Handsal

by Tyr, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The spring assembly met at Thingnes, where the land runs out into the lake on a tongue of grass, and the booths stood along it in two rows with their turf walls patched from the winter and their roofs not yet on. Men brought the roofs with them, a cloth or a hide, and stretched them over the walls for the days of the assembly, and took them home again. The walls stayed. Some of them had stood for three lifetimes.

Ketil Hallsson came on the second day with his sister's son behind him and two horses carrying the booth-cloth and the food. He had been coming to this assembly for thirty-one springs. He knew which stones in the wall of his booth would be loose and he put them back before he unloaded anything.

Bard did not help with the stones. He stood at the end of the row and watched the horses being led down to the water, and when a grey stallion came past with a rope halter and a boy on the end of the rope, he followed it with his whole head turned, as a dog does.

"Bring the cloth," Ketil said.

Bard brought the cloth.

---

The case had been settled in the winter, in so far as anything is settled before the assembly has heard it. At the horse-fight at Kalfshamar in the autumn, Bard's brown stallion had been losing, and the man goading the other horse had been Hrafn Onundarson, who was twenty and laughed easily, and who laughed then. Bard had gone into the ring with his horse-goad. When it was over, Hrafn had a broken skull and lived for three days, and on the fourth his father Onund had a case for killing.

Ketil had ridden to Kalfshamar before the case could become anything else. He sat in Onund's house with his hands on his knees and offered that the matter go to arbitration, and Onund, who had other sons and wanted to keep them, accepted. Two men from each side had sat over it through the dark months. Their award was thirty cow-values, in three payments: at this assembly, at midsummer, and at the autumn meeting. Bard was not outlawed. He was to keep away from Kalfshamar and its people for three winters, and there was to be truce between the two households, spoken in the proper words before witnesses.

All of this was known. It needed only to be done.

---

On the evening of the second day Onund came to Ketil's booth himself, which he need not have done, with his son Thorkel and a neighbour of theirs as witness. They did not come in. Ketil went out to them, and they stood in the open between the booths with the lake grey behind them and the smoke of thirty cooking fires going straight up in the still air.

"I'll not take the boy's hand on it," Onund said.

Ketil waited.

"The payments, and the truce. His hand has nothing behind it. He owns a horse and a cloak and he owes the horse." Onund looked past Ketil into the booth, where Bard was sitting on the bench with his back to them. "I want a surety. Someone whose hand is worth what it promises."

"You want mine."

"There is no one else's to want."

Thorkel stood a little behind his father. He was older than his dead brother and did not laugh. He had a long jaw and kept it shut.

"If the payments fail," Onund said, "the surety pays them. If the truce is broken, the surety pays what the law sets on a broken truce. You know what that is."

"I know what it is."

"Then think about it tonight. I'll be at the court circle at midday."

He went away between the booths with his son and his witness, and did not look back.

---

Ketil's wife Gro had come with the second party in the afternoon, with the cheeses. She was setting them out on a board when he came back in, and she did not ask what had been said, because the booth wall was a single course of turf and she had heard it.

Bard was still on the bench. He had taken off one shoe and was working at the stitching of it with an awl, though nothing was wrong with the stitching.

"The grey stallion by the water," he said, without looking up. "That's Thorkel Onundarson's."

"It is."

"It's the horse that beat mine."

"It is the horse that was beating yours," Ketil said, "when the fight was stopped."

Bard drove the awl through the leather and out the other side and pulled it back. He did not say anything else. After a while he put the shoe on and went out, and they heard him go down towards the water.

Gro cut a cheese in half and wrapped one half in a cloth.

"Will he keep it?" she said.

"No."

She wrapped the other half.

"The land at the lake," she said. "The meadow below the house. Is that what it would cost?"

"That and some of the cows."

"And you'll give your hand."

"If I don't give it, there is no truce. If there is no truce, Onund's sons ride before midsummer, and Bard is dead, and then it is my turn to ride, because he is my sister's son. And then it is Thorkel's turn." He sat down on the bench where Bard had been. "That is not a thing which ends. This is a thing which ends."

"It ends with our meadow."

"It ends," he said.

She put the cheeses on the shelf at the back of the booth, where it was cool. Then she came and sat by him, and they sat together without talking until the fire was low, and Bard did not come back until after they were asleep.

---

The court circle at Thingnes was a ring of stones and turf, wide enough for forty men to stand inside it, set on the highest part of the tongue of land, so that from inside it one saw only the sky and the far shore. Any man might stand at the edge and hear what was said. A good many did. A killing settled was worth hearing, because it was so often not.

