The Walrus Mutterer

by Mandy Haggith

  It made Rian feel sick to see them but she didn’t want to look away. Pytheas was saying something back to her and his laugh was deeper than normal.

  Ussa kept stroking his shirt, then she stood and crossed the narrow gangway to his bunk. But as she tried to sit down beside him he turned towards the galley and called ‘Rian,’ waving his cup at her. She couldn’t refuse his call and went to take the beaker.

  ‘Come.’ Turning to Ussa he put his hand to her forehead and pulled it away as if it was burning. He said something to her that Rian didn’t understand, and then he laughed, his mouth wide. Ussa did not laugh back.

  He buttoned up his coat, then headed out on deck. Rian took the cup back to Og, but Pytheas called her name again. There was no escape.

  Ussa was holding her left fingers to where Pytheas had touched her forehead, lips narrowed. She grabbed at Rian as she passed, her eyes too close. ‘Hussy.’

  Rian juddered away.

  Pytheas was chatting to Toma who was pointing into the distance, except there was no distance. Nothing was visible except water, with a swell out of proportion to the wind, and cloud. Dense cloud. Every direction was the same. They were enveloped. Out in the middle of nowhere.

  Cloud

  Only cloud in all directions. All that remained of the universe was the boat and that was just an animal hide, tensioned and tautened over oak slats and rods. The breeze was light, ruffling the water’s surface and filling the sail. It was enough to propel them forwards in a gentle burl. As the swell rolled, the boat lolled up and over the water’s undulations, the sail tight and full of wind. Yet the cloud, the blurred horizon, and the rocking motion all brought a feeling of calm. The keel folded each wave over into a slosh of bubbles which rose, hushing, by the stern and left a wake of foam behind them.

  The sailors were all at ease. Li was mending the part of the shelter that had taken a battering during the night. Faradh sat beside him watching, lending a hand to stretch the hide or to hold a tool as Li worked.

  Callum, the skipper’s boy, sat beside Toma, gazing out into the cloud ahead. Rian wondered if there was a way of befriending him but he and the skipper were wrapped up together, an inseparable unit, and he clearly felt no need to interact with anyone else.

  The boat’s hull hummed as the vessel cut through the sea. The tensioned wood seemed full of energy, its curves gripping its skin, poised over the great ocean depth, rich with potential. Expectation was in every lashing. The water was in total contrast to the boat: baggy and untensioned, its surface in constant motion, jabbling and tickling, loose. And the sky was even looser than the sea. Misty strands of cloud drifted like snagged fleece. The sun cast a glow to the east.

  Pytheas came up behind Rian and put his hands on her shoulders, propelling her towards the mast. She had to duck under the sail. Every surface was wet with mist or still soaked from the storm. She did not want to sit down and get damp again so she crouched, her back up against the gunnel.

  It was time for another lesson: action words. Pytheas is standing. Li is mending. Og is cooking. Pytheas is walking. Rian is sitting. Rian is standing. Pytheas and Rian are dancing. Pytheas is laughing.

  ‘Pytheas and Rian are making me mad.’ It wasn’t necessary to see Ussa’s face to know that she was not joining in the fun. She pushed past them, pinching Rian hard on the upper arm as she elbowed by.

  ‘I should have let her die,’ thought Rian. It was a bad thought, but she enjoyed having it.

  The clouds continued to thicken. Even though it was early in the day, the sky darkened. The glow of the sun dimmed, faded to grey then bruised away.

  Out in the distance there was a vessel, or was there? Was it Manigan’s boat? Ussa got excited briefly, staring out ahead, but as visibility declined and there was no repeat of the glimpse, her frown became a scowl.

  Snow began to fall. Li said something miserable. Ussa turned to him and Faradh and began ranting in the southern tongue they all shared that Rian did not understand. A tirade spilled from her down-turned mouth. Faradh kept his head down, fiddling with a rope. Li kept his face turned towards Ussa, his eyes not making contact with hers, his gaze intent on the point just to her right. She got to her feet and glowered over them, asking questions. By the sound of Li’s monosyllabic answers they were mostly rhetorical, but finally one response earned him a slap on the face. Faradh inched away but Li seemed simply to take the abuse. He lowered his eyes and turned his attention back to the piece of hide he was mending. Ussa kicked it aside and tried to get him to focus on her, but he shook his head, pointed to Toma, and pulled it back onto his knee.

