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HRA FNKEL O R T H E A M B I G U I T I E S
Hrafnkel or the
Ambiguities
Hard Cases, Hard Choices

WILLIAM IAN MILLER

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© William Ian Miller 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For the love of Skarpheðinn Njálsson, Björn Kaðalsson
í Mörk, and Þorgerðr Egilsdóttir: souls to die for.
 Acknowledgments

Jordan Corrente Beck, John Crigler, Daniel Halberstam, Ingrid Hedström,

Don Herzog, John Hudson, and Lára Magnúsardóttir read the ms at various
stages or gave help when I desperately asked for it; they will find that I took
almost all their advice. Two anonymous readers at OUP made valuable sug-
gestions. My secretary at the University of Michigan Law School, Laura
Harlow, without equal, gets things done at the speed of light. Nearing the
end of a career, one starts adding up the unpaid debts, the credit extended by
family, teachers, colleagues, friends, students, and even, or maybe especially, the
University of Michigan Law School. Imagine getting to write what I got to write
and teach what I got to teach in a very good law school, blessed with students
who are nearly as grateful as I am that they could actually get credit toward their
law degree by reading sagas.
 Table of Contents

Note to Readers xiii

Abbreviations xvii
Genealogies xix
Key Farms xxi

I . I N T R O D U C T IO N
1. A Somewhat Querulous Introduction: Hrafnkel and the Critics 3
The Hrafnkel Problem: Matters of Origins and Historicity 5
Law and Literature 8

2. Of Names and Manageability 15

II. E CONOMIC, S OCIAL , AND

G E O L O GI C A L C O N T E X T
3. The Saga’s Economics (ch. 14) 21
Extending Credit and Going into Debt 21
Culling Kids and Hrafnkel’s Gamble 24
Juridical Rank and Status 28

4. New-Found Land and Setting up Households (chs. 1–2) 34

Fathers and Sons 36

I I I . H O R SE , V O W , A N D KI L L I N G
5. Freysgoði, Frey, and Freyfaxi 43

6. The Ójafnaðarmaðr (The “Unevenman”) 48

Jafn vs. The Inherent Competitiveness of Honor 51

7. Sam, Einar, and Hrafnkel (chs. 3–6) 55

Sam 55
Einar and Hrafnkel 58

8. Freyfaxi and Hrafnkel: More on the Vow and its Price (chs. 5–6) 67
Vows Revisited 72

9. Hrafnkel’s Offer (ch. 7) 81

10. Thorbjorn’s Rejection (ch. 7 cont.) 88

x Table of Contents

IV. LAWSUIT A B O V O TO “ FINAL ” SET TLEM ENT

11. Mustering Support and Going Public (ch. 7 cont.) 99
Kinsmen 99

12. The Lawsuit: Preparatory Stages (chs. 8–9) 107

Deus ex Machina: Thorkel Thjostarsson 111

13. Thorkel’s Homily on Fellow-Feeling and Commensurating

Pain (ch. 10) 117

14. The Trial (chs. 11–12) 125

Sam’s Victory Dance 128

15. Hanging Upside-Down and Sam’s Self-Judgment (ch. 13) 133

The Gift of Life 137

16. Farewell Freyfaxi and Frey (chs. 15–16) 145

17. The “True” Nature of Hrafnkel’s Transformation (ch. 16) 150

V. SIX Y EARS LATER

18. Eyvind Returns; a Griðkona Takes Over (ch. 17) 157
The Skósveinn 157
The Astute Washerwoman 159

19. Who in Hell Are We Rooting For? (ch. 18) 168

Chase Scenes and Their Discontents 171
Trying to Give Eyvind a Psychology 174
Offstage 179

20. Hrafnkel’s Judgment and Justification (ch. 19) 181

You Got Two Choices, Neither of Them Good 182
An “Evenman” Who Pays Compensation 183
Justifying Killing Eyvind 187
Wiggle Room and Evenness 194
Coda: Settlement Breaking 196

