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

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    Hoskuld, on his side, had regained a little of his composure. Katla hovered about him in her fawning way, patting his forehead, arranging his ruffled hair until, exasperated, he pushed her away.
    When Gunnar’s song was done, Kalf brought out his bone whistle, which he always carried on a cord around his neck, and began to pipe. He piped
The Dun Mare
, which, after a few times through, turned into
Old Haakon at the Well
, and so on, without stop through half a dozen more.
    Gunnar led Vigdis to the middle of the floor and they danced together, face to face, hands on one another’s shoulders, as they used to do in their courting days. And soon others in the hall joined in, mostly men partnered with other men, as sailors do, for there weren’t enough women to go round. After a while, my mother prodded me to dance with Katla Thin-Hair, which I did, though she held me at arm’s length with the tips of her fingers and gazed steadily over my shoulder with a look of distaste. Kalf doubled over with laughter watching us.
    There was one fellow in particular, one of Hoskuld’s hired men, who caught my eye with his antics. His face was battered, pockmarked, and villainous, and his close-cropped hair was as spiky as a patch of thorns. I believed he was the ugliest man I’d ever seen. I had noticed him earlier in the evening, sitting well back from the fire, speaking to none nor spoken to by any, with a sort of dreamy look in his eyes. And yet I felt he paid very close attention to everything said and unsaid.
    Now he leapt into our midst, with a savage grin splitting his face, and all alone began to execute the wildest and funniest capers with great skill, not clumsily or drunkenly. He kept this up for a good long time, until just as suddenly as he had begun, he stopped and withdrew again to his place in the back.
    What a strange man, I thought, but soon dismissed him from my mind.
    As the evening passed, my eye strayed now and then to my parents. Gunnar’s little babe had gone to sleep in Jorunn’s lap. Thorvald’s hand rested on the child’s head, and he ran a calloused thumb gently back and forth over its pink scalp. The two of them did not look at each other or speak, and yet something was there between them. I caught myselfwondering, not for the first time, what secrets these two shared that we children would never know.
    Uncle Hoskuld was no more a dancing sort of man than a poetical one, but he put on a show of good spirits, grateful, I think, for the respite. In truth, we were all glad to send our troubles away for a little while. They were greater troubles than we had thought, and we made ourselves the merrier to forget them.

7

All Iceland Assembles
    Our great-great-grandfathers, newly come from Norway, fashioned a government for our kingless land: a
thing
, an assembly, to be held during two weeks in June on a wide, well-watered plain in the southwest quarter. Here, free men come together to hear the laws recited and sit in judgment on their peers. Nowhere else in the world does such a gathering exist.
    Approaching, as we did, from the east, you ride down into a grassy plain that stretches for miles, bounded on the south by the vast sheet of Thingvalla Lake and cut by the meandering streams of the Axe river. The plain is a sea of color: the tents and booths, roofed with homespun cloth, where the folk from Skagafjord and Snaefellsnes and Ljosawater, from the Eastfjords, from Breidavik and Eyr, and every inaccessible corner of our island are encamped. In a land without towns, without villages even, we create, briefly, a city of the whole nation.
    At the far edge of this plain you can see a thin ribbon of black. As you draw closer, that ribbon grows thicker and darker, and becomes, at last, the immense black and jagged rampart of Almanna Gorge. The walls and floor of this gorge, dense with shouting and jostling farmers, is the arena, the cockpit where we must stand and face our