Raven Speak (9781442402492)

by Wilson, Diane Lee

  And melting into the syrupy blackness, she felt herself drift away, felt herself falling … falling …

  Falling!

  Just in time she flailed her arms, planted her foot, and caught herself. What had happened? Where was she? Blinking, scrambling to gather her wits, she realized that Rune had stepped out from under her. In his own way he was eyeing her with disapproval. He snorted and shook his head. He pawed the sand and, from beneath his heavy forelock, delivered his most penetrating stare.

  Of course. She couldn’t sleep. Not right now, anyway, and not here. She had to get home—fast. Inhaling the cold, salty air—and gagging on its soggy weight—she tried to focus her thoughts. To get home, she had to find a way to mount.

  The very idea of that held her in place, stupefied. Climbing onto Rune’s back appeared at that moment as daunting as reclimbing the mountain she’d just descended. It just wasn’t possible. Her arm hurt too much. Her legs had no strength. She couldn’t.

  But here was Rune, when she’d not even asked, folding his knees and dropping onto the sand with a sigh. It was the trick she’d taught him as a child—a lifetime ago.

  Such selflessness! It squeezed her tight, made her eyes sting.

  New resolve ignited within her. “All right,” she croaked, sore-throated. (Was that her voice?) “If you can manage it with your bad leg, I can manage it with one arm.” And ever so gingerly she maneuvered her right leg over him and settled onto his warm back, gripping his sides with her knees. How odd it felt, after having not sat in days. To protect her throbbing stump of a limb, she clamped it close to her chest, then grabbed a hank of mane. Could he, as old as he was, battle-weary and injured, manage to rise to his feet?

  What if they both fell? Imagining the excruciating pain of slamming onto the hard sand stiffened her spine. Maybe she shouldn’t— No, no, no, she scolded, forcing herself to relax. She could trust him. He was Rune.

  Anxious, wondering, she nevertheless sat fixed. The ocean rushed and retreated, rushed and retreated. Rune remained kneeling. At long last he sucked in a deep breath, and with an explosive grunt extended his front legs. That raised his withers, and she leaned into the motion to keep her balance. He teetered there, legs splayed, then grunted again and heaved his hindquarters up to a shaky stance.

  For a while she swayed atop a floundering ship. Rune struggled to walk a line, but each hobbling step sent him lurching first one way and then the other. He faded to a halt, trembling. His skin twitched with irritation. His ears flicked forward and back. He seemed to be thinking, to be mustering his own resolve, and it must have been so, for soon enough he struck out again, one hesitant step at a time, and they began making their way along the shore.

  The blueish light of the fading day smudged her sight; it played tricks on her eyes and fogged her thinking. Everything sounded so loud inside her head: the surf, her breathing, the crunching sand. Without looking up she became aware of the two ravens accompanying them. Their jolting yelps pierced her skull until the buzzing already inside drowned them. Her arm’s throbbing measured their progress—if you could call it that—for each hoof-heavy step was labored. Clearly Rune suffered as much pain as she, and she rubbed her gratitude into his withers.

  The blackness continued to tug at her with such sweet promises that she frequently had to shake her head, twist her neck, and stretch her jaw just to stay awake. Luckily chilling gusts whipped the hair about her face and pushed her onward.

  Dusk deepened to night, and the ravens’ calls escalated from placid quorks to excited kr-r-ucks! They were calling to her now, calling her name. Asa, Asa, they encouraged, almost human.

  “Asa! Asa!” So very human.

  “Asa!” Through the deafening throb imprisoning her body she heard her name. And she recognized a voice: Wenda. Blinking, she lifted her head and tried to shake it clear. A yellow flame bobbed in the darkness. The splashing waves liquefied its brilliance and scattered its light across the shimmering water. Holding the flame high was a cloaked figure who waved a welcome and guided her home with shouts of joy: “You did it! You did it!”

  “The whale,” she mumbled thickly. “I found the whale.”

  “I’ll send them for it,” came the reply. “Your part is finished.”

  And then the hands again, lifting her down—Where was she? What was happening?—and the floor became the ceiling and the rafters ensnared her and the world spun top for bottom. More fire appeared, orange and snapping. She stared, entranced, unable to move. The many hands pressed upon her and pulled at her, and at one point the fire seemed to leap over to her and burn through her arm with its ferocious bite. She cried out, that much she knew, and her gaping mouth clamped down on a mug of steaming liquid that burned her lips. The taste on her tongue was oh-so-bitter and she tried to push it away but … but—Why wouldn’t her hands obey?—the delicious blackness came flooding in, and this time she gave in and did let herself go falling … falling … falling.

  TUTTUGU OK NÍU

  Although the sea sent chill breezes gusting up the fjord, the sun warmed the damp earth around the village. Almost overnight a vibrant green had painted the strip of land squeezed between water and mountain.

