He pauses, and rakes the fire. ‘I will kill him,’ he says, raising his eyes to meet mine.
I nod.
‘The baby. There is a clear solution. Tell everyone it is mine. We are handfasted still – there would be no shame in it for you.’
‘They are not stupid – the timing is wrong.’
‘People believe what they want to believe. They tend to find it convenient to believe me.’
I look at him as if at a stranger. There is something contained and ferocious about him. It is unnerving. He has to smile before I am easy again; that singular sweet smile I have known and loved a lifetime.
How strange it is, how sharply odd. To be sitting here with him. Morose and lined shadows of the children who played at being a family. But there is something of the essence. I can feel it, spinning between us in the half-light. And what is more, so can he.
I am still peculiar. I can still feel that man’s hate on my skin, his spit on my cheek. I am still furious with Somerled. This soft talking is dreamlike – a quietness in the storm. Yet there are flutters of joy to come. It is like that moment in carrying a child when you first feel a movement; it catches you and you stop in wonderment and confusion. Is that flicker in your belly a miracle pulse of growing life, or is it wind?
I smile at the thought and he moves his hand to my face to catch it. I flinch. He pulls back his hand and sits on it, as if to control his impulse.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘It is not your fault,’ he says. ‘It was a message for me, was it not?’
It is always about you, I think, but the thought is not worthy. Neither is it his fault that the world revolves around men and their stupidity.
‘What hope have we, if we talk about fault and blame? In any of it,’ I say.
‘You are a seer. I have always known it.’
‘Pshaw. I am a woman who wants to go home and will say any crap that will get me there.’
‘You want to come home, truly?’
‘No, I would rather stay here. I have a very important cabbage plot to tend. Don’t laugh. It is true. But if you insist, I suppose someone else can pull them up. And eat the bastards.’
‘What of Sigrdrifa?’
‘I think she will stay here with Padraig. The boy’s head is full of stone crosses, and he is better served here.’
‘I will go and find her soon.’
‘She is leaving us together. All tact and embarrassment. Bless her.’
‘Does she know? About that man?’
I shake my head. His shadow is long, and I shiver.
‘Oh, my Otter. I am sorry.’
I pull my blanket even tighter, like a swaddle. ‘If I come with you, what of your wife?’
‘I thought of sending her to Man. To run Dugald’s household there. I will give her face, load her with riches. She will be happy.’
‘She will be humiliated, unless she is very stupid.’
He pauses, and looks unhappy. Here are seas to chart another day, I think.
‘Still. I will stay here to have the baby,’ I say. ‘Let us not heap on the scorn by turning up with a big belly. I will have the baby, and suckle it, and then I will come.’
‘But that will be a year, at least.’
‘Have we not waited long enough? I will not come home with another man’s child in my belly. I will not.’
He looks fierce, and I remember that he is a great lord now, with a passive wife. He is not given to being contradicted. But he nods at last, and smiles, and I am relieved. I suddenly realize that, for all the terrifying boredom, I have been my own chief for nearly twenty years, as much as he has. I will not go home to be his vassal, no matter how much the thought of being there with him is turning me soft and simpering.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘You will have an easy birth, I know it. If you hate the child for being his, we will find it a home. If you love it for being yours, you will bring it with you. God between us and evil, but we will be together, my Otter. First, we must make it clear to listening ears that this baby is mine.’
I cannot be touched. I cannot. He smiles and shakes his head.
‘We will go to bed and be chaste as nuns, my darling. Perhaps a little play-acting.’
So in my corner of the hall we lie under blankets and make the noises of love, giggling silently like children. I reach for his hand in the darkness. I turn it over and kiss the oar-calloused skin. He turns my hand and kisses the hoe-calloused skin. I feel the madness in me, the strangeness, ebb from a shriek to a murmur. I am going home.
EIMHEAR
He is not done with me yet, this vengeful deity. I close my eyes and imagine his laughter churning the waves.
I feel the high kick of the baby against my ribs; the great swell of my belly pulling me earthwards. And I watch the woman being handed down on to the jetty. She is larger than I expected; fatter. Her hair is a greying blonde, curled and plaited as if she were ten years younger.
