by Ken Hagan
Hethrun treats me as one of her possessions. ‘You are my foundling,’ is how she puts it. And it is true: she did find me, washed up like flotsam on the beach. I am like a son to her. She will never admit it but that’s how things stand between us. I don’t object to her mothering — it is not as if anyone will take the place of Ma — the only drawback is having to put up with her odd ways, her crazy moods; her annoying habit of sending me on a wild goose chase on some cooked-up pretext when moon or mood takes her.
Take this morning, when she sent me to fetch more eggs. I was on the ness yesterday to gather wildfowl eggs. You can’t do it with harness and ropes in less than a day. I fetched exactly what she wanted, nine blue cormie-eggs, nine white puffin-eggs, and nine brown duck-eggs. Here I am again today, kicked out of the house, on the hunt for more. I know what she is up to. She doesn’t want me near the lodge, when farm-wives from the dales or fish-wives from Holmur, and their daughters, come asking for women’s remedies.
She could have said, ‘Kregin, I am busy. Make yourself scarce! Come back when the sun is at three-quarters, and not before.’
But no, that’s not her way. She makes out that three of my blue cormie-eggs — the ones I brought yesterday — were cracked. All I can say is: they were fine last night when I took them from the egg-bag. I wouldn’t gather eggs from the nests if the shells were over-ripe and veiny, ready to crack. I know how fussy she is. She wants the eggs fresh-laid. The shells have to be in perfect condition so that she can grind them down and mix the powder with her herbs.
As for the damaged eggs, I blame her; she did it on purpose. She cracked them when my back was turned; she made it her excuse to pack me off for the day. Blue cormie-eggs are hard to get. Cormies build their nestings on ledges, high on sea-cliffs at the ness. You need rope and harness to climb down anywhere near.
The clutching season for hens is all but finished. At this time of year cormie-eggs are few and far between; you have to hunt for ages to get a fresh one. Hethrun knows it well enough. That’s why she damaged the blue ones, the most precious of all, and not the ‘duck brown’ or ‘puffin white’.
I have tied the rope and made it secure to the hornstone. I call it my hornstone because it is horn-shaped like the keepsake of Da’s nails tied to a thong under my serk. It was Ma who overruled Jo and said I should have the nails. I loop the harness-end of the rope twice on my waist and shoulder, I take up the slack between my legs, walk out into the wind; back-first over the edge. I always look down. They say you shouldn’t while climbing, but I love the dizzy sense of danger, the sound of loosened rocks whizzing past my ears. There is a long wait while they tumble down, and then a cackling sound as they settle far below on the dry shore.
This rope — the one I’m using — was our spare from the Vigtyr. I came across it on the beach a week after the shipwreck. Everything lost at sea off these western shores of the ice lands washes up on Suthyre strand. I can smell the smoky grease — the veal-fat — that Einar smeared on the rope to make it water-proof. He used fat from the butchered she-calf, whose eye and neck were torn by Drak. It took my sister Alu three days to render lard from the joints of meat.
The rope is the full weight we had on the ship. I counted its length in spans. I checked it finger to elbow, all forty ells of coil. It seems lighter than it was then. These days I could carry a rope of this size three or four times over, no bother. And yet there are days when the weight of rope bears down on me. It begins to feel heavy when I think of Einar rubbing it with fat, or when I am brooding about Ma, and my brother Sepp, and the others of my family lost at sea.
It takes practice, a sharp eye, and a bit of luck to gather wildfowl eggs from these dizzy heights. Fresh-laid eggs will always be found in nests that look untidy, nests made ragged by breeding pairs landing in a flurry. That’s what to look for. You don’t need strength or skill or nerve. I have no thought for the rope snapping, no fear of falling. The risk of having my life exposed on the end of a rope brings more pleasure than fear.
Today, my egg-snatching has turned out better than I could have hoped. I have climbed only five or six ledges down and found the eggs I needed — three big cormie beauties, bright and blue. I have them, and a spare one for luck, all wrapped in straw, stored safe inside my egg-bag for Hethrun.
*
The sun is high over the estuary, what folks here call the Os, but what Ma in her native tongue would have called a lough. I am done sooner than expected. It’s too early to go back to Hethrun’s lodge on the strand. If I do, I will get an earful of abuse, and another chore to send me away.
