Work Text:
Like most jobs on Kjallakr’s farm, Thorfinn was used to plowing being a solitary affair. Solitary, and finicky. On rare occasions, when labor wasn’t spread thin or when more than a couple of acres of furrows were needed (wrangling two horses from behind was a trickier task than just one), he might get Gardar for a partner, or a farmhand, to pull the horses with rope or knock them with a stick while shouting commands to make them walk.
Askeladd—like the other plowmen he’d seen in this country so far—sang.
Their first day of work: Askeladd had stepped up to the yoke and patted one of the oxen on the head. Welshmen used cattle to work their fields.
Go rest, Thorfinn said. It’s gonna be a lot of walking.
Askeladd shot him a scowl. Shush.
Halwn, their closest neighbor who had passed them the plow after finishing with it himself, had offered up his sons for help while they were still visiting, and Askeladd politely waved him off. Halwn didn’t look surprised. Thorfinn was. Askeladd loved to delegate duties when the opportunity presented itself—why he seemed eager to work, Thorfinn didn’t know.
He was thinking this oddity over as he settled in with the plow, and once he gave a nod of readiness, Askeladd stepped back, still facing the oxen, and pulled in a large breath.
Words came out—words in Welsh—in an easy melody of moderate pace.
Thorfinn almost dropped the plow: Baldy? And, when Askeladd continued to—sing, he was singing, a sound Thorfinn hadn’t heard since the occasional late-night chorus of shanties around a campfire from years ago—You finally going senile on me? Woah—
The oxen took off, decisively, towards Askeladd as he walked backwards and flashed Thorfinn a broad grin.
Eyes on the furrow, boy, Askeladd switched to Norse but kept the singsong cadence. And listen. You might learn a thing or two. Mah-hoo!
Mah-hoo…?
What did I just say? The boy yaps yet the oxen tread on. Mah-hoo!
Thorfinn listened.
Askeladd had several songs in supply; in order to sate Thorfinn’s curiosity he brought out a rhyme in Norse once, just to prove that the oxen were keen on the music itself, rather than the particular sounds of the Welsh tongue. Whistling worked just as well, so did plain humming. But mainly he stuck to Welsh—he seemed to enjoy those tunes the most.
Thorfinn did not ask what the songs were about. Askeladd told him anyway. On the walks back from the fields he broke them down into small chunks, enunciated them slowly, made Thorfinn repeat after him in short phrases at a time. By that point Thorfinn was used to hearing the language, was even practiced in some of the more difficult sounds, so while the challenge was there, the task wasn’t unthinkable.
He preferred to omit the silly calls of woah and mah-hoo at the end of the verses (they seemed to be there for no other reason than keeping the oxen invested), but recreating the melodies under his breath helped to memorize the rhymes. Keeping versions of Norse in his head alongside the original Welsh helped to match up the foreign words with their meanings, and soon they didn’t seem so foreign anymore. Simple, common names for things of everyday use easily took root in his memory: market, morning, squirrel, day, tree, cuckoo, lady.
Ladies were a popular subject. The Fair-Cheeked Eira, the Bosomy Blonde, the Slender Lass. Thorfinn looked for patterns in the songs Askeladd chose: which ones he hummed to himself on and off the field and which ones he sang with the full of his fickle chest, so vigorous he broke into a rasp, or sometimes a cough to Thorfinn’s disapproving stares.
“Don’t strain yourself,” he grunted from behind the plow.
“What, you want to come up here and give it a go?”
Thorfinn gaped in horror.
Askeladd laughed openly. “No?”
“Shove it and walk straight. The tread is wobbly.”
“All right, all right.”
And the song resumed.
This one was about Little Gwenno, and pennies, and how the singer wanted to bring his pennies home to his little Gwenno—one of Askeladd’s favorites, clearly, as it came up often and not only in the field. Although he’d never say it, Thorfinn was rather fond of it himself—unsure why exactly that was; be it for the familiarity, or the noncommittal airiness of the tune that made it easy on the ears, or the way Askeladd experimented with his voicework, ending the simplistic phrases in little flourishes that rose or fell based on what he fancied that day.
“I love twelve pennies as I love my life:
A penny to spend, a penny to swagger,
And ten to take home to my little Thorfinn.”
Thorfinn blinked, and frowned, and gripped tighter onto the plow after his slackened hold let the oxen rock it too much to the left. “Huh?”
Askeladd continued, unfazed,
“I love ten pennies as I love my life:
A penny to spend, a penny to swagger,
And eight to take home to my little Thorfinn.”
Thorfinn stared. Puffed a strand of hair away from his eyes. “What happened to Gwenno?”
“Oh, lovely! Eight! Oh, fine! Eight!
“I love eight pennies as I love my life:
A penny to spend, a penny to swagger,
And six to take home to my little Thorfinn.”
“Baldy!”
Askeladd snickered. “Oh, lovely! Six! Oh, fine! Six, Thorfinn, six!”
“Stop changing the words!”
“Live a little, Thorfinn—I love six pennies as I love my—”
“Sing my name one more time and I’m dropping the plow.”
“You wouldn’t leave an old man all by himself—A penny to spend, a penny to swagger—”
“Try me.”
“Interrupt one more time and I’m stopping the oxen—And,” with a terrible, shit-eating grin, “four to take home to my little Thorfinn.”
Betrayed, a bit too warm in the cheeks, Thorfinn groaned as loud as he could and adjusted his sweating palms on the plow.
They had a ways to go. It wasn’t even midday.