The Winter Isles

by Antonia Senior

  All the women gathered to see them off. He scanned the faces of the men he would be leaving behind. A few looked pleased; most looked pleasingly disgruntled.

  She stood next to his mother, her face pinched and white. She would not cry now, he knew. But he would bet two silver rings that she would cry later, when no one could see.

  He moved over to embrace her, awkward in his war gear.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he whispered in her ear, cursing himself for the lack of words.

  ‘Goodbye. Keep yourself safe. Somerled …’ She paused, struggling for the words.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I am pregnant.’

  Jesus, Mary, Joseph. A child. A dangerous, woman-killing, love-slaying thing. He had heard the screams of childbirth. Watched women and babies carried away lifeless from the charnel house of a birth room, blood pooling on the floor, splattered on the ceiling. Oh Jesus.

  ‘I must go,’ he muttered, and walked away to the galley, where Aed, Ruaridh, Thorfinn and the others were waiting, impatient to be off.

  1131

  SOMERLED

  This is easy, he thought, as the skin sliced beneath his sword. Too easy. Like butchering a deer. He spun on his toes and took another, chest height, the flesh opening and the skin puckering. We are too good, and they are carrion fodder. Gull scraps. Shredded meat.

  Aed, beside him, moved with his usual speed. He smashed and parried, soundless, a smile on his face as the frenzy took him. Somerled wanted to pause, to watch. To drop out of the fight and observe the man’s grace and the blur as his sword danced. But here was another one who wanted to feel the edge of a blade, whose brain was begging to touch the air as his scalp slid sideways into the mulch at his feet.

  Too easy. He threw his head back.

  ‘Argyll! Argyll!’ he shouted.

  ‘Argyll! Argyll!’ Back came the cry. A sweaty, ragged cry but a victorious one.

  They pulled back then. Spent. Their swords clattered to the floor. A few turned and ran. One stood alone, his sword still up, his breath ragged. Their eyes met.

  ‘It is done,’ said Somerled.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said the man, and he rushed forward, his sword rising and his ribs exposed. He looked surprised when Aed’s blade took him one side and Sigurd’s the other, so that he sank to his knees spitted two ways.

  Too easy.

  Then a voice, a call, that shattered Somerled’s complacency. His name, called by Padeen, in a voice already rich with sorrow.

  Thorfinn. Skewered and sinking fast. A painful ending, this, with his stomach spilling out on to the floor and the stench of his guts souring the blood-smeared air.

  The poor, miserable bugger, to sink like this. In a scrap they had won with ease.

  Somerled knelt by him, Ruaridh on the other side, grasping the older man’s hand. ‘I told you so,’ said Thorfinn, in a weak voice, with a smile that seemed to crow that his pessimism had, at the last, been vindicated. A triumph at death. Or was it just a grimace of pain? Was it unreasonable to invest a dying man’s facial expression with meaning, like attributing pain and loss to a whining dog, or fear to a lamb brought to the knife?

  He was trying to speak, and they leaned in, trying not to gag on the stench of his exploding guts. ‘I told you,’ he wheezed. ‘I told you it was all shit.’ They laughed, as he wanted them to, offering him that at the last. He went then, with a gasp of pure pain and the smile sliding from his face.

  They were angry, now, the band. Thorfinn, one of the finest – not one of the best, but one of the first – was dead. All the relief and rage turned vicious.

  In the corner, the survivors huddled. Women and children, and a few hapless men. Somerled, sensing the mood, pulled himself back from the frenzy. Detaching, he felt it still in his thrumming, screaming body. Understood it as it clouded his men’s faces, turned them ugly. Thorfinn was dead and someone would pay.

  ‘Somerled,’ said Padeen, and the priest’s voice was gentle. A warning.

  He shrugged.

  The priest rushed forward, standing in front of the huddled group, holding up a cross with white-knuckled urgency.

  ‘They are under my protection.’

  ‘Fuck that, priest,’ shouted someone.

  The men growled, prowling and sniffing at the women and children, who shook and cried, beyond fear. Like cornered rats, thought Somerled. Trapped otters.

  Jesus.

  ‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Stop. Padeen, the children.’

  The priest looked mutely towards him. Aed bundled forward, picking up infants, plucking them away from their crying mothers. Sigurd went with him, and they carried the bairns to the galley. Their mothers would come after. After the men were done.

  ~~~

  He sat with Padeen away from it all. The priest shook as the screams seared across the heather towards them. He mumbled a prayer, stumbling to a halt. The last of the sun had gone now, leaving a chill and gloomy dusk. They hunkered down in the lee of a rocky outcrop, waiting for the cries to stop.

  A single howl rose above the rest, a great keening scream of grief and rage. Shrill, it hung in the dusk like a reproach. Somerled closed his eyes and thought of Eimhear. Of Mebd when he first saw her, blood-flecked and vengeful.

  Padeen would not look at him. He sat hunched towards the horizon, as if telling himself he had somewhere else to go. As the scream faded, and the quiet filled its place, he spoke. Perhaps to fill the silence. ‘And you, Somerled, the lord,’ he spat, as if picking up a conversation. ‘Could you not stop them?’

  ‘How long would I be lord if I did not let them loose sometimes, when the killing is done.’

  ‘Fucking animals.’

  ‘And would the ones we killed not have done the same to our women. To Oona? To Eimhear?’

  ‘And that makes it right?’

  ‘Father. I did not make this world. Not man’s nature.’

  ‘It’s God’s fault? Is that what you’re saying? Mine? For not making them understand his teaching?’

  Somerled spread his arms, palms upwards to the sky, the way you would for a shy horse, or a frightened dog. At last darkness came, hiding the blood, hiding the corpses, hiding the dead-eyed misery of the women.

  ~~~

  He sank next to her into the furs, watching her sleep. He was glad she slept. It gave him time to adjust. The contrasts were almost too much to bear: the soft unblemished skin, the calm rise and fall of her sleeping breast. The warmth rolling off her, the sweetened smell of her body. He closed his eyes and tried to adjust, but it was too recent, too fresh.

  She stirred sleepily, and opened an eye. ‘You!’ She slid a warm leg over him. ‘You’re cold. Poor darling.’

  He wanted to cry. Lord, how he wanted to cry. Instead he reached for her, burying himself in her; looking for oblivion.

  ‘It’s clever,’ he said afterwards, holding her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Adam, Eve. The act of love. It cleanses, somehow. Brings a man home from the fight. Centres his mind, through being mindless for a space.’

  ‘Is love, not life, the opposite of death, then?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Can a man be a lover and a fighter?’

  ‘You tell me, fierce one.’

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps a good fighter makes a poor lover?’

  ‘And which am I? Hey, hey?’

  ‘No, don’t tickle me! Sorry, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I should beat you, minx.’

  ‘I would leave you.’

  ‘I know. So I will not.’

  ‘It is the only thing that would drive me away. Except …’

  ‘So serious now? Except?’

  ‘If I ever find out you have forced a woman.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know. You will have other women, I know. You are the king. As long as you do not shame me, or your child.’

  Her hands fluttered across her belly. ‘But if you force a woman, I—’

  ‘Shh, fierce one. I will not.’

/>   ‘It is a corruption of love. It is not even about lust, but about hate.’

  ‘True. You are a seer, woman of mine.’

  ‘Pah.’

  They lay still for a while. He ran his hand up and down her bare back in the darkness, imagining the line of freckles that ran from her shoulders down to her bottom. He kissed her shoulder.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘love and death are not such opposites.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘When I fight, when my sword is singing and the battle is turning for me, Jesus help me, but that is a good feeling. A sense of being utterly alive. The only thing that matches it is when I am coming into you.’

  ‘Not this talking? This kiss?’

  ‘Witch. There’s a calmer joy in that, and you know it. I mean the touch of God. The divine frenzy. The promise of eternity.’

  ‘Ah. And to think I spent the day milling oats.’

  ‘And the night reaching for the divine?’

  ‘Lord, what import you give it. Do you think the rutting seals dream of their seal god when the seed is spilled?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘While you find God through killing, I sit here praying to him for you to come safely home.’