  Ussa stormed past Rian and Pytheas again and began ranting to Toma. In measured tones he responded to her questions.

  ‘Ussa is not happy,’ Pytheas murmured in Greek.

  That seemed to be the end of the lesson. The first few flakes of snow were turning to sleety rain. He indicated that he and Rian should retreat under the shelter where Og was making food smells.

  There, Pytheas got out his box and took out his beautiful bound set of parchments. ‘Look. Periplus.’

  She remembered the word. He showed her a sheet with markings made in ink.

  ‘Assynt.’ He was pointing to some lines on the middle of the sheet, on the left hand side. ‘Winged Isle.’ His finger poked further down. ‘Cape Wrath.’ A sharp corner further up from Assynt. ‘Sea. Land.’

  She got it. This was a diagram of their route so far along the coast. There was the Long Island drawn off to the west. She watched with amazement and not a little fear as he traced his finger around the north coast to the Seal Isles, then the Cat Isles, and on to where they were now, somewhere further north.

  There were more islands to the northwest of the Cat Isles. With trepidation, wondering if there was magic in this diagram that could be dangerous, Rian pointed to them. ‘Faroes?’

  Pytheas nodded. Saying something she didn’t understand he circled his finger around in the sea to the north and over to the west and shrugged. Then, seeing her bewilderment, he tried to explain, but other than hearing the names of Ussa and Manigan, his long, slow speech failed to mean anything to her and his swirling finger patterns on the chart made her more confused rather than less. Was he saying they were going to find Manigan out in the ocean?

  Og peered over at the chart. Rian pleaded at him with her eyes for help.

  ‘Pytheas says we’re lost,’ Og said, going back to his bannocks.

  Pytheas rolled his eyes at her stupidity and flicked his fingers in dismissal, rolled up the map and put it away. He began sharpening the end of a feather.

  She sidled towards Og who emptied the sack into a bowl. ‘That’s it for meal. The other bag was ruined when the shelter leaked. I don’t know who thought that would last with this many on board. I told her.’ He winked at Rian. ‘And we’re lost. Good eh? The mistress…’ He paused, stirring water into the meal. ‘It was obvious we’d failed to catch Manigan ages ago. I don’t know why we even bothered. And now we’re lost. Faroes could be north or south, east or west, Toma says since the night of the gale he hasn’t a clue. We should’ve passed them by now and we could have in the night and been none the wiser. So now we’re just going on northwards into stupidity because the mist…’ He stopped kneading, then restarted. ‘Well, anyway. We’re lost. And these are the last bannocks so let’s hope we’re east or south of the islands and we bump into them sooner than later.’

  ‘And if not?’

  He tensed his lips and shook his head. ‘We will be lost and hungry.’

  ‘Sorry, stupid question.’

  ‘Stupid everything.’ He punched the dough.

  Sooner or later the smell of baked bannocks brought everyone to Og’s iron fire pan under the shelter. When Toma ducked in to investigate, he stomped his feet with cold then tugged a fleece out from under a bench and thrust it at Rian and asked her to make wool pads to go inside his
boots.

  She was happy to comply. The greasy fleece smelled of home, of land, and it was warm on her fingers as she tugged and pulled, fluffing and straightening the fibres. It brought back memories of sitting between Danuta’s knees by the fire, her fingers tugging through her hair after a wash.

  When the bannocks were ready, Toma went back outside chewing hot bread and Ussa came for her share. She looked at the five remaining rounds of baked dough Og had made, took two for herself and, pointing to each bannock in turn, told Og who was to eat the others. Pytheas got one, Toma and Callum could have another. The last was to be shared among all the slaves. She tucked her second bannock into her bedding and sat there chewing with her mouth open.

