The Winter Isles

by Antonia Senior

  He laughed, a strange, thin sound. ‘And do I not have a wife for all that? Why keep a dog and get another to do its barking?’

  As if whistled, his dog came round the corner. A sly, vicious thing. He usually avoided the pig. They hated each other, and we laughed about him when he was not there.

  Jesus. Sometimes I forgot, in my loneliness, that she was only a blessed pig.

  The dog curled himself around his master’s shin, and yapped at me and the pig. The pig squealed back at him, and I began to laugh.

  ‘You’re always laughing, girl. What is there to smile about? What the fuck is there to smile about, that’s what I want to know. Are you cracked? Are you mad? Have you seen how we live? That pig lives better than we do; you fuss that animal.’

  He moved a little closer. ‘You know we’re to eat her? You know that we’re to fry her, roast her, sizzle her, salt her?’

  ‘Why else do I fatten her up?’

  I turned away from him, looking at the pig’s small eyes. Then I felt him close, and his hand snaking round my waist.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You know well enough.’ His voice was thick, throaty. I tried to pull away. He gripped my arm with a surprising strength, and I realized to my horror that this close up he was bigger than he seemed. He smelled of whiskey and dog hair. The dog yapped at my ankles, as if excited by this new game. Pig, the treacherous pig, carried on worrying at a rotten cabbage.

  ‘Get off me,’ I screamed. His other hand clamped over my mouth, yanking my head back so I felt his breath judder at my ear.

  ‘Quiet. Do you want her to hear us?’

  He had no free hands then. One to grip and one to silence. But I felt him begin to grind his body against the back of mine, and the vomit churned in my stomach.

  ‘I’ll take this hand away if you’re a good girl. If you’re a good girl, I’ll give you a pretty necklace. Would you like that?’

  I nodded.

  Slowly he moved his hand away from my mouth. Whispering at me as if I were a frightened horse.

  ‘Good girl. Quiet now. There’s a good girl.’

  His hand hovered by my face. Quickly I jerked my neck forward and bit down. My teeth crunched on bone and skin. The dog howled and yapped, the pig grunted and the man let out a scream of rage and pain. He dropped hold of me and I turned quickly, kicking him as hard as I could in his bollocks. He dropped to the ground, bleeding and spluttering.

  I ran to the house, bursting in. Aine was huddling in the corner. She looked up at me. I put my hand to my mouth, and it came away bloody. Jesus wept, I must have looked like a wild and vengeful fairy, bursting in there, blood dripping from my teeth. She stood up and walked towards me.

  ‘He tried to. He—’

  I don’t know what I expected. Not the hard and masculine punch to the face that snapped me backwards and sent the lights of the world spinning round inside my head. She pushed past me to get outside. Blurring with pain and rage, I gathered my pathetic bundle and what food I could grab and ran out. Up the path by the stream. The direction my father had ridden off in, nearly two years before. I paused by the rocky ford and looked back down at them. They stood watching me go; him still on his knees.

  I screamed down the hill at them, so fierce it made my aching head threaten to burst.

  ‘I hope the pig eats you, you turds. Roasts you, sizzles you, salts you. You and your fecking dog.’

  1125

  SOMERLED

  Outside, a torment of snow and ice. A wind so sharp it could lay a man’s skin open. Inside the cave, a muffled, crouching sort of a life. Mostly they found the blessed torpor that kept minds sane in winter, when the walls closed in.

  The rocks of the cave were cold and damp to the touch. There was a crack in the roof, somewhere above their heads. There must have been, for the smoke from the fire found its way out, mostly. The smoke that lingered grimed the walls and sooted their throats.

  Low rations. Watching Sigrdrifa’s careful splitting of the strips of dried meat and fish. Counting as she doled it out carefully. Trying not to think of the charred stubble of their fields. The splinters of their ruined hall. The lost cows and the dead hens.

  The rocks of Loch Linnhe they could reach at low tide were stripped bare. Even the limpets, rubbery and grim though they were to eat. At the ebb of the tide, when the weather relented to let them leave the cave, they could see across to the mainland and its mountains, heavy with snow. There was a forbidding beauty there. A sparkling white world. But, as Sigrdrifa said, hungry bellies made for dull eyes, and most of the time they were cast downward, looking for a string of plump mussels, a tangle of edible seaweed. White was the colour of menace, of cold. White was the colour of death.

