This was a mistake, he thought. A terrible, God-cursed mistake. She would suffocate here. She would slowly die of it. He thought of a landed salmon and its desperate clutching at air.
But the letters had gone to Man. And the reply expected to be held in Gillecolm’s hand, their beloved boy home again. Too late. Too late. To back out now would mean the end of everything: his honour, the strength of his word freely given, the fledgling kingdom, peace, his standing with his war-bands, who knew that this treaty meant fame, the chance to breathe and plan fresh plunder, the bride price to build castles and reward his men. All that balanced against her being locked up in this place. Jesus.
He looked at the cross, imagined the figure of his Lord twisting on its severe stone angles. You’re the only one whose sovereignty I admit, he thought. So tell me what to do. Speak. So many prayers. Tell me what to do, Lord. How onerous was the burden of being the one to make all the decisions. Sometimes he felt crushed by their weight, the volume of them, so that the simplest became impossible. Venison or hare? Mead or wine?
But now, with this huge, looming choice, he felt clear-headed. Certain. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back outside
Under the grey sky, they turned to face each other. She was flushed, her eyes bright.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We cannot do this.’
‘Why?’
‘Lord, your endless whys, woman. Because we cannot and we cannot and we cannot. I cannot leave you here. Sail away. Leave you in this cave.’
‘We met in a cave, do you remember?’
‘Of course,’ he said, impatiently.
‘Well then, do you think I am frightened of caves?’
‘No. But how can I leave you here?’
‘We were decided. All those reasons remain true. First of which is our son. This is what we must do.’
‘But this place …’
‘Yes.’ She laughed. ‘I daresay I’ll make something of it.’
‘But—’
‘But. But.’ Her voice rose to an angry hiss. ‘Do you think I am any less capable than you of doing what is necessary? Of being brave enough to face it, and laugh in its fucking face.’
‘No, no.’ He put out his hand and stroked her hair, as if he was calming a hawk.
‘Well then,’ she said, her head in his shoulder and her voice cracking. ‘Do not make it harder for me by pretending we have a choice.’
They were silent for a space, then. Listening to each other’s breathing.
‘Goodbye, my summer heart.’
She turned, and walked back towards the cross, where the women were singing a hymn to St Colm Cille, its tune plush with the rhythm of the oars and the beating of the waves. A stale echo of those heart-pulsing sounds.
She did not look back.
Part 2
1138
RAGNHILD
I am beautiful.
We draw nearer to the landing place, and I tell myself again: I am beautiful. I can see at this distance a group of men on the beach. Which is he? They are too far to be distinct. Most of them look tall. There’s a short runty one. God, what if that is him? I did not ask anyone how tall he is. Does it matter? Height in a man is nice. But kindness is nicer. A good smile. Gentle hands.
What if he has none of these? What if he is like my brother Godred? We can always spot the latest girl he has taken a fancy to by the bruises. Fingerprints on her neck sometimes, and always something in the eyes like a trapped doe.
I am beautiful. I am beautiful. I lift my chin to elongate my neck. My mother taught me that. Perhaps he has eyes like an eagle and can already see me. I must be like a queen now, just in case. Christ love me, I could throw myself to the deck and weep, I am so scared. No, I am not scared. I am of the line of Ivar. I am beautiful.
Everyone tells me so. It must be true. My father tells me, when he needs something from me. Like a song for a visiting dignitary who needs soaping. Or, say, a marriage to a strange and awkward warrior across the sea.
My mother tells me so, again and again. Straighten your back, slither your hips, bite your lips, pinch your cheeks. Cast your eyes down, flick them up. Smile, don’t smile. Be beautiful. It is all you have. It is your currency, your hack silver.
Your father’s bastards litter the island. You must stand out.
She is the most beautiful of his cast-off women and I must be the most beautiful of his daughters. Will yourself beautiful, she says. Make it so. Believe it, and it is true. Hold in your stomach. Laugh at their jokes. Not that loud, like a blasted herring-wife. Soft laughs, tinkling ones. Lean over when pouring; too far, you look whorish. Lick your lips. Delicately, child.