  ‘And does he answer?’

  ‘Are you a dream, here naked in my bed?’

  ‘No. I am here.’

  ~~~

  They heard from Brigte not long after. She was brought to bed of a son, and healthy, she said. Mael Coluim, after his father. He was a little lord, a new hero, a paragon of the age. Everyone said how fine he was, how beautiful, how strong. Somerled looked across at Eimhear’s growing belly and smiled. He was still uncertain about it, how it would change things. But he was resigned.

  They heard too from one of the last of the local families. They would pay him tribute. They would accept his lordship. He sent gifts: deer and cattle and silver. He let it be known that those who came to him willingly, he would treat well. Those who crossed him would be stamped into the peat.

  He sent letters: south to Fergus in Galloway; north to Mael Coluim and Brigte in Moray, and to Sigurd the Crusader, King of the Norse; west across the sea to Olaf, King of Man and the Isles, to Áed mac Duinn Sléibe in Ulster and Diarmait mac Murchada, the new King of Leinster; east across the mountains to David in Alba. The text was of nothing: pleasantries, greetings, the usual verbiage. The signing was what mattered: Somerled, King of Argyll.

  He counted.

  Sixty head of cattle.

  Thirty pairs of oars.

  Five galleys.

  Two swords; one from the forges of Denmark, with a hilt so fine it could clank at the archangel’s side.

  Three silver torques.

  One chess set, with pieces of true ivory.

  Six amphorae of wine from Italy.

  Forty-five sundry silver rings and armlets.

  One Eimhear.

  ~~~

  The pains came one night, in the darkest, coldest part of the winter. He heard her indrawn rush of breath beside him. He heard her pray softly, under her breath, and the next, stronger gasp.

  He lay there silently, wishing he had not heard, hoping that this was not it. He was not ready. He could not bear to lose her, to hear her screaming. Perhaps she would not scream. Perhaps he would slide out, the baby, in a rush of gold and crimson light, smiling and jolly and clean.

  They lay side by side in the darkness for a while. He reached out a hand to her, under the furs, and she took it. Every now and then, when the pain came, she would clench his hand tighter.

  ‘At least,’ she said in a lull, ‘I will not be pregnant any more. Once this is over I will be able to see my toes. Sleep in comfort. Ride you without crushing you.’

  ‘You are beautiful,’ he said, ‘either way.’ There was something glorious and rounded about her pregnant body, her full breasts and big belly. But he missed the long, light-limbed girl of their first couplings.

  They watched together as the room grew lighter. He could see her features now, the way her face crumpled with each surging pain, and then set again as it ebbed away.

  ‘You will have to go out soon,’ she said. ‘Leave me with the women.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you.’

  ‘I know. Ah, Jesus, here comes another one.’

  She clenched and shivered as it took her, unable to prevent an audible shriek this time as it clawed at her.

  ‘Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.’

  ‘Hush now, little Otter.’

  ‘Hush yourself. Fetch your mother, and get out of here, before I start cursing you properly.’

  The hall turned into a bustle of women then. The men were ushered out, grumbling.

  They packed into Aed’s glorious new house, the displaced men. Aed and his eldest daughter, five-year-old Mairi, kept the cups filled as the men struggled to talk above the strangled cries that drifted across the glen. Oona, herself full to bursting with a new baby, was in with Eimhear. It was unbearable, this waiting. Unbearable. Somerled paced and fidgeted. Played tafl, badly and sulkily. Frowned at levity, cursed at silence. Jesus, if he was anyone else, Aed would have slapped him. He imagined Eimhear smiling at him. The women do all the work, the men get all the leeway. And where is the change in that?

  A stronger cry now. ‘Jesus, Jesus Jesus Jesus.’

  ‘Do you think he heard her?’ said Ruaridh, and around him men laughed, until they saw Somerled’s scowl.

  At last, a quiet, and a summons, and Sigrdrifa’s tired face, saying, ‘A boy, a boy,’ and Eimhear, sweat-slick and triumphant, a new, wrinkled-red creature perched on her breast and a smile on her well-loved face. I am Somerled. Otter-lover. Son-begetter. Miracle-maker.

