Her eyes filled with tears, her mouth trembling. Taran took her in his arms and held her, just held her, just for a moment, just this one last moment.
‘Aido-urren.’ I love you, she said, her eyes, those eyes the colour of the shallow sea on a summer’s day glistening in the firelight, her gaze locking his eyes onto hers, holding him there, exchanging an unspoken communication too profound and intense for words to convey.
‘Go. Stay low and out of sight. Aido-urren,’ he finally said, his voice solemn.
Breeta nodded, stepped towards the doorway and stopped, tugging at her neck, removing the black cross she wore from under her cloak.
‘Argi-izara,’ she said, pulling the leather strap over his head. May God keep you safe.
Taran touched the object, feeling its weight against his chest. Breeta believed in this new God, this Christian God. Taran had his Gods, they commanded the stars and the seasons, and the weather they brought in-between. He hoped Breeta’s new God would save her this day.
She kissed him once, briefly, turned and ran down the passageway and was gone. No time left to tell her how much he loved her, cared for her, how much she meant to him and how she’d changed his life, how he couldn’t live without her.
But there was no time to dwell on such matters. He ran to wake Lutren and Morleo, working his way quietly through the chambers alerting the others, dousing fires as he went. If they stayed quiet, they could possibly escape with their lives, time enough at least for him to light the signal.
He stopped last at Denk’s chamber, advised the old man to flee, to head for Pobla Valley, he might have a chance there.
Taran returned to the central chamber, took the Cry Cloak, grabbed the bronze plates and headed outside.
He saw the boats approach, only three now, slicing through the calm waters; they would be on the beach soon. Scanning the valley, he caught sight of Breeta, a mere movement, a shadow breaking through the mist as she ran past the cabbage field. He touched the cross hidden beneath his tunic, praying to her Christian God to keep her safe, tucked the Cry Cloak and the bronze plates under his arm and ran for the headland.
The ships crashed against the shoreline, their cries a profanity against the peace of this new day. Taran saw them swarm from their boats and splash through the water, their shields to their chests, brandishing their swords and spears as they made their way up the valley to the settlement. His legs pumped, his heart threatening to break through his ribs as he ran towards Brud Stone, to the signal pyre at the ready on the headland. Once alight, it would be seen for miles around. He stopped briefly halfway up the hill, catching his breath that burned in his lungs, his eyes seeking out Breeta one more time. He caught sight of her through the dawn mists on the far side of the valley, her dark cloak blending into the landscape. He could hear screams from below, the savages flushing out the inhabitants of Betarra settlement, his family, scattering like mice out of a hole.
Taran donned the Cry Cloak, a ram’s hide marked with blood, worn in times of danger, times of attack, a cry to arms. He picked up the plates, symbols, handles soldered onto the backs and clanged them together, their sound loud and jarring, in time to his heartbeat, attracting the attention of the heathens below.
He headed towards the pyre, knelt down, his hands shaking as he sparked two pieces of flint together and lit the beacon, an enormous pile of crisp dry grasses covered with a layer of peat. He continued to clang, discharging the surge of adrenalin pumping through his veins, watching the fire flare and take light in the slow early morning breeze. He looked to the valley, banging the plates together, their cacophony breaking through the dawn silence, his eyes on Breeta as she climbed to the rise of the headland on the other side of the bay, his heart filled with love and loss and terror.
And black angry hatred.
They came uninvited, invading, taking everything.
He saw torchlight in Pobla Valley beyond. Acknowledgement.
The screams from below galvanised his attention. He saw Gest, dragged by the hair and thrown to the ground, an axe swinging into his head, Ainda screaming hysterically. A sword cut through the air, a glinting reflection of grey sky, and took her head off, her body following moments later, falling in a heap beside her son.
The Norse robbers stood laughing, loud and raucous. So many of them. Taran clanged the symbols together, again drawing the attention of those below and a clutch of heathens broke away from the mob heading towards the headland, charging upwards. They were coming for him. His legs turned to water and he turned to look at Brud Stone instead, praying to his God, banging the symbols. It was too late for him he knew, but Breeta perhaps would live through this and that was enough for him.
