The Walrus Mutterer

by Mandy Haggith

  The morning after that, Callum was dead in his bunk.

  Death

  Rian was wakened by Toma giving her a shake on the shoulder. He woke Ussa the same way. Og was already getting out of his bunk. It was still dark but the first grey of dawn was hinting in the sky.

  Toma stepped to the bunk of the boy and pointed to him. ‘Is he dead?’ He was looking at her. ‘Or can you wake him?’

  Rian took a deep breath.

  Pytheas had stirred and was sitting up in his bed. ‘What is it?’ he asked in Greek.

  Rian stooped and put her hand to the boy’s neck. She didn’t know anything about him except his name. It was as if he had been invisible. ‘I don’t know.’ She said it in Greek, then in her own tongue, then in Greek again, and then because she seemed to be able to do so now, in Keltic as well.

  Now Li and Faradh were awake too. Li said he had heard coughing in the night. Callum’s body was cold, stiffening. He was not waking up.

  Ussa pushed Rian aside and made her own assessment. ‘He is dead.’

  Rian crouched beside the body. She found herself smoothing his hair and pulled her hand away. It was impossible to understand what had happened to him. He was not old enough to die. He had not seemed ill. He had never complained.

  Li, Faradh and Og sat on their benches discussing the death, Li and Faradh saying it was a bad spirit on board, Og blaming the sea.

  ‘Shut up!’ Ussa wrapped her coat around her.

  It was snowing, big grey flakes that stuck to every surface of the boat.

  Og shook his head but after Ussa had barked at him he nodded slowly. His slave nod, as Rian had come to think of it, the one he used to obey Ussa, the one that expressed all the shame of his position. Rian hated that nod.

  Li and Faradh came and stood looking between Rian and the boy. Ussa turned her back on them and went to lie back down on her bunk. Toma touched Rian on her arm and indicated she should return to sleeping. Then he and Og took one end each of the boy’s small body and hauled it out and back to the stern. There was a scuffling noise and then a splash.

  Toma’s voice wove another of his strange songs. He did not return under the shelter but stood alone at the tiller.

  Og came back frowning, and tossed a bundle of snowy clothes at Li before retreating to his bunk where he lay, face hidden, legs bunched up to his chest.

  Why had Callum died? Why had Death chosen him of all of them? Danuta would have known, would perhaps even have seen it coming and healed the boy. Had the sea spirit taken him? Was this the way of this place? Was a person’s soul so vulnerable here that you could simply go to sleep and never wake up? Were they going to be picked off and fed to the fish one by one? If so, who would be next?

  Perhaps because of the offering of Callum’s body to the ocean, the cloud lifted for a while that afternoon. Pytheas and Rian went out on deck. It was a raw day and the sail hung thick with frozen hoar frost. They sat on the narrow bench under the mast, but sitting proved too cold, so Pytheas got Rian pacing and chanting numbers to keep warm. Then he took to tracing out symbols in the snow along the gunnels and making Rian learn them – a sign for each number. He switched between fingers and signs until Rian could remember them all and repeat them back without faults. She was trying, but a meagre oatcake was not enough to keep her from shivering.

  Toma crouched by the tiller, chewing like a cow at its cud. He had his own supply of dried meat of some sort, which he did not share. It made his breath smell foul and by his mastication it was obvious that it was tough. Og told Rian that it was the skin of a whale and he chewed it to give himself the spark of the great sea spirit. When she looked at the skipper again, she saw that he was crying.

  Ice

  In the morning everything was frozen: the drinking water barrel, blankets, ropes, deck planks, benches, boots, coats, toes, fingers, tears. Even the sea.

  Faradh’s nose froze. He cried. He buried himself in his bedding roll. Li wrapped himself around him to try to keep him warm.

  Ussa strode the length of the boat wrapped in her polar bear coat. She was a pacing fury. Sometimes Pytheas paced with her.

  Toma stood at the tiller, chewing. Periodically he said something. Rian heard him say it over and over, not knowing what it meant. He was saying it to Ussa and to Pytheas. Eventually he said it differently and something changed. Rian did not know what it was.

