by Ken Hagan
Again Mel tugs me to waken. She pleads with me, her little voice trembling, her hushed words sharply insisting. She wants me to walk with her up the fell. I can’t summon the effort to leave the shelter. Each morning my body is gripped by pains that nail me to the floor. Dull-headed and only half-awake, I struggle to my feet, concealing from my family what ails me. While I move about and do my chores, the aching passes. But the next day my inward pains return at dawn; I am to be tormented by the same crippling nightmare. In the darkness of dreams the deadly blade-work of the kirtle-man pierces me to the quick as it did to Feilan. Night after night a heavy blow from Drak punctures my chest as it did for Da. The smiting of sword and axe pins me to the ground; robs the power of my legs, weakens my will to walk. If this is how we have to suffer — once we have witnessed the breach of death — I would rather stay awake than sleep, or fall asleep never to wake up.
Mel wants me to come with her. She wants me to go searching for Feilan. ‘We must go,’ she says. ‘We must find him on the fell-side and bring him safe to shelter.’
‘Go back to sleep, little one,’ I whisper. ‘It’s too early to be awake.’
‘No, no; Kregin, I don’t want to wait. I want to go now.’
Outside, in a sunny mist, the sound of rushing water from the forse stuns our ears, as though the waterfall had been silent until now and has just begun to roar. I welcome the noise. There is no need to find words. I take Mel’s little hand and together we move silently through the grazing sheep, past the restless ram, over sticky mud trodden by the bull-calf, through ferns and gorse and bracken, walking slowly up the fell towards the cairn. It is a game of make-pretend to find a brother who can no longer be found. To find Feilan.
Two woolbacks, the heaviest of our wethers, are grazing near the cairn, separate from the others. At first they seem curious to know what we are up to, but they soon wander off, sniffing better forage at the ferns. We reach the cairn-stones; we are close to our dear ones, our blood and kin laid beneath the earth.
‘Dada is sleeping under there,’ comes the whisper from Mel. She squeezes my hand. ‘Why won’t you answer me, Kregin?’ My nod tells her it’s true. ‘I knew he was, all along.’ Mel has more to say. ‘It’s why Ma comes here: she’s not cross with Dada, scolding him or telling him to wake; she is happy for him to go on sleeping. Isn’t she, Kregin?’
I turn away and look up, my attention drawn by puffins circling the sky. Mel ignores the noise from the seabirds. ‘I don’t believe a word Vrekla says. Feily can’t be with Dada; he wouldn’t like it under the stones. It is cold up here, always mist and rain.’ She shivers. ‘Feily wouldn’t stay here and get wet through. Would he, Kregin?’ I try to smile, but can’t. ‘Why are you crying?’ She scolds as if I have no right to weep.
Mel deserves an answer. She is right: Feilan’s spirit can’t be happy under the cairn. When we sail from the island, he won’t like being left behind, cold and wet, forgotten on this miserable fell. I want our crazy brother to leap out from the ferns, chatter one of his rhymes, chant one of his spells, and do that silly one-legged dance of his, hopping widdershins around us till we are dizzy with laughter. I am weeping full tears now.
‘Feilan,’ I call to him. ‘Why did we have to lose you?’
‘Don’t cry, Kregin,’ says Mel, clutching my knees with a long sigh of comfort, like a mother would do, not as you expect from a child, and then she asks, ‘What does it feel like to be dead?’
I have to laugh, though my eyes are blinded by tears. ‘No one knows that. How can you tell if you are still living?’
‘But Feilan, he will know, won’t he?’
‘Yes, Mel, he will know how it feels. The men of the Raven took him from us. They stole his life. He’s dead; he is not coming back; he has gone from us for good.’
‘Dada is gone, and Cormac too; he went to climb the mull and he’s not coming back. But where have they gone? Where does everyone go when they die?’
I search for an answer. What first comes to mind is the familiar skald-man’s tale of men drinking at Thor’s table, but I think too of what Ma has told us of the saints, and those who follow them. Mel deserves to be told something, and right now it won’t matter if it’s right or wrong.
‘Ma says that the people we love, when they leave us, go to a better place: they live in a bright land, Mel, plenty to eat and beer to drink, and they are never cold or hungry; their wounds heal almost at once and they never stop smiling.’
