by Non Bramley
I stripped and lowered myself in, washing off days filled with the stink of grief and careful compassion. Oh it was wonderful. I swam for a while, diving down deep to touch the rough bottom and floating amongst the extravagant lilies and iris. I was hungry, so I pushed myself out of the water and sat cross legged, the warm breeze silkily licking at my drying skin.
I was searching my pack for the bread and cheese that would be my meal when a tall man pushed through a honeysuckle clogged arch and smiled at me, raising his hand.
‘I thought I heard someone. Welcome to the castle.’
‘Well you don’t look like an elf,’ I said, and he laughed. ‘You do, or maybe a water spirit,’ he said, shaking spider silk and honeysuckle blossom from his hair. ‘Are you hungry? I’ve just made lunch. I’m on my way to gather the last of it.’
‘I’ll help,’ I said, standing to dress, and making sure he saw me slip my heavy hammer through my belt.
We gathered white mulberries from a tree that was so laden its boughs touched the ground.
‘Do you live here?’
‘I do, my name’s Jón Erikson,’ he said, offering his hand.
I took it, and felt the warmth of him.
‘You’re Snælandic?’
‘I am. How did you know that?’
‘Your accent. I’ve come from Sigurd’s Town.’
He looked blank until I pointed to Tresgo. ‘It’s on Tresgo, you’ve never been?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t like too many people. I live alone here, but it’s a pleasure to have a visitor. Come and see the castle.’
We walked through gardens that here and there showed signs of Jón’s tending.
‘I came over from Snæland fourteen years or so ago. It was a small boat and there were a lot of us. It gave me a hatred of small spaces. I walked here on the first day and never looked back,’ Jón said.
‘Do you have family on Tresgo?’
‘No, they all died back in Snæland.’
‘You must have been a child when you travelled then, no more than fifteen.’
‘I was much older than that. At least I felt it.’
‘You look no more than thirty.’
‘Do I? I haven’t looked in a mirror for years. Ah, here we are – this is my home. Did I mention I like space?’
It was truly a castle. I’d expected a ruin, or some little crenelated pastiche of a place but this was the kind of castle a child would draw. Standing on a smooth green mound and surrounded by a moat its four towers were dotted with preening grey doves.
‘Come inside,’ Jón said, walking through the arch of the gatehouse to a paved courtyard.
‘You live here all alone?’ I said, looking up at the four high walls that surrounded me, the rough stonework broken up with windows, only a few of which were cracked.
‘I know, I’m a king in a kingdom of one,’ Jón said.
I followed him up a wide sweep of steps and into a great hall. Painted shields covered the walls, and a fireplace, flanked by carved naked women was piled with mounds of cobwebbed kindling.
We sat on the steps and drank from glasses that glinted like raindrops in the grass. I ate hugely, the food was wonderful, soft white cheese, oddly savoury pickled fruit with yellow pitted skins and golden bread that flaked as I spread butter and honey thickly. Still I ate, piling up raspberries and covering them in thick cream. I should have felt sick with the size of my meal but I was as light as a bubble in the stream. I could have eaten it all again. Jón ate to match my appetite, then spread his long legs out and smoked a pipe of green stuff. His voice dropped to a purr.
‘What is this place, Jón?’
‘It’s strange, that’s what it is. Come and see.’
He led me through dark corridors, through rooms filled with gilded furniture, clocks, fabrics and all manner of little pointless pretty things. In each room were human-sized dolls, dressed in uncomfortable finery and positioned to look as if they were in conversation and had just at that moment paused as we entered.
‘I told you it was strange. Look here,’ Jón said.
He handed me a wooden paddle. Pasted to it were the names of lords and ladies long gone.
‘There’s one of these in every room. I think the dolls are dressed to look like these people.’
‘For what purpose, I wonder? Some sort of religion, a way of honouring the ancestors of whoever lived here before the fall?’ I said.
‘Who knows? But they’re old, the faces crumble if you touch them.’
