Women of the Dunes

by Sarah Maine

  Chapter 3

   Odrhan

  They had a wounded man on board, the woman told him. “Do you have skills, holy man?” she asked, and he nodded, so the men fashioned a stretcher from two oars and brought him to Odrhan’s cell.

  The woman then issued further commands, sending the men back down to the ship while Odrhan knelt beside the injured man, and began uncovering a deep wound.

  “Can you save him?” the woman asked.

  He looked up at her. “With God’s help, perhaps.”

  Down on the beach the men were unloading baskets from the ship.

  “But your god is not his god,” she said, and he saw that her eyes were a pale aqua, the colour of the ocean.

  He made no response. Then: “Your husband?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “It was my husband who did this.” Odrhan frowned as he removed the bloody bindings. “We were fleeing from him but he stopped us at the shore, and they fought.” Odrhan bent to sniff at the wound. It was clean. “They are brothers, Erik and Harald,” she added.

  Odrhan looked up at her again. “And you leave one for the other, lady?”

  She returned the look evenly. “I do not ask for your approval.”

  “Only for my help.”

  The men were clambering up the rocks, grunting under the weight of baskets which they set down beside the cell before returning for more.

  The woman spoke again, quickly. “Erik beat me, saying I was barren. But the lack was in him, not me. We dared no longer stay.”

  Odrhan’s frown deepened as he considered her. These were heathen folk and she stood there, defiant in her adultery, a tall and slender figure, asking him to save her lover. “Lady—” he began.

  The men set the second load of baskets beside the first and the woman gestured towards them. “If you can save Harald then I will give you gold enough to build a church here—”

  “You think God’s help can be bought?” And anger grew in him that she should be so lovely, and yet so full of sin.

  “Then what must I do?” she asked.

  “Pray to God,” he said, “and repent.”

  Chapter 4

   Libby

  “Sex, murder—and a reckoning.”

  Declan might dismiss the legend in a single ill-formed phrase, but her grandmother had told it differently:

  Odrhan stood beside his cell, and gazed out o’er the sea.

  A sail, a sail, his eye espied, and fell he to his knee.

  Save me, Lord, from the Northman’s sword,

  Spare me from his wrath!

  “No, Nanna, not the poem. Tell me it like a story!” ten-year-old Libby had protested.

  “Don’t you like the poem, then?” Her grandmother had smiled.

  “I like some of it,” she had replied, with youthful diplomacy. “Especially the bits about Ulla.”

  Then Ulla fair, she stepped ashore,

  And Odrhan took her hand . . .

  The poem, as she had recognised even then, was a dreadful bit of doggerel, and her grandmother was all too prone to recite as much as she could remember, filling the gaps with the story as she had been told it by Ellen, her own grandmother. She had given Libby the little sketchbook with Ellen’s drawings in it and Libby had solemnly copied them, and it had become something they shared whenever Libby came to stay, their very own legend. She would sit amongst the rocks below the landing at her grandparents’ house, and make up different, more satisfactory endings than the official one, drawing pictures in Ellen’s sketchbook and showing them to her grandmother.

  The story, as she was told it, opened with Odrhan watching a sail approach the shore. The poem suggested that he had known it was a Viking ship, but Libby had always thought that unlikely. If he had, then why would he have stood there and watched it beach in the bay? He would have run away. Her grandmother had smiled at her reasoning. “Perhaps so, my dear.”

  There had been a woman, a wounded warrior, and three faithful men on board, together with a stash of gold and silver. “And what did Odrhan do?” Libby would ask, even though she knew.

  “Odrhan was a good Christian man, my dear, so he took them in and tended to Harald’s wounds and urged Ulla to become a Christian. But that night poor Harald died, and Ulla wept over him. The three men buried him next day and then they made off in the ship with all the treasure.”

  “And left poor Ulla stranded!”

  “That’s right.”

  “What happened next?”