‘And we will go there one day and be with Feilan and Dada and Cormac?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘And Kol will be there, and Elgyr, and Gaukyr and Tarkyr?’
‘Yes, they will all be there.’
Mel thinks about that, and then she puts her little hand on the cairn-stones. ‘I’m glad we came looking for Feilan,’ she says brightly, ‘and I’m glad we didn’t find him.’
The feeding wethers that followed us up the fell have taken something amiss. Something has spooked them at the ferns; they are off, running down the fell-side, and there is more commotion in the sky — a gabble of puffin birds — right above us. The seabirds’ cries are so loud that I have to yell in Mel’s ear to be heard.
‘Feilan isn’t here, little one. Let’s go back to the shelter, see how Ma is, and waken Alu and Vrekla. We need to stoke the fire: I’m ready for something to eat.’
*
‘Yes nipper, I’m starving.’ The shout comes from above in the ferns. ‘Yes nipper,’ Da’s voice again. Must be an echo in my head. An instant of hope, immediately crushed by doubt — by doubt and unbelief — by certainty that it cannot be. And yet I want it to be true, I want it to be Da’s voice calling me by my name. He has been calling, in my sleep, these past four nights; I have been waking in false hope, knowing that he cannot be there. I hear the shout again, ‘nipper’, but this time it is no voice in a dream.
It’s my brother! No mistaking our Cormac. He is waving at us. There he is, large as life, stepping out, dripping wet from the giant ferns. And now he is running like the clappers, down the fell-side, with his arms out to greet us. He has tied his jerkin — for ease of carrying — like a sack, and from the bundle he is throwing sea-crusted wood at our feet, driftwood for the fire. I am amazed that he has found a beach and gathered flotsam washed ashore, but overwhelmed by the sight of him: he has made it safely down from the mull.
We are not used to hugs from Cormac, but here he is, lifting Mel and me clear off the turf, binding us tight with his brawny arms. ‘I shouldn’t be calling you nipper.’ Cormac kisses my ear, making me shiver with joy as he hauls me off the ground. ‘I am barely able to lift you, you big lump.’ And he lets me drop to my feet. He still holds Mel, rubbing his downy beard on her neck, teasing and tickling her. ‘Now tell me, little one,’ he chuckles. ‘Have I found your tickles?’
‘You have come back to us!’ shrieks Mel, kicking her feet in delight. ‘But what is that stink on your hands?’ Cormac laughs and sniffs into his palms. ‘It will be from a whale I found on the beach. I pulled flesh off the blubber to see if it was worth saving, but hide and meat were too far gone.’
‘You found a beach and whale!’ Mel and I ask as one voice.
Cormac smiles proudly in return.
There is so much to ask him. I make a start.
‘We feared the worst, Cormac. We did! We thought that you had taken a fall. Tell us, how did you get off the mull? And how did you get back down on this side of the forse?’
‘I found a way over the summit. There’s a tarn up there. It must be the source that feeds the waterfall. You can’t see a thing through the thick ferns till you go all the way up.’
‘No one but you, Cormac, could have done it.’
He shakes his head. ‘It was a hard climb by the mull, but anyone can walk over the fell from this end and collect wood from the beach below, there is plenty of it washed up in a cove.’
‘Cormac,’ I ask breathlessly. ‘Did you see signs of people?’
‘So it was only local fisher folk you saw,’ asks Sepp, poking one of Cormac’s driftwood sticks into the fire, ‘and no brigs, no skin-boats, nothing under sail?’
‘No,’ says Cormac, almost choking as he eats greedily from the bag, stuffing his mouth with one of Ma’s farls. ‘I counted four rowing-boats, and then I saw a fifth join them. They were out with their nets in shallow fishing grounds beyond the skerries.’
‘Strange that there’s no sign yet of our friends in the kaupships,’ says Einar, ‘I would have thought they might be in these waters by now, looking for us.’
‘We are content as we are,’ says Ma. ‘They are no friends of ours now.’
Only days ago Cormac would have gone crazy at the mention of our friends, but that was before he climbed the rock face, found beach and driftwood, and returned to a hero’s welcome. Today we don’t see him flying off in a rage. And no hurtful words from Einar. Ma says there must be no more bad blood between them.
