Some of the women from the summer solstice ceremony have reappeared and they feel like sisters. Other people, mostly strangers, keep arriving, and although I am shy of them they are all kind to me. When I am at a loss I look to the hearth and always find something else to do, even if it is just feeding the fire or boiling water.
On the third day we carry Danuta to her grave and lay her in the earth. Eilidh says blessings and there is a storm of wailing, weeping, and more songs.
Then people start to disperse, including Bael, who goes wherever it is he goes. It’s a relief.
We try to carry on with life, but without Danuta, nothing can really be the same. Buia begins to spend more time in the broch, and I’m surprised by how much lore she knows, despite her wandering mind. She never seems resentful if I ask her to teach me.
One day I tell her the rhyme I made up for the cough medicine recipe Danuta taught me: ‘reed roots and nettle shoots, let them bubble for breathing trouble.’ She giggles, then opens her eyes wide. ‘That girl. That’s it.’
‘What?’
‘Reed. That was her name. Cuilc.’
‘Who?’ I have a feeling that name should mean something to me, but I can’t place it.
Buia’s hair may be a tangle, but her eyes are clear, although they are focused on somewhere far away. ‘Her mother.’ She looks at me. ‘Your mother’s mother.’
RIAN
WALRUS
The approach to the island revealed a colony of walrus lying on a beach, just where Manigan hoped they might be. They brought the boat in so Manigan could get ashore, then anchored in shallow water, far enough away not to alarm the animals but close enough to see what was happening. Rian remembered the terrible time she had waited and watched while Manigan performed his ritual killing of the guard walrus in the Seal Isles, only for Jan Bonxie and his fellow fishermen to ruin everything with their slaughter of the other animals.
This time there was no one to interrupt Manigan in his ceremony, as he transfixed the huge tusked ‘old gentleman’. Rian so wished she could hear him talking and know what he said and sang and whispered. He had told her and Shadow something of the ritual, with great reluctance, and she could still remember some of what he would be chanting.
‘The story goes: This is a story about a walrus
‘The story goes: Once upon a time there was a walrus.
‘The story goes: The greatest walrus there ever was…’
They were so far away, however, that it was hard to make out where he was relative to the huge animals, let alone whether his lips were moving. Badger kept a close eye on him, and Kino readied himself with tools for dealing with the carcass after Manigan’s hunt was concluded. Rian sat at the bow, watching Manigan.
It didn’t seem to take many minutes before all but one of the great animals were stampeding into the sea and Manigan was waving to them to approach. Fin lifted the anchor then they rowed ashore. Some of the walrus approached, their curious whiskery faces bobbing up just yards from the boat, on heads the size of barrels.
‘Now then, just leave us alone,’ Badger said to them. ‘We’re not wishing you any harm. It’s just the old gentleman that Manigan wanted a word with.’
Rian knew that one flick of those muscly back flippers could tip them up, and she didn’t breathe easily until they felt sand under the keel.
For hours they were all kept busy dealing with the ritual butchering of the enormous animal. Unlike the first time Rian had witnessed the act, when it had all been done in a rush amid the debacle of Jan Bonxie’s slaughter, this time it was quiet and dignified. Manigan had her light a fire just above the high water mark. There were mounds of driftwood, and they built up a blaze as the evening went on, to keep away any curious polar bears and to generate smoke to deter flies. Badger produced a drum from the boat and accompanied Manigan and Kino in a long, chanting invocation of the sea spirits. A few dozen strides down the beach, Manigan set various parts of the walrus on a rock and did not allow the others to watch as he bent over them, muttering again.
They ate some of the flesh of the animal and drank ale and were in high spirits. It never got dark, the sun merely sinking towards the northern horizon. When its journey took it beyond the landmass of the island, they fell into shadow and wrapped themselves up against the chill.
Eventually they were all seated beside the fire. Manigan had the hide slung across his lap and with a sharp blade was cleaning off the blubber. ‘Now’s the time for that story about the stone. Go and get it, Fin. Let it be here to help the telling. That’s one of its names, you know, the Stone of Telling. Aye, stories, secrets, the future, you name it.’
