Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

Next morning I must have looked like some ghoul of the marsh. My clothing was slimed with mud, my face and hands scratched and bloody where I had hauled myself face down through the swamp. Occasionally I gave a retching cough to try to dislodge the foul residues in my throat from all the muddy water I had swallowed. Yet I was confident that my crossing of the river had gone undetected. When the abb of St Ciaran's sent out word that I was to be stopped and brought back to the monastery, his messengers would first go to check with the keeper of the bridge if I had been seen, and then alert the people living on the east side of the river. By the time the news spread to the west bank, I should have put some distance between myself and any pursuit. Equally, I had to admit that my long-term chances of evasion were slim. A single, desperate-looking youth, wandering through the countryside, skulking past villages and hamlets, would be the object of immediate suspicion. If caught, I would be treated as a fugitive thief or an escaped slave and I still had the faint scars of the manacles that had been hammered on my wrists by Donnachad after Clontarf.

An image came to my mind from my childhood in Greenland. It was the memory of my father's two runners, the Scots slaves Haki and Hekja, and how the two of them would set off each spring and travel up into the moors, barefoot and with no more than a satchel of food between them, and live off the land all summer. And there was the tale, too, of how Karlsefhi had set them ashore when he first arrived in Vinland with instructions to scout out the land. They had gone loping off into the wilderness, as if nothing could have been more normal, and returned safely. If Haki and Hekja could survive in unknown Vinland, then I could do the same in Ireland. I had no idea what lay beyond the great river, but I was determined to do as well as my father's own slaves. I got up and, bending double, began picking my way through the tussocks of grass towards a line of willow bushes that would provide cover for the first few steps of my flight to the west.

The next five days blur together so I have no way of knowing the order of the events, or what took place on which day. There was the morning when I tripped over a tree root and twisted my ankle so painfully that I thought I was crippled. There was the lake that I came across unexpectedly, forcing a wide detour. I remember standing for at least an hour on the edge of the woods, gazing at the water and wondering whether I should circle around to my left or my right and, having made my decision and started walking, how I spent the next few hours wondering whether I was going in the right direction or doubling back on my path. Then there was the night when I was asleep on the ground as usual, wrapped in my cloak and with my back to a tree trunk, and I was startled awake by what I thought was the howling of wolves. I sat up for the rest of the night, ready to climb the tree, but nothing came closer. At dawn I was so drowsy that I set out carelessly. I had walked for an hour before I noticed that my knife was not in its sheath. Alarmed by the howling, I had pulled the knife out and laid it on the ground beside me. I turned back and retraced my steps. Luckily I found the knife within moments, lying where I had left it.

I never lit a fire. Even if I had carried a flint and steel to make a spark, I would not have risked the telltale smell of wood smoke. The autumn weather was mild so I did not need a fire for warmth, and I had no food which required cooking. I lived off wild fruit. This was the season for all manner of nuts and berries to ripen — hazelnuts, cranberries, blackberries, whortleberries, rowan berries, plums, sloes, wild apples. Of course, I still went hungry and sometimes my gut ached from eating only acid fruit. But I made no attempt to catch the occasional deer or hare that crossed my path. I was as shy as the animals themselves. I crouched back into the undergrowth when I observed them, fearful that the alarmed flight of game would attract hunters who might then find me by accident.

I was never far from human settlement, at least during the first part of my journey. The countryside was a mixture of woodland, cleared fields, pasture and bogland. There were frequent villages and hamlets, and twice I came across crannogs, places where a ri tuath had built himself a well-protected home on an artificial island in the middle of a lake. The village guard dogs were my chief worry. From time to time they detected my presence and raised a furious barking of alarm, forcing me to retreat hurriedly and then make a wider circuit round them. Once or twice gangs of children playing at the edge of the forest nearly discovered me, but in general their presence was useful. Their shouts and cries during their games often alerted me to the existence of a village before I blundered into it.

I had no idea how far to the west I was progressing. I noted, however, that the landscape was slowly changing. The forest was not nearly so dense and there were many stretches of open, scrubby ground. Increasingly the hills showed bald caps of rock, and there were broad expanses of barren moorland. It was a more harsh and unforgiving land so there were fewer settlements, yet the lack of forest cover made me more vulnerable to detection. After five days I had become so accustomed to slinking across the countryside that I began to think of myself as almost invisible. Perhaps made lightheaded by lack of food, I found myself again recalling the fantasies of my Greenlandic childhood and how I had fancied myself in the role of Odinn the Invisible, travelling the world without being seen.

So my discovery on the sixth day of my flight was all the more shocking. I had spent the previous night in a little shelter that I made by laying branches to form a roof over a cleft between two large rocks on a stretch of open moorland. Soon after daybreak I emerged from my lair and began to descend the valley that sloped down from the edge of the moor. Ahead I could see a grove of trees on the bank of the little stream which ran through the dale. The trees would give me some cover, I thought, and if I was lucky I might also find some which were fruiting. I entered the wood and penetrated far enough to come to the bank of the stream itself. The water was clear and shallow, rippling prettily over brown and black pebbles, and overhung with vegetation. Shafts of sunlight speckled the greenery of the undergrowth, and I could hear birdsong from several directions. The place seemed as innocent as if no human had ever stepped there. I pushed aside the bushes, placed my satchel on the ground beside me on the bank and lay down flat on the earth so that I could submerge my face in the water and feel it run cool against my skin. Then I drank, sucking in the water. Finally I got back on my knees, reached down to scoop up a palmful of water and splashed it on the back of my neck. As I wiped away the drops, I looked up. On the far side of the stream, no more than ten feet away from me, stood a man. He was absolutely motionless. With a shock I realised that he must have been standing there even when I first arrived and that I had failed utterly to notice him. He had made no attempt to conceal himself. It was only his stillness which had deceived me, and the fact that the wood was full of the natural sounds of birds singing, insects chirping and rustling, the ripple of the stream. As I looked directly into the man's face, his expression did not change. He stood there, considering me calmly. I felt no alarm because he seemed so relaxed and self-contained.

The stranger was wearing a long cloak rather like my own, of grey wool, and he carried no weapon that I could see, though he did have a plain wooden staff. I guessed his age at about fifty, and his face was clean-shaven with weatherbeaten skin and regular features that included a pair of grey eyes now regarding me steadily. What made me gaze at him in complete astonishment was his hair. From ear to ear the man had shaved his head. From the back of his head the hair hung right down to his shoulders, but the front half of his scalp was bald except for some stubble. It was a hairstyle that I had read about while browsing in the monastery library, but had never expected to see in real life. The monks at St Ciaran's — those who still had any hair — used the Roman tonsure, shaving the central patch. The man in front of me still wore his hair as a monk would have done if the style had not been outmoded and forbidden by the Church for nearly two hundred years past.