The estuary sparkles in the sun, dulls over, and sparkles again. The Os wind blows west to east. Straggly clouds run inland from the sea, racing up the fiord, hiding the sun at intervals. From here, high on the ness, sea and shore seem all the brighter each time sunlight re-appears.
The running clouds throw patches of shadow on north shore. The walled fields over there belong to Leif Njelson, the guothie at Osvellir. His meadows by the shore are empty. Here on the ice lands no one leaves animals on low ground for summer. Cattle, sheep and horses, all a man’s livestock save for his pigs in the pound, are put to graze in the fells from spring to winter-fall.
Leif the Tall is what they call him. He has land on both sides of the water. He is the ‘big man’ at this end of the Os, though, according to Hethrun, he is not as rich as guothie Klepjarn, who owns everything up-water east of Laxvik, heath-land and shore, river and stream. Klepjarns-stead is the place named after him at the head of the estuary.
Leif’s farm does well on the north side of the fiord, unlike the dales he leases to steadmen on south shore. Along this side, from Suthyre sands to Vorgha fell, we caught the brunt of ash rains from the bursting mountain. Back then, four years ago, the Os wind blew inland for weeks, saving north shore from falling cinders, dumping the worst of it south of the water.
I can see down-estuary as far as Klettur Os. The currents of sea-water stand like ridges around the islets of Holmur, where fisher folk haul for cod. Looking east to the head of the fiord, I see as far as Laxvik where, late in the year, Klepjarn’s men net a harvest of salmon, catching them in hundreds when the big silvery shapes leap up-river to spawn and die.
How different it looks to the morning I awoke in ashy darkness, half-alive, half-dead, on the mud at Suthyre. Poor Alufa, her drowned body fetched up on next tide, and the same day we came across Mel too, by the mouth of the river; my little sister, her small, round face crinkled and blue, her frizzy hair, untouched by hot ash, floating green like sea-weed in a stagnant pool.
Every passing day brought remnants of the sunken ship. The summer tides carried in timbers and strakes, rope and sailcloth, staves and beams, and drowned wethers and ewes, till enough of our shipwrecked mess had washed ashore to be assembled into the Vigtyr and its lading, if only a magic spell to work miracles was known to ones such as Hethrun.
Which of us, lucky to be fished from the sea, can stop themselves from gazing, from scanning over empty waves, waiting for loved ones missing in deep waters to come ashore, and waiting and hoping for what — for nothing but a dead body?
On the third day, Cormac. I spotted his corpse on mudflats while the tide was out, and not far from his shapeless figure, splintered staves from one of the water-butts. The pieces of driftwood were intact, as sound as when they were taken off the beach at Cormac’s cove, sturdy battens picked out by Sepp to re-build the ram’s cage.
No sign of the ram, no more bodies, not on the fourth day, or the fifth, or the sixth, no sign of Ma, or my brothers; of Vrekla and Jo, of Bedwyr and the bull-calf, nothing. Nor on the fourth, or fifth, or sixth week; nothing more was found.
‘They won’t turn up now.’ I heard those words, for months and months after, from Hethrun. Every night at bedtime she said the same old thing, while she fed me bilberry juice heated on the hearth, fermented drink, hot and heady to knock me out. ‘Best stop looking, lad, whatever was meant to come ashore, has come ashore.’
/>
We buried them on the strand, Cormac and my sisters. Their graves lie under a dune of windblown ash. Nothing can be seen now but heaps of mud and sand. There are no stones to mark their burial.
‘No need for a cairn,’ said Hethrun. ‘You will know where to find them.’
I come here often, to Suthyre sands, on the way back from egg-gathering, to sit on the dune, to think of Mel and Alu, and to remember Cormac in his prime.
Cormac was my hero. I still think of him as tall, stronger than me. Strange to imagine that I am older than Cormac was when he drowned. Last year, his jerkin, which I once prized, was already too small to fit my shoulders.
Hethrun unpicked his old reindeer-skin by the seams. She sewed the best part into a pair of boots, the ones I am wearing now, and from leftover leather she made an egg-bag, and stuffed it with straw ‘to stop me breaking the eggs.’
