Foxmask

by Juliet Marillier

  Thorvald felt a flush rising to his cheeks, for all his efforts to contain his anger. Words spilled from his mouth before he could stop them. “What did you expect? That this incomer would stand by and see your men blundering their way toward yet another bloody defeat? That I would amuse myself tinkering with ill-fashioned spears and poorly strung bows, knowing all the while that the whole venture was headed for certain disaster? If that was what you thought, I can’t imagine why you brought us here. You should simply have given us our piece of wood and waved us good-bye.” His foot moved, trampling the little isle of sand into an amorphous heap; a general sigh went around the circle.

  “You didn’t need to wreck it,” Knut said, outraged. “After all that work.”

  “Indeed.” Thorvald heard the chill in his own voice. He could not remember being so angry for a long time, not since the day Margaret gave him the letter and changed his world. “The work has been for a purpose, and the purpose is victory and self-respect. After that comes the peace these men crave. Is it so hard for you to comprehend that a man may wish to put his talents to such a use, to lead others toward that goal?”

  There was a frosty silence. After a little, the men started to edge away down to the shore or up to the sleeping quarters, with not a word said. Thorvald’s heart was beating like a drum; he was caught between fury and fear. The Ruler’s face was pale, his jaw tight. Probably nobody had ever spoken to him thus before. Thorvald held himself still, keeping his eyes on Asgrim’s, waiting for a stinging volley of retaliatory words.

  “You will never do that again.” The Ruler’s voice was deathly quiet. “If you feel you must express doubts as to the quality of my leadership, you’ll do it in private. I will listen, as long as your arguments are based on fact and not ill-considered outpourings of emotion. You know less of the mastery of men than you think, if you imagine such an exchange will not damage your reputation among them. They know me. They trust me. I am one of them. You are young, untested, untried. You’ve kept them occupied during a difficult time, and that has been useful to me. But you have not fought alongside them, you have not suffered and wept with them, laid brother, father, comrade in cold earth beside theirs. You have not endured the wrath of the Unspoken. You have not seen the light go out in a child’s eyes on the very day he first draws breath. How can you know what they want? You cannot even begin to understand how it is for them.”

  Thorvald felt as if Asgrim had struck him in the face. Hogni stood at a little distance, shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. Farther away, the men’s voices could now be heard as they went into the shelter.

  “You’re wrong,” Thorvald said. He was unable to keep his voice from shaking. “It is at just such an extreme that good strategy and sound technique come into play. At such a time, when men risk becoming swamped in a tide of emotions, an incomer is exactly what you need. I stand outside this; I see it with clear eyes and can devise the necessary solutions. Give up and make a truce, and your men may survive a little longer, until the next time these other tribes decide to turn on you. Mount a solid attack, planned with precision and executed with discipline, and they can win back both peace and their belief in themselves. You would lead a stronger people forward on these isles of yours if you could do that. I believe I can make that possible for you.” More words trembled on his lips, Don’t you know I am your son? Don’t you see how we can change the future, make it good at last? He bit them back.

  “You speak with some passion,” said Asgrim, “for all your talk of standing outside. I fail to comprehend your reasons for this dedication to a stranger’s cause. You’ve worked very hard this past season; I’ve observed that. Your friend too”—he glanced along the shore to the place where Sam still labored on the Sea Dove’s hull—“but his passion I do understand; the boat is his livelihood. You are more of an enigma. It seems that no sooner do you set foot on this shore than you are striving to control our endeavor, to prove you know better than we do how we should live our lives. Did they cast you out of the Light Isles for meddling?” The Ruler’s dark brows arched in query.

  Thorvald flushed again. “Since we are on that tack, I have a question for you. Are you not, also, an incomer? Is not each of you a refugee from some other place, come to this shore to forget? The Lost Isles: a realm where a man can put his past life behind him, his errors, his misdeeds, the crimes he committed, the good deeds he never managed to do, all of that conveniently set aside now he lives where his past cannot pursue him. Surely only the youngest among you were born and bred in these islands. The tongue you speak is our own; your manner of life does not suggest to me an exile of many generations. It seems to me the Long Knife people are outsiders here just as I am. I’m only trying to help you. How dare you judge me?” He found he was shivering. The conversation was slipping from his grasp, something he had been at pains to prevent.