21. Sam’s Last Gasp (ch. 20) 199

22. Sam and Morpheus: What Counts as Taking a Turn 204

Turn-Taking Revisited 204
Three Speeches Briefly Revisited 209

23. Conclusion: Hard Cases, Hard Choices 211

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/11/2016, SPi

Table of Contents xi
Appendices 217
A. Hrafnkels saga Freysgoði, translation of ms ÁM 156, fol. 217
B. Glossary of Norse Terms 235
Works Cited 239
A.1 Hrafnkels saga, Editions and Translations Consulted 239
A.2 Sources and Translations 239
B. Secondary Works 241
Maps 249
Index 253
 Note to Readers

For non-specialists, mainly students, who make up a large portion of my

intended audience, I have anglicized Norse names, thus eliminating the nom-
inative inflections, diacritics, and accents (though when quoted in the original
they of course appear in their proper form, as do the names of Icelandic scholars
generally): thus Thorkel, not Þorkell, Sam, not Sámr. When I insert in
parenthesis an original Old Icelandic noun, I tend to put it in the nominative
singular, not in its inflected form, as it appears in the sentence, but I have not
been entirely consistent, when I felt consistency looked silly in the particular
context. Hooked o appears as ö.
I am somewhat at a loss as how best to refer to Icelandic scholars, by their
given name as in Icelandic practice, or by their patronymic. I have decided to
cite them by patronymic as if it were a surname, if only because the Nordals,
grandfather and granddaughter, have a surname, and Hermann Pálsson worked
and lived abroad for a considerable time in Edinburgh.
I have translated the entire A version of the saga as an aid to the reader in the
Appendix. But I confess that Pálsson’s translation is stuck in my head, leading
to two opposed anxieties: inadvertent plagiarism, and advertent fishing for a
different wording simply because Pálsson used it, even if it is the only sensible
way to translate the Norse. He translates D but the text varies so little from
A that those who prefer to have it at hand while reading this book would not be
much disadvantaged. I have taught this saga for some forty years, using his
translation in the Penguin Classics, which is how most of two generations of
Anglophone students have experienced it. I can hardly improve on Pálsson’s
style, but I can render some passages a bit less tendentiously than he does, when
he seeks to moralize, as is his wont, when the text admits of easier more neutral
readings. I have also, in much conflict with my own better judgment, limited
somewhat the recourse to elegant variation for the original’s repetition of certain
verbs and nouns; I have not let myself be as free as Pálsson, but at the cost of
making the English on occasion somewhat stiff.1 Translations from Grágás

1 Other available translations lack his ear for lively English prose, and mine I am afraid joins them.

It is a shame that, except for his Hrafnkel’s Saga, Penguin has replaced his excellent translations (in
collaboration variously with Magnusson and Edwards) of Njáls saga, Eyrbyggja saga, and Laxdæla saga
with manifestly inferior versions.
xiv Note to Readers

largely follow those of Dennis, Foote, and Perkins, though I have altered these
in small ways on occasions that need not be noted.
Hrafnkels saga is preserved only in paper manuscripts dating from the
seventeenth century. But one parchment leaf survives from an early fifteenth-
century manuscript from which the paper manuscripts ultimately derive (ÁM
162 I, fol., labeled M in the tree below). This leaf contains the text from ch. 9
(where Sam asks Thorkel why he is not a chieftain like his brothers) up until
ch. 11 (where Hrafnkel is invited to make his defense in court). The saga itself is
commonly agreed to have been written c.1290, roughly contemporaneous with
the composition of Njáls saga, both thus benefiting from a century of saga
writing.
I have used Jón Helgason’s edition of the saga, though I have normalized the
spellings. He bases his edition on ms A (ÁM 156, fol.) as do the editions of
Baetke, Gordon, and Jón Jóhannesson.2 Pálsson and Gunnell (in the CSI
collection) base their translations on D (ÁM 551 c, quarto), with some lacunae
supplied from an early eighteenth-century copy of it (ÁM 451, quarto). D is
some 300 words longer than A; the additions mostly, but not exclusively,
providing more topographical detail during the chase scene in chs. 18–19.
B (ÁM 158, fol.) and C (ÁM 443, quarto) trace to a common ancestor labeled y
below, and are quite close to A. Helgason, Baetke, and Pálsson divide the saga
into twenty chapters, which I follow because the shorter chapters aid the reader
in locating the passages discussed in this book, and also because many readers
will have Pálsson in front of them. Gunnell’s translation has sixteen chapters,
while Gordon, Jóhannesson (also Byock’s Old Norse reader following
Jóhannesson), and Jones divide the text into ten chapters, which in fact is
how ÁM 156, fol. (A) divides the text.3

