Wayward Heroes Read online

  A man who is doomed to hang and waits only to be hoisted on the gallows-tree can no longer envision bloom-bearing life – in his eyes, it is all the vainest abomination. Nor did Þorgeir Hávarsson acknowledge in the least the presence of the woman whose loft he had entered, but said instead to her lover: “Here,” said he, “have I come, Þormóður, to call on you – with a ship.”

  Þormóður replied: “So many bright days this summer did I spend waiting for you, that I find it hard to see why we should sail through foul storms on winter nights. Yet I will not go back on my word and oath to you. Tell me your will, and skald shall follow hero as of old.”

  Þorgeir said: “Many a dim night have I gotten to my feet while others slept, brandished my weapons and bit my shield-rim in uncontrollable longing for the glory that is won by slaying men and ruling the world, or being slain to great renown. Here at last is a ship. I have repaired it myself for the most part, for lack of funds to pay smiths, and I have hired a crew of vagrants to sail with us to win fame. Now I would have us sail to the Jökulfirðir and along Hornstrandir and kill all who say they are not afraid of us. When that is done, we will be free to do as we please in the north. I have heard tell that in those parts dwells a great warrior named Butraldi Brúsason, who has spread word that he fears no man and will not stop until he has felled every swaggerer and swellhead in the Vestfirðir. I am convinced this warrior poses us no small danger while he is alive, and I advise setting out this very night to find him, arouse his hostility, and fight with him to the bitter end, taking no rest until we have won the victory from him, and showing everyone how mighty we are.”

  Þórdís butted in: “What great folly to choose to sail by night in precarious weather, only to hunt down outlawed thieves up north in Hornstrandir, wreck your vessel and be eaten by fish, rather than dwell in present bliss.”

  Þormóður girded his breeches, saying: “Men do not become skalds and heroes by dwelling in their present bliss. The saga of us sworn brothers will never be told if I dally at your side this night.”

  The girl went up to Þorgeir Hávarsson and walloped the champion’s ear. “Trolls take you!” said she. “Your fame will be greatest the day you are ripped apart by dogs and ravens.”

  Þorgeir gave a little laugh, without looking at the girl.

  Finally, Þormóður said to her: “It is for love that I have traversed this mountain to you. Yet as much joy as our trysts have brought me this many a night, I love you the most the night that I leave you.”

  12

  ÞORMÓÐUR ASKED NOTHING further, but walked with his sworn brother Þorgeir to the boat. The snowsquall had passed, but a bank of grim clouds seethed on the horizon. The sea swelled as the moon shone on rime-caked islets and reefs. Awaiting them at their destination was an average-sized fishing boat that rocked back and forth on the breakers, having little ballast. Aboard it stood weathered men with frozen beards and eyebrows, knocking ice off the sail yards and ropes. Þorgeir presented the crew to his comrade: first there was a father and son from down south in Kjalarnes – homeless men who hired themselves to farmers for their keep. Also from the south was a thief, Tjörvi by name, whose life was bereft of the protection of law. Þorgeir’s fourth crewman was named Oddi – called Lúsoddi, for his lice – he was a man of little wits, who, for most of his life, had been dependent on his impoverished mother at Akranes, but had started begging door to door by the time Þorgeir hired him.1

  Þorgeir addressed these men as follows:

  “This man is my sworn brother, Þormóður Bessason. He owns half this ship and everything aboard it. He is a greater skald than any other now living in the Vestfirðir. You are to heed his commands and prohibitions as though they were my own, for we stand as one in everything. Now drink your fill of the whale-oil keg, and then we shall sail west round Rytagnúpur and keep to sea until we come north to Aðalvík. I have heard rumor from there of the blustering of the man who calls himself the greatest warrior in the Vestfirðir, Butraldi Brúsason. We shall attack him and kill him.”

  The crew thought Þorgeir had spoken most manfully, and they heeded his orders. Þorgeir took the helm as soon as they left the lee of the land, and Þormóður acted as skipper. There was a crosswind, and they spread the sail and tacked hard. The boat bounded over the waves, but heeled drastically and shipped water to leeward, while the crew all bailed as best they could.