  “I don’t judge you, Thorvald,” the Ruler said quietly. “I merely seek to discover whether, in my plans for the future, you represent an opportunity or a threat. Your manner, your words make it plain you see yourself as a leader. The Long Knife people have only one leader.”

  “I am no threat to you,” Thorvald replied, wondering even as he spoke if this were the truth. “I have not acted thus from any desire to harm your cause or undermine your authority. Perhaps my motives are hard to understand. At home I was—I had—I felt I was outside affairs, in a way cut adrift. I—” Gods, he was sounding like a stammering, confused child. He forced his breathing to slow. “My father was lost to me; I never knew him. I have struggled to find a place for myself, a role and purpose. I traveled here at least partly in the hope of discovering both.”

  “Mmm,” said Asgrim, frowning. “The question is, do you desire simply to step into another man’s shoes? You know me a little by now, Thorvald. You know, surely, that such an ambition would set a very short term on your life.”

  “I’ve heard you can be ruthless, yes. I understand that, at least in part. A leader must act decisively in such a realm or quickly lose his authority.”

  The Ruler nodded. “Tell me,” he said, “why here? Why not southward to Ulster, or back to the east? This is a dark corner of the world, Thorvald, dark and forbidding. It does not welcome strangers. Such a choice seems wayward: not the decision of a rational man.”

  Thorvald drew a deep breath. “I thought it possible a kinsman had made his way here long ago,” he said. “I wished to discover if it was true. That was the sole reason for my choice. I have told you this already, I think. I suspect Creidhe may also have mentioned it to you.”

  Something flashed across the Ruler’s face, a shadow, a swift change, and was gone as rigid control was imposed on his features once more.

  “I had forgotten.” Asgrim spoke lightly. “What kinsman was this? These isles are not well populated; nobody arrives without my knowledge. What manner of man?”

  Thorvald swallowed. “He’d be of about the same years as yourself now, perhaps forty or somewhat less; a fit, able young man when he came here, and of Norse extraction.”

  “His appearance?”

  Thorvald could not prevent his mouth from twisting in self-mockery. “Somewhat akin to my own, I imagine. I never met him. He traveled to this shore in the year before my birth.”

  Asgrim’s eyes narrowed. “I see,” he said slowly. “And could you put a name to this fellow?”

  “A man can change his name.” Thorvald could feel his heart thumping in a crazy dance, as if it sought to leap from his breast. “Probably did, I imagine, seeking this shore as so many others did, in order to forget.”

  “All the same.”

  “Somerled,” Thorvald said. “His name was Somerled.”

  There was a lengthy silence. Hogni gave a little cough and shuffled his feet; from the shelter, now, came a smell of fish frying in oil, and a plume of smoke arose from the hole in the roof, to be quickly snatched away by the wind. The sky was glowing red, the sun sinking in the west beyond the dovegray s
hadow that was the Isle of Clouds. Thorvald watched Asgrim’s face. The man was a master of control; for a considerable time he seemed to react not at all. When he did, it was with a fleeting, humorless smile that set a chill on Thorvald’s heart.

  “Really,” Asgrim said. “Somerled. There is no man in these isles who answers to that name now. What was this Somerled to you, that you seek him so far from the safety of home, though he was gone before you ever clapped eyes on him?”

  Thorvald turned away, unable to bear the malice that had awoken in Asgrim’s dark eyes, the cruelty in the set of his thin lips. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, hardly recognizing his own voice, which seemed to come from somewhere far distant. “It’s of little importance.”

  It was only after he had walked away, ten, twelve paces up toward the shelter and the false comfort of companions who probably thought even less of him than the Ruler seemed to, that Thorvald heard Asgrim’s voice behind him, light, mocking.