X
M
A y D
B C

Two more matters: First, this book does not quite fit in either of the two
disciplinary domains into which it might be catalogued. It combines concerns
that are conventionally thought of as literary-critical matters, with my more

2 The A ms, ÁM 156, fol., is available online at the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar website: http://

handrit.is/en/manuscript/imaging/is/AM02-0156/13r-28r#page/13r+(1of+31)/mode/2up.
3 Helgason does not follow A’s chapter division, preferring the twenty-chapter division apparently

borrowed from Valdimar Ásmundarson’s 1911 edition, with some minor alterations in the dividing
point of two chapters.
 Note to Readers xv

usual historical hobby-horses, feud and conflict, the tactics and strategies of
maintaining face, and the motives that inform action or inaction. I am not sure
how you can do justice to one discipline without the other, especially with a
literature as sociological, legal, political, and complexly moral in its subject matter
as the sagas are. Second: please excuse what may appear to be an unseemly
amount of citing to my earlier work, but much of what I have written on the sagas
has appeared in my non-Norse books and in obscurely placed articles and is
unlikely to have been seen by those who might have some interest in the
discussions in them that expand in relevant ways on the points I will be making
in this book. I have written on parts of this saga variously in my long monograph
on disputing in the sagas, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking (1990), but also in my
more general book on pricing wrongs and the lex talionis, Eye for an Eye (2006).
Some of those discussions, modified and revised, reappear here.
 Abbreviations
CSI The Complete Sagas of Icelanders including 49 tales, edited by Viðar
Hreinsson, 5 vols (Reykjavík, 1997).
DGL Danmarks gamle Landskabslove med Kirkelovene, vols 1–8 (1932–51),
ed. Johs. Brndum-Nielsen (Copenhagen Gyldendal).
Grágás Grágás: Islændernes Lovbog i fristatens Tid. 3 vols. Edited by Vilhjálmur
Finsen. 1852 (Konungsbók), 1879 (Staðarhólsbók), 1883 (Copenhagen).
Rpt. Odense, 1974. For translation see Works Cited.
ÍF Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík, 1933–). This series is accepted as providing
the standard editions of the family, kings’, and bishops’ sagas, still
awaiting Sturlunga saga.
JD Juris Doctor.
McGrew/Thomas Julia H. McGrew and R. George Thomas, trans., Sturlunga saga,
2 vols (New York, 1970, 1974).
ModE Modern English.
NGL Norges gamle Love indtil 1387, Vol. 1, ed. R. Keyser and P. A. Munch
(Christiania [Oslo], 1846). For translation see Works Cited.
OE Old English.
ON Old Norse.
Sturlunga saga Sturlunga saga, edited by Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason, and
Kristján Eldjárn, 2 vols (Reykjavík, 1946).
 Genealogies
Hallfred

Hrafnkel = Oddbjorg da of
Skjoldolf

Thorir Asbjorn

Bjarni Thorbjorn

Sam Eyvind Einar unnamed children

Thjostar

Thorkel Thorgeir Thormod = Thordis da of Thorolf

Skallagrimsson
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/11/2016, SPi

Key Farms
Adalbol—in Hrafnkelsdale: first Hrafnkel’s, then Sam’s for six years, subsequently
reclaimed by Hrafnkel
Hol—Thorbjorn’s farm, a short distance from Adalbol, before he moves to Leikskalar
Hrafnkelsstead—at the southern bottom of Lagarfljot, Hrafnkel’s residence after his district
exile, called Lokhilla before acquired by Hrafnkel
Laugarhus—Bjarni’s farm, location not capable of precise determination
Leikskalar—Sam’s farm, home of Thorbjorn during six years Sam occupied Adalbol, and
like Laugarhus not capable of precise location
All of these except for Hrafnkelsstead are located along the stream running down Hrafnkels-
dale, which branches off a larger valley, Jokulsdale.
 I