Poor Alu. Her fate could have been different, if only Da had left her in Thwartdale. She could have married Bjorn, had his bairns, and been alive now. And little Mel, with her plans for the crows. She thought the birds would fly to the ice lands to find Da and Feilan, her sad childish dreams crushed to nought.
‘I knew I would find you here.’ Hethrun from behind me. ‘Where else would you be?’
‘You told me not to show my face till the sun fell past three-quarters.’
‘The farm women have gone. They got what they came for.’
‘I have the cormie eggs for you, big beauties, four, and none of them cracked.’
Hethrun laughs. I open the bag to show her. She lifts out a blue egg to admire it, without taking off her mitts; places it in the palm of her gloved hand. It is a summer’s day, but she is dressed in winter cloak, as dark-blue as the night sky, with furry hood and trims of cat skin, dark, felted mittens to match her cloak.
‘Why are you wrapped up as if it’s a winter’s day?’
‘This is how I dress, Kregin, to greet Blot’s wife and his daughters. I came to find you, without changing my cloak, directly after they had gone.’
She puts the cormie ‘blue’ in the egg-bag, and folds straw carefully around the egg. ‘You have been at it again,’ she asks, ‘more tears?’
‘Straw from cormie nests, or dust from a rock-fall at the cliffs: it makes my eyes sting, that’s all.’
The old kerling smiles. ‘It’s time,’ she says, ‘time they had a helping hand to get where they are going.’ Her keen eyes are on me: how is it that I know exactly what she means.
‘Will you send them somewhere safe, Hethrun?’
‘Yes,’ she says. Her eyes narrow to slits, as if she searches under the sand at our feet.
Full of promise, bright and beautiful, blue as summer sky, my four cormie eggs were stolen from the nests. Hethrun takes three of them from the straw. One by one she cracks them open; spills them, yolk and white, shell and all, crushes them underfoot. She mumbles, counts on her gloved fingers: one and two and three. She makes me repeat their names, three-times-three, Cor and Mel and Alu. And while I am doing it, she crushes the spilled cormie eggs on the sand.
‘Cor and Mel and Alu,’ she says, ‘a last time, Cor and Mel and Alu.’ And the last egg she leaves unbroken in the bag to take home.
*
I have worked up a sweat in Hethrun’s field, digging squared bricks of turf like Da showed me as a boy, when he did repairs to our steading roof in Thwartdale. Today Hethrun complains of being ill. She has taken to her bed. The leaks from the roof are annoying her. She is inside with Ikki the cat, brooding in the dark, listening to rainwater drip from the rafters. She has been mithering me to fix the leaks before winter sets in.
Our weather worsens, the air turning colder, not a day without sleet or snow. By moon reckoning it has not reached slaughter-month, but dalesmen on this side of the fiord, in Laugdale and Skogurdale, have brought their cattle down from the fell. The best milkers are settled snug in the barns to fodder on hay. Cows that gave scarce milk in summertime have been left outside to graze on the bare stubble ground, ear-marked, a splash of dye on their ears, awaiting slaughter.
Hethrun keeps no livestock for meat or milk. She doesn’t have to. Farm-wives bring cheese or curdled milk, salt beef or pork, and leave it overnight on the stone, nine paces from her door, out of range from the he-goat’s tether. It’s the same with fisher folk from across the fiord. Most mornings, if the men have been out all night on the water at Holmur, and providing their sea catch is good, we wake up to find a fish on the step, a coley or ling, flounder or dab. These gifts are Hethrun’s reward for work as a kerling.
A kerling is wise with herbs and potions, and she can search out what is yet to come, spae things of the future, things hidden from the rest of us. Hethrun is not loathe to share what comes to her in spae-dreams, but often as not she will keep it to herself. She says that common folk, as a rule, think they can profit from knowing what their fortune holds, but if it is bad news or a warning, it never suits them to hear the truth.
From here, sitting on the wet roof, I am reminded how much space there is below the eaves. Hethrun says it was once a fisherman’s lodge but when I ask how the place fell to her, what became of the man and his family, she clams up, turns away.
