by Paul Watkins
As we stepped inside the temple, two startled sheep ran out, dirty shreds of wool hanging from their sides. Between their trampling and ours, and the building’s general state of disrepair, Guthrun noticed no trace of our digging. At the far end of the room, the pillars glowered at us from the shadows. Stepping over the pellets of sheep droppings, Guthrun undid the strap of the leather bag he carried slung over his shoulder. From it, he took out a short knife with a reindeer bone handle. He did not ask me if I knew what should be done. Instead, he just held the knife out to me, handle first.
Bent double, I moved around the pillars in a wide circle, cutting a groove in the ground, following the path where countless grooves had been dug before. When the circle was complete, we would not move from it until the ceremony was over.
From his bag, Guthrun brought four bundles of twigs bound in scrolls of white birch bark and tied with dried grass. He also took out a wooden bowl and set it it on the ground. Into the bowl, from a cloth bag, he poured a handful of salt. With a sliver of glass, he cut a half-moon shaped slice into his palm, around the meat of his thumb. This place on both his hands was thickly scarred. He held his hand over the bowl, watching the red drops soaking into the crumbled salt. From a goat-skin bag, he poured some water into the bowl, stirred it with the blood and salt, and set it down on the ground.
Standing at the eastern edge of the circle, Guthrun walked around the rim, dipping his fingers into the water and flicking them at the groove cut in the earth.
We took the four bundles of twigs, set them burning with a piece of flint and a horse-shoe iron striker. Then we placed one at each of the four corners – first east, then south, then west, then north.
We knelt before the pillars, praying in silence while tongues of flame illuminated our faces. On this thin blanket of earth which covered the huge black thunder stone was the same shuddering energy as I had known in Miklagard. But here, it was even stronger, roaring around me. The words of the ritual seemed to be speaking themselves.
When the fires had died out, we gathered the charred twigs that remained; first east, then south, then west, then north, and threw them out of the circle. At the base of the pillars, we emptied the water from the bowl, then I took the short handled knife and ran it through the groove in the opposite direction, to open the circle again.
When all this was done, we stepped out of the circle and sat down against the pillars.
It began to rain outside.
‘Guthrun,’ I asked, ‘was it only because of Olaf that people stopped coming to the temple?’
Guthrun was unwrapping a slab of dried reindeer meat from his pack. He softened it by tossing the meat between his hands. With a gentle slap, it bounced from palm to palm. Finally, he raised his head and blinked at me with wolf-pale eyes. ‘It took me many years to admit that Olaf was right about one thing – that I was not fit to run the temple. With Tostig in charge, people walked out of this building certain that their prayers were being heard, but where Tostig travelled in his prayers, I never went myself. It was only a matter of time before people realised the truth about me. Who could blame them if they stopped coming? Even so, I refused to hand over the temple to Olaf. He may have been right that I could not handle the task, but he was wrong when he said he was the one who could. He might possess the strength. He might even have the faith. But he does not have the favour of the gods, any more than I do. That belongs to you alone, as it belonged to Tostig before you The gods themselves made that decision.’ Guthrun’s voice was dry and choked.
I took the birchwood cup I carried in my leather pack, walked to the doorway and held it out into the rain where it quickly filled. A man in Starya Ladoga had made the cup for me one afternoon when I wandered into town, leaving Cabal behind to wait for Godfred. The maker’s name was Herigar and he had one brown eye and one blue. He made a fist and told me to close my fingers around it and grip tightly. From the feel of my hand, he carved a cup which seemed to slide into each wrinkle of my palm. Silvery sinews in the wood glinted like tiny fish. I handed the water to Guthrun, who drank it all and gave me back the cup.
We looked out through the doorway towards the mountains, where glaciers stood like vast and tumbling waves, halted in the moment of their breaking.
