The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

the lady of all things to do with marriage and in the home. Traders began coming in, too, for word of what was in the wind had spread out beyond Barra to the Island Seas and the coasts of Alba and Erin, and a chief’s bride-ale was always good for trade.
    On the day that Aesa, in the midst of much advice from the older women of the settlement, was baking her great bride-cake, the broad-beamed serviceable shape of
Sea Cow
appeared, beating into harbour out of an autumn squall; and towards evening Bjarni, heading down to the boat-strand on some errand, met Heriolf Merchantman on the track up to the settlement. They greeted each other with much cheerful thumping on the shoulders, and turned aside into the lee of a peat-stack out of the wind for a few words before going their separate ways.
    ‘A fine beard you have grown yourself,’ Heriolf said.
    And Bjarni laughed, but flushing to the roots of his hair; for his beard was not much more than chicken-down as yet, and he was well aware of it. He had not thought that Heriolf knew about that; but the little merchant had a way of knowing more than one expected. ‘They do say that the Hero Cuchulain must needs paint his down with bramble juice.’
    ‘Na, na, no need for that,’ the other said consolingly. ‘And you’ve a man’s shoulders on you.’
    ‘Two summers at the oar,’ Bjarni said.
    ‘Two summers? It seems not so long since you sold your sword-service to my Lord Timbertoes . . . Good summers they’ve been, have they?’
    ‘Aye, good enough.’ Hugin, who had been off about his own affairs, came up smelling strongly of fish guts, and nosed lovingly into his hand.
    ‘Not feeling the wind in your sails then?’
    Bjarni shook his head. ‘Not as yet – tho’ there’s three years and more of my far-faring still before me and maybe I’ll get the itch for strange seas before they are all spent.’
    And an eddy of the wind dipped round the shoulder of the peat-stack and blew a cold spatter of raindrops into his face.
    Two days later came the appointed day for Onund Treefoot to take Aesa from her father’s hearth. Almost before daylight the whole settlement had begun gathering in the broad garth before the Hearth Hall. It was a day of thick yellow sunshine and sudden glooms under a sky of high-piled hurrying storm cloud threatening wild weather to come; but the harvest was in and the fleet home from the sea.
    With the rest of
Sea Witch
’s crew, Bjarni had spentthe night in Onund’s house, and in the early morning, all clad in their best, they went up with him – Onund walking with his familiar sideways lurch and swagger on the fine new wooden leg which the shipwrights had made him from the one he had rough-cobbled from a captured oarloom on the shore of Bute – to demand the bride.
    The women brought her out to him, clad in a kirtle of poppy-red merchant’s stuff, and with her hair bound back under the heavy silver-gilt bridal crown taken in some long-past raid. And Aflaeg set her hand in Onund’s over the fire, binding and unbinding them together three times with a supple sealskin thong. Then they drank together from the same cup in the sight of the whole settlement. ‘I take the woman from her father’s house to mine,’ Onund said. ‘Henceforth I am her man.’
    And Aesa lifted her head stiffly under the weight and balance of her crown, and smiled at him. ‘I go with the man from my father’s house,’ she said. ‘Henceforth I am his woman.’
    And so the thing was done.
    After, bride and groom and closest kin, having drunk the sacred juice that made the gods’ fire come into the priest’s head in time of sacrifice, went out to the God-House in its dark sacred wood, where Asmund the Priest waited with the black ram and the white ewe; and when they returned, walking behind Asmund, whose own robes were spattered, both Onund and Aesa had a streak of blood on their foreheads. But that was to do with seeking the favour of the gods on the marriage that