I brushed against the frilly skirts of a mouldering doll, who looked at the world with dusty eyes as Jón plucked up a candle, knocking a display of faded flowers to the ground where they smashed into powder.
‘It gets stranger than this. Come outside,’ he said.
In a corner of the courtyard steps led down into pitch darkness and deep cold. After a few strikes with a flint, the candle was lit and I realised with horror that I’d left my hammer back in the great hall. I was in a torturer’s den. The candlelight tricked the eyes into thinking that the hooded torturer and his open-mouthed victim were alive, but they were just more dolls, moulded with faces caught in a scream of pain or leering snarl of triumph.
‘Mother of God,’ I said. ‘What the fuck is this? Are there more?’
There were. We stumbled in the dark to the next chamber where a wax corpse was laid out, its guts cupped in the bloody hands of a doctor, or butcher. Who could tell?
There were pincers and knives and screws, instruments that glowed blackly with their sinister purpose. We found a ragged doll dressed as a witch, tied to a plastic pyre and clawing at the sky with a final curse.
The last door opened into a room stocked with miniature axes and toy animals dressed in gowns and flaking pearls.
‘This is an entertainment of some sort, isn’t it? But those devices, to crack bone and flay, they were real. I know a weapon when I see one. Perhaps it’s all a warning: This is what we were. Beware.’
Jón handed me a toy axe and a frayed black mask with two roughly cut eyeholes. ‘It’s child-sized, to dress a child as a little executioner.’
‘They got it wrong. We don’t wear masks,’ I said absentmindedly, listening again to the eerie cries of fan birds up on the enclosing walls.
Thou shalt not kill. There’s no commandment more burned into my heart, probably because I’ve broken it so often. I’ve killed for two reasons, to save myself and to protect the rest of us. Those lives I’ve taken in defence of myself I’ll stand before God and acknowledge with no shame. If I was Christ I would have let them scourge me, impale me, murder me, but I’m not Christ, who could ever hope to be? Is that what you really want of me, Lord? Is that my test? Will you pin me in a moment of time where I have to choose, my life or theirs?
The lives I’ve taken in defence of others keep me awake on nights when reality is thin, when I sit on this rock and look out into the shimmering lake of eternity, when there’s nothing between my soul and God. After I’ve caught my murdering lunatic I will have a choice. I could give up my life to walk with them, to keep them away from others, to be their gaoler. I could lock myself away from the world and make my life about that of another, like the soapwort. But I don’t want to do that. Who would? I don’t want to trade my years to help something so fucking loathsome. No. The easiest thing for us all to do is to kill the bastard. Let God deal with him. I have things to do. Christ have mercy for we have none.
‘What are you thinking of?’ Jón said curiously.
‘I’m thinking that all this flummery is just more stupid stories to frighten children, no wonder they grew into fearful and spiteful adults. Let’s go outside.’
‘You don’t like stories?’
‘I don’t like stories that try to be real.’ I paused and looked up, puzzled, ‘Why can’t I see the sun?’ What’s the hour?’
‘It’s still early. Come and see the treasure room.’
We drank, light wines filled with bubbles that tasted of summ
er rain. Delicious. That’s how I felt, delicious. He took me to a mirror-filled room and I stripped out of my working clothes and wrapped a long silk gown around me, it was as light as a thought and shimmered. Jón hung strings of pearls around his neck and found a glittering thing, made of tiny golden beads sewn on to net that he draped across his naked shoulders. He placed a diamond circlet on my hair and I threw it into a corner.
‘Have another drink,’ he said, filling my glass. ‘There’s a cellar full of the stuff. We’ll never run out.’
After that, I only remember moments. I know that we swam together, and I watched the silk of my gown billow in the water. I remember lying, naked in the sun as Jón covered my body in cool sea shells, and I remember his kiss, rich and strange. The sheets of his bed were as red as a rose. At sunset, I stretched out my arms to the sun and caught it in my hands, holding it to my belly.