She looks awkward as she climbs from the galley, as if her body does not belong to her.
Gillecolm, at my side, holds my hand tight. He sailed like a fury to get here first, to warn me of her coming. She is on her way to Man, to join her eldest son’s household. But why has she come here first? What use is it? What does she want with me?
She stops and looks around, pulling herself upright. Catching her breath, perhaps. Her eyes move past me at first, and swivel back. We stare at each other.
The heavy, violent atmosphere – the watching eyes. It summons up a memory, of the day I jumped down into the shallows at Ardtornish and walked up the beach towards Somerled.
The scene is sharp and clear in my head, and I relish it. I remember his face, that comical fear of the blooded warrior caught in mysteries of the heart he does not quite understand. The panic at the soft edges of love and life creeping up on him, when he’s used to the simple clang of metal.
I remember how he took a step forward, and one back, haplessly. I remember how old Sigrdrifa stood behind him, laughing at his obvious discomfort. I remember the eyes of the warriors on me, flicking up and down, assessing me like meat. As if my body mattered. As if he could not have had any choice morsels he fancied – as if what we were to each other was only the promise of entangled limbs.
Here I am again, meeting someone at the edge of the sea and the land. Someone whose life is threaded with mine.
The absurdity of it all hits me, and I feel the griping of laughter at my stomach, fighting for room with this mountainous baby I carry. I start to smile, and then to laugh.
Her face changes. I can’t read it, I don’t know her. But something in Gillecolm’s stance beside me tells me I have made a terrible mistake. This is a woman who does not understand the role of laughter in defeating Him and His plans. My rage would have been kinder than laughter. I have cut her legs from under her before she has even walked two steps on my island. What have I done?
RAGNHILD
She is laughing. Laughing at me. Of all the things I expected, of all the scenes that played out in my imagination, this was not one of them.
My mother’s voice echoes in my head. Straighten your back, slither your hips, bite your lips, pinch your cheeks. Cast your eyes down, flick them up. Smile, don’t smile. Be beautiful. It is all you have. It is your currency, your hack silver.
But I am not beautiful any more, I scream back. I have nothing. I am left with nothing. And she is laughing at me.
Neither is she beautiful, this witch. She is older, and her face is lined and sunburned. Her hair is faded, washed out of colour. Is that worse? That he is putting me out for this old, worn woman?
She walks towards me, swallowing her smile, made cumbersome by the weight of her belly. Her belly that carries my husband’s child. The laughter is lingering in her eyes. What is she laughing at? Why am I so pathetic, so hilarious to her that she must laugh at me?
‘Welcome, Lady Ragnhild,’ she says. ‘I am Eimhear.’
I nod. I know who you are, you witch. Cl
ose to, the likeness between her and Gillecolm is uncanny. It is clearer now why I always disliked him, and his sly face.
‘Come,’ she says. ‘We have food prepared. Simple enough, but good.’
I shake my head. I am cold and tired and starving, but I will not eat with this woman. I am conscious that I have not yet spoken. My mouth seems unable to work. She takes the lead, and I hate her for it.
‘A walk, then?’
I nod. She motions with her head to her people, her son, and they slip away, until it’s just the two of us here on this vile shore. We are beyond earshot of the galley, where my escort watch us with narrowed, prurient eyes. I glare at their captain and he blushes and turns away.
‘So,’ she says. ‘Why are you here?’
‘To understand.’
‘And do you, now that you are here?’
I shake my head. I cannot quite look at her full in the face. My eyes slide to the side. I feel her gaze upon me.
‘No,’ I say, with heaviness.
We pause, and the silence between us is filled with the screech and clamour of seabirds. When I get home to Man, I will order heavy shutters, and heavier curtains, and line the walls with tapestries. I will block out the sound. I will have silence.
