by Paul Watkins
Olaf and I had sworn a secret pact that we would be the ones. When the storms blew in, we never slept, waiting for that scratching on the door, praying for courage and speed.
Was it just a dream I had? Was Greycloak no more than a skeleton, sleeping in the cradle of the glaciers? Or had he called me out into the storm? A hundred times I relived that moment. Each time I grew less sure of what I had seen. Only the lightning was certain. Only the fire, branching from the sky to stop my heart and set it beating once again.
*
In this way, my life began a second time.
By the end of the first week, my hair turned grey and fell out.
My father sat at the table, whose legs had been fashioned from the rib-bones of a whale. He stared helplessly while my sister swept the floor around his feet and my mother fed me bowls of orange cloudberries, salted goat’s milk and smoked reindeer meat which made my jaw ache because it was so hard to chew.
My father’s name was Magnus. He was a tall man, always stooping to leave or enter our house. He had a shyness that did not match his size and a moustache which my mother said made him look like a walrus. He worked by himself on a small fishing boat which rarely strayed far from the shore. I looked forward to the day when I would join him in his work.
On summer mornings, Kari and I used to sit on the stone wall of our garden, watching his boat out on the bay. Sunlight fell like embers through the pines which grew along the rocky shore, making tiny stars of every dandelion on the turfed roofs of the town. I would feel its warmth brush like a hand across my face and see the flicker of my father’s net as he cast it out over a shoal of fish.
He had a gift for knowing when schools of fish came to the bay. He would be sitting at the table, in the middle of saying something, when suddenly he would tilt his head to one side, as if he were cricking his neck. ‘The salmon are here,’ he would whisper. Or it would be the herring, or the mackerel, and he was always right. He told me that he felt it like a rushing in his heart, as if the movement of a million fins deep in the black water of the bay had sent a ripple through the red tide of his blood.
Nobody seemed to find my father’s premonitions strange, but a boy who had been struck by lightning, and survived, was too much to ignore. They said that those who have been struck are marked as outsiders by the gods themselves, granted sight beyond what human eyes can see.
In the days that followed, as my mother and father went about their usual business, Kari never left my side. She treated me the same as she had always done and was the only one who did.
I found this out when Olaf and Ingolf came to see me. They lifted the blanket from my egg-smooth head and gasped. When I tried to tell them that I was not sure what I had seen, Olaf said that there could be no doubt. He talked and talked, saying this was proof at last, and that all our searching had been worthwhile. While he spoke, Ingolf just stared at me, the way he would have looked at something dead.
My father, like Olaf, was also convinced that I had passed through a hidden gateway into the world beyond. What worried him was that I might not have returned as the same person. When he thought I was asleep, I heard him tell my mother of rumours he had heard in town, that I was some creature living inside the strapped-on flesh of the dead boy I had been, sent to spy on them from beyond the realm of dreams. I could tell from the tone of his voice that he believed these stories, and his suspicions only grew when my once-brown hair grew back a coppery red, like some reflection of the lightning’s fire.
As soon as this news reached the ears of Ingolf’s mother, Tola, she sneaked up to our house after dark. She impaled the head of a white-faced owl on a stick in our garden to ward off the evil spirit that she said I had become. My mother discovered Tola just as she was sprinkling flakes of dried owl blood on our doorstep. She grabbed the first thing she could lay hands on, which was a mackerel, and chased Tola down the hill, clubbing her over the head with the dead fish.
After that, Ingolf was no longer allowed to see me.
From Olaf, I heard nothing at all.
Eventually, even Kari had to go. Despite her protests, our parents sent her down into town every day, to begin an apprenticeship which had been arranged with the village tailor. Kari left home at dawn and returned home only in the evenings, too tired to do anything more than eat her meal and go to sleep. This work brought her new respect from my parents. A new sleeping bench was built for her, and she and I no longer shared the one which was left to me. Kari did not have to cook or clean, except one day a week. My parents spoke to her with a strange formality, as if to place a distance between themselves and her. They knew the time was drawing near when she would leave their house for good, and they had already begun their long goodbye.