His back turned on them, he heard them arrive, puffing and panting through the percussion of their heavy weapons and armour as they approached. He clanged the plates louder and faster, unable to drown out the sound of their voices, their strange language.
A brute stepped up to him, placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and swung him around and Taran felt the contents of his bowels melt and run freely down his legs. The foreigner towered above him, his eyes hidden in the shadows of a copper helmet shielding the top half of his face, leather armour covering his wide chest, a heavy cloak billowing from his shoulders. He was strong and big and wore an exquisite gold and silver cloak fastener decorated with precious stones that glinted in the dull morning light. He took the bronze plates from Taran, studied them for a brief moment before handing them to another at his side. The Norseman twitched his nose, his lower jaw splitting from the metal helmet in a wide ugly grin displaying long crooked teeth the colour of bone marrow. He turned to those behind him, said something, and they laughed. Taran turned his head away in shame, the light morning breeze barely enough to disperse the foul smell of his fear. The heathen motioned to those behind him and two stepped forward, one lassoing a tight leather rope around Taran’s neck, tearing the Cry Cloak from his back and tossing it onto the pyre.
They hauled him down the slope behind them like a recalcitrant dog. He turned, looking over his shoulder, hearing a resounding vibrating clatter as two of the Norsemen attacked Brud Stone with their swords, the force of their strikes chipping slivers from the hard granite.
Taran tripped and stumbled as they dragged him down the hillside, choking, the rope strangling him until he was able to stagger upright again, the humiliating stinking slime smeared down his legs. He got his fingers under the noose and tugged at it, loosening it, gasping, allowing air into his lungs as they approached the valley.
He could hear laughing and shouting among the heathens. They were in high spirits, thieving and destroying everything they laid hands on. The remains of his clan stood mustered in a small flock in the middle of the farmstead. Regretfully he saw that his father hadn’t escaped in time, Denk staring wide eyed at the blood soaked ground, blood that ran from the glistening mass of his belly. A cluster of the brutes more interested in carnal lusts than plunder had taken Lutren’s young bride aside. She was screaming in terror as they jostled her amongst themselves, pushing her hard from one to another, tearing her clothes from her body, hitting her senseless. They closed in and she was lost in a maelstrom of arms and bodies while another two grappled with Uuoret. She was only eight summers old, her small high-pitched screams piercing through the air as the savages stripped the clothes from her small body.
Taran turned his eyes away, consumed with remorse and relief. Breeta was safe. He’d heard they ripped unborn babies from bellies. He could take whatever was coming to him, but he couldn’t bear to have her suffer this, to hear her screams, no physical torture he was to suffer could compare to that.
His captors tugged at him, pulling the cord tight around his neck, strangling him. He slipped his fingers under the noose again, loosening it, realising he could slacken it enough to slip it over his head. They were approaching the settlement, once there his chance would be lost. He glanced over his shoulder to Brud Stone. The two fools on the headland
were trying to push the great stone over the edge. He had to act now. He had to take his chance now.
Slipping the rope over his head, he held it in his hands, maintaining the tautness, looking at the monstrous backs of the heathens walking ahead of him. Once he dropped the noose they would know he was free.
He let go, turned and ran.
Their shouts followed him, another chorus added to the laughter and yelling already in his ears, the curdling agonised screams of humans and animals. He would head for Pobla Valley two glens away. With any luck he would meet help half way.
He saw it before he felt it, the bloody, shiny metal spearhead protruding from his left side. He felt its weight pulling him down, could feel it dragging and bouncing behind him as he stumbled and fell to the ground, convulsions of searing pain surging through him. He was near the burn. He crawled towards it, the spearhead dragging on the ground, grating through raw open nerves.
He could hear them coming, could hear their foreign tongue.
