The Winter Isles

by Antonia Senior

  So it went on; the boy prised a distance between them. And the worst of it was that she did not seem to mind. She was too busy, too lost in contemplating the miracle, too tired.

  Somerled remembered his first days of being chief, how he had walked like a chief and quailed inside – how he realized that sometimes the outward show is all that matters. So he looked the part, and did the right thing, and called himself Dada and chucked the boy in the air to make him squeal.

  And all the time, at the core, he felt this twisting bemusement.

  It would break them, he thought. Because if all the world was fooled, she was not. Eimhear watched them both with fierce eyes. She who had thought love was a thing of unalloyed joy, of beauty, of sweetness, was learning to carry it as a burden, an improbably enormous weight. Love was etching its fears into the corners of her eyes, marking her.

  They didn’t speak of it, this hollow in his heart. They spoke of the day’s tasks, of the people around them, of the increasing burden that came with the growth of his power.

  Sigrdrifa, too, seemed mesmerized by the little prince. He was given leeway that Somerled could not imagine he or Brigte had ever enjoyed. The boy knew to seek out his grandmother for treats, for bread dipped in honey, the crisped skin of the chicken. It was absurd to feel supplanted. Absurd.

  Then, one day, a year and a season since his birth, as the little fellow – Gillecolm – was learning to walk, he tottered to the sea when everyone’s back was turned. Somehow, while they talked or dreamt or worked, he clambered up on to the black, slippery rocks that edged out into the water, where the tide and the waves spewed and sprayed. He shouted, then, delighted with himself and his big adventure, and they saw him tottering on the edge of the rock, hovering at the lip of it, laughing at the sea.

  In that still moment, when Somerled was too far to reach, when the sea rushed hungrily towards his uncomprehending son, suddenly everything was simple enough. He felt a surge of protective fear that stemmed from an unrealized mountain of love. The fear fed the love, which fed the fear. He sprang forward, his feet scrabbling for purchase on the slimy rocks.

  He was reminded, in the second he caught his son and pressed his face into the boy’s velvet neck, of a serpent eating itself. ‘Oh boy,’ he said. ‘Oh my daft, tiny boy.’

  ~~~

  A cattle raid. A stupid, small cattle raid. Strangers, and all dead from Aed’s vengeful fury before they could be questioned. From Man, he thought, or one of its isles. But he didn’t think much more of it, not with the pain.

  Jesus wept, the pain.

  He had been careless, complacent. I am Somerled. Sword-heaver, carrion-feeder, fool-reaper. He had turned, stupid, to wink at Ruaridh. Stupid. A spear, thrust from nowhere by a small, skinny boy, caught him, ripping through his thigh, opening it up to the bone.

  He drifted in and out of consciousness as they jolted him home across the heather. He wanted to be home, wanted to see Eimhear, Sigrdrifa. They would fight over looking after him, and he smiled to himself.

  ‘Are you all right, lord?’ Aed’s voice from a great distance. His big face all concern. Somerled found it funny, in the middle of the pain, that unfamiliar look on Aed’s face. But when he laughed, it hurt, so he stopped laughing and concentrated on trying not to weep.

  Oh the pain. Poor Lord, poor Christ. What he must have felt on the cross. The searing, violent pain. The injustice. Why me, God? Why me? Why me? Why inflict this on me?

  Oh Lord.

  He mumbled the prayer, trying to take his mind off it, using the words to think of parts of his body that did not hurt, the parts that were whole, unblemished.

  Christ’s cross across this face,

  Across the ear like this,

  Christ’s cross across this eye,

  Christ’s cross across this nose.

  Christ’s cross across this mouth

  Christ’s cross across this throat.

  Christ’s cross across this back.

  Christ’s cross across this side.

  By the time they got back, he was babbling, he knew it. Christ’s cross, mingling with her face, Gillecolm, his father. Jesus Christ, where did he come from? Standing accusing. ‘What’s he told you? What’s he told you, Lord, about me? It isn’t true, I swear it. It’s not true. It’s not.’

  ‘Shh, my darling. I believe you. It’s not true.’

  ‘Eimhear. Tell them. Tell them it’s not true.’

  ‘I’ll tell. I’ll tell. Now be brave, my summer heart. Father Padeen is going to clean the wound. It will sting, my summer heart, but it will pass.’

  ‘You’re my Otter. My Otter. I know you. I didn’t love him, Eimhear. I didn’t. But I do now. I do now. Oh, I swear it. I love … Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.’

  ‘He’s cleaning and binding now, my darling. It will hurt less soon. Don’t worry. You’re safe, dear heart.’

  ‘Oh Jesus.’

