by Jude Fisher
She watched as her twin walked moodily away, kicking stones out of the turf as he went. He always hated it when she refused to join in with his games; and becoming a man had not improved his temperament. Halli had acted both as shield and arbitrator between the two of them, doing all he could to prevent their disputes turning too hot or violent. She wondered what it would be like at home without him, and found she could not dwell on that thought at all.
Instead, she found her mind nagging at another matter, one that was beginning to torment her a little more with each day that passed. She had tried ignoring it, but as soon as her day became quiet, on waking or just before she fell asleep, it would be back with renewed force. Turning her back on the dwindling figure of her brother, she headed back towards the hall. Nearing the enclosure, she saw a familiar figure sitting outside. It seemed her grandmother had had enough of the company of the other women and had dragged her big carved chair outside to make the most of the warm weather. She sat there with her face turned up to the sun, and the golden wash of light smoothed out her accumulation of lines and wrinkles so that she looked more like her daughter than a woman of her own advanced years. A yellowed bone comb lay in her lap, her hands curled idly to either side of it. At her feet was heaped a mound of the oily, brown wool which grew so profusely on the Rockfall sheep.
Katla smiled. She looked so peaceful. But at the approach of her granddaughter’s footsteps, Hesta Rolfsen’s eyes flew open and fixed her with a gimlet stare.
‘Can’t I shut my eyes for a second around here without interruption?’
‘Sorry, Gramma. I’ll leave you.’
The old woman’s clawed hand shot out and wrapped itself with the speed of a striking snake around Katla’s arm. ‘Might as well stay with me now you’ve disturbed my rest.’ And as Katla hesitated: ‘Well, sit down, child. You’re blocking the sun.’
Katla sat crosslegged at her grandmother’s feet. ‘Why are you out here, Gramma, and not inside with the others? Did they have enough of your sharp tongue and cart you out here, chair and all?’
‘Impudent creature! As it happens, I couldn’t bear another minute in that dingy hall with a great stickful of wool stuck under one arm and my distaff spinning away with Magla Ferinsen’s whiny little voice going on and on about how salting the fish is beginning to ruin her fine skin. Bloody woman. As if she was anything to look at in the first place, with her big nose and her cow-eyes.’
‘Gramma!’
Hesta Rolfsen grimaced. ‘Actually, my dear, I can’t spend too much time around your mother at the moment. We all have our own way of grieving, and I’d rather do mine out here in the air than watch Bera trying so hard to hold herself together. I keep waiting for her to burst apart at the seams like one of Morten Danson’s god-cursed boats.’
It wasn’t the most comfortable of analogies. But once Gramma Rolfsen hit her stride, there was no stopping her.
‘And that bloody man keeps coming in and helping himself to a dish of stew or a loaf of bread without a word of asking or thanks – just glares at us all and stamps off again; and Aran won’t say or do anything to stop him for fear he’ll stop his work on the damned ship, and that’s just making your mother worse. Which is no surprise: if any husband of mine persisted in such an idiot scheme having lost his own son to the sea because of it, I’d throw him off my farm and renounce our marriage vows without a moment’s regret.’
For once, Katla couldn’t think of anything to say. Her parents were barely speaking; her mother went about her daily chores all pinched and silent, her red-rimmed eyes the only clue to her misery, while her father stalked the steading like an afterwalker, and spent his nights sleeping alone in the barn. The silence stretched out uncomfortably. In the face of all her grandmother had said, she felt shallow and foolish to have any concerns of her own. She was just about to make an excuse and head back down to the harbour to fish for crabs, when Hesta said crossly, ‘Well, if you’re going to sit there, you may as well be of some use.’ She held out the comb to Katla, who took it uncertainly, and then sat back in the chair again and closed her eyes against the sun.
So Katla picked up a vast hunk of the wool, wrinkling her nose against the smell, and set about it with the comb. Within minutes, however, the entire thing had transformed itself at first into a complicated series of knots, and then into an impenetrable type of felting which defied all her efforts to separate out the strands. Cursing under her breath, Katla cast the mess down and picked out a far less ambitious handful of the wool and had another try. No matter how much care she devoted to it, the stuff seemed to have an independent will; now it tangled around the teeth of the implement, and then around her fingers.
