‘Three weeks?’ Iehmarc shifted his weight, considering. The wager was trapping him. Decline it and he had lost already. That much was clear from the faces of the band. He grunted his assent.
~~~
They had passed the place on their way back up to the caves. He had barely registered it, lost in the misery and the cold of that voyage. A small hall, clinging desolately to the rocky, wooded shore. A poor man’s hall, exposed and barren. But roofed and tended. No beaches up here, just rocky crags that fell away into a violent sea.
He set the younger boys to watch it. From the far side of Lismore island, they would pull across Loch Linnhe before dawn, dropping one of their number off to creep about the heather. Watching. They were too few to leave much to chance, and Somerled wanted to know his enemy. Little Ruaridh was the best of the stalkers; wasted, Sigrdrifa said, on this nonsense, when he could be after some venison.
There were some thirty men, with all their sundry women and hangers-on. Norse settlers, Ruaridh reckoned, though it was difficult to tell at a distance. Christians, he said. Still too many, thought Somerled – even with the advantage of surprise. There were nine in his pitiful band, if you counted the boys and discounted Gillebrigte.
Somerled felt the days drag by. He felt each passing hour as a crease in his forehead, until the frown was so deep it would never lift. Iehmarc watched him from the shadows of the cave, stoking his anticipated triumph.
One clear spring morning, two days before the wager’s deadline, Somerled saw the curragh racing for the landing point near the cave, running before the wind with the rigging straining, and the boys aboard standing and waving. Breathless, Ruaridh shouted the news. ‘They are gone hunting, Somerled. And with all the kissing and greeting and gear they carried, I’d think they are set for a long haul.’
‘How many left?’
‘Half, I think. I counted the ones out as fifteen.’
Somerled nodded. This was it. Christ, oh Lord, be with us.
~~~
The wet, boggy ground seeped through his clothes, leaving him damp and shivery. Somerled ignored it as best he could, concentrating. He wriggled up the hill quietly, keeping close to the ground. He thanked the Lord for the darkness, the absence of the moon.
Ruaridh, the Lord bless and save him, had watched the sentry postings from his mountain perch. He kept calling himself Ruaridh Eagle Eyes, hoping it would stick. Somerled smiled to think of it, and Sigurd’s refusal to call him anything but Squirt.
He heard the lookout before he saw him: a great hawking spit. One man only, on top of the small hill behind the hall, where he could watch the sea and the approaches to the glen. He was almost impossible to approach unnoticed. Below him, the entrance of the hall spilt over with light, and the sounds of women singing carried across the night air. A musical, noisy bunch, Ruaridh had said.
Somerled lay on the moist earth, watching the little hall go about its evening joys. The leaking light cast jaunty shadows on the ground. Crouching there, so small amidst the black mountains, it seemed to possess a bravery, an indomitable spirit. It sat, filled with music and light, as the eyes watched from the night. Somerled felt absurdly guilty. We are the thing in the darkness. We are the nightmare.
He waited, trying to ignore his rising unease. It might have been these folk who did for his father’s hall, for all he knew. They had a hall, and livestock, and raised beds full of vegetables, and strips of dried peat and a smoking shed, and he did not. They had a galley big enough to take a war-band, and he did not.
They are Northmen, he thought. We live by the rules they brought here. We die by them, too. And so shall they.
He waited. To divert his thoughts from the small lives he was about to take, he thought instead of the Otter, wondering what she was doing. She would be fourteen soon. Perhaps married. Lord, let her not be married.
A new noise hanging in the cold air. Below the top of the small hill, in the darkened hollows, came the unmistakable sound of a woman being tupped. Her low, long moans drifted out across the dark heather. Faster now, with a muffled urgency. Somerled took a risk and poked his head above the heather. Sure enough, the lookout had walked to the edge of the summit, where the boggy ground disappeared into a steep crag. The indistinct figure leaned over, peering into the blackness below, a shower of scree dislodging from under his foot.
Quickly now, Somerled climbed. He grinned as the woman’s panted moans grew sharper, timing his footfall to coincide with her ecstasy. He reached the top of the hill, and saw the shape of the lookout black against the dark-blue sky. Almost casually, he pushed, and the man fell with a sharp cry.
