The Walrus Mutterer

by Mandy Haggith

  As soon as his bowl was emptied, Rian followed Og. Outside on the muddy street he poured water into the bowl. She stirred slowly with her fingers, loosening the sticky dregs.

  ‘Who are they?’ she whispered.

  ‘Who? The sailor, or the big man?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘The heavy is the chief’s man, getting to complete a trade deal Ussa made last night. Tin. It’s on board the boat. He’s to carry it.’

  ‘And the sailor?’

  ‘He’s one of the walrus hunters. He went off on the drink and got left behind by Manigan who was in such a hurry that he left without him. He’s coming with us to the Cat Isles.’

  ‘The Cat Isles.’ She mouthed the name like a sweet treat in her mouth.

  ‘You’ll not have been there?’

  ‘Isn’t that the land of the whale people?’

  ‘Aye. Come on.’ They finished rinsing their pots. ‘Time to sail.’

  The sailor was leaving the house just ahead of Ussa. She told Og to hurry up.

  Pytheas was with the giant who was carrying his bundle. ‘Quick,’ he said to Rian as he passed her.

  They hurried to get their bedding and Og packed the pots in the food bag. Then they chased after the others back to the boat.

  Pytheas looked relieved to see them. Faradh was lugging sacks up from the hold and Li was manoeuvring them over the gunnels down to the big man. Li made the sacks look as heavy as corpses, then the giant swung them ashore like toys. As Og and Rian reached the high water mark, one of the sacks split as the big man dumped it down. Knuckle-bone shaped lumps of grey tumbled out and he evidently swore. Og and Rian helped him gather the spilt tin ingots. As they splashed out to the boat, Og called to Li to throw them a spare sack. The giant nodded his thanks.

  Before Og could climb aboard, Toma told him to bring stones from the shore as replacement ballast. Li, Faradh and Badger, the new sailor, were sent to help, and with the muscle-power of the giant they were soon ready to go.

  Ussa was in high spirits. What she had gained in exchange for the tin was anybody’s guess. Perhaps she was paid in gold, perhaps in promises. Whatever it was it didn’t take up much room. She sashayed about the boat. Rian stayed out of her way.

  Pytheas beckoned Rian under the shelter at the bow and showed her that where Fraoch and Gruach had been sleeping was now their space. It was an airy spot but it was undercover and there were straps to stop the motion of the boat pitching a person out of their bunk.

  Badger was chatting to Toma, looking closely at the rigging, getting familiar with the boat. There was an easy familiarity between them and Rian guessed they were not strangers. As soon as everyone was on board Toma ordered all hands on oars to get them out of the geo and into open water. The blisters on Rian’s middle fingers and palms broke open as she rowed. She realised too late she should have bound them.

  Once they were clear of the rocks, the sail was hoisted and the rowers could relax. Rian was pleased to find herself assigned with Badger to the never-ending task of fixing and binding rope.

  ‘So you met Manigan.’ He settled himself on a chest opposite her, the pile of ropes between them.

  She picked up a frayed end of rope. ‘Not really.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He was scratching behind his ear and looking around. Was he trying to signal to her, to make some sort of secret hint?

  ‘Well, what did you make of him?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  He raised his eyes as if she was as dim as a sheep.

  ‘Come on, you must have thought something. You don’t meet Manigan and then come away and have nothing to say about what you think.’

  He waited. She wound the fibres of the rope together and racked her brains for what she might be expected to say.

  ‘Did he speak to you?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’ Had he? She could only recall his touch and his eyes. She wound a string of sinew around the rope end. This one would never fray.

  Badger leaned in towards her with a conspiratorial wink. Whatever she had failed to say seemed to have been eloquence enough. ‘Say no more. That’s how he operates.’ Nodding, he picked up a rope end from the pile and untied a knot in it, pulling it little by little out from the heap, coiling as he went until he reached the worn section which he hung over a peg. He pulled the remainder of the rope out of the pile, leaving two neatly coiled ends, the worn section to work on in easy reach. He repeated the process as Rian plaited and plied, wove and tied, and the result was that the heap, tangled and chaotic, transformed into a few clear mending tasks, tidily stacked and ready.

