8.Bjorn’s Sadness

Thick white clouds boiled up from behind the point of land across the bay. The sky was wonderfully blue, shading from robin’s egg, where it met the sea, to a much deeper ultramarine at heaven’s peak. The sea was the same deep blue as the highest sky and was unmarked by wind or waves. Seabirds flecked the sky as if tiny specks of the dark rocky shore in the distance were flying up like thistledown. Colm’s chest filled and he felt like singing, though that was something he had never learned to do. He turned to Bjorn, “Look! How beautiful!”

Bjorn sat slumped over his knees, staring down. “Colm,” he said, “When you look down from a place like this, do you ever feel like jumping?”

Colm’s blood ran cold and all beauty left his thoughts. They were sitting on the edge of the cliffs, a long way above the water. Below were rocks that would crush a falling man before the waves swept him out to be eaten by sea creatures. “Never!” said Colm. He drew back from the brink a little. “I never feel that way, ever.” He thought of Edgar who Bjorn had thrown from the cliffs a few hundred yards from where they sat. He thought of slaves sacrificed by being thrown from the cliffs. He thought of Edgar...

“You are a blithe man,” said Bjorn. “You have glad thoughts.”

“What thoughts could not be glad on a day like today?” Colm resolved to be cheerful, though he felt Bjorn’s dark mood begin to cloud about him. “It is a beautiful day. The grass is green. The sheep are all well. We have good women in our houses. What is there not to be glad about?”

Bjorn shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“No, tell me, what’s wrong?”

Bjorn dropped his face in his hands. After a moment he said, “It’s all pointless. We live, we die. What does it matter?”

Colm was stumped. “What matters is the joy we find in every breath we take!” Bjorn did not respond but sat with his face in his hands. Colm wanted to say something about the joy of children, but he didn’t want to remind Bjorn of his son’s death, nor did he feel much joy at his own role in that event. The problem with talking to Bjorn was that his depression spread and attached itself to you, tainting your own pleasure. Colm said, “Let’s go drink some beer!”

“I drank all last night.” Bjorn raised his head and Colm saw that his cheeks were wet with tears. “I drank all I could hold and found not a single smile in the barrel of beer.” He lapsed into silence again. Lately he might sit that way for hours, hardly moving, never speaking.

Colm rose to his feet. “Well, you come watch me drink, then. Perhaps I’ll get drunk and fall on my face and that will give you something to smile about.”

Bjorn rose slowly and grabbed Colm by the shoulders. “You are a good friend, Colm, the best any man could ask for.” And fresh tears started in his eyes.

Colm embraced the weeping man and wondered if he really was Bjorn’s friend. And, deep down, he felt a thought rising that, perhaps, life was indeed pointless. He looked back out over the water into the wonderfully blue sky and tried to rediscover the gladness that had filled his heart before. But Colm had his own store of dark thoughts that sometimes spilled into his feeling.

He never spoke of Gudbrand's murder. A few times either Colm or Gwyneth alluded to the event around Geirrid, but the boy only returned a puzzled stare as though he knew nothing whatever about his foster-brother's death. And perhaps that was for the best, both parents thought. Let this thing vanish from memory. But it remained, another secret, another burden shared, another corpse -- Hastein, Gunnlaug, Grim, Gudbrand, the berserk that everyone believed Colm had killed rather than Gwyneth, the old Frisian that Colm never spoke of, and, worst of all, Edgar. Colm's life was raised on a heap of dead men, dead men and lies. People praised him for killing the berserk, Grim, and Gunnlaug, but all the rest were never to be mentioned. But they were there, always, burdening Colm and Gwyneth both and, by silencing themselves about these deaths, the couple lost part of their ability to express their feelings. They closed up and sometimes found themselves not speaking of other things, good things, that it would be a joy to share with another person. They had less joy as they grew older.