‘You’re not a child any longer.’ Abarhild beckoned him closer, and he squatted a few feet from her, pretending not to see her nose wrinkle as his clothes warmed and steamed in the heat from the little fire. She looked at him hard, and suddenly he was far from sure that anything about him would escape her disconcerting gaze. She went on staring, and he could feel her eyes dwelling on every aspect of his face, until his skin burned again and he looked away.
He heard her sigh. ‘So like your father.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said irritably. ‘That can’t be news to you. What’s done is done.’ She gestured him down, and he hunkered once again, but wary this time, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet, ready to pounce or flee. ‘The question now is what we do with you. Fredegar and I have been talking—’
‘That foreigner!’
Abarhild hissed with disapproval. ‘No more foreign than I am myself.’
‘It’s not the same! What gives him the right—’
‘Oh, shut up, boy.’ Abarhild batted his protest away as though it were some impertinent insect. ‘Fredegar thinks you are unsuited for the Church.’
Athulf stared.
But his grandmother ignored his startled look. ‘He is wrong, however. All you are is young. Ill disciplined and poorly educated, yes. But’ – she paused and glared at him – ‘young. We can correct all that.’
Athulf just gaped at her, until she poked his foot with her stick. ‘Close your mouth, boy. You look like a fresh-landed sturgeon.’
She had the right of it. Athulf felt as though he had swum unseeing into a wicker weir, and now he couldn’t find the way out.
‘No.’ He was on his feet, with no awareness of how he had got there.
‘No?’
He didn’t hear the warning in her voice. ‘I’m going to be a warrior. I need a sword. I’m going to join the king’s war-band.’
Abarhild was shaking her head. ‘Not the wisest choice, boy. Nor the safest.’ She tapped her stick on the floor. ‘Sit down again.’ She waited. ‘Sit down.’
He could feel his will beginning to bend when the door eased open behind him and Ingeld came in, closing it on the daylight, the fire glinting in the raindrops that beaded his hair. Athulf turned to his father, hand extended, mouth open, eyes pleading. Ingeld had never wanted to be a priest. He would understand.
But Abarhild hadn’t finished, and Ingeld held up a warning hand.
‘That matter with Cudda.’ She was pursing her lips, choosing her words. ‘Bad. Your fault?’
He clamped his mouth shut against the cry of protest that threatened.
She was relentless. ‘How else would he be drunk? That drunk? You’d been at the buttery.’
He scuffed his toe against the floorboards. ‘Yes, Grandmother.’
‘Warriors carousing in the hall, eh? Your little war-band?’
He shrugged, his eyes roving to every point in the snug little room but their faces.
‘What are you hoping? That Radmer will make you his heir?’
There was a snort from Ingeld, and Abarhild grunted confirmation. ‘Quite. That will never happen, boy. He’s said as much. We only want the best for you.’
‘But I want...’ He couldn’t get the words out past the lump in his throat.
‘Speak up!’
He stepped back, out of reach of her staff. ‘I want to take my sword to the king.’
‘Your sword?’ It was his father who had spoken. ‘Where have you got a sword from?’
‘I don’t – I haven’t.’ Athulf could hear what he thought was an undercurrent of amusement in his father’s voice, and it made him sick and desperate. ‘Not yet.’
‘You’ve no claim to a sword, you stupid boy.’ Athulf could tell his grandmother was reaching the end of her patience, but anger made him reckless.
‘I would, if I killed a man who had a sword and took it.’
‘Enough of this nonsense.’ Abarhild levered herself to her feet. ‘We have decided everything. Ingeld, you will write to Wulfhere about finding the boy a place at the minster. It’s not too late, even for learning to read. I have known older oblates, and stupider ones.’
Ingeld shrugged his acquiescence. ‘Yes, Mother.’
Athulf turned on his father, his mouth contorted with the effort of fighting tears. ‘You never wanted to be a priest!’
Ingeld stared at his son. ‘How would you know what I wanted at your age? What boy gets to choose?’
‘I have chosen! I’m good. Thancrad said so.’
