Secrets of Carrick: Merrow

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  ‘She tried offering it sweet grass. She tried skipping and circling in play all around it to awaken its curiosity. She tried ordering it to her side with the voice of command, and singing it to her side with the voice of the lark but nothing worked. She sat on the edge of the lake and began to weep in frustration. That’s when the horse, fickle and unpredictable creatures that they are, waded up to her in the shallows of the icy lake and nosed at her, and let her catch him.

  ‘As soon as she had her hands in his thick mane she leapt like a hare and swung her leg over him. She sat astride the beautiful horse and pointed his head toward home, no doubt dreaming of gratitude and reward. But the horse turned his mighty head to the lake and nothing would turn him.

  ‘With those powerful limbs beating and his mane turning to foam he carried the girl into the deep black water of the lake. She tried slipping off but her legs were now as one with the water-horse, for that’s what it was. She tried pulling its mane and beating its eyes to make it stop but her hands only passed through its hair and flesh as through water. She tried begging to be freed but the creature just turned and smiled and that’s when she recognised her own man, the man she’d taken home and fed and nursed only one month before.

  ‘And in this terrible moment the water-horse carried the girl down into the High Lake. And, instead of him becoming her husband, she became the water-horse’s wife. And she was never seen again about the home-place or the markets, and that was it and all about it.’

  Could this story be real? I thought it sounded as likely as any other story I’d heard: like the story of the kraken and the undertow, or the story of how Scully got his Othersight, or the story of Doolish Marrey and his merrow-wife. This story, though, was different and Ma seemed to be trying to tell Ushag something with it, but my aunt had stopped listening.

  She was quietly heating her pot, and tending the Northman as he slept.

  Chapter Nine

  Ulf’s Story

  ‘ULF,’ SAID THE NORTHMAN and hit his chest with his open hand.

  My aunt and I gazed at him and then at each other with blank faces.

  ‘Ulf! Ulf!’ he repeated.

  ‘Maybe he’s sore,’ I said, and Auntie Ushag fetched more hawthorn. She tried to get him to take it but he shook his head and grabbed her hand.

  ‘Mik — uh…ul…fuh,’ he repeated, firmly laying her hand upon his head and hitting his own crown with it at each sound.

  I tried passing him the pot. He’d suffered with a terrible double Flux all night and I thought he might be hungry after such an emptying and scouring. He shook his head, though, and covered his face while sighing deeply. Sitting up as well as he could he patted the bed next to him. I went to him and sat. He seemed to be setting himself to patience.

  Giving me the meaningful eye and smiling gently, he touched his chest. Then he said very clearly, ‘Ek heiti Ulfr.’ I didn’t understand him again and was sorry for it; his face was so hopeful and I, so curious for his story.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said as kindly as I could and patted his shoulder.

  That was the first day, when our Northman was such a stranger to us, and he seemed to be of another race than the race of men. It’s silly now but we weren’t sure even what to feed him and were relieved when he tucked into his rabbit and skirrets. He was plainly a human, in spite of him being so long and yellow, but until we could share talk I thought us doomed to be always strangers.

  But he’d given up on words and now he tried mimicry. Making the shape of waves breaking with his hands, he pointed out the door. ‘I suppose,’ I said. ‘It’s the sea.’

  His eyes followed my lips. ‘Ahspose. Dahzee,’ he copied me. He curved his hand into the form of a cup and placed it upside-down on his hand-waves.

  ‘A ship?’ I said. ‘A ship on the sea.’ He laughed his first booming laugh and it was catching. I laughed too.

  ‘Uh shepun dahzee,’ he repeated. ‘Uh shep.’

  ‘Ship.’ I drew my lips back to make the middle sound. He watched my mouth.

  ‘Sheeep,’ he said, and looked to me. He looked so content I couldn’t correct him again.

  ‘That’ll do,’ I told him.

  He raised his hand. ‘Bárufall.’ His hand-waves grew bigger and wilder on his story-sea.

  ‘Úveðr.’ The handcup-ship rose, spun and tipped.

  ‘A storm?’ I asked. I made the sound of thunder and wind, and made my fingers into rain.

  He nodded. ‘Ahstoam!’

  ‘A storm,’ I repeated. ‘Ho!’ I called out to Ushag. ‘He was in a storm at sea!’