  Rian finished a roughly foot-shaped pad of wool and went out on deck to see if it was what Toma wanted. He nodded at the felts and gestured to her to make some more for his boy, Callum, who smiled at her with his pale eyes and, as always, said nothing.

  Toma was scanning about as if the boat’s behaviour had him baffled. The sea was calm now. Too calm. The swell had dampened and snow-clouds wrapped them up into an intimate world of quiet. There was no land nearby. No birds came to the bait line hanging off the stern, no fish or porpoises rose to the surface of the water. Their world seemed uninhabited by anything except themselves.

  *

  They were barely trickling along, one small boat in the vastness of the ocean, one crumb on the puckered blanket of the deep. Only the line of bubbles behind them showed that they were moving at all.

  Staring at the water, Rian drifted into a daze. All the crew seemed touched by the calm in the same way. Li and Faradh played a slow, thoughtful game of counters with none of their usual squabbling. Pytheas chewed the second quarter of his bannock with evident concentration. The water rolled with an ever gentler swell.

  ‘Pfffff.’ It was the sound of a huge vat full of fermentation letting out its fizz. A shower of spray touched Rian’s face. She wiped her cheeks. Everyone was shouting until one bark from Toma silenced them all. An island rose out of the sea beside the boat.

  Rian ceased to breathe.

  The island was dark-surfaced, deep blue, with signs of scraping or scratching, hoeing or ploughing. As it rose, seawater poured off it. At first its tip was at the beam but either they were being dragged towards it or it was moving forwards. Soon it was alongside, stretching out both in front and behind, easily twice as long as the boat.

  Then it began to sink and as it did so a huge thing reared vertically out of the water. What was it, a root? A flag? A weapon? A wing? It plunged under the surface. The sea boiled.

  It was a sail, Rian realised. It had not been an island after all. It must be a huge, upturned boat!

  She dragged her eyes from the sea and saw Pytheas staring, mesmerised. Ussa stood beside him with both hands on the gunnel, shaking her head and muttering. Og had come out from the shelter and was smiling into the distance. Even Li and Faradh had got up from their game and were pointing, rapt. Everyone’s attention was riveted on the space in the sea where the apparition had been.

  And now a sound began: a bird-like wailing. She turned and saw that it was Toma, at the helm, making a noise that was a mix of a gull’s cry and a kind of chanting. Its tonal patterns somehow echoed the giant physical presence. Its rhythm was the slow pulse of awe.

  The song filled a gap in her chest. She wanted to run to Toma and cling to him but she was motionless with wonder. He sang on, hand on the tiller, eyes scanning left and right, head turning to give him the widest possible view. Rian could see he expected the island-boat, or whatever it was, to reappear. As his music filled the chasm inside her she understood that what they had seen had been a great spirit, a vast living spirit from the depth of the ocean, and that this was Toma’s way of worshipping it.

  She listened, and as the notes repeated in his song, she let out trapped air from her lungs to join the melody. He looked at her and nodded. They sang the chorus together. She did not know if it was words he sang or only sounds, but they came from her throat in unison with his.

  In the distance, water plumed as the island-boat rose and sank again. Its sail or wings or tail fluked out of the water and dived below like a wave of farewell.

  Toma’s song fell quiet. Suddenly everyone was talking, gesticulating and laughing.

  Rian edged over to Og. ‘Do you know what song Toma was singing?’

  ‘To the whale?’

  ‘It was a whale?’ She had heard people talk of them, but had not imagined any creature could be anywhere near that size. ‘It was so big.’

  ‘It was one of the deep spirits. The sea’s creatures are…’ He tailed off.

  Rian was confused. ‘Is it a creature or a spirit?’

  ‘Do you know the difference?’

  She had no answer to that.

  It didn’t take long for the flurry of excitement at the whale to die away. The little that had been happening beforehand continued, hushed and diminished. Under bruised clouds, the sea shone.

  Snow began to fall again. Flecks touched the sea surface and vanished. On the boat, snowflakes half-melted and the deck was soon a slither of sleet.