His words fell into silence. Ingeld was staring at him.
‘Tilmon’s son?’ His grandmother’s voice was sharp.
He nodded, sticking his chin out. After the whale-drive he and Thancrad had agreed to meet: once to go into the marshes with the fowling-nets, once to practise single-stick. Just Thancrad and him – not those other lads, Addan and Dene. They might be Thancrad’s cousins, but they were cousins he hardly knew after his seven years of exile across the sea.
Thancrad had his sword already.
Thancrad had praised his strength in the single-stick combat, his dexterity, his endurance.
‘Did you know about this?’ Abarhild was looking at Ingeld.
Ingeld just shrugged. ‘What does it matter how he spends his time at the moment?’ His voice was tight. ‘You’ve got it all mapped out for him.’
‘I don’t want to go to York.’ Athulf’s voice was scarcely more than a mutter, but Abarhild heard him.
‘Very well. Starve.’ Abarhild coughed, a ragged little grumble in her chest that went on and on. When she recovered her mood seemed to have softened. ‘You don’t like the idea of being a churchman, Athulf. I can see that.’ She reached out her free hand and patted his arm, ignoring his flinch. ‘No one could say you were cast in that mould. But not many men are. Not many priests.’ She dropped her hand and shifted to look at Ingeld. ‘There’s plenty to keep a boy like you busy in York, from all I hear.’
Athulf also turned to his father, frantic as a netted waterbird. ‘Can’t I stay here? I’ve been working hard for you! Storm has never been so well looked after—’
His father’s face closed like a stone.
Abarhild leaned her weight on her stick, the corners of her mouth tugging downwards. ‘Think about it, you stupid boy. Who will hold Donmouth minster after your father? Radmer would give it to Heahred tomorrow if he thought he could get away with it, just to spite Ingeld. If there’s no one here, the archbishop will give it to some other friend of his, come the day. Hmm? Thought of that?’ She stopped and breathed hard. ‘Is that what you want? Forty hides of fine land, given to some stranger? What will you live on then?’
Athulf realized to his horror that the tears which had been threatening for some time were leaking, hot and painful, from the corners of his eyes. He sniffed, and swallowed hard. ‘If I join the war-band the king will reward me.’
Ingeld shook his head. ‘He won’t, you know. There are too many others ahead of you. Ten years of peace!’ He gave his habitual wry smile, and Athulf read it as mockery. ‘Fine and well for the farmers, but the fighters are hungry and restless. The king has long run out of rewards.’
Abarhild thumped the tip of her stick on the floor. ‘Enough of this. You wear me out, boy. You may be an accident, but you’re still my grandson. You can’t be your father’s stable-hand forever.’
‘I want—’
‘You want!’ Her voice had taken on a cruel edge of mimicry. ‘You want to be a warrior. You and a hundred other idiot boys. Think Osberht has room for an untrained child like you?’ She raised her voice. ‘Come back here!’
Athulf was tugging the door open. But for all his inability to keep back the furious tears, he could not disobey that imperious note. He would not come back to her fireside, but he did stop and half turn round, his hand still on the latch. Abarhild’s women were hovering outside, agog.
‘I will write to the archbisho
p myself.’ She looked very tired suddenly, and one of her women stepped through the doorway, pushing past Athulf, and helped her back to her stool. When she was seated again, she looked up at him, still poised on the threshold between anger and flight. ‘You foolish little boy. When a man gives you a horse you don’t stop to check its teeth. Thank him, and get in the saddle.’
Athulf could feel the women’s eyes, inside the room and out, curious, judging. This couldn’t be happening. ‘Father?’ He had never called Ingeld by that name before, and to his fury his voice gave its tell-tale swoop and break as he did so.
But despite the anguish in his son’s voice Ingeld was spreading his hands and shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry.’ He seemed about to say something more, but in the end he just shrugged, and smiled.
32
Elfrun looked over her shoulder at the grey clouds to the west, and back to the deserted beach. She didn’t think the sun had yet set, but, with that louring sky and the veils of rain that had draped themselves over the hills, who could tell?
