by Paul Watkins
*
It was twilight when we dropped anchor in the bay at Altvik. The glaciers of the Grimsvoss glimmered in the dusk. An ice-blade moon was rising from the snowy peaks. Silhouettes of buildings clustered by the water’s edge, smoke drifting lazily above them.
‘Olaf,’ I said. ‘My parents’ house. Is it still standing?’
He shrugged. ‘More or less.’
‘Does Kari live there?’
He shook his head. ‘Not in that draughty old hut. She had a new place built.’
‘Nobody else has claimed the house?’
‘No. Everyone thinks it is haunted.’
‘By what?’
He grinned, teeth white in the dark. ‘By you, of course!’
‘And the temple?’ I asked.
‘It is a wreck. I would not even go inside if I were you. The roof might fall on your head.’
‘But Guthrun …’
‘Guthrun has done nothing!’ he snapped. ‘You might as well see for yourself.’
Olaf said he would sleep on the boat, so he could keep an eye on his goods. ‘You can sleep here as well, if you want.’
But Cabal needed to walk the stiffness from his joints, and I was too restless to sleep. Fatigue from months of lying on the decks of ships or sitting in carts or walking in mosquito-humming forests had all been shaken from my bones by the sight of this place.
‘Make sure you are back by sunrise,’ said Olaf, ‘to help me unload the cargo. Remember you work for me now.’
Borrowing a skiff that Olaf kept on board, we rowed ashore. As we moved through the quiet water, the only sound the creaking of our oars, I glanced back at the silhouette of the walrus skull tied up on the prow of Olaf’s ship. In the gentle pulse of waves, the bone face tilted slowly back and forth. It looked like an old man, nodding himself to sleep.
Olaf stood at the bow, watching us make our way in.
‘It is good to see you again,’ I said to him across the bay, which lay so still that the sound carried without me having to raise my voice.
He raised his hand and nodded, then hawked and spat over the side.
Cabal and I jumped out into shin-deep water and dragged the boat above the high-tide line.
The houses hunched under their thick turf roofs. The sound of tiny waves slapping the beach echoed among the buildings. Here and there a sliver of light showed through a crack in a shutter. Two dogs wandered down to the beach and sniffed at Cabal. Then, exhausted by the effort, they flopped down in the dirt and closed their eyes.
We walked up through the main street, passing the alehouse. From inside came the sound of quiet laughter and the sour reek of ale.
As we moved on up the hill, it became clear to me that Olaf was right about the town never having recovered. Many of the buildings were in poor repair and the streets were ankle-deep in mud.
Cabal said nothing, but from his silence I could tell he was not impressed by what he saw.
I thought of the Emperor’s palace of a hundred rooms, of the Hagia Sofia and the way its vaulted roof seemed to float on a cushion of sunlight. It all seemed like the substance of a dream, just as the Emperor had said it would be.
I stopped suddenly and turned to Cabal. ‘I forgot to ask where Kari lives.’
‘Tomorrow, my friend,’ he said. ‘You will frighten your poor sister to death if you show up on her doorstep now. Let her see you in the light of day.’
I had waited so long for this moment that now I had to stop myself from banging on every door until I found her. But I took Cabal’s advice and forced myself to be patient.
When we reached my parents’ house, I saw the stone Olaf had told me about. It looked like a tall man shrouded in a cloak, broad-shouldered underneath the folds of rock. Carved on the chest was a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Between the lines of the serpent’s body were a line of runes, lichen-patched with age, which read: ‘A mother set this stone in memory of her son, who vanished in a distant land.’
‘How does it feel to be a ghost?’ asked Cabal, running his thumbnail through the moss which had filled in the words.
I shook my head. ‘We are both ghosts, you and I.’
‘Are we going in?’ He shivered in the night mist which was settling on the ground.
‘Not yet,’ I told him. ‘There is a place I want you to see.’ I had made up my mind to share with him the secret of what lay beneath the temple floor, whatever it turned out to be. He had put his life in my hands by travelling north with me, and I wanted to repay his trust.