INTRODUCTION
 1
A Somewhat Querulous Introduction
Hrafnkel and the Critics

This essay attempts a close reading of Hrafnkels saga in the manner and style
that informed my readings of Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka (Audun’s Story) and Njáls
saga.1 It is meant as a small counter-gift to some anonymous Icelanders who
lived more than 800 years ago, who gave me my calling. I love this saga. I mean
to do ‘her’ right as best I can, and defend her against her other lovers, most of
whom, I think, did her wrong. Call it revenge.2
I find most all the critical literature on Hrafnkel frustratingly dissatisfying. The
critics have consistently been moved to take unnuanced positions on certain
intractable questions that the author is perfectly pleased to leave open. These
critics want everything neat, explicable, unambiguous, fully resolved. But no
“interpretive consensus” has emerged, in the words of one of the true masters of
saga studies.3 Interpreters thus cannot agree whether Hrafnkel is good or bad,
fully redeemed or the same as always. Yet they feel they must decide it is one or
the other or that they have failed to interpret the saga. Not just Hrafnkel suffers;
Thorbjorn and Sam must face similar inquisitions: are they blameworthy on
serious moral grounds, or is one the excusable victim of injustice while the other
is culpably prideful? Did Eyvind and Einar deserve their ends or were they
innocent victims? Is the saga deeply pagan and heroic or is it deeply Christian,
as if these categories were one-dimensional: ‘heroic’ taken to mean an ethic that
prefers stupid glorious defeat to thinking a bit and winning two weeks later,

1 Miller 2008; 2014.

2 Querulousness is hardly new to the criticism of this saga: Heinemann 1975a, 1975b and Hallberg
1975a, 1975b go at each other with unrestrained ad hominem hostility, to the delight, nonetheless, of
the reader.
3 Thus Theodore Andersson who seems to suggest that if there is fault for an “interpretive consensus”

failing to emerge it might well be the author’s: “what the author thinks of Hrafnkel is so unclear that
critics are divided on whether he is portrayed as arrogant or merely zealous in the maintenance of his
status” (Andersson 2006: 175–6; cf. 1988); also Schach 1993: 297. It is common for articles to begin
with reviews of the literature detailing how critics line up on Hrafnkel’s character. I am not going to do
so, but refer you instead to Harris’s reasonably recent and fairly comprehensive summary of the various
positions (2005–6: 28–54, 31–6); also Fulk 1986; Johansen 1995. To rehearse everyone’s position on
each point I make would be tedious to the reader. I will provide representative references when they are
especially telling of the problems infecting the critical literature.
4 Hrafnkel or the Ambiguities

while ‘Christian’ means mercy and forgiveness, a religion of peace, while the
damned writhe eternally in hell for avarice or pride.4 One critic denounced
Thorkel leppr (lock of hair) as a ‘liar’; that self-parodying moralism came from a
scholar who wrote one of the best articles on Njáls saga.5 Hrafnkatla6 seems to
emit toxic emanations that enervate the acumen of otherwise able scholars.
To the mind of the standard layman, scholars and critics are always finding
ambiguities, ironies, subtleties, difficulties, and sex where no normal human being
would ever think to find them without the unhealthy cultivation of an effete
sensibility and too much learning. Not in studies of Hrafnkels saga.7 There,
mindboggling simple-mindedness reigns. The drive to eliminate psychological
complexity and ambiguity has also deeply infected the very words of the text itself.
One famous emendation we will discuss in due course, but another will do for now
to prove my point: Sigurður Nordal, the father of “the Hrafnkel problem,” of
which more anon, emends one speech attributed to Thorkel Thjostarsson in all
manuscripts to give the lines to his brother Thorgeir: “I don’t know why you are
doing this; you will come to regret it greatly if you spare him.” An important speech
to rip away from one brother and give to another in the face of unanimity of the
manuscripts. Why change who said that? Because, says Nordal, Thorgeir is
practical, and Thorkel adventurous, “brisk, goodhearted,” and therefore the line
attributed to him is too practical and not sufficiently goodhearted to be originally
Thorkel’s. Well, the brothers were not so easily straitjacketed until the emendation
made them so; the manuscripts, following the clear sensibility of the author,
wanted the two brothers more fully rounded, more plausible as humans, less flatly
allegorical.8 There are absolutely no villains in this saga, and the only arguably flat
character who gets much time on stage is Eyvind, and it is precisely his flatness that

