The Winter Isles

by Antonia Senior

  Gillecolm nods, accepting the commission. Pray God he is up to it.

  ~~~

  At first, sitting in Roxborough at the great Christmas feast, he does not notice her. She is the king’s mother. She speaks a language he does not understand. The skin around her face is slack, her eyes wrinkled. She is Eimhear’s age, perhaps.

  He is polite to this queen, this not-Eimhear. His eyes slide past her, to the great long run of Scottish nobles talking, laughing, spitting, chewing, roaring their way through this meal. They fix on a girl talking to Gillecolm. Young, blushing. Her skin is white as sun-bleached rock. Her hair is black, with a sheen on it from the candlelight.

  To his right, the boy king is quiet. Somerled feels awkward with him. There is something awry about his frame; his head is too big, his body too thin. His face is set in a pinched frown, as if his crown is too tight for comfort. They say that he is in permanent pain. All his effort is focused on holding in a scream, leaving no air for the usual pleasantries.

  Somerled, wrong-footed by the boy’s silence, can’t decide how to pitch his conversation. Avuncular? Servile? Bluff? He cannot work it out. He feels heavy and stupid from the food and the heat.

  Everything is not what it seems here. A boy king who moves like an old man. A world of intrigue and symbols, peopled by Scots nobility who speak only French. Everywhere a stupid, tricksy language that sounds to the Gaelic ear like the rasping of insubstantial birds. Food piled high in glistening piles that will never be eaten. The giants themselves, readying their huge frames for the battle of Ragnarok, could not finish all the birds, beasts and fish that have been slaughtered in their thousands to lie on this table as a symbol of the king’s munificence, his wealth.

  Malcolm picks at a single thigh bone, cutting the meat from the gristle with delicate strokes. He sips at his wine, wipes his fingers carefully between each course.

  Down the table, as the feast winds on, they make some headway. Ribs and bones replace flesh. Half-picked, most of them. Somerled imagines his mother’s fury at the waste, pictures her grabbing a carcass and waving it reproachfully at the assembled nobility, jellied skin and small bones flying.

  ‘My lady asks why you are smiling, Lord Somerled.’

  He slides back to the present. The boy stands behind him, Ada de Warenne’s translator. Somerled turns to look at her, and notices how her green eyes crinkle with amusement. She appraises him, a frank, open look.

  ‘I was thinking of my mother, my lady.’

  She slurs French at the boy.

  ‘My lady says, your mother makes you smile?’

  He nods. ‘My mother made everybody smile. I was thinking that she would be furious, appalled, at the wasted food. She would be gathering it all up, putting it to use.’

  The boy relates this to Ada. Her eyebrows rise. He remembers, too late, that her mother was daughter to King Henry II of France. A cosseted princess. He looks down at her hands, which rest lightly on the table. They are milk-white, and soft. Hands used to fur-lined gloves and idleness.

  ‘And would your mother do this herself?’

  ‘My lady, I once saw my mother kill a beached whale with a kitchen knife, and butcher the carcass herself. She was head to toe in blood when she was done.’

  She says something to the boy. He twists nervously behind them. She snaps at him in French. Not one to be crossed, this great lady, he thinks.

  ‘My lady says I must translate everything she says. She says – and I am sorry, Lord Somerled – that you are proving to her that you are a barbarian.’

  Somerled looks at her. Her eyebrows arch, waiting, and he realizes suddenly that she is bored. She is provoking him, in the hope that he might amuse her. Turn fierce.

  ‘Tell your lady that I am a barbarian. I bite.’

  As the boy translates, Somerled gnashes his teeth. She laughs, and he joins her. It feels good, to laugh with a clever woman. He notices her long, elegant neck. Sees her properly for the first time. She must have had Malcolm young. She has five children. Hard to tell how it has affected her body, but he tries to look without her noticing.

  ‘I am sorry I have never learned French, your majesty.’

  ‘And I Gaelic. It is a difficult tongue to master. I have tried.’

  ‘It is the language of love and truth and beauty.’

  ‘Yet that is what we claim for our tongue.’

  ‘Can we both be right?’

  The boy’s whisper in his ear tickles.

  ‘Tell me, Lord Somerled, why are you friends with Henry in England, and not so with my son?’

  He reels from her frankness. How much do they know about his dealings with Henry? The supposedly secret talks Somerled has been holding with Henry’s emissaries, to sound out the wily English King. To find out how he would react to a strike against Malcolm the Maiden. Her son.

  He blusters.

  ‘My loyalty is to my people first.’

  She clicks her tongue impatiently.

  ‘Those nephews of yours. Like thorns in my son’s side. So irritating.’

  ‘You have one in a dungeon, your majesty. If he is so unimportant, let him go.’

  She smiles at him, pityingly, as if he has just let his queen be taken by a pawn.

  ‘Why can we not be allies, Lord Somerled?’

  ‘Why is your son granting land on my borders to his knights? Letting them build castles, take tributes?’

  ‘It is his land. Is he not free to reward his followers?’

  ‘But where will it stop? From where I sit, your majesty, it looks like provocation.’

  ‘Squint, Lord Somerled, and it may look different. Like fear of your growing might, perhaps?’

  A servant comes up, curtseying, seeking her attention. She smiles at him before turning to speak to the girl. Somerled looks down the table to where his men sit, checking they are behaving themselves. His eye catches on Brian. The man looks peculiar. He is talking with animation to the Norman knight next to him. A slight, blonde man in a gold-edged cloak. There is a flush in Brian’s cheek, a brightness to him that Somerled cannot immediately fathom.

