Above them the sky blazed, strewn with lights. The old moon was sinking toward the horizon; the evening star burnt there already like a lamp at the doorway. Above, across the great sash of the sky, Raef recognized those Corban had called drifters, the big bright one, and the fainter, faster red one. Above them all was the net of stars.
Conn pointed; he said, “There’s the star Pap calls the blue sun.” He meant the bigger of the two drifters.
Raef said nothing; he knew Conn was straining to find something to say to him. He felt suddenly more lonely than he ever had. He got up and went wearily to find his cloak and lie down in the belly of the boat. Back there in the stern Conn sat by the steerboard, a vague dark shape.
He thought of what Gunnhild had said, that he was denying himself, making himself ordinary. He understood suddenly why everything seemed so simple to Conn. He lay down in the boat and the weariness dragged him down into sleep. Half in dream, he said, “Well, it isn’t worth it anyway, if I can’t fly.”
“What?” Conn said, startled, but Raef was gone into sleep.
C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N
When Hakon’s men dragged Corban out of Gunnhild’s hall at Hrafnsbeck, they took him out to the little jut of land where the old stone tower stood. One in front and one behind, they pushed him up a narrow ladder tilted against the wall of the tower and threw him into the little round room at the top. On his knees, he heard the bar slam down across the outside of the door; he got quickly to his feet, looking around.
The space shrank down around him. The room was made of fitted stones, with a wide window on the wall opposite the door, which faced the lake and the head of the fjord here. It was a watchtower, he thought, very old. Broken wood and barrels cluttered it, a table, oars, a heap of something like rotten cloth. The floor was sound, but the last sun shone in through slates missing in the tilted roof. He went to the window and leaned on the broad sill and looked out.
Too far to jump. Below him, the brown stalks of the wintery marsh spread out into the margin of the lake. This was the largest of the chain of lakes that led to Hedeby, and here at its top the river ran in from the sea; directly before him he could see easily across to the far shore, another swamp, backed by low woods. A sail slipped by, going to Hedeby.
A black despair fell over him. His head began to pound, his stomach hurt, his arms and legs throbbed where they had kicked and beaten him. He turned back into the room. On the battered tipping table stood an empty jug with a crack in it. There were some broken benches and stools. The pile of moldering cloth was a sail thrown over some old fishnets. He went back to the window. The sun was going down, but he could not see it, no matter how far he leaned out the window, only the spreading cherry glow of its failing light.
The silence pressed in on him. The day faded around him. He could hear bats, fluttering and twittering under the eave of the roof over his head; now they began swooping away into the air before his window like a flock of winged rats. He looked out across the marsh to the uneasy water of the lake, gleaming in flashes and sparkles under the light of the rising moon. Slowly he became aware, close beside him, of a weightless pressure against his shoulder, a steady warmth.
His heart leapt. He was not alone. He had Benna.
He yearned toward her, his mind aching, struggling to bring her closer, to see her, to hear her voice, to touch her, to hold her.
He leaned on the windowsill, his face bathed in the icy air of the night. He would make her appear. He would think her into this world. Carefully he remembered the shape of every finger and every toe, and the curve of her calf against his palm, and the arch of her hip, remembered every inch of her, all over. He remembered how she smelled, how she laughed, how she made faces when she drew, as if she turned into different people.
He began to remember every day they had spent together.
He thought of when they first came to the island. Ulf had brought them across the sea from Hedeby; they were lucky and the weather was mostly fair, and they made a good crossing. Later they would come to realize how rare that had been: Going west was much harder than going east. They had come down the coast from where they first made landfall, looking for some place sheltered, some place safe.
When they first sailed into the great bay with its flock of islands, there had been smokes rising all around, and Ulf had wanted to go on, get away from any other people. But Corban had seen no smoke coming from the big island, and he liked the looks of it, with its southern beaches and thick stands of trees. Mostly he was tired of being on the ship, and the baby and the women were doing poorly, and he had Ulf put them down on the southern end of it.
Ulf stayed only a few days, left them some stores and some tools, and went back east again, promising to come again in the spring. Corban and Benna and his sister made a shelter of stones and driftwood, wadding turf into the chinks. Raef was then a tiny baby, colicky and fretful, with a yellow tinge to his eyes and a thin desperate wail. Mav nursed him, but her milk seemed only to make him cry more. Benna chewed up bread and dried meat for him from their diminishing store; more and more she took over mothering him as Mav wandered off into the forest like a wolf.
The great waterland around them teemed with food. They fished in the bay and found clams and crabs, he hunted deer and learned to catch smaller, stranger animals, and Mav showed them other things to eat, mushrooms and berries, rose hips, ferns, nuts, seaweed.
Raef grew, even if he seemed to throw up everything he was fed. They set about expanding the shelter by digging out the bank behind it and piling sod against the outside.
After they had been there only a little while, the forest began to turn color. He had seen trees change their leaves before but never in such masses, in such vivid color, extreme as everything else in this country. From the height of the island he and Benna sat looking out over the broad mainland just to the east, a great wind-rumpled carpet of a thousand shades of reds and yellows, oranges and rusts, sweeping away toward the horizon, the forest shouting at him in a language of colors. At night now the air bit. He sensed the winter like some great force accumulating just over the northern horizon.