  Og said, ‘Thank the Mother.’

  Toma came and stood over her. She closed her eyes so as not to have to see him. But he tapped her on her shoulder. She looked through him, but his face was that of a seal and it drew her gaze. He was holding out a piece of the whale meat he chewed, offering it to her, and then he hummed, bringing his face close to her right shoulder so she could feel his breath on her neck. He hummed almost inaudibly into her ear the song he had sung to the whale. Staring at her, wild eyed. Tugging her out of herself.

  She reached a hand out from under her blanket and took the meat. She curled her fingers around it and closed her eyes again. Her hand retreated with its gift under the blanket. Toma gave an insistent poke. She resisted, then lifted her lids. He pointed out on deck, and then touched her lips with a feather touch. His eyes spoke. ‘Come.’

  Something in her decided to accept the challenge. She allowed him to pull the puppet inside her and to do his bidding. She was, after all, only a slave now.

  They were sailing towards the sun and the sea was milky. They were among an archipelago of ice islands. Everyone was looking to the right. A white bear was ushering two cubs away across the ice, looking over her shoulder at the boat and striding purposefully away, her two followers scampering to keep up. At the edge of the floe she poured herself into the water and the cubs splashed in after her. She let them climb onto her back and swam off. Before long she was swallowed into the seascape, a blur, a dot, gone.

  Rian’s attention returned to the ice. Near to the water line it was translucent blue. The pieces ranged in size from large plates to small islands. They were all, subtly, in motion, a teeming yet inanimate hoard in a bath of jade green sea.

  A seal with a frozen moustache lying on one of the ice slabs regarded them with curiosity but no fear. Another, closer, slid into the sea. Two kittiwakes flew by, tilting sideways to get a better view of them.

  The boat nudged its way though slush and Toma began to sing the free spirit song. Rian joined in and let her voice escape out over the freezing ocean.

  Ahead of them a sea spirit with a single-horned head lifted from the water, puffed and rolled back under, showing them the way. Toma had taken over the tiller from Li, who moved between the ropes, tightening, slackening, keeping the sail taut with the breeze behind them. It seemed to be helping. Li did not sing, but he pointed to the water where the creature had been and breathed its name. ‘Narwhal.’

  Ussa did not sing either. She sat slumped in front of the sail, closed to the world.

  Pytheas perched at the prow, casting excited, if anxious, glances overboard. She could see him watching the ice, following slabs with his gaze as they approached and were gently shouldered aside by the boat like partners in a slow, elegant dance.

  Toma was focused not on the ice but on the water. She could tell from his singing that his attention was on the liquid flow, following it as if he had some extra sense none of the rest of them had guiding him between the ice, showing him the free passage, allowing him to detect liquid. She heard the fluid in his song and flowed with it, abandoning herself. She gave herself to her voice.

  Her voice trusted Toma.

  She could feel the ocean’s current barrelling under the boat. The slush scraped the hide, but stronger still was the water carrying them through. They rode the current and the wind’s hand thrust them along it.

  The ice wanted to trap them but the current and the wind wanted them to be free and for now, the ice spirit was on their side too, coursing along a
head of the boat, showing them the way. She sang to it and felt the thrum of its greeting in the timber below her feet. The whole boat was humming.

  The narwhal surfaced, its horn lifted in salute. Then it pierced the water ahead of them and sank below. Without warning they were out of the ice and back on water, and its motion was a jabble that tossed the boat from side to side uncomfortably, the sail slapping and flogging.

  Toma’s song stopped abruptly. Rian heard her own voice alone for a moment like a bird. It got out before she could stop it and it hung too long, echoing.

  Toma, Li, Faradh and Og reset the sail to ride the open sea.

  The new motion set the bilges slopping. They stank. Faradh was sea-sick and Og did not do a good job of clearing it up. Soon enough it would be her job again.

  Rian gave Faradh her remaining supply of lady’s mantle to stop his nausea. They had so little firewood left she couldn’t brew it up and suggested he chew it. He chewed, wincing at the taste, then threw it up.

