“Every corpse that comes to me lends its substance to the ship,” Loki said. The silver charm of his voice had turned to rust and sand. “Every corpse brings Ragnarok one breath closer, one breath closer to my freedom from this torment, and you think I will surrender one to you? What could you possibly offer me to make that one breath of extra torment worthwhile?”
There was contempt in his voice. He didn’t expect her to have an answer; nor did Gudrid, until she remembered Skuld walking her down the shore and pointing to the Ship of Nails. The oldest of the Norns did nothing without intent.
Gudrid closed her eyes. The names were gone and even the words to shape them seemed hazy. There were other words, though. Words so old they belonged to no language, and were beyond even Loki’s power to touch. They rose to the surface of her mind and pricked on the tip of her tongue.
She gave them a voice. The last time she had sung the weirdsong, she had been young and strong and her voice had been beautiful. Now it was tired and cracked, breaking in the wrong places and without the breath to hold the notes long enough.
Still, the weird’s power was not in its beauty.
Power gathered close under the notes.
The horrible wheezing efforts of Loki’s burn-scarred lungs eased and the newest wound on his bare chest crusted over. There were limits to the weird-song’s power. Gudrid was only a spae-wife, half-taught and out of practice, and Loki’s curse had been crafted by Mimir and laid by Odin, himself. The chains chafed and the poison dripped. All it could muster was a moment of ease. Loki closed his eyes and sighed.
Tears burned Gudrid’s eyes. She forced the words past stiff lips.
“One moment less of pain, Trickster,” she said. “My gift to you. Give me Beyla and you can have my soul in her place.”
There was silence. Gudrid didn’t know if he was surprised by her offer, or just her effrontery.
“And what good would your soul do me, old woman?” Loki asked eventually. “A wizened spae-wife. Even if I send you back, you’ll most likely end up here as my thrall. Or do you think that the Lawspeaker will give you a decent burial?”
The contempt stung but he had given himself away. Loki, the Trickster, knew why she was here. That he bothered to hear her out at all meant that her offer had some measure of temptation for him.
“Who will navigate for you?” she asked hoarsely. “When the ship is cast loose and you take the wheel. Who will plot the course and read the stars, who will keep the log book and mind the stores? I have crossed the world, from one side to the other and back again. I have been to the land of the Skraelings and the home of the White Christ. Give me Beyla and I will be your steerswoman on Ragnarok, your thrall until then. Is that not worth a breath of pain?”
Loki pondered the offer in silence. In an odd, almost human gesture, he worried his lip as he thought.
“Very well,” he said. “I will take your trade.”
He shifted on the stone altar and lifted one arm as far as the chain would allow, pointing to the corner of the cave. A small, twisted creature, sallow skinned and lank haired, shuffled into the cave, dragging a shorn, waxen girl behind it. It led the girl over to Gudrid.
“Of course,” Loki said, his voice bright again. “I made no promises as to the state of the girl.”
The girl stood on bloodied feet and stared blankly at Gudrid. Her mouth was slack, drooling, and someone had drawn a second, raw-red mouth across her throat.
“Beyla. Beyla Volgangsdottir?”
Something stirred in the depths of those vague, milky eyes and the wet lips moved.
“So I was called,” she said.
“Go,” Loki said. “Go before the bowl o’erspills. GO!”
The honey-coloured poison trembled at the lip of the bowl, ready to pour over Loki’s chest. One more drop, perhaps two, and it would overflow.
Gudrid caught Beyla’s hand and dragged the stoic Beyla along behind her, fleeing up the runnel. They were near the top when Loki’s screams echoed after them and the world wrenched with his agonies .
The two women, one alive and one not, stumbled out onto the shore. Gudrid was gasping for breath and doubled over a stitch that felt like a knife in her ribs. Beyla just stood, hands lax by her side. Eventually, Gudrid straightened up and took Beyla’s clammy hand. She led her away over the shore, back towards Midgard. Beyla’s bare feet, nails torn from their beds for the ship, left bloody prints on the stones.
