“But after a while—I’d got a roast rib in one hand and a mug of ale in the other—the men started shouting. Just outside the light of our fires there was a shape on the sand, a big shape. Beached whale, we thought, but when we ran over, it wheezed and came at the first man there. He backed off, we looked for our weapons. I thought it might be a hrosswhale. Whaleross, some say.
“And right that moment there was a lot of shouting from the top of one cliff. The lad up there, Stig was his name, shouting for help. Not blowing his horn, mind, but wanting help. Sounded as if he was fighting something. So I climbed up the rope to see what it was.”
“And what was it?”
“Nothing, when I got there. But he said, near in tears, he’d been attacked by a skoffin.”
“A skoffin?” said Vigleik. “What’s that?”
Skaldfinn laughed. “You must talk more to old wives, Vigleik. A skoffin is the opposite of a skuggabaldur. The one is the get of a male fox and a she-cat, the other of a tom and a vixen.”
“Well,” Sigvarth concluded, “by this time everyone was getting unsettled. So I left Stig up there, told him not to be a fool, slid back down the rope and told everyone to get back on board.
“But when we hauled the boat in, the woman was gone. We searched the beach. I checked the party in the gully—they hadn’t moved an inch while we were getting ready, swore no one had passed. I went up both ropes to both cliffs. No one had seen anything. In the end I was so angry, what with one thing and another, that I threw Stig down the cliff for sniveling. He broke his neck and died. I had to pay wergild for him when I got home. But I never saw the woman again till last year. And then I was too busy to ask for her story.”
“Aye. We know what you were busy with,” said Thorvin. “The business of the Boneless One.”
“Are you a Christian to whine about it?”
“What it comes to,” said Farman, “is that she could have swum away in the confusion. You swam to shore.”
“She would have had to do it fully dressed, for her clothes were gone too. And not just to shore. A long way, in the dark sea, to get round the cliffs. For she was not on the beach, I am sure of that.”
“A whaleross. A skoffin. A woman who vanishes and reappears carrying a child,” mused Farman. “All this could be explained. Yet there are more ways than one of explaining it.”
“You think he is not my son,” challenged Sigvarth. “You think he is the son of one of your gods. Well, I tell you: I honor no god save Ran the goddess who lives in the deep, whom drowned sailors go to. And the other world you talk of, the visions you boast of—I have heard them speak of it in camp about this Way of yours—I think them all born of drink and sour food, and one man’s blather infecting another, till everyone must tell his tale of visions to keep in with the rest. There is no more sense in it than there is in skoffins. The boy is my son. He looks like me. He acts like me—like I did when I was young.”
“He acts like a man,” snarled Thorvin. “You act like a rutting beast. I tell you that though you have gone many years without regret and without punishment; still there is fate for such as you. Our poet said it when he saw the Hel-world:
” ‘Many men I saw moan in pain,
Walk in woe the ways of Hel.
Streaming red their wretched faces,
Punishment for the pain of women.’ ”
Sigvarth rose to his feet, left hand on sword. “And I will tell you a better poem. The Boneless One’s skald made it last year, of the death of Ragnar:
‘We struck with the sword. I say it is good
For swain to meet swain in the sway of brands.