The Soul Thief

by Cecelia Holland

  The glen opened up before him. The smoke rose from the house, from the byre, from the cookhouse, black billows of smoke blown down low by the wind. As he ran he saw people scurrying across the open ground between the buildings and the home pasture. Beyond the drifting smoke, through it, he could see the dragon-headed ships drawn up along the beach.

  He screamed. He stretched his legs to giant strides, hurtling down the path. Now among the rushing and scurrying of the people he could see bodies sprawled on the ground, and heard shouts and shrieks. He rushed down the last stretch of the path to the back of the farm, past the midden heap, toward the blazing pigsty and the byre.

  They were driving off the cattle. Already most of the herd was shuffling away down toward the beach. Just past the byre he came on a big man with a long braided beard waving a stick at a brindle cow and her calf, and Corban without pausing in his long strides leapt on him from the side.

  The bearded man went down under him with a yell. Corban hit the ground so hard all the breath left him. He clutched at the body under him, struggling to get air. The man under him roared, and rolled over, throwing him off.

  Corban scrambled away; he looked around quickly and saw, surprised, that he and this other were the only people he could see. Somewhere though, a woman was screaming. Flame crackled. The bearded man raised his stick and came at him.

  Corban dodged, all his hair standing up on end. He stooped, groping over the ground, and felt a rock under one hand, and leapt up, breathless, just as the other man swung his stick. The blow struck him glancing on the shoulder but still knocked him to his knees. The bearded man let out a howl of triumph. Swung the long stick high. Corban reeled away from the stroke, snatching the sling from his belt, but he had no chance to load the stone. The stick cracked him across the head and he went down cold.

  He woke in the dark, and thought he was blind.

  He blinked. For a moment he had no memory. He could smell smoke, and he pushed himself up on his arms and looked around, and saw it was night, deep in the night. His head hurt. Above him, above the stone wall of the cattle byre, the thatch was gone; he saw the rough line of the top of the wall against a strange red haze in the dark.

  He leapt up, all his memory flooding back, the smoke, the bearded man, the ships on the beach. He screamed, “Mav!” His heart thundered under his ribs, painfully hard.

  Standing, he could see past the stone wall of the byre. The house beyond was mostly gone now, the fire low and crackling along the last of the walls, casting up a red blur into the air. He blinked again, looking around him. The brindle cow and her calf were gone, the bearded man was gone.

  He groaned. His belly heaved, and his legs sagged at the knees. “Mav!” He staggered out toward the fire.

  The light grew stronger as he passed the byre wall. The whole of the long meadow down to the sea was filled with a faint orange flicker of light from the burning house. He saw a dark shape stretched on the ground and went down and knelt by it, and put a hand on it, and saw it was one of the bondsmen. His head was smashed in, his brains like a red pudding on the ground. Corban was sick to his stomach; he lurched off away from the body and threw up.

  From there he saw another, right in front of the doorway to the house—what had been the doorway to the house—and that one he knew at once. His knees gave out and he fell. He stood and staggered over and fell again to his knees by his father, but he dared not touch him.

  He should have come, she was right, he should have come down. His father lay with his face turned away, the harsh line of cheekbone and jaw fuzzy with dried blood. Corban sobbed; his eyes stung from the smoke. He croaked out something, a call to God, and shut his lips again. God had not saved his father. He shambled off toward the next dead, two more of the bondsmen, sprawled in a heap.

  He straightened. The dawn was coming, the sky turning paler. He screamed, “Mav!” and there was no answer.

  He wheeled around, looking for the others. His mother, his grandmother, his sisters, his brother Finn. He went from one heaped corpse to the next, rushing back and forth across the meadow. Too few.

  At first he found mostly the bondsmen: they would have come out to defend the farm. Then where the edge of the pasture ridged out over the sloping sandy beach, out in front of them all, he came on his brother, lying sprawled face down with a club still in his hands, his back carved open in a great red wound.

  “Finn.”

  He had fought them, his brother, slight and young, always praying. It seemed he had led the fight. Corban’s chest throbbed, some hard hot lump lodged in his chest refusing to come up or go down; he stood beside his brother a long while. Better to have died so than be Corban now, he thought, and the great lump in his chest choked off his breath.

  He drew back from Finn, his heart pounding, afraid. He had seen no sign of his mother. He stumbled on, following the trampled bloody trail down onto the beach. He remembered seeing the ships drawn up on the beach; now they were gone, even the family’s fishing boats were gone. Along the sea’s edge were heaps of bones, and piles of guts and heads and hoofs, slick drying puddles of blood. They had slaughtered the cattle here. The stench made him gag; his legs wobbled. Beyond the slaughterground a row of black buzzards flapped and lumbered awkwardly away from him down the beach, too heavy with feasting to fly.

  His heart clenched in his chest. Ahead he saw a woman’s shape, but it was his mother’s old spinning woman, crumpled on the grass. Nearer the water lay a baby, its head horribly flattened. By the very edge of the waves he found his little sister, four years old. Her eyes were open. Her hair floated on the little lapping waves. There was a horrible wound in her chest, a gash that seemed bigger than she was, a great mouth come out of the sea to eat her up. He sank over her, rocking back and forth, gasping for air again. His hands moved over her, not touching, as if he could somehow smooth together the hole in her chest.

