by Jude Fisher
A few moments later, they wished it had continued to do so.
A solitary figure sat in the boat. Its face was blackened by the elements and its eyes were staring pits, reflecting the fire of the torch Aran Aranson held aloft. Gappy teeth showed through smeared lips. Its hair and beard were long and matted with some coarse substance which had also leaked down over whatever rags of clothing it had left to it. Its boots were gone, exposing one long white foot and a single grisly stump. In its hands it held what appeared to be a complex arrangement of ivory, whilst heaped all around it, as in one of the long barrows of legend, was a pile of bones and a scatter of skulls.
‘By Feya’s eyes!’ cried Emer Bretison, unmanned by the implications of this appalling sight enough to call on the women’s deity.
There was a rattle as Flint Hakason dropped the harpoon.
‘God protect us!’
‘Vile, murderous bastard!’
‘How? What?’ asked Fall Ranson slowly, his already-protruding eyes seeming to stand out as on stalks. He continued to stare and stare at the ossuary surrounding the figure in the faering without the least understanding of what he saw. ‘The crew – what happened to the rest of the crew?’
‘He’s eaten them . . .’
Now they could not help but focus on details: how long legbones lay shattered and split open, the marrow gone; how a knife lay buried in what was left of a ribcage; how a skull had been cloven in two, revealing a glossy, empty cavity.
And at last, Urse: suddenly recognising the item the survivor clutched in his clawlike fingers. ‘By the Lord Sur,’ he uttered in horror. ‘He’s eaten his own foot . . .’
‘He has, he has!’ An insane shriek of laughter split the air. ‘He’s eaten his own foot!’ Fent echoed, his wild eyes shining.
A moment later there came a strange whistling noise and a thud; and the cannibal fell backwards into the pile of bones. The pale stump of the survivor’s leg twitched convulsively for a few seconds, then the corpse fell still. A harpoon lay embedded in his chest and beyond that ravaged cage, into the timbers of the faering. It was a weapon designed to secure a narwhal or a whale: unleashed on such puny prey, the force with which it struck was disproportionate, savage. Soon, dark wellings of seawater had begun to pool around the skeletal remains; in no time the faering was awash.
Aran Aranson turned his back on the deathly scene. He stalked across the deck of the Long Serpent, took his oar-seat and began to scull with a vengeance. Men took their places around him and unshipped their oars rapidly, relieved to have a practical task to set themselves to. Within minutes, the ship had passed the scene which would haunt each man until his dying day.
For some, that would come sooner than for others.
For Bret, the lad from the east shore, it was to be the last sight he laid his sweet blue eyes on; that and the dark wave that came up and engulfed him as Fent Aranson slapped one hand over his mouth and with the other pushed him roughly and swiftly over the side and into the churning wash of the ship.
Twenty-nine
Raiders
Even as Katla emerged from the twisting defile out into the heathland at the foot of the cliff it was already too late. By the time she had cleared the boggy mire around Sheepsfoot Stream and run full-tilt down the steep shingle lane past Ma Hallasen’s bothy, where the old woman’s ragtag collection of goats and cats watched her pass with similarly inimical golden, black-slitted eyes, the strange ship had entered the inner harbour and the women of Rockfall were in the agonisingly slow process of realising their error.
The vessel which even now was loosing its landing craft into the home waters of their port was not the Long Serpent; nor indeed, as Katla had realised precious minutes earlier, a northern ship at all, but a long, lumbering, lashed-together travesty of a boat from another continent entirely which had against all odds braved the hazards of the chancy Northern Ocean and won through intact. It was captained by a man even his friends (of which he had few, and those were now dead, in the main) called ‘the Bastard’, and crewed by a callous band of cut-throats, criminals and malefactors from every corner of the Southern Empire.
But rather than grasping these facts and at once taking to their heels, the women on the mole were transfixed by curiosity. The newcomers were exotically attired and weirdly cleanshaven. With their dark skin and darker hair, they looked nothing like the big, raw, fair-complexioned, shaggy-bearded men of the Northern Isles. Instead of homespun and leather, they wore bright-coloured silks and linens which shone with beads and metallic stitching. Their belts and chains were of silver and bronze; they had silver rings on their fingers and beaten silver bracelets on their arms, chalcedony necklaces and filigreed earrings encompassing droplets of amber which shone like gold in the falling sun. Instead of battered leather hauberks they wore gleaming mailshirts; instead of notched iron axes they carried slim silver swords which glimmered redly in the failing light.