As we walked out across the moonlit fields, I explained everything to Cabal.
‘No wonder you were so anxious to get back here,’ he said.
When we reached the temple, I was shocked to see the place almost in ruins. The doors were missing and much of the earth had come away from its walls, revealing the bare rock, like a skeleton showing through a body left to rot out in the open.
Inside the temple, the ground was pocked with the hoof-marks and droppings of sheep. The benches were either missing or broken, stamped apart by generations of boys released from the watchful eyes of their parents. The pillars still stood, fierce eyes defiant as ever. Moonlight shone through a hole in the roof. Its pale glow lay like frost across the wooden faces.
While Cabal gathered wood for a fire, I gave thanks for a safe journey home. I pressed my ear to the ground and lay there for a while, hearing the quiet thunder of the earth.
As the faint glow of Cabal’s fire spread across the walls, I studied the ground, in case it might offer some clue as to where this thing might be buried. I used the blade of my sword to scrape away at the dirt in a few places, but turned up nothing.
‘There is only one way to do this,’ said Cabal. ‘We must dig up the whole floor.’
He started at one end and I started at the other. Using pieces of broken bench as shovels, we heaved clods of earth against the walls, showering the rotten benches.
I was digging close by the pillars, making my way down through layers of ash and bone from years of sacrifices.
We kept working half the night, pausing only to wipe the sweat from our faces and to stoke up the fire.
‘Are you sure this is the place?’ asked Cabal.
I stopped my shovelling, then slowly straightened my sore back. I looked around the room. The ground was gouged with holes where we had started digging and then given up. Loose dirt lay piled against the walls. ‘There is only one temple,’ I said. ‘It has to be here.’
‘Maybe the old man was lying to you.’
I dropped my make-shift spade and pressed my blistered fingers against my closed eyelids. I was exhausted.
Cabal grunted, then returned to his digging.
A moment later, I heard his makeshift shovel glance off something which made a different sound than the stones we had unearthed so far.
‘Look at this,’ he said.
It was a piece of black rock, shiny like glass.
I reached for the black hammer around my neck and pulled it from the warmth between my body and my shirt. The hammer was made from the same kind of stone.
Cabal dug around the rock, trying to dislodge it, but it was bigger than he thought.
I didn’t know what to make of it and went back to digging by the pillars. A short while later, I also hit a piece of the same black rock which Cabal had just uncovered.
Now Cabal and I began digging a trench towards each other. We began to realise that the rock stretched all the way across the room, an arm’s length down under the earth. The whole temple was built upon this huge slab of black stone.
My breathing grew shallow and fast as the shock of our discovery set in.
I remembered what Tostig had said – that it was the only thing ever to pass bodily from the world of the gods into our own. It must have fallen from the sky. I tried to imagine it, cocooned in flames, shrieking with speed, and the tremor which must have shaken even the vastness of the mountains as it slammed into the earth. From that one terr
ifying moment, the Norse faith had been born.
‘I know what this is,’ said Cabal. ‘It is a Thunder Stone. I have seen fragments of them before, like the one around your neck, but never one as large as this.’ He set his hand upon its surface. ‘My people say that Thunder Stones have the breath of life in them,’ he said, ‘and they have been alive longer than anything else on this earth. The first spark of our existence in our world came from these Thunder Stones, and life still streams from them like rays out of the sun.’
Cabal and I stood looking at each other. The black rock reflected the flames of our fire, as if it held its own flames deep inside.
I understood now why this needed to be hidden, having seen for myself what had happened to the places which other faiths had openly declared their holy ground. They became battlefields. The only way for their disciples to protect them was to turn them into fortresses, where the meaning of their sacredness was blurred by the blood shed in their defence.
In silence, Cabal and I scraped the dirt back into the hole, then trampled it flat so that there was almost no trace that the earth had been disturbed. We left the door ajar as we had found it, knowing that sheep would wander in and cover up the last signs of our digging.