  Her grandmother had smiled, a little sadly, and shaken her head. “This is where the story begins to unravel, my dear. My grandmother told it differently every time, and only one thing was certain: Ulla stayed with Odrhan and that winter she had a child.”

  “Harald’s child?”

  Her grandmother had gazed out of the window towards the little harbour. “When my grandmother first told me the story, she said it was Harald’s, but as she grew more frail she insisted that Odrhan was the child’s father, while other times she would grow fretful, saying it had really been the child of Erik, from whom they fled. Her mind had become very fragile by then, you see, and she was consumed by the legend, believing herself to be Ulla, left alone, deserted by God, and deserving of no comfort. It was almost as if she really felt the Norsewoman’s pain and grief. And she would tell me the story as if she had never told it before, sometimes saying that murder had been done, sometimes that she was guilty, and sometimes even that she had killed a man, and she would cry piteously, calling out sometimes for Harald, sometimes for Odrhan. In the end she had to be confined to the house for her own safety.”

  “Whose child do you think it was?” Libby had persisted, keen to have this matter resolved.

  “We’ll never know, my dear.”

  She was too young then to appreciate Ellen’s personal tragedy, and only later had she wondered about this strange obsession.

  Libby woke next morning to the homely smell of frying bacon wafting up from the pub’s kitchen. She dressed quickly and went downstairs to find a single table laid for breakfast and a plump woman sorting glasses behind the bar.

  “I heard you on the stairs,” she said, and came over to switch on a heater beside the table. “Were you warm enough last night?” Libby assured her that all had been fine and agreed to the offer of a full breakfast. It arrived a few minutes later and the woman stood over her, arms akimbo and curious. “So what brings you here, at this time of year?”

  Direct and to the point. Libby took a mouthful to give herself a moment. “Just exploring, really, and having a bit of a break.” Time enough to talk about the excavation in the summer.

  “And will you have a packed lunch then to take on your exploring?” the woman asked.

  “That would be marvellous—”

  Fortified by her mighty breakfast and with a packed lunch beside her, Libby drove back down the track to the coast. It was not yet nine o’clock. Best time of the day. Perhaps she need not have arranged to stay a second night after all, but could have left after lunch and driven through the night.

  Too late now.

  She bumped over the ruts in the road as it narrowed towards the coast and parked where she had done the night before, beside the manse, and went down to the beach. Emerald seas had replaced the dark waves of last night and she stood a moment watching the curls of waves roll in, row upon ordered row, over the sweeps of sand. What a place! She walked along the beach, sending knock-kneed shorebirds scuttling along the foamy edge ahead of her, jabbing their beaks into the sand, questing— If the weather was good, it would be idyllic this summer. Perhaps she would swim.

  To get out onto the headland from the beach she had to scramble over barnacle-encrusted rocks, and she slipped on the treacherous green seaweed. Straightening as she reached the plateau, she stood with a hand on the tumbled ruin and saw that an early morning mist still hung over the water, thickening further out. It was all too easy to imagine a high-prowed ship making its way towards the shore. And Odrhan had stoo
d right here watching it approach, not fleeing as he might have done.

  And on that simple, unfathomable decision had hung all subsequent events. What an extraordinary thought.

  She turned and looked back towards the dunes; even in daylight the mound was hard to spot unless you knew where to look. Such a pity they weren’t allowed to do a survey and plot the landscape properly, but that, it seemed, was out of the question. From where she stood, the ruin on the headland appeared to triangulate with the mound on one side and the ruined church on the other. Paganism and Christianity joined, or perhaps divided, by Ulla’s ness.

  And Sturrock House, that bastion of authority, positioned across the divide.

  She looked down at the jumble of stones at her feet. Odrhan’s cell, if that was what it was, survived as only a few low courses masked now by nettles and grasses, the roof fallen in, its stones softened by moss and lichens. Was there any chance at all that they might be allowed to clear the debris and reveal the ground plan? It stood perilously close to the edge of the headland, so perhaps they could point out the continuing threat of erosion.

