The Soul Thief

by Cecelia Holland

  “Well?” said Grod, impatiently. “Do you want to go to England or not? That’s the way to Jorvik, you know. First you have to go to England.”

  Corban stared at him. Mav might be in Jorvik. He did want to go to England, or he had, before he got this handful of silver, which now suddenly seemed larger and brighter than anything else, and more of it for the having, if he went after Einar.

  “Who are you?” he asked the old man.

  “My name’s Grod. I found a boat leaving for England, and you can get on it, if you want.” His eyes flicked down Corban’s fist. “You could give me a little of that, too, for doing so. If you want.”

  Corban closed his fist tighter on the silver. He turned and looked after Einar, walking away down the slope toward the river. Then he turned to Grod.

  “How?” he said. “What is this, I might go to England?”

  “That merchant boat, down at the wharf. It’s leaving tonight, when the tide goes out, and they need rowers. He came up to the gate, to see if we knew anybody—I thought about you. He will take you to the other side of the sea if you row.”

  Corban grunted at him. England was far away. Mav might not even be there. He felt the silver in his hand, safe in his hand.

  His mind divided; one half of him stood there, wanting not to go to England, but to stay here, where so much was going well, and the other half stepped back, and saw himself in the grip of the silver.

  That pushed him along, recoiling at that, to be under anything. He nodded to Grod. “Take me to the boat.”

  “Good.” The bald man led him away. His head turned, looking over his shoulder, not into Corban’s face but at his fist. “Are you going to give me some of that?”

  Corban laughed. The silver felt warm in his hand. He began to think where he might hide it, to protect it. With some difficulty he pulled his mind from the contemplation of it and thought of England, and Mav.

  He remembered his sister, the last time he had seen her, as she had told him she would bring him home. He thought how she would think of him, if she knew he stopped looking for her.

  He and Grod were walking down toward the wharf, now, and he heard the loud voices ahead of him, speaking nothing he understood. He drew in a deep breath. In England they would all speak that other tongue. If he was going to look for Mav, he had to have help.

  He said, “Grod, have you been to England?”

  “Oh, yes,” Grod said. “I have been everywhere.” His eyes followed Corban’s fist with the silver. “I’m not Irish, you know.”

  Corban laughed again. He felt the tug of the silver’s power over him and knew Grod felt that too. He said, “I will give you all this silver.”

  “Ah!”

  “But you must come with me to England.”

  Grod’s bald head wrinkled; he tore his gaze from Corban’s fist and looked up into his face. “What?”

  “As I said. I need you to come to England with me, and help me find my sister.” He stopped; they were nearly to the wharf again, where men were carrying folded hides, stiff as planks, into the round wooden belly of the boat. Already the space there was stuffed with goods. His boat, he guessed. He faced Grod, opened his hand, and held it out to him.

  Grod’s face flushed. He reached for the silver, and Corban closed his hand again. “When we find my sister.”

  Grod snorted at him. “She may be dead. We may never find her.”

  “In England, then. When we reach Jorvik, and you have helped me look.”

  Grod’s mouth worked. His eyes looked past Corban, seeing someone else. Somewhere else. He nodded abruptly.

  “I will take you to Jorvik. Then you give me the silver.” He pulled his cloak up over his shoulder. His mouth curled. “I have been here long enough, I will go to Jorvik gladly, and then maybe I will go home again, who knows?”

  “Good,” Corban said, and opened his hand and took two of the silver bits and handed them to him. Grod seized them, and smiled; he had a wide mouth that smiled like a snake.

  “Jorvik,” he said again, and tucked the silver away in his shirt.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mav felt stretched out long and thin; it seemed to her that she was leaving herself behind with every step, and yet she was going on, also, down the long road. They had come across the sea and now were walking, walking endlessly through fields, a forest of oaks, toward low, lumpy hills.