He felt a heavy foot on his back, pushing him down into the soggy bank of the burn, an explosion of agony erupting through his fibre, jangling over every muscle and tendon. The foot pressed down harder on him, driving him into the ground, the sudden pressure forcing the shaft of the spear to retrace its passage through his flesh and bone. Taran screamed, the colour of blood filling his eyes, fleeting crystallised moments of his life flashing through the red haze. Breeta, her eyes dancing in firelight, filled with laughter and love, long winter nights warmed by the heat of her naked body. Boyhood recollections of splashing in the burn in high summer with his brothers. The harvests, the feasts, the heather wine. Watching the dancing lights in the night sky with Breeta. In this final moment his head and his heart were clear of bad thoughts, filled with joyful and contented memories to carry him through into the journey towards the great dark. A peaceful bliss and acceptance settled over him and he thought of Breeta, her face wavering through his mind like a reflection in a calm loch. He just stared at her, watching the sky brighten through the corner of his eye.
Breeta was safe. She had been saved from this.
A desiccating thirst clawed down his throat, the water trickling so close he could feel it splash against his fingertips, unable to move, merely existing through each excruciating wave of agony. He could make out a part of the headland, hazy and out of focus. He turned his head slightly, the movement creating fresh torrents of pulsating red pain. A procession were making their way up towards Brud Stone, a small cluster of people at the front being pushed and prodded, tripping and stumbling up the headland, their naked skin red with blood.
The Norsemen separated one from the group and somewhere in his anguished mind Taran knew that it was Morleo, his older brother’s son. He could tell by his stance, young and bullish, so much to prove to the older men of the settlement. The invaders were saving him for a special torture. Tying long lengths of twine around his wrists, they pulled him towards the rock, fastening his arms around it, his face pressed into the stone. A dagger, thin and long, cut into his exposed back and Morleo screamed high and unbroken, as pure as a newborn baby’s as the blade see-sawed down his spine severing his ribs from their anchorage. The bones curled outwards, opening slowly like bloody wings. Taran had heard talk of this unspeakable torture, but had never believed that it could be real.
A war cry reached his ears, unable to lift his head to find its source. How many had come from other settlements to battle with these savages he wondered. Not enough. They would all be sacrificed this day, obliterated, smeared into the ground to be forgotten by the time the red-foamed seas turned white.
Taran closed his eyes, thought about his pain instead, embraced it and allowed it to carry him away.
Sunday, In the Sea
Deidre’s eyes met darkness, a thick dense blackness. Her heart pounded in her chest. She had to be still, quiet. The Norsemen were nearby. She listened, hard to hear over the roar of her own breath and the thump of blood in her head, becoming aware of the overpowering stench of excrement in the air.
She felt a disconcertingly soft and slippery sensation as she sat up, confused and cold, stiff. Staring into the blackness she could sense a pain she could no longer feel continue to pulsate through her body, terror still pumping through her veins, sights and tortured sounds too incredible to think about still vivid and real in her mind. A small girl, Uuoret, squabbled over by two rabid barbarians.
They tore her apart.
Blood red wings.
Her rapid, terror induced breathing deafened her in the darkness.
She was Deidre Hart from Sydney Australia.
‘I’m Deidre Hart,’ she said into the thick blackness, aware of the smell, the unsettling sensation that she was sitting in her own shit.
She patted the floor around her in search of the torch, her hand landing on a long thin shaft of bone and she pulled back in revulsion.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ she said filled with remorse, reaching out, finding the skeleton on the floor at her side and tentatively, reverently touching her hand to it, lightly tracing it in the darkness feeling the swelling rise of the ribcage. Her hand moved to the chipped left pelvis feeling the jolt of its incredible pain, the memory of its excruciating agony real and palpable. Unbearable. It made her feel weak with nausea and she rested her hands on the stone floor, supporting herself, her fingers knocking against the torch. Her hands shaking, her entire frame trembling, she picked it up and clicked it on. Blackness. The batteries had died. She made to stand up, preparing herself for the pain that would assault her body, surprised when she felt nothing more than the slimy discomfort of her soiled clothes. Hands reaching out to the darkness like a blind zombie she felt her way towards the passageway, following the bend until she saw the insipid penetration of dull light seeping in through the narrow opening.