She slapped me for slouching, slapped me for giggling, slapped me for lounging. Afterwards she would cry and I would cry and we would talk again about how my face and my body are my power. Without power, I am nothing. A chattel. I must enthral this stranger. It is not enough to make him my husband. Husbands stray; husbands ignore their wives. I must make him need me. Want me. That is the only way to become powerful – through his weakness for me. That’s what my mother said.
I can see the sense in it. My father is the most powerful man in these seas. His wife is a nothing. She did not make the most of the early days of his pleasure in her to build her own kingdom within a kingdom. She let it slide, until one day he took his first mistress, and all the flattery and the bribes and the elaborate homages went sideways while the wife looked on. She was humiliated.
I have one lever already, beyond and above my face. My father.
‘Come here, my beautiful one,’ he said when I went to bid him farewell. He did not come to the jetty to see me off, but at least he granted me an audience.
I walked towards him. Stomach in, lips bitten, chin high.
‘Was I wrong,’ he said, ‘to give you to this upstart?’
I inclined my head with grace, or so I hoped. He does not always expect an answer to his questions.
‘But he is becoming awkward, and you, my child, can settle that.’
I was proud of his trust in me.
He had been talking to his champion, and a few of his other leading men. They were drawn against the wall, respectfully waiting for the farewells to be done and their business resumed. I tried not to look at them. At one of them in particular. I felt his eyes on me, though. I knew he was watching. What use is crying for the impossible? At least so my mother said when she found me weeping over him. Baldur the Bold, they call him. Baldur the Beautiful, I whispered to him once, when we were kissing in the forest.
Oh Jesus, watch over me.
My father pulled me to him. He hugged me. That frightened me more than anything, for when did he last do that? When I was seven, perhaps, and forward with my affection. I would run at him and throw my arms around his neck. Do not be opportune, said my mother. Do not hug the king like some common fisherman’s daughter. So I did not run to him any more, and he seemed not to notice. At least, he never pulled me into an embrace. He ruffled my hair sometimes. Chucked my cheek.
So on this last day, he pulled me tight against his bristling beard and I felt uncomfortable. Baldur’s eyes at my back, my father’s unfamiliar smell surrounding me. He let me go, and looked me up and down. ‘He will be pleased, unless he is made of stone. Hear this, Ragnhild.’ He raised his voice so that his warriors could hear; a promise given to a woman is no promise unless other men hear it.
His kingly voice, then, with the warriors listening in to witness it. ‘I have told him, and I am telling you, that you are the favourite of my daughters. He is honoured to get you. If he breaks that trust, if he dishonours you in any way, I will crush him as a dog crushes a rat’s skull. Do you understand? You are to be his wife, and he will treat you with honour. As Christ is my witness, your honour will be dear to me.’
There was some shuffling in the corner at this, but of course no one spoke. My father thinks himself a Christian man, a moral man. He thinks himself a dutiful husband and expects his men to treat their wives with
respect. He is utterly blind to his own hypocrisy. He can kiss his latest whore with one face, and lecture the islanders on marital morality with another. My mother says that this is one reason why he is a great ruler: he is bullishly convinced of his own purity and clarity of thought, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Will my new husband be the same? They need careful managing, men like that. They must believe all ideas are their own; that all dissent is agreement. Lord, what will he be like, the stranger I am to marry? Thorfinn Ottarson has met him, and says he is all that a woman could want in a husband. But Thorfinn would say that. This marriage was his idea; if it goes awry, it will be he who earns my father’s displeasure. But how could it go wrong? That implies that there is a choice for me. That I could step down on to that beach and say: ‘No. I do not like the look of him. Take me home, Thorfinn. Take me home, and I will marry Baldur the Beautiful and we will have ten children as beautiful as he. I will not marry this strange barbarian.’
I look aside to Thorfinn Ottarson, and try to imagine saying the words aloud. No. No. No. The word is like rising bile in my throat. No. No.