‘I have heard,’ said Guthrun, ‘that Trygvasson, the new king of Norway, is determined to wipe out the Norse religion. Trygvasson! Before he became king, people used to call him Crowbones because he had a gift for telling the future by emptying a pile of crowbones on a table and seeing how they fell. And now he wants us to be Christian? We will see about that.’
‘But do you think he could succeed?’
Guthrun spat on the floor and wiped the back of his hand with his mouth. ‘If he pushes this country in a way it does not want to go, he has about as much future as the crow whose bones he is reading.’
‘You are not worried at all?’
‘I am too old to worry. Besides, what happens to the temple now is up to you.’
I felt the burden of his words, but I needed to hear them. Now my work here could begin.
We made our way back across the wide and open field. The rain had stopped and the sky was powdered saffron yellow. Wolves howled in the mountains. We walked a little closer, side by side.
*
Olaf did not need Cabal or me for the next few days, since he was preparing for the mid-summer trading run, collecting whatever goods had been made here in town for sale down in Hedeby.
At my parents’ place, Cabal and I hung our shields on the wall, then set our spears and swords across the rafter beams. We knocked down one side of the house and built it up again from scratch. We laid new turf over the roof and re-filled the gaps with moss. Against the wall I constructed two beds of wooden slats and padded them with reindeer pelts, while Cabal made a table and some chairs.
Kari brought me pots, wooden spoons and bowls, some of them left over from our parents. With her help, I gathered the trappings of a less restless life.
She and Cabal became so absorbed in hushed discussions that I had to find tasks which gave them time alone together or else risk being in the way. I wondered what they found to talk about, and there were moments when I was almost jealous, as much of Kari as of Cabal.
Kari’s reasons for remaining unmarried were still a mystery to me, but what I had seen of the few eligible men in town left me convinced that she had made the right choice.
When she had gone, Cabal said nothing about her, thinking he had kept his emotions a secret.
I allowed Cabal to think so rather than embarrass him, but I found it hard to hide my curiosity about what had drawn them so quickly together.
*
In my mind, the past was grating against the present, like two pieces of broken glass, trying to fit back together.
As I moved around the house, moments from my childhood flickered to life in the same greenish glowing light that I had seen lingering in the air above old graves.
There was my father, hauling on his heavy cloak as he headed out to fish on a rainy day.
There were Kari and I, as children, sitting at the table with our arms folded, bowls of oats in front of us which we had refused to eat because my mother burned them and we could not stand the smoky, metal taste of burned oats. She always burned the oats and always denied it, and if my father was not there to agree with us, we would be made to sit at the table until her temper died down.
Images of my mother shimmered in many places at once, multiplying and overlapping. I could hear her voice, words twisted together and indecipherable, like someone speaking underwater.
Then suddenly, the voices would stop and the flickering pictures would scatter, like a flock of birds flushed from a tree.
*
At the temple, I scrubbed years of grime from the pillars, rebuilt benches, swept floors. Almost every day, I cut more coins out of my vest to buy materials for the following day’s work.
Meanwhile, Guthrun fielded questions from those too shy t
o ask me in person. Would they be welcome at the temple? Would the rites of the seasons be observed? And the rites of the thirteen months? Wolf Moon. Snow Moon. Horn Moon. Plough Moon. Seed Moon. Hare Moon. Mead Moon. Fallow Moon. Grain Moon. Harvest Moon. Shedding Moon. Hunting Moon. Fog Moon. All of them. Yes.
Cabal and I knocked the wall stones into place and filled the cracks between with clay and moss. We refitted the beams which supported the old roof. As soon as I knew that the temple was not going to collapse in the next gust of wind, I began to carry out the rituals.
The first day, only one person besides Guthrun came to the temple, and it was Olaf. He sat stiff-backed on a bench by himself, closely watching everything I did. Afterwards, he left without saying a word.
‘I have not felt so harshly judged in a long time,’ I said to Guthrun, as Olaf trudged down the hill.