  Mav.

  He stood. He turned and looked back at the burning house. His heart was a drum, a thunder in his ears. This girl, and the old woman, the baby—where were the other women? He bent to gather the little girl up in his arms and trudged up toward the house again.

  The day was breaking over him, clear and cool. Going back up he saw now the tracks where the old woman had been dragged along—that was why they had killed her, he thought in a flash, because she was too weak to keep up. Why they had killed the baby, and this child in his arms. They wanted strong young people. Strong young women. Mav. His legs wobbled. He went on back toward the house, and laid down his little sister in the dooryard where his father lay. Grimly he went around between the house and the cookhouse, and there at last he found his mother, crumpled in a heap near the cookhouse door.

  He lifted her in his arms; she was stiffening, her hands flexed like claws. She had fought them, then, like Finn. No use, but she had fought them. A surge of pride struck him unawares, that his family should have struggled so against their doom. He took her to his father, lying before his doorstep, and laid her down beside him. Tears streamed down his face. He tried to say words but nothing would come. His mouth worked, but his mind was empty. He buried his face in his hands.

  He thought of Mav. He knew she was taken. He went back down to the sea’s edge, where the surf broke, and stretched his gaze out across the water, as if she might have left a track on the waves. The water rose and fell away from him. Before he realized it he had walked out into the waves, into the sea, reaching with his gaze as far as he could over the water. Toward the horizon, where they had taken her.

  The sea lifted him, as if it would carry him away after her.

  He shivered in the cold. He backed away, back up onto the beach. In his mind he heard her calling out to him. He knew she was alive, that she was out there, somewhere.

  He should have come back with her. He bent his head and wept.

  The rest of the day he gathered them up, all the dead, and laid them in the dooryard around his father. He could not bury them, there were too many of them
. It cost him all his strength to drag them, cold and stiff, some from the far edge of the meadow. Overhead, ravens and buzzards circled and he kept them up there with his sling. Off by the edge of the meadow, he saw a long grey shape skulking, too far away to shoot.

  The raiders had left one of the pigs in the sty, where it had burned along with the buildings, so Corban ate of fine roast pork all day long. But it choked him to swallow the flesh.

  All the while, he thought of what he could do to find Mav, and by afternoon he had resolved to go to a place called the Black Pond, which was down on the coast a little, on a river there. He knew that the foreigners kept a market there and perhaps the men who had done this would take what they had stolen there, to sell.

  He thought he might also find the men who had done this. What he could do then he had no way to know. He bundled up all his rage and hate and stuffed it away in a black corner of his mind, down out of reach.

  He went all over the farm, making sure he had discovered everybody. By the ruined byre he caught sight of another wolf, slinking into the brush behind the midden, and back by the field of corpses the birds were lighting on the ground. The wolves and buzzards would get them all in the end, anyway. His mind was clogged, he could feel nothing, think nothing, and he was weary to his bones.

  When he had at last done, and all his people were gathered in the dooryard, he stood there, and thought he should say something over them. He had lost all sense of them as horrible, from the custom of handling them, and now saw them as the people they had been, and still were, for a little while, in some way. Many still had their eyes open, which made it seem all the more that they lived, inside: some little warm life still there, inside. Others lay in strange poses, curled up, or stretched sideways, one arm awkwardly out, clutching the air. The smell of them made him sick to his stomach.

  He had to get out of here, out of this place of death, where he couldn’t even breathe. When he left, he knew, the scavengers would come, and tear them apart.

  Now suddenly words leapt from his tongue.

  “I can’t help you any more than this. I’m sorry I was not here to die with you, but I shall find Mav.” He was weeping again, like a woman, he felt himself pitiful and frail, useless in this huge task before him, and yet he dared not turn from it, because what else could he do? He stretched his hands out toward them. “Good-bye. Good-bye.”

  He turned, and made ready to go. He had put some of the roasted pig into a sack, and he slung that on his shoulder. He found a stout stick to lean on. He filled his waterskin with water, took the stick, and walked across the farm, weeping as he walked.

  He went down along the seam between the pasture and the sandy beach, and crossed the little stream that ran down to the sea. On the far bank he climbed up the narrow path to the top of the sea cliff. There he looked ahead and saw the land rolling away before him, vanishing into the haze of the distance, and he quailed from it.

  As he stood there, unsure how to go on, he realized he was not alone after all.

  They had all come with him. He saw nothing, and yet he sensed them all around him. They spoke, their voices jumbled, complaining, reproachful, and sad. They tugged on his arm, and poked him, they breathed down his neck and draped themselves across his shoulder. They made the air thick, so that he went along stiff-legged, his hair on end. He heard the deep rumble of his father’s voice; and his mother’s sigh; and low and terrible, the baby’s hopeless wailing; and all the while, the many others, muttering and weeping and trudging along with him. He went forward as stiff as wood, his breath stuck like a fire in his throat.