Thorfinn catches my eye and smiles at me, in a manner I assume is meant to be encouraging. Beyond him, standing gripping the prow, is a boy of about seven or eight perhaps. I do not know. I can’t see his face. He is looking towards the beach, all rigid like a hunting dog. I do not know who he is.
I look over his head to the shore. My mother came down to see me go. When I began to cry, she slapped my arm. It is not far enough a journey to cure red eyes and a snotty nose. First impressions are everything. Everything. She was stopping herself from crying, and I owed her that much, although I thought I would burst from the keeping it all in.
The wind is fierce on my skin. I think of the popping of tiny red thread veins on my cheek. But now is not the time to shelter. Now is the time to stand tall and proud. I will the boat forward. I plead for it to stop. I cannot decide if I want this meeting to come quicker or to be put off indefinitely. Put off, I think. So that this moment spins out for an eternity, and I never have to step ashore and meet my fate.
1138
SOMERLED
Here he is, then, on the same beach, waiting for a girl. And here she is, walking towards him, all the eyes on them both. He is glad to see that she walks straight and with decided steps, despite the watchers pressing on her with their expectations, their hopes and their malice.
Ragnhild is fair, with blue eyes and an eyebrow arched at him as if to say, here I am. Do you like me? And, God help him, he does like the look of her. He feels a sudden keen pleasure at the thought of sleeping with her, this poppet of a princess with her big eyes, slim body and serious face. The churning in his loins feels like a betrayal, a bricking-up of his beloved in her island cell.
But what can he do?
As he says the necessary words, a boy darts from the boat behind her. Gillecolm. He looks around the beach with quick, smiling eyes. Something dawns on him, Somerled can see it: an awakening. The boy looks from Somerled to Ragnhild and back again.
‘Where is my mother?’ he says, in a voice too high and too cracked. ‘Where is she?’
RAGNHILD
I am beautiful. He tells me so. He whispers it in the darkness. ‘You are beautiful,’ he says. It must be true. His voice is full of sadness. It is the aftermath of love. For he loves me. How can he not?
What we do in the night; what more proof of it do I need? It floods my body. I am there and not there. I am Ragnhild, and I am Freya. It only hurt the first time, and he was gentle. My husband.
There are so many reasons to be proud of this man, this husband. He is a great thinker. A great warrior. His men follow him without question. They are not scared of him, exactly. Not like men are scared of my father. They do what he says because they trust him.
Trust. I trust him. He is kind, and gentle. He is all that I could have hoped for. The relief. Oh Christ, the relief. He is not a man who beats women. He is not a man quick to use his fists. He is not a man to fear. Neither, I think, is he malleable. I have not worked out yet how best to be Ragnhild in his presence. Until I have judged it right, I am careful to hold myself near him as my mother has taught me. I am grace and lightness.
His hall is built on a wild, rocky outcrop. Near us is a long sea loch, at the head of which is a sheltered area by a river. I suggested, with all proper diffidence, that we build a hall there, hidden from the wind and the waves. He laughed.
‘And how, my princess, would I see the sea roads, hidden away there like a turnip farmer? My eyes are my strength.’
So we are buffeted out here. I do not leave the hall over-much. The wild wind shivers my hair into knots, and one look at Sigrdrifa’s mottled face is enough to know what it can do to a woman’s skin. So I stay inside and I spin and I weave and I sing and I forbid myself all thoughts of home. It is gone to me now. I may visit it, perhaps, in a year or two. For now, I must pretend that it does not exist. It is the only way.
Father Padeen was here earlier, leading the prayers for all those not off hunting or fishing or fighting. The boy was there, Gillecolm, the one who made the fuss on the beach at the moment that should have been my triumph. He was praying earnestly, and missed my look of contempt. He has kept out of my way since I have been here, which is to the good. He is my husband’s bastard son, I am told. But Somerled does not pay him much heed, and so neither shall I.
