In the distance the longhouse door opened. A greeting rose in her throat until she recognized Jorgen and she froze in place, praying to meld with the darkened hillside at her back. She hadn’t planned on encountering him out here.
Her blood thudded along her neck, her tongue thickened, and her eyeballs grew chill because she didn’t dare even to blink. She watched him jerk his head in a funny way, sniffing at something, looking for something. Finally, after an unbearable while, he retreated inside the longhouse and pulled the door closed after him. Waters still rushed across the earth, noisily returning home, but she couldn’t move.
Hating herself, she stood undecided. Her mother was mere steps away. But so was Jorgen.
A few latent raindrops, fat and hard, pelted her head. Yet she stood. A flash of lightning stripped the land naked, startling her to momentary blindness, and when the land fell black again she bolted clumsily toward the nearest shelter: the abandoned byre holding the clan’s dead. It would have to do for now.
She half expected an unhappy draugr to knock her flat when she entered, but only a rotten odor slapped her face. Not daring to proceed further, she sank to the earthen floor just inside the door and waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom.
The cloudburst pounded the sod then, as before, abruptly passed on. The steady drip-drip-drip of water punctuated the ensuing silence.
As the gloom receded the dead slowly appeared. A mute audience, they stretched away in a neat row, side by side, heads abutting the opposite wall, shapes differing only in the dim color and weave of their blankets. The farther bundles seemed flattened somehow, as if the unhoused souls, tired of waiting for burial, were tugging their decaying bodies into the ground unnoticed. They had been Einarr, Systa, and her own brother, Harald, there in the oat-colored blanket her mother had woven. The first three to die, though with so many passing it was hard to keep the order straight. Surrounded by so much death, she became acutely aware of her heavy breath warming her cold lips.
Nearer were the bundled forms of Kolla and her shy daughter Ragna, and still nearer, the slender remains of her other brother, Magnus. A bright vision of his freckled face offering a gap-toothed smile sprang to mind. Always laughing, he’d been her father’s favorite from the day he was born, and when he’d died, her father had retreated to the bed-closet and not come out for two entire days. Magnus’s loss, she believed, had made it easier for her father to step onto the Sea Dragon and steer it into the storm.
She pressed her chin onto her knees. She’d not cried for any of them, even her own brothers, and had stoically swallowed the pain their deaths delivered. Death was part of life. And yet … and yet it seemed there’d been far too many deaths of late, and that they’d begun weighing inside her like so many stones. She shifted position and drew a difficult breath.
All the while that her eyes were passing back and forth over the bundles, she knew she was pointedly ignoring the nearest one, the newest one, the only bundle in the row free of dust and leaf litter. The only form wrapped in a beautiful madder-red blanket and pinned with her mother’s filigreed, gold-and-silver brooch. Its two gripping beasts, eternally entangled, glinted even in the dark.
Clasping her knees tighter, Asa forced herself to look. Tears brimmed. Her mother’s death wasn’t unexpected, she scolded; and yet, childishly, she felt cheated. She’d never again feel her mother’s smooth, calloused hand cupping her chin; never trade good-natured teasing with her; never witness her mother’s delight in a double fistful of purple foxgloves dangling on their stalks. All of which she might have had if she hadn’t galloped away in the middle of the night and left her mother to die alone. The tears rose further and trembled upon her lashes. She bit her lip, blinked rapidly, angrily, and fought them away. Digging her chin harder into her knees, she recalled every last thing that she loved about her mother and mentally pinned those memories to her shroud, that her mother might remember them also and smile in her spirit world.
Later, when she’d gone numb even to the odors in the cold byre, she sat thinking how everything had gone wrong and she arranged much of the blame around her own shoulders. Long ago she should have seen how lost her father was and how sick her mother was; they’d just hidden their needs so well. And what had she done? She’d galloped off to save Rune and, all right, to seek a little food for the clan, but had been talked (by a fool!) into setting her sights on a whale—a whale, of all things! (And who, really, was the fool?) If only she’d kept her eyes fixed on the ground, gathered some roots or some nuts, taken smaller, safer steps, maybe then she would have returned in time to save her mother. Or at least returned in time to give her a farewell kiss, to prevent her from dying alone.