  ~~~

  ‘Eimhear!’

  ‘I am here, shh.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here. It’s dark. Here’s my hand. Here’s my kiss.’

  ‘Don’t leave.’

  ‘I will never leave.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Truly. Sleep now, my summer heart. You need sleep.’

  ~~~

  ‘Eimhear!’

  ‘I am here.’

  ‘I am hungry.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  Later, full, and propped up with furs, he looked at her, a little embarrassed. ‘Did I ramble? Was I dreaming?’

  ‘A little,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘I thought I might die.’

  ‘Father Padeen thinks you have a few years before meeting your maker. Which is good. For I am having another child.’

  ‘Good!’ he said. ‘Good!’ He was pleased to find that he meant it.

  ‘I was worried,’ he said. ‘A man’s thoughts sometimes come in a shameful rush when he is hurt. And – don’t laugh – I sing my own song in my head. Sometimes, when you are not with me, I cannot tell what is my song and what is a memory. What is a song and what is a plan.’

  ‘Do you tell your bard?’

  ‘Sometimes. No.’

  ‘Do you think that the warriors of song were true? Flesh and blood and fear and bile. Did Fionn mac Cumhail quake before the giant?’

  ‘Perhaps. The songs make us brave. The songs to come, as well as the ones we listen to in the darkness.’

  ‘Does the Scottish king believe in songs, do you think?’

  ‘Not the old ones.’

  ‘Is he right, my summer heart? Why do the songs matter?’

  ‘If they do not matter, then what does?’

  ‘We have been here before. Why does anything need to matter?’

  ‘Women are different. You find immortality in your children.’

  ‘What tripe you talk, my lord. We are too busy wading in swaddling clothes and puke and tears and our men’s giant bubbles of pride and ox shit to worry about immortality. We leave it to Christ.’

  ‘You smell very fine for all this wading in puke.’

  ‘You smell of blood.’

  ‘Still? I don’t smell it any more.’

  ‘So why do you care for immortality? You won’t be here to see it.’

  ‘I won’t be here. Does that not make you wince, fierce one? That all the vivid sense of being you could one day vanish.’

  ‘As long as it vanishes before you, and before my children, I am content. I could not bear the pain.’

  ‘I am not going anywhere.’

  ‘You say that now.’

  ‘Tears, my fierce one? Come, that’s not so fierce. I am here.’

  ~~~

  He had to walk with a stick that winter, a stick that skittered on the ice and snow. He used it to play at mock fights with Gillecolm. He put it out to trip Oona as she walked by, earning himself a clout around the head. He gripped it with calloused hands the night Eimhear’s second child was born, a daughter who slid from her mother’s
warm womb into a bitter night. She was a grizzling, hungry baby. Sigrdrifa said it was because of being ripped from the warm to bear the cold.

  This time, Somerled fell in love quickly, passionately. This time, when he cooed over tiny fingers, when he leaned in to smell her sweet skin, when he ran his fingers over the downy hair on her too-thin skull, this time he was not playing.

  He used his stick as the snow melted to slush. He lopped the heads off new spring flowers, as he had a lifetime ago. He watched his warriors sloughing off the winter, and cursed his limping, painful leg. He used the stick to point out their weaknesses in the training, slamming the point into the ground to urge them on.

  And one fine, cold morning in the spring, he used the stick to point out to Gillecolm the galley pulling into the bay, a drab little thing that limped under too few oars, its sail badly trimmed and slack.

  He threw the stick aside when he saw the galley’s passengers: Brigte and two tousle-haired boys. Hobbling forward, he pulled her close, listening to his mother’s frantic bustling and questions. He buried his face in her neck, avoiding her reddened eyes with their dark circles, ignoring her patched-up, shabby gown and the bleakness of her expression. He buried his head to swallow the words ‘I told you so, I told you so.’