The other people who lived around the bay, whom they saw now and again at a distance, and whose main villages Corban had carefully noted in his mind, were moving away. Fewer smokes rose every day from their villages, and finally they were gone. The blaze of the forest faded, and the leaves fluttered down, like a warning he had no idea how to read.
Then one day Mav came in, saying, over and over, “Snow. Snow.” She led them to gather firewood and they filled up the shelter with it, and then the storm struck, a swirling onslaught of snow and wind that seemed to suck them out of the world and into a great dark gray howling nothing. They had almost no food; he sat desperately in the half-dark by the little fire struggling to make willow boughs into webs for his feet so that he could get around in the snow, while the baby cried endlessly and the two women cooked old bones over and over for soup and measured out the last handful of berries one at a time. After five days the storm screamed itself out and he dug a way up to the surface of the snow, and he and Mav went off into the forest. The foot-webs he had strapped to his feet kept falling apart, and he had to stop and bind them up again with freezing blue-tipped hands, his teeth chattering, while Mav glided over the snow on the perfect hoops she had made, and hardly looked cold.
She took him deep into the woods, to a place where the wind had blown snow in a twenty-foot drift against the sheltered side of a hill. From the top of the hill he looked down into the hollow between the drift and the slope of the hill, and imprisoned in this snowy bowl were three does.
He used his sling and his knife and a club of wood to kill one; he hauled all the pine boughs and bark he could gather to feed the others, coming back faithfully day after day, keeping them fat until he needed them. The deer meat sustained them all the rest of the winter, through three more storms, and a bitter cold that cracked the rocks of their shelter. By the beginning of spri
ng, Benna was heavy with their baby.
Conn, born when the sun was warm and bright, when the trees burst with green, and everything smelled of growing: born to be always happy. Soon after, Ulf sailed up, talking of an awful trip, men swept overboard, howling cold winds and rain.
He helped them move their camp up from the southern rim of the island to the northern end, where Corban had found a cove to shelter a boat, and a rock to back his house up to. With Ulf’s crew helping, he dug out the foundation of his new house and set the corner posts. When Ulf left, too soon, Corban went doggedly at it by himself, the women always busy with the babies, built strong walls of withy, an inside and an outside, and stuffed the space between with sod. And all the while, furiously, they stowed away food for the winter.
He had been always hungry, those early years. He was hungry now, in the tower at Hrafnsbeck; Hakon had said he would not feed him.
He thought about kneeling behind Benna in the old rock shelter and holding her with his arms around her, and Mav between her knees, taking the baby in her long hands, wet and slick, dark hair plastered against his skull, erupting in a yell of rage. They had burst out laughing, all three of them, held him and each other and laughed and laughed, while Raef watched them glumly from one side, little scrawny yellow-haired boy.
Out there now, in the dark, he saw ships slipping away down the river—dragons, which could be warships. He wondered if Sweyn and Palnatoki had escaped from Bluetooth’s plot. He wondered which of the Haralds Hakon would end up fighting, and who would win. He had no view of the hall of Hrafnsbeck; he saw nothing of those who guarded him—if anybody. They could have simply locked him up here and left him.
Benna nudged him, a tingle in his mind. She wanted more of the island.
He was tired, and hurt all over; he leaned on the windowsill. Out in the black night sky in the swarm of the stars he could see two of the drifters very close together, and about to overtake the nimbus of light he thought of as the star net. His throat was aching with thirst. Soon he would be on the same side of death as she was, and then they would be together forever. But now he had to sleep. He dragged the mound of sail and netting around until it made a bed, spread his red and blue cloak on it, and lay down.
He slept fitfully. She seemed there, and not there. Over and over he dreamt of waking and finding her gone, a devastating aloneness. As the night wore on he was burning with thirst, his belly grating with hunger. He wondered how long it would take him to die.
When at last he stirred into daylight, he found three big pieces of bread on the floor by the bed, and a jug half full of water.
He gulped the water down. “Thank you,” he said, “thank you,” and beside him invisibly she smiled, like a little sun back there, and laid her hand on him; he felt every touch like a quickening in his skin.
Thereafter, he spent every day thinking about the island, and every night as he slept she brought him food, apples and bread and cheese, a whole braid of onions once, and now and then a cup of milk. The winter shut down over him The bats went away and did not come back. Snow fell, and blew in through the holes in the roof, and he gathered it into the old jug and had more water. He pulled all the broken wood into the bad side of the room, under the holes in the roof. No one from outside the tower ever came to see what was going on with him. He tried making a rope of the old nets, but the first knot came apart in his hands in clots of dust. He walked around and around the room, restless and bored.
“Find a key,” he said to her, in the dream, the only time he could see her. She shook her head: There was no key. She pushed at the door and shrugged.
One night in the dream she came to him very excited and tried to tell him something.
He could not hear her; he could never hear her. She frowned at him, and he apologized. She went away and came back with a piece of wood and a charred stick, and she began to draw.