‘Run!’ cried Thin Hildi, who was less stupid than she looked. ‘Run, run for your lives!’
Ferra Bransen and Kit Farsen stared in disbelief as she lifted her skirts, revealing mismatched and wrinkled woollen stockings and a pair of pigshit-crusted pattens, and hared back up the mole, her wooden shoes clattering on the pitted stonework. There, she overtook Kitten Soronsen in her best crimson shift and Magla Felinsen, who stared openmouthed at her skinny, retreating backside as it jiggled past. ‘Ridiculous creature,’ Kitten sniffed haughtily, ‘scared off by a bunch of traders. I wonder what they’ve brought with them? They are very finely turned out: perhaps they are showing some of their wares. I’d not say no to a look at some new jewellery and a length of bright emerald Galian silk—’
Beyond them, Thin Hildi encountered a knot of old women who called after her, ‘Where are you off to so fast, Hildi Rabbitfoot; is your house burning down, or your dog eating the dinner?’
One of the Seal Rock women nudged her neighbour with a grin. ‘She’s gone to put on fresh drawers,’ she chuckled lewdly, ‘in case the smell of the ones she’s got on drives all the men away!’
This kept them all cackling contentedly for several moments, by which time the first of the ship’s boats had reached the seawall and two men had run up the iron ladders there, knives gripped in their teeth.
Even the sight of these ne’er-do-wells did not alert Magla Felinsen. She turned to her friend to comment on the elegance of their oiled black hair and their aquiline profiles and found Kitten Soronsen gone: her crimson figure a lurching shape at the landward end of the mole. When she turned back, the men were upon her. One of them grabbed her roughly by the wrists and held her there with one hand, his head cocked assessingly. With the other hand, he squeezed her left breast hard.
Magla was enraged. If a northern man had conducted himself so, even in his cups, she could have demanded that her male relatives chastise him with their fists and knives, or have had him driven off, or force him to cough up a hefty fine. He and his entire family would have been shamed by his behaviour. He would never have been able to marry well in the region and would most likely have had to take to the high seas for the rest of his life.
It was a brave or foolhardy man who would take on Magla Felinsen. She was a woman well known in the Westman Isles for her loud and unforgiving mouth, and this she turned upon her attacker now.
‘Take your hands off me you filthy heathen! How dare you touch me so without the least word of greeting or any formal introduction! You should be ashamed of yourself, groping a woman in such a way. Do they teach you no manners where you come from? Where do you come from, anyway?’
The man recoiled from this tirade with a look of distaste. Holding Magla away from him at arm’s length, he turned to his companion and uttered something complex and unintelligible in the sibilant southern tongue, and the other man laughed and returned a comment of his own. Then, with an expression of the utmost nonchalance, he drew his free hand back and punched her hard in the face. Magla’s eyes went wide with shock. Then she crumpled to
the ground.
The sight of Magla Felinsen thus assaulted reduced the other women to complete panic. Forna Stensen, Kit Farsen and Ferra Bransen all shrieked and took to their heels, almost catching up with Kitten Soronsen in their desperate flight. The old women stopped gabbling and gawping, grabbed up their skirts and legged it for the path with an unlikely turn of speed for such ancient crones, looking for all the world like a bunch of hedgehogs surprised by a fox and sprinting for the cover of the bramble-patch. Fat Breta, all red in the face with the effort of running down the hill to the harbour, now took a gulping great breath, turned around and wheezed her way back up, with little Marin Edelsen pulling her by the hand.
Bera Rolfsen, the Mistress of Rockfall, was entirely bemused. She and Otter Garsen had been walking sedately down to the quay, deep in conversation as to the merits of punishment and reward in the raising of difficult daughters and had thus failed to observe the details of the incident involving the latter’s wayward child and the Istrian sailor. It was only when Thin Hildi dashed past them crying ‘Raiders, raiders!’ followed swiftly by Kitten, head down and running so hard she did not even notice the rips and tears the thorn bushes were dealing to her bare shins, that they realised something was surely amiss.
