Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

At this point I had no idea of the significance of the transaction. When the four men got to their feet and walked back along the path to rejoin their waiting retainers, I waited silently, still pressed to the ground, until I guessed that the others must be gone. Then I slipped quietly back to the booth, where Kari was conferring with Thorhall, and reported what I had witnessed. Kari scowled and muttered something about making sure that Eyjolf did not live to enjoy his bribe. Thorhall, lying on his cot, was more phlegmatic. 'Eyjolf s a tricky customer,' he said, 'but he may not be quite the invincible lawyer that he thinks he is.'

The eagerly awaited lawsuit began next morning before a large and expectant audience. One after another, various members of Kari's faction stood at the foot of the Law Rock and took it in turns to pronounce the accusations. The most eloquent speakers had been chosen, and the legal formulae rolled out sonorously. They accused Flosi Thordarson and his allies of causing the death of the Njalssons 'by internal wound, brain wound, or marrow wound' and demanded that the culprits be neither 'fed nor forwarded nor helped nor harboured' but condemned as outlaws. Further, they demanded that all the goods and properties of the accused be confiscated and paid as compensation to the relatives of the dead family and the people living in their area. It was then that I noticed how the crowd assembled round the law court were standing in separate groups. If I had not been a newcomer, I would have identified much sooner how those who supported the Burners were standing well apart from the band of men allied with Kari and the Njalsson faction. Between them, acting as a buffer, stood a large crowd of apparently neutral bystanders, and it was just as well they did so because both Kari's men and the Burners had come fully armed to the Law Rock and were wearing tokens -ribbons and emblems attached to their clothes - which signalled their loyalty and that they were ready for a fight.

For the moment, however, both sides were prepared to let the lawsuit take its course. The first day of the court case was occupied entirely with Kari's people laying accusations of murder or conspiracy to murder against the Burners. The second and third days saw legal arguments over which court had the power to try the cases, and who should be on the juries. Eyjolf proved to be every bit as slippery as his reputation suggested. He tried every wily trick in law to delay or deflect the accusations, and even came up with several variations which were entirely new. He fastened on tiny procedural irregularities which he claimed rendered the prosecution irrelevant. He discredited witnesses on minor technical points and had so many jurors disqualified for the most arcane reasons that Kari's side were driven to summoning up and enrolling nearly a dozen substitute jurors. Eyjolf bent and twisted the law this way and that, and the Lawspeaker, a man named Skapti, was constantly being called on to adjudicate. Invariably he found in favour of the clever Eyjolf.

At the end of each day the crowd, who greeted each new legal subtlety with a murmur of appreciation, judged that the Burners had the upper hand. But then next morning the spectators had to reverse that opinion because they had not reckoned with Kari's hidden adviser, Thorhall, lying in his booth nursing his grotesque boil. I was kept employed constantly running back and forth to Thorhall to report every latest twist in the. legal wrangling. Thorhall, grimacing with discomfort, red-faced and tears of pain running down his cheeks, would listen to what I had to say, though the legal wording was so ornate that half the time I did not know what it was that I was reporting. Then he would wave me away to return to the law court and wait my next errand while he mulled over the fresh scrap of news. That evening he and Kari would have a consultation, and Kari or his representative would appear before the Lawspeaker the following morning and produce Thor-hall's counter-argument, which would save the day and allow the prosecution to proceed. The Lawspeaker several times remarked that he did not know there was anyone who knew the laws so thoroughly. One little wrangle, I remember, turned upon whether the ownership of a milch cow entitled an individual to sit on the jury as a person of property. Apparently it did.

After four labyrinthine days, the case finally ended with a verdict. Despite all his twisting and turning Eyjolf had failed to get the case thrown out and the Burners were found guilty by the forty-two members of the jury. At that moment Eyjolf produced his master stroke: the verdict was invalid, he pointed out, because the jury was too large. It should have had thirty-six members, not forty-two. Kari and his faction had fallen into the trap that Eyjolf had set right at the beginning. His strategy had been to challenge repeatedly the composition of the jury, until he had lured Kari's faction into agreeing to an excess of jurors. On this technicality, the case against the Burners collapsed. Promptly Eyjolf turned the case on its head. He announced that Kari's prosecution had been malicious and that he was indicting Kari and his followers for false accusation and demanded that they, not the Burners, should be pronounced outlaws.

Kari came with me this time as we hurried back to Thorhall's booth to report the disaster. It was just past noon, and we left a crowd of onlookers clustering round Eyjolf and the Burners and excitedly offering their congratulations. Kari pushed past the door flap and summarised the situation in a few words. Thorhall, who had been lying back on his cot, swore loudly, sat up and swung his tender foot onto the ground. I had never seen a man look so angry. Thorhall groped under the cot and pulled out a short stabbing spear. It was, I remember, a particularly fine weapon, razor sharp, its blade inlaid with some fine silver work. Lifting up the spear with both hands, Thorhall brought it plunging down on the enormous boil on his ankle. There was a sickly squelching sound and I could almost hear the pus and blood as it burst out. A fat gob of pus slopped on the earth and there was a splatter of black blood across the earth floor as the putrefaction exploded. Thorhall let out a brief moan of pain as the boil was lanced, but a moment later he was on his feet, spear in hand and with bits of his own flesh still on the blade, striding out of the door, not even with a limp. Indeed, he was walking so fast that I found it difficult to keep up with him. I noticed that Kari, who was matching Thorhall stride for stride, had pulled off his browband, shaken out his hair, and had clapped a helmet on his head.

Thorhall came barging into the back of the crowd loyal to the Burners. The first person he encountered was one of Flosi's kinsmen, a man called Grim the Red. One look at Thorhall's furious expression and the spear in his hand, and Grim raised his shield to protect himself. Barely pausing, Thorhall rammed the spear into the shield with such force that the shield, an old and badly maintained wooden one, split in two. The spear blade carried right through Grim's body so that the point came out of his back between his shoulders. As Grim dropped to the ground, someone from the far side, from Kari's faction, shouted out, 'There's Thorhall! We can't let him be the only one to take revenge on the Burners!' and a furious melee broke out. Both sides drew their weapons and flung themselves at their opponents. So I saw what, in the end, is the deciding factor of Icelandic justice.

I also understood how Kari had got his reputation as a fighter. He came face to face with two of the Burners — Hallbjorn the Strong and Ami Kolsson. Hallbjorn was a big brute of a fellow, heavy-boned and broad-set. He was armed with a sword, which he swung at Kari, a low scything sweep at his legs, hoping to cripple or maim him. But the big man was too ponderous. Kari saw the blow coming. He leaped high in the air, drawing his knees up to his chest, and the sword swept harmlessly under him. Even as Kari landed, he struck with his double-bladed battleaxe at Ami Kolsson, a hit so shrewdly directed that it caught the victim in the vulnerable spot between shoulder and neck, chopping through the collarbone and splitting open his chest. Mortally wounded, Ami fell. Turning towards Hallbjorn, who was getting ready to take a second swing at him, Kari sidestepped and used his axe backhanded. The blade glanced off the lower edge of Hallbjorn's shield and carried downward, severing the big toe from Hallbjorn's left foot. Hallbjorn gave a howl of pain and hopped back a step. One of Kari's friends now rushed in and gave Hallbjorn such a shove with his spear that the big man toppled backwards in a heap. Scrambling back to his feet, Hallbjorn limped back in the crush of people as fast as he could set his injured foot on the ground. With each step he left a small splash of blood.