  He leaned in to kiss her.

  ‘Careful,’ she said, and one outstretched arm kept him at a distance over the baby’s head.

  He stepped back, perplexed and awkward.

  The baby began to cry.

  EIMHEAR

  I lay next to you, watching you sleep.

  I remember it as a perpetual storm outside, although that can’t be how it was. I remember the screaming rage of the sea wind beyond the walls. The violent snatching of the waves at the rocks below.

  Inside, the soft rush of your breath.

  The tangle of blue veins under the stretched cream of your forehead. The red lines traced on your closed eyelids, that only I knew to look for. If the light was right, I could see the beat of your heart reflected in your temple. A miracle pulse of life. The absurd innocence of your slack mouth. The sheen of your milk-white skin in the firelight.

  You twitched in your sleep. Flailed. Sometimes your arms were flung so wide, it jolted you awake.

  We wondered what you were dreaming about, to make you throw your arms in the air. What do babies dream about? His future as a glorious warrior, said Somerled. Swimming, I said.

  You broke out of me already covered in blood. After, when you were clean and sleepy, I lay next to you, praying that blood was not in your future. Great looping prayers with little hope of anyone hearing. A sleepless, befuddled bartering with God. Charm his life, damn mine. Take my eyes, leave him whole. Kiss his brow, oh son of God, and I will prostrate myself before you.

  In, out. Shallow and regular as a bank of oars. In, out. I drifted on your breath, half sleeping. Listening for watchers in the darkness. Imagining the breaking of the storm and a bank of strange warriors screaming out of the gloom. Understanding, for the first time, the point of all the violence.

  Sharpen your sword on strangers, my husband. Learn your trade. Wade in their blood. Make them pay for not belonging to us.

  In the darkness I kissed Somerled’s muscled arms and shoulders. Not lust; gratitude. For his strength, for his viciousness in battle. For the violence that kept his son cocooned. I imagined you tiny and naked. Alone. Around you a ring of warriors facing outward. Swords raised and waiting. Your father at their head. Your father, who was awkward with you. Clumsy and diffident.

  He always struggled, Somerle
d, with contrasts. He found it difficult coming to my soft, clean skin after the jagged tearing of his enemies’ flesh. He took his time switching from ferocity to tenderness, and I learned to wait for him; not to rush it. And then there was you, so unbearably small, so vulnerable. Impatiently reaching for him. Expecting him to switch his souls on demand. You unsettled him.

  My overpowering love for you – from the instant I saw your puckered, birth-slimed face – that unsettled him.

  In, out. Your chest’s rapid rise and fall.

  Sometimes, you seemed to pause on the in breath. I would jolt alert, panic searing my chest. Waiting for the next breath. Helpless. A chasm opening beneath my feet. A whirlpool sucking me in. A mountainous wave rushing down upon me. The pause too desperate for prayers.

  A snuffle, a new breath. A relief fiercer than joy.

  I lay next to you, watching you sleep.

  1133

  SOMERLED

  As Somerled watched the little frog-like creature grow into a recognisable human child, he was plagued with this one recurring thought: where does the myth that men are simple and women complicated come from? He watched with awe the fierce, untwisted love his wife held for this tumble of skin and screaming. He found the whole business bemusing. He didn’t like to think of it: his odd jealousy for this tiny thing – her absorption in it, her unconditional adoration of its every mew, every twitch.

  It was beneath him, this absurd, complicated bemusement with which he viewed his son, Gillecolm. He didn’t understand it.

  Perhaps, he thought, the myth was there because men perpetuated it. They sought to appear uncomplicated, un-profound. Tortured souls were for women and priests. Perhaps, he thought, as he looked at the shining faces of his men as they bantered across the oars, mocked each other by the fire, ogled women together, perhaps there were deep currents beneath. Unglimpsed complications and doubts. Perhaps that was why they liked fucking and fighting so much – it was the only time that life was as mindlessly simple as they sought to make it appear.

  Who knew. Other men’s souls were a mystery to all but God, said Father Padeen, and likely to remain that way.