A clatter and a pause. Then a low hoot, like an owl, told him the job was done.
They regrouped at the bottom of the hill. Oona, her white-toothed smile breaking the darkness, climbed up to take the sentry’s place, her acting done. Or was it acting? Aed looked sleek, the silent banter of the other men’s winks and nudges rolling off him.
Somerled hissed into the jollity.
‘Concentrate. Form in swine array, at a run. Aed the snout. Me and Iehmarc the ears. Through the door. Kill everything that squeals.’
Iehmarc looked at him, surprised. Somerled stared back.
‘Well?’
‘Nothing,’ Iehmarc muttered. He bounced on his toes, passing his axe from hand to hand.
They formed into a wedge. Aed’s sword was sheathed in favour of his great double-headed axe. There was, Somerled realized, a hidden bonus of being in charge. The responsibility of leadership kept him tethered to the wedge. Pride and duty kept him standing, kept him from sinking into the ground to whimper with fear.
As they began to run, his thoughts seemed to soar above his stretching body. Had he anticipated everything? Were they running into a trap? He felt the great weight of other men’s souls in his care. Why these men, and not the ones he was running to kill? Were they not in his care too, in a different sense?
Enough. They were on the hall, bursting through into the light. The formation was aptly named. The swine array. They felt like one beast, one great bristling, starving beast, whose snout smelled food and would not be tamed. All the momentum came from Aed, the snout, who laid about with his axe, seeking out enemy skin with all the fury of the world. The sudden transition into the light was blinding, and Somerled, beast-like, roared, hitting out with sword and shield edge. The noise was incredible; a jumbled scream of fear and rage, a tangling of attackers and attacked. Somerled felt his sword punch home. He wrenched it free and swung it around at a new foe, flinging the blood across the room like rain.
A huge man with bare legs came screaming towards him from behind a curtain, axe raised. Satan’s arse, he was large, this man, and crazed. Behind him, a woman added her voice to the screaming. She was naked, and a knife flashed.
Somerled threw up his shield arm to take the axe, the shock of it jolting up to his shoulder. He poked desperately with his sword, all training forgotten, and the big man dropped to his knees as the blade bit into his calf. Somerled wrenched his shield sideways and the man’s axe followed, his hand still gripping on. Behind the man’s head, Somerled saw the glint of the knife coming towards him, and the woman’s wild screaming.
Oh Jesus, he thought. I am gone.
A great gash appeared in the man’s throat, like a second mouth stretched in a crimson yawn. Somerled didn’t understand. Then he saw the woman straddling the man’s back, stabbing and stabbing until the skin hung off him in ribbons and the blood puddled on the floor at his feet.
Somerled stood, mesmerized, before registering that the sound around him in the hall had dropped. The shrieks had subsided, leaving whimpers and crying, and in the middle of it, his men were still standing, their ragged breath coming heavy. The only movement was the naked woman, who stood up from the body with blood-speckled skin and a matted weave of black hair to spit, with disarming ferocity, at the corpse’s pulpy face.
~~~
A honeyed buzz of triumph and mead. A warmth
and dryness that seeped to their blood.
They killed a calf that night. They were hungry, and victorious. As Sigurd pointed out, if the next part of the plan came off, they would have a dozen cows. And if it didn’t, added Thorfinn, at least they’d journey on with full stomachs.
Mebd, the knife-woman, told them that the hunters would be gone two more days.
‘Can we trust her?’ asked Aed, as they watched the life blood draining from the calf’s neck.
Somerled gestured at the sores on her wrists from the ropes that had bound her before they came, and the red, raised weals on her back. And, he pointed out, she had murdered the big bastard as soon as she had the chance.
He remembered the sight of her, straight-backed and red-painted, too fierce, too frightening to be beautiful.
‘Who is the leader?’ she had asked while they stacked the bodies, her Gaelic thick with disuse, looking at Aed.
Aed had gestured at Somerled, and her eyes had widened in surprise.
‘The boy?’
He nodded.
She told them how long the hunters would be gone, then moved away, the welts on her back rippling.
