Tim Severin - Sworn Brother

Here I paused to draw breath before reciting:

'It is better to live than to lie a corpse,

I saw flames rise before a rich man's pyre

and before his door he lay dead.'

Kjartan saw his chance. He quoted the next verse for me.

'The lame rides a horse,

the handless is herdsman

The deaf in battle is bold

No good can come of a corpse.'

A low mutter of approval came from the crowd, and a voice from the back shouted, 'Forget about Thorkel. Odinn had other plans for him. I'm all for the accepting Knut's silver.'

One by one, the members of the council spoke up and all were in favour of Kjartan's proposition. Only Thrand failed to speak. He sat there silent, and on his face was the same distant expression that I had seen while he gazed into the ship's wake and thought of the defeat at Hjorunga Bay.

As the assembly began to dissolve, Kjartan took me aside to thank me. 'Your speech made all the difference,' he said. 'Without it, the men would not have committed themselves to fight for Knut.' Then he smiled. 'With my wooden leg, I liked the bit about the lame being able to ride a horse. But I'm not sure that when I get back to London I should tell Gisli One Hand that, according to you and Odinn, he should become a cowherd.'

'It was All-Father Odinn who spoke through me and swayed the minds of the audience,' I replied. What I did not tell Kjartan was that, after a month in Jomsburg, I knew that the new order of Jomsviking could never resemble the felag Thrand had known. The new Jomsvikings were driven by their thirst for silver, not glory, and in the end they would have accepted Knut's bribe whatever Thrand had said. By citing the High One, I had given Thrand a reason to accept their decision with no loss to his own sense of honour or duty to his fallen comrades.

We were summoned to earn our fifteen marks of silver early in September. Knut moved against the forces massing to oppose him, and sent a messenger to tell the Jomsvikings to join his fleet, now on its way from England. His messenger slipped into our citadel disguised as a Saxon trader because Knut's enemies already lay between us and the man whose pay we had taken. To the west of Jomsburg a great Norwegian force was raiding Knut's Danish territories, while their allies, the Swedes, were harrying the king's lands in Skane across the Baltic Sea. This left the felag dangerously isolated and our council met to discuss how best we should respond. After much debate it was decided to send two shiploads of volunteers, the most experienced warriors, to run the gauntlet and join the king. The rest of the Jomsvikings, fewer than a hundred men, would remain to garrison the citadel against any enemy attack.

'Stay and complete your training,' Thrand advised me. He was packing his war gear into the greased leather bag which also served as his sleeping sack while on campaign. As one of the most experienced fighters in the felag, he had been appointed second in command of one of the two ships in our little expeditionary force. My speech in defence of Thorkel the Tall at the assembly seemed to have done no damage to our friendship, though Thrand was so taciturn that it was difficult to tell what he was thinking.

'I've already volunteered to join the expedition,' I told him. 'If I'm to take Knut's silver, then I feel I ought to earn it. Besides, our battle drills are becoming very repetitive.'

'As you wish,' said Thrand. He slid his sword halfway out of its scabbard to check the blade for rust, and then carefully eased it back into the sheath. The scabbard was lined with unwashed sheep wool, the natural oils in the fleece protecting the metal from decay. As an added precaution he began to wind a linen strip around the hilt to seal the gap where the blade entered the scabbard. He paused from the work and looked up.

'Be warned: Knut wants the Jomsviking as warriors in his line of battle. That is what you have trained for. But if it comes to a sea action, all that training is next to useless. There's no chance for the swine array or shield walls. Ship fights are close up and brutal. Most of the engagement is pitiless and chaotic, with a good deal of luck as to who emerges the victor.'

That afternoon I went to the armoury to withdraw my weaponry for the expedition. When I had been a new recruit, the crippled armourer had been casual, issuing me with a mail shirt in need of repair and the weapons that were closest to hand. This time, knowing that I was going into action, he took greater care, and I emerged from the armoury with a helmet that fitted me properly and a byrnie of a new design. Attached to the helmet was a small curtain of mail that hung across my lower face, protecting my throat. He also produced for me a good sword with an inlaid metal handle, two daggers, half a dozen javelins, an ash spear and a round limewood shield, as well as a short-handled battleaxe. When I stacked this assortment of weaponry on the ground beside Thrand, he commented, 'if I were you, I would change the grip on that sword. Wrap that showy metalwork with tarred cord so that your hand does not slip when your palm gets sweaty. And you'll need a second shield.'

'A second shield?'

'Every man brings a second shield. Nothing fancy, just a light wooden disc. They'll be arranged along the side of the vessel — there's a special slot along the upper strake to hold them — and they'll make a fine display. In my experience much of warfare is decided by appearances. Strike fear into your enemy by how you look or act before the first blow and you've won half the battle.'

A spoked wheel with alternating fields of red, black and white was the pattern that the council chose for our insignia, and I had to admit it looked imposing when the shields were set in place. They gave our two ships a professional air, though a trained eye would have noted that the vessels, like the Jomsviking harbour, were antiquated and in a poor repair. The two drakkar, longships of medium size, were all that now remained of a Jomsviking fleet of thirty vessels, the great majority of which had been sunk or captured in Earl Haakon's time. These two survivors were leaky and their timbers were suspect. The felag's shipwrights had struggled to make them seaworthy, caulking seams and applying a thick layer of black pitch to the outside of the hulls. But the deck planks were warped and cracked, and there were splits and shakes in the masts. Fortunately the Jomsburg lowlands grew flax so we were able to obtain new sails and rigging at short notice. But nothing could hide the fact, as we set out on a bright and crisp September day, that our two vessels were unhandy and slow, and their sixty-man crews were badly out of practice as sailors.

A fully manned drakkar offers little comfort to her crew. By the time we had loaded aboard all our weapons and equipment, the spaces between the sea chests which served as our oar benches were so crammed with gear that there was very little room to move about. Our only gangway was a walkway of planks, laid along the middle of the vessel to connect the small platform in the bows of the drakkar with the stern deck, where our captain stood. He was a squat thug of a man, a Jute who had lost one eye in a minor skirmish and the wound made him look like a bandit. Indeed, as I glanced round at my companions with their diversity of homelands and racial features, I thought they looked more like a pirate crew than a trained fighting unit. The truth was that we were hired mercenaries, setting out for money and the chance of loot — I wondered how long our discipline and our loyalty to the felag would last.

Our inexperience showed in the chaos of our embarkation. We found our places about the drakkars, unlashed the oars from their stowage and fitted them to the thole straps. Men took practice pulls with their oars to test their length and find their own best position. Unless they were careful, they knocked into their neighbours or struck the man sitting directly in front, hitting him in the back with the loom of the oar. There were oaths and angry grumbling in several languages and it was some time before our captain was able to order the lines to be cast off. Our drakkars pulled slowly out of the harbour, their oars moving to an uneven beat as though we were two crippled insects.