  He throws his napkin to the floor and reaches down for it, beating the translator boy to it. Down there, he looks across, under the table. Sure enough, there is a fumbling of hands on Brian’s large thighs.

  Somerled rises, glad of the king’s silence and the queen’s inattention. Lord. Can it be right, what he has seen? He looks across to Brian and understands the brightness. It is happiness – Somerled has not seen it on him before. A sin. An abomination; belied by Brian’s glow. He hopes no one else has seen it. He feels a rush of irritation at his champion. What a problem to lay at your lord’s door. He will forget he has ever seen it. He hopes that it will not take the edge off Brian’s skill. Each famous warrior has something that drives his sword, some source of power. With Brian it has always been his misery, guiding his arm, making it stronger, more fearsome to his enemies. Sadness is to Brian as hair is to Samson.

  ‘My lady apologizes, Lord Somerled. She asks you to take some wine with her.’

  He watches her eyes over the rim of the cup. Knowing, amused eyes. He begins to think about unpinning her hair, letting it tumble down her back.

  They talk, Somerled and Ada, through the boy. They talk of the limitless ambition of Henry down in England. He has subdued Gwynedd, quelled the ferocious Marcher lords in Wales. Somerled does not lay bare his recent dealings with the man. His tentative steps towards an alliance. Henry cannot be ignored. He must be befriended or counted an enemy. A firebrand, like his mother, Matilda. The great-grandson of the Conqueror himself, he is greedy for land, like a beggar for sausages. He wants the borders, the seas, the very rocks.

  ‘I have met his wife, of course,’ she says. ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine. I knew her as a girl.’

  ‘What is she like?’

  ‘And why does anyone care, Lord Somerled? She could not bear her first husband a son, and he put her aside. Now she has given a boy to Henry. Richard is his name,
is it not? Is that not all there is to know about her? Look at me, Lord Somerled. What do you see?’

  He is conscious of the translator, squatting behind his ear like a tick. Strange to watch her mouth move, and hear the gravelled, just-broken voice of the boy.

  ‘The mother of a great king, your majesty.’

  ‘You seek to flatter.’

  She pauses, and Somerled senses a but hanging in the air between them, untranslated.

  ‘A womb. This, Lord Somerled, is the point of women like me. Like Eleanor of Aquitaine. I have five children. This is all there is to me. This mouth? An irrelevance. This face? An irrelevance. This neck? An irrelevance. This body?’ She arches her back, just a little.

  Somerled swallows, eyes flicking to the boy behind.

  ‘It is not so, my lady.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I wish I could speak your tongue, to tell you.’

  She smiles, amused, and turns away to talk to the lord on the other side. Somerled is prickling with the heat, stifled. He turns to the king.

  ‘A glass with you, your majesty,’ he says. The boy king’s pale eyes turn on him, and look through him. They raise their glasses. Malcolm drinks deep. Somerled wonders if it is true that Ada has been frantic in her efforts to persuade him to marry. That she sent a naked girl of good family to lie on his bed. The story goes that she lay cold and goose-bumped waiting for him. When he saw her, he was polite, mindful of the eyes beyond the door. He slept on the floor.

  Which girl was it? Somerled wonders. He sweeps his eyes across the room, picking out the pretty girls and imagining each of them in turn. Jesus. He should think of something else.

  ‘My lady says,’ the boy interrupts his priapic thoughts as if the conversation had never been broken, ‘that it is understandable, this obsession with royal wombs. Much as it is irritating for the owner of the womb. She says, is that not the preoccupation of power? How to pass itself on without ruptures?’

  ‘You are wise.’

  ‘They have different customs among your people, I think? Not the firstborn, but the best. Be he a cousin or a younger son.’

  ‘That is the way it has been. Sometimes the firstborn is a weakling.’ He winces, trying hard to stop his eyes turning to the boy beside him. She offers him a half-smile.

  ‘It is a stupid custom. Have you not come from fighting in Ireland? Are the wars there not cousin against cousin in an endless battle to be high king? And once crowned, like your friend Muirchertach Mac Lochlainn, are they not just waiting for the next pretender? A miserable miser waiting to be robbed.’

  He nods, thinking through what she has said. ‘But without wars, how would the young men prove themselves?’

  His answer has disappointed her, he can tell. She looks down at her glass, twists the stem with elegant fingers.

  ‘My lady, there was a Roman emperor, Diocletian. He was a great and wise ruler. But after twenty years of ruling the Empire, he retired. To grow cabbages.’

  He has caught her back.

  ‘And what happened to the Empire?’

  ‘Civil war.’

  ‘Of course. And Diocletian?’ She struggles with the name.

  ‘He grew lots of cabbages.’

  ‘And how,’ comes the boy’s voice, dripping into his ear as he watches her lips move, ‘do you think he felt, this Diocletian? How would you feel, Lord Somerled?’

  ‘At first, an enormous relief. I would take to my bed. Stay there for a month. See no one. Well, almost no one.’

  She smiles.

  ‘I would watch the rain. Fish. Hunt. Read.’

  ‘At first?’

  ‘Yes. And it would not take long,’ he says, ‘before I was restless, bored.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And very sick of bloody cabbages.’

