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Ulf was holding the girl’s hand on his knee and looking into her face, and she put her hand on his chest and pushed him.
    “No, go away, you are very familiar. I’m not even supposed to come in here.” She pushed him again, smiling at him.
    “Just a little while,” Ulf said. He took cheese and meat from the basket. “Share this with us.”
    “I am going,” Bjarni said. He went down the sleeping booth toward the door. The roofbeams crossed just over his head, trailing cobwebs, and he beat them down with his hands. At the door he glanced back to see Ulf and Gudrun sitting together in the half-dark, laughing. Ulf fed her a piece of a bun.
    “I must go,” she said, and giggled, and made no attempt to rise. Bjarni went out of the booth.
    Swan was moored in among the longships. Her broad beam and chopped prow made her loutish by comparison. Bjarni collected some of his crew and they refitted her, mending rigging and filling her watercasks. No one said anything about the fight. Carefully no one looked at Bjarni’s bruises. His hands bothered him. In the stern he came on the oar with the runes on it. He touched the rune called the Hammer, where it occurred in several words, and swore that he would repay Sigurd. After that his mood lightened. He went back to the shore.
    Kristjan was standing there on the beach. When Bjarni pulled the ship’s boat up onto the cobbles Hiyke’s son called to him.
    “Lord Sigurd wants to see you in the hall.”
    Bjarni made the boat’s painter fast to a stump. “Why were you talking to him?”
    Kristjan sidled away down the beach. “He asked me a few questions.” He turned his back to Bjarni and went off.
    Bjarni found Sigurd in the hall, eating, with a servant behind him to hold his napkin. When Bjarni came into the hall Sigurd put down the meat bone in his hands. He looked Bjarni over well before he spoke. Bjarni was willing to wait for his revenge; he could be civil now, and he let Sigurd look.
    “I understand you are stocking your ship,” the older man said. “Have we frightened you away?”
    “I don’t mind a little fighting,” Bjarni said. He stood across the table from Sigurd. “I don’t like that you questioned my stepbrother.”
    Sigurd picked the bone from the table and set his teeth to it again. “He is not a talkative child.”
    “We are all together, we Icelanders,” Bjarni said. “You talk to us all when you talk to me.”
    “Hoskuld hates you. Now, why would he send me a son he hates? It sounds to me as if he wants you done away with.”
    “I don’t know about that,” Bjarni said. “Neither does Kristjan.”
    Sigurd snapped his fingers and the servant brought him the napkin so that the lord could wipe his greasy beard. He drank from his gold cup. Voices sounded at the far end of the hall. Footsteps ground on the floor. Sigurd struck the table with his palm.
    “You are an innocent,” he said to Bjarni. “No one lives the way you want to live. In this world, everyone has his master; everyone has his underlings. I can protect you from your father. Serve me, fight for me, obey me, and I will make you rich. But you must take Christ.”  
    “My god is Asa-Thor,” Bjarni said.
    “Your stepbrother says that all save you are Christian.”
    “All save me and Ulf. His mother turned to the white altars when he was weaned. What about this Bishop you are warring with? Is he not a Christian? I thought you loved one another, you Christians.”
    “The Bishop is a false priest who claims lands where I alone am lord,” Sigurd said. “But you do not see the advantages in taking Christ. Your god-goat gives you nothing. I need only repent at the proper moment, and Christ will give me life eternal.”
    “Do you have to die first? Then I don’t see that he gives you very much.”
    Sigurd thrust his empty cup at the servant, who took it at a run down the table. The lord thrust his grey head forward toward Bjarni. The shredded gold flashed on his sleeves and collar.