‘Even lies?’ Fin called as he jogged away from them.
Manigan chuckled. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
They waited in silence. Rian fed the fire until it blazed brightly again. When Fin returned, he unpacked the stone and set it on its bag on the sand. Its faces sparkled in the firelight. Manigan fetched a piece of walrus meat from where they had packaged it up. He squeezed it over the head until some blood dripped into the dimple on top of the stone head, then gave the meat to Badger, who added it to the pile he was chopping up and skewering. Every so often he swatted at flies or tossed a pebble at a gull whose curiosity brought it too close.
‘Where shall I begin?’ Manigan said.
Not for the first time, Rian realised that so much of her life had been governed by the Stone of Telling. The man she loved most in the world, and the woman she loathed, had both been in thrall to it, and yet there were still huge gaps in what she knew about it. ‘You promised you’d tell us how you got it,’ she prompted.
‘All right. It was my Aunty Fraoch gave it to me, because she said a hunter needed to look after it. Only a hunter would be able to keep it quiet, to appease it. You know one of its names is the Death Stone. It has a lust for death, an appetite, shall we say. It relaxes when a hunt is successful, after blood is spilled, and it gets grumpy and dangerous if there has been no quarry for a while. Aunty Fraoch said she had urges she could hardly bear to live with when she had the stone, and she’d find herself trapping mice, setting snares for birds, dreaming of ways to kill people. It scared her.’
As he spoke his voice lowered so they all stilled to hear him better. Only the fire whispered.
‘She had a favourite cat and when it had kittens, she strangled one of them.’
Rian gasped. Manigan nodded. ‘Yes, she told me the next time I saw her that I had to take the stone away from her. She couldn’t control herself. She was weeping about that kitten, she said it was a lovely, fluffy little thing and she would never dream of harming it and yet there it was, limp in her hands, its body heat cooling. She didn’t know what had come over her and she feared that she would meet the same fate as her mother, my grandmother, who had the stone before her.
‘Anyway, I agreed to take it and it drove me on with the hunting. For a while I thought it brought good luck, that its bloodlust gave me a better chance of making a kill, but after a few years with it I decided it simply drove me on, kept me at it. And woe betide the crew if the hunting was poor. Though any old seabird seemed to satisfy it. Fish less so. The bloodier the better.
‘And so now I see it in your eyes, Fin, the bloodlust. Watch what you do with it. It has a bad record. I found the only way to deal with it was to make each killing, each hunt, a ritual. I’ve always been strict about keeping the sea spirits happy, paying due respect, and that seemed to balance out the influence of the stone.’ He fell silent, staring into the fire.
‘Your grandmother,’ Rian prompted.
‘My grandmother, aye, that’s the next bit of the story. She got it from her father, the Merlin, who got it from his father before him. It’s been in our bloodline since the iron forges began, but that comes later in the story.
‘My grandmother had it for years and it turned her mad. She had been a gentle woman, my Aunty Fraoch said, one of the Spirit Keepers on Ictis. She used to do magic of course, mostly healin
g spells, the occasional love charm, rites to ensure good harvests, nothing wicked. It was only after it was too late that anyone realised she had started killing things for bad magic, black spells to meddle with the weather and the tides. She wanted to make the moon eclipse at her will. Why anyone would even want to do that I can’t imagine.
‘Anyway, she did some terrible things. I don’t want to tell you what I know of them. You will have to use your imagination.’
‘Oh, go on, tell,’ said Fin. He got up to clear fat away from where Manigan was working and packed it into a bowl. Then he sat back down, tucking his knees up under his gansy.
‘You ghouls! I shall not tell.’
‘You’re a tease, so you are,’ said Badger.
‘No. Not with the boy here, not with the stone around. It would be serving its evil purposes and it has been my mission, all life-long, to keep it in control, to limit its potential for misdoing by feeding it with only what it needs. Are you listening, boy? If you don’t take care, my grandmother’s fate awaits you, or Ussa’s. You’ve seen her evil eye.’
