Free The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

and scramble aboard.
    The Barra men had made no attempt to give chase or hunt them down. ‘Vestnor has lost brother for brother and most of his fleet, and the feud-price is paid. Let him away to lick his wounds,’ Onund had said peaceably, sitting on his milking-stool with his sword across his knees and looking much as though he had just come out from a slaughterhouse.
    They had taken a few captives, not many, for the Dublin slave market, and they lay at a little distance, roped like cattle. A few survivors had reached the shore and disappeared into the high country of Bute or the mainland. The pirate wounded they had dealt with according to the usual custom, and tipped them overboard. There would be dead men all along the coast on the next few tides.
    They had dead of their own, and these they had tipped over likewise, though more gently and with much of their heavy war-gear still on them to keep them down. Their own wounded they had seen to as best they could, and the sorest scathed of them lay now beside the ships with sails rigged over them for shelter from the fine chill rain-mist that had set in with the dusk. All along the beach among the rocks the Barra men had kindled drift-wood fires and, gathered about them, they had supped well on captured stores and half-singed, half-raw meat – there were red deer for the hunting among the high moors of Bute. And sitting beside one of them on his gashed milking-stool which his men had brought ashore for him, Onund Treefoot was making himself a new wooden leg; replacing the splintered end of the old one with an oarloom from one of the captured galleys. Bjarni had cut it to the right length for him with a blow from somebody’s war-axe, and was squatting beside him steadying one end of it while his lord jammed the other into the boiled-leather cup with its dangling straps, and bound it in place with a length of fine sealskin cord.
    ‘That should hold until we come again to Barra and they can make a neater job of it in the ship-sheds,’ he said when he was satisfied, and began to buckle it on as another man might buckle on a piece of his war gear. He jerked the buckle tight on the last strap, the one that encircled his waist beneath his sword belt, and stood up to a cheer from the men about the fire.
    ‘Timbertoes is himself again.’
    He looked round at Bjarni, who had risen also with an odd feeling that he was being left behind, and his mouth quirked into its rare, fierce and fleeting smile. ‘Not but what I’m minded to keep it as it is to mind me of a day well spent and in good company.’

6
Bride-Ale in Barra
    THEY SPENT THREE days lying close under the elbow of Bute, patching up their own ships and the captured reiving vessels, before they swung out the oars again for Barra. They met squally weather in the open waters beyond Arran, but on the third morning the southernmost islets of Barra rose like faint cloud shapes out of the sea; and before evening they were nosing in past Vatersay toward the main island harbour.
    The sails had come rattling down and the crews had taken to the oars and Bjarni, pulling with the rest, saw only the tall graceful up-thrust of the stern post, and beyond,
Wave Rider
and
Red Wolf, Reindeer
and
Star Bear
and the three captives, with prize crews aboard them, following each in another’s wake, and beyond again the empty seaway that they had crossed. Onund was standing braced on his renewed wooden leg at the steering oar, bringing
Sea Witch
into harbour, leading home the fleet.
    All along the rowing benches men were beginning to snatch glances over their shoulders as the coasts slid by. And Bjarni, glancing back also as he swungto his oar, saw the high-pitched gables of the ship-sheds above the gull-grey shingle of the landing-beach that had been stranger-strand when first he came that way, but grown familiar as the months went by until the sight of it brought with it a sense of homecoming.
    The next glance snatched over his shoulder showed