Tim Severin - Sworn Brother

The eyes were grey-blue, and I realised that I was looking into Allba's face. I was back on the deerskin, still seated.

'You have come back from the saivo,' said Rassa. 'You were there only a short time, but long enough to know how to return there if you wish.'

'It seemed very like our own world,' I said, 'only much larger and always just beyond reach, as though it withheld itself.'

'That is appearance only,' said the noaide. 'The saivo is full of spirits, the spirts of the dead as well as the spirits who rule our lives. By comparison our world is temporary and fragile. Our world is in the present, while the saivo is eternal. Those who travel into the saivo glimpse the forces that determine our existence, but only when those spirits wish to be seen. Those who visit the saivo regularly become accepted there and then the spirits reveal themselves.'

'Why should a bear smile?' I asked.

Opposite me Allba suddenly got to her feet and left the tent. Rassa did not answer. Without warning I felt dizzy and my stomach heaved. More than anything else, I wanted to lie down and close my eyes again. I could barely drag myself back to my sleeping place and the last thing I remembered was Rassa throwing a deerskin over me.

Snow fell almost daily now, heavy flakes drifting down through the trees and settling on the ground. Our hunters made repeated sweeps of the forest to lay out their wooden traps because the fur-bearing animals had grown their winter coats and were in their prime. The siida made one final move. It was laborious because our tents were now double- or triple-layered to keep out the cold and difficult to dismantle and we were hampered by our heavy winter clothing. We went to ground, quite literally. The siida had its midwinter camp in the lee of a low ridge, which gave shelter from the blizzards. Over the generations each family had dug itself a refuge, excavating the soft earthen side of the ridge, then covering the crater with a thick roof of logs and earth. The entrance to Rassa's cabin was little more than a tunnel, through which I crawled on hands and knees, but the place was surprisingly spacious once inside. I could stand upright and though the place was smoky from the small fire in the central hearth it was cosy. I admitted to myself that the thought of spending the next few months here with Allba was appealing. Rassa's wife had spread the floor with the usual carpet of fresh spruce twigs covered with deerskins, and had divided the interior into small cubicles by hanging up sheets of light cotton obtained from the springtime traders. The contrast with the squalid dugout where Grettir had died could not have been greater. I said so to Rassa and described how my sworn brother had met his end through a volva's malign intervention, with curse runes cut on a log.

'Had your sworn brother met with such an accident among the Sabme, injuring himself with that axe,' commented Rassa, 'we would have known that it was surely a staallu's doing. The staallu can disguise himself as an animal, a deer perhaps, and allows himself to be hunted down and killed. But when the hunter begins to cut up the animal to take its flesh and hide, the staallu turns the knife blade on the bone, so that the hunter cuts himself badly. If the hunter is far from his siida, he bleeds to death beside the carcass of his kill. Then the staallu returns to his normal shape, drinks the blood and feasts on the corpse of his victim.'

Allba, who was listening, gave a little scornful hiss. 'If I ever meet the staallu, he will regret the day. That's just a story to frighten children.'

'Don't be so sure, Allba. Just hope you never meet him,' her father murmured, then turning to me said, 'The staallu roams the forest. He's big and a bit simple and clumsy. We say he's like those coarse traders who come to acquire our furs in the springtime, though the staallu's appetite is even more gross. He eats human flesh when times are hard, and has been known to carry off Sabme girls.'

That same week I gave away the rest of the contents of my trader's pack. I had lost any ambition to barter with the members of the siida for furs and I was ashamed to hold back items which could be useful to the band. The Sabme were so generous and hospitable to me that it seemed wrong not to contribute my share to their well-being. Apart from mending nets and doing some primitive metalwork, I was useless to them, so I handed the pack over to Rassa and asked that he distribute the contents to whoever needed it most. The only item I kept back was the fire ruby — and that I gave to Allba as a love token. The jewel delighted her. She spent hours in the cabin, sitting by the fire with the ruby in her fingers and turning the gem this way and that so that the red light flickered within the gem. 'There is a spirit dancing inside the stone,' she would say. 'It is the spirit which brought you to me.'

The effect of giving away all my trade goods was the reverse of what I had expected — instead of ending my chances of obtaining furs to take to Miklagard, I was deluged with them. Nearly every day a hunter left outside Rassa's cabin the frost-stiffened carcass of an ermine, a sable, a squirrel or a white fox, whose luxurious pelt Allba would skin and prepare for me. There was no way of knowing which hunter was responsible for the gift. They came and went silently on their skis. Only the blizzards stopped them. When the blizzard spirit raged the entire siida would disappear inside their underground shelters and wait for the terrible wind and driving snow to end. Then, cautiously, the Sabme dug themselves out of the snow-covered lairs and, like the animals they hunted, sniffed the wind and set out to forage.

Of course we ate the flesh of the animals we skinned. Some were rank and disagreeable — marten and otter were particularly unpleasant. But squirrel was tasty and so too was beaver. Whatever meat was left over we placed in the little larders each Sabme family had built close to their cabin, a small hutch on a pole or set on top of a rock, so as it was out of reach of animals. The food never spoiled in the bitter cold. If a hunter was lucky enough to kill a wild boaz, he stored wooden bowls of the fresh deer's blood in the same place. Within hours it had frozen hard and could be chopped in pieces with an axe and brought within the cabin as required.

Rassa was called away by the spirits from time to time, though not always when he wanted. Without warning he would begin to twitch and writhe, then lose his balance and fall to the ground. If the spirit call was urgent, he foamed at the mouth. He had told us to press a rag into his mouth if his tongue lolled out, but not to restrain him if he was in spasms because, as his body writhed, his spirit was entering the saivo, and soon all would be calm. Rassa's family were accustomed to these sudden departures. They would lay the unconscious noiade comfortably on his face, place his drum beneath his outstretched right hand in case he had need of it in the saivo, and then await his return to our world. When Rassa did rejoin us, his mood depended on what he had experienced in his absence. Sometimes, if he had been fighting evil spirits, he would come back exhausted. At other times he was elated, telling us of the great spirits that he had encountered. Ibmal the Sky God was untouchable and unknowable, but Rassa sometimes met Biegg-Olbmai, the God of Wind, and wrestled with him to prevent a three-day blizzard. On another occasion he had asked the God responsible for hunting, a spirit he called 'Blood Man', that the siida's hunters should be rewarded. Two days later they tracked and killed an elk. The Gods and spirits whom Rassa revered were new to me, but his words aroused a faint recollection of a spirit world far older than the Elder Faith. I sensed that my own Gods, Odinn, Frey, Thor and the others, had all emerged from Rassa's saivo to take the shapes in which I knew them.