The arbitrators stated their award, each of the four in turn, and named their witnesses. Onund stated that he accepted it. Ketil stated that Bard accepted it. Then Onund named his witnesses again, two men from the district who had no interest in either house, and said in front of them that he would take the handsal of Ketil Hallsson of Hrisholt as surety for the payment of the award, and for the truce.

"I give it," Ketil said.

They came together in the middle of the circle. Onund put out his right hand and Ketil took it, palm against palm, and the witnesses came close and looked at the two hands joined, because that was what they were there to do. Onund's hand was dry and hard and very cold. Ketil held it and said the words of the surety: that he bound himself, his goods and his land to the payment of thirty cow-values at the three meetings named, and to the payment of the fine at law if the truce were broken by Bard Thorvaldsson or by any man of his household. He said it without hurrying. It was not a thing to be said quickly.

"I take your handsal," Onund said, "and these men saw it."

"We saw it," said the witnesses.

Neither man let go first. They let go together.

---

Then the truce was spoken. There was an old man at the assembly, Grim of Eyvindarstadir, who had the words, and who was asked for them whenever they were needed, because they were long and must be spoken whole. He stood in the circle between the two households with his hands folded on a stick and said them to the sky over the far shore, as if the sky were the party to be bound.

He said that there was to be truce between these men, between Onund and his sons and household on the one part and Bard Thorvaldsson and his kinsmen on the other, for every case and every injury that had been between them, and that they should be at peace at meetings and at the assembly, at feasts and at the fold, at home and abroad, on ship and on shore, and should share knife and meat and all things as friends and not as foes.

He said that if any man of them broke the truce he had sworn, that man should be a wolf. He should be driven out and hunted as widely as men hunt wolves, as widely as Christian men go to church and heathen men hold sacrifice, as widely as fire burns and the earth grows green, as a child calls its mother and a mother bears a son, as ships sail and shields shine and the sun melts the snow; and he should be shut out from every house and hearth and from the company of good men, and no man should share meat with him again.

The men at the edge of the circle were very quiet. Some of them had heard the words twenty times. They were quiet in the same way every time.

Then Bard was brought into the circle, because the truce was his as well as Ketil's, and he gave his hand to Thorkel Onundarson, and Thorkel took it. Grim watched the hands. Bard's was the larger, and it was Bard who gripped; Ketil saw the knuckles of the young man's hand go pale, and saw Thorkel hold his own hand quite still inside it and look into Bard's face without changing his. Then they let go, not together.

It was done. Men began to leave the circle to go and eat.

On the way back to the booth, Bard walked beside his uncle for a while without speaking. They passed the place where the horses were watered. The grey stallion was not there.

"There aren't any wolves in this country," Bard said.

"No."

"Then what does it mean? To be one."

"It means what the words say," said Ketil. "The words came here from a country that has them. The men who brought the words did not bring the animal. It is a law for the wolf, and the wolf is not here, and the law is."

Bard thought about this. He thought about it all the way to the booth, and then he went in and ate, and said that Gro's cheese was the best at the assembly, which was very likely true.

Ketil paid the first ten cow-values the next morning, before they rode home: four cows and the rest in wadmal and a little silver, counted out on a cloth in front of Onund's booth and witnessed. They were Ketil's cows. Bard owned a horse and a cloak.

---

The summer went as summers go. The hay was cut in the home-field and then in the meadow below the house, where the grass stood thick because the lake fed it from underneath. Ketil mowed the meadow himself, the whole of it, with a scythe whose blade he had put on new in the spring; it took him six days. He did not hurry over it.

At midsummer he rode to Kalfshamar alone and paid the second ten. Three cows, a bull-calf, the rest in wadmal. Onund counted it and said it was right, and offered him food, and Ketil ate it, sitting at Onund's board while Onund's household watched him eat. Thorkel was out at the shielings with the sheep. Nobody spoke of Bard.

Bard worked through the summer. He was a good worker when he worked. He turned hay, and cut peat, and went with the boat for the char on the lake; he broke in a young mare for a neighbour, which he was good at, and was paid in a fleece. Twice he rode off for two days without saying where, and came back with his horse lathered and the look of a man who has been somewhere he was told not to go and has not quite got there. Ketil did not ask. Asking would only have made Bard tell him, and then they would both have known, and nothing would be different.

