stress or when I was in the company of a volva or seidrman.’
‘What are those?’ he asked.
‘It’s the Norse way of describing the women and men who communicate with the spirit world.’
Edgar understood immediately. ‘There’s a person like that over to the west, a good two days’ walk. An old woman. She too lives by a well. Takes a sip or two of the water, and when the mood is on her, goes into a trance. Some people call her a witch and the priests have cursed her. But often her prophecies come true, though no one else would drink the water from this well. It gives you a bad gut if you do, and there’s something mysterious about the well itself. The waters suddenly gush up and overflow as a warning that a dreadful catastrophe will occur. The last time that happened was before Ashington Battle, when the Danes defeated our men.’
‘Were you there?’ I asked, still feeling faint.
‘Yes,’ Edgar replied, ‘with the Saxon levies and armed with my hunting bow. It was useless. We were betrayed by one of our own leaders and I was lucky to get away with my life. If the waters of the well had been able to warn us about traitors, I would have slit his throat for him, for all that he was an ealdor-man.’
I hardly heard what Edgar was saying because, as my head cleared, I was trying to puzzle out what could have caused my vision.
Then, in a sudden flash of comprehension, I understood: I was sensitive to the spirit world not only when in the company of someone who also possessed the second sight, but
by
place.
If I found myself where the veil between the real world and the spirit world is thin, then I would respond to the presence of mysterious forces. Like a wisp of grass which bends to the unseen wind, long before a human feels it on his skin, I would pick up the emanations of the otherworld. The realisation made me uneasy because I feared that I had no way of knowing whether I was in such a sacred place before another vision overcame me.
It was a week
after my vision in the forest and Edgar was in high good humour. ‘South wind and a cloudy sky proclaim a hunting morning,’ he announced, prodding me with the toe of his shoe as I lay half-asleep among my blanket in the corner of his cottage. He was very fond of his proverbs.
