Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

I still asked Kari if I could continue to serve him. But he refused. He would have no retinue or following. He would act alone in pursuing his vengeance, and a thirteen-year-old lad would be a hindrance. But he did have a suggestion: I should travel to Orkney, to the earl's household, and find out more details about my mother for myself. 'The person there who might have some more information for you is the earl's mother, if she is still alive. Eithne is her name, and she and Thorgunna got on particularly well. Both came from Ireland and they used to sit for hours at a time, quietly talking in Irish to one another.'

And he promised that if he himself was ever going to Orkney, then he would take me with him. It was my reward for spying on the Burners during the Althing.

Kari's revelation that on Orkney, in the person of the earl's mother, I might find a source of direct information about my mother completely eclipsed my earlier, ill-formed scheme of trying to rejoin Gudrid and Thorfinn. There were another six days before the Althing would be closed and the people dispersed to their homes, and I spent those six days going from booth to booth of the more important landowners, looking for work. I offered myself as a labourer, willing to spend the autumn and winter on a farm doing the same humdrum jobs I had performed in Greenland. In return I would receive my board and lodging and a modest payment when spring came. I realised that the payment would probably be in goods rather than cash, but it should be enough to buy my passage to Orkney. As I was rather weakly looking, I encountered little enthusiasm from the farmers. Winter was not the season when they needed extra hands, and an additional employee in the house had to be fed from the winter stocks of food. My other failing was that no one knew who I was. In Iceland's close-knit society that is a great disadvantage. Most people are aware of a person's origins, where he or she comes from, and what is their reputation. The people I spoke to knew only that I had been raised in Greenland and had spent some time in Vinland, a place few of them had even heard of. They were puzzled that I did not speak with the vocabulary of an ordinary labourer - I had Gudrid to thank for that - and I was certainly not slave-born, though once or twice people commented that my green-brown eyes made me look foreign. I supposed that I had inherited their colour from Thorgunna, but I could not tell them that I was Thorgunna's son. That would have been disastrous. I had made a few discreet enquiries about my mother, without saying why I wanted to know. The reactions had been very negative. My informant usually made some comment about 'foreign witches' and referred to something called 'the hauntings'. Not wanting to seem too curious, I did not pursue my enquiries. So, with the exception of Kari, I told no one about my parentage.

Thus my anonymity, which had been a help when Kari set me to spy on the Burners, was now a handicap, and I became anxious that I would not find a place to spend the autumn and winter. Yet, someone had made a very accurate guess as to who I was, and was keeping an eye on me.

He was Snorri Godi, the same powerful chieftain whose half-sister Thurid Barkadottir had stolen my mother's bed hangings at Frodriver.

Thus when I arrived from Greenland, bearing the name Thorgils, and of the right age to be Thorgunna's son, Snorri Godi guessed my true identity at once. Typically, he kept the knowledge to himself. He was a man who always considered carefully before any action, weighed up the pros and cons, then picked the right moment to act. He waited until I approached him at his booth on the penultimate day of the Althing, looking for work. He gave no indication that he knew who I was, but told me to report to his farm at a place called Tung five or six days' distance to the northwest at the head of a valley called Saelingsdale.

Snorri's bland appearance belied his reputation as a man of power and influence, and it would have been difficult to give him a nickname based on his physical looks. Now in late middle age, he was good-looking in a neutral way, with regular features and a pale complexion. His hair, once yellow, had turned grey by the time I met him, and so had his beard, which once had a reddish tinge. In fact, everything about Snorri was rather grey, including his eyes. But when you looked into them you realised that the greyness was not a matter of indifference, but of camouflage. When Snorri watched you with those quiet, grey eyes and with his expression motionless, it was impossible to know what he was thinking. People said that, whatever he was thinking, it was best to be on his side. His advice was sound and his enemies feared him.

Snorri turned that quiet look on me when I reported to him on the day I arrived at his farmhouse. I found him seated on a bench in the farthest shadowy corner of the main hall. 'You must be Thorgunna's son,' he said quietly, and I felt my guts coil and tighten. I nodded. 'Do you possess any of her powers?' he went on. 'Have you come because she sent you?'

I did not know what he was talking about, so I stood silently.

'Let me tell you,' continued Snorri, 'your mother left us very reluctantly. For months after her death, there were hauntings at Frodriver. Everyone knows about your mother's reappearance stark naked when they were taking her corpse for burial. But there was more. Many deaths followed at Frodriver. A shepherd died there under mysterious circumstances soon afterwards, and his draugar, his undead self, kept coming back to the farm and terrifying everyone living in the house. The draugar even beat up one of the farm workers. He met the worker in the darkness of the stable yard and knocked him about so badly that he took to his bed to convalesce and never recovered. He died a few days later, some said from pure fright. His draugar then joined the shepherd's draugar in tormenting the people. Soon half a dozen of the farm workers, mostly women, got sick and they too died in their beds. Next, Thorodd, the man who had given your mother a roof over her head when she came from Orkney, was drowned with his entire boat crew when they went to collect some supplies. Thorodd's ghost and the ghosts of his six men also kept reappearing at the house. They would walk in and sit down by the fire in their drenched clothes and stay until morning, then vanish. And for a long time afterwards there were mysterious rustlings and scratching at night.'

I remained silent, wondering where Snorri's talking was leading. He paused, eyeing me as if to judge me.

'Have you met my nephew, Kjartan?' he asked. 'I don't think so,' I replied.

'He was the only person who seemed to be able to quell the hauntings,' Snorri went on. 'That is why I'm sure your mother's spirit was responsible because in her life she really desired that young man. I think that even as a ghost she still lusted for him until finally she understood that he had no wish for her. She came back one last time, in the form of a seal, and poked her head up through the floor of the farmhouse at Frodriver. She was looking at him with imploring eyes, and Kjartan had to take a sledgehammer and flatten her head back down into the earth with several strong blows before she finally left him alone.'

I still did not know what to say. Had my mother really been so enamoured of a young teenager, scarcely three years older than I was now? It was unsettling for me to think about it, but I was too naive as yet to know how a woman can become just as hopelessly attracted by a man, as the other way around.

Snorri looked at me shrewdly. 'Are you a follower of the White Christ?' he asked.

'I don't know,' I stammered. 'My grandmother built a church for him in Brattahlid, but it wasn't used very much, at least not until Gudrid, who was looking after me, took an interest in going there. We didn't have a church in Vinland, but then we didn't have a temple to the Old Gods either, we only had the small altar that Thorvall made.'