  Perhaps she had lost the ability to heal. She stood by the mast, hanging onto a block she didn’t know the purpose of, trying and failing to understand what she had done to deserve all of this.

  Thule

  The cloud must have been thinning for a while. It was the change in the texture of the water that Rian first noticed. The slow swell lost its glassy sheen. It crumpled like cloth, as if an invisible hand were puckering it.

  Toma called to Li and Faradh and they roused themselves from their beds. He made them beat the sail with oars. They were showered with ice and cursed, then turned it into a game until a snarl from Toma finished it. Stumbling back to their benches under the shelter, they were stopped by a shout from Pytheas.

  ‘Look!’ He pointed before them to the prow and pushed past beyond the sail.

  Out of the thinning cloud, shapes loomed. There was a weird glow in the sky. Was it the sun?

  Pytheas called to Toma, ‘What do I see?’

  Rian put her back to the mast and looked out. There was land ahead.

  The calm was easing. A trickle of water murmured under the keel. The sail twitched and tensioned.

  It was like wakening from a dream.

  Unfolding out of the cloud was a coastline unlike any that could be real. The land was made of impossibly black rock. It smoked. Catching an acrid smell on the air, Rian breathed it in and understood that this was not the world. It must be some sort of nightmare and they had not woken at all.

  ‘Where is this?’ Pytheas asked.

  Nobody answered.

  Li, Faradh and Pytheas were all agog, standing forward up on the gunnel straps to see more.

  Toma caught Rian’s attention. ‘Ussa.’ He indicated she should go and rouse her.

  She ducked her head under the shelter. To the single word, ‘land’, both Ussa and Og reacted as if struck by some physical blow. Ussa jumped into motion, grabbing her white coat. Without bothering to tie her boots, she was up and out on deck. Og was a breath behind her.

  All on deck they stared at the impossible, furious, seething place.

  ‘Where is this?’ Pytheas asked again, but once more no-one seemed to hear his question. It was as if they were all made into statues by the sight ahead of them: the fuming, black slick where the sea touched whatever kind of land it was.

  The air smelled rotten and burnt. It reminded Rian of the smell of the forge, only darker, as if something foul were being created. She shuddered. Callum had died and now they were sailing beyond the edge. They had not even noticed themselves cross the threshold. There had been no membrane to pierce, just cloud. The sea had taken them too far. The sea had taken them beyond the edge of the world.

  Rian clutched a rope tied to a peg at the mast, as if it could attach her to reality. Why did no-one apart from her seem to want to go back?

  ‘Go back,’ said Og. ‘We should go back.’ He was kneeling, with one arm around the mast. Rian wasn’t sure if anyone else heard him.

  The sail snapped to life with a shower of ice flakes as the wind picked up a little more. Toma kept the boat a constant distance from the shore, not approaching, not backing off, just skirting along, watching what emerged as they picked up speed and the land flowed by. The cloud continued to lift. The black smoking sludge gave way to rock, spattered with orange and green, just like the lichened crags of home. A swirl of gulls suggested there was life here of some sort.

  As the cloud cleared, it revealed a mountain looming. At first it was a glow though drifts of mist, then more clearly a blaze, belching a torrent of filthy smoke into the sky.

  ‘Where is this?’ The question was more insistent.

  Rian let go of the rope and drifted back to the stern. Behind her back, her hands clutched the gunnel on the side of the boat away from the land. She leaned against it, wanting to be as far from this sight as possible, needing the support of something strong. The boat seemed impossibly flimsy compared to this vast rock dragon, breathing fire.

  Toma must finally have heard Pytheas. ‘Thule.’

  The Greek caught the word and span round to nod assent. ‘Thule,’ he repeated, awe in his voice. He went to his box and brought out a little bottle, poured a few drops of a liquid into the water. Rian heard him muttering in his own tongue, but most of it she didn’t catch or understand, until he turned, made a theatrical gesture at the smoking mountain and said clearly, ‘Of course. It is a volcano.’