I would also be leaving home more often. Or so I had been told. This was to be the year that I began work with my father on his boat, but suddenly my father changed his mind, believing I had now been chosen for a different path.
In preparation for this, instead of teaching me about his trade, he began to share what he knew of the world beyond our own.
Late in the afternoons, when he returned from his work, he would bring me out to the storage barn, where smoked hams dangled from the rafters and baskets of wrinkled apples were stacked in the corners. He would place two milking stools in the middle of the cramped space and motion for me to sit in front of him. My father spoke as much with his hands as he did with his mouth, long fingers trailing through the air and white palms appearing and disappearing as he clenched his sunburnt fists. ‘Far below us,’ he said, ‘are the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree in whose branches the world hangs like a never-ripening fruit. These roots form the roof of a house, which belongs to three widows called the Norns. They spin the multicoloured threads of life itself and weave the destinies of men.’ As he spoke, his fingers unravled an imaginary spool of yarn. ‘Coiled beneath the house of the Norns’ – he twisted his feet around the legs of my stool and dragged me close, until our knees were touching – ‘is the Midgard serpent, which will wake on the day of Raggnarok and destroy the world in a storm of fire and ice.
‘We, the Aesir, live along the rocky shores and in the gentle valleys of the north, but above us, in the foothills of the mountains, live the Trolls. They exist in many forms, some with more than one head.’ With these words, my father’s open hand became a second face beside his own. ‘Some Trolls are the size of mice, others as tall as trees.’ He stood and reached towards the ceiling, and then he began to pace around me, as if he had become the beast itself. ‘They hide in caves whose entrances we cannot see, leaving only at night and returning before dawn, because the rays of the sun will turn them into stone.’ My father sat down with a dusty thump on the three-legged stool. ‘They are slow-thinking and bad-tempered but dangerous if you venture out at night into the hills.’
‘What do they eat?’ I asked, filling my lungs with the dry, sweet smell of the storage barn.
‘They chew the moss from boulders.’ He pretended to gnaw at his knuckles. ‘At night, if you watch carefully, you can see sparks from their teeth as they bite on pieces of flint, or you might hear the scrape of their bristly tongues over the rocks.
‘Higher still, up on the mountain tops, live the Jotun. They are giants; part ice, part flesh, part stone, whose hearts you can see beating in the frozen cages of their chests.’ Rhythmically, he opened and closed his fist. ‘They hate us, who live down in the warmth of the valleys, and will butcher’ – he hacked at the air with the knife edge of his palm – ‘anyone who wanders up into the snow. Afterwards, they use the victim’s flesh like bloody bandages to fill the cracks across their hide.’ And he slapped his arms and legs, as if patching his own frost-rotted skin.
My father believed the tales that Greycloak had not died but lived among these monsters and preyed upon the snow-blind people who trespassed into their world. He lured them with music from a flute made from the shin-bone of a man. Welcoming them into his house, whose ice walls glowed an eerie blue, he would serve them a me
al of bone-marrow soup in a cup made from a human skull. The blinded guests would compliment him on the soup and would ask about that strange sound they could hear – that hollow thump which seemed to fill the halls – never guessing that it was Greycloak’s heart beating in a fleshless ribcage made of wrist-thick icicles. After the meal, he would give them a bed whose shaggy blanket was sewn together out of human scalps. The guests, still blind, would say how warm it kept them. Then, while they slept, Greycloak would bring his face close to theirs, suck all the air from their lungs and use their bodies to restore his own. With the remains, he would prepare another meal for the next lost traveller to be summoned by the music of his flute.