****
Clad in a fresh habit, her bloodied hands and frostbitten feet anointed with salve and bandaged, Gudrid sat in the Lawspeaker’s budir, under the shadow of the Law Rock. Beyla, clad in a modest, high-necked gown with long sleeves, sat next to her. A close-fitting snood covered her shorn, torn scalp.
The morning was near gone by the time Orm came striding down from the Law Rock, gold glittering on his arms and chest and sword slung at his hip. His guards walked close by him. One of them, a giant of a man with an evil turn to his mouth, blanched and reached for his sword when he saw Beyla. For her part, the dead girl smiled for the first time since she’d left Nieflheim. It was not pleasant
“Greetings to you, Gudrid,” Orm greeted her, as effusively as if she was an old friend. His smile slipped a little when he turned to Beyla, but only one who was watching close would notice. “And to you, Beyla. My heart is glad that you have recovered from your illness.”
He drew Beyla to her feet and kissed her cheek, shuddering at the texture of her skin and the odd smell of her. Then he dismissed his guards and led the two women into his tent. A flask of mead sat on his table, waiting for him. He poured a goblet for himself and drank thirstily, swilling the honey-sweetness around his mouth.
Gudrid was too heart-sore and weary to even muster hate.
“I have upheld my end of the deal, Lawspeaker,” she said. “Now, you swear to leave me and mine in peace?”
Orm spat the mouthful of mead onto the floor. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and nodded.
“Aye.” Then he pointed a warning finger at her face. “For as long as you hold your tongue on this, Gudrid.”
Gudrid bent her head in stiff acknowledgement. She started to leave but stopped.
“Why,” she said. “You killed her. Why coerce me to return to her?”
Orm shrugged and tossed back the rest of the mead. He walked over to his chair and sat down, his long legs stretched out over the furs.
“I could protest my innocence, but I doubt it would fool you,” he said. “It was an accident.”
“You slit her throat by accident?” Gudrid asked.
Orm smiled and looked down, like a child caught lying about a trifle. It chilled Gudrid. She might have bargained her soul away, but she doubted that Orm had ever possessed one.
“Things got out of hand,” Orm said. “She was not eager to wed me; I forcefully pressed my suit and…went too far. If her father was to throw his wealth behind my latest trading venture, I needed her back.”
Gudrid shook her head tiredly.
“For money, then?” she said
“Do you think I care what you think of me, old woman?” Orm asked. “Take yourself back to your convent and wait to die. You’ve done what I asked of you.”
Gudrid nodded and drew her hood up over her head. The shadow fell down over her face and she peered out of it.
“That I have,” she said. “And I paid dearly enough for it. So, Orm Lawspeaker, treasure your wife; she will be your bride; she will sit in judgement by your side and she will bear your son. And she will never be parted from you…not even by death. Nor will she share you with another or ever leave you, even for a moment. She bears you no love, Orm, but she will be loyal.”
For the first time Orm’s easy confidence faltered. His looked past Gudrid to Beyla as the dead girl started to disrobe, revealing her torn fingers, slashed throat and soft, dead flesh. Horror dawned in his eyes and his hand sought out the cross at his throat.
“Gudrid,” he said. “Abbess. Send her back. In the name
of Christ, send her back.”
“He doesn’t listen to me anymore,” Gudrid said. “Nor you, I would think. Try not to scream, Orm. I doubt the guards would understand.”
She left the tent and headed out of the camp, ignoring any offers of shelter that were made. She had a long way to walk: back to the shore of bone and death; back to the dead man’s boat.
Orm didn’t scream while she was in earshot.
****
the blind man
Carole Johnstone
The boys barely looked his way at all as they sorted the herring and hung out the nets. Donald noticed perhaps as many as a dozen new holes, and big ones at that. Towards one end of the drift even the tarred warp rope had snapped, buckling the train. Breaking its back. They wouldn’t be going out again that night. Maybe not even the night after.