4 Pálsson (1971a: 40–50, 57–61) is the chief proponent of an unnuanced Christianity. And one can

take one’s pick among critics who understand heroic moral systems simplistically and erroneously as
devoid of any means or impulses to settle disputes or make peace, taking the heroic to be a flat ethical
system without nuance. Peacemaking techniques were obviously available to Germanic pagans before
they became Christian; Erlingsson 1970: 12; G. Sigurðsson 2004: 29.
5 Bolton 1971: 42 passim (he nonetheless makes insightful stylistic observations); cf. Bolton 1972.

Van Wezel (2001: 177) reiterates the insult to Thorkel: he is a liar because he says Hrafnkel killed Einar
saklauss, without cause. And was it a lie for Thorkel to omit Hrafnkel’s offer of reparations when trying
to convince his brother to support old Thorbjorn’s cause? His are partisan views to be sure, but lies?
6 Hrafnkatla is the saga’s Icelandic nickname, or short form.
7 Despite the title of van Wezel 2001, its focus is to dismiss Pálsson’s claim for specific clerical

sources for the saga, but he does not offer any general view of the saga’s interpretive complexities. It is
hard to deny that some forms of clerical writing, notably hagiography, play some part in the history of
saga writing; see Wellendorf 2010.
8 See Nordal 1940: 53: “In view of their natures it must be Thorgeirr and not Thorkell who warns

Sámr, against giving Hrafnkel his life” (Thomas tr., as are all cites to Nordal). The most important
Icelandic edition, Jóhannesson’s (1950), adopts the emendation, ÍF 11: 121n4. Helgason 1959 and
Gordon 1927 keep the mss reading as does Pálsson 1971 and Gunnell 1997, but not Jones 1980; see
Chapter 15, n. 15.
 Introduction: Hrafnkel and the Critics 5

begs for interpretation, his motives and actions anything but self-explanatory, even
if his will is constrained by the demands of the literary type he is called on to play.
Ironies are not seen, ambiguities explained away or lamented, or not even
recognized and, if recognized, edited away. There must also be a message.9 And
it is what? Repent and ye shall be redeemed? Don’t make stupid vows?
Moderation is the ultimate virtue? Don’t ride by a guy’s farm all dressed up
with shields flashing when a woman who lives there is outside doing the
laundry? Listen to reason even when it is put in the mouth of a little skósveinn
(lit. shoe-boy, a serving boy)? Don’t look a gift horse that will feed you and your
kids in the mouth? When torture is a freebie why not take up the opportunity?
Beware the wicked? Take the higher, longer road? Reject pagan gods? He is a
wise man who knows himself? Don’t torture someone and let him live?
If the saga worked the way that nearly all the critics say it does, if it means what
they say it means, either X or minus X, no one but the narrowest of specialists
would read it or write about it. It would have been translated as often and read
about as much as the Ormulum.10 But perversely a truth does manage to emerge
from the critical literature as a whole, from its very failure to achieve any consensus
on the simplistic questions it poses. The truth? That the author meant to ask
difficult questions with no easy answers, if answers are even to be had. He created
complex actors and put them in high-stakes encounters, each step of the action
raising difficult legal, moral, and political questions. The ambiguities are inten-
tional. They are what make the story so compelling, so thought-provoking.

T H E HR A FN KE L P R O B L E M : MA T T E R S
OF ORIGINS A ND HISTORICITY
The saga is the main character in a saga of its own. Around it centered much of
the debate on saga origins, whether the sagas were mostly a consequence of a

