The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

A heavy swell running and
Sea Cow
wallowed through it, not so much like her namesake as like a farrowing sow. Bjarni had forgotten how different the motion of the broad-bellied merchantman was from that of the slim Barra longships he had grown used to in the past two years, but it was last night’s ale partly, and with it the cold shock of all that had blown up like storm out of a clear sky, that had given him today’s queasy belly and splitting head, though it was only the ale that he blamed. He crouched against the bulwark, Hugin stretched beside him, his left forepaw lashed up like a small blood-stained pudding in dirty rags. Sometimes Hugin tried to bite the pudding and Bjarni would put out his own foot to thrust the dog’s muzzle aside.
    He was going over last night in his mind, not remembering very clearly through a haze of ale and firelight and the dark and levin-flash of storm. Faces crowded in on him, Onund’s face, Thara’s and the drugged face of the Priest her father; faces of the men striving to drag Hugin away, the faces of his fellow ship-carles turned into the faces of troubled strangers.And again, Onund’s face as he wiped his sword blade. A chill spatter of spindrift in his face brought him back to the present, and the sickness in his belly twisted itself into a sudden hard knot pressing up behind his breast bone. He dragged himself up, leaned over the side, and threw up like the veriest landlubber on his first sea-faring.
    Putting up his hand to wipe the back of it across his mouth when the heaving was over, he found the string of amber swinging forward through the neck of his leather jerkin, and wished that he had flung it at Onund’s feet – foot – last night, even as he gathered it up to thrust it back inside. But whether the thought made him harshly clumsy, or the thing happened by chance, the cord snapped and suddenly the honey globules were purling down through his fingers into the long green trough of the swell. Gone like the Barra years, the years that he had been Onund’s man. He opened his hand and found that a single bead was left, lodged between two of his fingers. For an instant he thought to keep it, thought maybe he was meant to keep it. Then he parted his fingers and let it go after the rest.
    Someone had come lurching up, and was beside him. For a short while they gazed out together on the heaving skyline. Then Heriolf Merchantman said, ‘This is the second time. And the dog this time also. Have a care that you do not find yourself living in a circle and getting nowhere.’
    It was said half in jest, but something in the words struck home to Bjarni all the same. He had had such dreams at the outset; stupid, boy’s dreams of carving a path for himself with his sword. He might as well have dreamed of becoming Emperor of Byzantium. But it seemed all the time other men were laying his course for him: Dublin and the King’s bodyguard,Heriolf beside him here. The nearest he had come to choosing his own seaway was the night he had sold his sword-service to Onund Treefoot. But now Onund had cast him out.
    ‘Why did he do it?’ he demanded.
    ‘Do what?’
    ‘Everything – I don’t know – lame Hugin – throw me out?’
    ‘For the first,’ said Heriolf, ‘it was the quick and sure way to save him from Asmund. When the wound is healed it will but take the edge off his speed. In some lands they do it to dogs to stop them chasing the king’s deer. Would you rather have had him hanging from the god’s tree with the corbies and the black-backed gulls pulling at his carcass? For the second, he will have trouble enough to make his own peace, with the priest kind, without you on hand to make the thing yet harder. For the third – how long think you it would have been, after last night’s work, before death, disguised as the wrath of the gods, came upon you?’
    ‘I had not thought of that,’ Bjarni said after a silence filled with all the voices of a ship at sea; he found an odd