‘The fact that he said nothing is the only sign of his approval you are ever likely to receive. Anyway, it is a beginning,’ said Guthrun.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’
The next day, Olaf was back, silent as before. There were others, too, including Ingolf and Tola. Kari did not come, and I did not expect to see her there. Like Cabal, she had made her own balance of the world around her, in which the temple, and all that it stood for, did not play a part. For this, as I had learned from my years with Cabal, I did not love her any less, nor did I pity her or say a word about it.
Steadily, the numbers began to increase. The temple was never full but, as Guthrun had said, it was a start.
*
One evening, Cabal and I went down to Ingolf’s alehouse, where we played chess with a set brought back from Miklagard. The pieces had been carved from soapstone the colour of honey. The board was of soft leather, which served as a bag to hold the pieces.
The struggle between the two faiths, which Cabal and I had expected to find here, seemed far away from this sleepy little town. With so little to occupy his time, I knew it would not be long before Cabal was on his way. He had taken to wandering after dark, usually when he thought I was asleep. His restlessness was growing. I wondered if, one of these nights, he would simply not come back, having found it easier to leave without saying goodbye.
I felt sorry for Kari and just as sorry for myself, but I knew that once he had made up his mind, neither love nor friendship would stand in his way.
On this evening, we had finished our game, and the pieces lay scattered on the leather board. The ale and the warmth of the fire had made us sleepy. Except for Ingolf, we were the last ones in the place. Any moment now, Tola would come in and tell us we had to go home.
‘Do you miss our days in the Varangian?’ asked Cabal.
At the mention of that name, the remembered scent of cloves and cardamon and the pollen-yellow mustiness of turmeric swirled dustily into my brain. ‘I miss some things about it. I miss the taste of wine.’
‘Yes,’ he said dreamily. ‘Wine.’
‘I miss the taste of dates. I miss the heat of the sun.’
He smiled, and smoothed away the hard lines of his face. ‘I have seen a little sun here too, you know.’
‘I mean the midday heat, which snatches the air from your lungs. That is the sun I am talking about. And what about you? Do you often think back on our old life?’ I asked.
Cabal stretched and yawned. ‘When things remind me of it. Yes.’
‘But what is there to remind you here? Not the buildings. Not the people. Not the food.’
‘Little things,’ he said. ‘Like the light of this fire tonight. It brings to mind that time we stopped at the Oasis of Wadi Hamra, when we were escorting the Emperor home from Baghdad.’
I recalled it immediately. There were twenty of us Varangian, along with the Emperor, and we had been riding camels for eight days through the desert before reaching Wadi Hamra. This oasis was the only source of water for several days journey in any direction. A small village of stone huts had sprung up around the dirty green water and sloping palm trees.
From this speck of safety, Cabal had wandered out into the desert heat, still wearing the weight of his chain mail. Half buried in a dune, he found the skeletons of a man and a camel. Over the next two days, while the rest of us hid in the shade of our tents, gasping the oven-hot air, Cabal built a scaffold from the dried-out branches of old trees that jutted from the sand. From this scaffold, he hung the bones with hemp twine. The man and the animal were all mixed up. When the wind blew, hissing over the red ground, these bones clinked together with almost musical sounds. It was terrible and beautiful at the same time.
Seeing this, the Emperor would not go near Cabal again, convinced he was some kind of devil. He had similar suspicions about the Bedou tribesmen who passed through this oasis. They usually appeared out of the dunes at sunset, their faces and long robes powdered orange-red with dust. They hitched their camels to palm trees and made their way in among the houses, looking for a meal. We Varangian learned to eat where they ate, sitting on woven palm mats. We scooped food into our mouths with our right hands, hugging the bowls to our chests with our left hands, which was their way as well. We would sit against one wall and they against the opposite wall, staring at each other across a fire which burned in the centre of the room.
That same firelight, as it rippled on the walls of that stone hut, seemed to be dancing now across the heavy timbers of the alehouse wall.
