The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson Read Online Free Page B

The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson
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was making his way up the sandy track that looped inland through the furze, Bjarni, following with the rest, returned to the subject. ‘Why Treefoot?’
    ‘Why Treefoot?’ somebody said, clearly surprised at his ignorance.
    ‘Seems an odd name.’
    ‘Lost a leg in battle, to Harald Finehair,’ Heriolf said. ‘Six – seven years since, that would be.’
    ‘And he still goes sea-faring?’ It seemed an unlikely way of life for a one-legged man.
    ‘Well enough, with a leg of good stout oak-wood under him.’
    ‘It must be chancy on a pitching deck?’ Bjarni half questioned.
    And Heriolf laughed. ‘There’s always somebody’s shoulder to grab.’
    The track lifted over a low furze-grown ridge, and there ahead of them rose the Hall of Evynd the Easterner, its high, antlered gable-end catching the last of the stormy sunlight against the murk of the mountains northward, though already the lower buildings clustered about it were swallowed up in the coming night.
    Later, with the evening meal inside him, his eyes full of torchlight and his ears full of harp-song, Bjarni sat with Heriolf and his men on the guest bench at thefoot of the great Hearth Hall, and felt that life was good. Soon, maybe in the morning, he would take his sword to Evynd the Easterner. There must be room for another sword, always room for another sword, among the seamen and fighting men who kept the coastwise lands of Northern Ireland against the raids and river-farings of the Viking kind.
    He looked at the big dark-haired man with a noble paunch on him who sat in the High Seat, midway up the Hall, and wondered what sort of lord he would be to follow. A giver of gold? Surely a giver of gold by the look of him, and by the glint of the yellow metal on fine weapons and arm-rings that showed among the men around him. The two who sat nearest to him, also, were men worth looking at; the one, younger and less paunchy than Evynd, but clearly of the same blood, was Thrond his brother, ship chief of the second galley on the keel-strand. The other was built altogether on lighter and swifter lines, with hair like a fox’s pelt growing low onto his forehead, thick, upward-quirking brows, and a mouth which Bjarni judged could look kind or cruel as the mood took him. ‘Loki might look like that,’ he thought; Loki the God of Fire, who could warm your hearth or burn the roof over your head, also as the mood took him. The man’s legs were lost among the smoky shadows under the trestle table, but even if he had not been told, Bjarni would have known him at once by the kinship between him and the dragon-head of his galley.
    ‘Always they hunt in couples, those two, Thrond and Onund,’ Erik of the
Sea Cow’s
crew had said earlier as they bent their heads together over a shared bowl of pigmeat. ‘You wouldn’t think that the first time the foxy one beached on this strand, ten yearpast that’d be, that Evynd was all for pitching him back into the sea.’
    ‘Why was that, then?’
    ‘Evynd’s woman is daughter to an Irish king. Barra in the Outer Isles was part of his territory until Onund and his friends drove him out of it and took the island for their own living place. Therefore Evynd had small love for Onund, until Thrond, they do say, made some sort of peace between his brother and his foxy friend.’
    ‘Gossip, gossip, gossip like an old fisherwife,’ Heriolf had said, overhearing. ‘That is threadbare history; and I’m thinking Evynd Easterner would be feeling the lack, these days, if he couldna’ call on yon pirate and his war-keels from Barra when he had the need of them.’
    Now the food was done, and Evynd’s flame-haired woman who was daughter to an Irish king had risen and swept the other women after her from the cross-benches at the end of the Hall, away to their own quarters. The trestle boards had been taken down, and many of the younger men were sprawling at their ease among the hounds beside the long hearths. Game-boards had been

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