  She walked down onto the other beach, disturbing more shorebirds which rose as a piping cloud to settle again a little further on, and she branched off into the dunes to examine the mound more closely. It lay in a little hollow between two sand dunes where, during the storm, the sea had carved a channel inland to gnaw away at its base, revealing it for what it was. She pulled herself uphill, grabbing handfuls of marram grass to reach a vantage point on one of the flanking dunes from where she could look down.

  The exposed line of five large stones really did form a curve. But was it boat-shaped? Oval certainly.

  She stood there, totally absorbed. And if it was a burial mound, as they hoped and predicted, who might they find? Harald, dead of his wounds as described in the legend? Or Ulla herself—the place was named for her, after all. It was not going to be Odrhan, that much was certain, not buried in a pagan—

  “Are you alright up there?”

  The voice seemed to come from nowhere. She looked up, and saw that a figure had appeared on top of the opposing dune, a black Labrador at his heels. It was the man from last night, the one who had left the pub with his sons, dressed today in an old donkey jacket and wellington boots.

  “Yes. Fine, thanks—” He seemed to expect more. “I was miles away.”

  His gaze sharpened as she pushed her windswept hair from her face. “You were in the pub last night,” he said and, swiftly descending the side of his dune, he came up to join her, followed by the dog.

  “And you came to collect your boys, and their fish.”

  He gave a slight smile. “Not the fish, thank God. But what brings you out here?” His directness echoed her landlady’s, and the tone suggested that he had a right to ask.

  “Just exploring,” she said, and instantly regretted it. Better to have introduced herself. If he was connected with the estate, then she would encounter him again in the summer.

  He seemed to find her answer unsatisfactory. “Exploring what?” he asked, and she remembered then that the older man in the pub had called him “sir.” Oh God—

  “My name’s Libby Snow,” she said, distracted as the thought grew in her mind.

  The man looked surprised, then briefly amused. “How do you do, Libby Snow. And just to be tedious, might I ask again, exploring what? Coalbox!” He snapped his fingers at the dog, who was digging out a rabbit hole in the side of the dune, and it came to him at once. Coalbox? “Technically you’re on estate land, you see, so I’m within my rights to ask you.”

  The words were mildly spoken and yet she felt wrong-footed. “I’m sorry. You must be—”

  “Sturrock,” he said.

  Damn. The sand slid a little under her feet.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Let me introduce myself.”

  “You just did—Libby Snow.”

  “I meant, who I really am.” She was making a right mess of this. “We’ve been dealing with your agent, you see, and I thought he might have told you my name. Which was why I told you—”

  “It is an unusual name,” he conceded. “And what were your dealings about?”

  “The dig this summer.”

  “Ah.” A frown appeared on his forehead, just a single vertical crease between his eyes, and it made his lean face austere. “And what brings you here, now?”

  “Just an opportunity to look around, really, do a bit of thinking, and planning. Getting the lay of the land.”

  “Did you tell us you were coming?”

  Was that the majestic plural? Dear Lord! “Actually it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and there was no need to disturb you.”

  He continued to study her. “So what’s the meeting about next week then? As you’re here now—” What meeting? She must have looked blank, and the frown on his face deepened. “I have Professor Lockhart in the diary for Wednesday morning.” He paused; then: “You must forgive my stupidity, but who exactly are you, Libby Snow?”

  “His assistant.”

  Perhaps he caught the bitterness in her tone, for his expression lightened. “Crossed wires, eh?”

  “Looks like it.” Damn Declan. When had this been arranged? And why—

  The man was still regarding her with a disconcerting intensity. “Is there anything unclear in the arrangements?”

  “Not as far as I know.” And she mentally cursed again, realising that she’d have to tell Declan about this encounter. She’d no idea what he was up to, but she’d probably queered his pitch. As if things weren’t bad enough between them.

  “So you’re all set?”