  As he wheedled the rope into order, he talked about Manigan. Just hearing someone speak her own dialect was a balm. The man she had met was brought back into their presence by the story. Was it the unlikeness of the tale or the solid certainty of its telling that made the hours pass like clouds, unnoticed? As her fingers worked, her mind rested. Within the boat upon the northern sea, Badger’s story was another vessel floating on the ocean of his oddly familiar voice, and on that story boat she allowed herself to sail away.

  Muttering

  ‘I first met Manigan when I was just a boy. His mother had died and he had run away from his foster mother to join the walrus hunters and he was the boat hand on the handsomest boat I ever saw. It sailed into the bay on Tanera one spring morning just ahead of a storm, and we took in the crew and fed them and listened to their stories for what seemed to be days. We’d been hoping for the first spring flowers and didn’t usually like to be kept indoors at that time of year, the days lengthening, everything to be done to get the year’s growth under way. But we didn’t mind so much with the walrus hunters as our guests, their tales were so good. And it was Manigan who told the best ones.’

  Badger stretched his arms out along the gunnel behind him and braced his feet against ribs of the leaning boat, settling himself. ‘I remember he related a story about his Great Aunty Onn and the man called Ultuk, who was the Walrus Mutterer, out on the ice in the far north, their boat seized up in the freezing sea for a whole winter. They were chasing narwhal when the ice folded in around them and they hadn’t been able to make it back through the floes to the open sea.’

  ‘What’s ‘narwhal’?’ Rian asked.

  ‘They’re sea-unicorns with a great long pointed horn.’ His hand demonstrated a long spike coming out of his own forehead.

  Rian nodded, wanting him to continue. She had finished mending a rope and while he paused, she picked up another and started picking apart the fibres where it was worn.

  ‘They had been trapped for a while, then a crack opened up and instead of trying to follow it and get mown down by a berg – these are mountains of ice with evil spirits inside that chase you down and try to crush you – instead of that, Ultuk told them to take the boat out of the water. The crew scrambled out onto the floe and got ropes to the boat and used them to lift it up and as they did so the ice helped them up. The crack squeezed closed and the frozen plates lifted the keel of the boat up, helping the sailors to pull her up onto the top. Then they turned the boat over and lived under it for the whole winter. They made walls of ice and used the boat as a roof, and it soon covered in snow and they were snug as bears in a den. At least they were until the bear came along who wanted to use it as a den. But that’s not the story I’m trying to tell you.

  ‘That story was the one that Ultuk told while they were there inside the boat shelter. It was after they had been there for a month or more, more most likely, and the food supplies had run out and all they had was the occasional seal they could manage to catch. The crew had all started dying, some of them faster, some of them slower. It depends on how much fat a man has, but most of all it depends on the mood of each person when the Death Spirit pays a visit. And you never can tell when that might be. You can be sick a
s a dog, but if someone has just said something funny and you’ve cheered up enough to chuckle, the Death Spirit sees you laughing in its face and skedaddles. Yet a cheery soul with nothing wrong with them can be caught short needing a pee in a storm and feeling sorry for themselves just for a moment, and that’s them finished. Doomed.’

  Rian wondered where he was going with this story. Badger took off his woolly hat and scratched his head, then put it back on. He was clearly in no hurry, and given where they were, out in the ocean, why should she be worried if he took hours to tell the tale? Her fingers wove the rope together as he wove his words.

  ‘Anyway, eventually starvation got them all except old Ultuk and Manigan’s great aunty Onn. What she was doing there in the first place I can’t remember for the life of me. You’ll have to ask him that but, well, you’ve seen Ussa. You’ve seen what a family they are.’

  ‘Family?’

