The Ballad Of Sigurd Jorsalfare

Danny Maseng
Aug 24, 2017 · 7 min read

Chapter 49

Outremer; autumn 1108

“By the autumn of 1108, Halvar Night Hawk was sick of Jerusalem. Sigurd Jorsalfare vanished into thin air. Search parties, spies, informants all came back with no hard evidence but plenty of rumors: Sigurd was now a mendicant, weaving foolish tales of lost fish and winsome virgins, of The Lover’s search for his Laila.

Sigurd was a shepherd, roaming the hills of Judea, barefoot, telling stories of a dark city called Dublin, teaching the sheep the song of the lost seamen.

The best rumors had Sigurd flying north to nest by the reeds of the river Jordan, or caught high in a fruit tree, having become a bat.

“Idiots,” spat Halvar, “The place breeds idiots like Mediterranean fruit flies.”

Having already spent more time than he’d ever bargained for in Outremer, Halvar had resolved to never again visit this cursed plot of earth as long as he lived.

In truth, Halvar was lonely.

The leaderless Norse contingency had whittled down to a handful of heavy-drinking, sour and resentful war veterans who were in the habit of gathering at sunset in the city’s pubs and whore houses and drinking themselves into the floor and lower, into the tunnels of Jerusalem, wandering aimlessly through the dark heart of the eternal city, singing repetitive ballads in major keys, upsetting the musical foundations of the city of David.

No one knows for sure how many Vikings had perished under the city’s pavements, having run out of hope, oxygen, or songs to sing.

Some Norsemen were rumored to have made it all the way back to Norway via underground tunnels, proving Jerusalem was, indeed, the heart of the world.

The rumor scared the pants off King Baldwin, who ordered his thinnest and most subversive engineers, mostly southern Italians, to go underground and build iron gates, dig moats and fortify the city seven layers down, to prevent any future invasions from Azerbaijan, Estonia or, God forbid, Hungary.

Indeed, to this very day no Magyars, Azeries, or Estonians have ever invaded the Holy Land. As a fringe benefit, the project kept the darker Southern Italians under blonder Northern rule (a situation whose remnants can still be seen in Italy today, if one but wishes to look).

Halvar had not come to Jerusalem to fortify, nor to drink. He had come to kill, and other than the odd pesky Flemish pain-in-the-neck or Provencal blow hard, Halvar could find very few candidates worthy of disposing.

There is nothing sadder than an unemployed killer.

Halvar was gaining weight and losing muscle tone. The word in the street was that he was suffering from the dreaded ‘Palermo Syndrome’, so named by the Norsemen for the condition that had transformed Sigurd from the brooding killing machine he was prior to arriving in Sicily, to the lusciously evanescent rumor he’d become in Outremer.

Halvar took to hiking alone down the western slopes of Jerusalem, the most beautiful of her hills, searching for capers to pickle and salmon to keep the pickled capers company. Finding no salmon, Halvar imagined salmon.

Halvar cleaned and salted his salmon, built a smoke house on a lonely hill and cured his catch to perfection. Suspicious of all Middle Easterners, having met them, Halvar set traps around the perimeter and sat sentinel in an Olive tree sixty paces from the hut. A young man was hired to take shifts in order to allow Halvar the rest he sorely needed. Halvar, however, mistrusted the native and ended up spending his time off the olive tree disguised as a prickly pear, watching the young man watch the imaginary salmon cure for three weeks at a time.

Only two things can come of such foolishness and both of them came to Halvar in the form of Madeleine Sauvage and Therese Pitie and not a moment too soon.

Halvar’s loneliness was getting so bad he had begun hunting for humpback whales, craving the fat and protein-rich memories the behemoth mammals would offer the lucky whaler.

The hills of Jerusalem are notorious for their scarcity of whales, a fact with which Halvar would not reconcile. Neglecting his salmon for weeks on end, Halvar would skulk from rock to rock, spear in hand, calling the reluctant whales in his salty voice, luring them with terse Norwegian idioms like prized plankton pearls which he spread out upon the thorny hills.

Do not leave plankton out in the sun for too long or you will get a foul odor so pungent, so powerful as to render you speechless, a fact the residents of the hills of Jerusalem learned all too well in early October, 1108.