A week of autumn storms, and she had spent most of it on the foreshore half a mile from here. Her hands were chapped and sore with salt and water, and a weary ache tugged across her shoulder blades, but the job was done, the whale-meat salted away in its barrels, the skeletons left on the beach above the high-water line to be picked clean by birds before being transformed into everything from weaving battens to writing tools. Another good source of profit in the York market.
Her father would be pleased.
Wrapping the thick red folds of the cloak around her, she padded down to the waterline, trying to keep her bare soles from skidding on the thickly plaited coils of weed that strewed the sand. Much more weed and many more shells than usual, the seabed churned by the force of wind and water, but the wind had died right back now and all was still, though the scent of rot was thick on the chilly air. Sea and wind were quiet for once, and the loudest sound was the trickle of the stream where it ran down from the hill and soaked into the sand.
She had a plaited-rush basket on her arm and a rake in her hand, and if anyone challenged her she planned to say that she was looking for cockles and razor clams. Rain was drifting in a slow grey smirr down on to the beach, and the daylight was failing fast.
At the bottom of the basket lay the mirror, ready to be returned to its owner. She set down rake and basket and pulled the mirror out from its hiding place.
Beautiful. The word had made itself a nest somewhere under her ribs, warm and curled like a fox cub in its den of dry leaves. All through that blood-soaked, back-breaking week she had been aware of it, and had found herself pausing in her work, the corners of her mouth tugging upwards, an answer to the memory of Finn’s smile that came not so much as an image but as a rich, sleepy sensation that made her think of honey and drowsy, laden bees. The scent of meadowsweet, already half-forgotten on this dreary feast of All Hallows.
Beautiful. She peered at her frowning face, and shrugged, and turned the mirror over to look at the patterned side. Now this was beauty, if he wanted beauty. Her eyes danced along the lines, tracing those coils and whorls inscribed by some long-dead master who must have known what was in God’s mind when He first drew up the plans for this shifting world, that never-ending pattern which reminded her of eddies in the river where it ran shallow, or the sky when fragile clouds were stirred by the winds of the upper air, harbingers of storm.
Fredegar had said that tomorrow they would celebrate another mass for the souls of all the faithful dead, both those whom they often commemorated and those whose names no one remembered any more. This was a new thing, this mass for All Souls, that they had started doing in the churches of Frankia. One of the many important matters of which the Northumbrian churches were ignorant, he had said, his nostrils pinched as though against a bad smell.
Forgotten souls. Those souls felt tangible in the twilight, by the ebbing sea, as though the gauzy pall of drifting rain were the veil between this world and the next. Perhaps that was what was meant by the patterns on the mirror, that everything was always changing, that everything you loved slipped away on the tide, the solid world proving itself liquid, vaporous, gone...
The mirror was cold in her hands, and she had a sudden horror of looking into it again, of what she might see.
Finn wasn’t coming. Of course he wasn’t.
The beach was almost dark, and she was a fool. The sun must have set long ago. The chill had seeped even into that little secret haven under her breastbone.
Shoving the mirror back into the basket, Elfrun walked out on to the flat grey sand and started raking furiously. The cockles were densely packed just under the surface, and she set her rake aside and squatted to burrow beneath and scoop up the thick, ridged shells with both hands before dumping them into the basket. Sand and shell further abraded the raw skin of her fingers but the pain came as a welcome distraction.
After some moments of furious activity Elfrun found herself calmer as well as warmer, and the sides of the rush basket were bulging. But half her haul was made up of wet sand, and she decided to go down to the edge of the ebb and wash the shells before lugging them back to the women’s house. Her belly was growling, and she thought wistfully about prying open a few of the cockles there and then, but it would be hard work with just her little knife, and she knew fine well they would be full of tooth-cracking grit. Far better to take them back and rinse them properly, and steam them. Too late in the year for wild garlic, though there might be some dried leaves left in the store. Saethryth had brought some butter down from the sheepwick just the day before, warning that it would likely be the last of the season’s. Butter, and a little salt. Her mouth watered.