Mortified, the congealing mess in her pants spread further as she climbed out, weak watery light filtering through the clouds giving no hint of the time of day or night. She couldn’t go back to Stayne House like this. Repulsed and bow legged she headed for the small inlet where she could wash, the dream imprinted on her senses like the inscriptions on Brud Stone, permanent and enduring, never to be erased for the rest of her days.
‘A dream, just a dream.’
She climbed down a small embankment to reach the beach, her boots crunching on the small round pebbles swallowing the lapping waves. She took her boots and socks off, stripped her jeans and knickers off, repulsed by her transgression. A foul stain had spread across the lower back of her thermal vest. She stripped naked, took the soiled clothing and waded into the cold dark water, its arctic temperature seizing her breath and almost arresting her heart as she went in deeper, sinking down into the water, cleansing herself.
Tortured screams of men, women, children and animals resonated in her head. She dipped under the surface in an attempt to block out the sounds, the images, the feelings crowding her thoughts, trying to douse their reality from her mind. She was here, now, swimming in this small calm inlet, its coldness real; she wasn’t lying in the valley with her left hip gouged open. This was her world, this was her actuality; there was no pain here, no fear.
No dignity, she thought reaching down, grabbing a handful of pebbles from the sea floor and scrubbing her clothes.
Blood wings. She had never seen, had never thought of anything so horrific in her life, had never imagined another human being could inflict such abominable mutilations on another. The axe splitting Gest’s skull open like a pumpkin. Deidre scrubbed her jeans harder, the cold almost forgotten, her reality, her sense of being and place overwhelmed, assailed by these memories, these images so real to her, the screams still echoing in her ears. She had been there. She had lived through it.
Uuoret, her small body tumbling through the air over and over like a doll. Ainda, her life, her history, her head severed with one swipe of a sword, Denk staring sightlessly at the blood soaked ground as the old man’s intestines spilled from his cl
eaved belly. Deidre knew these people; she knew their names, their histories and felt the grief of their cruel demise.
Breeta. Deidre felt a sharp pang of panic like a single strike of lightening lighting up the darkness in her mind. Breeta.
‘Deidre!’
She looked up at the sound of her name. Dylan stood on a low brow of the headland, Stuart, Malcolm and Short Cut Kevin running into view behind him. Dylan scampered down the steep incline to the inlet, Deidre watching him, immobile, as he jumped over the embankment and down towards the beach, throwing his jacket off.
Deidre remained anchored to the spot, numbed by her detachment to this unfolding reality as Dylan splashed into the water in boots and jeans, waist deep until he was standing before her, his hands on her, shaking her roughly.
‘What’re you doing?! What are you doing?!’ He was so angry, his face so close to hers, his eyes red and inflamed, glazed with temper. He turned towards the shore, pulling her by the arm out of the water behind him, Stuart, Malcolm and Kevin standing on the beach watching, agape. She was naked. She held her wet clothes against herself as she waded towards them. They were all looking at her wearing varying expressions of concern, annoyance and suspicion. And anger. She felt it in Dylan’s harsh movements as he wrapped his jacket around her, taking her wet clothes away. She zipped herself up, the jacket longer than hers, reaching her thighs and still warm from his body. She pulled the hood up, her hair wet and her head cold in the wind, pulling it lower over her brow to hide her shame.
‘She’s got da madness,’ Kevin said casually. ‘Dis is what dey do. Dey do aw dis weird shyte.’ He pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, lit it and took a long, languorous drag, observing Deidre as Dylan helped her into her boots. ‘An’ ye have t’admit, dis is a pretty weird ting t’be doin’. Who in der right mind goes swimming ‘ere?’ He pointed at the shore. ‘In dis wedder. Nakit! Ye’d have t’be ootta yer mind. Unless yer a nudist. Are ye a nudist, lassie?’
The Stone Dweller's Curse: A Story of Curses, Madness, Obsession and Love Page 17