The Lyre Dancers

by Mandy Haggith

  ‘You could teach Soyea.’ Rian said. ‘She’d honour the tradition.’

  ‘It is forbidden for a woman to know the Muttering. It is not merely the physical strength required in the killing, it is the need to face the Old Gentleman of the Sea, man to man. How could a woman cut the penis bone off a walrus and live to tell the tale? And for that matter, how could a woman tell the stories of the stone? I must pass them on too, to someone who can tell them in his turn.’

  ‘You told me some.’

  ‘Aye, I’ve told you bits, but there’s more that I haven’t told anyone.’

  ‘It’s gone now, though. Isn’t it? It’s not your burden anymore.’

  ‘No, it’s not mine anymore. But I had it for years and years and the stories are part of me.’

  ‘You never did tell me exactly how you lost it.’

  ‘Did I not? I was probably too furious. I never want to spoil the time we have by getting het up.’

  He paused and took some breaths, as if readying himself for an exertion. ‘You know how the Queen Bitch, cousin Ussa, followed me around like a horsefly in summer trying to get it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well one day, just like a horsefly, she bit in before I noticed her and took it from me.’ He settled himself on his bench. It would be a proper story.

  Fin had woken up. He perched himself within earshot, listening. Rian frowned, reluctant to widen the close circle with her man to include the lanky youth, but Manigan nodded approval.

  ‘You might not have heard this one, Fin, but you need to. I was on Bradan, this very boat, at an anchorage off the Long Island, in a sheltered loch called Marabhig, hiding from a north-westerly gale. It was midsummer and so it never got dark. The crew had landed to go in search of food and drink. I always seem to have crew with insatiable thirsts, and you might as well let them go instead of sitting on board, all cramped up, with them climbing the mast for want of grog. They snarl and fight, or sulk, or drive you nuts with bickering. So, I’d turfed all three of them off, Badger with them to try to keep them in order, not least his crazy little brother.’

  He waved towards Kino, who was slumped beside the mast, head on his chest, sleeping, and then settled his eyes on Badger, who was sitting on a thwart, gazing ahead. ‘I don’t know what I would have done over the years if it weren’t for the loyalty of that man. A real friend, he is. I call him a lazy dog and a poisoner. He won’t lift an oar and he can’t cook without burning everything or leaving it raw and he farts and he’s ugly and cantankerous and he drinks far too much, and I could list a thousand other faults in the man but he’s loyal to me. He has sailed in Bradan for more years now than I can remember and that counts for something, even if he is the lousiest, filthiest good-for-nothing crew a skipper could have. He’s my friend, and I’ll call him it to his face if I have to.’

  Badger turned his head and grinned.

  ‘Aye, of course he’s laughing. He never misses a thing, that one. Isn’t that right, Badger, are your ears flapping?’

  Badger poked one finger sharply up, then returned to gazing out to sea as if ignoring them.

  ‘Anyway, there I was, alone on Bradan, and it was calm enough in the loch, surrounded on all sides by good green land. The channel in there is tight and forked and no amount of gale can hurt you as long as your anchor bites. There was smoke out of one of the houses and I could imagine the ceilidh. There were plenty of happy-looking black cattle and a prosperous air about the place. I knew the crew wouldn’t be back until well into the next day, and that was fine. We weren’t going anywhere in that wind and I was looking forward to a bit of head space. You can go a bit crazy on a small boat, crowded together, knowing every intimate detail of everything you’d rather not have to know about your crew. So a night alone was a boon, a treat. I’d checked the anchor a dozen times and I was happy we weren’t dragging, then I’d tucked myself up in my bedroll. I must have been deeper asleep than I’d intended, because without me noticing, Ussa blew in. She’d lashed her boat to mine before I was properly awake. She must have been circling, checking me out. I had avoided her so well for years. To be honest, I think she had given up the chase and it was just a coincidence that we were in the same part of the Minch at the same time, sheltering from the same wind, and she took the chance. Her skipper knows all the safest anchorages, just as I do.’

  ‘Is Toma still with her?’ Rian said. ‘I loved Toma. He always knew the way.’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you, Fin?’