The boys knew that well enough; they were likely torn between frustration at their enduring misfortune, and relief that they would not soon be suffering another cold and stormy pitch black of night aboard their skipper’s decrepit clinker. The catch was meagre, and boys they were — on land and the water. Donald’s own faithful were all long gone: to the Moray Firth or the shipyards of the capital, though Donald held too healthy a terror for the Poor House to follow in their footsteps.
None of their callow replacements had the wit to realise that Donald had saved them from a slow death in the pits, or a slave wage on the saltpans. There were too many people now starving in the old villages all along the northeast coast. People whose families had fished and crofted there for generations. And the coastline had become studded with clay thatched huts, packed to the rafters with feckless Highlanders, who starved all the quicker and spread their diseases.
Donald turned back to the harbour, watching his battered skaffie where she sat low in the lee of the sea wall beyond Brora Bridge. He claimed perhaps a dozen of the fattest herring for his own, fishing them out of the barrels while ignoring his crew and their mutinous scowls.
“Get the rest tae the curing yard by sun-up. I don’t want tae be hearing about them spoiling because ye were too busy sousing yourselves in the Bannockburn.”
Off they went, west along the shoreline, just as another gust of icy wet wind pushed them backwards against their not so heavy loads. The gust carried with it weightier evidence of their discontent: muttered forecasts that they would doubtless be finished in the yard long before sun-up, and braver threats of defection to the vast Herring Busses and their favoured tonnage bounties. Donald was not overly concerned; even should a few of them fall foul of the fishery officers and find themselves signing on a dotted line, they would be back again soon enough. If not one of them could stomach a single night of inshore drifting, a couple of weeks at sea would likely finish them completely.
“And get back here when ye’re done! Those nets won’t fix theirselves.”
Once they had disappeared beyond the harbour wall, Donald climbed up from the quayside on too weary legs. The late September wind coming off the North Sea still slapped against his face, lifting the hair from his scalp and filling his lungs with the briny taste of ocean. He struggled around the headland, looking to the empty sand beach below with a heavy heart; hearing the far off call to the bell-pit north of the river, its winches and water-powered pumps stretching wide above the grey swathe of village like a hungry raven.
He supposed that he was no more entitled to indulge his ill will towards the coal mine than he was to the vast salt pans that now stretched as far south as Easter Ross and Cromarty: from Kintradwell Broch to the mouth of the Dornoch Firth. His son had worked at the mine for nigh on two months now, and had survived no less than two cave-ins and three floodings; while Donald’s own dwindling livelihood relied upon both the salt recovered from the ocean and the distilleries fuelled by Uaran’s rich seams.
They were not the source of his malaise; his wretched decline in fortune. Nor was the culprit to be found in his sullen crew, battered boat, the bloody Fishery Board or the North Sea’s temper. It was people — always people. Great, swelling, lumbering masses expelled from the low peaks, high moorland and small lochans of the Flow Country, and spewed onto the coast like herring worm and fish guts.
As he climbed the last few steps towards the narrow row of white-painted cottages that ran close to the shoreline, he fought as hard against an early assault of smurry as he did the hopeless fury that was ever now his constant companion. His too-empty creel banged hard against his thigh. The sun winked over the Clynelish in the east, where brown moor cambered inland away from grassy cliff. Before them, Brora’s bell tower stood against the grey-gold skyline like a mournful sentinel.
He dropped to his knees just shy of the old Pictish cairn of the Caledonii, setting his creel upon the stone. “May Manannán of the Sea bless my catch and humble burden,” he whispered close to the ground, though there was likely no-one else around to witness his heresy; most of the newcomers imagined themselves to be still in the hills and rarely rose before dawn. “May He have pity upon my fortune and send the Tuatha against all those who seek my ruin.”
There was a familiar gloom above the thatched roof of his cottage, he could see it now: a rank, dark shadow that neither his prayer nor the miserable dawn looked ready to banish. Before he even opened the door, he knew that the cottage was still in darkness. He knew that the hearth would not be lit and his breakfast would not be cooked. It had happened again, and he had not the strength this time to stomach it.