‘Sur’s nuts!’
Gramma Rolfsen started to cackle. ‘What are you doing, chook, trying deliberately to get me into trouble with your mother?’
Katla grinned ruefully. ‘I don’t seem to have inherited many of her abilities, and that’s the truth.’
‘You’re a lot more like her than you think.’
‘Really?’ This seemed unlikely to Katla. ‘I thought it was just her hair I’d got.’ Even under the sort of stress that would render another woman insensible, Bera ran a fearsomely orderly household, juggling tasks as disparate as descaling a fish with one hand while manning a heddle with the other with all the ease of Silva Lighthand at her best. Damn. She closed her eyes with a groan as she was visited by an image of the acrobat describing a final graceful arc into the dark waters.
‘And her temper. And her terrible impatience. You could never teach Bera a thing: always thought she knew how to do it without a word of instruction. And run around like a little hoyden? I thought she’d never settle down, never take a husband. No one was good enough for her it seemed: not Gor Larson, nor Joz Ketilson, nor even Lars Hoplison, though his father had left him the biggest farm this side of Halbo. Ran them all ragged. Till your da came along.’
Katla hugged her knees. The idea of her mother – so prim, so organised and stern – as a hoyden was beyond belief. ‘And did she run him ragged, too?’
Hesta Rolfsen chuckled. ‘He didn’t know which way was up. Poor Aran. Once he has his heart on something, it’s all he can think about until he’s got his hands on it. Trekked over here day after day on that tiny pony of his, his feet dangling on either side so close to the ground he might as well have been walking, and sometimes she’d be out the back door and up into the hills like a sprite, and wait till sundown and he gave up before she appeared again. Other times, she’d be making him daisy-chains and threading them through his hair. Poor lad didn’t stand a chance: loved her to distraction and she just kept saying no to his offer. He’s a handsome man, I said to her: think how beautiful your children will be; and so strong and practical, too. But all she could say was that she wanted no children and was quite strong and practical enough in herself, and would she listen to me? I might as well have been talking Istrian for all the notice she took of my advice.’
‘To take him and be glad of it?’
‘He’s a good man, your father, for all his dangerous obsessions.’
‘I know.’
They fell quiet for a little while. A cloud passed across the sun, and a moment later a flock of starlings burst out of the trees bordering the enclosure with a great clatter of wings.
Katla girded up her courage. ‘Gramma?’
The old woman took note of the change of tone in her granddaughter’s voice. She opened her eyes and settled her direct grey gaze on Katla’s upturned face. ‘A man?’
Katla coloured. She nodded.
Hesta Rolfsen tilted her head to one side and her eyes glittered just like a hawk’s spying its prey. ‘At first I thought it was mourning for your brother that was making you so lacklustre. But I’ve been thinking there was more to it than that.’
‘I loved Halli with all my heart.’
‘I know that, my dear. We all did: he was so like his father.’
Two fat tears started to roll down Katla�
�s cheeks, and suddenly she could not stop the flood that had been swelling up inside her ever since the disaster, so many tears that it was as if all the water displaced by the sinking of the Snowland Wolf were suddenly gushing up out of her eyes. After some time during which her grandmother held her tight and they rocked back and forward, and Ferg came bounding up the field and ran around and around them with his tail down and his great bark reduced to a puzzled, questioning yelp, Katla managed to gasp out: ‘It’s Tam, too. Tam Fox.’
Gramma Rolfsen held her at arm’s length and scrutinised her so closely that Katla found her gaze hard to bear and had to look away. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Ah. So that’s the way of it. It doesn’t surprise me: he is a very remarkable man – full of energy, full of life. Compelling eyes. Good hands, too. Ah, my dear, it’s hard to lose them. Very hard. The sea takes the best of them.’