  Fin shook his head. ‘The old man’s out to grass. A guy younger than you skippers her boat these days, Eachan. Nutter.’

  A frown furrowed Rian’s forehead. ‘Where’s Toma?’

  Fin shrugged. ‘Dunno. Not well. Maybe even gone west by now.’

  Rian pursed her lips. She was thinking of the time the old man had helped her to steal the stone back from Ussa. He hadn’t wanted the evil thing on his boat.

  Manigan waited to see if she was going to say anything, then continued. ‘Anyway, they pulled alongside with barely a bump and it wasn’t until there was the lurch of footsteps on board Bradan that I knew what was happening. Three of them – two big men and Ussa with a knife at my throat before I’d got myself out of my sleeping roll. With the eye patch over her missing eye, I hardly recognised her. And you remember that big thug, Og, who used to be her slave?’

  ‘Of course,’ Rian said. ‘He’s not back with her, is he?’

  ‘Aye, he went back to her even after he’d been granted his freedom, more brawn than sense if you ask me.’

  ‘I sometimes suspected he loved her.’

  ‘More fool him. Anyway, he had me pinned down, his knee in my groin. It was like having a bear on top of me, and with her blade half-choking me I wasn’t moving. Some weasly little slave was rummaging and throwing everything he could overboard, and there are times when you have to do the only thing you can to survive. So before he had completely emptied my locker of every piece of useful tackle I possess, I told her where the stone was. It was over in a moment. My throat was nicked, but I’m still talking, aren’t I? She’s a greedy, ruthless bitch and I hate her, but blood must mean something because she could have left me a corpse with no difficulty at all, but she just took the stone and a few choice tools and weapons. The big man cut a few ropes out of spite as he climbed back over the gunwales to her boat. I was furious, but to be honest, in hindsight, if I’d been in her shoes I’d have made much more of a mess of the rigging just to make sure I couldn’t come after her. As it was, my drunken crew turned up the next day with raging hangovers, long after the gale had eased enough to let Ussa get away, and I never even got to see whether she headed south, east or north at the mouth of the loch. I didn’t see her again until more than a year later and the stone had done its worst by then.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It took away her glamour completely. Fin, will you take the helm for a while?’ He got the young man to take the tiller, showed him how to make sure he stayed at the same angle to the wind, then busied himself with tidying ropes. Once satisfied he sat down next to Rian on the other side from Fin, slung an arm around her shoulder and said, ‘Do you remember when she was beautiful? When I was a boy I remember thinking she was like a princess. And she was loveable.’

  Rian raised an eyebrow. ‘Loveable?’

  ‘She was! She had a way of listening to you as if she treasured your words, as if she was savouring your voice, and it made you want to tell her everything. She must still have it somewhere. Nobody’s rotten all the way through. But she is rotten, there’s no doubt about that.’

  ‘How do you think she got like that?’ Fin asked.

  ‘It started early. As soon as she got the trading bug. At first she did it just for a bit of fun, buying trinkets from smiths then setting up a stall at the fair in Ictis and selling them as fine jewels. The thing is, when she put some tawdry beads in her hair and stood with the sun on them, they gleamed and twinkled. Her beauty shone on her wares and peop
le would pay for a share of that sparkle.

  ‘Later, the beauty and grace became seduction, and she moved on from pretty trinkets to weaponry. She knew it was obscene, what she was doing, going around, unsheathing daggers and swords at every harbour, but once she’d started, she didn’t seem to know how to stop. As it got more dangerous she needed a bodyguard, and that’s when she got into slaves. Og was the first. She bought him for a sword from a member of his family, his stepfather. I’ve never understood why he was loyal to her. But there’s a lot about Ussa I do not understand.

  ‘Once she had bought a slave, another followed, and selling them was easy for her. As soon as she fell out with someone, off they’d go and she’d buy herself a new one. She knows no one properly. She has no friends. We are not people to her any more. We are all just objects to be traded. If you can no longer see the sacred spark in a bronze-smith’s casting, why should you see it in the eyes of a human being?