  ~~~

  He leaves the next morning, guessing that the shadow in the upper window is Ada watching him leave. He waves, just in case, ignoring the questioning stares of his men. They are not used to this mood, this jauntiness.

  As he walks across the damp heather, he whispers a prayer to keep her safe. He is grateful to her. She has given him back something; a tie with another human soul. The knot may be loose, like a slipping bowline, but it is there. He feels it, and the spring in his step that tells him that he is not finished yet. That he is not committed for the rest of his dwindling days to this sad and furious loneliness.

  Ada. He thanks her again in his prayer for her cleverness. She knows that he is not done with the Maiden, cannot be done with him while his little lords build castles with arrow slits pointing to Somerled’s seas. She knows that they will play out this game until it is over. He is the child of the north and the west, with his tumbling, violent heritage of Norse and Gael. She is the child of the east and the south, with her Norse forefathers swallowed whole by Frankish things, like Fenrir’s son Skoll swallowing the sun and allowing the burning inside to erase his own tale.

  They will wrestle for this place, for its tongue and its God and its soul. But she is clever, this French queen, and charming, and she has given him a gift of something intangible and precious.

  He searches for the word, which shivers beyond his horizon like a sail sighted at dusk. He raises his face to the rain, and finds it there. Joy. For did he not have a clever, spirited queen by his side when he needed her most? He has been so angry, so furious at her leaving him that he forgot to thank her for being there at all. She was a blessing. Her children are a blessing. Gillecolm, the best sailor in the fleet and a diplomat of uncommon skill. Sigrdrifa, all grown-up and quieter than any who knew her tiny self could have expected. But in both of them that gift for happiness their mother had. A happy sigh at the end of a meal, delight in a dolphin dancing in the bow wave, the inhaling of a loved one’s skin.