  Yet, blessed be the Lord, no one died that winter.

  The children fretted and whined, but they did not die.

  The adults led a crouching existence; a grim cycle of seeking food, shelter, warmth. Hanging on.

  Gillebrigte sank further into a disconnected half-life. He was topped up continually on whisky, even when the pain no longer justified it. His burns hardened into pitted scabs, with their own complicated geography of mounds and valleys and dark ridges where the blood had set.

  They all colluded, without acknowledging it, in his slow pickling. He was sometimes violent, often lachrymose. Only Sigrdrifa could soothe him, hectoring him in her strange, jumbled language until he calmed. On the rare occasions he was lucid, he was vicious. Iehmarc goaded him, whispering to him.

  Pent up in the cave during the winter storms, Somerled thought he might snap. He thought he might launch himself at Iehmarc, limbs flailing like a berserker. He grew envious of the small children, who were allowed to give in to their rage, allowed to throw themselves on the floor and punch the unforgiving stone, to arch their backs and scream, roar themselves hoarse.

  He took refuge in elaborate mind plays, in which Otter came back and Iehmarc’s whispering malice drew divine retribution. He tried to plan for the spring, but there seemed to be no future in the caves; only a relentless present.

  ~~~

  They told stories. Bright fables of St Colm Cille crossing the sea. He stood in his curragh as it beached on holy Iona, cross in hand, the Lord’s name on his cracked lips. Stories of the old gods, Norse and Gael both. Just stories, said Padeen to the children. Not like our Lord.

  Once, Somerled watched his mother turn on Padeen with venom in her eyes. Brigte was lying on her lap, watching the fire, her mother’s hand brushing her hair from her forehead again and again.

  ‘Pah,’ hissed Sigrdrifa. ‘Don’t give me that, priest. Your God is so great, and so good. Yet how can he explain us here in this cave?’

  ‘He does not need to explain. He moves in ways beyond our ken.’

  ‘Please.’ She closed her eyes as if in pain. ‘Always you Christians have an answer. He is your God, and he loves you, you say. If life works, it is the goodness of God. If your life is shit, God moves in mysterious ways. If your life is unbearably, impossibly shit, don’t worry, children, there’s always heaven. He’ll be nice to you in heaven.’

  Padeen shrugged. ‘And what do your squabbling, childish gods do but behave like toddlers. Worse?’

  ‘But at least it explains things. What else can explain the way life batters us but the trickster God? Your theology has no Loki, and that’s where it falls, Padeen. There must be someone spiteful up there. Someone who thinks it is funny when we crawl on our knees. A malicious trickster, laughing, and the rest? Indifferent. What other view of heaven makes sense?’

  Padeen looked down to Brigte, whose eyes were closed now. There was a hint of a smile on her face and her skin glowed gold from the fire. Sigrdrifa’s hands kept up their gentle, rhythmic stroking. Over and again she ran her hands over her daughter’s hair, handling it like silk.

  ‘There is something your view of heaven misses, Sigrdrifa,’ said the priest.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Love.’

  Som
erled watched his mother’s hands, hatcheted with lines, calloused with work, pause in their stroking. She made a non-committal noise, and resumed the movement. Padeen, the Lord bless him, had the good sense to turn away from her then, watching the shadows leap and crow on the cave walls.

  ~~~

  Somerled spent much time that winter with Aed and Oona. She was smaller than Somerled, fine-boned and flinty. She looked at the big warrior with adoring eyes, which turned sour when other women approached. Her life revolved around one central truth: that Aed was the most handsome, desirable man to have ever lived. She found it inconceivable that other women did not agree. They were plotting to entice him, their seeming indifference a mere ploy.

  Aed could hold his two hands around her tiny waist. He could pick her up and put her on a high rock, where she squealed with delicious fright. There was something touching and appealing about their evident joy in each other and the baby. He was much longed for, the child. She had miscarried time and again. Her labour with baby Aed had been long and difficult. Baby Aed was a god; a prince. He was cosseted and kissed, and the big warrior grumbled she would spoil him, before rubbing the baby’s tummy with his beard and laughing at his squeals.

