10

Bruni and Odindisa set off for the workshop, taking Solveig and Vigot with them.

“I’d rather be fishing,” Vigot grumbled, “but I’m short of hooks. Bronze ones. You’re sure this man . . .”

“Oleg,” Bruni told him.

“You’re sure he’ll have a good supply?”

“He did last time. And a fine fish knife with a bone handle.”

“Bergdis guts them,” Vigot said. “I catch them.”

On their way, the four of them walked through the cemetery—it stood on a grassy knoll, looking out to sea.

“Rus and Swedes and Finns and Slavs and Balts—they’re all buried here,” Bruni told them.

“All together?” asked Solveig.

“Why not?”

“But they don’t all worship the same gods. I mean, Christians can’t be buried alongside us. Not in Norway. Not unless they worship the old gods as well.”

“True enough,” said Bruni. “But the men who settled here were all far from their first homes. They may have been divided by their faiths, but they were united by their trading. Bulgars and Arabs—a few of them settled here too. They all lived together, and now they lie together.”

Solveig examined a roughly dressed stone rather taller than she was.

“I think I can read these runes,” she said.

“Old or young,” Vigot said, “Odin doesn’t care. A brave lad, cut down in battle.”

“You can’t tell that,” Odindisa replied. “He may have caught fever.”

“Or drowned,” added Bruni.

Solveig looked at the memorial stones all around them. She stared out to sea.

“What survives of us?” she asked. “Here on middle-earth.”

But Bruni and Odindisa and Vigot were all so caught up in their own thoughts that none of them replied.

Then Solveig heard her father’s words: “One thing never dies nor changes: the name you earn during your lifetime.”

What survives, she told herself, is just runes, some so salt-eaten it’s no longer possible to read them. No! That’s wrong. Each stroke of each rune in this place was carved with love, with tears. That’s what survives of us. The longing that binds daughter to father, mother to son.

Solveig remembered going to her mother’s grave on the evening before she left the farm, and kneeling in the lank, wet grass, and talking to her. She realized her eyes were blurred with tears, and she sniffed and wiped them away with the bandage on her hand.

“Ghosts,” observed Bruni. “No one can escape them.”

“No one should want to,” Odindisa said. “We should give them peace. We should lay ghosts, especially our own.” But then she grabbed a rune stone to steady herself, gasped, and fell to her knees.

“What is it?” asked Vigot, and he quickly looked around him. He knew, as Bruni did, that Odindisa could see what they could not. They’d followed her when she traveled into what has been and foretold what will be.

“Did you see him?” Odindisa whispered.

“See who?” asked Bruni.

“Standing here. Waving.”

“Who?”

“Bergvid.” Odindisa was trembling. “Bergvid was. Brave lad! Warning us to turn back, back home to Sigtuna.”

Bruni and Vigot and Solveig all stared at one another.

Odindisa closed her eyes. “Come and gone. And now I’m a sodden rag.”

“All white,” said Bruni.

“And moon-blue,” said Solveig.

“Go back to the boat,” Bruni told her.

“Shall I come with you?” offered Solveig.

“No,” said Odindisa. “You go. You’ll be glad.” Then she opened her eyes and gazed listlessly at Solveig. “Slothi . . . did he tell you?”

“About Edith?” Solveig said. “He did, yes.”

“You must choose it, then. You’ll know which. You’ll recognize it.”

With that, Odindisa got unsteadily to her feet and turned back toward the boat.

“She’s walking between worlds,” observed Solveig.

“Lurching,” said Vigot.

“There’s an old woman in our fjord like that,” Solveig told them, wrinkling up her face, “and we never know how much to believe.”

“In any case,” said Bruni, “Red Ottar’s not going to be put off by a ghost. Not likely!”

For a while the three of them watched Odindisa, and then they continued into Earth Town.

“You see that building over there,” Bruni told them, “the big one with the conical roof . . .”

“It looks like a squatting troll,” Solveig said. “Some trolls wear hats like that.”

“Earl Rognvald’s house,” Bruni said. “He rules this town. Red Ottar told you.”

Solveig smiled and tapped her head. “He did? I fear the ale was speaking more loudly than he was.”

“Do you know why the Rus are Christian?” Bruni asked her.

“I didn’t know they were.”

“You don’t know much,” said Bruni. “There was a king in Kiev who decided it was time for the Rus to choose one faith.”

