Her Share of the Plunder

They came up from the strand with the tide still running out, which meant they had beached in the dark and sat in the wet sand a long while, waiting for enough grey in the sky to find the doors by.

Svanhild knew that before she knew anything else. She was awake because she was always awake before the others, out at the fold with her breath standing white in front of her, and the knowing came to her in the wrong order: first the smell of pitch where no one at Naustvik burned pitch, then the sound of a shield-boss knocking a doorpost, then the light going up orange behind the byre roof.

She did not shout. Shouting would only tell them where she was, and she needed the ten heartbeats it took to get across the yard more than she needed the warning to be early.

The byre was already going. Whoever had lit it had done it properly, from the seaward end and low, so the wind off the water pushed the fire uphill into the hay and the cattle screamed and the smoke came down over the yard in a grey rope. That was not cruelty. That was a man who had done it before and knew that people run toward animals.

Her father's sword hung inside the hall door on two pegs, where it had hung for the two winters since he stopped needing it. Three notches in the edge that no one had ever paid a smith to grind out, a grip re-wound in undyed cord because the leather had gone slick. Her hand closed on it and the old burn on the inside of her wrist pulled at her, a white pucker from a forge she should not have been standing so close to when she was twelve.

"Svanhild." Asgerd was up on one elbow in the dark of the sleeping-bench, her hair loose, her round face still soft with sleep. "Is it the byre?"

Six weeks down from Vikrar for the autumn weaving, out of the house that had taken Svanhild in at thirteen and handed her a foster-sister aged six; going home on the next fine day since the middle of the month.

"It's men."

Asgerd got up. She did not scream, and she did not stand there asking a second question. She went straight to the low end of the hall where the two children of Munan slept in one pile like puppies — Munan who held the dairy off Svanhild's father and had held it off her father's father, and who was three days up at the summer pasture with the wethers and would walk down into all of this on the fourth, which was the only luck anybody at Naustvik got that night. Svanhild heard Asgerd's voice go bright and ordinary, the voice she used at the loom.

"Up now. Up. We're going out the back way and you're going to be very quick and very quiet and then you may tell everyone how brave you were."

Svanhild put her shoulder to the hall door and set her back against the post.

The doorway at Naustvik was a hand narrower than a big man's shoulders. Her grandfather had built it that way on purpose, in a worse year than this one, and she had been mocked for saying so at the last Thing, by men who had never had to stand in it. One at a time. That was the whole of her plan and she had no other. Behind her the hall smelled of ash and old milk. Ahead of her, through the smoke, men were coming up the slope at a walk, spread out across the grass in a line, not hurrying, sorting the outbuildings between them with their hands the way you divide up a haymaking.

There were more of them than there were people at Naustvik. She counted anyway, because counting was what she did instead of being afraid, and the number came out at somewhere past twenty before the smoke closed and she lost the far ones. Down at the water she could see the ship, black against the pewter of the sound, hauled up with her stem in the shingle. Fifteen oar-ports on the side turned toward her. Thirty oars, then. A large vessel, and no one had told anyone in this fjord that a large vessel was on the sea-road.

The first man reached the door and died of it.

He was not careless, only certain, and certainty came to the same thing. He put his shield into the gap to lever her back and she did not lever; she stepped in under the rim and put the notched edge into the meat above his knee where no mail ever reaches, and when he sat down in the doorway she left him there. A man in a doorway is worth more than a man in the grass. The second one had to come over him, and lost his footing on his own friend's leg, and she took him across the face and he went away down the slope on his hands.

After that they stopped being certain, and it got worse, because thinking men are slower and slowness was not her friend. Her arm began to tell her about itself. There is a place in the shoulder, above the joint and behind it, that starts to burn after twenty strokes, and after fifty it is a stone with a nail through it, and she was somewhere past that and counting her breaths instead of the men.

The byre roof fell in with a soft enormous sound, like a wave turning over.

Then the young one came.

She would learn his name later, standing on the sand, and she would carry it for twenty-six days after that, but in the doorway he was only a boy of nineteen or so with a thin brown beard growing in patches and his mouth open, and she understood him at once, because she had been him. He wanted the door. He wanted the crew standing behind him to have seen him take the door. He came in fast and alone and off-balance and she killed him.

It was not clean. She meant it for his throat and got him under the arm where he had lifted it, and the sword stuck a moment on bone, and he did not fall down and stop the way they do in the poems. He went to his knees in the doorway and knelt there breathing wetly, and the breathing went on. She stood over him with her arm shaking and the blood running warm down inside her sleeve to the old burn scar, and he said a name that was not hers, twice, and then he stopped saying it.