The ocean, too, was filled with spirits. My father spoke of Ran, the mother of nine beautiful, red-haired daughters, who had names like ‘She Who Is Glittering’ and ‘She Whose Hair Is Russet in the Evening Sun.’ They lived together in a drifting fortress on the sea. Its walls were made from foam-topped tidal waves, and its roof was a cloud of shrieking sea-birds. Ran spent her time gathering treasure from ships that her daughters wrecked and sent below the waves. My father swore he had seen their fortress, sliding like an iceberg through winter sea. He swore, too, that he had glimpsed those beautiful daughters, long hair wet against their milky backs.
‘I hear them calling me,’ he whispered. ‘Their laughter echoes in my sleep.’
And above us all, my father said, beyond the ceiling of the sky, lay Asgard. This was the land of the gods, who dabbled sometimes cruelly in the fates of men below.
‘Those things are in your dreams,’ my mother told him, if he was ever foolish enough to mention the subject in front of her.
But in my father’s mind, the gods were not in our dreams. It was we who were in theirs.
At the centre of it all, he said, hidden someplace in the vastness of our northern world, was a secret that linked these worlds together. This was the very heart of our faith, whose source was kept so hidden that those who knew about it never revealed where it lay, or what its power was or even what it looked like.
One day, when my mother could stand it no longer, she stamped out to the storage shed, flung open the door and shouted, ‘I forbid you to believe those lies! It was nothing more than bad luck that you were struck by lightning, but your father refuses to see it that way. He has spent too much time out on the water catching fish and now he is starting to think like one.’
‘I am trying to explain the things he needs to know,’ said my father, straining to remain calm.
‘You are not explaining,’ she replied, raising her voice even louder. ‘You are just making noise. Fish noises. You are the one who needs to hear some explaining, but you are too stubborn to listen.’
He stood and faced her, clanging his head against one of the iron pots that hung on a hook from the crossbeam. ‘Stubborn? Who is stubborn, woman? You or me? You are more stubborn in what you do not believe than I am stubborn in what I do. And that, believe it or not …’ he paused for an unbearably long time, then breathed in deeply and shouted, ‘is one of the reasons I love you!’
Then my mother could not help but smile.
My father had a way of saying things to make their arguments disappear. Of all the qualities he possessed, this one I most hoped to inherit.
Even if I did not believe every word my father said, it was not possible simply to do as my mother commanded and banish all his stories from my head. I began to wonder if perhaps I really had been chosen for a different path in life.
I grew restless. I was angry at my friends for leaving me, angry even at Kari, because it was her absence that I felt the most.
My mother’s answer to this restlessness was just to keep me busy.
When she carried up from town the fish that my father had not sold, my job was to cut them into flat shapes like the clipped-off wings of birds. We hung them out on racks to dry. This was in summertime, when the setting sun would only brush against the horizon before climbing again through a sky streaked purple and pink.
Later, when the weather turned to rain, we carried the fish inside wooden sheds and smoked them over birch-wood fires. The smell of that fish was rubbed like salt into our skin, into the rafters of our house and the fibres of our clothes. Every evening, my mother brushed the dry-curled scales from her arms and shook them from her hair.
She tried to carry on as she had done before, still chanting her denial of all ghosts, monsters and devils, but it seemed to me that even she was not certain anymore.
*
On rare occasions when I could sneak away from the chores conjured up by my mother, I wandered aimlessly or sneaked inside the temple. I threw rocks at the pillars, bouncing them off those bulging, furious eyes.
One day, when I was walking in the fields, a stone hit me in the back, as if hurled in revenge by the pillars themselves.
I spun around but saw nothing. Then I noticed Olaf stand up from the heather where he’d been hiding, sunlight glowing in the shambles of his hair.
I was so pleased to see him that at first I could not even speak. Before I found the voice to call his name, he threw another rock.
I bent my knees and the stone flew over my head. ‘What are you doing?’ I shouted.
‘I heard you could make stones stop in the air without touching them.’
Slowly, I straightened up. ‘I do not know who told you that.’
He started walking towards me. ‘Down there they say you can and plenty of other things besides.’
I laughed. ‘But you know that none of it is true!’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not know. Tostig says you will never be the same again.’
For a long time, we stood there in silence.
