by Jude Fisher
When she awoke the next morning, it was to the sound of a horde of small trolls painfully excavating the inside of her skull with their vicious little picks and hammers. Each thump made her wince, and that was before she opened her eyes. Sunlight lanced her pupils like hot needles; she shut them again immediately, only to be assailed by a horrible, flaring red that scoriated her eyeballs. Her mouth felt as furry as the thing she was lying on, and she felt an overwhelming need to pee, throw up or merely die.
Feeling something hard pressing uncomfortably into her naked buttock, she shifted her weight and reached down. Her fingers closed over a number of small, unidentifiable objects. Very slowly, she opened her eyes again, shielding herself from the worst of the light with her other hand, and held her discoveries aloft. In her grasp were a pair of pale pink cowrie shells, and a twist of silver wire with several long red hairs still attached to it. More shells were scattered across the blanket; the shrivelled husk of a snakeskin lay beside her on the pillow. Mystified, she looked around. It took a while to register her surroundings or, indeed, her companion. Inside a makeshift tent of sailcloth and lashed-together oars, the chief of the mummers’ troupe lay propped on one elbow, regarding her with a hugely satisfied smile. Some of his braids had come undone and his hair was in disarray.
Events from the previous night started to come back to her in hallucinatory little flashes, and suddenly she became aware that the only item of clothing she was still wearing appeared to consist of a single felt sock, and that was half off her left foot.
Katla groaned. Now death definitely seemed the most welcome option.
‘Well, that’s a most charming greeting, Katla Aransen. Good morning to you, too. And so far I’ve found it to be a very beautiful morning: the sun is shining, the wind is true and there appears to be a naked girl in my bed. Not a bad way to start the day.’
‘Did we—?’
It was a pointless question. The bearskin beneath her hip was still slick and damp. Katla was no virgin: she knew what that must mean. This time her groan was louder.
‘By Sur, I must have been drunk.’
Tam Fox regarded her curiously. ‘You could not imagine engaging with me unless you were rats’-arsed?’
It was a quaint term used predominantly by Fair Islanders. Inconsequentially, amidst all the other confusions, Katla wondered whether that was where he had originated. Her short, bitter laugh was her only reply: his question had surely been hypothetical. When Tam leaned closer and put a hand out to her face she jerked away like a skittish mare.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. Even so, perhaps I will ask your father again for the right to wed you, when we return.’
‘Again?’
Tam nodded.
Katla was aghast. ‘Why, what did he say the first time?’
The mummer tapped the side of his nose. ‘That’s my secret.’
‘I will never wed,’ she said vehemently.
‘Never?’
‘Never.’
Tam raised his eyebrows. ‘If that is your choice, then so be it. ’Twould be a terrible waste, though, if such a lovely body were not to grace a good man’s bed on a regular basis, most preferably mine . . .’
Then he pushed back the covers and ducked out of the tent to stand stark naked in the sun. The light fell on his long, lean muscles, his narrow waist and neat buttocks. He was a well-made man, that much was undeniable, but what really caught her eye was the mass of scar tissue across his back and shoulders.
She called his name to catch his attention, meaning to ask him what had caused such despoliation to his flesh, but when he turned to face her full on, the question went right out of her head, and when he smiled and came back into the tent she made only the most cursory protest when he slid under the furs beside her once more and started to run his big hands gently down her flanks.
Later, it was her turn to prop herself up on an elbow and survey his drowsy face. ‘Do not get the idea that this means more than it does. I still will not wed you, or any man.’
‘It means enough; and enough, as my mother always said, is as much as a feast.’ He smiled like the cheesemaker’s cat. ‘Besides, I only said that perhaps I would ask your father. I may have changed my mind now that I have sampled the goods.’
Katla thumped him furiously and got dressed in such haste that it was only when she stomped off across the beach with the mummer’s laughter ringing in her ears that she realised she had put her leggings on back to front and that the rip in them must have revealed to anyone she passed (and there were quite a few, most of whom seemed to be well aware, from the knowing smiles they conferred upon her, where and how she had spent the night) a very considerable expanse of her bare arse.