  “Your father?”

  So this was what it came to. He had traveled this far, had given all he had in an attempt to achieve something worthwhile and lasting, to prove himself. He had found his father, and his father cared so little for the bond of kinship that he didn’t even take the trouble to acknowledge it. Yet it was there, and Asgrim knew it: Thorvald had recognized that in the supercilious lift of the brows, the cruelly bantering tone of voice. This was Somerled all right. Somerled had found his own place in the Lost Isles, a place with no room at all for a son.

  Thorvald sat alone on the rock shelves above the pebbly shore. Small waves washed in and out in the half-light, the sound they made a sighing, sorrowful, resigned. We change, and are the same. This is as it was. This is as it is. This is as it will be. He threw a pebble into the water, and another. The sky had darkened to the gray of sealskin, tinged with a faint glow that was both memory and anticipation of day. This was as dark as it seemed to get in summer here. He could hear the solitary calls of birds, somewhere up there winging from cliff to cliff, a mournful counterpoint to the whispering of the sea.

  There was no more to say. There was no more to be done. If your own father did not want to recognize you, even when you had tried your best to please him, that said something pretty clear about your value in the world, didn’t it? If he wasn’t prepared to acknowledge you even though he himself was an exile, a man who understood, surely, how it felt to be cast aside as if you were rubbish, then what did that make you? Thorvald shivered. Why had he come here? Why had he trusted his instincts instead of thinking this through properly? He had been angry: angry with his mother for holding back the truth, for being less than the perfect creature he had believed her, for . . . he did not know what. Margaret was human, after all. She must have been barely seventeen when she lay with Somerled and made a son who would grow up as dark and twisted as his father. He had been furious with Eyvind, who had been his father’s dearest friend and who had banished Somerled forever from the land where he had once been king. What man would take so drastic a course of action? The boat, they said, had been a frail curragh of wattles and skins, the provisions minimal. Such a repudiation had been heartless. It had been quite out of character for Creidhe’s father, known as the most wise and just of men. He wished, now, he had talked to Eyvind. Most of all, Thorvald had been angry with himself, because the day Margaret told him the truth, he had recognized that he was his father’s son. He bore within him Somerled’s cruelty, his ambition, his single-mindedness. Somerled had become king because he was ruthless and driven. He was Ruler here for just the same reasons. His talk of sharing sorrow and regret with his men was sentimental rubbish, no more than a play for Thorvald’s sympathy. Asgrim remained leader here not through any fellow feeling, but because of his iron fist and the way he fueled his people’s fear of the Unspoken. Thorvald knew, to his shame, that he carried the same determination, the same grim sense of purpose within his own breast. He knew it made him snap and snarl at those who sought to curb him. He knew it made him blind, sometimes, to the needs of those around him. Creidhe had told him so, and Creidhe never lied. At the time he had pretended not to hear her. But he had heard, understood and accepted; accepted this dark energy inside him, which could work to achieve more wondrous goals than an ordinary man might dare to aspire to, and could work to send him spiraling downward into a deep pit of despair.

  Gods, how he wanted Creidhe here now, sitting quietly beside him in that way she had, still and calm, just listening. He could say anything to Creidhe and know she would understand and forgive. She was the only one he could talk to when this black mood was on him; tell his true thoughts to anyone else and he would be judged as crazy. There were times when he would have believed that himself if Creidhe had not been there to comfort and reassure him. True, she was a little free with her advice at times, but nonetheless in some strange way she was essential to him. He realized he had missed her a long time, without recognizing what it was he lacked.