9 Even Henry Kratz, 1993: 301, one of the more enjoyable writers on the saga, feels obliged to boil it

down to a single message, though he hedges it with an ‘if ’: “if [the saga] has a message, it seems to be that
only some are called to be leaders, but those who are must always exercise restraint.” Were the Thjostarssons
in any way punished or set back by torturing Hrafnkel and his men, by their failure to show restraint?
10 It is not just Christianizing critics who search for sins; they are only a little more guilty of

excessive simplification than those taking various contrary positions, such as the saga is about knowing
your place, or the saga is a comparison between pure unthinking heroic honor and pragmatism; see,
e.g., Halleux 1966a; Fulk 1986; Johansen 1995. Pálsson (1962, 1966, 1971a, 1988) takes most of the
heat for others who share his Christianizing views of the saga, for his redemptivist position with regard
to Hrafnkel. Pálsson’s belief that Abbot Brand Jónsson was the saga’s author has also elicited
convincing refutations; see Kratz 1981; Wolf 1991. Yet no one has done more to get this saga read
and loved in the Anglophone world than Hermann Pálsson because of his talent for translation.
6 Hrafnkel or the Ambiguities

prior rich oral tradition or whether they were predominately literary artifacts of
a later literate culture. This debate also hooked in to the debate on the
usefulness of the sagas as historical sources for the so-called Saga Age, that is,
the period in which the events were set, c.930–1030, or whether, if they had
anything of value for the historian, it was to be largely confined, with some
exceptional hard-to-identify prehistoric bugs preserved in the textual amber, to
the period in which they were written, c.1190–1320. The positions and issues
in these debates are so often summarized that I am not going to go beyond a few
remarks, and direct the reader instead to the works cited in the footnote that
concludes this sentence.11
But it should be said that the obsessiveness of saga studies for more than a
century with the question of saga origins has its own deeply psychological
origin: at some level no one—especially, it seems, saga scholars—can quite
believe that such a sophisticated, subtle, almost ridiculously and paradoxically
‘urbane’ literature should have been produced in the Middle Ages of all times in
the middle of nowhere of all places, a place possessing nothing even passing for
a small town until the eighteenth century.12 The sagas are the Easter Island
moai, those uncanny statues, of world literature.
The role our saga played in these battles was largely due to Sigurður Nordal’s
Hrafnkatla13 which appeared in 1940. The saga became the poster child for the
Icelandic school’s view that the family sagas were largely original works of
individual Icelandic authors, who also happened to be literary geniuses. The
warriors who starred in tales of derring-do were their fictional inventions.
Nordal loved the idea of substituting literary genius for muscle, athleticism,
killing, and other grand deeds.14 Indeed, one can see his work both as a hostile
reaction to, and as an instance of, the incredulity these remarkable texts seem to
generate at their very existence.15

11 On bookprose/freeprose see Andersson 1964: 64–81; Clover 1985: 239–45; also Hughes 1980.

Just when one thinks that there is nothing more to say on the question of saga origins one gets the fine
study of G. Sigurðsson 2004 and the gem that is Andersson 2012.
12 On the incredulity that such excellence should have or could have been produced then and there,

see Ker 1897: 236.

13 Clover 1985: 243: “The one saga that has for some forty years stood as the test case for the

bookprose-Icelandic school position is Hrafnkels saga. Ever since Nordal published his 1940
monograph declaring Hrafnkatla to be ‘pure fiction’ with no traditionalist basis whatever, the larger
discussion of [saga] origins has centered on that saga.”
14 And there must have been more than a few geniuses, for we cannot with any confidence attribute

more than one saga to any supposed author.

15 No discounting for nationalistic pride can prevent Nordal from being dead right when he writes

this: “[the author] was sustained by one of the most powerful literary movements in recorded history”
(1940: 57). The pride, the awe, is fully justified.
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Sally had told him this morning not to call them together—to just go
and do it. But they would have been out in the corridors, waiting. He
would have had to brush by them. One touch—one contact of flesh
to flesh, and one of them might have tried to prove the mortality he
found in Sean Brendan.
"I want you in your homes. I want your doors shut. I want the corridor
compartments closed tight." He looked at them, and in spite of the
death he saw rising among them like a tide, he could not let it go at
that. "I want you to do that," he said in a softer voice than any of
them had ever heard from him. "Please."
It was the hint of weakness they needed. He knew that when he
gave it to them.
"Sean!" Sally cried.
And the auditorium reverberated to the formless roar that drowned
her voice with its cough. They came toward him with their hands
high, baying, and Sally clapped her hands to her ears.