Fin nodded. ‘She told me the stone was hers by right.’
‘Aye, she believed the stone was hers to inherit from our grandmother. But Aunty Fraoch was determined only a hunter should have it. And Ussa was one of the stone’s victims, she was corrupted by it.’
‘What do you mean, corrupted?’ Rian asked.
‘I see I am going to have to tell you something about my grandmother after all. She was mad by the end, and wicked. She did things that should never be allowed to happen, things with children, things with animals, and more often than not the deeds were preambles to death. She got to like watching death by other hands than hers, to observe one innocent taking the life of another. At first it was a cat and a mouse, a dog and a rat, but then that wasn’t enough and she needed to co-opt people. Children, mostly, who she could intimidate into keeping secrets.
‘Ussa was one of them, aye. Ussa did a lot of killing for her. She was greedy anyway, her father taught her everything she could possibly learn about greed, and after she went to live with Grandmother Amoa, she got a taste for slaughter. Everything, anything: rabbits, cats, dogs, birds, snakes. And worse. Yes. Another child, in the end. That’s what turned my grandmother mad enough to take her own life. The stone must have turned on her. I don’t know.’
‘Were you involved in that?’ Rian said. This was all making her feel sick.
‘Yes, I was.’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it. Really, it was horrible.’
‘You can tell us.’ She partly didn’t want to know, but now they had come this far, she would rather find out the dark secret than not.
Manigan shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Did you do something bad?’
He said nothing, just gazing into the fire.
‘You can tell us.’ She put her hand on this.
‘I can’t.’
‘But isn’t it part of the story?’ She could feel how much he was hurting at the memory.
He turned to her, his eyes bleak. ‘I killed my dog. He was my friend.’
‘Oh that’s so sad.’ Rian stroked his head like a child.
Manigan’s voice was broken. ‘Yes. She made me do it. This was how I learned about death and why I ran away to sea. My grandfather had to heal me of the hurt it had caused me. It was my most difficult and important lesson. Maybe I never really healed. Can you heal from evil? I do not know. I do not want to talk about it anymore, my love. Don’t make me cry. I just want to tell my story so you’ll understand what I’ve been carrying all these years and so he can be prepared. Don’t make me say anymore.’
‘You don’t have to say anymore. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Thank you.’
Kino handed Manigan his flask. He took a drink and sniffed.
‘My poor love.’ Rian stroked him again.
‘I’ll be all right. It’s difficult, that’s all. We’re all bound up in it. It’s so tightly meshed. It’s a mess. That stone. I can’t seem to get it out of my life.’
‘You can stop telling us, if you like.’
‘No, I’ll carry on. This place is big enough for me to lose myself in.’ He took another slug from the flask and passed it to Rian who passed it straight to Fin, who likewise passed it on to Badger, who was staring, grim-faced, into the fire. He took a sip and kept hold of the bottle.
Manigan sniffed and breathed out deeply. ‘So, where had I got to? Amoa, yes. She got the stone from the Merlin when he had a dream. Are you ready for this?’
Rian reached for another chunk of driftwood and tilted it onto the fire. ‘If you are.’
‘The Merlin’s dream was of a king. You’re not ready.’
Rian was poking sticks into the heart of the blaze. She turned her full attention back to him.
Fin said, ‘Who’s the Merlin?’
‘The highest druid.’
‘It’s Riabach now, isn’t it?’ Rian said.
‘Aye. But back then it was Amoa’s father.’
‘How did he get the stone?’ Fin asked.
Manigan twined the fingers of his hands together. ‘I just think the Merlin had always had it, since it was made.’
‘You mean it was passed down the line of leaders?’
‘From one to the next, aye.’
‘So when was it made?’ Fin’s monkey was lying on his feet, and he stroked it as he listened, without taking his eyes off Manigan’s face.