  Well, if Asgrim got his truce, Thorvald thought savagely, hurling another stone into the sea, he would see Creidhe soon enough, for this would all be over, his work with the men completely wasted, the neatly made weapons set away in storage, the tribe of the Unspoken and their ghostly counterparts on the Isle of Clouds allowed their victory without even a token resistance. Orm, Wieland, Knut, the rest of them would think they were safe, would think this was an easy peace, until it all started again. And it would start again; such feuds did not die after so lame an ending. Something would reignite the burning anger, and these tribes would be at war once more, and the Long Knife people would be vanquished because he had not been allowed to lead them, because by then they would have forgotten what he had taught them. Pointless, useless, all of it. He tossed another stone. Futile and wasteful. A pox on Asgrim and his treaty. A curse on his cynical laughter. How dare he mock? Thorvald sat there a long time, his thoughts turning in a familiar pattern. One step forward, two steps back, that seemed to be the way of it for him. It was as if a shadow had been cast over his life before ever he left his mother’s womb: a kind of curse, almost, that Somerled had bestowed on him as a reminder, for the rest of his days, that he was flawed, damaged, unable to set his hand to anything without all turning to ashes. He had allowed himself to forget that in the challenge of making this disparate rabble of islanders into a disciplined fighting force. He had believed in the task and, for a little, he had believed in himself. That just went to show how warped his own judgment was, for it had taken Asgrim—Somerled—only a moment to destroy his son’s vision. How much of a man were you, when your own father dismissed you as a meddling incomer?

  In his mind, somewhere, he could hear Creidhe’s voice, quiet, careful, saying, There are others who love you, Thorvald, others who believe in you. Your mother . . . Do not forget Margaret, and Ash, and your friends. But he closed his thoughts to those half-remembered, half-imagined words, for tonight he was beyond such comfort. Creidhe was not here, nor Margaret, nor anyone but Sam who snored among the others in the shelter, worn out by an honest day’s work on the boat. Thorvald was alone with the ocean and the night, alone in a place well suited to a man whose spirit seemed no more than a small echo of the desolate shores, the harsh, bare-topped hills, the monstrous cliffs and voracious surges of this most ungiving of realms. One could make an end of things, of course. On such an isle the means were readily at hand, the answer as easy as stepping off a cliff or entering the water at night when nobody else was at hand to cry, No! Thorvald pondered this, considering the methods, and which would be quickest and least untidy. Somerled could have killed himself, all those years ago. His voyage of exile had been desperate, a far greater challenge than that terrible journey on the Sea Dove. Sam’s boat was big and sturdy and there had been three of them to handle her in the end. Somerled had been alone. He had not known if there was any land at all to be found to the west of that shore where his dearest friend had cast him adrift. Yet he had not taken the easy choice of a sharp knife and a quick, bloody trip to obli
vion. Somerled had gone on; had gritted his teeth and followed some inner voice to this wild place to make his life anew. Why? To become Ruler of a sad collection of dispirited folk at the mercy of the Lost Isles’ earlier and more dangerous inhabitants? To father a daughter and a son and then lose both in a futile struggle for survival? There was no reward in that, no satisfaction at all. But he had stayed here. He had chosen this, and chosen to survive. And Thorvald knew that he, too, would choose life, for all the dark thoughts that hedged him around. There was no saying why; there was no sense to it. It was simply the steady beating of the heart, the regular pulsing of the blood, and at the point where outward breath pauses and becomes inward, the decision each time, the knowing. I will go on. It is not yet my moment of darkness. Even in this, it seemed he was his father’s son.

  Dawn came eventually, and not long after it Sam, with a frown on his usually placid brow.

  “Been out all night, have you? Not the best start to the working day.”

  Thorvald said nothing.

  “Cold, too, summer or no summer. Here.” Sam dropped a blanket over his friend’s shoulders. It would have seemed a gesture of childish petulance to shrug it off; Thorvald gathered it around him, not trusting himself to speak, for all of a sudden he seemed to have tears in his eyes: utterly foolish.

  “Heard you and Asgrim had a little disagreement,” Sam said without any particular emphasis. “Did you tell him?”

  Thorvald nodded. “More or less,” he managed. “He chose not to recognize it; I should have expected that, I suppose.”

  There was a short silence.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said quietly. “Sorry, but not surprised. He’s got his own little world out here, and no room for anything else in it.”