  She made an effort to regain lost ground. “Yes. I think we are, sir.” The “sir” sounded unctuous and servile and she immediately regretted it. “We’re getting our team together and there’ll be about six or eight students and me. And Declan—Professor Lockhart—will be here for part of the time.” He nodded, his eyes still holding hers. “And, as we agreed with your agent, four or five tents for the students, a cook tent, eating tent, et cetera. Is that alright?” He nodded again, saying nothing. “He suggested there was some flat land behind the manse we could camp on.”

  “Aye. It’s well-drained and quite sheltered there.”

  “And we’ve sorted two chemical toilets,” she continued desperately. He must know that all this would have been covered, and could not possibly be interested, having delegated the whole thing. “And we’ve fixed to take the students up to the youth hostel a couple of times a week for a shower.” She was talking too much, but how did you address a baronet in the twenty-first century? When you needed him firmly on-side— “They’ll be well-behaved, I promise you, and I’ll be here all the time, although Declan—the professor—will come and go.”

  “You’re running the show?”

  “Day to day. With a supervisor to help me.”

  He started to move off back down the side of the dune, his hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets, but slowly, and in a manner that seemed to assume that she would fall in beside him. His dog understood what was expected. “Is there anything else?”

  Coalbox probably had the right idea, she decided, so she walked beside him, pretending to consider the question in what she hoped was a professional manner. “We’ll bring stoves and gas bottles for cooking.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’ve arranged for a bowser for drinking water—”

  “Yes.”

  “And we’ll ship out all the rubbish when we go.”

  “Of course.”

  “And record and catalogue everything we find.”

  “Naturally.” He stopped and turned to her. “So is that it?”

  “I think so.”

  His expression was unreadable as he searched her face. “And if I went back through the e-mails and agreements, I imagine I’d find that this had all been discussed, and agreed, some weeks ago.” He raised his eyebrows, awaiting her confirmation.

  “Probably.”

/>   “So what remains for your professor to discuss next week?” She began to feel bullied. “He’s been prepared to make all the arrangements through post and e-mail so far. So why bother to come up here now, do you imagine?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve no idea.”

  “And yet he sent you on ahead—” The frown was back and his lips were a thin line as he continued to examine her.

  “No. He didn’t send me.” She maintained a neutral tone. “I came on my own account. He doesn’t know—”

  He appeared not to hear. “He’s been very persistent, but you can tell him from me that if it’s the headland he wants to talk about again, he’s wasting his time and can save himself the journey. Same goes for the church.”

  “The church?” They were not planning any work there, other than recording the early stonework, and that was more of a teaching exercise than anything else. “You mean the building recording?”

  “We’re fine with that. But no trial pits, no sampling, no metal detectors. It’s a plain and simple no, as it has been from the start. Our position has not and will not change, no matter who he sends up to make his case.” He looked her up and down in an infuriating manner. “Perhaps you’ll make that clear?”

  She contained herself with difficulty. “As I said before, he didn’t send me. But I’ll make sure he understands the situation.”

  “Thank you.” He gave a brief nod and looked away at last, out towards the ocean. “So if he wants to cancel his visit, he can give me a ring. It’s a busy time, you see, what with lambing and calving starting.” When he turned back to her, the frown had gone. “We can sort any other practical matters in the summer, I’m sure. Everything except the weather, that is. You’ll have to take what comes.” Out to sea the sun had broken through the mist and along the beach there were now patches of dazzling white sand and the sea was a chalky pastel. He gave her a half smile and raised a hand to his forehead in a brief salute. “So, I’ll leave you to your thoughts again.”

  “Thank you—” she said, and added another “sir,” just for good measure.

  At that he stopped and turned back. “My name is Rodri Sturrock. Plain Mr., not Sir.” His eyes flashed with sudden amusement, unmistakable this time, and it transformed his face. “I seem to have given you the wrong impression. My brother Hector is the Sir, but he lives in Norway and is rarely here. I’m his agent—and so, until the summer, Libby Snow. And I’ll remember the name next time.” And he left her, following a narrow track that led to a gate in the wall which surrounded Sturrock House, the dog at his heels.