  Our success had put heart back into the Northman and he rose from his bed. Ushag tried to lead him back but he only paced stiffly and muttered feverishly in his own talk. ‘He’s done-in. You shouldn’t bother him,’ she whispered to me.

  ‘He’s not bothered,’ I said. ‘He’s trying to tell us.’ The man listened closely to us, even coming right up to our faces to watch our lips move as we spoke. He towered over us, and was so pale he almost lit the dark byre with his own soft light. ‘He wants to tell us.’

  ‘He makes a body feel so small,’ whispered Ushag peering up at him and standing as straight as she could. She put her hands on her hips and pointed back at the bed, but the man just made his hand-ship and -waves again, and he carried on.

  He pointed into the little ship he’d made, touching it everywhere with the tip of his finger. ‘Vegendr,’ he said. ‘Vegendr. Vegendr.’ He stood up straight and broad, giving us a fierce face and hacking at us with ghost-sword and axe. Ushag frowned and he hung his head.

  ‘A ship of killers, that’s plain enough,’ my aunt said, and spat into the straw. The man held out his hands, palms up, and spoke.

  ‘No vegandi!’ He played out the killing once more, shook his head and hit his chest with his outspread hand. ‘Ulf,’ he repeated. He lifted the hair from his nape and pointed, and there was a cross inked in blue. ‘Nei! No vega! Kristinn maðr.’

  He had tears on his cheeks trying to make us understand. He pressed his palms together. ‘Kristinn. Ahfarzher ooaht inevvan…’ he said and sat heavily, weakened by the effort. ‘Ahman.’

  He seemed to be suffering some type of Terror. We laid him back into his bed. ‘Well, I don’t think he’s a killer anymore, whatever he was before,’ I said and patted his big, clammy hand.

  ‘Ahman. Ahman,’ were his last words before he became insensible once more.

  ‘No.’ Ushag watched him like you would a strange dog; a strange dog with fine breeding and a shifty humour.

  I woke the next day feeling stupid and ran straightways to the byre. ‘Neen,’ I said pointing at my chest. ‘Ushag,’ I added pointing back at the roundhouse. ‘Breck.’ I slapped the cow’s rump and she frisked and protested. ‘Bo.’ I waved my hand at the heifer and she came and leant against me. The Northman’s face lit up. He waited.

  ‘Ulf,’ I said at last, pointing at him. He laughed.

  ‘Goð pika. Nin, nin, nin. Ushah. Ushaaah.’ He repeated the names to himself.

  ‘That’ll do,’ I said.

  Ushag brought in the food. ‘Ulf’s his name,’ I told her. ‘And he might be wiggynagh but he’s also Christian.’

  ‘Oh, they’ve gone right up there, have they?’ She piled his trencher high with leeks and colewort and took it to him. ‘Well that’s nothing to brag about here.’

  ‘Mister Ulf,’ she said, handing him his plate and looking him straight in the eye.

  ‘Fru Ushah,’ he returned, and they shook hands. I’ve never seen two people more serious at a meeting.

  ‘Come out now and help me salt the mackerel.’ She gathered all the night-time simples into her box and waited for me on the threshold.

  ‘No, I’m going to stay with Ulf.’ I filled my mouth with fish so that she could see any talk of mackerel salting, or anything else, was over. ‘I want to find out his story.’

  She nodded slowly and turned to go. ‘As useful as a blind tailor as usual,’ she muttered as she
went.

  ‘Nin.’ After eating he beckoned me to him. He’d cleared a space in the straw and chaff, and the smooth dirt showed through. Using his blade he drew a ship of stick-men in a stormy sea. All the men held weapons except the one with a cross hanging around his neck.

  ‘Ulf,’ I said touching that one. Ulf nodded.

  He got up from his bed and he was wearing a garment of Ushag’s; it was one of her longest tunics but on him it only fell to his thighs. He tried to pull it down over his bare legs, which I couldn’t help noticing were covered in matted yellow hair. The tunic wouldn’t do, so he wrapped himself in his rug. Then he squatted and scratched in the dirt again.

  First, he drew a raid. The stick-men raiders coursed with wide open mouths through a small village, where the people lay in the lanes and pathways stuck all over with blades. He drew children and old people, dogs, cats and chickens without their heads, or without limbs, and all bleeding or weeping.