We watched fireflies write in the blackness, and raced through the dim grass, filled with daisies that blinked their eyes at me. I let myself be caught. To this day he has never let me go.
There was a moment in that long night when I sunk my fingers down into the moss and let them drink. There was a moment of shuddering delight, when all the faceless things turned to me and called me home. It’s all one. I felt the veins in my arm swell with nectar and my desire unfurl out into the midnight air and my hair sway down with the green seaweed. In his name, in our name, in my name I claimed my place.
I woke at dawn next to Jón who was still asleep, his dark hair falling over his face. I was hungry, hugely hungry. I didn’t want cream or wine, I wanted the rough baked bread and apples that I’d brought with me in my pack.
I wandered through the gardens. The air sparkled and I spent minutes or many hours looking for my belongings, it was hard to tell. I found them hanging from the branches of a cherry tree some way from the castle walls.
I dressed, slipped my hammer through my belt and ate, quieting my protesting stomach.
Jón found me on my knees, tearing my way through a loaf.
‘Oh, you’ve eaten,’ he said sadly. I could have given you better than that, have some sweet wine my love. Come and play with me.’
‘Not today, I need a clear head, but you can be my guide, I’d be grateful.’
‘You want nothing else?’
‘You’ve given me enough. I need to do my job now. I need to search the rest of the island.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘That’s right, I haven’t told you,’ I said, feeling a flicker of that otherworldly bemusement that wine can bring. ‘You won’t believe it, but I’m looking for elves. The addled townsfolk of Sigurd’s Town believe elves have been killing their children, and possibly setting fire to their houses.’ I gave him a rueful smile. ‘Such is my job.’
‘They believe that Huldufólk are murdering their children?’ Jón said.
‘One boy child dead of some mystery affliction that looks like poison, one boy child on the verge of death from the same affliction, and one mother killed in a fire, her door chained shut so she and her daughter couldn’t escape. The daughter’s still living for now. The dead woman is Gudrun, you’ll know her I think? She must have sailed here in the same boat as you? The two boys are the illegitimate sons of her man, Sigurd. Does that sound like elves to you? It doesn’t to me.’
‘They believe the Huldufólk are angry?’ Jón said.
‘Not you too? Oh, that’s right, you’re Snælandic, you know elves exist.’
‘I’ve not seen any on Piskelli.’
We walked the island, through meadows thick with flower and across a scrubby heathland. It all felt so familiar.
‘It’s very like Tresgo, this place,’ I said. ‘In fact, it feels just the same. Same woods, same meadow, same heathland, but bigger, more lush.’
On a hill overlooking the sea, in a green field fed by a spring clotted with kingcups, stood a house. It was stone built, unadorned, almost ostentatiously modest, and behind it I glimpsed a garden laid out to crops and an orchard, filled with the hum of bees.
A young man, broad, and with red hair falling to his waist came from the door and stared at us, unseeing.
‘Who’s that, Jón?’ I said. ‘I thought you were the only one living here?’
‘That’s Sigurd,’ Jón said ‘Come and meet him.’
This man was young and strong, no lines on his handsome face, still in his prime. He couldn’t be Gudrun’s Sigurd, if he’d lived the head man would be well into middle age by now.
‘He can’t see you,’ Jón said, ‘but he can see me.’ Sigurd looked up suddenly, looked past me, his face lighting up.
‘Sol, you’re here again. I’m glad!’
I turned and Jón had gone, in his place was a small woman with orange eyes who held out her hands in greeting. On her forehead a small tattoo in the shape of the sun was almost covered by her pale hair.
‘Come in, Sol, and see Gudrun,’ Sigurd said, and I followed them to the house, where Gudrun Rannveigsdottir stood, young, strong, beautiful and in love.
It was wrong, it was all wrong.
I knocked over a chair in my haste to get to her, stooping to look into Gudrun’s eyes. ‘See me, look at me, how are you here? What is this?’
I took hold of her wrist and the skin in my grip rippled, went from pale petal to red raw and blackened meat.