In the autumn the sheep came down off the high ground.

---

The round-up was at the common fold below the moor, where the sheep of the whole district were driven together into one great pen of stone, and then sorted by their earmarks into the smaller pens round it, one for each farm, like the petals of a flower round the middle. It took two days. Every household sent men. It was a thing that had to be done together or not at all, because no farm's sheep kept to that farm's land, and the mountain did not know whose they were.

Ketil sent Bard and two of the farm hands, and went himself on the second day.

He heard what had happened before he reached the fold. A boy from the next farm met him on the track, running, and turned and ran back with him, telling it. A ewe with Kalfshamar's mark had been in the Hrisholt pen. Bard had seen Thorkel lift her over the wall, and said the mark was a cut that had healed badly and the ewe was theirs. Thorkel had shown him the mark. Bard had said something. Thorkel had said nothing at all, and turned his back to lift the ewe, and Bard had hit him across the shoulders with a sorting-stave, a length of birch as thick as a wrist, and then again on the arm when he turned.

"Is he dead?"

"No," the boy said. "His arm's broken. They've got it in a splint. He walked."

"And Bard?"

"Gone. He took his horse from the line and went up on the moor."

At the fold, Thorkel was sitting on the wall of his father's pen with his arm bound up against his chest, very white in the face. Men stood a little way off from him, and a little way off from Ketil when he came, as men stand off from a fire. Nobody needed to tell anybody what it meant. They had all heard the words in the spring. Most of them had heard them twenty times.

Ketil went to the wall.

"I am sorry for your arm," he said to Thorkel.

Thorkel looked at him.

"It's not your arm to be sorry for," he said.

Ketil stood a moment longer, and then went and sorted the Hrisholt sheep, ewe by ewe, reading every mark himself; and when he found the ewe with the badly healed cut, he lifted her over the wall into the Kalfshamar pen.

---

At the autumn meeting, which was smaller than the spring one and held in a single day, Onund brought his case: that the truce had been broken, by whom, before what witnesses, and in what manner. There were nine witnesses. The case was not difficult.

Bard Thorvaldsson was declared a truce-breaker, which is to say outside the law. No man might feed him or shelter him or help him to a ship. He might be killed without compensation by anyone who found him. It was said in the court circle in the plain form, and Ketil stood at the edge of the circle and heard it said, and did not speak, because there was nothing in it that was not true.

Then the surety was called.

Ketil came into the circle with his own witnesses, and with the last ten cow-values on two horses, and with the rest, which could not be carried and which he had by heart. He stated that he had given his handsal in the spring, before these men, as surety for the payments and for the truce. He stated that the truce had been broken by a man of his household. He stated that he had come to pay what was owed.

The last ten cow-values were counted out on the cloth. Then he stated the rest: the meadow below the house at Hrisholt, from the stone with the cross cut in it down to the lake and along the shore to the stream, with its fishing; and eight cows, which were at Hrisholt and could be fetched. That was what the law set on a broken truce, by the reckoning the arbitrators had made of it, and Ketil had made the same reckoning himself on the night before the spring assembly, sitting on the bench in his booth, and the figure had not changed.

Onund heard it through. He named his witnesses and took it.

"It's good land," he said, as if it were a thing that needed to be said in the circle, so that it was heard.

"It is the best I have," said Ketil. "The lake feeds it from underneath."

---

They did not leave the circle at once. There was another case, a small one, after theirs: a man from the north shore had sold a horse to a man from the south shore, and the horse had turned out to be lame in a way that showed only after a day's riding, and the buyer wanted his price back, and the seller would give it back only if the horse were returned sound, which it could not be. The two of them had worked their way to an agreement in the afternoon, with some help, but the seller was young and his father was dead and he had no one of standing, and the buyer would not take his hand alone.

The buyer looked round the circle. It was late; there were not many men left in it. Onund was rolling up the cloth on which the cow-values had been counted, with his witness to help him. Ketil was standing by the stones with his empty horses.

"I'll take Ketil Hallsson's hand on it," the buyer said. "If he'll give it."

Onund looked up from his cloth.

"His hand pays," he said. He said it to no one in particular. Then he went back to rolling up the cloth.

The young man from the north shore came across the circle to Ketil, not quite meeting his eye, and said something about the horse, and about how it was a small matter, and how there would be no trouble with it, none at all.

Ketil looked at him for a while. Then he put out his right hand, and the witnesses came close to see it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Tȳre per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Tyr, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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