  ‘Aye. They’re cousins. Did you not know?’ It wasn’t really a question, as he carried on with the story. ‘You know Manigan tells this story to everyone. He says Ultuk told it to his Aunty because he’d never told it to anyone all his life and he thought he might be the next to die. He said to her, “If I don’t tell you it’ll die with me,” and she told Manigan on her deathbed the same thing. And Manigan says that for a while it was like knowing a wonderful secret that no-one else knows, but then he couldn’t bear being the only one to know and so he told someone and then he told another. He says it’s like a magic chest: you can keep on doling out the treasure and it never runs out.

  ‘He has us all rapt, you know, waiting for his golden words, holding out our hands for the treasure, and he loves it, he revels in sharing it out. Except, he says, inside the chest is a wee jewel box, and he’ll give out the treasure to everyone and anyone, the more the merrier, but he won’t share the key to that wee casket. Inside it is a gem, he says, but he’s saving it, and Mother bless us, let’s hope he doesn’t die with it. Anyway, that’s getting ahead of myself, or behind, he usually says all that as a kind of introduction.’

  Badger turned his head and looked down at Rian. ‘I’m not really any good at this story telling malarkey, am I? You should be getting it from the horse’s mouth. He’d have you spellbound.’

  ‘I like it.’ She lifted the piece of rope up as if to show she had nothing else to do but listen while she worked.

  ‘Ach where was I? Oh yes, Ultuk and Great Aunty Onn in the upturned boat, adrift on the pack ice, everyone else dead, polar bears chewing at their corpses outside the boat. One night, with a storm raging, Ultuk starts on his story. And it goes like this. Are you following?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Good. Right. There was this whaler man and in a storm he was flung out of his boat and washed up on an island in the northern ocean. There was nothing to eat. He’d found a few berry bushes but it was spring and he’d starve before they fruited. He had nothing but a pocket knife on him. There were no trees on the island, nothing to make a spear with. And his few rags of clothes weren’t enough to make a net to catch a fish. He found a spring of freshwater and hoped he might find a frog or something to eat. But the island was barren. There weren’t even any birds nesting there. The only other life on it was a herd of walruses, and each day the man went to watch them, wishing he had a spear, trying to imagine some way of being able to kill one and eat it. But a walrus is a huge thing, bigger than a bull, and they look after each other. Not even a polar bear can pick off a walrus from its pack and there is no greater hunter than a polar bear.

  ‘The stranded whaler man chewed on seaweed, but it made him so thirsty he stopped. He became weak and his mind wandered with hunger and he spent more and more time with the walruses.

  ‘One day, crazy with starvation, he started talking to them. They had got used to him now and let him come close by. He started telling a story, but one by one they got bored of his voice, or maybe they just wanted a swim. Anyway they slithered off and away into the water until there was just one of them left on the island. All the others were bobbing about just off-shore, listening, and the one left closed his eyes and seemed to be at peace.

  ‘So the man saw, as he reached the end of his tale, that the walrus had given himself up. Trembling with hunger, he crept up to the snoozing walrus and got his knife out and slit its throat, gentle as a mother putting her baby to sleep. And so he lived to tell the tale, as they say.’

  Badger grinned. Rian tried to put the pieces of the story together in her head, but she couldn’t see the connection between what he had told her about Ultuk and the man who killed the walrus and Manigan. She frowned.

  Badger carried on. ‘I guess now you’re wishing I’d get on and tell you the tale that made all the walruses leave except for that one, and what it was about that story that made the one left there go to sleep. But the real story, the one you tell to get the walrus, that’s the key to the little box inside the treasure chest that Manigan’s saving until he’s scared he’ll die with it. That’s the one that makes him the Walrus Mutterer. And I hope I’m not the one who hears it, for it’ll be a sad day when Manigan has to give up the key and pass on the gem, although in another way of course I wish I knew it. Wouldn’t we all? Treasure, is it ever enough for us? Don’t we always seem to long for something more?’