They cast off from Kjaley around noon and sailed west-southwest until the sun began its slow dip towards the horizon. They had made good time: a strong wind filled the sail all the way so that they sped along at such a clip Katla could have sworn the prow of the Snowland Wolf barely skimmed the surface of the sea. This time tomorrow they would be home. She could feel the draw of the islands in her bones, like an aroma scented on the air, acknowledged but not yet identified.
Halli must have had the same thought; though prompted more by his understanding of dead reckoning and navigation than by some uncanny intuition. She watched him take Tam Fox aside, watched the two of them in deep conversation; saw Tam take a handful of Halli’s hair in his fist and shear it off with his belt-knife. Katla frowned, remembering a similar occurrence of her own. A little while later, Tam crossed the ship and took a bundle of old, faded twine from the bottom of the costumes chest and passed it to Urse, who made his way steadily up the length of the Snowland Wolf, tied one end of the twine carefully to the sternpost and then let the other down over the stern to trail in their wake. Then nobody did anything for the best part of an hour; except Jenna, who had donned her best blue dress again and was now fussing with her hair.
Katla marched boldly up to Tam Fox, who was now sitting on the chest, plaiting together a black and yellow braid.
‘What’s going on?’ she demanded, hands on hips.
The mummers’ chief did not even look up from his task. ‘You’ll see.’
‘I’ll see what?’ Katla persisted.
Tam said nothing. His fingers flicked the strands of hair expertly in and out of one another until he reached the end of the braid. There he wound the remaining strands into a complicated knot and finished off the binding neatly. He waved it in front of Katla’s nose, then whisked it out of her reach and stowed it in his belt-pouch.
‘Wait and see.’
And with that, he leapt to his feet and padded his way down to the stern, where he drew the soaking twine aboard, unhooked its dry end from the post and brought it dripping back up to the centre of the ship. There, he squeezed the seawater out of it until there was a small pool at his feet; then he called Jenna and Halli to him. Katla watched curiously as Tam Fox made the pair face one another, then wound the wet twine about their wrists in a complicated series of figure-of-eights so that their palms were inextricably pressed together. Then he crouched, dabbled his fingers in the puddle of brine and anointed each of them on the forehead and tongue.
By now, a group of the mummers had gathered around their captain and the lovers: Katla had to move nimbly to get herself to the fore of the crowd in time to hear Tam Fox intone: ‘This salt you taste is for remembrance, that the Lord Sur has witnessed your promises.’ Then he raised his voice. ‘The Lord of the Waters, Lord of the Storm, Lord of the Isles watches the vows which you, Halli Aranson and you, Jenna Finnsen, make this day in your handfasting. This twine that I have bound about you symbolises the endless circle of life, which is the Lord’s gift. In exchange, I offer this braid as a token of their vow to take one another as man and wife within a year from this day, and to honour Sur’s name with their lives and the lives of the children they will bring into your world.’
He took the braid of black and gold hair from the pouch at his belt
and held it aloft so that all might see. Then he cast it over the side. Jenna followed its arc, her upturned face lit golden by the setting sun. The saltwater gleamed on her lips, which were curved into the most blissful smile. Halli’s face was blithe: he looked, Katla thought, like the child he had once been. Apart from the beard, and that big strong jaw . . . The braid lay bobbing on the sparkling waves for a second, then it filled with water and sank slowly from view.
Everyone started to talk at once, congratulating the couple, exclaiming at the tightness of the binding Tam had made, and at the unusual configuration of knots.
‘Look,’ Min Codface was saying, ‘he’s woven in a blessing for five children. Five! Imagine that!’
‘Are you sure it’s not five sheep?’ someone else said. ‘The knots are very similar for “babes” and “ewes” . . .’
They all laughed.