  ‘Úthlaup,’ he said, indicating the entire scene.

  ‘Úthlaup,’ I repeated. It was plainly a raid on some settlement somewhere.

  He drew himself in his war-weeds right in the middle of the killing, his weapon drawn, with a smile and a clenched fist. He shrugged at me sadly and I nodded back. He had been one with the killers. He had been filled up with the blood-lust just as they were.

  Rubbing the dirt clear, he drew another raid but this time the dead were all women and children. The raiders coursed as before but this time the drawing showed Ulf at the centre of the slaughter with his weapon at his feet and his hands hanging at his sides. Blood dripped from his fingertips. A dead woman at his feet was wearing the Christian’s cross on a chain around her middle. The real Ulf groaned quietly.

  ‘Oh, iskald sál,’ he shivered. ‘Blóð-sál.’

  I didn’t know what those words meant but he had the face of such sorrow on him and his body slumped so done-in against the stall door, that I held my breath. Bo leaned over and licked at his head and that seemed to put some backbone into him because he jumped and started acting out the storm at sea.

  He reeled from side-to-side making a thundering sound, and making lightning bolts with his hands and hurling them at me. The real-Ulf shaded his eyes and pointed faraway, and the story-Ulf sighted an island on the horizon. The real-Ulf crouched behind the feed-box, and the story-Ulf hid from his crewmates in the stern. Once the storm had blown itself out and the crew were all busy with the aftermath, the story-Ulf slipped over the side and set out to swim to the island.

  Ulf pointed at the dead woman in his drawing, and at all the women and children in his scene, and put his hands to his heart as if it hurt him. He pointed at the raiders and holding his belly as if he was sick, shook his head. He kept on shaking it as he slipped over the side and into a black night sea. In his story, it seemed to me that he was happy to drown rather than stay with his ship and the other raiders. Which happiness, in fact, he nearly won because he no sooner left his ship than he was caught in the kelp forests that ring Carrick.

  Kneeling in the dust, he formed the weed with his hands and arms. It tangled and knotted about his arms and legs. It caught in his hair and his mouth and left a slimy sweat everywhere it touched. Story-Ulf fought and choked as long as he could but in the end the terrible weed beat him. He gasped for what he thought would be his last breath, and sank below the surface into the green world.

  While he still had enough air in him to notice such things, he felt the brushing of smooth skin against his. Just as his air was leaving him, he felt the soft prodding of these bodies all alongside and under him. Just as he felt himself failing, a face with wild, black eyes rose to his own and bubbles tickled at his nose and mouth and encompassed him around. Then there was nothing until he woke to Ushag and me dragging him up the cliff-path. ‘Sea-girl,’ he said. ‘Sea-girl.’ It seemed to be the only Carrick he knew apart from his prayers.

  Ulf’s story had drawn in the day around us and we sat in silence for some time. ‘Ushah?’ he said pointing at me. ‘Ushah móðir?’ I didn’t know what he meant. ‘Mamma?’ he tried. ‘Ushah, mamma?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ I got up as I heard Ushag and Ma come in with meat and drink. My voice rose. ‘No. Oh, no, no. Nin’s mamma gone away.’ I puffed at my closed fingers and thumb and opened them, watching something light and precious fly away.

  ‘Pff! Gone,’ I said. ‘And we don’t know where.’ I mimicked losing something important. I looked inside the churn as if it might be there. ‘No mamma there,’ I said. I shaded my eyes and peered out the door. ‘Not there.’ I lifted Bo’s tail and looked there. ‘No, not there. It’s a mystery,’ I said. ‘A whole mother, gone entirely.’

  My aunt’s face was a mask but once again she couldn’t meet my eyes.

  ‘Auntie Ushag will tell you the story.’ I shrugged at Ulf, but he was watching Ushag with eyes as pale as the cave-spiders.

  ‘Well then,’ she said at last to change the subject and all unsuspecting. ‘What’s his story?’

  She wasn’t going to like it but I couldn’t help that. I took a deep breath. ‘Ulf was a raider and he’s been raiding around these parts with his people for years but I think he killed some women and children when they were alone in their village one day and also one was a Christian and after that he, well, I suppose he had a change of heart.’ I stopped and patted his shoulder. ‘Anyway, he doesn’t want to be a killer anymore. He says he’s a Christian man now.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Ushag put the jug by his bed and waited for me to carry on. She raised her eyebrows at me.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing. How did he get into our net, then?’

