In the darkness, they have found an illusion of closeness that suits them both. He kisses her young lips in the shadows. He watches the play of light and dark dapple her skin. He took the first time slowly and gently, listening for the quickening of her breath. Trying not to think of another woman alone on an island full of women.
She smiles at him at the right times, casts her eyes downwards in the light and grapples with fervour, pretend or real, in the darkness.
And yet.
‘It is not her fault,’ Sigrdrifa told him last night, finding him alone on the shore watching the Sound.
‘Whose fault is it?’
‘And that is a child’s question from a big man.’
She sat next to him, grunting on to the rock.
‘Is she not a pretty enough girl?’
‘Yes. But.’
‘But, but. Loki has tricked you and toyed with you and is laughing now. All you can do is live with it. Does she know how she is here?’
He shook his head. ‘No. She thinks that it is the usual run of things. A political marriage.’
‘And you will not tell her?’
‘How can I? She is so young, Mother. I just want to be kind to her.’
His mother sighed. ‘She has that quality, poor thing. She invites make-believe. We circle round her on tiptoes. Fill her with half-truths to keep that pretty face smiling. Not like …’
She paused, and the missing name filled the night around him, choking him.
Into the darkness she said: ‘In the middle time, there is someone you are forgetting.’
‘Gillecolm.’ He said the name with an unfamiliar heaviness.
‘Gillecolm,’ she nodded. ‘Poor boy is eating his own heart. He misses his mother. And you are telling him nothing. Nothing.’
‘I promised her.’ He found it difficult to say her name, afraid that if he tried, it would come in a howl. ‘How can we tell him that he was the reason for it all? What kind of a burden would that be?’
‘So instead you say nothing, hey? Avoid him. Let him be fatherless and motherless and sisterless, poor dear pup.’
‘I will try,’ he promised.
‘Too many secrets,’ she said. ‘Too many.’ They settled into a comfortable quietness.
Now, as he unthinkingly matches the flex of his knees to the rise and fall of the galley, Somerled thinks of the silence that spins itself around him and Ragnhild. Does she find it oppressive too? He finds her pliability depressing and unconvincing. Whatever pleases you, husband. Whatever makes you happy, husband. Whatever you like.
He imagines her mother standing behind her, whispering in her ear. Please him. Bend yourself to his wishes. He knows he should shake her out of it. Ask her, what pleases you? What do you like? But he fears the answers.
And what of Gillecolm? He shakes his head, irritated suddenly. How is it that home has become a knot of problems? What can a man do who has lost his sanctuary?
He thinks of turning the galley around. Screaming his defiance towards Man and sailing to Iona, casting himself at her feet. Throwing his aching head into her lap.
Why doesn’t he? He wrestles himself.
‘Somerled?’ says Aed, nearby. He must have spoken. He looks at Aed as if through a fog. If he follows his heart, all the forces of Man will fall on him. Not just on him – he could bear that. On Oona, and the rest of the women and children. He has no choice. Choices are, by and large, an illusion. Without power. Power must come first; his heart’s desires second. He will kiss Olaf’s hairy arse. He will build his strength. He will grow in power. And then, then he will put his upside-down world the right way up.
He thinks of his mother’s words about Gillecolm. He should have spoken to the boy before he left. He has lied to himself, through the unmooring. Told himself that he tried to find the words to talk to his son.
But, he thinks now, watching the galley rise and fall, pushing its way into northern seas, I did not try very hard. There was too much to do, before the leaving. Too many men to brief, galleys to inspect, stores to account for, prayers to offer. Until all there was time for was a snatched goodbye, under the questioning eye of Ragnhild. He kissed them both and ran for the sea, for the cleansing rush of wind and spray.
~~~
Olaf the Morsel, King of the Isles by the grace of God, is a giant of a man. He stands almost shoulder to shoulder with Aed, and Somerled resents immediately the crick of his neck to look up at the man. Olaf uses his bulk with great skill. He dominates any space he is in, planting wide feet and lengthening broad shoulders. He does not smile until he has weighed the effect of it. He has never, to anyone’s knowledge, laughed.
