Odin’s Child by Bruce MacBain Read Free Book Online Page A

recalled to each other, shaking their heads, that bad business of a year ago. People with little to remember forget none of it.
    We kept to ourselves and waited.
    And at last the day came when it was time to ride to the Althing.

6

Friend Kalf
    Jorunn bustled about the yard, ordering, haranguing, directing. “Daughter-in-law, set down the bedding and help me with the cooking things. Skidi Dung-Beetle, is this how you tighten a girth? Skin the man, must I do all?”
    The fat-bellied horses shifted patiently under towers of sheepskins and tenting, cauldrons and tripods, clean clothes and weapons, while we scurried back and forth between house and yard.
    Our caravan complete at last with everything needful for a week’s camping on Thingvellir Plain, Jorunn called out with forced cheerfulness, “Husband, take your place in the lead.” She did not want to shame him in front of the thralls, who were gathered to see us off. He obeyed her like a sullen child, but it was Jorunn who gave the signal to advance. Looking, with all our baggage, like a family of tinkers, we lurched up the stony track that led from our home-field, out into the wild country beyond.
    Our first destination was Hoskuldsstead.
    Hoskuld Long-Jaws was my mother’s brother, a widower who farmed at Hawkdale-by-Geysir, in the house where he and Jorunn had grown up. Not being designed by nature for an active life, he had devoted himself to the pursuits of farming and law. He had succeeded so far in both that his fifty milk cows and two hundred milking ewes were the fattest in southern Iceland, and his law-wit was sought after by many. Even powerful godis were not ashamed to take his advice in their lawsuits.
    My mother wanted more than advice. She would ask him to be our advocate and plead our case at the Althing. Being fifteen years younger than he, she saw in him more a father than a brother, and her faith in him was boundless. She had already sent him word of our troubles, and it was arranged that we should break our journey at his house before going on together to the Althing.
    And what had Black Thorvald to say about this? Not a whisper of a word. During the winter he had grown ever more listless and despondent, his energies so low he could seldom even rouse himself to a rage. He gave up washing and combing his hair, and very nearly gave up eating. By winter’s end he had aged ten years.
    For myself, I was determined to be hopeful, and so clung to my mother and Gunnar, whose optimism never flagged.
    â€ 
    Our way lay northwest across an open heath ribbed with steep, stony ridges cut by swift rivers. We rode for hours, it seemed, before the great glittering rampart of Long Glacier began to grow large on the horizon. And meanwhile a ribbon of smoke curling up from Hekla’s peak still smudged the sky behind us, as though the volcano were unwilling to let us go. The heath gave way to a stretch of watery meadow in which treacherous bogs lay hidden. Beyond the meadow, we came to a range of gray, stony hills that rose like whales’ backs from the mossy earth. The track we followed wound between them and brought us suddenly to Gulfoss, a thundering cascade of water that spilled into the river below us. We broke our journey here, and while the women saw to supper, we men found a hot pool and soaked ourselves in the steaming, milk-white water.
    Next morning, we traversed several miles of smiling farm land, passing any number of farmhouses along the way, until abruptly, as by a line drawn across a map, the tilled land ended and the great lava field began. Here stood pillars of black and twisted rock that were said to be the bodies of night-trolls caught and frozen by the sun.
    Scrabbling up a hill of cinders, we saw spread out before us the red, cracked plain of Hawkdale, overhung with the pall of countless smokes. We kept tight rein on our mounts now, for they hated the sulfur stenchand shied at the spitting pools of hot mud and the