The man of the house must have kept a big household, for he built a hall for living quarters, benches and bunk-boxes, outhouses for cows and pigs, a dairy with sunken vats to sour the whey, a smoke-room to cure fish, and a barn-loft for hay. The turf-roof can be climbed without a ladder: it stretches all the way to the ground. The outhouses are no longer in use, except to store flotsam and jetsam carried in by the tide. The barn is stuffed with driftwood, brought back by Hethrun from years of gathering on the beach.
I am squatting astride the roof, layering sods of turf over the gable ridge where the leaks are coming in. The sleet is driving in my face. An Os wind blows raw over the fiord. Smoke escapes through a fire-hole in the roof. The smoke hangs low, a tang of salt from burning sea-wood and a smell familiar in the kerling’s house, a strong waft of yarrow-weed; the fumes bitter and sweet.
Hethrun has drunk a pot of yarrow ale and sprinkled yarrow dust on the hearth: sniffing eases her ailment. I hear her dazed voice singing gibberish inside the lodge to the screeching accompaniment of her cat. The old kerling and Ikki the cat are so addled by the weed they won’t surface from their yarrow trance till nightfall. If Hethrun drinks like this, and inhales smoke from the fire, her spae-dreams and the cat’s baleful yawning may last till morning.
A gust of wind almost lifts me off the roof. I am done with this. I have patched and sealed the worst leaks. Hethrun will be none the wiser if I leave just an odd brick to finish tomorrow. I am off from here into Laugdale, where Blot’s daughter is waiting.
Chapter 14
Snow is falling when I turn off the beach to start my climb into the fells. I will follow the course of the beck upstream into Skogurdale. My boots slip on a tangle of tree-roots and splash in the icy water. My thoughts hop to and fro, missing a stride here or there, while I balance over stones, roots and wood-falls in the tumbling river. I will take the long way under river-willows into Laugdale, and come out by woodlands of downy birch and juniper above Blot’s steading. I want to reach the hot springs at Hver without being seen. Idris, Blots daughter, doesn’t like her father or brothers to know that we meet.
My steps hop and slip, running against the stream as it rushes under the willows: Hethrun’s words on the beach that fine summer day, crushing three eggs underfoot in the sand, naming Cormac, naming Alu, naming Mel, have worked their magic. The kerling-spell has done the trick. In my mind’s eye I no longer see brother and sisters, as they were, while alive, nor do I think of them as lying buried under the sand.
‘The cormie birds,’ says Hethrun, ‘have claimed the dead in return for the eggs you snatched from their nests. Now that the birds have gone for winter, and carried your loved ones south, they won’t return.’
Hethrun’s spell and the birds’ winter flight have taken away my
tears. Memories of Cormac have faded, not only of him but Alu and Mel too. Try as I might, I can’t bring to mind Mel’s wispy curls or the colour of her hair. As for Alu, I can’t recall her face: I see an outline of her chin, her shiny neck glistening hot with sweat, while she scolded Jo and Vrekla for lying boldly on deck, the hot day, the day of the mountain blowing fire, when they undressed to the skin. And yet, despite the magic of the eggs, come winter-fall, something no less wounding has filled the void in my head. I can’t shake off the debt of love I owe to Ma and Sepp. I have little thought for the others. I never felt their loss in the same way.
‘Ma, did you end up in the sea? Or were you scorched to ash by a floating fire of rock? Sepp, you would have done your utmost for Ma and Vrekla and Bedwyr, helping everyone, till it was too late for you! But Ma, you would have jumped! You wouldn’t have let flame or fire reach you! And yet, once in the sea, shouldn’t you have fetched up, like us, on Suthyre strand? Or the skiff stayed afloat! Is that it? Somehow, our skiff carried you all ashore!’
Every year in mud-month, when melt waters flood off the dales, when the air turns mild and soft, I resolve to go looking for Ma and Sepp, to strike out on my own, taking leave of Hethrun and the lodge, trekking north, trekking south over the fells, anywhere, everywhere, in search of them.
Not that I believe they were saved. Not that I cling to any hope they can be found. It is more a sense of having let them down, a sense that I ought to be out searching. A son or a brother ought to do it. It’s what a man owes to his family.