  He borrowed her joy, and now he will borrow theirs.

  They march on towards the dusk, he and Brian both smiling and whistling, until the rest of the crew are hushed and uneasy, which only makes them laugh all the more.

  RAGNHILD

  I have always hated it here. But I had nowhere else to go. I am not wanted in Man. It is not the place I left; I recognized none of it. Baldur is long dead. My mother is long dead. The girls I giggled with are matrons. Strangers. The place I grew up in is gone; burned down by Somerled.

  My son did not want me there. I was a great and fat embarrassment to him.

  So I came back here. What else was there to do?

  The wind is relentless. Grinding. It pounds the rocks, flattens the grass. It finds holes in the walls. Seeks me out. It whips up the waves, which crash on the rocks and spray me malevolently. It tugs at my clothes. Wraps my hair into tight knots.

  It keeps me inside these walls. I have paced each inch of this place. I have sat by the fire, eating, eating. What else is there to do? I am revolting. A great pig of a woman, with slitty eyes and puffed-up cheeks and a belly that ripples and judders and sinks to the floor. My breasts, once stared at, are pendulous things. I do not look down when I wash. I close my eyes.

  My children are all grown up. They laugh at me. I have seen them. I saw Olaf do an impression of me to Bethoc. He blew up his cheeks and pushed his flat belly forward and waddled from side to side.

  We were at odds from the day I came here, Somerled and I. I did not see it. I was filled with hope, stupid girl that I was, filled with relief that he was youngish and slim and did not seem violent. But we were opposites, right from the start. Was it my fault? Probably. He loves it here. He loves the lash of the wind and salt in his face, and that great long view both ways down the Sound. My trap is his freedom. My end is his beginning.

  Perhaps I was always doomed to fail. Perhaps his success demanded my failure. My great fat irrelevance. That was always what I was most frightened of: being irrelevant. And that is what has happened. I am the shrug at the end of the sentence, the pause in the ballad. Even I don’t listen to myself any more. I just sit. And I eat.

  1164

 
; SOMERLED

  It happens fast, one summer’s evening. Two days before he is due to sail. The final reckoning with Malcolm. His bound men summoned, his allies called. They have come from Kintyre, from Man, from Dublin and the western isles. The chief of them are here, in this great hall, drinking and boasting and summoning their battle selves.

  Ragnhild is sitting next to him, eating a haunch of venison. They talk, of what? The inconsequential things that long-married people talk of. Of leaking roofs, reluctant milkers. Of storms to come and gales they have seen. Of food stores, and silver, and the fishermen’s haul. Of their children, of other people’s small lives, small loves.

  They do not talk of their sons’ violent envy of each other. They do not talk of Bethoc, their daughter, who refuses every potential suitor except Jesus, to whom she is passionately, morbidly attached.

  They talk instead of a weaving she has done, of Olaf’s sword arm and Angus’s skill at the tiller.

  And then, suddenly, she stops talking. A glassy look in her eye, a tremor that runs through her body. Slowly, definitely, she topples sideways, her grey-blonde hair catching in the blueberry sauce, trailing a smear of purple juice across the table.

  She is on the floor. Entirely still and silent, her blubbery body not moving. The hall is strangely quiet. A hubbub looms on the horizon, like a squall. In the silence before it arrives, Somerled knows that she is gone, knows that he has failed her. He thinks, too, in that silent heartbeat that stretches onwards, of his own great age and the grim gods waiting for him. Oh, my sad, my piteous wife, he thinks as his sons rush forward to throw themselves on their mother’s still-warm skin. I am sorry.

  ~~~

  How is it, he wonders, that they are all so young? They should be playing with wooden swords, these youths who cluster round him, seeking his orders. They should be playing tag across the rock pools, not commanding galleys. He looks out over them. Each the jarl of his own boat. Each an emperor in his own empire of planks and rigging.