‘Well,’ says Sepp, ‘if our friends were there, you would have seen them for sure: they can’t easily hide five kaupships; they need wind and sail to come ashore.’
‘I saw nothing under sail,’ says Cormac, ‘but believe me, it’s hard to see a thing; the sky north of the mull is worse than here. The skerries are clouded in rain and mist. No big ship will risk coming in past the reefs. Even the fisher-folk give those rocks a wide berth. I have not seen one of them row into the cove.’
‘I don’t want you going back there,’ says Ma.
‘To the cove?’ Cormac laughs. ‘Why not?’
‘Sepp needs you here to dig a drain round the shelter; we were flooded last night.’
‘I can manage alone,’ says Sepp, ‘let them go, Ma. We can do with more wood.’
‘And besides,’ says Einar, ‘I can check on the tides on the far side of the mull. Don’t worry, Ma, we will be back by nightfall.’
*
Bedwyr won’t be able to join us on our trek to the beach. The lad is too sick, he can’t put one foot in front of the other, let alone scale the fell, or tramp down the west coast to Cormac’s cove. A pity that he can’t come; we could do with his help; we aim to carry as much wood as we can.
The fever that started in Bedwyr’s lungs has taken hold of his body. Ma has him lying face down by the fire: he coughs up bad stuff from his chest. Hopefully the warmth of a fire, piled with Cormac’s wood, will ease the pains in his back.
On Ma’s say-so, Mel has been sitting pig-a-back on the lad to keep his body warm and make him sweat. It’s a game for my little sister to wriggle and play, but it must be torture for the boy: Mel can’t sit still; she never stops asking questions, and she keeps chattering away to her caged crows.
‘Bruni, Bruni, here, girl,’ she cries to her favourite crow, and the bird comes obediently to the bar of the cage and takes veal-fat from her finger.
*
Near the summit of the fell, on the last stretch to the top, the three of us take a breather. We have climbed beyond the cairn-stones, Einar, Cormac and I. Far below, where we have our shelter, the scant grazing seems no more than a patch of green above the sea, and the unrigged hull of the Vigtyr, anchored off the cliff-face in hazy waters, hidden under cuttings of gorse taken from the fell, looks like another rocky islet on the shore.
I can make out the limping figure of Sepp, his head down, digging a ditch round the back tilts of our shelter. It’s the flood channel Ma asked for; when the ditch is cut, rain will drain into it off the hillside and leave us dry.
Vrekla and Jo — I recognise them by their aprons — are cutting sods for Sepp, shaping and stacking turf at the entrance of the shelter; Ma fans the fire, getting smoke in her eyes. She won’t bake the farls until the stones are hot. I can’t see Alu or Bedwyr or little Mel for all the smoke.
We reach the fell-top inland from the mull. It has taken much longer than Cormac had said to retrace the hidden gullies that he found on his descent. No one is more sure-footed than Cormac. He is running ahead, scaling gully and scree, stopping every so often to wait for us. That look of his, when he stops, makes us feel that we are holding him back. It has caused Einar no end of annoyance, but, to keep his promise to Ma, he made the effort and bit his tongue.
It is cold on the summit, the misty air jarred with cries of ground-nesting puffins. The plump seabirds are everywhere, shuffling head to tail, crowding the heather and moss. They nip and peck in pairs, fuss and fence at each other playfully with their bright bills. The hen-birds, fatter than their nest-mates, keep disappearing under burrows, where they have laid their eggs.
Beyond the breeding colonies is the shallow tarn that Cormac spoke of, the source of our waterfall below; from its rippled surface, raked by the summit wind, swathes of mist drift towards the headland, and escape out to sea.
‘It wasn’t worth climbing to the top,’ says Einar. There is a deliberate edge to his voice, intended to dent Cormac’s mood. Einar peers into wet haze where sea and sky should be. ‘Can’t see a thing from here.’
‘Worse than yesterday,’ agrees Cormac, ‘I told you it was bad, maybe it will clear by the time we come back with the wood.’
*
Cormac’s cove is as he described, no more than a tiny inlet cut from the sea. It is shaped like the curve of forefinger to thumb, a mull and headland jutting seaward at either corner, a rugged fell behind. The beach is watered by becks from the tarn, running fell-side to reach the sea, cutting streaks of peat over the cindery sand. Loads of driftwood. It is clear that no one comes ashore to comb the beach.