Now she herself was left truly alone. Her mother and brothers were dead; her father was gone and Rune was gone. She had no one to help her and, worse, though separated by dark and distance, she sensed Jorgen’s malicious, manipulative presence. Who knew what he was up to?
Hah! She did know what he was up to: He was taking over leadership of the clan. And with her mother dead, he’d probably already assumed her father’s seat of honor beside the fire. That twisted her belly. How was she going to live here? She heaved a sigh as Wenda’s words came back to her: Has all of your father’s work been so easily tossed to the winds? Yes, she answered bitterly, as easily as smoke.
It seemed ages since she’d slurped down Wenda’s mussel stew; the warm broth would certainly have been welcomed now. Her mouth watered involuntarily. What about the meats left in the bags? Without having to stir too much, she managed to fumble through them.
A lone mutton loin, as heavy and as hard as a rock, lay inside the first bag. It would require a lot of boiling. The dried fish might be palatable so she blindly reached into the second bag. Her fingers met not food but something thick and soft and, even without being able to see it, she knew it was the blue cloak she’d worn in Wenda’s cave. At least she could be warm; that was something. Hastily she peeled off her wet cloak and wrapped herself inside the blue one. The garment was nothing short of magical in easing her shivering at once.
Reaching into the last bag she discovered the partially dried fishes. She tore one apart and teased the still tender flesh from the bones. The meat flaked on her tongue and quieted her stomach. Her back unknotted and, with warmth oozing through her body, she gave in to sleep.
She had no idea how much time had passed when she was startled awake by the sound of steps approaching the byre. She held her breath, her heart thumping. Jorgen! It had to be him; no one else dared enter here. She was trapped.
Fastening her eyes in the direction of the door, though she could barely make it out in the darkness, she waited. Another step, muffled by mud, and then another. Slow, hesitant. What was he up to? A whiffle, akin to an animal’s breath, came just on the other side of the wall at her back; it was followed by a low, questioning nicker. Rune.
Exhaling in relief, she thanked the gods it wasn’t Jorgen, though it would be soon enough. Already she discerned slender strips of gray light across the floor. She climbed to her feet and carefully pushed the byre door open. Rune shoved his head against her, nickering concern.
“Ssh … ssh,” she soothed, cupping her hand, stiff with cold, over his muzzle and pushing him backward. The mountains stood silhouetted against a fading sky. Day was coming. Jorgen would be coming.
She gazed toward the longhouse. Did she have a place there anymore? Did she have a place anywhere?
She continued to calm Rune with caresses. What should she do?
Feed her clan. That’s what she had set out to do. And she plunged back inside the byre to gather up the dead calf. Quietly, she crossed to the longhouse and laid the body on the stone door-slab. Rune watched with pricked ears.
Next she needed to get the cow and surviving calf back to their byre. The rain had stopped, and if the pair weren’t ambling their way homeward they were most likely in the same brushy mountainside shelter where she’d left them. She ducked into the small byre on
ce more to grab the bags. There she hesitated. On an impulse she knelt beside the raised planks supporting a shrouded body and swept her hand beneath them. There it was: a bit of cheese, horribly moldy by its odor. She pulled it out, dropped it in the bag containing her wet cloak, and searched for more of Jorgen’s selfish hoard. In a matter of minutes she discovered a pouch of what felt like nuts, a rather hefty bag of barley, dozens of tubers she didn’t recognize, the molting head of a long-dead fish, and the charred remains of some partially plucked bird wrapped in cloth. The cloth felt rather slimy in her hand; the meat was definitely spoiled. She stuffed it all inside the bags and was ready to leave—Rune was pawing all too noisily on the door-slab—when she hesitated again. She had to let Jorgen know his stab at leadership wasn’t going uncontested.