  ‘I never asked you something,’ said Somerled one day, as they cast lines into the icy sea beyond the cave. A rare clear day. Cold, but bright. The wind had dropped, this once, and they could talk and hold their faces up to the weak sun. ‘I never asked how you came to be here.’

  ‘No?’ said Aed, peering into the shallows.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well. Magnus Barelegs. May he be flayed by demons. While my mother was carrying me.’

  Somerled nodded. The violent rampage of the Norwegian king still echoed through the islands and coastal settlements of this sea. Laying claim to southern isles to sit alongside his northern holdings, he had torn through the islands like a malevolent gale, wasting and burning, raping and destroying. Forcing his terrified victims to admit his sovereignty.

  ‘Those of us who survived ended up like beggars on the fringes of the Antrim court,’ said Aed. ‘My family were little kings in their own place. Until Magnus Barelegs. My mother, God bless her, did not let me forget. But we had nothing.’ Something in Aed’s face warned Somerled against asking questions. There was, he thought, some clear Norse in the great man’s shaggy countenance. His father, God forbid?

  Aed paused, cursing softly as his foot slipped on the green-slimed rock. ‘Your father stood on a table in the court. He offered an adventure to all the landless, to the younger sons and the dispossessed, to the children birthed in the fire of Barelegs’ making. The Earl of Antrim told your father that he could take as many of the younger, unwanted band as he could fit in the chapel. I was eighteen, and hungry. I elbowed my way in.’

  He turned to Somerled, looking at him through a tangle of hair. ‘Remember, boy, that your father was young once. He was confident. Certain of his destiny. Like you now.’

  Somerled nodded, but he couldn’t imagine his father young. His attempts to picture it dissolved quickly, leaving an image of the drooping, pickled man of the cave.

  ‘Aed, why did you not leave with Fhearghais and the others?’

  The big man turned back to his salmon. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Better to have nothing here than nothing there, perhaps. I’m not ready to go back a failure yet. I’ve cousins who would be too glad to see that.’

  They caught three small fish, and rewarded themselves with the smallest. They built a fire in the lee of a small rock and roasted it on a stick, crunching through the blackened skin and into the white flesh.

  ‘My father,’ said Somerled slowly, as the fire cosseted warmth back into his limbs, ‘should have staked it all on a first strike. One push against the Norse, when we first sailed here. He settled for a long campaign without the means to sustain it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Aed.

  ‘And now we are in the same position, just writ smaller. Too few men to strike without risk, yet slow attrition if we do not.’

  Aed licked the last of the fish from his fingers, and picked his way through the bones.

  ‘Well,’ said Somerled. ‘Then we must risk all. Push forward our queen.’

  Aed looked up sharply. Somerled felt as if he was being weighed and measured. He kept as still as he could, rigidly returning the big man’s stare.

