The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson Read Online Free PDF

defiance, he scrambled up the steep slope towards the waiting figure, and made a kind of flying upward dive at its legs, striving to bring it down. The figure kicked out, shouting defiance in its turn; Bjarni thought he heard laughter, snatched away on the wind. The kicking foot was captured andthe two figures became one sprawling darkness of arms and legs, then shook itself apart into two once more, half-sitting, half-kneeling astride the roof-ridge, heads down and arms locked. From further along the roof and from the torchlit garth below, their friends and sword-fellows cheered them on. Darkness swept across the moon with the next flurry of rain, and when it cleared again they were on their feet, each struggling for a wrestler’s throw, looking scarcely human but more like two bears struggling up there, swaying together and trampling to and fro. Once Sven was on his knees, but managed to twist clear and come up again on the twist, once the other man was half over the far side of the ridge before he could check himself and come swarming back.
    It was a good fight while it lasted, but it did not last long and the end came unexpectedly with a sudden eddying change in the wind that sent a great belch of smoke and a trail of sparks from the smoke-hole side swooping along the roof to engulf the two battling figures. Even the watchers in the garth were coughing and spluttering; and Sven, caught off balance and blinded by the choking cloud, missed his footing on the heather thatch made slippery by the rain and came rolling and clawing down the steep slope.
    From the eaves to the ground was not a long drop on that side, but flying off with a yell, all arms and legs, he landed awkwardly, pitching down on the point of an elbow. Bjarni, who was among those nearest, heard the sharp unreal crack of breaking bone.
    There was a sudden silence, and in the midst of it, in the midst also of the flaming light of the pine-knot torch, Sven Gunnarson lay with his right arm under him, bent at an unlikely angle between elbow and shoulder. But even as they closed in around him, he sat up, and got slowly to his knees and then to hisfeet, cradling his right arm with his left. His foe of the roof-ridge had come sliding down to join them, still coughing and spluttering from the smoke. Somebody went to put a steadying arm around Sven, but he backed away – he seemed for the moment quite steady on his feet and stone-cold sober. ‘If anybody touches me,’ he said, speaking quietly but through his teeth, ‘I’ll kill him.’ And he turned towards the pool of light that spilled from the foreporch doorway.
    He went back into the Hall under his own sail and walked up it, the rest of them following close but keeping their hands to themselves, until he came to his own place on one of the side-benches, and sat down in it rather suddenly, as though his legs had given way beneath him.
    Somebody came through the crowd, walking with a sideways lurch of the shoulders; and Bjarni got the feeling that they were all being swept back to make room, though no word was spoken about it. ‘What fools’ game hast been a-playing here?’ demanded a voice, swift and light as the speaker himself; and Onund Treefoot was standing in the midst of the small space that had fallen clear about him, his fox-yellow gaze taking in the rigid figure on the bench.
    ‘No game but a fight with the troll kind. Their hair is in my eyes even yet,’ said Sven.
    ‘Fell off the roof and broke his arm,’ other voices struck in.
    ‘So I see,’ said Onund Treefoot. ‘His sword arm, too. The goddess Ram, the Mother of Foul Weather, would see to it that it is his sword arm . . . Well, we must be doing what we can . . .’
    Evynd the Easterner, seeing that it was no man of his own, had returned to a game of draughts with his brother Thrond. A general shout went up for Hogni Bone-grinder, and a man who might have been a trollhimself for his hairy ugliness and the length of his arms appeared