  They had not sailed very long before a black snowsquall hit them, with fierce gales and churning waves that thrashed the boat and pelted it with spray hard as gravel. Þormóður reefed the sail and let the boat run before the wind. It was dark as pitch around them, and the frenzied storm wrenched all control from their hands. The strakes and ribs cracked, water poured in time and again, and most cargo that was loose flew overboard. Only the bailing pails in the hands of the crew had anything to say, and no one knew which would come first: whether the boat would sink or be smashed.

  When they caught a glimpse of the sky once more, and the tiniest whiff of moonlight, they found themselves west of Snæfjallaströnd, near the peak Geirsfjall. Above them glinted a spray-lashed, ice-coated cliff face.

  They worked hard to hold their craft clear of the cliff to avoid wrecking it, before attempting to beat northwest to open sea and push round Rytagnúpur, yet were scarcely free of the final cliffs of Snæfjallaströnd when the sky blackened anew and the winds howled with fresh fury. This blizzard blew far longer than the first – and then their rudder snapped. Throughout the night they were tossed uncontrollably, until finally the waves slackened. When the clouds finally broke, snow-laden mountain ridges towered on both sides. Þorgeir asked Þormóður whether he recognized these peaks.

  Þormóður said: “I do not believe things will worsen if we let ourselves be borne for a time on our present course. Yet little did I think that I would glimpse these peaks tonight.”

  Soon afterward, the late-midmorning sky cleared enough for them to spy Orion’s three milkmaids.2 They were now some distance up a narrow fjord that had but scant foreshore and mountains towering at its end, their precipitous faces hung with menacing crags, blue and naked, shoals at their base and a river running to the sea. They caught the odor of cowsheds and smoke from a human dwelling. They made land, and hauled their vessel ashore. Naught remained of the few valuables they had but the oil-keg, which was lashed astern, and the weapons that they had strapped to themselves.

  Þorgeir asked his sworn brother if he still thought he knew where they might be.

  “I would be farther off than I thought,” said Þormóður, “if that jutting mountain there is none other than Gýgjarsporshamar Crag, where tracks of ogresses can be read on the rock, and the fjord itself, Hrafnsfjörður, the innermost of the Jökulfirðir fjords. I have often beheld these regions in my dreams.”

  “Then we have strayed to a foul spot,” says Þorgeir, “for our last-resort landing. It is clear that our comrades have little spirit left for sailing, and besides, our mast is broken, our sail gone, and our rudder in pieces.”

  The voyage had left the entire crew cold, drenched, and spent, and their clothing hard blocks of ice. The lad from Kjalarnes was so exhausted he could barely walk, and his father was frostbitten – both were sorely in need of relief. The sky was tinted with the first flush of dawn, but it was still a long time until sunrise. A little farther down the fjord they found a farmstead, where no one was stirring yet. Þorgeir asked his sworn brother to go to the window and wake those inside. Þormóður replied:

  “You are our leader. It is you who shall wake them, and bid them the gods’ good fortune. But if in your venture you prove unsuccessful, by all means call on me.”

  Þorgeir went to one of the windows and shouted that there were visitors outside, and that those inside were to open the door.

  A woman asked who went there.

  “Champions and warriors,” said Þorgeir.

  “So you are not men of peace?” asked the woman.

  “I hope that we will never
commit such a howling offense as to sue for peace with others,” said Þorgeir. “We yield to none.”

  “What do you ask of us?” said the woman.

  “We ask nothing of anyone,” said Þorgeir. “But we would have food to eat and fire to thaw our clothes and a place to sleep. If you will not give us these, then send out a man or two worthy enough to do battle with us.”

  The woman replied: “It has hardly been the custom here in the fjords for wet, weary men to fight against farmers for bed and board. What a foolish man you are! What is your name?”

  “It is I, Þorgeir Hávarsson,” he said, “along with my company. We challenge every man of any mettle here in the fjords to come and fight us.”

  Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld then said: “Now it is my turn, brother.”

  He went to the window and bade them good fortune by gods and men.