  Asa stood on a gentle rise beside the longhouse. Having considered all the possibilities, she dragged a stick to etch four lines in the mud. Yes, this would do. The site was high enough to catch a bit of wind to stoke the cooking fires, but near enough to the longhouse to easily carry the sizzling meats on their serving trays. Tora had been complaining for days that the hearth wasn’t big enough for all the cooking and preserving they’d been doing, and when Ketil had reminded Asa that her father had promised a new cooking shed, she immediately stepped outside to select a location. It would be the first project under her reign as clan chieftain, and she wanted to make sure it was right. As Ketil watched, she moved about inside the imaginary walls she’d outlined, made one-handed motions of lighting a fire, of lifting bags from hooks, of chopping and stirring. Had she remembered everything? She frowned, thinking.

  Along which wall would the water barrels sit? Well, she’d leave that to Tora. The woman needed to be mistress of something, and this cooking shed would serve nicely. Besides, useful work bred more loyalty than a silver ring pin.

  Standing at her invisible doorway, she raised an eyebrow in Ketil’s direction. He nodded. “It’ll do. I’ll have the boys start digging at once. Good day for it too,” he added, lifting a cheek to the sunny sky. “First of many, I suspect.” And with that he gave her his best smile.

  She nodded in return. At one time she might have thrown her arms around his neck, but that was when she was just a girl; now she was clan chieftain. There were unspoken boundaries.

  Stepping across the nascent threshold, she left Ketil to his work and climbed the path to the outfields. Along the stream, pristine white snowdrops shivered on their stems and the spicy fragrance of juniper scented the air.

  The geese had returned seven days ago. Their trumpeting calls had awakened her before dawn, and she’d left her mattress to stand shivering in the gray light and watch their wavering V formation pass overhead. Finally … finally … summer had arrived!

  In the nearer of the outfields Rune and the other two horses, each as thin as skeletons, busily nibbled their way across the new blades. They heard her approach—she could tell by the flicking ears—but only Rune lifted his head to whinny a greeting. His bristly, upright mane was already beginning to flop over, and he looked sadly comical as he limped toward her. But what a welcome sight. The day he’d rescued her, she was so weak and had lost so much blood that she doubted she’d have made it back to her clan. Again he’d saved her life. He butted her shoulder, begging for a treat, and she fed him a barley cake. For the rest of his days, she’d always carry these treats for her trusted friend.

  A loud gronk shattered the morning, startling her. She would never get used to the capricious visits unique to Wenda’s mischievous ravens.

  “Ach, you keep sweetening h
im like that, and he’ll be waddling like a goose before Shieling Month.”

  Asa shook her head. Nor would she get used to the way Wenda could seemingly appear from air. She turned to find the one-eyed woman smiling.

  “But you can both do with a little fat on your ribs.” Wenda handed Rune some more barley cakes and her a portion of mylja. How many days in a row had she bolted down the crumbly flatbread made so much better with melted whale blubber? Not enough to satisfy. Without hesitation she sank her teeth into it.

  The old woman had settled in as the clan’s skald. Well, “settled” wasn’t exactly the right word, because she rarely sat for longer than the span of a story before rising and busying herself with some nonurgent task, regularly glancing toward the door or the ocean, as if she were expecting someone, or as if she, herself, were planning to flit away. But she’d brought bags of new stories to carry them through the summer nights, and she was relating them with an artful zeal that seemed to please her as well as the clan.

  “How’s the arm today?” The motherly concern in her voice warmed Asa.

  “It hurts. And it’s still keeping me awake nights. And sometimes”—this was rather unnerving—“sometimes when I lie really quiet I can feel my hand, though I know that’s not possible.”

  Wenda nodded. “We always have a sense for what’s been lost.” She turned and gazed through the trees to the ocean, then stalked toward them, studiously avoiding the circle of ashes and charcoal where Jorgen’s body had been burned. She gazed down toward the settlement, and Asa left Rune to join her.

  Ketil already had Helgi and Thidrick digging a trench for the foundation. The two boys carefully followed the lines she’d scratched, and that gave her pride. Gunnvor emerged from the longhouse to watch, coaxing little Engli along at the end of her hand. It was the first time he’d been on his feet in a month. Yes, everything about the day—the generous sun, the construction of the cooking shed, the sparkle returning to Rune’s eyes—heralded good fortune.

  Without glancing over she felt Wenda’s one eye boring into her. Though she’d related her trial in exhaustive detail to her clan, and answered so many questions that she’d finally held up her hand and forbidden more, she’d not discussed a word of it with Wenda. Oddly, it was she who’d had bandages and the bitter medicinal tea waiting that night. But now, at last, Asa sensed a question coming.

  “Did you make a good trade?”