She was soaked now, kneeling in the shallows with her skirt hoicked up, drenched from rain above and salt water below, the red cloak a heavy, dragging burden, matted and weary. She was glad he hadn’t come. No one would think her beautiful this evening.
Finn. No other name. No people. Some unreliable vagrant of the roads. What did she care what he had said, anyway?
Hot tears pricked her eyes, and she had to sit back on her heels and wait for the iron grip around her ribs to ease. An errant wave ran up and over her feet, further drenching her hem, but she barely noticed. She could hardly be wetter, anyway.
Had she in fact come down to the sands too late? She had left the women’s house as soon as she could decently get away, but perhaps the sun, invisible behind the lowering clouds, had set earlier than she had thought. Finn could have come and seen the beach empty, and left again, perhaps only moments before she herself had come hurrying down through the dunes.
She closed her eyes. Another wave ran over her toes.
‘Lady?’
Elfrun scrambled to her feet, grabbing for rake and basket.
‘Lady, the tide’s coming in. I wouldn’t have spoken, but...’ The smith’s girl. Wynn. Twisting her hands together and sounding embarrassed. ‘I saw you from the top of the dunes, and you weren’t moving, and the tide’s coming in fast, your cloak was in the water, so I thought I’d just see...’
Elfrun could feel the blood rising and heating in her own face. ‘I was washing cockles. Do you want to take some to your mother?’
They had begun to walk up the beach but Wynn stopped there, just before the dunes. ‘I’ll take them to my father, lady.’
‘Is your mother still at her sister’s, then?’
Wynn nodded.
‘All right. Hold out your skirt.’ As she shovelled handfuls of damp shells into the fold of cloth, Elfrun said, ‘Your brother will be much missed at the forge. Has your father said anything about how he’s going to manage without Cudda?’
Wynn contemplated the question, her pointed little face suddenly taut, eyes narrowed. ‘Too soon to say, lady. It’s only been a week. You leave us be for a bit.’ Her gaze suddenly shifted. ‘Lady...’ she said on a panicky in-breath.
Elfrun half turned. And there he was, loping along the edge of the ebb-line, from the
south.
‘It’s... Don’t worry. I know him.’ She set down the basket and rake, and raised a hand as he approached.
‘Lady.’ He bowed his head, grave and formal. ‘I have kept you waiting, and I ask your pardon.’
She nodded, trying hard to mask her pleasure. How, in a week, had she forgotten his easy, light-footed grace, and the way that the curve of his eyebrow and cheekbone conspired to make his expression so warm and open even when, as now, he was not smiling?
She wanted him to smile.
More than that. Oh God, please, let him smile at her. She had been so cold and clenched, and now there was warmth in her veins, a bubble and a fizz and a lightness as though the dreich November had turned into May.
Gradually the world widened out again, and she became aware that Wynn was staring. She picked up her basket again and foraged beneath the layers of wet, sandy shells for the soggy little bundle of sacking. ‘Here.’
Finn nodded and took the bundle from her, and she felt a pang. He shrugged off his pack and set it down on the drier sand of the dune-edge, before turning back and unwrapping her careful little parcel.
‘I’ve taken good care of it.’ How defensive she sounded.
‘I’ve no fear of that, lady.’ He was running his fingertip along the sensuous curve of the red-enamelled pattern, his face remote and thoughtful. Elfrun became aware of Wynn edging closer, her fists still bunching the cloth of her skirt to make a bag for the dragging weight of cockles, but all her attention on the mirror.
Finn glanced at the girl. ‘You want to see?’
She nodded, speechless.
‘Sit down.’
She subsided gracelessly, legs folding under her, her wet lap still heavy with shells, and Finn hunkered down and offered her the handle. Wynn used both her hands to hold the mirror, confident and enquiring; and Elfrun, watching her turn it this way and that, was startled by how much she minded seeing another woman handling it, even such an awkward, childish creature as this. The girl squinted at the polished bronze; and Elfrun was intrigued despite herself to observe that Wynn appeared more interested in the narrow edges than either the broad, engraved and enamelled surface or the burnished one.
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