Odinn's Child by Tim Severin Page B

bad scare. I was walking past the open door to the main cattle shed when a thin arm reached out of the darkness, and seized me by the shoulder. I was yanked inside, and in the gloom found myself staring close up at the sinister face of Tyrkir. I was convinced he was about to batter me for some fault, and I went numb with fear as he briskly hefted me to the back of the cow byre and twisted me round to face him. He was still gripping my shoulder and it hurt. 'Who told you about the uniped?' he demanded in his heavy accent. 'Did you speak with any of the crew about it?'
    'Turn the boy so I can look at his eyes,' said a voice with a deep rumble, and I saw another man, seated on the hay at the back of the byre. I had not noticed him before, but even without looking at his face I knew who he was, and my fright only increased. He was Thorvall, known as 'the Hunter'.
    Of all the men in Brattahlid Thorvall was the one we boys most feared and respected. He was the odd man out in our community of farmers and fishermen. A huge, weatherbeaten man now in his late fifties but still as fit and tough as a twenty-year-old, he was disfigured by a scar which ran from the corner of his left eye back towards his ear. The ear had been partly torn away and healed with a ragged edge so that Thorvall looked like a tattered tomcat that had been in numerous fights. The injury was the result of a hunting accident in which Thorvall had been mauled by a young polar bear. Standing in front of him in the cowshed, I tried to keep my glance away from that terrible scar, while I thought to myself that Thorvall had been lucky not to lose the eye itself. As it was, the lid of his left eye drooped, and I wondered if it affected his vision when he was drawing his hunting bow.
    Thorvall was dressed in his usual hunting clothes, heavy leggings bound with thongs, stout shoes and a jerkin with a hood. I had never seen him wear anything else, and to be frank the clothes did smell strongly even over the stench of the cow byre. Thorvall had no one to look after his laundry. He was a bachelor who lived by himself in a small house on the edge of the settlement and he came and went as he pleased. His only personal ornament was a necklace made of the teeth of polar bears he had killed. At that moment, he was looking at me steadily and I felt I was being scanned by some sort of predatory bird.
    'Maybe the woman told him. She has the sight and knows a good deal of the ways,' he said.
    Tyrkir was still gripping my shoulder in case I made a dash for the open door behind me. "We know about her qualities, but she's only his foster mother. Besides she wasn't there either. I think the boy saw the uniped himself. They say that Leif s Orcades woman had seidr powers. More likely the boy has his abilities from her.' He gave me a slight shake as if to check whether these mysterious 'abilities' would somehow clank together inside me.
    'You'll only scare him more if you rattle him around. Let him speak for himself.'
    Tyrkir relaxed his grip slightly, but did not release my arm. 'Have you talked with Gudrid about the uniped?' he asked.
I was puzzled. I had no idea what a uniped was.
'That creature who hopped along on just one foot.'
    I now realised what this interrogation was about, but was completely baffled why Tyrkir and Thorvall would be interested in my childish antics. Surely I had done nothing wrong.
    'What else do you see? Do you have any strange dreams?' Tyrkir was asking the question so intently that his German accent was all the more obvious. I did not know how to reply. Of course I had dreams, I thought to myself, but so did everyone else. I had nightmares of being drowned, or pursued by monsters, or that the room was squeezing in on me, all the usual terrors. In fact I was rather ashamed of my nightmares and never spoke about them to anyone. I had no idea where my vision of the so-called uniped had come from. It was not something I had dreamed in the night. The image had simply