Katla laughed with them, though she was more than a little annoyed that no one had thought to include her in their plans before the fact. She was about to swallow her irritation and offer her own good wishes to her brother and her friend when she felt a vague tremor beneath her feet. The vibration she felt from it travelled through her soles and into the bones of her shins, setting up a faint aching sensation. The ship rocked slightly, then it was gone.
She frowned, shifted her feet. When she looked up, she found that Tam was watching her curiously and she looked away quickly, just in time to catch sight of an oddly forked tail emerging out of the foam of the steerboard wash, and then disappear again.
She ran to the gunwale, looked overboard. Nothing. Nothing except a serried rank of greying waves tinged with the last of the sun’s red light and the bright white of the scudding surf. But the wood under her palms told another story. The planking was filled with weird energy: her hands tingled and buzzed, but not in the familiar way that denoted the approach to land, the passage of the ship over reefs or veins of crystal, lodes of metal; deep-buried ores. The charge was more frenetic, as if it were tangled and knotted, caught in cross-currents; confused, warped, even. So when the surface of the sea began to behave in a strange way – swelling out in slow, broad circles, heaving upward like a welling geyser – she held her breath and waited, beguiled, hypnotised, unable to move. Gradually, the waves swamped away from whatever they had been hiding, to reveal the thing that had been following them, that had brushed the keel of the ship a few moments ago, the thing that owned the forked tail she had glimpsed, and she was barely more than a little surprised.
It was vast: at first she thought it some sort of whale, though of a far larger species than any normally caught off Rockfall’s waters, or even the great grey whale that had washed up on the northern coast of the island some years back, that had kept them all in meat and oil the whole winter and more. But when it raised its head out of the sea, she knew it was no whale, nor any other natural thing.
Its vast, bulky body was variegated in every shade of grey and green so that it looked as though it were patched with lichens and moss; indeed, as it drew down upon the Snowland Wolf, great swags of vegetation – kelp or weed – were revealed, clinging to portions of its anatomy as if growing on sea-washed rocks, trailing out behind it in long clusters like the ragged hem of a vast robe. An array of fins alternated down its knobbly spine with what seemed to be the tentacles of some enormous squid that it had somehow absorbed into itself, digested and then partially expressed. The forked tail which Katla had spied flicking through the waves served only to deceive the eye as to the true size of the thing: for it was only one of many small appendages attached to the creature, and each completed itself in a different manner: soft fronds, an ugly knot; what looked almost like a hand. Its true tail, if it had one, remained below the water; but clearly some huge device was at work down there beneath the visible monster, for a great vortex of sea churned and sucked behind it, producing an alarming whirlpool in its wake. As the creature rose out of the waves, its maw opened to reveal a black cavern of a mouth fringed with lethal-looking teeth surrounding a leprous purple tongue liberally furred with grey. Katla, suddenly and inconsequentially gifted with a moment of utmost clarity, saw how some parts of its skin were as sheeny and smooth as the skin of a seal, repelling the water in great sheets and beads; whilst other patches – all mottled and boggy with retained moisture – appeared to be porous, as if the thing were only partly adapted to life in its ocean home.
Up it came – fully twenty feet into the air, its silhouette red-lined by the failing light – to reveal a livid green and white belly studded with further mouths. Behind her, Katla was vaguely aware of cries of horror and despair from her crewmates, then Tam Fox was at her side, a reversed oar in his hands, his hair wild in the sunset. Someone cast a fishing spear into the monster. It buried itself neatly in the creature’s back, in one of the porous patches of skin, and water and other foul liquids gushed out around the puncture. Something silver flashed past Katla’s head; followed by another and another. Katla turned to see that Min Codface had shimmied halfway up the mast and, with one arm and one leg crooked around the pole, was delivering her throwing knives with murderous accuracy at the brute, all the while yelling with great snarls of defiance: ‘Get back, you vile squid, you hagfish, you overgrown guppy; you abomination of a megrim! Back to the depths, to the ocean-cracks where you belong!’