‘You should know,’ I say, ‘that he is incapable of sticking with one woman. He has paraded them in front of me. Trotted them up and down. Fondled them with my back barely turned. Young ones. Old ones. He is a goat. He is vile.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
I want to swear at her, like a fishwife. I want to fly at her, scratch her eyes, make her take back her pity. I look away, blinking hard to stop the tears.
‘I had no chance,’ I say. ‘Somerled loved your shadow, all the time. It would have been different. You stole my life, when it had barely begun.’
She laughs at this. Laughs. ‘Jesus wept,’ she says. ‘Some old bastard is laughing at us now. You stole my life, Ragnhild. You stole mine. You and your father.’
I turn around and face her then. Her laughter is too much, and I feel something snap. Something deep. I feel a swell of rage so sharp it’s almost an ecstasy. Before I recognize what is happening, I spit at her. I spit at that laughing, mocking face. She steps back with an expression of horror. I think she will hit me, assume she will hit me. But she just stares and stares and stares. Until at last I turn and hurry back to the jetty, and the safety of the galley.
EIMHEAR
Her spit slides down my cheek. It sears my skin. It burns.
There is hatred in her face, in her eyes. Her brother’s eyes.
Deep inside, I feel something give, something go. A click in my pelvis. I feel a trickle of moisture between my legs. A sudden sharp tightening on my great belly. The baby kicks, and it feels vicious. It feels like a warning.
I touch the place where her spit scalds me, and watch her go. My legs begin to shake and I sink down to sit on the rocks. I am frightened, God help me. For the first time in an age, I am terrified.
1157
SOMERLED
He hurries down to the shore, from up near the crags where he has been hunting with Brian. A messenger has brought him news that his daughter is here. Sigrdrifa! She has not been here since they left some twenty years ago. She was a tiny, voluble scrap then, his littlest otter.
It is a glorious, glorious day. Sharp but clear. The sky is blue and the sea sighs. Overhead, the skuas wheel and call. He will take his daughter roaming. Show her all her old favourite spots. She loved the river’s tumble into Loch Aline. They will go there, and talk of days gone and the ones they love. They will hunt, perhaps. She seems stronger than Bethoc, more like to draw an arrow than whine to Jesus.
He will throw a feast for her. He shouts at the messenger to find his steward. The hall will ring with the sound of cooking and cleaning and scraping. The smell of meat will send the dogs into a frenzy, and the children will gather at the back to beg for scraps. Lord, what a night they will have to welcome his daughter home.
She is married now, he knows that. To the boy he met, the stonemason. He would not have allowed it, had he known in advance. She should have had a champion; a prince. Still, it is done. He will order up crosses, set him to work, keep them here. Grandchildren, perhaps. Little girls that look like their grandmother turning somersaults in the cold sea and rising up, laughing, from the waves. Little boys to fight with wooden swords, and God love their hypothetical brows, if they are as useless as their uncle, he will laugh it off and gather them up and claim a grandfather’s right to be tender.
He tries to move faster down the hill. His old man’s knees protest the pace. He tries for the loose-limbed lollop of his youth, which carried him fast down a mountainside but it will not answer.
Perhaps she is here to broker the homecoming for her mother. Perhaps this means that both his otters will be coming home, where they belong. He lets the hope froth up, and he laughs aloud – a great booming laugh that frightens a bird from its perch in the heather. As it flutters away, he sees Sigrdrifa.
There she is. Being handed down by a broad-shouldered fellow; her husband. She is holding a bundle – a baby. He feels his heart leap, and prays it is a girl. A daughter for his daughter. A freckled sprite who will chatter up at her grandfather and take him swimming and laugh as he is upended by a wave.
He finds himself running forward, careless of his dignity. Men stare.
He calls her name, joy in his voice. She looks up at him, and her face checks him. He comes to a halt. She moves forward, crying, the grief ageing her by a hundred years.
‘Child. Daughter. What is it?’
She cannot speak. He moves towards her. The baby shrieks, suddenly and loudly.
‘Your mother?’
‘It was the baby. This baby. She wouldn’t come. There was blood. So much blood. My mother,’ she says, in a broken voice, ‘she seemed defeated. Without fight.’ She gives up trying to speak, and looks at him with mute despair. He understands, and he is lost.