Bera scanned the scene below, saw how even the old women were moving swiftly away from the harbour and instantly appraised the situation.
‘My god, Otter,’ she said, catching the other woman hard by the arm. ‘I suspect these newcomers are not the sort of visitors we wish to welcome to our shores or our hearths. Let us make our way back to the steading, barricade the doors and make such a stand there as would make our husbands proud.’ She waved to the women running up the path towards her. ‘Quickly, quickly – back to the hall!’
‘But—’ Otter started, squinting at the scene on the seawall in horrified recognition ‘—what about my daughter?’
Bera gazed dispassionately down at the mole. ‘I do not think there is anything we can do to save her at the moment,’ she said firmly, ‘and it will hardly ameliorate matters if we allow ourselves to be taken by these raiders, too.’ She paused. Then: ‘Can you shoot a bow, Otter?’
The older woman stared at her in disbelief and her mouth fell open. She thought for a moment. ‘Well enough . . .’ she said doubtfully.
‘Then,’ said Bera Rolfsen, gripping her by the shoulder, ‘we shall do what we can to save ourselves, and then her.’
From the gap between the hawthorns where the path took a sharp turn back on itself, Katla was afforded a single tantalising glimpse of the events unfolding down below in Rockfall’s harbour. She watched as two of the visitors lifted the form of Magla Felinsen aboard one of their ship’s boats and frowned. Was she dead? Unconscious? What had happened here? She couldn’t quite imagine why foreign men – or any man, for that matter – would want Magla Felinsen either dead or alive, though she was prepared to admit she might be a little prejudiced on the subject and that you could never account for taste. She was, however, relieved to see that something had occurred to turn the tide of the women’s curiosity and that they were all fleeing back up towards the steading. She assessed her choices.
She could slip back up the Hound’s Tooth and lie low till the trouble had blown itself out. This seemed attractive for a brief, spiteful moment which passed like a butterfly on the breeze, despite the low urging of that other voice. She could run back to the steading and join the others in whatever defence they could put together there; but this idea she dismissed almost immediately. She was one of very few who could wield a weapon and she’d be wasted at close quarters, jostling for elbow-room amongst a hall full of panicking and useless women. She’d have to swallow her pride and take orders from her mother, too: unthinkable. Better, then, out in the open on her own. Out in the open, she could run and shoot and stab and take the enemy by surprise. And, she thought with terrible pragmatism, if the worst did happen, she would not perish like a trapped rabbit, holed up in the hall with the other women, but outside, with a sword in her hand.
She ran on, looking for a suitable spot for an ambush.
Exhibiting an unlikely turn of speed for a woman who had borne eight children, five of whom had perished in childhood and a sixth in his twenty-fifth year, and been weighed down by her daily tasks for well over twenty years, Bera Rolfsen sprinted up the harbour-track towards Feya’s Cross, the intersection with the path which ran down from the steading’s enclosure. Here, the hawthorns knit themselves together to form a natural arch over the track which during the fifth moon’s cycle became a froth of white blossom exuding a rank and sexual scent of blood and heat – as was only fitting for trees dedicated to the fertility goddess. In earlier times it had been a Rockfall tradition for girls who wished to wed to rise before dawn on the first day of spring and run down to the strand to sit in the dark at the water’s edge, thinking about the lad they loved while the sea washed up between their legs, praying to Sur for his favour. Bera Rolfsen remembered the day she had done this herself, dreaming of a tall young man with a chiselled face and intense, deepset eyes, how she had run back up the path and stood beneath the arch of may until the first rays of the sun had filtered down between the branches to freckle her face with rosy light and then stretched up and picked a single sprig of blossom from the centre of the arch without mishap, and with it Feya’s blessing. And – superstition or not – her wish had come true: three days later Aran Aranson had ridden his sturdy little pony over the crest of the island to ask for her hand. Over the years, however, the apex of the arch had become higher and more difficult of access as a result of this constant Mayday pruning, until that it was only a very athletic girl who could succeed in the feat of picking a spray without the thorns pricking her or ripping her shift. Either presaged disaster: a single drop of blood spilled meant miscarriage of the first child; torn fabric a rift in the marriage; or worse still, no wedding at all. Soon, no one seemed able to carry out the task without inviting disaster and the ritual was abandoned. Even so, the spot remained a site invested with much sacred dread and excitement by the girls of the island.