Somerled watches him. This man defeated his elder brothers by cunning and force, and took the power of all the isles. He has held on to that power for years that stretch into decades. He is a good man to watch, to study.
There is no hatred. Olaf was playing the game, the great tafl play of power and influence. Somerled thinks of Eimhear and little Sigrdrifa in their island tomb. Anger and violence will not get them back, only cunning. He must be as mighty as Olaf; he must number as many ships, as many men. Then let the Morsel tell him who he may or may not love.
Somerled sits with Aed and Sigurd on a small shingle beach, which hangs awkwardly from the edge of rebellious North Uist. Ruaridh’s absence is still alive to them, but none of them talk of it. His men are exaggeratedly gentle with him, like children told to tiptoe round a deathbed. It is infuriating, but he finds the distance between them useful. He thinks that a kind word or a misplaced reminiscence might send him spiralling into public grief; a wailing, stone-throwing, God-cursing storm from which he will never have the strength to emerge.
‘Strange land, this,’ says Sigurd.
‘It is,’ Aed nods, picking up stones and running them through his big hands. ‘More water than solid earth. Do the men here have webbed feet, do you think?’
‘It’s good for us,’ says Somerled. ‘If they stay inland, we should be able to find them. Where is there to hide? No hills. Just water.’
‘Imagine living here—’ Sigurd begins.
‘We do not have time,’ says Somerled sharply, ‘to play childish games.’
He notes the quick look that passes between his old friends.
Somerled kicks at the fire, sending sparks skywards. His breath catches as he notes the beauty of the flying embers. How odd that the commonplace can sometimes arrest you with its extraordinariness. God’s work. Why did he make fire beautiful, when it only needs to be useful? Or do we find it beautiful precisely because it is so essential? It is the type of question Eimhear would love to worry at. Is she watching a fire now? Is she reconciled? Raging? He does not know. Here is another question she would like. Is physical proximity necessary for two souls to remain each other’s twin? Will his soul still speak to hers, across all the rage of wind and sea?
He becomes aware that Aed is talking to him. ‘Small fights, Somerled. They are when a man becomes careless. When he drops his guard. Especially when he is …’ Aed searches for the word, and Somerled almost smiles at the man’s embarrassment.
Sigurd is nodding with vigour. ‘Aye. A man needs something to fight for.’
‘Is that true?’ Somerled unbends a little. ‘Is it not enough to want to stay alive?’
‘It is not,’ says Aed. ‘Life must be more enticing than death, and sometimes that is not always true.’
Somerled has a sudden image of the three of them when they were younger; full of banter and bravado. Everything weighs heavier now.
He pushes himself to his feet and mutters something about lookouts, walking away from the fire and into the black night.
~~~
The next day, Somerled remembers Aed’s words as they finally find the slippery bastards on dry land, caught in that silvery space between the sky and the water’s sheen. They are being tested, he knows. Sent in by Olaf alone against the men of North Uist, to prove their friendship.
They rush at t
he Uist men, with their usual ululating roar of fury. Somerled throws his misery into the cry and it tears his throat. The enemy give before the swords even clash, so great is their terror. But there is something not quite right, some tug at the edge of Somerled’s battle cry. They are ceding ground too easily, as if in a pattern.
Before he can work it out properly, he gives the order to stop, regroup. Even as he shouts it, he knows it is going to be difficult to check their battle rush. He shouts it again, and again. Aed hears him – the words penetrate and he comes to an uneasy stop, his axe quivering with the effort. Between them they slow the others and step back. A strange, uneasy silence falls, broken only by the heavy breathing of the confused warriors. The Uist men are not running, as they should be. They too have checked their flight.
‘A trap?’ says Aed, from the corner of his mouth.
Somerled nods, offering a silent prayer of thanks that he spotted it. His duty to his men outweighs his misery when the swords are drawn. The knowledge comes as a relief and a rush of something he could call love for the big hairy warrior at his side.
