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

as from nowhere, followed by a boy carrying flat billets of wood and strips of binding rag.
    Onund sat down on the bench beside his man, his wooden leg stuck out in front of him, and braced himself behind the other’s shoulders, holding his upper arm in a grip that looked easy to Bjarni, watching, until he saw how the muscles stood out like cords on the ship chief’s own arm, as the bone-setter got to work. Hogni was pulling the damaged arm out straight, twisting and drawing it, frowning a little over what he did. Sven turned not so much white as a kind of dirty yellow, his mouth shut and his breath whistling a little through flared nostrils. Bjarni heard the two ends of bone creaking together with some curiosity. He had never been so near to a broken bone being set before, and he was interested accordingly. The thing seemed to take a long time to do; all the while it was as though Hogni Bone-grinder was feeling and listening and looking through his hands at what he did. At last, with one slow powerful heave, it seemed that it was done, the sweat springing on the faces of all three men shone in the torchlight, and the arm was more or less straight once more. Still holding it, the troll-man took the bits of wood from his boy and began to splint it, binding them on tightly with the strips of rag. A little blood pricked through, but not much: the bone had barely pierced the skin. And when it was done, and Onund had taken his hands away, the bone-setter fashioned a sling to take the weight and knotted it around Sven’s thick neck.
    Onund got up, and stood looking at his tawny giant without sympathy. ‘You mazelin!’ he said. ‘Now we shall be lacking a man from the rowing benches and the sword-band all this summer!’ But the tone was not as harsh as the words. To the others of
Sea Witch
’screw he said, ‘Get him drunker than he is already, and bed him down in the byre.’ And to Evynd, sitting with a draught piece in his hand, ‘He’ll be good for neither man nor beast until the bone is knit. Will you give him hearth-space until I come again at summer’s end?’
    And Sven Gunnarson’s friends got to work on him with a fresh jack of ale, before carrying him away. To be borne into the Hall like a swooning maiden would have shamed him, but there was of course no shame in being too drunk to leave it on one’s own feet. And the rest of the company returned to whatever they had been doing before.
    Bjarni stood where he was, thinking hard and quickly. ‘Lacking a man from the rowing benches and the sword-band all this summer,’ Onund had said. ‘Lacking a man’ – Oh! But where was the sense in hiring one’s sword to a one-legged ship chief who must in the nature of things be less worth following than a captain with two good legs under him . . .
    He started up the crowded Hall, Hugin following as usual at his knee, towards the High Seat where Evynd the Easterner sat over his game of draughts.
    But not knowing that he was going to do so, he stopped short, where Onund Treefoot sat with his wooden leg stuck out in front of him, leaning his shoulders against the weapon-hung wall and watching the sparrows who had built in the thatch.
    ‘Onund Treefoot,’ said Bjarni, bright-eyed and formal, ‘I have no lord to follow. I can handle an oar, and my sword is for hire. I am your man.’

4
Harvest on Barra
    BJARNI LAY ON his stomach in the short mountain grass, his chin propped on his forearm, and gazed away over the windy emptiness. From up here on the shoulder of Greian Head you could look out over the score or more of islands that went to make up Barra and on northward past Eriskay and Uist away and away along the great wild-goose skein of the Outer Isles.
    He had been across to one of the native fisher-villages on the south shore, after a new pair of sealskin brogues. There was a little black-eyed hump-backed man over there who claimed to have been taught the art of making them by the Lordly People and charged