*
At my parents’ house, the door would not open. I gave it a push and the whole thing fell back into the building. A smell of damp wafted into my face. Inside, Cabal and I tripped on fallen beams and pieces of broken furniture until we reached the fireplace. Using a chair as kindling, we managed to light a fire there. Through the haze of rotten-wood smoke, I saw the place where my sleeping bench had been and where the iron hook that held the cooking pot still hung from the rafters like the curled tail of a cat. The roof had sagged in at the far end, spilling turf across the floor. Dandelions, huge and spindly, stretched up towards the gap in the roof, through which I saw the shattered glass of stars. From somewhere in the shadows came the cooing of a dove.
Cabal lay down beside the fire, using his shield as a pillow and hugging his leather pack against his chest. Almost at once, he began snoring.
As tired as I was, I could not sleep. I did feel like a ghost. A stranger even to the shadows of my parents, which still lingered in this place.
My mother had spent half her life in this room. An image returned to me of her sweeping the hearth with an alder-twig broom. Now her own restless spirit carried on as she had done – cleaning, mending, cooking, convinced of small conspiracies, unaware that her heart had stopped beating and that the dust she cleared away was her own.
I walked over to the broom and picked it up. Slowly and methodically, I began to sweep the floor.
PART II
I woke before dawn, curled beside the embers of the fire and with one of Cabal’s feet for a pillow. Leaving him asleep, I went to the door and moved it aside, since it was no longer on its hinges and only propped in place.
Walking out into the morning fog, I looked down on the rooftops, which floated on the mist like upturned boats. I wondered which belonged to Kari, which to Guthrun, which to Ingolf.
When I walked back inside, Cabal was awake, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
We washed in the stream behind the house, making our way through the overgrown garden, among the herbs my mother had planted. The thyme and rosemary, along with bearberries, gentian and mint, had all managed to survive. Cabal drew his hands through the mint, then touched the tips of his fingers to his nose, breathing in the dusty sweet smell.
We made our way down to the beach. Now that it was daylight, I could see even more clearly how run-down the town had become. The muddy streets, the saddle-backed roofs of the houses, carts which had been repaired too many times rather than being replaced, the tired-looking people in their worn-out shoes, all left me feeling ashamed that Cabal had to see it this way.
Either Cabal did not notice these things, or he was good enough not to mention them. This had once been a prosperous place, and I wished he could have seen it back then.
Olaf was there to meet us on the beach, having run his boat up on the sand. He was still half asleep and his hair stuck up in tufts, which made him look like an owl that had been knocked out of its nest. ‘What do you think of our beautiful town?’ he asked Cabal.
‘I like it here.’
Olaf grinned. ‘You ought to be a merchant. You certainly lie like one.’
‘It is no lie,’ replied Cabal.
When I asked Olaf where Kari lived, he told me I would see her soon enough.
‘She will be down here before you could find your way to her house. I have brought some knives and bowls for her and she is coming to collect them. For now, I need your help setting up my tables.’ He led us to his house, which stood close to the beach.
The place was a shambles. Two huge arcs of whale-rib formed the entrance. The door, which he had left open, was made of hide stretched over a wooden frame. The entranceway itself was so tilted over that to go through it a person would have to lean as if they were on the deck of a rolling ship. Inside, I glimpsed a tangled mess of boat parts, tools, rope, evil-smelling whale bones, broken pots and chairs which, when Olaf saw the look on my face, he announced he was planning to fix up some day. Then he went on to explain that, even if an object could no longer fulfil its original purpose, it might always be useful for doing something else. Because of this, he had never thrown anything out.
Olaf’s shed leaned precariously against the side of the main house. This was where he kept his trading tables, which Cabal and I helped him carry to the water’s edge. Then we unloaded the cargo, while Olaf busied himself laying out bolts of cloth and wooden crates containing glass, unfinished knives, soapstone bowls, and the pots of honey.
