The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson Read Online Free PDF Page A

brought out, and games of fox and geese were going forward, and here and there a man was patching his own breeks or renewing the binding of a spear, while the Hall harp went round, passing from hand to hand, as man after man woke the strings with more or less of skill and offered up riddle or song or story; a bright web of sound to keep out the menace of the rising storm that had come beating up the lough to hurl itself against the settlement out of the dark. There were wonderful stories that came from the Northman’s world, of water-horses and baresarkers’ ghosts and troll-women who rode the roof-ridges of halls on winter nights.
    Bjarni, listening spellbound, woke suddenly to thefact that the troll-women story had been told maybe too often. There began to be a restlessness among the listeners, a snort of laughter in the wrong place from the lower benches. Then heads got together, and a knot of young warriors who had been drinking together in a corner got up, grinning, and were somehow gone through the foreporch doorway into the stormy darkness, scarce noticed in the constant coming and going of the great Hall.
    A squall of rain came spattering into the fire; and once Bjarni thought he heard a snatch of laughter outside in the wild weather. Then suddenly in a trough of quiet between gust and gust, there came a flurry of sound high overhead on the highest crown of the roof near the smoke-hole; a trampling of feet and a thick shouting, and something small and dark fell through the hole into the fire beneath. There was a smell of singed fur, and a moment’s high squealing as the rat streaked free of the hot embers. Then the dogs lying around the hearth were up and onto it, and the squealing stopped. Men scrambled up also to cheer on the dogs, and the harper flung his harp aside between note and note.
    And in the general uproar a young tawny-haired giant rose to his feet, swaying a little and holding an ale-jar high in one hand. ‘No call for troll-wife tales, for seemingly the real thing is come upon us by the sound of it.’ His voice rose to a joyful bellow. ‘And that is a thing Sven Gunnarson will not be having on any roof he drinks under!’
    And slamming the jar on a friend’s head in passing, he set a somewhat wavering course for the foreporch door. A good few of the young men scrambled whooping after him, and with them most of the dogs in hopes of a rat hunt. Bjarni and Erik went with them, Bjarni still with a hand on Hugin’s makeshiftcollar, for he had no mind to let the dog run loose among his own kind with the gash only half healed on his shoulder.
    Outside the wind buffeted by, and the light came and went as the racing clouds let the moon swim free, then caught and swallowed it again in their dark stampede as another squall of rain came trailing up the lough. There were dark figures on the roof-ridge, found and lost in the swiftly changing light. And below in the garth figures more fiercely lit by the wind-teased flames of the pine-knot torch someone had carried out from the Hall. In the russet flame of it, Bjarni saw Sven Gunnarson already climbing by way of a friend’s back onto the roof, which on that side came down to within not much over a man’s height from the ground. Next instant he had swung himself onto the heather thatch, and with a handhold on one of the weighted ropes that held it down against the winter storms, was heading for the roof-ridge.
    High against the racing moonshot sky, one of the dark shapes rose and stood to meet him, crouching a little with arms outspread.
    Afterwards Bjarni never knew whether there was so much ale in Sven Gunnarson that he really thought it was a troll-wife there on the ridge, or whether he knew well enough that it was a bunch of his own kind who had caught a rat in the grain store and dropped it down the smoke-hole to enliven the evening. Clearly he was the kind to find one reason as good as another for starting a fight when the drink was in him. Yelling