They pushed the bodies into the smoking shed, rather than burn them. Too much smoke might draw the rest before they were ready. Fifteen dead men, including the lookout Aed had dragged in from the place he had been scragged. There were five women too, and, God help them, a couple of bairns. Somerled could not look at their twisted little limbs. You did this, he thought. You should look. Coward.
He could hear the crying of the few remaining women and children, who knew they would be shipped off to the slave pens in their own galley. He felt the cold misery that came after the rush of victory. The pity of it.
They ate the calf’s tender bits that night, the stuff that did not need hanging. Fresh, bloody, unsmoked meat, washed down with stolen mead. They were gods, it was true. They were Odin-kissed, Mary-blessed.
His men – his men! – were laughing, proud of themselves and of their leader. Fifteen men dead, and they just had scratches.
‘Come,’ shouted Sigurd. ‘Aed, you randy dog. Were you really balling Oona?’
‘It was too convincing,’ said Thorfinn.
The bard strummed a few chords of a well-known bawdy song and they all laughed, while Aed looked down at his cup and Oona stomped by the fire.
‘Convincing, eh, Thorfinn?’ she called. ‘And how would you know? From what I hear, you’ve never heard a woman moan with pleasure.’
‘He’s better with sheep,’ said Domnall, ducking as an oatcake came flying at his head.
‘I thought we were done for.’ Aed shook his great head. ‘But the boy had it right. What man could resist a peek, out there on the lonely crag?’
‘Jesus knows, I wanted a peek myself, the noises your Oona made.’ This from Thorfinn, with a mock-dolorous tone.
‘Shame,’ she said. ‘Never a peek you’ll get, Thorfinn the Catcher.’
Aed raised his cup. ‘Somerled,’ he cried. ‘Deep thinker.’
Somerled took the toast, and revelled in it.
Iehmarc, sitting near the bottom of the table, stared into his cup as if seeking something. An omen, perhaps.
‘You are not toasting, Iehmarc.’ Aed’s voice was mellow, conciliatory.
‘Apologies. I was thinking about the arse-kissing to come.’
Somerled stood. ‘You fought bravely. I saw it. My arse shall remain unkissed. I release you.’
There was cheering at this, and a fresh wave of brotherly back-slapping. Somerled alone stayed watching Iehmarc, and how the smile slid from his face, his eyes hooded and dark.
‘What next, Somerled?’ Ruaridh asked thickly, the mead tripling his tongue.
‘We pick them off as they come back from the hunt, weary for home, and tired, and carrying some fat deer on their backs. Our deer. They’ll save us the bother.’
He smiled at his men’s faces, the victory shining off them like sunlight on a still loch. He looked behind Aed’s head to Mebd, cleaned up and almost pretty. She caught his eye and smiled, coming over with the jug.
This, then, was why men led; why they took the burden. This sweetness. I am Somerled. Gift-giver, deep thinker, girl-taster.
Close to, she was lovely, and he ran his eyes over her, dry-mouthed. ‘You can have me, lord, if you ask nicely,’ she said.
‘And will you stab me too?’ he asked.
‘You are the leader, and I will be your woman alone.’
‘What if I don’t want you?’
‘Have you seen me, lord?’ She shook her long black hair back from her pale face, and he laughed.
‘Well then,’ he said. ‘Come here.’
~~~
Two days later, Mebd pottered by the well; drawing water, bustling, beating a wool rug strung between two posts. An ostentatious display of normality.
‘Can we trust her?’ whispered Aed. They peered through holes gouged in the stone wall at the girl, and beyond her, at the returning hunters – the laughing, back-slapping, bantering men. They could smell the stew drifting over the heather. They could see the slave girl about her tasks and anticipate all the delights of home and safety and leisure.
And inside their hall lurked Somerled and his band, like malevolent cuckoos.
At the lookout point, Sigurd, dressed in rifled clothes, waved cheerily. As they drew closer, he turned his back on them and squatted behind a rock, his face hidden.
Somerled heard the hoots of laughter directed Sigurd’s way. He heard the slap of the dead deer hitting the ground. He saw, with his face pressed against the scratching wood, the big man at the front reach for Mebd’s bucket, plunging his head in and pulling it out, shaking his wet hair in streaming ribbons. The dogs chased their tails with happiness to be home, for they knew what the meaty smells meant.