  ‘When she stole the stone from me, she was already one-eyed, yet she was still trying to look glamorous, but when I saw her one year later she was rotten through and through. Perhaps the stone spoke back to her and made her see what she had become. All her poise and surface charm was based on self-deceit. She didn’t believe what she was doing was wrong. It was just trade. But the stone must have made her incapable of hiding from her wickedness and let it eat her up from the inside to her very skin.’

  ‘I wonder whether she has been play acting for so long she no longer knows who she really is,’ said Fin. He sounded genuinely sorry for her.

  Rian stared at him. What was she doing on a boat with a sympathiser of Ussa’s?

  Manigan wasn’t thrown by the remark. ‘She always used to have a spark of that vulnerable girl in her eyes, no matter how much of a queen she was trying to be. There was someone in there who looked out and attended to what she saw with fascination, with curiosity. Even you, Rian. Even though she was cruel to you, I can imagine her enjoying your beauty, admiring your courage, appreciating you for your fierceness, your independent self. But when I saw her last, the only time I’ve seen her since she robbed me, her eyes were dead and soulless, with only hunger in them, and she had become blubbery. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against looking well fed but she looked as if her body could no longer be satisfied by anything.’

  ‘That wind is strengthening,’ Badger said.

  Sure enough, the sky was grey to the west and a swell was building.

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing, Fin?’

  He nodded, and Manigan went forward to help Badger put a reef in the sail. They were kept busy for a while until the shortened sail was back up.

  Manigan took the helm and they settled again. Kino whittling a piece of ivory, Badger making some porridge and Fin, with his eyes shut, back against the mast.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Rian gestured towards the youth.

  ‘He’s napping again. I never knew anyone to sleep so much.’

  Badger looked up, ‘Every lad’s the same, you know that.’

  ‘I suppose that’s right, at that age it’s normal. But I’m not convinced it’s good for you, too much sleep.’

  Rian chuckled. ‘You’re becoming an old grouch.’

  ‘Ach, stop me from becoming that, my love, if you can. I’ve no reason to be grumpy with you here on the ocean, finally doing what we should have done all those years ago.’

  Badger slopped porridge out into mugs and handed them round. He left Fin’s by the mast.

  Manigan blew on his mug and put it down. ‘It’s easy to lose yourself out here, to drift away for hours, but I find there is a core of me that floats free when I let go of my thoughts. That’s the part of me that loves you best, Rian. It’s the part that missed you when I was traveling and would tell me to head home to you. Now you’re here, so I don’t need any other kind of home.’

  Rian reached out and stroked the back of his neck. ‘I remember Danuta telling me there’s great wisdom inside every one of us if we know how to listen. Whenever Ussa or Pytheas or anyone was being cruel to me, I used to go inside myself. It used to feel like I could climb up a crag within me that had a safe place at the top. It’s hard to explain. But up there I knew nobody could really touch me or do me harm.’

  He turned and rubbed his cheek against the top of her head and for a while they said nothing, looking out at the water.

  ‘I thought the wind was getting up here, but now I’m wondering if we should shake that reef out again. Don’t you love the way the sea surface glitters? This ruffle on the swell. It soothes, like the touch of fingers on skin. I can watch the light on water for hours on hours, those patterns of sheen, as if the light is curdling. See those blobs of colour, the way they distend and stretch and merge with each other, then disintegrate again? It’s an endless dance. All my woes slough off and dissolve among the ripples, while all the things I’ve never done bubble up and dazzle me.’

  He took a slurp of porridge, and after he’d swallowed, said, ‘I meant to tell you about Fin and how I found him. You know he’s Fraoch’s little brother? Half-brother, anyway.’

  Rian hadn’t thought about Fraoch for a long time. At one point she had thought they might be friends, but Rian had never found it easy to forgive people who betrayed her. She dredged in her memory for what Manigan had told her about their kinship. ‘So he’s Gruach the bronze smith’s son?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And Gruach was your cousin.’ She remembered Fraoch’s bronze smith father with much more warmth, but the connections with Ussa and Fraoch still left her distrustful of the youth.