  Drawing back, he saw he might as well have shouted them from the mast-top. She looked at him with a face that said ‘You told me so. This is your fault.’

  ‘What has happened?’ he asked.

  Sigrdrifa was kneeling, clucking at the boys, who hid their grubby faces in their mother’s long skirts.

  ‘He fought for his birthright,’ she said.

  ‘And lost?’

  The pain flitted across her face.

  ‘Not yet. He’s won some skirmishes. But David, they say, has a huge army in the field.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know. Coming here, I think. That was what we agreed. If it were lost, he would come here.’

  Oh Jesus wept. With an army chasing him. He might be dead, Somerled realized, brightening.

  She followed his thoughts on his face, and wordlessly walked past him to the hall. Inside, they were placed next to the fire. Sigrdrifa plied the children with oatcakes smeared with honey; hot spiced mead for Brigte. Gillecolm eyed the two boys warily. The younger, Domhnall who was looking brighter now he was inside and cosseted. The elder, Mael Coluim a boy of about four, looked pinched and miserable.

  Brigte was pregnant again, that much was clear. She looked old and tired. How long since they had seen her – five years, six? She sipped silently at the warm liquid as her mother whirled around, discomposed. ‘Here you are then, precious thing. Loki’s own daughter to turn up unannounced, with the cold snapping at these poor boys. And you were not wrong, my girl, such fine boys. Do you see your grandmother, hey, Domhnall? Domhnall. A name for a Nordic tongue to struggle with, little man. Grandson of a king, that you are, and grandson of mine.’

  Somerled met Brigte’s eyes, and something softened. The worst was over for her, he realized. The meeting. Now she could relax into her family.

  ‘Was it rough on the boat? Ours have been inshore only for weeks.’

  ‘Terrible rough,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t cry, Uncle,’ said Mael Coluim. ‘But he did.’

  ‘Didn’t,’ little Domhnall shouted, consumed with the injustice of it.

  ‘Did.’

  ‘Stop,’ roared Brigte, and they hung their heads.

  ‘Gillecolm,’ said Sigrdrifa. ‘Take your cousins and show them about the place.’

  Gillecolm nodded. ‘There’s a new calf,’ he said. ‘Should you like to see it?’

  They went happily, leaving a silence behind them; a fresh awe at youth’s resilience, their childlike ability to leave the dark matters to their elders. The dark matters. Somerled sighed, and looked over at his sister.

  ‘Later,’ Brigte said, to his questioning face. ‘Let me sleep in a warm bed, just for an hour or two. Please.’

  She was bundled away by Eimhear and Sigrdrifa, trussed up in furs. Somerled sat and watched the flames dance. What trouble would this bring? Lord save his children. Lord save Eimhear.

  1134

  SOMERLED

  ‘Thor’s arse, Somerled,’ whispered Aed beside him, his face barely moving. ‘Did you ever see so many men?’

  Never. He shook his head, strangely fearful of big movements that might betray his unease.

  They stretched out across the plain, thousands of shadows in the dusk clustering around countless fires. The smell of burning oats mingled with the peat smoke; the place was hazy with it, dreamlike.

  Somerled’s band, fifty strong, fidgeted at his back. He could sense them champing at the ground behind him, weight-shifting, throat-clearing; obvious in their attempts to appear unmoved. Casual.

  ‘How do you fight a battle with so many men?’ asked Sigurd.

  ‘Run at them screaming and spike the bastards, just as always,’ said Aed.

  ‘But what if the bastards are these English on their horses, with their lances, so they’ve taken you in the eye, and you swinging your sword like a child being held off by Aed’s palm? What then?’

  ‘Frightened, Sigurd?’ asked Ruaridh.

  ‘Bloody right I am. So should you be, little man. They’ll take you out first, with you the smallest.’

  ‘Shush,’ said Somerled.

  He was impressed, and that made him feel small. He had only ever met Mael Coluim in his own lands, where he was the lord and his brother-in-law the supplicant. Here he was a wild western chief with an average-sized war-band. The lad had done well, to regroup and reband. Oengus of Moray, the first general of the rebellion, may have died, but Mael Coluim would not give it up.