‘Swine array, at a walk,’ he shouts, and they cluster in behind him. ‘I lead, Aed,’ he says, and the big man concedes with a nod. He probes his way forward, pushing the point of his spear into the ground. His shield is up, and he feels the jar of the spears hitting. They move forward with agonizing slowness. Behind him he hears a cry as a high-flighted spear finds its mark. He walks on. And there it is. He pushes his spear into something that seems like scrubby land, and it gives way. He can’t find the bottom with his spear shaft, and it pulls out with a rotten suck.
‘Watch out on the right,’ he cries. ‘Bog to the right, to the right.’ The cry carries back down the line, and the wedge flattens behind him into a column. Good men, he thinks. Good men.
He continues slowly, probing ahead and to the side. Ahead of him, some twenty feet away, the Uist men watch him, growling at him in their strange dialect. There, on the left, a similar falling-away of his spear, a similarly odd mash of land and water, each pretending to be the other. They are on a sort of natural bridge or ford, then, across this hidden bog. Jesus, imagine if they had carried on their headlong charge, each abreast of the other, all roaring with battle madness.
He feels a flood of nausea suddenly. A rush of horrifying might-have-beens which threatens to paralyse him. In his head, his men flounder and are picked off, one by one. The grinning Uist men spit their contempt as they skewer them. They are sucked under, bog water bubbling in their lungs.
Jesus, Somerled, hold it together. He has lost his song, he realizes. Once he would have sung himself brave. He tries. I am Somerled. I am Somerled. I am … I am …
He has stopped. Aed bumps into him, swearing softly. The Uist men are nervous. They bounce from foot to foot, shake their weapons, roar themselves brawny. The biggest steps forward. From the narrow bog-bridge, this will be like a prow-to-prow galley fight. Somerled bunches himself tight. What use the Loki trick of guessing their plan, if he cannot be Thor as well, barrelling forward to take out his man?
He roars forward, Aed at his shoulder. The big Uist man blinks, and Somerled knows he has him. The man’s axe comes forward, too slowly. Somerled glances it away with his shield, and takes out the man’s legs with a spray of blood that sends him crashing to the floor like a felled and stupid tree.
They meet the rest of the Uist men head on, sending them scattering backward. The pockets of water splayed across the land turn red, and quickly it is done.
~~~
‘This is the price of betraying your lord,’ he says to the old man kneeling at his feet. Outside the pathetic hut they can hear the sound of women screaming.
‘But the Orkney lord threatened us with this if we did not swear loyalty to him.’ The old man’s voice cracks into a boyish wail. A higher scream breaks through the wall. In the corner, the youngest girls huddle. Somerled has ordered them here and they watch him with the wide eyes of cornered hares. He realizes that he has forgotten to tell them that his order was to keep them safe; they must think that his taste runs to undeveloped flesh. He feels an immense, overwhelming disgust. With himself, with his men, with the girls crying in the corner, with this old man who lost the battle and must pay the price.
‘What choice did we have?’ The old man screams it.
‘This is the price of betraying your lord,’ says Somerled again, woodenly. Obstinately. He knows that a world of easily broken oaths is an impossible world in which no one can be safe. He knows this as a principle that cannot be violated. It is a theoretical truth that all right-thinking men must understand. And yet here in this smoky hut, confronted by the rawness of the old man’s misery and the girls’ fear, all seems utterly hopeless.
EIMHEAR
We watch the sea, little Sigrdrifa and I. I find the horizon calming, when life here threatens to drown me. I hate the land for its constancy. It never changes. Rocks sit there, stupid and immovable. Even the heather comes and goes with maddening slowness. It changes colour slowly, too, when you are not looking, as if to emphasize time’s numbing advance.
But the sea changes its mood in front of your eyes. Waves curl and retreat, each one just different enough from the one before to mesmerize. There is a high spot, on this pathetically small island. Just high enough to kill a leaper. We sit there sometimes, Sigrdrifa and I, watching the light playing on the water. We drink in its endless cycling though blues and greys and greens.