  “Who goes there?” said the woman.

  “None other than I, Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld,” declared the visitor. “And I know for certain that there are women here in the Jökulfirðir that have heard this name.”

  Upon his speaking these words, the door opened, and there on the threshold stood a woman, with a blue mantle tossed over her shoulders. This woman had large eyes and dark brows, and emanated more warmth than other women. She opened her arms to Skald Þormóður, kissed him tenderly, and bade him and his band welcome to her home, for as long or short a time as they wished. She had awaited this moment so long, she said, that she had nearly lost hope of its coming – but now the men of theirs that were frostbitten or helpless must be borne in, and life restored to those who were at death’s door. They had ended up at the dwelling of Mistress Kolbrún in Hrafnsfjörður. Slave Loðinn went out to tend to the livestock, without greeting the visitors.

  “Now it makes sense, brother,” said Þorgeir, “why you were eager to steer toward the fjords, when we should have sailed deep off the headlands. Farthest from my mind when we left behind Borgarfjörður was calling at women’s knees in the west.”

  “The only way,” said Þormóður, “for your saga to last longer, brother, was for me to lie about our course when we were pressed hardest.”

  Þorgeir said: “While we are here, we shall rule this farm, and ask nothing of women.”

  “That is good news,” said Mistress Kolbrún. “Too long have my daughter and I lived widows’ lives here, ridiculed by most. I am glad to have visitors of manly mien, both to delight us and to avenge the provocations that we have had to endure from wicked men.”

  The sworn brothers now entered the house there in Hrafnsfjörður, dragging their bone-weary comrades with them. Fires were lit in the hall and they were given fresh clothing, while their wet garments were hung to dry. Kettles were brought out, meat was boiled, and porridge was heated, and the exhausted men gradually revived. They began wiping down their weapons, cleansing them of rust and salt. Then the men were shown to their beds.

  It was late in the day when Þorgeir woke up. The weather had worsened again, with freezing snowsqualls. Þorgeir woke his men and told them that they had not been hired to sprawl on their bellies deep in the fjords – awaiting them elsewhere was seemlier work. The mistress said that the weather was foul, and that they need not put themselves at risk. They were more than welcome to linger there with her, she said – the longer, the better.

  Þorgeir said that the weather was the least of their concerns – they cared little whether others called it foul or fair. “Neither frost nor tempest can hurt us, for we have no wives, children, or beasts to tend.”

  What with their boat being so battered and barely fit to float, besides being buried in snow in its shed on Skipeyri Point, and with the inner fjord slathered with ice, further sailing was out of the question. Þorgeir said that if the ice and freezing weather hindered their seafaring beyond any reasonable length of time, he and his men would hike over the mountains to Hornstrandir. She asked what he was planning to do there. Þorgeir said:

  “There is a man named Butraldi, a great champion. He has spread word that he flinches before no man. He makes his abode in Hornstrandir. I will attack him and kill him. I have vowed to slay any man who thinks himself as valiant as I.”

  She asked what would come next.

  Þorgeir said that when champions and other men of moment in the north were all dead, he and his sworn brother would be free to take whales and other great catches on Hornstrandir.

  Mistress Kolbrún laughed and said: “What peculiar men you are, wanting to hunt down wretched outlaws on Hornstrandir and flense whales, when there is more valiant work much nearer.”

  They asked what work that was.

  “It seems to me more valiant,” said the mistress, “to kill free strongmen in human habitations – those who oppress widows and other poor folk – than to chase after derelicts or cut apart whales.”

  They asked whom she meant.

  She replied: “Across the fjord at Sviðinsstaðir live a farmer named Ingólfur and his son Þorbrandur. They have made their farm on a shelf of Lónanúpur Peak. These men graze their cows and sheep on my land, though they have their own scrap of moor on the mountain above. And they pull heaps of skate, flounder, and plaice from the water within a line’s cast of my homefield.”

  Þorgeir said: “We do not deem it death-worthy for a man to make his living, as long as he is inferior and likely to fear us.”