  Four years it had been since Mael Coluim had first rebelled, limping into Somerled’s hall and carrying away Brigte. Four years of riding from place to place, hitting David’s outposts, feasting the discontented northern lords; of deals proffered and small skirmishes won. And all the while, the English King of Alba skulked about by the border lands worrying about monks.

  Father Padeen had tried to explain it to Somerled – how the king was entranced by the monastic orders of the south and the Continent. The great rich orders, with their strict covenants and powerful potentates. David was bringing them north, the Cistercians and the Tironians and the Benedictines. Not a drop of the Gaelic between them. When I’ve secured Mull, thought Somerled, Iona will be under my sway, and I’ll return that holy place to glory. These seas, according to Padeen, needed Gaelic hymns to soothe them – the Latin was not enough.

  ‘There he is,’ Aed said, pointing out the most richly decked of the tents. They saw his symbol flying, and walked towards it. Picking their way through the men, who gabbled and fought and bantered in rich, unrecognisable accents, Somerled and his band were silent. He felt like a boy looking at the heavens. How big the sky; how small am I.

  He drew confidence from Aed’s easy grace. They were noticed as they walked through – the big man drawing stares and compensatory puffing-out of chests. I am Somerled. Ring-giver, war-leader, carrion-maker. He stepped in time to the beat in his head, and he thought of Eimhear, and the way she clapped just past the beat and then laughed at herself.

  He was smiling, then, when Mael Coluim walked out of the tent, arms wide in welcome.

  ‘Well met, brother,’ he said.

  Somerled, waiting for the reproach for avoiding Mael Coluim’s rebellion, grinned. He had, true, been using his growing fleet to watch the Clyde estuary, in case David made a flanking run under sail up the west coast. And if foul winds had left him free to roam south and west, raiding here and there, well that was his price. But the real fighting had been elsewhere, and they all knew it. Somerled’s raids were beginning to provoke Olaf Crovan in Man, so he had heard. Ah well, he thought, let’s fight one battle at a time, hey.

  Mael Coluim’s eyes slid behind him to the men at his back. He had a general’s hunger for men; like a starved
dog with a bone. He eyed Aed as if he could lick him, but contented himself with a slap on the big man’s back.

  ‘Well met, well met,’ he said jovially. ‘And here we are. A final push.’

  There was a wild, contained excitement in him. He looked like a man caught in a fever. It made Somerled a little nervous, the way he bounced on the balls of his feet, and his too wide smile, like a merchant selling a leaking bowl.

  ‘Where is the enemy?’

  ‘Two days’ march south, the scouts say.’

  ‘And their number?’

  ‘Oh, lots, I daresay. But we’ve been beating them every time, the past few years. We’ll smash them for good now.’

  You’ve beaten them in the small wars we’re good at, thought Somerled. David’s your master in these big set-piece affairs.

  ‘I’ll leave you – get them settled,’ he said, jerking his head back at his men.

  ‘Good, good. You’ve brought your own food, of course?’ Mael Coluim’s face was anxious suddenly, tense.

  ‘Of course.’

  They found a patch of unclaimed ground. Unloading the peat from the pack horse, they stoked a few fires in time for night to fall. Somerled’s fire naturally drew his oldest mates, and they sat in companionable silence for a while, watching the crackle and sparking of the flames. Somerled held his smoked venison almost reverentially in his hands. It was his link to home. He imagined Eimhear killing the deer, out hunting with him on some unnamed cold, clear day. He imagined his mother clapping her hands as they dropped the carcass at her feet. He imagined Oona setting to on the butchery, and the long strips of meat hanging from the roof over the fire in the hall, where the smoke could cure it and keep it. He imagined the children fighting over the antlers, and the careful sharing-out according to age, and the creatures that Aed’s boy would whittle from the bone for the little ones.

  He bit a piece off, and the peatiness, the familiar, caramelized smokiness of it, caught in his throat. He could have been at home, so sharp was the sensation. It filled his head, his nose, his mouth. He could picture Eimhear by the fire, leaning in to poke it alight, the shadows pooling in the hollow of her throat, her dark hair falling over her face. Jesus wept. Oh Lord, keep them safe.

  A long, rumbling belch. Ruaridh. A fat sigh of contentment. Sigurd.