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

him the whole landing-beach and the rough grass slopes beyond freckled with people. Clearly they had been seen from afar – a look-out on Vatersay maybe – and the whole of the mainland settlement had come crowding down to see them return in triumph. Eight war keels returning, where they had seen five away.
    Onund’s voice quickened in the rowing chant, ‘Lift her! Lift her!’ and
Sea Witch
leapt forward like a mare that scents her own stable and is eager to be home. Onund put over the steering oar and she came round in a sea-swallow curve, the others following in the white oar-thresh of her wake. The water was green now in the steep shallows, and they were heading straight in through the broken water where the weed-grown jetty thrust out to give shelter from the storms and the swinging tides.
    ‘Now! In oars! Out rollers! Run her in, my heroes!’
    They unshipped the oars and swung them on board and caught up their rollers from their places under the thwarts. They were out over the sides, belly-deep into the icy water, running her up through the shallows, the rest following after. The people at the settlement came plunging out to meet them, set their shoulders to the ship’s sides and helped with the rollers as they ran her up the sloping shingle, shouting and cheering as they went.
    The whole settlement seemed to be there, old men and boys, women and bairns and the usual flurry of dogs. Bjarni was still shin-deep when the black and joyful shape of Hugin was thrashing about his legs,trying to leap up on him, adding his frenzied showers of barks to the general tumult. Bjarni thrust him off with one foot; but only a few gasping moments later, with
Sea Witch
safely stranded, he was squatting on his heels to receive the loving onslaughts of the great black dog. All around him men were greeting their women, tossing up their bairns, joyful reunions all along the ship-strand, save where a woman here or there stood looking for her husband or son who had not come back with the rest. Here and there were girls who had kilted up their kirtle skirts and came running down to meet the returned ships; and among them, Thara Priestsdaughter. She passed close by Bjarni, slanting her eyes at him and holding her shoulders back to make the most of her little round apple breasts. But he never saw her, because his face was buried in Hugin’s neck and his hands were up, working into the warm hollows behind the great hound’s ears.
    Later, when the longships had been run up the beach and tended like hard-worked horses brought back to their stables, when the reunions were over and the evening meal had been eaten, the captured booty was brought up to the broad garth before the Hearth Hall and the crews gathered to the share-out, with most of the rest of the settlement looking on. The harvest, by now gathered in by the thralls and the womenfolk, had been a poor one, thin in the ear and storm-battered, but this other kind of harvest would help to see them through the long lean winter. Daylight was fading, and torches had been brought out and here and there the flamelight through the smoky dust struck out blinks of coloured light from the growing piles of booty as the wicker sea-kists and the sail-cloth bundles were opened and their contents flung out on the beaten earth.
    Bjarni, squatting among the rest of
Sea Witch’
s crew, watched the coming to light of the fruits of a whole summer’s raiding; fine weapons and rapiers of narwhal ivory that would be sold in the south as unicorn’s horn. Furs and enamels and good stout copper cooking pots. He saw a thick russet woollen cloak that might be a prosperous farmer’s best, and sea-spoiled striped silks from foreign parts; a hacked silver cross, and a painted picture of a woman with a golden straw hat on the back of her head and a babe in the crook of her arm, also damaged by sea water, which he knew by now probably came from a God-House of the White Christ. There were hangings worked with