  They had been bundled along from place to place now so much she had lost track of the days and the places. Now they seemed to be in another country. Only three men guarded them. At first they kept the women tied together, a rope looped from neck to neck. The men rode horses and as they rode they whipped the women along with long switches of willow. At night they stopped by the rutted path, and the men gave them pieces of flat bread and let them pass a jug of water, and they slept together like eggs in a nest, curled up.

  They passed a few people on the road, who stared and whispered as they went by; Mav could see there was no hope of help from them, who didn’t even speak her language. During the first night, when she thought the men weren’t watching, she tried to untie the rope around her neck, but the knot was tight, and she could not wiggle the loop up over her head. The rope wore her neck sore. She saw that, too, on the other women, the red ring like a mark of their slavery, and her spirits sank as low as the road.

  They passed through a village, a string of huts with a squat mill at the edge of a river. The men on their horses, with their long willow switches, kept them moving at a quick pace along the little row of houses. A woman stood in her dooryard, but she turned her back rather than see them go by. With their switches the riders harried out of their way an old man hauling a load of sticks on his back. A child stared at her, as she walked along, but then its mother came and snatched it up and went inside.

  Passing by the mill, with its yard half-full of sacks, and the slow grinding of its turning wheel, she smelled the fresh flour and her stomach growled. Soon they were walking through the lonely countryside again, toward the hills.

  Two days later, in the distance, she saw smoke rising. As they drew closer the road swerved, and on her right hand, to the south, she could see a great hall behind a fence with other buildings around it, just a little walk off the road. Sheep dotted the rising green hillside beyond. That place seemed as good as home to her, but the men whipped them on with their switches and they did not stop.

  Now they were climbing the hills. The bread was stale, and they had to soak it in the water to make it soft enough to eat. They saw no more people on the road, and the men stopped tying the women together. That night, a tall skinny girl ran away.

  When the men woke, and discovered this, they cursed and beat the women who remained, and tied them together again. One stayed with them, and the other two on their horses went after the tall girl, and brought her back quickly enough. Then they laid her down on her back in front of the other women and possessed her, one after the other, over and over, until around Mav the bound women were sobbing and covering their faces and trying to turn away.

  Mav only shut her eyes. She could escape nothing. She knew not only the moaning women and the endless road, but all that lay behind them, the wild forest and the moors, and the sea that ringed it, as if her great floppy self reached all across the world. Voices sounded in her ears, speaking words she did not know, and wild singing, and screams and laughter, some in the distance and some right in her ears. She thought she had ripped, maybe when they raped her, and spilled herself out of her skin.

  She yearned for her home, but she saw the flames, she saw the dead, she knew she had nowhere to go back to. Only, ahead of her, she could make out nothing but a cold gray fog, into which she walked and walked.

  The men untied the women again, and drove them on. They straggled along the worn little path, one of the men leading the way and the other two coming after, with their willow sticks harrying anybody too weary and sick to keep up. The tall skinny girl stumbled along, her thighs streaming blood. Mav pu
t an arm around her waist and helped her walk. She could feel the girl shaking with every step.

  They trudged through the forest. At night they stopped and ate bread and crouched miserably around the fire trying to get warm. The men were tight with the bread, breaking the loaves into quarters, a piece for each of the women; the men themselves each ate a whole loaf.

  All day long they plodded along on the road. Mav had no trouble keeping up, and easily stayed close behind the lead rider, but when the other women began to fall behind, she slowed her steps, falling back among them, and the other women slowed even more, until the lead rider disappeared around the curve ahead of them, and the two men herding them along were yelling and whipping at all of them.

  Mav stopped. One of the men came up screaming at her to go on and lashing at her legs with his long willow wand, leaning awkwardly from his saddle. He was a boy, who always shouted; she knew he was lowly among them, and kept her eyes on the road, waiting. Soon the lead rider came galloping back around the curve, his cloak flying out behind him.

  The boy stopped yelling. His face was red, and he lowered his eyes and pulled his horse around and back. The rider galloped up and stopped. He glared at Mav and looked down the road again and bellowed a stream of words she did not bother to understand. She started forward again, swinging around his horse, and the other women with her; she took as easy a pace as she could keep step to.

  The women bunched behind her, murmuring. From horse to horse the men were shouting at each other over their heads. The lead rider swung around, and came close by her; he snarled something at her. She braced herself, knowing what was coming, and took the lash of his willow wand across her shoulders. She gathered the rags of her clothes around her and walked on. Soon the skinny girl was beside her again. Her thin hand crept into the curve of Mav’s arm.

  Walking, she felt herself enormous, reaching backward to the edge of the world, where in her mind she saw a little figure toiling along. That was Corban, her brother, she realized, with a gladness like a surge of warmth all through her body. That was where she was stretched to, wherever her brother was.

  She longed for him; she remembered what her mother had said once, that maybe in their shared womb some piece of him had grown in her by mistake, so that she had more of everything, and he had less. That explained why she longed so for him, even more than she mourned the rest of them dead, and why now everything seemed to whirl around her all in bits and shreds, nothing fitting together, nothing making sense.

  Always before, at her family’s home, she had known where she ended, but now she flowed everywhere, borderless. She was walking on this road, and at the same time she was creeping over the branches of trees, sprouting up through mold, she was whirling in the air like a blown leaf, she splashed over rocks, she ran crabwise under the curling edge of the sea, she buzzed in the hollows and soared over the sky.

  Her head whirled, lost in the middle of it all. There seemed so much more going on now, more all the time. She saw her mother, as she had been, an old woman, and also as a young wife, her belly round with her first baby. She saw her father laughing and her brother Finn trying to play the harp. They seemed around her and she called out to them but they never answered, they never noticed her, they floated away from her into the woods and disappeared. Then it seemed all around her was the deep fog that let no sun through, and clung cold and wet to her skin, and she longed to sink down and weep until she turned all her self into salt water.

  The road went over a little wooden bridge and the posts and planks of the bridge groaned and sighed under her feet, mourning the trees they had been once.

  She walked fast and then slow. The lead rider came back twice more and lashed her, to make her go faster, but she ignored him. The men gave them bread and now and again sips of water. They made a game of that, taunting the women with food and water, so that they had to beg. Mav would not do it; when they offered her food and then, laughing, pulled it away, she only shrugged and sat down.

  She found other things to eat, mushrooms and nuts, gathering them up as she went along. When she was thirsty, she turned off the little track they were following, cutting across the stony hillside, although the men came and tried to drive her back. The trees hampered them, and they and the other women came crying and complaining after her. Down in a gully she found a spring and drank, as did the others around her.

  The men watched from their horses but let them all drink their fill. That night they pulled her away, off behind the bushes, yanking her hair and rubbing themselves on her, and while they did as they pleased with her, she let her mind go into the fog, where she felt nothing. Afterward for a long while she felt as gray and blank as the fog, all through herself.

  Other times she walked along and saw the broad sky and the wide moor, all covered with heather, and some strange random joy took her like wings and her heart flew up. She sang, and strode along so fast she once found herself passing the lead rider, the women croaking after her to wait, to slow, and she all unheeding, singing at full voice.

  One day on the long declining side of the hills she felt the vast envelope of herself shaking and quivering and her belly rolled and she could smell rain in the wind. The wind was rising and the sky, although still blue, was beginning to go milky. She could sense in the air a great tightening and twisting, as if some tremendous force knotted up, ready to spring free. Then she turned and spread her arms, gathered them all, sweeping up the riders with her, led them all off into the bed of the river and found a place where a south-facing bank beetled over; the riders screamed and fussed and would not get down and crowd into shelter with them, but all the women did. Then the storm broke over them with the wild hammers banging and the laughter of the great smith and the howling of his dogs, and the huge lightning as if the air itself split apart; the bitter stench of lightning, the annihilating blasts of thunder like fists of air in her ears. And the horses reared and shrilled in terror, and the riders left their saddles and burrowed in among the women and they clutched one another and watched a tree across from them explode in a blinding white flame.

  Through sheets of rain they watched the tree blaze. The heat scalded her; she could feel the burning all through her, pure and wild. A moment later another terrific crack sounded above them and the whole world turned white. Mav with her arms around the skinny girl knew she was singing because she felt her lungs fill and empty but she could hear nothing. The lowly boy was next to her huddling against her and she put her arm around him too. The rain sluiced down over them. Whistling down, yet another great stroke of the hammer fell, a little farther on. The smith had pounded directly over them. She began to hear her own singing again, and she laughed, rejoicing, strained her voice, trying to outsing the wind. The skinny girl clutched her, laughing. They walked out of the shelter of the river bank and up to the road; half a tree was down across the road but they climbed over it and set off still to the east.

  The men looked for their horses all the rest of the day but could not find them. Thereafter they walked among the women, and everybody went at Mav’s pace. They had lost the bread, too, which the horses carried, so they chewed grass and drank water and starved.

  They walked out of the forest, and went down a long winding slope; they crossed another road, where stood a great wooden table, and on that table a whole feast was, but it was holy meat, food for the sky and the ravens, and no one dared to eat of it. They plodded along, too hungry even to speak anymore.

  But the next day they descended down onto the broad windy flatland along a river, and ahead they could see smoke in the air, a great smudge like a hundred cooking fires. The men began to yell, and walked around lashing at the women with sticks to keep them together. All day long they walked toward the smoke. By nightfall they could see ahead of them a great earthworks. Beyond it, Mav knew, lay a thick clot of buildings, larger than any farm she had ever seen.

  Many of the women were stumbling and weaving now as they walked, and the men let them stop and rest. Two r
emained with the women and the other went on, trudging away down the road, and around moonrise he came back with bread and horses. Even in the middle of the night they woke the women and gave them bread, all they wanted, now, and the bread was fresh and good. Then in the morning they walked on and came to the great settlement.

  They crossed by a wooden bridge over a little water, and came down on the far side into a place full of people waiting to get through the gate in the earthworks. The air was smoky and foul. All the people stared at the women and Mav put her head down to keep from meeting their eyes. After a while, they went on through the gate into a street filthy with rotten stuff, fallen leaves, horse shit. A big black pig snuffled at them and one of the riders drove it off.

  On either side were houses so close together the ground between them was dark with the shade of their pitched roofs. An old woman wrapped in a shawl stood in a doorway and spat at them as they passed. Little boys ran by and hit out with sticks at their legs, screaming to see them shy and skip. The riders shouted at them and the boys dodged away into a lane. The constant noise startled Mav’s ears; she lowered her head, her gaze on the ground, drowned in the flood of sights and sounds and smells. In all the clamor of voices she heard no word of her own language.

  A wagon lumbered toward them and they all had to stand against one side of the street to let it go past. Mav smelled a delicious aroma of cooked meat, and then right behind it the stink of shit. From a window over her head a voice came screaming. The church bells rang. Two women were arguing somewhere through a window. A rooster crowed. The little boys ran by again, and the riders chased them off. Her mind ached as if all these doings pounded on her like fists.

  They trudged along a lane between open stalls crowded with people, where she saw hanging braids of garlic and onions on the walls, the limp featherless bodies of ducks. A wave of a stench of burnt hair made her gag. In front of a stall full of long silvery shapes two dogs were fighting over a bloody fishhead. At the edge of the street were stacks of clay bowls and she stumbled over them and knocked them spinning and rolling. The land tilted under her and she followed the way downward. Ahead was a broad stream, the ground sucking and damp along it, and rows of long dragon ships drawn up among the broken stems of reeds.