Read The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson for Free Online

accordingly. A whole silver coin with a king’s head and three ears of corn embossed on it, these had cost, but Bjarni knew that they would be worth it; they were his second pair.
    Now he was on his way back to the settlement with them tucked into his belt. But there was no hurry. It was good up here. Beside him Hugin thumped his tail, head alertly up into the wind. It was over a year since he had followed Bjarni out of Dublin, and he had grown and fleshed out into a big powerful hound,black as midnight save for some white hairs under his chin, and still those surprisingly light amber-coloured eyes.
    Bjarni, his hand rubbing behind the pricked black ears, let his mind drift back over the time, to the Hearth Hall of Evynd the Easterner. ‘I have no lord to follow,’ he had said to Onund Treefoot. ‘I can handle an oar, and my sword is for hire; I am your man.’
    And Onund Treefoot had looked him up and down as a man looks over a horse he is minded to buy, and agreed, ‘You are my man.’
    It had meant leaving Hugin behind along with Sven Gunnarson for the three months’ summer sea-faring. But when at summer’s end they had returned for Sven, whose arm had mended somewhat out of shape but as strong as ever it had been, they had picked up Hugin too, out of the dog pack. Bjarni had earned that, and had the hands to prove it; hands that had blistered on the oarloom and grown red-raw when the blisters burst and healed over into thickened and calloused skin that marked him for a seasoned rower.
    Another sea-faring summer since then. Merchant runs – not the long open-sea runs down as far as Spain for slaves and spices from the Saracen traders, but coastwise and island-hopping with salt and hides; once north as far as Orkney with farm-slaves for Jarl Sigurd. He remembered lying off the Great Head waiting for the right stage of the tide that they might slip through from the Pentland Firth without falling foul of the roaring, down-sucking turmoil of the whirlpool there, the Eater of Ships, the Widow-maker. He remembered the tide races between a score of islands, the storms and the occasional calms. He remembered the land journey with Evynd against a flare-up of three native Irish kings and the Danish war-bandsthey had brought in to help them. A southward raid on their own account upon the Danish settlements on the Welsh coast.
    Onund and Thrond, Aflaeg and Thormod Shaff, sometimes hunting in couples, more often running their longships together as a fleet. Three who had come west-over-seas together, to be done with King Harald Finehair: one, Aflaeg, who was on Barra already, a friend from earlier raiding days, older than the rest and of mixed breeding so that the Isles were already in his blood. Maybe that was why in land matters he took the lead; why it was he who sat in the High Seat in Hall when the others gathered from their steadings in the settlements round about, and had the last word as to the time for barley sowing or the start of the seal hunt, while in all matters to do with sea-faring, it was Onund Treefoot, without argument, who was the Sea-King, the ship chief over them all.
    Away between the islands the sea was changing colour with the turn of the tide, and his belly told him that it was time to be getting back for the evening meal. Bjarni rolled over and sat up, and remained a few moments with narrowed eyes gazing across the shining water toward the west. No more islands that way, only emptiness until one fell off the edge of the world – unless one came upon those other islands that Aflaeg’s harper sang of sometimes, the islands beyond the sunset, the lands of the ever young . . .
    Meanwhile, the surf was going down, the pale feather of a new moon was in the sky, and he was hungry. He drew his legs under him and scrambled to his feet, Hugin leaping up beside him. Together they started back towards the settlement. Down from the high bare rock and grassland of the mountain shoulder into the lower country of