In a trice, a dozen separate gouts of blood had erupted from the monster’s hide and it roared its distress with a bellow like thunder. For a moment, it seemed that the crisis might be over, for the great fish now turned tail and dived beneath the ship, a red tide bubbling in its wake. Katla had time to turn and scan the faces of her fellow sailors – aghast, excited, terrified, or in Min’s case, utterly elated.
‘That taught the foul morwong its business!’ The knife-thrower slid down the mast, her eyes shining. ‘That great garfish won’t be back in a hurry!’
She was wrong. A moment later there came a hideous grinding sound and every timber in the ship groaned in protest. Water sprang up between the boards at Katla’s feet. Someone tumbled past her, cursing. The ship tilted dangerously, then righted itself with a booming crash. Displaced water shot skywards like a fountain, then rained down on them so that they were splattered with a glistening mixture of brine and fishblood, and the sunset reflected on them, turned them all into red things.
Katla felt instinctively that, against all the odds and despite all she knew of the great fish of the oceans, the beast had deliberately tried to overturn them instead of fleeing for its life. This was, clearly, no ordinary creature. She remembered suddenly the rash of superstitious tales that had recently been told around the cookfires: tales of bizarre sightings, peculiar corpses washed up on deserted beaches; strange objects netted in the midst of a catch of herring. The creature was not going to leave them alone: something must be done.
People were running this way and that, trying to save oars and belongings, chests of clothing and tradegoods that had been dislodged and strewn around the deck. In the midst of it all, the handfasted couple clung together with Jenna’s head buried against her lover’s shoulder as if by this means she might shut out the horrible reality beyond. Others were strapping on swords and sharpening oars and staves under Tam Fox’s command. He strode around the deck, issuing orders like a man born to lead, the short stabbing sword he carried habitually – a brutal enough weapon at close quarters – beating against his thigh as he went.
A subconscious hum took up residence in Katla’s skull; a zinging: a call. The Red Sword. She could feel its blade singing to her like a grasshopper in a thicket. Instinctively she knew its whereabouts: in the casket Fent had loaded onto the ship in the harbour at Rockfall, that she had thought would make a gift to King Ravn; but the mummers’ leader had clearly had other ideas. Dodging skittering pots and pans, snaking lengths of rope and stumbling companions, she found herself in the stern; and there was the casket, still securely lashed down. With strong fingers and raw determination, Katla undid the sea-wet knots, dragged the
lid open and liberated the great blade. In the light of the setting sun, it gleamed a bloody red, as if already anticipating the damage it would do. The sword fitted her hand as she had always remembered, the polished beauty of the carnelian pommel contoured snugly against her palm, the crosspiece hard against her fist. Exhilaration filled her, an inebriating song which filled her veins, running from her right hand through her arm and shoulder, suffusing her neck and head; coursing down through her torso, heating her abdomen, running like molten iron through her legs. The Red Sword! With the weapon buzzing in her hand she felt invincible.
She shook her head, trying to clear the thrill of the metal’s spell. Wielding the carnelian blade was all very well, but she was hardly going to get close enough to the monster to simply run it through . . .
Grabbing up the cord that had lashed the casket down, she ran back towards the stempost, where even now the beast was looming up again, wrapped about by foaming pink surf, its spines and tentacles shaking in wrath, its great, blank forehead bearing down upon the prow of the Snowland Wolf, eclipsing its carved dragonhead entirely, like a snowy owl mantling over a sparrow. A discarded oar nearly felled her, and when she leapt it, caught her a numbing blow to the shin. Swearing hideously, Katla cast herself down beside the oar and set about it with her belt-knife. In mere seconds she had hacked out a sizeable chunk of the good oak. The violated inner wood gleamed palely amidst the deeper gold of the handpolished exterior, but Katla was in no mood to appreciate such aesthetics. While Tam Fox and his men fired arrows from the ship’s few shortbows into the monster, Katla fitted the hilt of the Red Sword into the gouge she had made in the oar-handle and lashed the two together using the cord she had taken from the casket and every swift knot she knew.