Returning to her mother, Asa carefully unfastened the gold-and-silver brooch and lifted the blanket from her face. The waxy image, bereft of her mother’s spirit, stirred little pain in her. Carefully she rolled the blanket back on either side, revealing her mother’s hands clasped across her chest. With a shivery thrill Asa tore a piece from one of the dried fishes and tucked it between her mother’s hands. When Jorgen returned, he’d find all of his food gone. That made her smile. Let him think her mother, a chieftain’s wife, had eaten it all and had even found her own; let him think she was a draugr, one of the walking dead. And let him tremble for all the evil he had done.
SJAUTÁN
A thick coastal fog muted such details as branches, speckles, or crevices. That tumble of boulders resembled the place where she’d found the cow last night, but the longer she searched, the more she suspected she was on the wrong mountainside. Rearranging the beaded blue cloak around her shoulders—how amazingly warm it was!—she whistled softly for Rune. Fog swirled through the brush, like damp smoke seeking kindling, but other than the muffled lapping of the surf below, she didn’t hear a sound. No matter. He’d just wandered off. Best thing to do now was climb higher and figure out where she was.
She leaned into the effort, her clouded breath mimicking the drifting fog, and reached an open space nearer the top. Stands of white-trunked birch trees gave way to a thicker pine forest blanketing the rising slope. She still couldn’t see much, couldn’t get her bearings, but in searching the area she came across a picture-stone, fully the size of a man, silhouetted against the gray sky.
Picture-stones were rare; she’d only known the one on the whale-nosed bluff north of their village, so she approached this one with great curiosity.
Carvings ornamented it from top to bottom. They’d been dug into the rock some time ago, for the lines had been softened by weather and in places cradled bits of damp green mosses and lichens. She trailed her fingertips over the beautiful illustrations, catching droplets of condensation that rolled down her wrist. With a quickening heart she began to sense that the night-chilled stone held a story as momentous as any Jorgen had ever told. While fruited trees crowned the top, embracing robust animals and thatched houses, below and around them wound an enormous, flat-headed dragon that flicked its tongue at one house while stretching its claws toward another. Menace or protector? Rather boldly, she tapped its tail.
Squiggly lines buttressed more fruit trees—furrows? waves?—but beneath them were three straight lines, quite barren. She passed over some incised hatches and dots, symbols that explained the story, she knew, though that magic was known only to skalds. For her the stone held its silence.
Farther down she touched a ship leaping over ocean waves. Men rowed vigorously. Their leader, standing in the prow, pointed toward the horizon. But here the lines describing the sea stretched on and on, and as she followed the turbulent pattern around the side and then to the back of the stone, the men left in the boat seemed to shrink in comparison.
A crunching split the morning’s fog-shrouded stillness and she looked down to find a spattering of rock chips and dust beneath lines that were powdery white and new. They reminded her of the pale inner bark of a tree freshly exposed by the bite of an axe. Somebody, it seemed, had recently carved new designs, and she bent to study them more closely.
At the edge of the undulating lines, racing into nothingness, galloped a horse. The girl on his back wore no head cloth and her windblown hair unfurled in long ribbons. She carried a sword in one upraised hand.
A girl warrior? Who was she? How long ago had she lived, and what had happened to her? And … who was commemorating her now?
The faint, distant cry of a seabird, carried on a freshening wind, distracted her. The fog was breaking up, and as she turned away from the stone she found herself gradually falling under the hypnotic spell of the ocean’s cold blue-gray expanse. It stretched into the distance until it met with an equal expanse of watery blue sky. Both appeared endless, timeless. They had always been and would always be. She shifted position and, as her boot crunched the stone chips again, she became aware of the mountain beneath her. Immense. Immoveable. Unchangeable. The mountain and the sky and the ocean would be here long after she was gone, and she suddenly felt as small as the men in the boat, as inconsequential as a breath of wind. As if to mock her, a gust whipped the hair across her eyes, temporarily blinding her. She brushed it aside, clamping it to her cheek, and looked at the picture-stone anew. It, and the people on it—their images at least—would pass all the days, forever and ever, here with the sky and mountain and sea. A hundred winters from now they would still be rowing, pointing, galloping. A thrill rippled through Asa. Wouldn’t that be something? To slip from life’s bounds and meld with the earth, to slow one’s breathing and become timeless.