  A skua flew so low over the boat Rian could see its eagle beak and yellow eye.

  Og ducked as it swooped over him. ‘Thule,’ he echoed, but in his voice it was a warning of something fearful, a naming of a disease, a death threat spoken and irredeemable. He crouched below the level of the rowlocks, hunched up with his head in his hands. ‘Go back. Please, let us go back.’

  But Toma showed no interest in retreating. They continued skirting the shore of this strange place. As the night drew in and stars began to pit the sky, the temperature plummeted. Rian felt her will leaving her as she grew colder. Og retreated to his corner. Their firewood supply was dwindling, but he lit a little fire to brew up a weak soup. Ussa and Toma consented for the slaves to be given an oatcake each. A line trailed behind the boat, baited, but the gulls showed no interest. No fish rose. The sea mocked them.

  Having cleared the sky, the wind faded away again and with it their motion ceased.

  Pytheas was enthralled by the hellish landmass and stood questioning Toma as dusk set the mountaintop to ever more terrifying proportions. He wanted to land but Toma said it was out of the question. So the Greek appealed to Ussa. What if the Walrus Mutterer was here? But she too was unwilling to set foot on the place, saying she could smell its evil.

  As night grew, molten metal, or some similarly fiery material, smeared down the mountain’s flank. The black land glowed in the dark.

  When they drifted closer, the temperature rose and a hissing sizzle became audible, presumably where the smoking material reached the sea. Toma ordered the slaves to the oars and they rowed, wearily, out to sea. Rian was glad to be making the monstrosity shrink, but her limbs were weak and the effort of trying to row in time with Og, Li and Faradh set pain running in her arms so they also seemed to be on fire. Sweat poured down her face, down her sides, down her chest, until she felt she might explode with the agony, or collapse.

  But it was Faradh who first lost control. His oar splashed. He lost the rhythm and then let go, slumping forward with a groan. Ussa grabbed him by the hair, tugged him to his knees and let fly with her whip. One stroke was enough to flatten him. In that one lash, Rian learned much about the woman. What drove her on, what fuelled her rage, what fed her talent for terrorising others was not strength or power. As the woman lifted her arm in its thick, polar bear pelt and raised the leather handle with its snaking sinew, her face traversed from the fire-spewing mountain to the flaccid sail and her eyes carried a light in them of a cornered pre
y. It was fear that Rian saw there. Ussa was afraid, not only of this island, if an island it was, but of anything in the world more powerful than her.

  Faradh, shielding his head with one arm, got to his knees, then took his place back on the bench behind Rian. They resumed rowing again until Toma’s call relieved them. They were empty anyway.

  The mountain had shrunk to a distant glow. Pytheas had not taken his eyes off it.

  When Rian stopped rowing and her breathing settled, her clothes were wringing with sweat. It took no time for shivering to begin, her teeth chattering. She tried to get to her feet but after all that work she was wobbly. She sat back on the bench, holding the oar, trembling. She had not known such intense weakness was possible.

  Pytheas was her rescuer.

  He gave her his coat, took her down to her bunk and wrapped her in a blanket.

  But the cold deepened, her trembling continued until he took her to his wider bunk and shared his body heat with her.

  She calmed eventually, warm enough to drift off into sleep.

  She woke in the darkness to his hands on her skin.

  And then he hurt her.

  And Rian understood what it meant to be a slave.

  SLAVERY

  After

  Rian crept back into her own bunk, rolled over to face away from the world and sunk into herself.

  Pytheas had done to her what was not his to do and now she was defiled.

  Her hand moved towards her crotch. She wanted to hold herself, to make herself whole again, but it was impossible. Ice gripped her fingers. She tucked them into her armpits, crossing her arms over her chest. She brought her knees up to her belly, moving with slow, barely noticeable shunts until she had pulled herself into smallness. Within her body, she continued to shrink away. She faded, withering like a flower does. Autumn came to her and she allowed it to take what it would. It wanted flesh, so she gave herself to it. She was only meat, only a body. She let herself be devoured.