Brendan stood, wiped his hand over his eyes, turned, and jumped.
He was across the stage in two springs, his toenails gashing the
floor, and he spun Sally around with a hand that held its iron clutch
on her arm. He swept a row of seats into the feet of the closest ones,
and pushed Sally through the side door to the main corridor. He
snatched up the welding gun he had left there, and slashed across
door and frame with it, but they were barely started in their run
toward his office before he heard the hasty weld snap open and the
corridor boom with the sound of the rebounding door. Claws clicked
and scratched on the floor behind him, and bodies thudded from the
far wall, flung by momentum and the weight of the pack behind them.
There would be trampled corpses in the auditorium, he knew, in the
path between the door and the mob's main body.
Sally tugged at the locked door to the next section of corridor.
Brendan turned and played the welder's flame in the distorted faces
nearest him. Sally got the door open, and he threw her beyond it.
They forced it shut again behind them, and this time his weld was
more careful but that was broken, too, before they were through the
next compartment, and now there would be people in the parallel
corridors, racing to cut them off—racing, and howling. The animals
outside must be hearing it ... must be wondering....
He turned the two of them into a side corridor, and did not stop to
use the welder. The mob might bypass an open door ... and they
would need to be able to get to their homes....
They were running along the dome's inside curve, now, in a section
where the dome should have been braced—it hadn't been done—
and he cursed Falconer for a spiteful ass while their feet scattered
the slimy puddles and they tripped over the concrete forms that had
been thrown down carelessly.
"All right," Brendan growled to himself and to Falconer, "all right,
you'll think about that when the time comes."
They reached the corridor section that fronted on his office, and
there were teeth and claws to meet them. Brendan hewed through
the knot of people, and now it was too late to worry whether he killed
them or not. Sally was running blood down her shoulder and back,
and his own cheek had been ripped back by a throat-slash that
missed. He swallowed gulps of his own blood, and spat it out as he
worked toward his door, and with murder and mutilation he cleared
the way for himself and the mother of his boy, until he had her safe
inside, and the edge of the door sealed all around. Then he could
stop, and see the terrible wound in Sally's side, and realize the
bones of his leg were dripping and jagged as they thrust out through
the flesh.
"Didn't I tell you?" he reproached her as he went to his knees beside
her where she lay on the floor. "I told you to go straight here, instead
of to the auditorium." He pressed his hands to her side, and sobbed
at the thick well of her blood over his gnarled fingers with the tufts of
sopping fur caught in their claws. "Damn you for loving me!"
She twitched her lips in a rueful smile, and shook her head slightly.
"Go let Donel out," she whispered.
They were hammering on the office door. And there were cutting
torches available, just as much as welders. He turned and made his
way to the control cubicle, half-dragging himself. He pulled the lever
that would open the gates, once the gate motors were started, and,
pulling aside the panels on cabinets that should have had nothing to
do with it, he went through the complicated series of switchings that
diverted power from the dome pile into those motors.
The plain's mud had piled against the base of the gate, and the
hinges were old. The motors strained to push it aside, and the dome
thrummed with their effort. The lighting coils dimmed, and outside his
office door, Brendan could hear a great sigh. He pulled the listening
earphones to his skull, and heard the children shout. Then he smiled
with his ruined mouth, and pulled himself back into his office, to the
outside viewscreen, and turned it on. He got Sally and propped her
up. "Look," he mumbled. "Look at our son."
There was blurred combat on the plain, and death on that morning,
and no pity for the animals. He watched, and it was quicker than he
could ever have imagined.
"Which one is Donel?" Sally whispered.
"I don't know," he said. "Not since the children almost killed me when
they were four; you should have heard Donel shouting when he tore
my respirator away by accident—he was playing with me, Sally—and
saw me flop like a fish for air I could breathe, and saw my blood
when another one touched my throat. I got away from them that
time, but I never dared go back in after they searched out the
camera lenses and smashed them. They knew, then—they knew we
were in here, and they knew we didn't belong on their world."
And Falconer's kind would have gassed them, or simply re-mixed
their air ... they would have, after a while, no matter what.... I know
how many times I almost did....
There was a new sound echoing through the dome. "Now they don't
need us to let them out, anymore." There was a quick, sharp, deep
hammering from outside—mechanical, purposeful, tireless. "That ...
that may be Donel now."
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