The first buyers were already gathering, women mostly, shawls pulled over their heads to guard against the morning chill. They were quickly followed by the remainder of the town, until it seemed that everyone who could walk or find someone to carry them had assembled on the beach.
A story-teller started up his act, and children gathered around him. Their grateful parents dropped a coin in his wooden bowl and wandered off to see what Olaf had brought. Nearby, an old woman squatted on a stone, telling fortunes with a handful of bones and glass beads.
With growing apprehension I watched the crowd, wondering if Kari would even recognise me, or if I had changed too much for her to know my face.
‘Will Guthrun be here?’ I asked, as I handed Olaf a crate of glassware padded with straw. Splinters from the flimsy wood hooked into my skin.
‘You will not see him here this early,’ replied Olaf. ‘He is too lazy to get out of bed. Besides, he has no money. You will not need to find him. When he is ready, he will find you.’ Olaf shook out a piece of red silk, which wafted in the air above the table. The silk shimmered and spread in the sunlight, like a drop of blood falling into a pool of water.
On the table lay Olaf’s own sword, a handsome thing in the short Roman style with a leather-wrapped handle held by a twisted braid of gold. He used it for measuring cloth, which was always sold by the sword-length.
It was not long before news of my arrival began to spread. There was a great deal of muttering and pointing in my direction.
‘You seem to be the main attraction today,’ said Olaf. ‘A shame I am not selling you.’
‘I have been through that once already,’ I replied, as I lifted a bale of cloth from the bow of the boat.
No one else spoke to me, which made me wish I could stand up on one of these tables and announce why I had returned, but my instincts steered me towards silence. I stole glances out across the crowd, searching for a familiar face.
Meanwhile, Olaf cut the strings that tied bales of cloth and prised off box lids, revealing pale green Frankish glassware in its packaging of straw. These were snatched up and then immediately put back after Olaf quoted the price.
The old fortune teller, her back bent like the arc of a drawn bow, offered to tell Olaf’s fortune in exchange for a pot of honey.
Now that she was close, I thought I recognised her. ‘Tola?’
She peered at me and smiled, gums pulled back from her peg teeth. ‘You remember me, do you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘We gave you up for dead long ago.’
‘How is Ingolf?’ I asked. ‘Is he here?’
Tola nodded. ‘He will be along to buy up some rubbish or other.’ Then she went back to pestering Olaf about the pot of honey, until he took some of the straw packing, set it on her head, and pushed her away.
She scuttled back into the crowd, muttering insults and swatting the straw from her straggly hair.
Soon after, Ingolf appeared from inside the alehouse and strode towards the beach with a leg of lamb over each shoulder. He had grown almost as wide as he was tall, and his round, red face still showed the gentle nature which had marked him as a child. He wore a leather apron, which slapped against his knees with every step.
‘He and his mother manage the alehouse now,’ said Olaf as we watched him approach. ‘His father died a few years back. He went out to slaughter the pig they fed on scraps left over from the alehouse meals, and the pig slaughtered him instead. Tola still runs Ingolf’s life, same as she did when he was little. Or as little as he has ever been.’
Ingolf came straight over to me. ‘Heard you were back,’ he said, with a solemn look on his face. ‘Thought you were dead.’ He kept his arms wrapped around the legs of lamb.
I smiled and suddenly it was as if no time at all had passed.
Ingolf was grinning, too. ‘I cannot stay,’ he said. ‘Have to get this lamb on the fire, and the alehouse will be open soon. I am in charge there now, you know.’
Olaf made a snorting sound and Ingolf scowled at him.
I introduced Ingolf to Cabal.
‘I have a Celtic recipe for ale,’ said Ingolf.
‘I like you already,’ replied Cabal.
Ingolf built a driftwood fire on the sand and began roasting the lamb on an iron spit. Soon, he had begun to sell slices of rare meat, which he laid dripping on top of thick slabs of bread. Cabal bought two of these, and held one in each hand, taking bites first from one and then the other. As he spoke to Ingolf, gesturing one way and then the other, juice from the meat flicked out over other people waiting for their turn to buy.