Once inside, he wrenched open the shutters like a man possessed. He tossed his meagre catch into one of the salt barrels, and wasted too much flint in getting the peat alight in its damp recess. The air was frigid and stale with old smoke. The thickly cut turf had come away from a corner of the sea-facing wall, as if something had sought to burrow out in the night, exposing a leavening of rough stones through which more of that late September wind screamed.
On the other side of the curtain, he could hear stuttering crying that could too easily lapse into the keening wail that kept him awake most nights. Even when he was out at sea. Putting down his fury a second time was too difficult.
“Isobel! Get out here, woman. Where is yer husband’s bloody breakfast? Where is his fire?”
She took too long to obey; worse than that, she then no more than loitered by the soiled curtain, twisting it between her fingers and offering no amends.
“Get out here, woman!”
Her hair was a tangled shroud that hid her face. Behind her, the sobs grew higher and uglier in pitch.
“It came again, Donald.”
Donald was still better disposed towards anger than fear. “Aye? I spent a night close tae being battered against the Laoghal Rocks, and was rewarded by less than ten barrels of herring and the cliping of my crew. Yet yer troubles were the harder tae endure? Yer troubles see me starving and cold in my own hame?”
She came out from behind the curtain then, but still she did not venture near to him. Picking up an oil lamp, she kneeled down by the revived fire, leaning too close. Donald could smell the singeing of her hair over the low stench of peat before she stood again. Still she faced the fire, and Donald found that he was too glad.
“Do you want me tae warm some stew?”
“Aye, I want ye tae warm some bloody stew, woman! And I don’t want tae hear another word about—”
The sobs beyond the curtain began their wail in the instant that his wife turned around, the lamplight exposing the wide white of her eyes framed by old crusts of blood. Deep scores ran from her temples to chin, and her frightened grimace exposed another new gap in her teeth. When he glanced down at the fresher blood on her skirts, she gathered the stiff material in her fists and clamped shut her mouth. There were raised and blistering welts at her wrists and blooming stabs of purple inside her elbows and forearms. Still, she wouldn’t look at him.
“Jesus, Isobel!” His gaze suddenly found the curtain again as a bird started battering wings against his ribcage. “Nancy? Is Nancy—”
> For one moment there might have flashed some anger in those wide, red-framed eyes. “Nancy is fine, Donald. She slept through again. Though Moira—”
He had already stumbled past the curtain and into the ben beyond before hearing his wife reassurances. Nancy — his Nancy — was curled up on her side, close to the still sleeping bairn. He recognised the unhurried rise and fall of her slumbering breath. And finally released his own. The bird inside his chest calmed through more pleasant swoops and flutters.
Moira he remembered as an afterthought. She was not in the bed. Close to the piles of broken net and new hemp on the far side of the small room, his older daughter shivered and still bayed, her bony knees drawn up to her chest, blood pooling around her feet.
“Haud yer wheesht, Moira! Isobel! Get this child cleaned up.” He stumbled in his haste to retreat, winning another barely-disguised glare from his wife in the process. As he caught her eye, the smell of his warming stew made him feel queasier still. “Shut her up, Isobel. We will not talk of this. Not again.”
Isobel set down her lamp. “Aye we will, Donald. This time we will.”
****
Donald was in the end spared that ordeal by another that was far more insistent. Awoken from an ill-easy slumber by a battering at his door, he stumbled towards the threshold, his weary mind no match for his ever present caution. Nothing good had knocked at his door in more than two years.
The Countess’ factor stood just shy of the muddy dip ahead of the entrance. He wore a non-descript plaid, belted and held at the shoulder by the Sunderland brooch. His face was as grim as the weather that beat down upon his bonnet-less head. Donald’s heart sank even before he glimpsed the men that loitered close to the bluff’s summit.
Dead Souls Page 3