Katla’s only memory of her maternal grandfather was of a tall, stern man with hair like beaten bronze shot through with silver, and a beard that stuck out this way and that, but still failed to disguise his long jaw and dimpled chin; a man whose face could transform itself in an instant when he laughed. She had seen him only a few times between his voyages, and then the sea had claimed him, as it traditionally claimed the men of Rockfall: sailors and fishermen all. And remembering her grandmother’s loss, and Jenna’s death, as well as Halli’s and Tam’s and those members of the troupe who had perished, Katla felt suddenly unworthy and deeply selfish. She knew why she had sought out Hesta Rolfsen: for she could surely not talk to her mother or, Sur forbid, her father, about what troubled her beyond their loss.
Firming her jaw, she managed to blurt out:
‘It’s worse than that, Gramma. I think I may be pregnant.’
For a moment it was as if all of the island was holding its breath, then Gramma Rolfsen smiled. It was a smile of beneficence, a smile of the utmost calm, and suddenly the weight that had borne down on Katla these many days fell away from her, flowed out into the grass, into the rock beneath it; into the wind. ‘It’s just more life, child, if you are.’ She took Katla’s right hand – the one that had been maimed until the seither worked her magic on it – in her own thin grasp and squeezed it gently. ‘When was your last course?’
Katla grimaced. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t seem to be very good at keeping track of these things. I’m not entirely certain Sur meant to make me a girl at all.’
Hesta Rolfsen sucked her teeth, clicked her tongue chidingly. ‘We’ll go visit Old Ma Hallasen, see what she has to say. She’s a wonder with sheep and goats, that one; never wrong.’
Katla was about to protest that she was neither sheep nor goat, but the sudden arrival of her father put an end to the conversation.
Aran Aranson looked as if he had not slept in weeks. Black shadows hung beneath eyes that seemed unnaturally bright; his skin appeared thin and waxy, and his beard had grown unkempt. His long dark hair was tangled and knotted, but in no orderly fashion. He had made no remembrance braid for his first son, Katla noticed now for the first time, recalling with a sharp pang the one Erno Hamson had made for his dead mother. She sometimes wondered what had become of Erno, but it was yet another subject on which she did not dare to dwell too long.
‘I need you to forge some more rivets for me, Katla, and braces for the bow.’
Katla spread her hands. ‘The rivets I can make; but the braces?’
‘Danson will show you,’ was all her father said; and with that he turned on his heel and headed back down the hill.
Katla watched him go in consternation. She looked to her grandmother, but all Hesta could do was to shrug. ‘Better do as he says, child. He’ll not stop till the damned thing’s built and he’s taken every fool in the islands aboard it for his insane expedition.’
Morten Danson was already waiting for her at the smithy – indeed, looked as if he might have been waiting for quite some time; for his arms were folded across his chest, his feet had scuffed all the pebbles away from the path up to the forge, and his face was set in a thunderous scowl. He carried nothing in his hands – no measuring cord, no length of notched wood. Katla wondered whether his obvious impatience was for her late arrival, or for that of his foreman, Orm Flatnose, bringing the necessary calculations with him.
All he said was: ‘Aran Aranson tells me you’re the finest ironworker in the Northern Isles; and I replied to him that such vaunting statements would serve him for naught if it were not the truth.’ And then he sneered at her; a queasy half-smile that made her skin crawl. ‘I offered him my own smith’s services, but he waved the suggestion away with contempt. Your father must be keen to make an early acquaintance with the god’s seabed home if he thinks to entrust such a crucial task to a stripling girl, and one who surely knows better how to use what’s between her legs to win her way in the world than to wield a hammer on an anvil.’