“Why?” asked Solveig.

“Stop interrupting me,” Bruni said testily. “I wasn’t there, but the Swedes, and the Finns, and the Balts, and the Slavs, and the Bulgars, and the Khazars, and the Arabs all had different gods, I suppose, and . . . I don’t know.” Bruni waved his hands in exasperation. “So this king, Vladimir, sent his ministers to many, many countries to find out about their religions. They rode into Asia, they sailed the length of the Great Sea, and when they reported their findings, the king thought that Islam—the faith of the Arabs—was the best religion.”

“Why?” asked Solveig.

“But then his ministers told him that the followers of Islam never drink liquid that’s fermented or distilled.”

“What?” said Vigot. “They don’t drink ale?”

“No! Not ale or cider or wine or any ardent spirit.”

“What do they drink, then?”

Bruni shrugged. “Moldy water. Milk.”

Both Vigot and Solveig slowly shook their heads.

“When Vladimir heard that,” Bruni told them, “he shook his head like you two. He said that a religion forbidding ale would fall flat on its face.”

“In Norway too,” said Solveig.

“So then the ministers who had traveled to Miklagard . . .”

Solveig’s ears pricked up.

“. . . they told the king how glorious the Christian church was, the great church of Hagia Sophia, and all the ceremonies inside it. ‘On earth,’ they said, ‘there’s no splendor to compare with it, no beauty to better it.’”

Solveig’s eyes were shining.

“So King Vladimir decided the Rus should be Christian,” Bruni said. “But you can be sure most of them worship their old gods as well. In fact, I’ve heard there’s even a word for it. Garthar, they say, is dvoeverie—a country of two faiths.”

From the moment she lowered her head under the lintel and stepped into the little log room, Solveig felt she had crossed into a magical world.

It was hot and stuffy and sooty, and everywhere, on each surface, in each corner, lay treasures such as she had never seen.

Here, a pile of glass beads, forget-me-not blue and mossy, pearly, crocus yellow . . . there, a piece of amber almost as large as a kneecap . . . there, a stack of rivets . . . two silvery birch baskets . . .

Solveig could scarcely look closely at one object before her eyes were drawn to another. She felt quite breathless and would willingly have stayed right there for the remainder of her life.

There was a stirring in the inner room. Then the tatty piece of curtain dividing it from the workshop was swept aside, and out jumped—out bubbled, almost—a slight little man with a head too big for his body. He had such a warm and open smile, and the whites of his eyes were almost as pink as pink roses.

“Oleg!” exclaimed Bruni.

“Bruni!” exclaimed Oleg.

The two men embraced, and, with their hands still on each other’s shoulders, they appraised each other and laughed.

Bruni gestured to his companions. “Vigot,” he said. “Solveig.”

“Welcome!” said Oleg. “Man . . . woman . . .” He smiled sweetly at them and slowly locked his fingers.

“No!” exclaimed Solveig. “No, we’re not!”

“Not what?” asked Vigot.

“Man and wife,” said Solveig. She felt her blood rush to her face. “He thinks we’re married.”

Vigot just laughed. “She keeps begging me!” he told Oleg.

“My young friends have heard about you,” Bruni said. “The smith of smiths!”

“Stuff!” said Oleg.

“Whoever wants to learn should work with you. Not that women ever make good carvers.”

“I have two apprentices,” Oleg replied, “and that’s enough for me.”

Solveig saw how restless Oleg was—picking things up, putting them down again, blowing soot from surfaces, pulling at his clothing, as if he couldn’t keep still for a moment.

“Solveig wants to learn,” Bruni told him.

Oleg smiled at her, and she could see that although the whites of his eyes were rosy with so much smoke and rubbing, the irises were brown as chestnuts and glistening.

“For one . . .” Oleg said warmly, “for one, success at swordplay . . . Do you know this song?”

“That’s you, Vigot,” said Solveig accusingly.

“For one the hawk on the fist . . .” Oleg continued. “And for one the skill of the craftsman. What I think is . . . the craftsman’s workshop is a crossing place.”

“How?” said Solveig.

“Let me ask you this: Is anything beautiful unless it’s useful? And is anything truly useful unless it’s also beautiful?”

“No,” said Solveig. “They go together. Please show me.”