The Mistress of Rockfall rounded the corner into Feya’s Cross now and almost fell over Kitten Soronsen, who was lying half across the path and half in the hedge, trying feverishly to disentangle her red shift from the hawthorn without tearing the silk. Her pretty beaded slipper – a gift from Haki Ulfson, and a thoroughly impractical item of footwear for running full-tilt up a rough track – lay empty and wedged beneath an exposed root in the middle of the path, bearing mute witness to her fall.
‘For Sur’s sake, girl!’ Bera snapped, taking in this tableau, ‘Get up and run!’
Kitten turned a tear-stained face to the Mistress of Rockfall. ‘I can’t,’ she sobbed. ‘My dress is caught on the thorns. It’s my best one, my – oh!’
Bera stood over her, a length of ripped red silk in her fists. Her knuckles were white.
Kitten looked horrified. ‘Now I shall never marry!’
‘If you do not make it to the safety of the steading, it’ll be more than your pretty little shift that gets ripped,’ Bera returned grimly, and watched the girl quail. ‘Get into the hall and gather up sticks and staves and anything that may be thrown to do hurt,’ she continued, dragging Kitten to her feet. ‘Or none of us shall henceforth have the luxury of choosing the man with whom we lie!’
Her face as white as the Mistress’s knuckles, Kitten Soronsen leapt to her feet and ran away from Feya’s sacred hawthorns as fast as her legs could carry her.
Bera caught her breath, then redoubled her pace. At the top of the hill, she spied Thin Hildi’s scrawny figure climbing the wall into the home enclosure.
‘Hildi! Hildi!’ she cried.
Wobbling on the rockover point of the wall, the girl looked over her shoulder, saw that it was the Mistress of Rockfall who addressed her so peremptorily and promptly fell backwards into the meadow.
Bera crested the rise, sprinted across the rough grass and scaled the stone w
all with surprising agility. ‘Come with me!’ she ordered, grabbing Hildi by the arm to drag her upright.
Having no choice in the matter, Hildi obeyed, though her feet stumbled to catch up with the rest of her. Thus connected, they sped across the meadow towards the smithy. Once inside, Bera let go of Hildi’s arm and took down the ring of keys which hung from the wall above the tool bench. The two dozen iron keys clanked unhelpfully together. She stared at them in disbelief, having little idea which key fit which lock in hall, barn, smithy, stable or store, then threw them down onto the stone floor in disgust.
‘No time for niceties,’ she declared, grabbing up an iron bar from the bench. A moment later she was prying unceremoniously at a massive oak chest which served as the steading’s weapons store. Two moments later, the wood around the lock splintered apart. She stared into its dark interior.
‘Sur’s teeth!’ she swore loudly.
Thin Hildi’s hands flew to her mouth. She had never heard the Mistress of Rockfall curse: she was such a genteel woman, always punctiliously polite even when furious.
‘Sur’s giant prick and bollocks!’ Bera went on, delivering a vicious kick to the box.
The chest was empty apart from a couple of rusty old knives and a handful of arrows with loose heads. Someone had taken everything they stored there against just such an emergency, but whether all the weaponry had been dealt out to Aran’s expeditionary force, or whether someone else had helped themselves to the contents, she could not imagine. Strangest of all was why anyone having rifled the contents so thoroughly would then go to the trouble of relocking the chest. Unless they wished the theft to go unnoticed.
There was no point in further conjecture. She looked around determinedly. On the shelf below the bench was the beautiful sword Katla had promised Tor Leeson’s mother, and the two daggers she had been making as show pieces. The latter were awaiting Katla’s fine niello work, and were as yet dull and unadorned. As ornamental daggers they would win no prizes; but the points and edges were forged as sharp and true as any warrior’s blade.