Katla surprised herself by not punching the man hard in the eye, as would be her usual response to an insult. Such a slur deserved at least that the giver be summoned to the duelling ground by herself or by one of her kin; but she could tell by the way he grimaced at her, his teeth showing through the ostentatiously decorative trim of his beard, that he knew himself entirely safe in his role as the Master of Rockfall’s shipmaker; at least until the vessel was finally constructed and launched. Then, thought Katla; then we shall see how brave you are. Instead, she gave him a hard stare and shouldered past him into the smithy. Inside, it was dark and stuffy, and the air was heavy with smoke. Ulf Fostason had been reassigned by Aran to his new task of keeping the fire going; so currently he was failing in both of his appointed roles, for his goats were no doubt wandering the fells; or worse, eating every new shoot in the arable fields; while the fire had dwindled to a feeble glow. He stood now, looking thoroughly bored, leaning against the bellows, his face all red-lit from beneath by the hot charcoal, but as soon as Katla came in, he drew himself smartly upright and gave the bellows a quick pump. Little coils of disturbed ash spiralled up into the air and the coals flared hungrily.
Katla nodded at him, then looked around at the state of her forge, newly revealed by the burst of light. Little bits of pig iron were strewn around the stone floor, and someone had upset half a bucketful of new rivets and roves amongst the detritus and not bothered to gather them up. All her tools lay scattered here and there; and some clumsy workman had missed his stroke with the heavy sheet-hammer at some point and taken a corner off her best granite anvil. Katla had her own suspicions as to who was the likely culprit: her father seemed beset by a demon where this ship was concerned.
Cursing under her breath, she set about the pig iron, rivets and roves with a broom, got it all into a heap and squatted to sort the nuts and nails from the scraps, and then through the latter to find the better quality pieces that might be smelted again. Then she picked up each tool and replaced it in its accustomed place on the rack, turned the big anvil, with a great deal of heaving and puffing, so that the chipped corner was closest to her and less likely to be problematic. Then she stood up and wiped her hands on her breeches.
‘So,’ she said to Morten Danson with the barest civility she could muster. ‘What about the measurements for these braces then?’
The shipmaker tapped his brow.
Katla frowned. It was hard to know quite what he meant by the gesture: was he indicating she was mad – ‘touched’, as Gramma Rolfsen would say, with the same indication – or that he was? ‘What?’ she asked, rudely.
‘Everything I need to know about the crafting of any part of a ship lies in my head,’ Danson said, smirking with insufferable complacency.
‘Well, that’s not how I work,’ Katla said furiously. ‘Unless it’s in my head, how can I gauge the amount of iron I must smelt, or the shape and thickness I must hammer out?’
The shipmaker shrugged. ‘I will tell you.’
Taking orders from anyone was not Katla’s way. She bristled. ‘I don’t think that will work.’
‘Then what do y
ou suggest?’ Danson asked sharply.
‘I need to see how the brace will fit the wood, how it will be fixed, the strain it will be subjected to by the movement of the ship.’
The shipmaker looked at her in surprise. This was not at all what he had been expecting: he was used to most of the men he employed doing exactly what he told them as if they had no greater brains than sheep, and as for a woman thinking to take such an active hand in the making . . . Well! He would show her the working in its current state and let her make the fool of herself that seemed inevitable by this show of arrogance.
‘Come with me,’ he said briskly, and turned on his heel.
‘Keep that fire hot, Ulf,’ Katla grinned at the goatboy, and trotted after the shipmaker.
She had not been down to the home ground, close by Whale Strand, to see how the ship was progressing for a week and more. Her other concerns had obscured all else around her. When she had last visited the site, there had been little of any great interest to see. Four of the great logs they had towed and barged from Danson’s shipyard had been hauled up out of the water, and one of the largest oaks – a monster of eighty feet or more, and as straight as a taut rope – had been neatly split to reveal the heartwood, all golden and fragrant and close-grained. Workmen had skimmed the bark from the second great oak, a tree that had also grown perfectly upright and true; the other two logs curved gently through their entire length, which had surprised Katla: these latter pair did not look as if they would produce good strakes, for which the graceful arc of the planking would be achieved through careful steaming. There were a dozen men busy at the site with axes and adzes and the air was full of the lovely smell of fresh-cut wood; but Katla, unable to concentrate on anything for long in her current predicament, had soon found her mind wandering, and had then allowed her feet to follow its inclination away from all the noise and bustle.