That was what Oleg did. He showed her the drinking cups he had just thrown on his wheel in the inner room. He showed her the decorated bone handles and arrowheads and rivets and nails and pieces of polished and cut amber and dress pins . . .

Then Oleg dug into a pocket, pulled out a bronze key, and unlocked a solid hinged wooden box. It contained several pieces of metal jewelry, and the moment Solveig saw the bronze brooch, she knew it was the one. The one for Edith.

Like a little double hammer, handle end to handle end. No . . . like a double cross. Two silver eyes in each of the hammerheads . . . Solveig couldn’t take her eyes off it.

Oleg laid the brooch on Solveig’s right palm. She felt how heavy it was, and when she turned it over, she saw how finely Oleg had fashioned the pin catch.

The craftsman took it back and peered closely at it. Then he pressed the brooch to the top of his workbench and picked up a little hammer.

At once Solveig noticed how still he had become. When he’s talking, he’s all movement and busyness, she thought, but when he’s working, he’s so quiet. So still.

Oleg gave the fastening the lightest tap, and then a second, smarter one, and eyed it again. “That’ll do,” he said. “Yes, poems, sagas, tapestries, ships, harps and pipes, swords, brooches—each has its own material, but they all have to be well wrought.”

“This is the one,” Solveig told Oleg.

“One what?” asked Bruni. “What are you talking about?”

“Ask Odindisa!” Solveig replied. And then she told Oleg, “Odindisa, she’ll come here tomorrow and buy it. I’ll come back too, if I can.”

Oleg smiled. “I’ll be waiting for you both,” he said.

How old is he? Solveig wondered. His skin’s unlined, almost. He’s got no hair, though, except those pale patches over his ears. He’s supple and quick, but his eyes are age-old.

Oleg’s sandy eyelashes flickered, and he gave Solveig a knowing look. “All ages,” he said with a merry laugh.

After this, Vigot bought seven bronze fishhooks, and once the craftsman had wrapped them up in a scrap of oily sealskin, Bruni said it was time they were getting back to their boat.

“Our skipper’s a slave driver,” he told Oleg with a wink at Solveig and Vigot. “Anyhow, Solveig wouldn’t want to be out with men like us after dark.”

“She wouldn’t want to be out without you,” Oleg said. “That’s for sure.”

“I can look after myself,” Solveig protested. “I’m rising fifteen.”

“Exactly,” said Oleg with a rueful smile.

Then Oleg pressed something into the palm of Solveig’s injured hand and closed her fingers around it.

“You have a maker’s eyes,” he told her. He stretched his thumb and forefinger. “Two colors. Wide and dreaming.”

Solveig opened her left hand. A violet-gray glass bead nestled in it, shining with a quiet inner light.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, holding it up to what little light there was. “It’s beautiful!”

“Your third eye,” murmured Oleg.

“Subtle as a fish scale,” Vigot observed.

Swiftly Solveig stepped toward the craftsman and embraced him.

“Not much of a man,” said Vigot disparagingly as the three of them strode side by side out of Earth Town. “An overgrown dwarf or something.”

“The best smith and carver I’ve ever met,” said Bruni.

“More skilled than you will ever be,” Solveig told Vigot.

“All he wanted to do was talk about his . . . stuff.”

“What did you expect? We didn’t go to see him to talk about the weather.”

“He made it all sound . . . well, as if it matters more than anything else in the world.”

“It does,” said Solveig. “To him it does.”

“Makers like nothing more than to talk about their work,” observed Bruni. “It’s what’s most alive for them.”

“Mmm!” agreed Solveig, smiling. “I can’t explain it exactly. But for me, well, meeting him was like taking a step onto the rainbow bridge.”

“Heh?” inquired Vigot.

“That little workshop. It’s like the bridge between middle-earth and Asgard. Between humans and gods. For me it is.”

“You mean,” said Bruni, “that when men make something fine . . .”

“Yes,” said Solveig. “Somehow, the gods strike a spark in them.”

“With strike-a-lights!” said Vigot.

“No, you don’t understand.”

“There’s a story,” Bruni told them, “about how Odin won the goblet brimming with the mead of poetry. He shared it out between all the gods, but now and then he offers a drop or two to some human.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Solveig eagerly. “It’s like that.”

“He didn’t ask us anything about our journey,” Vigot said. “The crew . . . the cargo . . . where we’re going.”

