Sharp-bitten into my child imagination are the incidents immediately after my birth, as told me by old Lingaard.
Lingaard, too old to labour at the sweeps, had been surgeon, undertaker, and midwife of the huddled captives in the open midships.
So I was delivered in storm, with the spume of the cresting seas salt upon me.
Not many hours old was I when Tostig Lodbrog first laid eyes on me.
His was the lean ship, and his the seven other lean ships that had made the foray, fled the rapine, and won through the storm.
Tostig Lodbrog was also called Muspell, meaning
“The Burning”; for he was ever aflame with wrath.
Brave he was, and cruel he was, with no heart of mercy in that great chest of his.
Ere the sweat of battle had dried on him, leaning on his axe, he ate the heart of Ngrun after the fight at Hasfarth.
Because of mad anger he sold his son, Garulf, into slavery to the Juts.
I remember, under the smoky rafters of Brunanbuhr, how he used to call for the skull of Guthlaf for a drinking beaker.
Spiced wine he would have from no other cup than the skull of Guthlaf.
And to him, on the reeling deck after the storm was past, old Lingaard brought me.
I was only hours old, wrapped naked in a salt-crusted wolfskin.
Now it happens, being prematurely born, that I was very small.
“Ho! ho!—a dwarf!” cried Tostig, lowering a pot of mead half-drained from his lips to stare at me.
The day was bitter, but they say he swept me naked from the wolfskin, and by my foot, between thumb and forefinger, dangled me to the bite of the wind.
“A roach!” he ho-ho’d. “A shrimp!
A sea-louse!” And he made to squash me between huge forefinger and thumb, either of which, Lingaard avers, was thicker than my leg or thigh.
But another whim was upon him.
“The youngling is a-thirst.
Let him drink.”
And therewith, head-downward, into the half-pot of mead he thrust me.
And might well have drowned in this drink of men—I who had never known a mother’s breast in the briefness of time I had lived—had it not been for Lingaard.
But when he plucked me forth from the brew, Tostig Lodbrog struck him down in a rage.
We rolled on the deck, and the great bear hounds, captured in the fight with the North Danes just past, sprang upon us.
“Ho! ho!” roared Tostig Lodbrog, as the old man and I and the wolfskin were mauled and worried by the dogs.
But Lingaard gained his feet, saving me but losing the wolfskin to the hounds.
Tostig Lodbrog finished the mead and regarded me, while Lingaard knew better than to beg for mercy where was no mercy.
“Hop o’ my thumb,” quoth Tostig. “By Odin, the women of the North Danes are a scurvy breed.
They birth dwarfs, not men.
Of what use is this thing?
He will never make a man.
Listen you, Lingaard, grow him to be a drink-boy at Brunanbuhr.
And have an eye on the dogs lest they slobber him down by mistake as a meat-crumb from the table.”
I knew no woman.
Old Lingaard was midwife and nurse, and for nursery were reeling decks and the stamp and trample of men in battle or storm.
How I survived puling infancy, God knows.
I must have been born iron in a day of iron, for survive I did, to give the lie to Tostig’s promise of dwarf-hood.
I outgrew all beakers and tankards, and not for long could he half-drown me in his mead pot.
This last was a favourite feat of his.
It was his raw humour, a sally esteemed by him delicious wit.
My first memories are of Tostig Lodbrog’s beaked ships and fighting men, and of the feast hall at Brunanbuhr when our boats lay beached beside the frozen fjord.
For I was made drink-boy, and amongst my earliest recollections are toddling with the wine-filled skull of Guthlaf to the head of the table where Tostig bellowed to the rafters.
They were madmen, all of madness, but it seemed the common way of life to me who knew naught else.
They were men of quick rages and quick battling.
Their thoughts were ferocious; so was their eating ferocious, and their drinking. And I grew like them.
How else could I grow, when I served the drink to the bellowings of drunkards and to the skalds singing of Hialli, and the bold Hogni, and of the Niflung’s gold, and of Gudrun’s revenge on Atli when she gave him the hearts of his children and hers to eat while battle swept the benches, tore down the hangings raped from southern coasts, and, littered the feasting board with swift corpses.
Oh, I, too, had a rage, well tutored in such school.
I was but eight when I showed my teeth at a drinking between the men of Brunanbuhr and the Juts who came as friends with the jarl Agard in his three long ships.