A young boy shouted: ‘Mother! Mother! I did it!’ He was twelve, perhaps. His face was eager, clean-cut like a spear point. He looked around him, mumbled something to the big man and came on towards the door.
Oh Jesus, thought Somerled. That lad will be the first one through.
It was dark inside the hall. A gloomy dusk outside, thank the Lord.
At the end, near the fire, bubbled the pot. Oona stood in the shadows beside it, her back to the door. Visible but smudged. A woman, any woman. The boy burst in, his mother’s name on his lips, his hunting triumph humming about him like a halo. Somerled hesitated, but Aed did not. Quickly, deftly, the big man snaked around the boy – one hand to muffle, the other to slice. The boy crumpled, gurgling, the blood bubbling from his cut throat, falling backwards into Aed’s embrace.
They came through the door in twos and threes after that. Somerled could not believe that the muffled thump and slice of their slaughtering could not be heard outside. Being so close to home was robbing the men of their wariness, making them careless and complacent. At last, one got away. Sigurd botched it, and the roar of the man with his cut cheek and astonished rage wakened his friends outside. They rushed in, as they were, half in armour, half out; half-fearful, half-furious. In the gloom of the hall they tried valiantly to resist. But it was too late. When at last the few men Somerled had left hiding in the smoking house burst in behind the Northmen, it was far too late. They met only their brothers, red to the elbow and savage with joy.
How will it be when I am old? thought Somerled then. He stood with blood pooling at his feet, crusting his hands on the sword’s pommel. Would this joy see him through to the grave? Could he slide along rivers of blood to a great and glorious future? They will know my name. They will know of Somerled. He was shouting it, shivering with the ecstasy of victory.
EIMHEAR
I skipped across the land on bleeding feet. I danced and whirled. I sang snatches of old Norse songs Sigrdrifa taught us when we were little ones, bloody things dripping with the profanities that made her laugh. I cackled and shook my fist at passing folk. I brayed like a donkey, and once I went a mile crawling on all fours down a busy
stretch of road near a market.
I let my hair thicken and tangle, until it hung over my face like a putrid veil. I rolled in fox shit, like a hound, and smeared the mud of passing sties on to my skin. The hunger helped. I was walking for weeks, and I made do with what I could forage. I was high and light, as if the nuts in my stomach were not enough to tether me. I would catch myself in the act of being a madwoman, mumbling of hunger and betrayal, and think with a small, still, rational voice: Am I still pretending?
I did all that. I trusted in the appearance of madness and the stench of the midden. I was foul, polluted. And still some bastard tried to rape me.
A short, squat man wearing a cloak too big for him. I met him at dusk on the final stretch of road before the dun of Áed mac Duinn Sléibe, the lord of the Ulaid. He watched me writhe and caper with a look of horror. I hissed at him through my hair, some gibberish he might take for a curse. I moved past him, the dun in sight and filling me with too much hope. I thought I would see my father soon. I scampered past the man. And he was on me, his hand scrabbling at my thighs, his teeth worrying at my shoulder.
I struggled and bit, but this one was strong. I tasted again the metallic bitterness of a man’s blood in my mouth. Fighting made him more angry; he was shouting, and I screamed over him to block out his words. I would not hear them. I swore and cursed and tried to bite some more.
‘You.’ A deep voice, used to command.
My attacker’s hand pushed down over my mouth.
‘My wife, your honour.’
A grunt. I could hear the squelching of hooves in mud, the clanking of armour.
‘A bit noisy, hey?’ came the voice, and the sound of laughter. I couldn’t see them, only my attacker’s boots with his big toe pushed out through a hole, the long nail yellowed and curling into the mud. But I could hear with a strange sharpness. And I heard feet thumping flanks, and the low hum of conversations resumed, and the unmistakable sound of the horsemen making off.
The anger took me then, and it seemed to give me some sudden swell of strength. I wrenched away from him, pushing him sideways into the mud as I did so. He fell with a soft cry. I straightened up, and pulled back my hair, and screamed at the backs of the riders.
The Winter Isles Page 7