  There was no way out. I had to tell her the whole thing.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  Ulf was watching closely.

  ‘Well, here it is and don’t blame me. He said on the way back home his ship was blown past Carrick in a storm and he went overboard and he tried to swim here but got himself tangled in the weed…in the sea-forests…and he nearly drowned and…and then the merrows came and gave him air in bubbles and carried him into our net for us to find.’

  My aunt sat blinking at me like an owl. Her silence had grown. It used to be a quiet thing but now it was loud and took up all the space between us. As soon as she came in I could hear it. And there was something else too; I couldn’t look straight at her face. There was something in it that ran my flesh cold. She looked like somebody thinking of doing an impossible thing just to see if she can, like turning inside out or flying to the sun. She looked reckless. She looked like somebody I didn’t know.

  Auntie Ushag sat rock-still and the sigh she breathed out seemed to come from some deep cave inside her body. She looked at me straight for the first time in weeks with her bright, bird’s eyes. They were the eyes of a person who’d had enough.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ve had it! Now, I will tell you.’

  Chapter Ten

  Ushag’s Story

  ‘I CANNOT PRETEND ANY LONGER not to know what I know,’ sighed Ushag and even Ulf could tell something was up. He turned his pale and freckled face to hers. ‘I’m done-in from trying to keep it from you.’

  ‘Why have you, then?’ I asked. ‘Why not just tell me.’

  ‘You’ll see.’ My aunt’s voice dropped. ‘It’s a hard story to tell…and to hear. It’s not the sort of story you can tell a child.

  ‘I’ll have to go back somewhat, to the old Marreys. You’ve already heard from Scully and Ma, I’m sure, on how the family came to the cove…’ Ma looked sheepish, ‘…but now it’s time for some truth. In the days when Merton was only a dozen families, the Marreys were driven out. Snug home and good living all lost, all at once and all because of a touch of the Scale.

  ‘Well, I say good living…it had been that for generations but there was a Hunger about so the living wasn’t as good as it had been. The fact is, even the oldest folk could remember only feasts as far back as memory took them. Somehow, through all the good year
s they’d forgotten what it was to be hungry.

  ‘The way I heard it from my father, most of Merton had some disfigurement in those days; there was one boy who lived a whole lifetime in just seven years, growing aged and feeble before he even reached his mother’s shoulder. The southerners disagreed as to the nature of his Otherness, but everybody agreed it was unlucky for a child to age so contrary, and he was bound to bring trouble on them. Banishment was the cure but the lad died before they could act, and his parents set for the mainland before the town could feel his loss. And they were right to do so because a day later the mob burned everything belonging to that family.’

  Ushag fell silent and I waited. My heart felt too big for my chest. She watched my face. ‘People do bad things when they’re hungry,’ she said sadly.

  ‘As it was with that boy, so it soon followed with the Marreys. As a girl, one of the grandmothers suffered terribly with the Scale. This was that grandmother called Tosha, a woman out of Strangers’ Croft, and who was married to Doolish; she was shingled in thick sheets of Scale, and green and leaking they say it was too. Nobody had seen anything like it and the family expected her to up and die at every moment. But she lived on and, given what they’d wanted to do to the aged boy, perhaps it’s not so unexpected that soon Merton should turn on her. It didn’t take long. In town she became known as the merrow-wife, but she did not die of it and the family did not run from the island.

  ‘The Marreys just upped and took everything they could carry over Shipton-Cronk, and they came to the northernmost cove. We were always tight-knit, as close as snigs in a stream. There were two other brothers and a sister, all as yet unmarried and all now unlikely to be so. Nobody wanted to make a match with the family who boasted a merrow.

  ‘At first they survived on salt and weeds, and sheltered in caves up the gorge. They found eels swarming in the rivers, and bats blackening the cave walls, and they ate them. They stole eggs from the nesting sea-birds, and honey from the bees. And they found useful wreckage all along the shoreline; timbers curved and straight, all kinds of line and chain, anchor flukes, pinions, whisky, blades and boxes; all the flotsam of lives lost at sea, finding its way to Marrey cove where all this found stuff helped rebuild their lost lives.