It is also a very bad idea to neglect salmon, imaginary or not, for more than three days in the Mediterranean climate.

Not that Outremer smelled so wonderful in the pre-regulated-sewage era of the early crusades, but the stench that rose like a ring of death around Jerusalem from Halvar’s neglect was so awful — it kept the rains from falling. It kept vital supplies from reaching the beloved city of eternal strife. It also kept holiness from trickling out of the sacred city like a leaking faucet towards the Jordan Valley to the East and the coastline to the West, leaving the Holy Land bereft of holiness.

*

Madeleine Sauvage and Therese Pitie were born to Arab or Circassian parents in an Arab or Circassian village (either of which will remain nameless in order to protect the villagers’ prescience and ambiguity) in anticipation of the Crusades and the Frankish invasion, twenty-three years before the cataclysm.

Brilliant as the premonition was, the two young ladies had no hope of a normal life bearing such Franj names in a land of exquisite xenophobia. They were expelled from the village at a tender age and sent forth to the wilderness of Judea, where they learned the secret of succulents, the magic of abstinence, and the thundering power of silence.

By the time the First Crusade rolled in, the two maidens had had about as much as they could take of their exile and prowled the hills of Jerusalem nightly for means by which to unburden themselves of all that they had learned.

It was the song of the whaler that drew them towards the Western hills, away from their Judean refuge to a land they did not know, and were it not for the sun’s last rays catching the tip of Halvar’s spear, they would have missed the wary Viking altogether.

I would love to say that it was love at first sight, but I can’t.

Not because love was an impossibility — after all, Halvar was a striking man, fierce and proud and turbulent as the month of March in Newfoundland, and the maidens were stunningly feral, like nothing Halvar had ever seen before.

Suspicion and disbelief were the first currents to flood the opposing parties.

Danger was the wall that kept them apart for the seventeen seconds they stared at each other, circling slowly and cagily.

Lust, hunger, and loneliness tore down the wall and sent the three running at each other like loosed demons at the sight of a pure soul.

Dust, rocks, twigs, thistles, and thorns flew as the three combatants clashed.

Halvar drove his spear into the earth, hitting a water vein that sent a fountain of pure bliss into the chilling air. Therese and Madeleine ripped Halvar’s garments off, ate them and then pinned the warrior down, driving stakes through his hair, embedding him to the harsh soil like a Samson.

Having accomplished all this in less time that a cat takes to move a whisker, the two had no idea what to do next. They had witnessed humans only from a distance and the plants they had come to know intimately in the desert offered no clues as to what to make of a naked Viking.

Agitated and yet somehow happy, the two sat down on each side of the splayed warrior and picked twigs and dust grains from his hair.

“Chante encore,” they said to him and brushed their dark, dark hair over his body, sensing, somehow, it would please him.

Halvar closed his eyes and sang the song of Egil Thorvaldson, the first man to plant a tree in a cloud, the tree of life by which all Norsemen guide their ships back home to safety.

Therese and Madeleine wept with pleasure. Madeleine ran off and returned with twine, leaves and soft branches, which she wove into a garment with her teeth and her nimble fingers. Therese pulled out a vile of plant extract, which she applied to Halvar’s body, causing him to moan with such sweet anguish, the two mistook it for pain.

Hair untied, stakes removed, Halvar sat up and was cloaked with his new garments.

“Viens avec nous,” said Madeleine, as though Halvar needed to be asked, as though there were something else he’d rather have done, somewhere else he’d rather have gone.

Through the night they walked towards Judea, leaving all civilization behind, escaping the rancid smell of rotting plankton and pickled capers, of smoked salmon and whale blubber, escaping the pettiness of Jerusalem and its wailing prayers, its blood-soaked streets and clanging bells and incense columns rising towards the angry God who found such offerings pleasing.

By dawn Halvar had forgotten war and sea and ice and sorrow. He found himself running with the wind alongside his soul mates, his angels of herbal deliverance, the desert rocks and stones caressing his bare feet as though he were running on warm snow, back home again in the Ostfold he’d never forget.”

)
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade