The witch nodded, and from a cupboard she produced a glass jar of some cloudy liquid, purplish-black.
She nodded again.
“This will do what you require,” she said. “Wait until nightfall. Go into the woods, or some other place where you will not be seen. Take off all your clothes, for you do not want to be caught in them when you wake again. Drink it. Drink it all. You will sleep.
“When you wake again, you will have assumed the form you desire, but you must make sure you hold that form in your mind as you go to sleep.
“Is that understood?”
Merle said nothing, and nodded.
Rising from her chair, she looked at the October sun, already sinking fast toward the western horizon.
She walked to the graveyard, sat on the grave, and waited for nightfall.
As she waited, she sang a song.
The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In a cold grave he was lain.
I’ll do as much for my true-love
As any young girl may;
I’ll sit and mourn all at his grave
For a twelvemonth and a day.
The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
“Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?”
Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
I crave one kiss of your cold clay lips,
And that is all I seek.
At darkfall, Merle stood, and delicately let all her clothes slip from her body, now thinner than ever, yet still something fresh and fleet, of the fields.
She lifted the jar to her lips, and without a further thought, she drank.
The jar fell from her lips, and she fell to the earth, clutching her throat and her belly.
The witch had not said it would be like this. With such pain, and yet she remembered the witch’s other words, and so, even as she writhed in agony on the grave, thrashing around on the grass, she kept her desire in mind.
Her desired form.
A hare.
Eight
Next morning, Merle’s father discovered that she was missing, and had not returned as usual from the graveyard in the early morning.
He organized a search for her, but though they searched the whole island over, and over again, all they found was her clothes, lying in a crumpled heap on the grave of the fisherman.
Her father collapsed on the grave, weeping.
From a short distance away, a hare watched the man crying.
After a while, the hare saw some other people pick the man up from the grave, and they all walked away.
* * *
The hare was alone. It hopped into the graveyard, across to one particular grave, the one where the man had been.
The hare seemed bothered, disturbed. It hopped around the grave, as if agitated, looking this way and that, looking, searching, searching for something, something that should have been there, and was not.
Finally, the hare sat on the grave, and waited.
And as it waited, a voice sang to it, from beneath the soil.
This was what it sang.
You crave one kiss of my cold clay lips;
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my cold clay lips,
Your time will not be long.
Tis down in yonder meadow green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that e’er was seen
Is withered to a stalk.
The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So, will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till Death calls you away.
* * *
The story ends now, in tragedy.
For watching the hare, on the grave, was another pair of eyes, and they belonged to the huntsman, out that night with his gun, seeing what game was to be had.
As the hare slept on the grave, he took aim, and fired. He smiled, because he knew his wife would be pleased with him, with a hare to stew. He slung its body into his sack, and walked home through the dark, whistling an old folk melody.
* * *
With a last few whispered words, Laura finished her story, then she was silent.
The children stared at her, even wider-eyed than they had been before. Brother looked at sister, and sister looked at brother, then they both looked back at Laura.
Even in the dimness of the moonlit room, they could see she was crying.
Sister looked at brother, and brother looked at sister, and the twins decided without exchanging a word that they needed help.
They climbed out of bed, and tiptoed downstairs to find their parents.
“Did you notice?” they asked each other as they trod softly on the dark boards of the staircase. “Did you notice her dress?”
They found their parents sitting in the drawing room, with another lady, one whom they hadn’t met.
“Mamma. Pappa,” they said, together. “Laura’s crying. We think you should come up and speak to her.”
Herr and Frau Graf looked puzzled. Embarrassed.
“Who, dears, did you say is crying?” Frau Graf asked.
“Laura. The lady you have to look after us at bedtime. She was telling us a ghost story, and it wasn’t even a proper ghost story. And now she’s crying.”
Herr Graf stood.
“This is some kind of silly joke,” he said. “One of your games. I want you to apologize right now and go back to bed.”
Then the twins began to cry.
“But it’s true!”
“Children,” said their mother, more gently. “This is Laura, here. She wasn’t able to join us until today. I told you all this, don’t you remember? Her mother has been sick, and she has only just arrived now.”
The twins turned to each other, then back to their parents. They looked at Laura suspiciously.
“Then who is it in our room?”
Now, their parents’ eyes widened, and Herr Graf suddenly stormed upstairs. He was gone a little while, and then returned.
“Nothing,” he said. “No one. As I said, one of your games.”
The children were too bewildered to answer.
“And did one of you spill your water? The boards are damp, at the foot of the bed.”
Nine
The twins would not apologize.
“This is not Laura,” they cried. “Laura is upstairs! She looks nothing like her.”
“Stop it!” cried Herr Graf. “Stop it! I want you to stop all this nonsense right now. What will Miss Laura think of you?”
But Laura sat quite unmoved on the sofa, a strange look on her face. She remained quiet.
“But what about the story she told us?” the twins suddenly realized. “If we made all this up, then how could we know the story about Merle, and Erik? And about how they fell in love, but they weren’t allowed to? And how Erik drowned and Merle went mad and then turned herself into a hare? How could we know that?”
Now their father was really angry.
“You have made it all up. You could make up any story and tell us a stranger told it to you! How dare you! How dare you embarrass your mother and me like this?”
“Children,” said Frau Graf, with one eye on their guest. “I think perhaps you should go to bed now, and we can talk about it in the morning. When you’re less tired. When we’re all less tired.”
The children were about to protest, when the lady who was really called Laura spoke.
“But, you know, Herr Graf, Frau Graf. There is such a story, though I haven’t heard it in a long time.…”
She stopped, looking puzzled.
“Only it was … rather different … from the one your children have just told us. It all happened just so, except that the reason their love was forbidden was not because Erik was poor. Merle w
as rich, but so was Erik. He wasn’t a fisherman, and … well, he wasn’t Erik. He was a she—Erika.
“She was a nobleman’s daughter. Their love was forbidden, because, well…”
She broke off, looking at the children. It was not the sort of thing they should hear. Laura remembered the story a little better now.
“Erika was beautiful, too, they say. And always dressed so well, though she always wore the same dress, a favorite one.”
The children were silent.
* * *
Outside, a lady in a black and purple dress listened to the silence of the house.
From somewhere, a long way away, came the scream of a wounded hare.
It sounded so human.
The lady shook her head, thinking of her lover who had lost her mind, and become a lithe creature of the shadows.
“Well,” she said, sadly. “So it is.”
One
I am old now.
I am old now, and the things that happened under the weak light of the snow moon when I was a little girl have drifted far downstream. And yet, when I close my eyes, I see it all before me, once more.
Maybe there are things I have forgotten.
Maybe there are some things, things that have passed from my memory, and now exist nowhere. I am the oldest of the clan, and when I die, my memories will die with me, unless I have passed them on to the memory of others, through story.
So I have. I have told many stories in my life, and those stories that I have told, well, they will live on in the younger ones.
But there are some stories I have never told.
There is one story, one story …
There is one story, which some people know a little of, but of which only I know the whole truth, and I will take that truth with me to whatever it is that lies in wait for us, when we close our eyes for the last time.
Two
Either the snows were early and heavy that year, or the boats were late returning, because the long meadows were almost impassable.
But no. It was the snow moon, I remember that, so it was the boats that were late. That was why it took the whole village to pull the long ships up onto the cold meadows, gray in the half-light.
Even Eirik and I helped, though we were less than ten winters, I’m sure.
We had been sitting on the Outlook, waiting and wanting to be the first to see the ships return after the viking was over for the year.
They were so late. So late!
And with every day that they did not return, the village became a more and more silent place.
It was simply not possible that every ship had been lost. That none would return. Of course, from time to time, an expedition lost one, or even more, boats; it was dangerous to go viking. But to lose the whole fleet of ships? Impossible!
And yet, as the days turned over, and the nights grew so long that they almost touched each other, unspoken thoughts became muttered words, which became cries of woe!
They have abandoned us!
They have been lost to the middle-earthers!
They have been swallowed by the Krake!
But Eirik and I did not believe these cries. The ships had returned every autumn, and they would return this one, too, even if autumn had become winter.
* * *
Finally, as we sat on the Outlook, watching the sun barely skimming the sea, Eirik saw the masts.
He tugged my sleeve and we stood, breathlessly, and counted.
We waited until they were closer, and then, still not saying a word, we counted again.
They were all there.
“Go!” I screamed, and I ran with my brother down the hill, and burst into the longhouse at the crossways.
“Mother!” we cried together, as we so often did, “Mother! They are come back!”
Our mother turned from her work at the fireside, among the other women, and stood, one hand holding a knife, the other the limp body of a hare, half skinned.
It took time for the words to mean anything to her.
I can see her lips now, in the eye of my mind, as I picture how she repeated the words we spoke, but without sound.
“They are come back.”
“Mother! Come on!”
By now others in the northern harbor had seen the masts, too, drawing in fast on a westerly wind. Shouts came from the lane.
Mother yelped then, as if she’d burned her hand. She dropped everything, and we all ran into the snow, joining the shouts and the cries of the whole village, the young, the old, and the women, as their men returned.
Then, there they were!
Father, standing on the prow of his ship, waving to us, to his village, as a chieftain should.
“Eirik!” his cry came across the wind, “Eirik! Melle! We are home!”
He was laughing.
We tried to call back, but the wind was against us, and he shook his head.
The keel scrunched on the stones, the hull breaking the ice-plates, the round beginnings of a frozen sea, swarming in the shallows.
Father leaped.
He leaped from the great height of the prow, down to the stones, and strode toward us.
“Bring the wheeled sleds!” he roared, but we had run to him, and threw our arms around him.
“My boy! My girl! How much have you grown!”
He laughed again, and we stared up into his eyes.
Eirik laughed back, I think.
I just smiled.
I know that’s how it was with Eirik and me.
Eirik’s tools were his hands, his legs, his arms.
My tool has always and always only been one thing, my thoughts.
And with that thought, I could see that although Father was laughing, something was bad inside, something that he did not want to be. And yet was.
Three
The viking had been a good one.
All twelve ships had returned, laden with wonders, and the losses had been but six men, two of them from sickness.
And there was someone else, someone new.
As Father and Eirik and I walked up the beach, and Father greeted the village elders, there was a crunch of steps behind us, and a man that Eirik and I had never seen strode past us.
He looked down at us, and I was afraid immediately, I do not know why. I think, and I have thought about this for years, that it was the way that he looked at us.
He looked at us as though he wanted us. The way a wolf wants meat.
It frightened me, but I think it excited Eirik.
“Father!” he whispered, “Who is that? Where did you find him?”
“His name is Tor,” our father said. “And I want you to have nothing to do with him. You hear?”
We nodded, and stared secretly at the figure. He was tall and strong, maybe even taller and stronger than Father. He looked much older than Father, too. He was dark haired, and his skin darker than ours, as if he had seen much sunshine, for a long time.
Eirik and I believed him to be a stranger.
That was our guess, that he was someone that Father had shown pity for on his travels, and had brought back, and yet we were wrong, because the elders recognized him, and some even put their arms around him.
And he knew their names. So we knew he had been to Bloed Isle before.
“Bring the sleds!” roared Father again. “We have little light.”
He was right.
The short, weak day was nearly done, and there were twelve ships to unload and beach.
Before long, we worked by torchlight.
The whole village toiled.
Small boats put out to and from the ships, ferrying the spoils back to land.
Meanwhile, the shipmen set the wheeled sleds into the water at the prow of Father’s boat, and then the ropes were tied fast.
Taking a cue from the waves, the hardest part was swiftly done, lifting the ship’s prow onto the sled.
Then the hauling began, with great shouts and songs to make it easier, and everyone, every one of th
e village had some place on some rope, all but the smallest barn, and even those tiny children held the torches by which we worked.
I remember it.
What a night! The great ships towering above my head. The orange torchlight on the snow, black smoke coiling out of sight into the shadow-blue sky, the smell of the men, the smell of the salt water on the ships, the barnacles on their hulls like the stars in the heavens, our hands freezing to the ropes.
The songs, the laughter, the curses.
But I remember one thing above all others.
We worked next to our father, the Chieftain, so proud and happy to see him again after so many months.
We were struggling just then. It was the last ship, the last to be pulled from the water, and dragged through the piling snow, like a huge dead wooden whale.
Maybe the men were tired, but we struggled.
Suddenly the stranger, Tor, was there. “Not enough strength, Wulf?” he said to Father.
Father ignored him.
“Have your men lost their power?”
“Get on a rope, Tor,” Father said, but Tor didn’t.
He rubbed Eirik’s hair with one of his massive hands.
“Nice boy,” Tor said.
Eirik smiled, and father threw down his rope, and in a moment, he stood with his face a handsbreadth from Tor’s.
Everything went quiet, and there was a long silence.
The creak of the ropes, the shouts and songs, even the rush of torch fat seemed to go quiet.
Then Father spoke.
“Get on a rope, Tor,” he said.
Tor looked deep into Father’s eyes, and then, not looking away, bent down and picked up the rope.
There was a shout, we heaved, and the boat slipped into its safe haven in the snows of the meadows.
The work was done, and I remember just one more thing about that evening.
How, as Tor walked off toward the longhouse, Father watched him go.
Then he spat on the ground where Tor had stood.
Four
The feast flew. Soared into the night like a ravening bird, like a fire flame, like the spread of a plague, a party as wild as the night outside was long.
* * *
It seemed to go on for days.
It felt like the longhouse had never been empty, not all those many months when the men were away on the knarrs.
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