More birdcalls punctured the silence, though this time they didn’t come from the sea. These were the hoarse cries of ravens. Again? Were they following her? Mocking her? And just as she thought it, the familiar pair flapped into sight, circled above her, and then alit on a shrub, bending the bough perilously close to the ground with their combined weight. They bobbed and preened and snapped their bills, all the while pretending not to watch her, though she knew, just knew, that their beady brown eyes marked her every move. As moments passed she got a strong sense that they were waiting for something—or someone—and that gave her a prickly, unsettled feeling.
Asa held her breath and listened. Just when her growing impatience was pushing her to continue looking for Rune and the cow, she heard someone coming and spotted Wenda’s hunched figure climbing the same path she’d taken. Asa had no choice but to wait now, though her irritation with the old woman stiffened her jaw.
Maybe she should run and hide. She was younger, faster. But even as her heart kicked and her toes lifted slightly, she knew it would be useless. The ravens would find her, even in the wildness of these mountains they would pick her out, and they’d communicate her whereabouts to Wenda, and the chase would never end. Besides, she was done running.
And so she waited, while the breeze whipped her hair, stinging her face, and the emerging sun nudged her around. On impulse she picked up one of the larger stone chips and fiddled with it, noting the roughness between her fingers, savoring its heft. She’d keep this one piece, she decided, and think about the stone’s carvings later. Maybe someone from her clan would remember who the girl on the horse was.
In between these skittering thoughts Asa shielded her eyes and checked Wenda’s progress. As the old woman neared, Asa pulled herself tall and glared.
Raspy breaths preceded the woman. Understandable, since it was quite a climb. Admirable, even. Wenda staggered close and grasped the stone with the ferocity of a drowning swimmer clawing at a rope. Her chest rose and fell with her sucking inhalations. Her head lolled forward and her one eye closed tight, and Asa thought she was about to faint. But Wenda seemed to be concentrating on something instead, and as her breathing slowed, she opened her eye and found the two ravens hunched on their bough. Immediately the birds began chattering. Wenda didn’t move. She stood rooted, one mottled hand still clutching the stone, the other wrapped around the strap of her satchel.
Wenda let go of the stone just long enough to effectively shush her with an open palm.
That rankled. Well, she wasn’t waiting any longer; there were more important things to do than grow old on this windswept bluff watching an addled crone engage in some sort of raven speak. The blue cloak gave a rustling sigh as she started off, and it occurred to her that maybe Wenda had followed her to get her cloak back. Of course, that was it, and so she began unfastening it, though somewhat unwillingly.
“No, no, no!” Wenda cried, flapping her hands. “You are the one who must wear it now.”
Asa let the elegant brooch fastener click back into place. “Why?”
Wenda was busy searching the clearing. “Where’s that horse of yours?”
“I don’t know; I’m looking for him.”
The woman had only to turn her eye on her two ravens and nod, and they lifted off the branch. Ignoring Asa, she took her time digging through her leather satchel.
“My mother’s dead.” The words sounded accusatory somehow, even to Asa’s ears, yet Wenda, now crouched over her open pouch and apparently oblivious to them, continued digging. That irritated Asa. In a louder voice she repeated, “My mother’s dead.” And announcing it atop this mountain and having the breeze strip the words from her lips made the loss freshly painful.
Wenda lifted her head. “I know, Asa.” Compassion filled her voice though a sense of urgency overran it. She glanced toward the birch trees. “I’ve always known.”
She returned to searching through her pouch, pushing its contents this way and that and making the strangest chirruping noises with her tongue. “Yes, here it is! What you’ve been wanting since you first crossed my path!” From the depths of the pouch emerged a silver-accented strike-a-light and a blackened hand torch.
Raven Speak (9781442402492) Page 12