‘Then why are you here?’ I asked.
The wind tousled Olaf’s hair. ‘I want you to show me where the spirits live. You can talk to them. You can make them appear. You can do all of that now. My foster-father says you are changed. That you have been chosen by the gods.’
‘Olaf,’ I said quietly. ‘I cannot do what you want. I do not know how.’
He took a step back. ‘That is a lie,’ he said.
I breathed in and felt the air trail out again. ‘Olaf … It is only me.’
‘No!’ he snapped. ‘It is not you. Do you know what they are saying in town? They say you walk up here at night and that you are followed everywhere by a dog with the face of a man. They say you have the power to make water flow upstream. That you can change the shapes of clouds.’ He stepped forward and flicked at my chest with the tips of his fingers. ‘They say a raven lives under your shirt and at night you send it flying down to Altvik to listen at people’s doors and scrape its beak across their shutters. Then it flies back and tells you everything it has heard.’
‘None of it is true,’ I protested. ‘Olaf, you are my friend.’
‘You were my friend. All you are now is a liar.’
‘I swear I am not lying to you,’ I protested. But it made no difference. I could not convince him.
He stalked back down the hill, pausing now and then to throw stones at me.
Until now, I had been able to persuade myself that things would eventually return to normal. Now I realised that Olaf was right, even if his reasons for saying so were wrong. The truth no longer mattered. All that mattered was what people believed. I had never felt as lonely as I did then or as helpless to do anything about it.
*
The following day, my father left to dry his nets. Once a year, he had to dry out the twine or it would rot. The smell of those nets, weed-tangled and glittering with fish scales, was too strong to hang them near town, so he took them to an empty beach up the coast and laid them in the sun. He would be back the next morning.
Soon after he left, Guthrun the blacksmith climbed the hill to our house.
My mother stood in the doorway. ‘What do you want?’ she asked, with a voice she reserved for people who tried to sell her things she didn’t need.
I
stayed in the house, hidden among shadows.
‘I have come to speak with Magnus,’ said Guthrun, swaying on his feet from the exertion of the climb. The way his legs were planted on the ground made it seem as if the earth was rocking beneath him and he was the one standing still.
‘He has gone to dry his nets,’ said my mother. ‘Whatever you have to say to him, you can say to me.’
‘I think not,’ said Guthrun. He turned to leave.
‘Say it!’ barked my mother.
This stopped Guthrun in his tracks. ‘Very well,’ he muttered and turned around. ‘Tostig has chosen your son as his apprentice.’
‘But he has you to help him,’ said my mother. ‘What need does he have of an apprentice?’
‘I am only his assistant,’ replied Guthrun. ‘Your son will one day be a priest. What Tostig will teach him, only priests can know.’
‘I will not let him get him mixed up in that.’ She wagged her finger in his face. ‘Why does he have to send you to deliver the message? What is he afraid of?’
‘Tostig knows you dislike him.’
‘Well, that is the first sign I have seen of his intelligence.’
Guthrun was not backing down. ‘He felt it would be better for you to hear this from someone who cares about you, who would never do anything to hurt you or your family.’
She became quiet but continued to glare at him.
I was impressed.
Guthrun had reasoned my mother into silence.
I had never seen it done before.
‘The path of your boy’s life,’ he explained, ‘was laid out long before the lightning ever struck him, before you even knew you would have a son. Even if you do not want to believe that …’
‘I have no intention of believing it.’
He looked down at the ground. ‘Surely you can see that my offer is the only chance he will have to be accepted. Your daughter is making a future for herself down there in town, and if she grows up to be less stubborn than her mother, she will have a good life. But what is there for your son? He cannot follow in his father’s footsteps now.’ For the first time, he fixed me with his cat-green eyes. ‘Besides, he is interested in what I am saying. I can tell.’ Then he turned back to my mother. ‘I did not climb this hill to get the better of you, which is what you always think the world is trying to do. Now take my offer and do not try to have the last word.’