  How many times she’d asked herself that same question! Especially those first days, passed writhing on her mattress in agonizing pain. Had she? Thoughtfully she studied the village below. Astrid and young Pyri were wringing out freshly laundered bedsheets. Tora was scraping remnants from one of the giant whale bones dragged closer to the longhouse. The door to the livestock byre stood propped open, and the cow ambled through the settlement at will, grazing in bliss. Her surviving calf skipped and played by its lonesome, exuberant as only one who was innocent of darker days could be.

  Pride swelled her chest. Her clan was safe and, under her leadership, would remain so. They had food and warmth. They had each other. And now, for one sacrifice, they had hope. Her father and her mother both would have been proud.

  A good trade? She lifted her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and nodded, smiling. “Yes,” she answered. “A good trade.

  AUTHORÙS NOTE

  This novel began, oddly enough, as a picture book. I had envisioned pages of colorful illustrations depicting magnificent blue and green fjords, red Viking ships, golden ponies, and one very determined copper-headed girl named Asa. Since a nearby museum was hosting a special exhibit on Vikings, I began my research there.

  Among the many artifacts on display I spied a carved antler comb that I imagined Asa using, a pointed spur she would never have needed with Rune, and a gold and silver brooch her mother might wear. Inspired, I picked up a few books at my local library and returned home. Then I wrote the first lines: “In the pale light of a wintry morning seven men saddled their ship across bucking white waves. A girl stood alone on the shore.”

  I kept on writing, but as much as I tried to compress Asa’s story into a handful of illustration-friendly pages, she kept slipping off them and whispering that there was more to her life. Frustrated but intrigued, I set aside my wordy draft and followed.

  I visited a larger public library and two university libraries to dig more deeply into the Viking culture. One of the first things I learned was that the Vikings did NOT wear horned helmets! That’s a modern myth. Yes, they were marauders; in fact, the very name Viking means to go forth and raid, to go “a-viking.” But many times they were forced to set sail in search of land and food because the habitable areas around their fjords were too narrow to afford sufficient room for crops and livestock. This was especially true on the western coast of modern-day Norway where Asa’s story takes place.

  During the time that this book was bursting free of its picture book bindings, I had the opportunity to visit Scotland and England, areas of which were once settled by Vikings. At the Royal Museum of Scotland I discovered a hammered metal helmet crafted by a Viking for a warrior pony, a helmet with the most magnificent curling horns. I knew Asa had a very special horse and became certain he would have worn this exact helmet—until I read the tiny museum note card stating that while experts had also once been excited by this find, all had determined that the helmet was an example of a nineteenth-century reconstructive error. Okay, okay. Not even the Viking horses had horned helmets.

  In the beautiful English walled city of York I toured the Jorvik Viking Centre. Stationed upon an ongoing archaeological dig, this museum has unearthed more than forty thousand Viking objects, and among the many on display were shoes and clothing more than a thousand years old. Amazing. Also at Jorvik I got to experience a life-size recreation of a Viking settlement—complete with sounds and smells—which provided invaluable research material.

  Time and again I came across depictions of Viking mythology: Thor’s hammer, Freyr’s golden boar, the Valkyries with their offering cups. But the god that intrigued me most was the mercurial, one-eyed Odin. A seeker of knowledge, Odin could change his shape at will, and in some accounts traveled as a woman on a white horse. He had sacrificed his eye in exchange for wisdom—sacrifice for the greater good being a revered attribute and common theme in Viking mythology—but continued to seek understanding, often ordering his two ravens to bring him news of the world. I wanted him to be part of Asa’s story and therefore modeled the enigmatic Wenda after him, creating her name to reflect Odin’s nickname, “the wanderer.”

  In my reading I learned how important storytelling was to passing long winters in tight quarters. (Perhaps because the winters were so long, the Vikings had names for only two seasons: summer and winter.) The skald—or storyteller—was highly respected, second only to the clan chieftain, and if he could interpret runes (the carved symbols that served as an alphabet) he was thought to possess almost magical powers. So what would a silver-tongued skald bubbling with evil ambition do with such powers? And how does an entranced audience sift truth from fact?

  I was surprised to discover that the Vikings were fairly egalitarian. Men and women could each own property and could have a say in how things were run, and if a man went off to battle, a woman could run the clan in his place. I learned that self-sufficiency was much admired and that an independent spirit in children—even to the point of being outspoken and argumentative—was encouraged. That’s when Asa finally nodded, stepped back, and allowed me to tell her story.

  As she makes her extraordinary leap from young woman to clan leader, Asa struggles with the sacrifices required of good leaders, and she gradually learns to balance the needs of the community against those of the individual—challenging tasks for anyone. But as her father pronounced at her birth, Asa is “no ordinary child,” and her story exceeds the bounds of pictures.

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