Free Odin’s Child by Bruce MacBain

enemies.
    My uncle’s booth was a snug little cabin of turf with a roof of striped awning that he brought with him each year for the purpose. Besides the godis, not many kept such permanent quarters on the plain. Our family had had one once, too, but it had long since passed from our handsalong with Thorvald’s chieftaincy. Here we stopped while Kalf and I got Hoskuld’s awning up and all the baggage unloaded with the help of his two servants. One of these was that ugly man who had performed the wild dance. I heard my uncle call him Stig. He seemed to me, as before, an uncomfortably silent and watchful fellow and disinclined to talk when I tried to sound him. I wondered why Hoskuld kept him.
    We pitched our own two little tents some ways away, and soon had a fire going. We all supped together on the leavings of yesterday’s dinner and tried our best to be cheerful.
    Kalf, washing down a last hunk of bread and mutton fat, licked his fingers, and said, “Tangle-Hair, let’s explore. Who’ll come along?”
    To our great relief the old folks begged off and only Gunnar, before Vigdis could get a good grip on him, jumped up, shouting, “Off to the fair!” and with an arm around each of us, plunged into the roiling crowd.
    Everyone was out and about, as hungry for the sight of new faces after winter’s long solitude, as they were starved for the sun’s light. A human river wound slowly up from the lake to the great gorge and back again, turning aside in chattering eddies around every oddity that fairs attract—dealers in charms, sellers of falcons, sword-grinders, wrestlers, stone-lifters, and storytellers.
    I was listening to one of these, when I noticed that Gunnar and Kalf were no longer beside me. A twinge of alarm pricked me, but I ignored it and drifted again with the crowd, expecting at every moment to see their faces. When after some time I still hadn’t found them, the twinge became something stronger. With gathering panic, I realized I was lost.
    You will laugh if you are accustomed to the ways of cities, but remember that I grew up in an empty country, whose few solitary landmarks were known to me from infancy. I had never been lost in my life, had never even imagined the condition.
    I pushed my way through the resisting mob, going faster and faster in my agitation. The sun, by this time, was below the mountains, leaving the plain, not in darkness, but in soft deceptive shadow where every striped canvas looked like ours, and every bulky shape that sat or sprawled around a campfire seemed, for a moment, familiar.
    I thought that if I steered toward the distant mountains, I must eventually come out at about the right place, and before long, I glimpsedwith relief the blue and black striped awning—I was positive—of my uncle’s booth.
    Coming upon it from behind, I failed at first to notice the strange shields propped against its turf walls, or the unfamiliar faces of the men who sprawled in the grass nearby. In my eagerness, I very nearly yelled out Hoskuld’s name before I heard a sound that froze me in mid-step. A voice I knew well—and it wasn’t my uncle’s.
    Taking advantage of a passing horseback rider to shield me from view, I worked around to the front of the booth and made myself as inconspicuous as possible in the milling crowd. The man whose voice I’d heard sat on a three-legged stool in front of the booth’s little doorway, with a drinking horn in his hand. There was no mistaking that brutal face with its missing ear.
    But it was his companion who riveted my attention. Strife-Hrut was a good-sized man, but he looked like a puny child beside this other one who overtopped him by half a head and whose blond beard was streaked with gray. Though I’d never laid eyes on him before, there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt who he was; I’d heard him described often enough at home. My father’s nemesis, the man whom he