Chapter Two:  The Time Before

Ungarn Helmansson, fighting for his life, heard a blood-curdling scream he knew to be Helgarda's.  He could not stop fighting to look around for her; he prayed that her courage and strength would keep her alive.  The thane dispatched two barbarians with his double-bladed battleaxe, tripped up another and chopped his head off.  He fought back to back with his man Olaf, and the enemy began to give ground.  Prisoners were dragged off to a stockade.  Crouching on a rock pile nearby, the old bard Skjald began to sing.  His epic song terrified the barbarians' hearts, and they ran off, back to their ships.

Sadly, Ungarn paid his last respects to his dead. He would give each a hero's pyre, set afloat on a raft, to join the gods in Valhalla.  He saw to it that the wounded were taken away and cared for.  If only Erik would come home!  He searched everywhere for his daughter, but only her broadsword and battle dagger remained.  No one saw her go; Ungarn feared that the barbarians had taken her. At least she was not dead; they would have left her corpse on the bloody ground.  Worse, he thought, were she to be made a spear-bride for one of their stinking, hardly-human soldiers.

He made his way over to the cave that sheltered his family; the barbarians had burned his great Hall to the ground during the terrible night when they over-ran his land like rats, killing many in their sleep, tossing firebrands onto thatched roofs and burning others in their homes.  He found his daughter in law, Gudrun Sjogrunsdottir, caring for Erik's children.  She had lit a fire in the dim cave, and beckoned him to sit.  "Sit down, Father," she said, patting a thick skin on the stony floor. "Come, now.  You were victorious today; why so sad?"  She took his helm off his head and handed it to little Leif, who proudly bore it over to a rock shelf.  The little girl, Birgit, was already asleep.

"Thank you, daughter," Ungarn said.  He leaned back against the pile of skins, suddenly weary.  Gudrun brought over a skin of water and a cloth and began to wash his face and hands; she was like his own child.  Indeed, he had known her from birth.  He submitted to her kindly ministrations, and accepted a bowl of thick soup with a large chunk of bread in the middle of it.

"I'm worried about Helgarda," he said.  "She must have been taken by the barbarians; all that I have left of her is her sword and battle dagger." 

"Pity the barbarians who have taken her, " Gudrun stated.  "She will overcome them and end their lives, and then come back to us.  Would that I could have wielded my sword at her side!"

"Let us pray for her safe return," Ungarn said, beginning to eat his soup. He sighed.

Leif climbed up on his lap and snuggled down, his mouth open like a baby bird's.  "Look at you!" exclaimed his grandfather "Are you yet a fledgling, that I should feed you?" 

Leif nodded his head vigorously, his mouth still open. Ungarn chuckled and put a piece of the soup-soaked bread in the child's mouth

Leif made short work of the bread.  "Grandfather, am I big enough yet to go to sea?" he asked.  He was a tall child, already very strong for eight years of age, with huge hands and feet, and his father's bright red hair.

"Soon, soon, Leif Eriksson," said his mother. "Let's get your father home safe before we start losing track of you."

 Leif sat up, twining the cord that held his grandfather's runestone in his hands.  "Father is on his way," he announced.

Ungarn looked closely at his grandson.  The child had stated a fact: he wasn't imagining it.  How did he know?  "Tell me, Leif," said Ungarn, "when did you start knowing things that nobody else knows?"

***

"My king, he may be a Seer," stated Skjald, limping over to the fire and accepting a bowl of soup from Gudrun. "When he was born, I brought him to the mineral springs and dipped him therein, as I have done every child born in your holding for more years than you have fingers and toes together.  When I did it, the water in the spring bubbled and whirled strangely, and my many-times-great grandfather spoke to me out of it:  "My grandson, it is time I returned," he said.

"I was so frightened I almost dropped the infant," Skjald continued.

"Why?" asked Ungarn.  "Aren't you a mage?  Wasn't your father a mage, and his before him, and so on to the egg of the world?"

"We have ever been so," answered Skjald.  "We sing our history, we brew tonics, we say blessings on the newborn and newly dead, we make sacrifices to the gods, perform marriages and cure boils. Never could we foresee:  that is forbidden."

"Apparently my grandson hasn't heard of this forbidding," rumbled Ungarn.  He put his arm around the boy. "What else do you see, Leif?"

Leif stared into the fire.  As he did so, a flame of the fire separated itself from the rest, and, as Leif turned around slowly, the flame leapt onto a rock shelf, where it hung, glowing, next to Ungarn's helm.  Ungarn leapt to his feet, spilling Leif onto the ground. Gudrun covered her eyes in awe. Skjald shrank back, trembling.  Then he stood up, and beat his staff against the floor three times.  "The world is changing," he said softly.  "All that we knew will change.  There is magic abroad in the world, as there was in the times before time.  From this day, nothing will be the same." He looked keenly at the boy.  Until this day, he, only he, had entry to the world of magic. 

An intelligence indiscernible to mankind watched as all the springs in Nordland began to boil and bubble, and an eight year old boy looked into his mother's campfire and saw his father's long-eyed ship a day's sailing away, with the storm that had lashed the land gathering momentum as it sped over the ocean towards the ship. 

Leif saw the storm; saw his father's ship.  As if it were one of the little ships his grandfather carved for him out of scraps of wood, in his mind's eye Leif lifted the ship, with its sailors, masts, sails and cargo, out of its place in the water and set it down on the muddy earth outside of the charred remains of his grandfather's hall.  There was general pandemonium as the rowers found themselves trying to row mud, and a stentorian bellow shook the air as the huge Erik the Red, holding onto the mast, recognised his father's holding and voiced his astonishment at finding himself suddenly there, on the land, ship and all.