Tim Severin - Sworn Brother

'Here,' Thrand said. 'Hold these.'

He sifted through his hoard, picking out the pieces for me to weigh as I told him how much I owed to each farmer. Once or twice, when he could not find a piece of silver that matched the sum, he took out his sword, laid a larger piece of silver on the table, and chopped off the correct weight. 'That's how we did it in the old days,' he commented, 'when we divided up the spoils. No bothering with coins; a mark of silver is just as good by weight as when it is stamped with a king's head.' Sometimes more so, I thought, remembering Brithmaer's forgeries.

I was tactful enough not to ask Thrand where he had acquired his treasure and said only, 'I give you my word that I will repay your generosity when I have the chance.'

In reply he said, 'This is a gift, Thorgils. It does me no good locked away here in a box,' and he quoted the Havamal again:

'If wealth a man has won for himself

Let him never suffer in need

Oft he saves for a foe what he plans for a friend

For much goes worse than we wish.'

When I had paid off the last of Grettir's victims, I decided it was time to pay a visit to my sworn brother. I had no idea where to find him, so I set off across the moors in the direction that he had taken when I had saved him from the angry farmers. As it turned out, Grettir saw me coming from a distance away. He had made his lair in a cave on high ground, from where he could keep a watch for the approach of strangers, and he came down the hillside to greet me. He led me back to his cave, the two of us scrambling up a near-vertical rock face to reach his home. He had hung a grey blanket across the entrance, the colour matching the rock so that you did not realise that the cave was there until you were a few paces away. Inside were a fireplace, a place to sleep, where he had laid out his leather sleeping sack, and a store of dried food. He took his drinking water from a small rill that drained at the foot of the cliff. When I commented on a pile of fist-sized rocks that he had stacked near the entrance of the cave, he explained that he had collected them to use as missiles. 'If anyone tries to storm the cave,' he said, 'there's only one approach, and that is straight up the cliff. I can keep them at bay for hours.'

I noticed a second leather sleeping sack, thrown in a heap on the far side of the cave. "Who does that belong to?' I asked.

'A man called Stuv Redbeard. He's an outlaw like myself. He's gone off to raid for food. He should be back soon.'

Redbeard returned that evening, carrying a shoulder of dried lamb and a bag of whey he had stolen from an unguarded shepherd's hut. From the moment that I laid eyes on Stuv Redbeard I was worried. There was a shiftiness about him which put me on my guard. When he left the cave for a moment, I took the chance to ask Grettir about him.

'How long have you known Stuv? Do you trust him?' I asked

'Not entirely,' Grettir replied. 'I know there are men who would kill me for the price on my head. Last autumn a man came to the moor and joined me, claiming to be an outlaw like myself and needing shelter. One night he crept up on me, thinking I was asleep. He had a dagger in his hand, and intended to stab me, but I awoke in time, and managed to grab the weapon from him. I made him confess that he was a professional killer, hoping to win my blood money from Thorir of Gard.'

'Thorir is offering twenty-four marks of silver for your head and Oxenmight's family have promised to match that sum for anyone who kills you,' I said. 'It's twice as much as the highest reward ever offered for the death of a skogarmadur.'

'Well, that night creeper didn't get to collect it,' Grettir said. 'I killed him with his own dagger, carried his body over to the nearest lake, weighed the corpse down with stones and dumped him in.'

'So why are you now taking the risk of sharing your lair with that Redbeard? He could also be after the reward money.'

'It's a risk I'm prepared to take,' Grettir replied. 'I make sure that I keep an eye on him, but I would rather have company, however suspect it might be, than live here out on the moors by myself. At least after sunset.'

I remembered that, for all his ferocity and reputation, Grettir was still mortally afraid of the dark. I knew it was useless to try to persuade him that his childish dread was putting his life in danger.

My fears were well-founded. Over the next few weeks I was rarely at my father-in-law's farm as I was spending most of my time on the moor. I brought Grettir regular deliveries of food and clothing, and the two of us would sit for hours at the entrance to the cave, looking out across the moor as I relayed to him news of what was happening in the outside world. Grettir's family and friends had been negotiating with Oxenmight's people in an attempt to settle their feud, and the two sides had agreed that the deaths of Oxenmight and Grettir's brother Atli should cancel each other out. Grettir's supporters even collected enough money to offer a heavy compensation to Thorir of Gard for the death of his sons. But Thorir refused to be placated. Nothing less than Grettir's death would satisfy him.

It was on one of these visits to carry supplies to Grettir that I found the cave unoccupied. It was a warm day and I guessed that he had gone to the nearby lake to bathe and wash his clothes. Leaving my parcel of food, I started off across the moor to find him. The lake lay on the far side of a low rise in the ground. As I came to the top of the slope, I found myself looking down on a shallow expanse of water fringed with reeds and with one or two small islands in the centre. From my vantage point I could see Grettir in the water, far out from the shoreline. Much closer to the bank was his fellow outlaw, Stuv Redbeard. Clearly they had both decided to go for a swim, stripped off their clothes and left them on the bank. I watched Redbeard wade out of the water, return to his pile of clothes and get dressed quickly. There was something about his hasty movements which was suspicious. I saw him pick up his sword, unsheathe it and then slink back to where he could crouch down among the reeds in ambush. The distance was too great for me to shout a warning to Grettir, who was now approaching the landing place. I saw him reach the shallows, stand up and begin to wade towards the bank, pulling at the reeds for support as his feet moved through the slippery lake bottom. He was naked and I realised that this was the moment that Redbeard had been waiting for, perhaps for months. He had Grettir at his mercy.

Even as I watched, I saw Redbeard suddenly rise up from his ambush and the flash of his blade as he slashed at Grettir. Grettir's reaction was astonishingly swift. He must have sensed the blow coming, for he flung himself backwards into the water with a tremendous splash, and the sword stroke missed. Redbeard immediately raised his sword for a second strike. But Grettir had disappeared. The ripples still spread out from where he had flung himself back into the water, and Redbeard stood poised, head thrust forward, watching for his prey to surface, his sword at the ready. He watched and watched, and both of us became increasingly puzzled as Grettir did not reappear. For a moment I wondered whether Grettir had been caught by the tip of the sword and drowned. It was too far for me to see whether there was any blood floating to the surface. The water of the lake was a dark peaty brown, and the only sign of the struggle was the broad patch of dirty yellow where Grettir's feet had disturbed the mud as he fell backwards. This opaque patch was my sworn brother's salvation. As time passed, Redbeard concentrated his gaze in that area.

Then I noticed the reeds quiver a short distance to Redbeard's left. From my vantage point I saw them bend and stir gently: their movement was tracing a line from the water's edge to where Redbeard was standing. I realised that Grettir must have swum underwater to the bank, hauled himself out and was stalking his prey. In his eagerness Redbeard stepped forward, wading up to his knees in the water, still holding his sword with the point downward, ready to stab. But now it was Redbeard who was edging into danger. He was facing the lake, ready to pounce, when Grettir burst from the reeds behind him. I was reminded of the way that the boar had charged from the thicket when I was hunting with Edgar in England. Once again the charging animal was lethal. Grettir, stark naked, flung himself out of the reeds and onto Redbeard's back. The force of the impact knocked Redbeard into the lake. I saw Grettir reach forward right-handed, and pluck the sword from his attacker's hand. Then with his left arm, Grettir spun Redbeard over in the water, and plunged the sword in the man's belly. By then I was running down the slope, heart pounding, until I slithered to a stop beside Grettir and clasped him to me. Redbeard's body lay face down where he had intended my sworn brother to die.