We see timbers from a shipwreck, sturdy beams big enough for house-building; and logs, long and straight, unworked by man, seemingly torn from a tree of great girth, and washed out to sea. They are unweathered by salt and wet, and have bark the colour of iron that we have never seen before.
Cormac kicks a piece of driftwood and grins. ‘You have enough wood to burn for weeks, maybe months. No need to break up the ship’s bilge or waste the deck-boards: you can stay as long as you like.’
Einar rubs his beard. ‘Let’s hope we are not here for much longer.’
‘If you think that,’ says Cormac, wide-eyed, ‘why put the Vigtyr out of commission? Why pull down our mast and rigging? Why cover it in gorse? It will take days to make the ship sea-worthy.’
‘I should have thought the reason is obvious,’ says Einar. ‘We did it to conceal our presence.’
‘Not from the fisher folk — they are no threat to us — you did it to hide from Jarl.’
‘I won’t deny it.’
‘You are keen to keep out of his way?’
‘I’m not shy to have it out with him. Is that what you are getting at? I will confront him when I am better able. I will do it in my own time.’
‘They need to pay for what they did,’ replies Cormac, ‘for Da’s sake, for Feilan’s.’
So much for Ma’s hopes of a truce, my brothers are at it again: I leave them to it and wander up the beach to collect driftwood that can be chopped small to carry. I work upwind of the smell.
The beached whale is at the far side of the cove. The stench from the carcase takes my breath away. Gashes from Cormac’s knife, where he ripped the whale open, have leaked blubbery oil into the sand. The dead flesh crawls with flies and maggots. Seabirds, lured inland by rotting fat, feed on the carrion, squabbling over a share of the spoil.
*
‘What a stink from the whale.’ says Cormac, when he and Einar finally join me at my end of the beach. He strolls up with a swagger, hands in belt, looking cheerful.
‘Never mind the smell,’ is my grudging response. ‘It is time you two gave me a hand. See how much I have cut. There is more in that pile than we can carry.’
Cormac laughs at my giving him cheek. ‘Maybe we won’t need the wood, after all.’
I make a face in return. ‘What’s he on about, Einar?’ Cormac looks expectantly at our older brother.
‘I have promised to talk to Se
pp,’ says Einar. ‘If he agrees, and if Ma has no objections, I will go along with it.’
‘Go along with what?’
‘Great news, Kregin,’ replies Cormac — he can’t hold his tongue any longer. ‘We will leave in a day or two, three at the most, isn’t that right, Einar?’
‘But you can’t leave,’ I protest. ‘You can’t! Think of poor Bedwyr. We need to wait till he is over his fever. Taking him out to sea, before he is well will probably kill him.’
*
Ma and Sepp have put paid to any thoughts of our leaving; Jo is only too glad to gang up on Cormac, giving Einar daggers’ looks for having agreed to anything.
‘Hell’s teeth,’ she says to Einar, ‘the lad’s poorly — he will never make it at sea! It makes sense to wait till he’s better. And we need him. You say it takes a crew of six to man the ship. Who will see to the animals, or take turns to rest and sleep, or do the cess-pails?’
Einar shrugs it off. He had no intention of leaving. He knew that Ma would say no. And he knows — we all know it now — that Ma has the last word on everything.
*
‘Feilan would count the crew for us,’ says Mel, ‘he would do it with one of his rhymes. Will you count for me, Vrekla? Count one by one like Feilan?’
Vrekla always makes time to play with Mel, no matter how tired she is. ‘There are five of us women,’ begins Vrekla, ‘look, Mel, do it on your fingers. There’s you, Ma, me, Jo, and Alufa.’ She counts to five on Mel’s fingers. Mel laughs to carry on the game. ‘Now do it on the other hand,’ says Vrekla. ‘Do the men: Sepp one, Einar two, Cormac three, Kregin four, and Bedwyr five.’
*
We have no need to eat puffin birds or their eggs. We have a store of veal from the heifer; we could feast on it for weeks, maybe months, but Cormac, as a treat for Ma, stopped to gather puffin eggs on our way back from the cove, and Ma liked the taste so much that she asks Vrekla and Jo to fetch more eggs from the burrows on the mull.