“He asked you what kind of fish you want to catch,” Solveig reminded him.

“All kinds,” Vigot replied, and he flashed her a handsome smile. “Big ones, small ones, they can’t escape me.”

Bruni grunted. “Thinking about girls again, are you, Vigot?”

“And fish,” said Vigot.

“You’ve got a mind like a cesspit.”

“And you’re my teacher,” Vigot retorted.

Bruni gave Vigot a scornful look, and his thick lips parted. “So says the pot,” he sneered. Then he glanced at Solveig. “Ignore him,” he told her. “Vigot and his fish, they’ve reminded me of something.”

“What?” asked Solveig.

“Hooked, are you?” said Bruni, and his mouth fell open again. “Listen to this! Thor went out fishing, and do you know what he used for bait?”

“A turd,” said Vigot.

“No,” said Bruni. “He baited his hook—his very big hook, Vigot—with the head of an ox.

“In the depths of the sea the monster was waiting, the Midgard Serpent coiled around our middle-earth. He let go of his tail and snapped at the bait, and the sea frothed like ale. It fizzed. But Thor hauled up the monster. Then he reached for his hammer and whacked the serpent’s head. The Midgard Serpent tugged, and the huge barb tore at the roof of his mouth. He jerked his head from side to side, he wrenched . . .”

Bruni grunted, he spluttered and spit like the Midgard Serpent—and he woke all the sleeping dogs of Ladoga.

No more than a couple of hundred paces from their boat, Solveig and Vigot could hear yowling and yapping, and it was coming closer.

“You and your monster!” snapped Vigot. “You’ve woken them all up.”

Then two huge hounds came bounding along the quay toward them, snarling.

Bruni stood his ground and roared at them. But that only maddened the dogs all the more. They mobbed the three companions. Solveig could hear them panting and smell their foul hot breath.

“Clear off!” yelled Vigot, picking up a paddle lying beside the Bulgars’ boat.

But even as he did so, one of the hounds snarled and jumped at Solveig, knocking her off balance.

“Run for it!” yelled Bruni.

But Solveig couldn’t do anything of the kind. She stumbled backward, she clawed the air, and then both hounds leaped at her. She could see their gleaming eyes. Their pointed teeth.

Solveig shrieked. She tried to fight them off.

But one hound bit deep into her left calf, and the other sank his teeth right into her slender neck.

Solveig screamed. She screamed as never in her life before. And then she heard a massive clout—a thwack!—and felt the heavy body of one hound collapsing on her.

“Got you!” shouted Vigot. “You hellhound! Now you!”

The other dog didn’t give him a chance. Seeing the dreadful fate that had befallen his companion, he ran off with his tail between his legs, howling.

Vigot turned back to the first hound. He gave him a poke with the paddle and then whacked his head again. The hound slathered strings of spittle and blood all over Solveig’s back and shoulders.

“Get him off!” spluttered Bruni. “Come on!”

So both men dragged the heavy hound off Solveig’s body, and then Bruni knelt beside her.

“Girl!” he said. “Solveig! You’re safe.”

Solveig was curled up as if she were unborn. Her bandaged left hand was clamped to her neck. With her other, she clutched her bleeding calf. Her whole body was shaking. And when she heard Bruni reassuring her, she began to sob.

Bruni put his hands under Solveig’s shoulders and tried to help her to her feet, but she had no strength in her calves and thighs. No kick in her limbs, no force in her body except for her palpitating heart. So when Bruni relaxed his grip, she just slumped down on the quay again.

“Come on, girl,” Bruni encouraged her.

But Solveig lay in a heap, shaking and sobbing.

Bruni sniffed and scratched his right ear. “Nasty!” he said.

“Hellhounds,” said Vigot. “Killers.”

Bruni stared at him. “Like you,” he said thoughtfully.

“A good thing too,” Vigot replied. And then, more fiercely, “Isn’t it?”

Bruni got down on his knees beside Solveig. “I’ll carry you back, girl,” he said.

“I’ll carry her,” said Vigot.

But Bruni slipped his arms under Solveig’s back and hips and looked up at Vigot with a challenging smile.

Still Solveig couldn’t stop sobbing. Bruni was rocking her in his arms, like a baby almost, and she felt utterly unable. She wished only that she’d never left home. With all her head and heart and torn body, she wished she had never come.