‘Don’t,’ Sol said, putting a gentle hand on my shoulder. ‘You have iron in you. You could bring them out of their world but do you really want to? Do you want Gudrun to live for even a second twisted and deformed? Do you want Sigurd to crumble to dust? I caught their souls on the wind and made them this place.’
‘Why?’ I said, caught between anger and terrible grief, terrible pity.
‘To give them time together, they had so little. She has an eternity now to love, and he to ponder his evils, to know the depths of the harm he caused and to understand his own soul, the better to ask forgiveness.’
I turned on Sol, ready to snap her frail neck.
‘Did you kill Gudrun and Petur? Did you harm Bjorn and Pia?’
‘I don’t enjoy killing, Jude. I’m not you.’
‘And you’re not Jón. The only thing I know about you is that you lie.’
‘I’ve never lied to you. And of course I’m Jón. I’m both man and woman, all souls are if they’d but realise it.’
‘What kind of thing are you?’ I said, putting my hand on my hammer, its cold iron the only real thing in a place that was suddenly terrible in its sickly colour and light.
‘I’m not a murderer. I say again, I am not you. If you want to know who’s harming the children of Piskelli go home and ask the bees.’
I only looked behind me when I was half way out across the wet sands.
Jón watched me from the shore.
I scooped a handful of seawater and bathed my eyes with bitter salt, and he was gone.
Chapter Eleven
No one was waiting for me when I waded on to the shore at Tresgo. My senses were addled, I’d lost my way and made shore on the far side of the island. I crunched over seashells and took a long drink from the fresh water that trickled down the rocks.
Up on the heathland the wind was cold and I shivered in a shirt that was suddenly too thin. There were the woods. The seasons must turn quickly here, there were unripe berries on the holly trees. I could hear voices. I skirted the woodland and followed that faint noise up to the headland, to the place were Olaf’s church was to the built.
There it was, complete. Four walls and a turf roof. Even with every hand working how did they make this place so quickly?
Childish voices were coming from an open doorway that was covered with a flap of old sacking. Inside I found Asif and the children of Sigurd’s Town. His beard had grown and the voices came to a faltering stop as I swayed and had to steady myself with a hand.
‘How long have I been gone?’
Hunger came in waves, I would eat my fill, watched by whispering chi
ldren, and another gut tearing cramp would twist my stomach and so I ate again, cramming my mouth with whatever Asif put in front of me.
‘Where have you been for all this time?’ Asif said gently, touching my shoulder and taking his hand away quickly. ‘You’re so thin!’
‘I’ve been on Piskelli, I was only there a day.’
‘You’ve been gone for three weeks. Look at yourself!’
I put my hand to my face, felt the sharpness of the bones there. ‘It was only a day to me.’
‘It’s true then, there is something wrong with Piskelli. Did you meet them?’ He looked around and lowered his voice. ‘Did you meet the elves?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I met something. Who’s the fool now? Did you look for me?’
‘Yes, after two days I searched the place. There was no trace of you, but there’s a ruined castle on Piskelli.’
‘I know, I slept a night there.’
‘How, it’s just a few old walls?’ Asif gazed at me and shook his head. ‘Are you sure you didn’t, I don’t know, fall? Hit your head? Could you have been injured, so you couldn’t call out?’
‘There’s not a mark on me, Asif, I was awake. I don’t know if what happened to me was evil or wonderful. Bring me my pack.’
I searched the contents. Everything was there except Olaf’s golden cross.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said, looking past him to the owlish children of the town.
‘I’m teaching, as you suggested. I think I may be good at it.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said, touching his arm with a scratched and filthy hand, and aware of what a ghoulish sight I must be, thin as a corpse and dressed in rags. ‘Who bought the necklace from Stephen Farrar?’
‘Gunnar. You were gone so long and I didn’t know what to do with the knowledge, so I asked him about it. He said it was a present for his wife but it was stolen before he could give it to her.’
