Gest shook his head. “I have heard, and I do not call you a liar, Eyvind. You passed on what you were told. But Starkadh never made any such lay. Another skald did, lifetimes afterward, and put it in his mouth. Bravellir was bloodied—“ He sat a few heartbeats thinking, while the fires in the trenches guttered and crackled. “Was it three hundred years ago? I have lost track.”
“Do you mean Starkadh was not there, and you were?” gibed the guardsman.
“Oh, he was,” said Gest, “though he was not much like the stories men tell of him now, nor lamed and half blind with age when at last he went to his death.”
Stillness fell anew. King Olaf peered through shifting shadows at the speaker before he asked low, “Did you, then, know him?”
Gest nodded. “I did. Indeed, it was right after Bravellir that we met.”
HIS STAFF was a spear, for no man traveled unarmed in the North; but over the small pack on his back hung a harp in its case, and he offered harm to none. When at nightfall he found a homestead, he slept there, repaying hospitality with songs and tales and news from outside. Otherwise he rolled up in his cloak, and by dawnlight drank from a spring or brook and ate of whatever bread and cheese his latest host had given him. Thus had he fared through most of his years, from end to end of the world.
This day was cool beneath a wan sky where clouds were scant and the sun swung southward. The woods that decked the hills of Gautland stood hazed and hushed. Birches had begun to turn yellow, and the green of oak and beech was less bright than erstwhile. Firs lifted darkling among them. Ripe currants glowed hi the shade. Smells of earth and damp filled every breath.
Gest saw it all, widely, from a ridge he had climbed. Below him the land rolled off to an unclear edge of sight. Mostly it was tree-clad, but meadows and plowed fields broke it here and there. He spied two houses and their outbuildings, distance-dwindled; smoke rose straight upward from the roofs. Close by, a stream glistened on its way to a lake that shone in the offing,
He had come far enough from the battlefield that the wreckage and the dead strewn across it were blurred together in his eyes. Carrion birds swarmed aloft and about and back down, a whirling blackness, but also gone tiny for him. He could barely hear their cries. Sometimes the howl of a wolf lifted, to hang above the hills for what seemed a long while before dying away in echoes.
Living men had withdrawn, bound home. They took wounded kindred and friends along, but could merely throw a little earth over such of the fallen as they knew. A band of them whom Gest had come upon this morning did tell him that King Sigurdh had borne off the body of his foe King Harald, to give it a barrow and grave goods at Uppsala for the sake of his own honor.
Gest leaned on his spear, shook his head, and smiled sadly. How often had he beheld the like of this, after young men stormed forth to cast their lives from them? He did not know. He had lost the number somewhere in the waste of the centuries. Or else he had never had the heart to try keeping count. He was not sure which, any more. Yet as always, he felt the need to say a farewell, the only thing he or anyone else could now give the young men.
It was no skaldic drapa that came to his lips. The words were Northern, so that the dead would understand if they could hear, but he lacked all wish to praise bravery and recall mighty deeds. The verse form that he chose was from a country thousands of miles toward the sunrise. There a short, slanty-eyed folk knew much and fashioned things of wondrous beauty, though there too the sword ranged free.
“The summer fading, Chill shall slash the leaves bloody And the geese trek—where? Already this ground went red While the wind called souls away.”