  The mistress says: “I have neglected to say what we women suffer worst from men: something against which, by nature, we have no defense – and now I am speaking to you, Þormóður, who have made me a lay greater than any woman in the Vestfirðir has ever been granted, and which was so well delivered that if a kinsman of mine had been my defender, you would have lost your life for it long before. As it happens, Farmer Ingólfur of Sviðinsstaðir laid me in his bed for a grievous moment last Yule, after he and his son found my daughter and me in tears at our bereavement and lack of ale, when we had not a drop to gladden us. He has kept up with this new habit of his and refuses to desist – and his son Þorbrandur has dishonored my daughter. Both she and I are wearied and worn from putting up for so long with such an abominable affront and abasement.”

  As Kolbrún concluded, Slave Loðinn laughed in the doorway. She said to the slave: “I will never love you, you poltroon, so much that I put weapons in men’s hands to kill you. Be gone from the sight of us free folk!”

  Þorgeir turned his gaze to his sworn brother, as if asking what solution he might have for this matter.

  Þormóður said: “Clearly, a woman so valiant should never have to endure the tyranny of wicked men for too long. She absolutely does not deserve for us to refuse to deal with these two, or to delay in doing so. It is time this woman saw our mettle in more than just poetry.”

  “On your feet, lads, and repay the mistress’s hospitality,” said Þorgeir Hávarsson. They stood up, took their weapons, and went out.

  13

  THEY REACHED Sviðinsstaðir late that evening, after all there were sleeping. Not far up the mountain, the farm hunkered on a shelf that dropped sheer to the sea. A low wall encircled the buildings. Up beneath the mountain’s eaves trickled rivulets now swollen with ice. Þormóður went to a window and wished the household peace and plenty. Someone inside asked who went there and what business they had.

  Þorgeir Hávarsson spoke thus: “At your door are the sworn brothers Þorgeir Hávarsson and Þormóður Bessason. We have come here to challenge you to fight with us, for we have heard that you are doughty men. We will kill you, and when you are dead, we will take away your cattle and carry off on your horses what chattels we can find. Defend yourselves stoutly now, while you still have your lives.”

  The person inside asked if there was any hope of them suing for mercy from the two warriors.

  Þorgeir said no. “We have trusty report,” said he, “that you lavish amorous attention on certain women in the neighborhood, and graze your livestock on their land without having proposed marriage to them. Th
ey will no longer put up with such an affront.”

  Farmer Ingólfur replied that neither he nor his son would beg for their lives, since life was of little worth when it was granted by wicked men. He declared that they would die here willingly, weapons in hand, if that were verdict of the Norns, and fall at the feet of their two barren cows and the stack of skate they had curing in the muckheap for winter food stores – these being their only possessions. As far as women’s love went, he said that it was better to trust a sick calf or a coiled snake, as the old saying went – women are most inclined toward a man on the day that they bring about his downfall and death. The father and his son then put on their clothes, took their spears, and went to the door. They had two servants, one a slave, and the other decrepit with age. These two crawled out through the ash-hole, the old man with a cudgel in hand, ready to rain blows on Þorgeir’s men – while the slave ran off up the mountain, unwilling to fight. When the farmer and his son tried to go out, the sworn brothers blocked the doorway and jabbed their weapons through it, until a sudden rage seized them and they thrust and hacked their way in, to feel warm blood splashing onto their faces. Soon father and son were slumped by the wall, a whistling coming from deep wounds to their chests. The sworn brothers swung away with their swords at the men’s bodies until neither a groan nor a cough could be gotten from them.

  Þormóður and Þorgeir called to their men and told them that Ingólfur and his son Þorbrandur were dead, and that the others there should be given quarter. The old man had been overcome, and the slave was up on the mountain. The moon shone. The sworn brothers dragged out the corpses, which were now just one big clot of blood. They laid the men on the slates before the door and marked them for Óðinn according to ancient custom, treating them carefully and solemnly. They placed the old man a good distance from his master and left him unconsecrated to the gods, but no sooner were the visitors gone than the old man stood up – alive – and grabbed his cudgel. Just as the old man rose, the slave returned from the mountain.