  So he traveled in a great cloud of souls along the top of the cliff, where the path ran bare as a scar through the high yellow grass all bent down by the harsh wind off the sea. But as he went along, he realized that those around him were becoming fewer, their voices hushed. They touched him less and less. One by one they were falling behind, going back to the farm again.

  Now he was afraid of losing them. He began to listen for them, as the voices died away. In the thinning braid of their voices he could no longer find the baby’s crying, and then his little sister was gone, then Finn and his mother, until at last he heard only his father, and that fainter and more seldom. Corban crept along the path, bent under the weight of this, his ears straining, until he had gone a long, long way and heard nothing.

  Then he sat down by the road and wept again, until his eyes were dry. He sat slumped by the road, his hands dangling over his knees. He felt thin and flat as a winding sheet. He had thought he was alone before, he had thought he was no part of them, but he had always been part of them, he had measured himself against them, needed them always to set himself against. Now he knew better, too late now he knew what it meant to be alone.

  His head hurt where the stick had struck him. His belly churned. His feet were sore already. The ordinary world settled down around him, the twittering of birds, the long grass bending and hissing under the wind. The sky was enormous, stippled with thin cloud, traced with long-gliding gulls. He had thought two nights before that he might leave them. He remembered that with an agony like a white-hot iron through his mind. He had brought this on himself. He had made this happen. Grimly he rose, and put his legs under him, and set off down the road to find his sister.

  Mav thought she might die; she might float up from her body and sail away across the stars, back to the farm. She had seen her father killed, her sister killed; shackled together with the other women, she had been flung down in the wooden belly of a ship. She had thought then of climbing up and throwing herself over the side of the ship, but the chains held her fast to the other women around her and she could not rise.

  Then they came quickly to some other place, and they were dragged off the ship and thrown down on the sand, and all the men made use of them. The men made a big fire somewhere near and roasted meat and drank and all the while one after another they had the women. Mav lay still, her eyes shut, while they hollowed her out like a hole in the ground.

  The woman next to her was from the farm; once, as they lay there, somehow, her head turned, their eyes met, and she saw death there, in her bondswoman’s eyes. A moment later they dragged her body away.

  She stared up at the sun, then the moon, then the sun again. More women came, from other places. “Our men will come,” one shouted, over and over. Mav lay still, thinking: All our men are dead.

  When she thought of her mother and father, her sister and her brothers, from deep in her belly a wave of such feeling rose into her head and her eyes and her mouth that would drown her if she let it break.

  She could die, somehow, and be safe from this. She knew if she lived on, that worse would come, that her soul might die, wink out like a candle in the rain.

  “Our men will come—”

  Dead. All but one. She kept her eyes shut, and thought of her brother Corban, and her ruined body throbbed, quickening again.

  Around her as her senses sharpened she could make out the other women, groaning and crying, some of them, but many only lying there on the rocky shore. She felt them around her and in her, all their terrors and pain, and gritted her teeth. It was too much, it was too hard. She would die. She saw her mother and her father hovering around her, and talked to them, and saw her brother Finn smiling at her, although he was dead, and the stars shone through him.

  Farther away, she saw her brother Corban, coming toward her.

  “Worthless boy,” her father said.

  No. He was still there, he was coming after her. No, she said, to the starry sky. Her father floated around her, her mother, summoning her. She could go back to them, to the farm.

  “Damn Corban,” her father said. “No son of mine.”

  No. She saw Corban coming after her. She saw him stagger on the long road.

  She forced herself back into her body, down into her fingers and toes, even into the bloody ruin of her woman’s place, which no man had known until so many of them did. She took up the pain, even the pain and
the fear of the other women. She would live. Corban was coming.

  Beside her someone was weeping, low and wretched. She turned, as much as she could with the ropes around her, and moved her arm and touched the unseen, unknown girl there. That girl jumped, afraid. Mav whispered, “I am here.” At the sound of her voice the girl stilled, and crept a little toward her, and Mav slid her bound arm around her and comforted her. “I am here,” she said, into the girl’s filthy, sea-smelling hair. “I am here.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wrapped in his cloak, Corban slept that night at the foot of an ancient stone standing beside the road; in the morning he lay snug in the warmth of the cloak and could not make himself rise. There seemed no reason to do anything at all. A heaviness lay on him like the shadow of the stone. Some vague dream pricked at his memory, of being helpless among great birds who stabbed him with their beaks. Above him the sky stretched enormous and empty to nowhere.

  Eventually he got up because he was hungry. With his sling ready he went along the road south, watching for hares and birds. The road led through bracken and forest, bracken and forest, endlessly over the low rolling hills; he walked and walked but never seemed to get anywhere. He thought of Mav, as she had looked the last time he saw her, with the wind blowing her hair back. The rush of memory gripped him; there seemed so much behind him, and yet nothing in front of him.

  When he came to the Black Pond, if she was not there, what then? He would have walked all this way for nothing. He began to calculate when he could give up searching without feeling bad. Nobody would know, if he gave up. There was nobody now to tell him what to do. Nobody who cared what he did. Nothing he did was going to matter anyway.

  In his mind, he saw her, with the wind blowing her hair back, staring out to sea, waiting. He realized he had come to a stop, he was standing in the middle of the road, staring away into the empty air.