Two Ravens Read Free

bench. He watched the grampus circle past the ship again.
    The deck shivered under his feet; Hoskuld was coming back. His knuckles were bleeding. He stood before Bjarni and said, “You call me father .”
    “Nothing could make me admit it,” Bjarni said.
    Hoskuld’s chest swelled, and his small mean eyes glittered like spear-points. He said, “Did you save the axe?”
    Bjarni showed him the axe. His father said, “Be glad,” and went past him to the steerboard.
    On the bench in front of Bjarni’s, Ulf sat nursing a split lip. There was blood all over his chin. Bjarni clapped him on the shoulder.
    “Stiffen up.”
    “I hate to fish,” Ulf said. He turned to his oar. Behind them, Hoskuld lifted his voice.  
    “Pull!”
     
    WHEN THEY HAD TAKEN as many fish as the ship could hold, they sailed back to the bay of Hrafnfell. There the women of the farms split the fish and hung them up on frames to dry in the sun. The men cleaned the ship and spread out the nets and mended them.
    Hoskuld called for his jug and the chessboard. He sat down on the grass where a boulder blocked the wind and told Bjarni to play chess with him.
    Bjarni sat on his heels on the opposite side of the board. They passed the jug back and forth as they played. Hoskuld took three drinks to Bjarni’s two. Bjarni won the game, but Hoskuld stayed jovial.
    “Here.” He put the jug over on Bjarni’s side of the board. “Get drunk. Maybe then I’ll beat you. Have you thought over what I told you?”
    “What—that I can go anywhere but Vinland?”
    “I have an old friend who lives in the Hebrides. Sigurd Gormsson is his name. He needs men. It’s rougher work than felling timber for Eirik Arnarson.”
    “Fighting?”
    “Well, what comes up.”
    Bjarni fingered a black pawn. On the beach the wind stirred the racks of drying fish like silver leaves. A boy was running up the slope toward the chessplayers. Bjarni looked down at the chesspiece in his hand. The boy reached them, out of breath: Kristjan, Hoskuld’s stepson, Hiyke’s son.
    “Shall we anchor the ship out in the bay now? We are done with her.”
    “Haul her up onto the beach,” Hoskuld said. He pushed his finger into Kristjan’s face. “Tell them if her hull sees a rock I’ll mend their beards into the nets.”
    Kristjan ran off. His black hair tossed on his shoulders. Among the women on the beach, among the racks of fish, his mother might be watching him.
    “The Hebrides,” Bjarni said. “That’s away over the sea. How am I to get there?”
    Hoskuld smiled at him. “I will take you there. In Swan .” He put out both hands for the jug.
    The Hebrides Islands were far to the south, a long, complicated sail. Bjarni said, “How would you know how to get to the Hebrides?” Yet he knew of old rumors about Hoskuld, a murder, an exile spent aviking.
    His father said, “I’m not surprised you hesitate. I myself was somewhat younger than you when I sailed, but times were different then.” He pulled on the jug and smacked his lips, wiping his beard with his fingers, smiling at Bjarni. “Maybe you should stay here, and start calling me father.”
    “I will go,” Bjarni said.
    Hoskuld handed the jug to him. Bjarni thought, He is glad to be rid of me. While he raised the jug to drink, he looked down the slope toward the women, hanging up the fish in the sun.
     
    IN THE LATE AFTERNOON Bjarni climbed over the hill path that led to the ocean and came to the hot springs. He stripped off his clothes and walked into the pool. At first the waist-deep water was icy cold. He stepped into a sulphurous eddy and a ribbon of heat curled around his legs. He sank down to his neck in the water.
    The north wind was blowing hard. Rain was coming. From the spring he could look down through a notch between two slopes of the hill and see the ocean in the distance. Catching the axe in the sea had been lucky. Thor was with him. Whatever Hoskuld intended with his sudden friendship, in the end it would all