  ‘What happened to Aunty Onn?’ said Rian. She had finished binding the ropes.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But she must have got back from the ice to tell Manigan.’

  ‘Someone must have found her, or the ice melted. I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.’

  Rian took a deep breath. It was like being stretched up on one leg, straining to reach a bunch of berries on a high branch and not being able to reach them.

  ‘It’s a good story, eh?’ Badger wanted her to praise him, she could see that.

  ‘Good enough,’ she said. ‘But it’s only half a story so far.’

  ‘Nah, you want the little gem box. You women are all the same, you just want the jewels. But what about the rest of it?’

  ‘Well, a bunch of people get eaten by bears on the ice. It’s not exactly happy.’

  ‘I don’t tell it right. If it was Manigan you’d be rapt.’

  ‘What are you two slackers gossiping about?’ Ussa was awake. ‘And what would Manigan be doing?’

  ‘I was telling her about the walrus muttering.’ Badger did not seem remotely in awe of Ussa, although his left hand moved up his thigh and as it reached his hip it clenched around the handle of the long knife he wore slung on his belt.

  ‘And where will he be now, do you think? Which way will he head?’

  Badger blinked slowly. ‘Cat Isles.’

  Ussa tapped Rian on the side of her head, just above her right ear, with the tip of her staff. ‘Help Og.’

  Rian scuttled forward to help Og under the awning, making food. Then clearing up. Then making Pytheas’ bed. There was always something to stop her returning to Badger for more of his stories.

  The Cat Isles

  By next morning the weather was poor, the sea choppy, visibility bad and the motion uncomfortable. The boat slewed across big waves, which sprayed over the bow. The sailors were busy keeping watch. Pytheas grumped in his bunk. Rian was put to bailing the bilges again. It stank and was dispiriting work. There was no way for her to get clean or dry. As the day wore on, the sea became even wilder but Toma’s mood was ebullient. He seemed to love it when the sea rose and snapped and writhed. The boat alternately bucked on and sliced through waves as if it could not decide if it was riding or riving the sea.

  Ussa sat under the shelter looking back, getting up from time to time to peer ahead northwards. There was nothing visible.

  Rian asked Og what Ussa searched for.

  ‘Manigan’s boat, not that we could catch it. Or land. Ostensibly land.’

  And eventually land came, looming out from under th
e cloud. They made their way along parallel to the shore.

  Ussa dressed to take off but it wasn’t necessary: a boat heading out of the harbour told them all they needed to know – no Manigan. So on they went away from what the sailor in the other boat told them was ‘the Fairest Isle’ – to the Cat Isles. It was no time to stop for mere beauty.

  The wind dropped away, which was a relief to Rian, but not to Ussa or Toma or Badger. They spent another night on the water making little progress. Ussa wanted to arrive without notice. She began to talk about how they could conceal their vessel and allow her to get ashore in secret to surprise the people.

  Next morning, they entered a patch of sea that roiled and broke, and Toma turned the boat away the way they had come. ‘The Roust’, he called it: dangerous water caused by the tide. Pytheas questioned him intently as he sailed away for an hour and then back again, by which time the sea had calmed and they could continue.

  Closer into shore the sky filled with seabirds. Cliffs towered above the boat and thousands of gannets somehow found footholds and even nest sites on cracks in the sheer rock. A constant stream of the white birds launched themselves from their perches, their huge black-tipped wings outstretched, beating out and up then soaring. Rian had watched gannets many times from her home on the western coast but had never imagined so many could congregate in one place. What could they see with those egg-yolk eyes? They must have been able to spy fish in the water below because they would suddenly tip down and fall like knives. The water all around the boat punctured as they dived.

  As they sailed away from the gannet cliffs, a group of dolphins leapt ahead and led the boat northwards until eventually peeling away. They passed two boats with a net swung between them. Close in, seals lolled on skerries and as they turned into a wide inlet a grey seal surfaced with a snort just beside the bow and watched them placidly, huffing, used to being greeted with a fish.