  ‘Old Gruach was a wily old wizard, and he made special magic happen for more than one woman. I’d heard him claim he had a son, but I’d never set eyes on the boy until he was sixteen, when he ran away from home to live with Ussa, of all people.’

  ‘What about his mother?’

  ‘I’ve never met her. She’s somewhere in the Summer Isles or near there.’

  Manigan supped his porridge, and Rian finished hers and handed the mug back to Badger. ‘So he’s one of Badger’s kin as well?’

  ‘No, not Badger’s folk, some other lot.’

  Badger nodded. ‘Scoraig.’

  ‘Why did he go to Ussa?’

  ‘I asked him that. He said she passed through where they lived and invited him along. He just wanted to travel, he said. What other way was there? He wasn’t allowed to go with her, naturally. At least it sounds as if his mother was a sensible woman. But the tyke stole a coracle and set off across the sea to wherever it was Ussa had said she was going. Idiot boy. I gather it’s not so very far but even so, anyone who tries island hopping in a coracle deserves what they get. I gather it was a bit scary. “I hadn’t realised how long it would take to paddle over and the boat seemed awful small and the sea awful big half way across,” he told me.

  ‘He’s determined, I’ll give him that. He didn’t turn back, and he reached the island. I don’t know which one, you’ll have to ask him. He found Ussa’s boat and stowed himself away as best he could, which wasn’t very well, he said, and Toma found him when the crew came back next morning before they set sail. Anyway, young Fin threw himself at the mercy of his aunt. Can you imagine? And yes, dear old motherly Ussa let him stay. I can bet what she was planning. No, I’ll let you imagine. You know her as well as I do. Queen Bitch got herself another lapdog, even prettier than Pytheas.’

  ‘Don’t say that kind of thing, you horrible man.’ Rian elbowed him as if in disgust, but her eyes were laughing.

  ‘Look, he’s awake now. Ears burning, no doubt. He doesn’t mind if I talk about him like that, do you Fin?’

  ‘I’m just happy to know I’m so interesting. It was Tanera Mòr, the island.’ He was smiling, and clearly not taking offence. Badger pointed out the porridge and Fin grabbed it and started eating. The monkey, which had been asleep in his coat, tried to join the feast.

  ‘See! So tell Rian what Ussa did next.’

  ‘No.�
� Fin seemed to be absorbed in feeding porridge to his pet.

  ‘You’re an arrogant young pup, so you are.’

  ‘I’m eating and you’d tell it better.’

  ‘Would I?’ Manigan turned back to Rian. ‘Do you know this young fellow wants for nothing? His father’s the best bronzesmith the north has ever known and greedy old Ussa has made him her heir. He has gifts lavished on him from all sides, and yet he says they don’t mean a damn to him.’

  ‘It’s this, the sea, that’s the only treasure I’m after,’ said Fin.

  ‘He says he only went off with Ussa because she journeyed on the ocean, not for her gold and jewels. Well I reckon you’d have to be mad to throw away an offer like Ussa’s for riches beyond counting, just to spend a season chasing walruses. I know what I’d choose if I had the option.’

  ‘You wouldn’t taint yourself,’ said Rian.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. The riches coming from Ussa would make me pause for thought. For a moment or two, anyway.’

  ‘More.’

  ‘Aye. Maybe three. But not much longer! If I had a chest of golden jewellery to my name I’d give up this chase before you could say Old Gentleman!’

  ‘No you would not.’ Rian was laughing.

  ‘Would I not? You really don’t think so? Oh try me, why don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t have a chest of jewels.’

  ‘Aye, well that, my love, makes two of us. So here we are. And here’s this rapscallion good-for-nothing sleepyhead nephew or cousin or whatever he is of mine, daft as a sea urchin, that’s what I think, and about as useful on a boat. If I have to show him how to tie a bowline properly one more time I’m going to tie it around his neck and show him how it tightens.’

  Fin grinned. ‘And no doubt you’d tie it one-handed, behind your back.’ He got up and went to dip his mug in the water barrel.

  ‘Too right. Hey, don’t dip that in there like that, wash it first. I want to drink that water later and I don’t want your porridge scum in it.’