  Aed, at last, grinned and nodded.

  ~~~

  ‘Spring is coming.’ Somerled looked around the watching faces. Noon outside, but in the cave it was dark. The fire was low; their peat stores were running out. He thought about being caught in here with no heat, no light. He imagined the press of the dank walls, the smell of damp wool that never dried.

  ‘We must plan our move. Be ready.’

  He saw Aed nodding, his smile visible behind a tangle of hair. Ruaridh piped his approval in his unbroken voice. Sigrdrifa, her hands busy with a pile of wool in her lap, muttered something that might be assent. Behind her, Gillebrigte lay sleeping, a noisy, irritating medley of whistles and grunts.

  ‘We should send a party out in the curragh, to Man perhaps, or Iona.’ This from Padeen. He nodded as he spoke, as if to convince himself.

  ‘And what good would that do?’ Iehmarc sat picking at his nails with a knife.

  ‘Do you not feel our ignorance? Since the raid, we have seen no one. We cling like limpets to this rock, with as much ignorance as they. When last we heard it, Toirdelbach Ua Conchubair held sway in Ireland. Godred in Man. In the south, the Conqueror’s son Henry. Is he still there? The last we heard, his only son had drowned.’

  A few men crossed themselves. Fear of drowning shadowed them all.

  ‘Did it send him mad? Is he still king? Is a son of Mael Coluim Canmore still king over in Alba? Alexander reigned when we dropped from sight, but he is childless. His wife is dead, we know that. Perhaps he has married again and whelped. They say he has made bastards.’

  ‘It is strange,’ said Sigrdrifa. ‘All these kings with no sons.’

  Iehmarc made a sound of contempt. ‘And why does it matter, priest? Why? We are ants to them. Spawn. We are nothing. We fester in a cave.’

  ‘Of course it matters, man. Kings die, kingdoms fall. Would you set sail without checking which way the wind blows? Perhaps the sons of Magnus Barelegs have been killing and thieving in the isles again. Perhaps the Scottish kings have given up sitting on their arses in Dunfermline speaking French to each other and are marching across the mountains to stake a claim to the west. We don’t know.’

  Somerled saw something like panic rising in Padeen. He saw the big priest’s hands twist on the molten cross he carried like a talisman. He could understand it. It was unnerving, this cave-dwelling. The wind howling at the entrance, the men crouched inside like beasts until the whole world beyond seemed a dream. A Loki-sent, confusing tale told to make children behave.

  Sigrdrifa stoked the fire and a sudden leaping of flames threw a dark shadow on the priest’s face as he said, in a low voice, ‘Jesus keep us, but judgement day itself could be tumbling from heaven and we would not know it.’

  The younger boys looked solemn at this, gazing at the priest’s shade-dappled face.

  Sigrdrifa laughed into the silence. She stood up with a creak and a grunt, muttering to herself in her mother’s tongue.

  ‘Enough,’ said Iehmarc. ‘Even supposing the priest is right, and the world is being unmade out there …’ He waved vaguely towards the cave’s entrance. They turned to look, as if learning for the first time of its existence. Not Somerled. He kept his eyes carefully on Iehmarc’s face. ‘It makes no difference,’ the steward said. ‘We have only one choice. There are too few of us. Fhearghais was right. The only thing to do is abandon our claims here, and throw ourselves into the service of another lord.’

  ‘No.’ Somerled’s voice was sharp, almost petulant. He must learn how to speak like a lord, he thought, catching the off-key tone. ‘No,’ he said again.

  Iehmarc loo
ked across at him, waiting. A curl in his lip, a challenge in his raised eyebrows.

  ‘My father is still the lord here.’

  As if hearing Somerled in his nightmares, Gillebrigte grunted and turned in his sleep. Somerled could see the burned part of him now, the sickening, puckered mess of skin.

  ‘Truly?’ Iehmarc said. Somerled felt the hatred twisting him round its hilt. He clenched and bunched his muscles to fight it off, struggling to keep upright and calm. He looked around. Nine of them if you counted the boys and discounted his father. If he killed Iehmarc, there would be eight, even if he succeeded in the fight, which was doubtful. Iehmarc was about thirty, battle-seasoned and tough. Let him go and he might take one or two with him. What could Somerled do then, with a sprinkling of men and some boys? Nothing.

  I am Somerled. The patient one. The Loki-fired one. The clever one.

  ‘Perhaps you are right, Iehmarc,’ he said, quietly. Over his enemy’s head he saw his mother suddenly stand upright, away from her chore, looking at him.

  ‘I am sixteen. Untested. My father is indisposed.’

  Thorfinn snorted at this, but the others ignored it. Somerled felt the pressure of their eyes boring into him.

  ‘Perhaps I should rely more on your wise counsel, like my father did. Who advised him, Iehmarc, not to set sentries the night of the ambush? Who whispered in his ear that the feast was the thing? Who stroked him and puffed him up?’

  Iehmarc began to look uneasy. He looked around the men for allies, but there was something hypnotic about Somerled’s tone, something mesmerizing in his eyes. Somerled paused, letting the moment spin itself into a web. He threw it. ‘A wager.’

  ‘What sort of a wager, boy?’

  ‘Let me plan a raid, follow me. Give me three weeks. If we are not sitting in our own feasting hall, balls-deep in women and pickled in beer by the end of the third week, then you win.’

  ‘What do I win?’

  ‘Them.’ Somerled inclined his head. ‘The right to determine the future of the kindred. The right to call me boy.’

  ‘And if you win?’

  ‘You will call me lord. And you will kneel before me, and you will kiss my arse.’