1160
SOMERLED
He is a stranger. He is a single, quivering point of rage. People are frightened of him. Servers’ hands shake as they pour the wine, knowing that a spilled drop will pull his great fury down on their heads. Young warriors grip swords with white clenched fists as he passes. He has donned armour and a helm impenetrable to the human eye. Once, he believed that this encasing was a temporary thing. Eimhear, when she came home, would peel off the necessary layers. Unbuckle the plate, lift the helm. Kiss the bare skin beneath. Perhaps that was only ever an illusion; it is welded on too tight to shift.
He beds women indiscriminately and widely. They are brought to him as offerings from all over his lands, white-faced and nervous, snapping-eyed and keen, young and old, thin and plump. He loses himself in white flesh, cream, bronzed. He needs only a decent pretence at willingness; when you are king, the line between enthusiasm and duty is irrelevant anyway. He knows this as well as they, and why bother pretending otherwise?
He showers them with gold, silver, jewels. Doubling up for those with child. He loses count of the bastards. He has trouble enough with the ones he owns to.
He is a goat, a satyr. Sometimes a flicker of something like shame catches him by the throat, and he forces it away. There is no one left to fan the ember. Padeen died on the road from Rome, disillusioned and bitter, so his companions say. Disgusted by the corruption in Rome. He sent a letter before he died, full of ramblings about his shaken faith. At home, I thought I could hear Him. Here, He is present in the sea and the sky and the rock. But can my God really be their God? Can my God hear prayers in Gaelic as well as Latin? Can His voice be true in the dust and the stink of the Tiber, and also at home, where the water runs clear as the day He made it? Is my faith a truth spoken in a true language or a lie? If our God is not their God, then who is He? I do not know. You sought to give me knowledge, Somerled. All I have gained is doubt. And that is a terrible, terrible thing.
Doubt is a terrible thing. Somerled
will allow for no doubt now. He let doubt and weakness rule him once and he will not do it again. He will allow for no mistakes in those who follow him. There is only the hard drive forward, the clash of steel on steel, the screaming of the prow beasts.
There is Gillecolm. This son, who once he berated and ignored, has become his crutch. The only one, now, who ever sees him smile. He is the one they send when there is bad news; the only one who will not be spitted on Somerled’s fury.
He stands now in front of his father. The hangers-on and the servants are sent away, and Somerled gestures for Gillecolm to sit. The boy smiles, and it lights the room. Does everyone see the glory in that smile, thinks Somerled, or is it the blood between them that makes it so?
‘Father,’ says Gillecolm. ‘We have had some news from the south. The Maiden has granted more lands to Walter FitzAlan. Down Paisley way. Set up on terms as a vassal again, the way they’re doing it now. They’ve moved the monks in, too. Cluniacs, they call themselves.’
Somerled nods. The Maiden is pushing his vision of Alba steadily westward. He has been fighting Fergus in Galloway, demanding his vassalage to the Scottish crown. He’s planting his knights along the Clyde, slowly, castle by castle, to where the river meets the sea. Somerled’s sea.
‘Giving land to this steward, FitzAlan. A deliberate provocation?’ says Gillecolm.
‘Partly. If I was my neighbour, I would put some muscle at the borders.’
‘We never settled terms with the Maiden, did we?’
‘No. Just let things slide while we took Man and the isles.’
‘Well?’
Somerled thinks, trying to push aside the great weariness that still tugs at him. It is less urgent now, that desire to close his eyes.
He needs air to think, salted air. ‘Come with me,’ he says, and they duck outside, walking down to the sea. He likes having Gillecolm with him. The boy cannot fight, but his judgement is sound.
‘Go to Roxborough,’ he says. ‘Make terms for me to visit the king. Peace, friendship, all that. We need to buy some time. We are only just back from fighting the Irish wars. The isles are still restless. Godred’s in Norway, trying to persuade King Inge the Hunchback to send a fleet against us. We need to watch that.’
The Winter Isles Page 29