I do not think I like Father Padeen. There seems something sly and over-clever about him. He told me that he knows of women who can write; not Ogham, which is carved only by masters on stone. But in old tongues, like Latin, scratched on to parchment with sharpened quills. Absurd, I told him. But I thought how lovely it would be to write a letter to my mother, one that only she can read. I sent Thorfinn Ottarson with a message:
Your daughter is well and happy in her new home. She is treated with all the honour that is her due. She sends her love and her greetings across the sea and hopes this message finds her esteemed mother in good spirits.
He had a similar message for my father. He looks at me with an annoying smugness, this Ottarson. It is known in this place that Somerled enjoys me. I hold my head high for the women, sway my hips for the men, and let them read in it my husband’s lavish attention. Feast on this, Oona, I think, as the dwarfish old witch looks on. I do not like her. She treats me like a pet, like a spoiled child.
If I could write a letter to my mother that only she could see, what would it say?
Oh my mother. I miss you. I love you. I miss you.
My husband is a good man. He is gentle, and kind. And oh, my mother, it is such a relief to find him so. He is nice-looking. Medium height, good eyes, a broad smile. He is not short. He could have been anything. Sometimes I lie awake at night, while he breathes near me in the darkness, and I pray so hard in thanks that my brain rings with it. Thank you, Lord, thank you. To have a youngish, gentle husband who is kind to me. What a boon. He could have been like the giant Aed. Grizzled and frightening, with missing teeth and a too violent laugh. He could have been like my brother Godred. You never did like his mother, but even she is frightened by him, they say.
He could have been Baldur, but that was not my fate. You have taught me often enough to be disciplined with my mind. No use lamenting what cannot be.
So I give thanks for what I have, and for what I may have. For all this coupling must produce a child. And love. Surely that will come. How can it not? I think I might love him already. You said it would grow, and I think it is. How do you know, though? What should it feel like?
Oh my mother. I would not write this, as I do not want you to be sad for me. But I am a little lonely. The women disregard me. Life goes on in well-worn patterns, which were woven before I arrived. My attempts to change things are met with bland smiles, and no action. There is no one for me to talk to. And I am alone here.
Better perhaps that I cannot write. Better not to send such a letter, I think. Safer to stick to platitudes.
I look behind me and find that Somerled is standing near, looking at me.
I rise, pulling in my stomach, straightening my hair. I hold up my cheek, and he comes to me and kisses it swiftly with cool, dry lips.
‘The rain has gone off,’ he says. ‘I’m heading out into the hills for the night, hunting. You could come with me.’
I consider this. ‘Where would we sleep?’
He smiles as if my question is amusing. Will there come a time, here, when people do not treat me like a child? ‘In a shieling, up in the hills. We may get a deer, perhaps two. Or there’s salmon in the loch.’
I picture a cold, wet dawn. I think of how my hair will straggle down my face, and the mud smears, and the pinched red nose from sleeping outside. I imagine how his face will sour at the sight of me bedraggled like a fisherwoman.
‘I will stay, I think, husband,’ I say.
He looks at me for a heartbeat. I cannot read his face. I struggle to know what he is thinking, which makes it hard to please him. The only sure way I have found so far is in silent night-time tumbling.
‘Whatever pleases you, my dear,’ he says. He leaves me, and the walls close in a little. I pull my shawl closer, and forbid myself from thinking about home.
SOMERLED
Somerled is, to his slight regret, relieved to sail away. He looks behind him once, to the small figure standing on the edge of the shore, watching the reduced fleet depart. The oars are out, pulling them into the Sound of Mull before pointing north. North, to meet Olaf and his fleet. He is sailing as an ally, to take on the rebellious men of the northern isles.
He looks out over his crew, creaking into their familiar rhythm. He will take his turn at the blade on the way north, he thinks. He is getting flabby. He looks down at his body, this traitorous thing that tups the silent princess with such abandoned joy. He finds a release in sex without love that he was not expecting. He does not care over-much if she is enjoying it; and that, he finds to his shame, is liberating. He thinks of their last frenzied coupling, and he leans into the wind.
The Winter Isles Page 19