Nobody came in over him.

There was a long moment in which the fire took the byre wall and the cattle had gone quiet and men out in the smoke were shouting to each other in a dialect from further south, and Svanhild stood in her own doorway with her father's sword hanging off the end of her arm like something borrowed and heavy, and knew, in the flat way you know weather, that this was already over and had been over before she woke.

Then the men in the yard stopped shouting, and stepped back, and made a lane.

The captain came up the slope without hurrying. Svanhild had time to see all of it and no strength left to do anything with it: a tall woman, long in the arm and heavy through the shoulders in the way of somebody who had pulled an oar since she was a girl, in a plain byrnie with the rings gone brown at the hem. Fair skin weathered ruddy across the nose and cheekbones. Dark-blonde hair in one thick braid. Pale grey eyes set close together in a face that was doing nothing at all, and the doing-nothing was the frightening part; Svanhild had faced angry men all morning and anger she could use.

The woman stopped four paces out, where a thrown sword could not reach her, and looked past Svanhild's shoulder into the dark of the hall.

"How many behind you?"

"Enough."

"There are four," the captain said. "Two of them are children, and they went out the back and up the fold wall a while ago, and my man on the wall let them go, because I don't pay for children." She looked at the boy in the doorway. Something passed over her face and was put away again. "Your arm's going."

Svanhild set her feet. "Come and see."

"I can see from here." The grey eyes came back to her. "You've held a door against thirty men for the length of time it took to burn a byre. There's nobody left to be impressed by the rest of it."

"There's me."

"Yes," the captain said, as though that were a fair point and she had weighed it. "There is."

Then she came in, and it was so unhurried that Svanhild's tired arm made the stroke it had been making all morning, and the woman was not there, and there was a hand on her wrist and a hard shoulder under her elbow and a turn her joint did not want to go. The notched sword came out of her fingers as easily as a spoon out of a sleeping child's. No heat in it. No triumph, either. The captain simply stepped back with the sword point-down in the grass and shook out her own hand once, and Svanhild stood there with her palm open and stinging and her breath tearing and understood exactly, and hated exactly, how much of the last hour had been permitted.

"Bind her hands," the captain said. "In front. Not the throat, she'll be walking down."

They took the hall then, and it took very little time. She had thought there would be more of it — that a life would come apart with more noise. Instead men walked in and out of her father's door with their arms full of things she had touched every day, and one of them dropped the good iron pot and swore, and someone laughed, and the byre burned itself down to a red seam in the grass, and the smoke leaned out over the water.

They walked her down to the strand at midday with her wrists roped and her sleeve stiffening.

The plunder was laid out on the shingle in rows, the way a market lays out, and the tidiness of it was worse than anything that had happened in the doorway. Grain sacks in one line, counted. Hides folded in another. The iron in a heap with the pot on top. A grey-haired woman in a sea-cloak sat on an upturned tub with a squared stick of pale wood across her knee and a small knife, cutting notches, taking her time, saying a number aloud to a man who repeated it back to her.

At the end of the last row, five people stood roped together at the waist. Munan's herdsman, with his hands shaking. Two boys off the shore farm. A woman coughing into her own shoulder. And Asgerd, at the end, with her hair still loose from sleep and her feet bare on the wet stones and a scrape along one cheekbone, standing perfectly straight and looking around her at the ship and the rows and the men as if she intended to remember all of it and tell somebody afterwards.

Asgerd saw her, and — because she was who she was — smiled with the whole of her face, as though they had met unexpectedly at a wedding.

Svanhild's throat closed.

Further up the beach, above the tide-line, they had laid the boy from the doorway in the grass with a cloak over his face. A big grey-bearded man in a boiled-leather jerkin knelt beside him with one hand flat on the dead chest, not moving. After a while he got up, and looked down the beach at Svanhild, and looked at her for a long time, and then walked to the captain and said something low.

The captain did not answer him at once. She was undoing the end of her braid with two fingers, unpicking it and re-laying it, watching the rows on the sand.

"Weigh it at Bjarkey and it's four marks to you, near enough," the grey man said, louder, so the nearest oars would hear. "That's the captain's share, off this. Silver or a pick. Say which and we'll cut it."

The captain finished her braid.

Then she turned her head and looked, without any heat at all, at the short woman standing roped on the shingle with blood dried to her wrist and her people counted in rows behind her.

"I'll take her instead."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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