He went close beside her, to see what she made. Under her hand the images spilled out flawlessly, and so fast they seemed to move.
He saw the hall, as he remembered it, with the great front door wide open, and the huge overhang of the roof. Then he saw the inside of the hall, three or four men sitting around a table dicing, drinking, a fire crackling behind them. One of the men had already fallen asleep, his head on the table. He saw how she was able to find food; the table was covered with scraps.
She rapped him sharply. Pay attention, he knew she was thinking.
She drew the men getting up now, going, walking out, and other men coming in. These new men all wore the same coat, red with a big bird sketched on it. After them came a tall man, lanky, with a gaunt righteous face, dressed in a long white robe.
“The Bishop,” he said. “Bishop Poppo.”
Benna smiled at him, and put away the wood and the bit of charcoal. A moment later he woke up.
He went to the window and looked out; the far shore was white under new snow, the air biting, the lake spangled with whitecaps. He thought about Poppo suddenly appearing here. He had been deep into the memories, and the world outside had fallen away, but now here it was back again. He beat his fists on the windowsill, longing to get out; it was long before he could turn away from the open air, to eat the food she had brought, and feed her with memories.
He gave her memories of the island, of the deep summer nights when fiery bugs twinkled under the trees and the children bundled themselves into their parents’ laps and even Mav came down to listen, and she told them all story after story, some she remembered and some she made up, of terrible evil giants and bold great-hearted heroes and magical cities full of marvels, cities called Jorvik and Hedeby.
He had said, “I don’t remember it was that good.”
She had laughed, and leaned on him, as she did now, pretending to need his strength. “Oh, well, I wish it had been, and now I can make it so.”
Then, the next night, just before he fell asleep, he heard footsteps thump on the wooden wharf, outside below the window.
He got up and went to the window. Down below him, on the wharf, stood several men, all staring fixedly out toward the water; one was holding up a lantern. Out on the lake, a ship rowed swiftly toward them.
This startled him. He watched ships go up and down the lake every day, but none had ever stopped here before, certainly not at night. He watched the men tie the ship quickly to the wharf, and then in a crowd they all went up to the hall, the men from the ship, the men with the lantern, and as they went by close under his tower the lantern light showed on their red coats, the black birds spread out on the breast.
He went straight back to his bed and lay down, his heart thumping, trying to force himself into sleep. He lay rigid there what seemed the whole night, desperate to sleep, until, once again, feet boomed on the wharf below the window.
He sprang up again. From the window he watched men in red shirts troop away down the wharf to the ship, bundle themselves in, and quickly row off toward the river to the sea.
He went back to his bed and lay down, and now with morning on him he did sleep, but he did not dream.
All the next day he paced up and down the room, trying to settle himself. He struggled to find the flow of memory, but only bad things came to him, their two little winter boys, Finn and Cu1m, who died at the breast, one year after the other, in the starvation time of the early spring. He shrank from that, afraid to hurt her, but she nudged him, when he thought that; she wanted that, too. He was gathering himself for that when he heard something at the door.
He turned, surprised. Someone was wrenching at the bar on the door, trying to get it open. A voice reached him through the cracking door. “It’s been two- solid months, no food, no water, he won’t even stink anymore.” Then the door burst open, and several men pushed in.
He stood where he was, by the window, watching them. They goggled at him. Three he had never seen before but one he recognized, from the crowd that had dragged him here: the hall porter, who had just spoken.
Leaping into the room, the
porter skidded to a stop. His eyes bulged from his head, and he let out a rip of a scream.
“It’s him! He’s alive!”
The man behind him muttered an oath in some other language. He gave Corban a single hard white-eyed look and tramped into the room, looking all around, one hand on the hilt of his sword, as if something might leap on him from the jumble of broken furniture. He wore a fancy coat with the emblem Benna had drawn, a black eagle on a red ground. The other men huddled by the door, ready to flee. The man in the red coat went to the window and looked out, and wheeled around toward Corban.
“You are Corban? You have been here all this time?”
Corban nodded.
“Who fed you? Who’s been helping you?” The man in the red coat had a thick accent. Corban smiled at him, seeing no reason to answer. The German captain glared at him, then turned to the others and rattled off a string of orders. The other men bolted away out the door, leaving it swinging wide; Corban could see the top of the ladder rattling against the little landing there as they scurried down to the ground.
The man in the red coat said, “So. You are some kind of wizard, you want me to believe. You keep yourself alive perhaps on the gleanings of blackbirds.”
Corban said, “I don’t care what you believe,” but his voice had gone unused for so long the words croaked out almost inaudibly. He shook his head. The jug was standing on a piece of wood he used for a table, and he picked it up and took a drink from it.
The German jumped toward him, grabbed the jug, and looked into it. He tipped it and let some of the rainwater pour out into his hand, and sniffed the little puddle on his palm. He gave Corban a wild look. “Witch-wine?” Corban laughed, shaking his head, his voice useless, and the German already too far gone into what he thought he knew. Then someone was scrambling up the ladder again.
“His Eminence says to bring him down. Right away, he says.”
The German lowered the jug and faced Corban. “Do I have to force you?” he said. His voice quivered.
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