‘Have you been happy here?’ I asked, speaking of it as a thing in the past, as I assumed it to be.
‘From the sound of your voice, you seem to think I am leaving.’
I picked up one of the chess pieces, a glowering pawn with his teeth sunk into the top of his shield like a warrior gone mad. I spun it around on the table, rather than answer Cabal.
‘Did you know,’ he began, ‘that your sister has found in the fields around this town over forty plants which can be used to cure any number of illnesses?’ He began counting them off on his fingers. ‘There is fennel for stomach and lungs. Juniper for sinuses and bladder. Licorice for colds and nausea. Hawthorn for sore throats and skin sores and lobelia for coughs and fevers …’
‘She has taught you well,’ I interrupted.
Slowly, his face creased into a smile. ‘I taught myself, and long before I met your sister.’
‘Taught yourself?’
Cabal seemed to hesitate, but then he reached down under the table and brought up the leather sack which he always kept slung across his back. He slid back the ring of bone which held its drawstring in place and emptied out onto the table dozens of small linen bags, each one marked along its edge with the strange Celtic writing called Ogham. ‘Seeds,’ he said, ‘from every place I have ever been. I have gathered them over the years. Why do you think I never get ill? I know how to cure myself before I even become sick.’
I recalled the sight of Cabal chewing on leaves and flowers down in Miklagard. I had thought of that as one of his many strange habits, with no purpose to it other than his liking the taste. ‘You know about plants?’ I asked. ‘Why did you never tell me?’
Cabal folded his arms across his chest and sighed. ‘What would you and the other Varangian have said if you had found out I was walking around with bags of seeds?’
‘I do not know,’ I replied, ‘but I do know what they said about your heads in cedar oil.’
He crumpled his lips, as if unwilling to recall. ‘Those days are behind me now.’
‘So that is what you and Kari have been whispering about.’
He touched his hand against his chest and slowly lowered it, opening his palm as he searched for the right words to say. ‘Until now, your sister has only gathered her plants where they grew in the wild. Since the best time for collecting them is at night, when the flowers are closed, she has to go out into the fields by herself.’
‘I think her time up in the fields has not been quite so lonely these past few nights.’
Cabal swallowed. ‘I have suggested to her that these plants could be grown in gard
ens. I had always planned to have such a garden myself, in the place where I hung up my shield for good.’ He spread his hand across the bags of seeds. ‘Not all of these will grow here, but enough of them will.’
‘For good?’ I asked.
Cabal began to gather the bags, returning them to his pack. ‘For Kari and me, the suddenness of things has caught us by surprise.’
I laughed. ‘You are not the only ones who are surprised.’
He had been looking down, but now he glanced up and met my gaze. ‘At first, seeing how quiet it was here, I had thought about moving on. But now I am thinking of staying.’
‘Does Kari know this?’
He nodded. ‘Nothing is certain, of course, but we seem to understand each other.’
It was quiet for a while. Burning wood crackled in the fireplace.
‘It is more than Kari. More than you too, old friend. This place has spoken to me somehow. You do not always get to choose what is sacred in your life. All you have to do is know it when you see it.’ He slid the bone ring shut to close his pack. ‘So here I will stay, if you do not object.’
I sat back and smiled. The past and present, which had scraped against each other in my head since the moment I set foot back in this town, were finally fitting together.
*
The alehouse door opened and Olaf walked in with a Finnish trader named Boe who had dropped anchor in the bay that afternoon. Olaf was softening him up for some business deal he had in mind.
Cabal nudged me. ‘The master at work.’
We sat back in the shadows and listened.
Boe was a short man who wore a vest made from silver-fox pelts sewn together in horizontal lines. His conical hat was also made from fox fur and had a fox’s head, squashed flat and eyes sewn shut, worn like an emblem on the front of the cap. When he took off this cap, he revealed a head of hair as fluffy as the fuzz on a dandelion seed. Boe was complaining that he had been up north looking for the Lapps but had not found them.