She has stopped asking about home. She has stopped asking about Somerled. I fight to keep my face smooth and cheerful.
If I float on the surface of my life, it is almost bearable.
Our days have a numbing sameness. We rise at dawn, and take our turn with the milking. There are more cows than women on the Island of Women, crowded as it is. Colm Cille banished us both, cows and women, to this overgrown rock. As the saying goes, Where there is a cow, there will be a woman; and where there is a woman, there will be mischief. This from the mouth of a saint, so it must be true.
If the day is fair, we can hear the monks’ low chanting drifting across the short crossing between Iona and the Island of Women. The sun, if it rises, catches the stone of their church before it draws out the sparkling turquoise of the sea. More often, the morning flops through shades of dark and rain, until we lie suspended in the half-light between a grey sea and a black sky.
As the hymns fade, the first boats begin to ply. The children take the urns of milk, the bowls of curd, the fresh-churned butter down to the water, where the novices will load the boats and banter shyly with the older girls. The novices bring with them loaves of still-warm bread and the dear love of the baker to his wife, who sets her butter-smeared hands on her hips and thanks the Lord it is a Monday and there are five full days before she has to see his miserable face again.
The master stonemason kisses his wife and three girls goodbye, boarding the returning boat with his eldest son. He has stayed an extra night on the women’s side, but the man is an artist so he sets his own terms. They say that the cross he is carving is like a living thing under his hands. They say it is so beautiful and so complicated that he is terrified of not being able to finish it, of bringing all the loops and whorls back to where they started.
There is real affection between the man and his family. I turn away, and look towards the sea.
When the boats are gone, we eat a little and pray a lot. I managed early on to escape the worst jobs, proving my utter incompetence in sewing the simplest of cowls. I tend the vegetables. I concentrate with all my might on whatever job is at hand. Pricking out the seedlings. Spreading the manure. Weeding and deadheading and rootling about in the earth. The harder the labour, the less space for thought.
Darkness brings the relief of a warm fire, and some food. We all eat together; simple stuff invariably. Prayers. Bed. I struggle to sleep. Instead I construct elaborate plans of escape, which the morning always reveals to be unworkable. Two perpetual stumbling blocks – my refusa
l to place myself under the protection of any man who is not Somerled; and the safety that this place provides for little Sigrdrifa. It it were me alone, well, that would be different.
But here I am, and I must try to make the best of it. Oh, how I try.
There is a strange hierarchy here, based on skills I do not possess. The preening head of the pack is the woman who embroiders the abbot’s robes. I admit her right to eminence; the neat and intricate stitching is a wonder. I do not admit her right to send me half mad with boredom as she talks of thread width and dye efficacy and needle style to her gaggle of ninny-headed acolytes.
Sigrdrifa has more of a skill for it than I. She is popular here; cosseted for her cheerfulness, praised for her needlework. I have struck a deal with one of the older monks, who works as a scribe in the monastery’s library. I smuggle him wine, and he teaches Sigrdrifa her letters and the Latin. I watch her scratching out the hic haec hocs with something approaching envy and a vast pride. She could be a boy, he said once, meaning to please. She takes to it so quickly.
What good it will do her, I do not know. Stuck out here, no good at all. But life has a habit of changing quickly, and it cannot hurt. She is Somerled’s daughter, after all.
We hear of him, sometimes. When travellers and pilgrims arrive too late for the crossing, they hop across to us and we feed them. His is a name that crops up, as he grows in power and influence. His success is built on my banishment. Even though I agreed the terms, sometimes I swell with a bitterness I did not expect. I fight it. It will drown the good in me, if I let it.
When his name is spoken, there is always a whispering, a naming of me. Pride makes me silent, when I want to fall at the travellers’ feet and cry, yes, I was his woman. How is he? How does he look? What of his wife? What of my son?
The Winter Isles Page 20