  Where the sea spirit had been was now blurred. As the cloud horizon drew in, the visible world shrank. The afternoon light dimmed to a cold, wet gloaming.

  After the huge presence, Rian felt only absence and longing. She hunkered down between a bench and the gunnel, making herself small. Each sound made by the crew seemed like a physical blow. She wanted only to hear the sad, beautiful song Toma had sung. It rang on inside her.

  Under the skin of the boat, the sea held onto its secrets, but Rian could sense hordes of living beings, a seethe of spirits, waiting in their mist-world beyond the edge. Somehow she knew the boat had slipped out of time, over the lip of reason, crossing the cusp of the world into a place of limitless danger.

  Calm

  A dense boredom settled over the boat, stealing their breath. Their wake fizzled into nothing as their forward motion ceased. The sail hung loose, slapping only with the swell, until Toma asked Callum and Li and Faradh to pull it down.

  Og began a story about a time he was on board a boat in the western ocean that drifted in the doldrums for weeks until their fresh-water supply ran out. His voice faded without completing the story.

  Ussa paced along the deck, three steps forwards, spinning on her heels, placing her feet in the same three spots on her return. Her presence became unbearable.

  Rian slipped off to her bunk and lay down wide awake, contemplating the vast danger looming around them. Like the cockroaches, it showed itself only when it wanted, and hid when noticed. You could go for hours without acknowledging its presence. She thought back to the first hour on deck the morning after the gale, when Toma must have known they were lost, yet seemed so calm. She had not sensed any hazard then. What had happened to create this sense of danger? Had the sea spirit brought it? Or had it been on board all along, unobserved, like a rat?

  She could taste the danger, rusty on her lips. She breathed out slowly, feeling it leave her body and go roaming. Did it inhabit only her? Everyone else appeared to be at peace. Even Ussa, bored certainly, did not appear fearful.

  As dusk grew, the slaves’ bannock was ceremonially divided by Og. Rian distributed the pieces. As they were eating, she saw that Pytheas took out his third quarter and gobbled it down with none of the care with which she had seen him relish the second. Og had made a soup from dried meat. It was thin but warm. It brought a song to his lips, but no-one else joined in.

  Callum was looking queasy and did not want any soup. Rian took his bowl back to Og who shared it with her.

  ‘Have you heard Toma sing that whale song before?’

  Og shook his head.

  ‘Would you ask him for me?’

  ‘Ask him what?’

  ‘Ask him what the song was.’
<
br />   ‘Why don’t you? You sang it.’

  ‘I’m scared to.’

  Og raised his eyes. ‘I suppose I’ve got nothing better to do.’ He stomped down the boat.

  Ussa challenged him.

  ‘I’m going to ask Toma something.’

  Her retort was obscene, but it didn’t stop Og.

  He conferred with Toma at the helm then returned to Rian. ‘It’s called something like Free Spirit. It’s an Inuit song.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Inuit, the people of the ice.’

  ‘Who are they?’ She wondered if this had anything to do with the story Badger had told her about Manigan’s Great Aunty Onn.

  ‘They wear clothes of polar bear fur like Ussa’s coat, and they live on seals. Most people don’t believe in them but Toma claims to have lived with them. It’s his only story.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Not now. Ask me when I’m really bored.’ He turned his back and retreated to his corner. He pulled out his bedding roll. Rian waited. He saw her watching. ‘Go to bed.’

  She lay down on her bunk. The tiny portion of bannock and watery soup, plus one stale oatcake, was not enough. There was an ache in her belly. She put her hands over it and hoped she would sleep.

  Li and Faradh squabbled over their game until Ussa told them to quit. Quiet settled.

  In the night she woke to a touch on her head and smelled Pytheas. His face was close to hers. He was bending down, looking at her in the dim light. She could see the sky had cleared. There were stars.

  The next day nothing at all happened, except Rian learned to count from one to ten in Greek. The day after she reached twenty and they caught a common gull, little enough food for them all, but welcome.