‘Ach, I can tell you all about where it came from and how it was made, but that’s a different story again. I thought you wanted to know how I came by it.’
‘Yes. We do,’ Rian said.
Fin nodded.
‘All right then, so you’ll let me finish the Merlin’s dream?’
They all nodded, then Fin said, ‘Can we hear how it was made later?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You’ll forget,’ Rian said.
Manigan rummaged in a pocket and produced a bit of twine. ‘There, look. I’ve tied a knot in this bit of string, that’ll remind me.’
‘How’s that going to help?’
‘Tie it around my finger, that’s the making story. I won’t forget.’
Rian tied the string around his right middle finger.
‘Very good. So, the dream first.’ Manigan’s voice changed to his storytelling sing-song. ‘The Merlin dreamed of a king. He had killed a rival; a great warrior called the Raven who had been challenging for years for lands in the east of the kingdom. The dream began with the king returning to his broch with the Raven’s head on a spike. He stuck it up in a prominent place so everyone could see he had conquered.
‘Well, the head of the Raven watched him for three moons, while birds plucked the skull clean. Then one night it lifted itself from the stake and went to the bedroom where the king was sleeping. He woke to find the skull hovering over his face, taking his breath. Each time he breathed out, the skull sucked it in. The king tried to bat the skull away, but it always hung just beyond reach, gobbling up the air he breathed out. As you know, our knowledge, our creativity, our very soul is in our breath and the skull was gradually emptying him of it all. His last gasp of breath was a scream, and the king was dead.
‘Then the skull went to the King’s son’s bedroom and found him wakening. Just as he yawned, the Raven’s skull poured the last breath of the dead king into him, so he woke to all his father’s knowledge, including how he had died. The skull grimacing over the King’s son sent him raving mad.
‘Then the skull went to the nursery where the king’s baby grandson picked it up and played with it. Then the wee boy rubbed his eyes, itched his ears, stuck his pudgy little finger up his nose and licked it, as a child would. The young prince was found next morning, blind, deaf and dumb, unable even to feel his nurse’s touch or smell her milk.
‘The old Queen woke up to find her husband dead, her son insane, her grandson trapped alive inside his
senseless body. And then she found the cause, the skull, and lifting it out of the baby’s crib she said, “only a woman can avenge this wrong.”
‘Well then the Merlin woke from his dream, and he was shaken. He meditated long and hard about what it might mean, and he concluded that this was a message from the Death Stone. He already knew the stone was dangerous and he thought the final image of the queen holding the skull meant that only a woman could keep it safe. So that was why he gave it to my grandmother Amoa, his daughter. However, as I’ve explained, as it turned out neither she nor my Aunty Fraoch could cope with the death lust that came with it. Maybe there’s some other way of understanding the dream that we haven’t figured out yet, or maybe it is just another of life’s many mysteries.’
In the quietness that followed, the fire cracked and sputtered.
‘Worth waiting for,’ said Rian as Manigan turned to her.
He patted her thigh. ‘It’s not bad, is it?’
She blinked hard, thinking about it. ‘No, it’s horrible.’
Fin got to his feet and stretched each leg in turn. ‘Good story.’
‘Had you not heard that one, Fin? No, I suppose not. Is there a hot drink going anywhere for the skipper of the old tub, do you think? You know I used to be able to last all night and day with only cold water. I must be getting old. The circulation’s not what it was.’
Badger stopped slicing meat and poured some ale into a beaker from a bronze flask he had sitting on a stone beside the fire, and stirred in some honey.
Manigan reached across Rian to take it, and she tapped the finger with the string on it.
‘What was that for again? Oh aye. The making of the stone. Red the Smith.’
‘I’ve heard that one,’ she said.
‘Have you? The way she chipped the three faces out: the Master, then the Boy and then the Sage?’
‘Yes, you told me years back.’
‘Did you hear about the prophecies, though?’
‘I don’t think so.’
He set his beaker down. ‘Ah well, then, you need to hear the three prophecies.’
The Lyre Dancers Page 13
