But I hold myself in, tight like a closed cockle. They call me proud and prickly here. They think me humourless.
Perhaps they are right. I am losing myself. I drift on the surface, and underneath is a void, a blankness. Even thinking about it makes me dizzy with pain and grief. So I rise at dawn and I milk the cows and I wait for dusk.
RAGNHILD
I hate becoming fat. This stomach feels like it belongs to someone else. My face is puffy. My ankles are swollen. Even my fingers are rounded and fat.
I am a stranger to myself. At night, my chest burns. As I roll over, the massive weight of my body wakes me up and I spend the nights sleepless and tearful. I attempt, sometimes, to pull the younger warriors’ eyes to me. But they slide past and fix on younger, slimmer girls, and I am enraged and pitiful all at the same time.
Who am I? Who is this fat and slothful stranger living in my body? Who is this girl who can make a room full of women fall silent when she enters? Who is this tearful person, with red eyes in a puffy face?
When the baby comes out, I hope then to snap back to being me. I pray for a boy. A boy will bring me power; consolidate my position. Somerled is still together with my father. When he comes back, I will present him with a boy, and he will bow to me. And if he bows, so will they.
Sigrdrifa is fading. She gabbles in Norse, and talks as if her husband is still alive. Perhaps when she dies the women will treat me more seriously.
In the meantime, I grow and grow. I am breathless. I am heavy, when once I was light.
There is something else. Something troubling.
When Sigrdrifa is in her madness, she names a woman. ‘Eimhear,’ she says. ‘Who are you, moppet? I want Eimhear. I want Sigrdrifa.’
I am impatient. ‘You are Sigrdrifa, you old fool.’
‘And look who is calling me a fool.’
She laughs, and the drool leaks from her mouth, running down the lines in her chin. She is horrible. I cannot look at her. There are long grey hairs straggling along her jaw, and pink scalp showing underneath her thinning locks. Her hands are claws. She has three teeth.
She garbles of otters.
‘Stop talking nonsense, old woman.’
Her chattering is a constant buzzing in the background. I will her to be quiet. I ask her politely. She laughs at me, edging closer to the fire, taking all the heat I need for my baby. I ask Oona to take her in. She stares at me. ‘This is her home.’ In my head, I scream: it is supposed to be my home! But I say nothing and stare at the wall. Sometimes I want my own mother here so much I have to fight back the tears. I do not want the mad old witch to see me crying.
We had word from Somerled. He will be on his way home soon. I will greet him with a son, and it will be the moment of triumph. I imagine it again and again, holding his son to him and meeting his eyes, and knowing that I am his queen in soul as well as form.
1140
SOMERLED
‘God’s blood, boy, it’s not that difficult.’
He stands over Gillecolm, who sprawls on the floor. The boy’s knuckles are bleeding. There is a bruise flowering around his eye. Fingal, Aed’s younger boy, stands aside. His breath still comes in ragged gasps. He’s exaggerating, no question of it. For it was pitifully easy for him to send Gillecolm sprawling backwards, his wooden sword skittering across the stones.
Gillecolm puts his fist to his mouth and sucks at the blood. A smear of it sits on his cheek, and Somerled fights the urge to raise the boy up and push it away with a tender thumb. It will do him no good. The eyes of the men are on them already, and Gillecolm’s ineptitude is bad enough without coddling him.
Is this where I went wrong? wonders Somerled. Loving him too much? Is it this tenderness that has made him soft?
The boy unnerves him. He is a quiet, still child with a broad grin and a happy soul. He is provoking to Ragnhild; she cannot understand him, and the joy that flutters about him like a cloud of butterflies, despite all the reasons in the world for bitterness. He can sit for hours on the rocks with the seals. He knows where the eagles’ eggs are. He knows the name of each wild flower of spring. He can read the sea as well as Sigurd, sense the changing moods of the sky before they rush over the horizon. But he cannot hold a sword like a Christian.
It is no help to be the lord’s son; Somerled’s band does not work that way. The boy finishes the practice sessions bruised and bleeding from the flat and sharp of the wooden swords. All the patient coaxing, all the irritated barking, all the private lessons cannot make him faster or more instinctive.
Gillecolm pulls himself to his feet, not catching his father’s eye. He breathes deeply, clearly willing himself to hold the sword upright to stare along its blunt point at Fingal.
Behind them, there is a shuffling and deliberate quietness. The embarrassment of it all hangs heavy over the sparring boys. Somerled can feel the eyes on his neck, the contained nervous laughter. The pity for him and his boy, barbed with disdain. He longs to spin round and tell them all to go to hell, but he fears that will ratchet up this dripping atmosphere to something unbearable.
Fingal spars with Gillecolm, restraining himself. The champion’s boy is light on his feet. The wooden sword is part of his arm, part of the dance. Gillecolm, God keep him, shows all the joins.
Everyone watching knows that Fingal can step up a level. He clearly has his father’s surprising softness for his friends. Fine, thinks Somerled, as long as he has his father’s ferocity with his enemies.
Will it be like this with his new son? He thinks of the boy. He has his mother’s colouring, fair and bright-eyed. He is hungry, strong, packing on weight with each passing month. He is, in the eyes of the world, the legitimate one. When Somerled returned, Ragnhild held the child up to his father like an offering. She crowed of his maleness. He was ready to greet her, to say the necessary words, when he noticed something else. He saw Oona’s red eyes and the misery of the women, and the absence of his mother. He looked around, a child’s panic lurching in his stomach. Oona shook her head, her tears falling freely.
He pushed past Ragnhild and the baby, desperate to be away from the eyes. He ignored her stricken face. The need for solitude was greater than his grief, fiercer than any lust he had ever known. He pushed through the silence. It was only when he was halfway up the hill, alone and accepting the crushing grief, that he realized he had not even asked the boy’s name.
EIMHEAR
He is coming. He is coming.
I roll the words around in my head, but still they make no sense. It is two years since I saw him. Two years. Each minute a cut, each day a scar.
And now he is nearly here. Aed told me, bless him and keep him. The big man jumped down from the galley and waded ashore to shave seconds from the meeting. He is in that galley there, he said, pointing, and I looked along the line of his finger to the most beautiful boat the world has ever seen. In her bow, clutching the beast, a small figure with wind-whipped hair, waving and shouting across the sea.
I wrap my arms around Aed, and he kisses the top of my head and whispers the laments we did not have time for when I left. It feels odd to hold a man, even one so very much like a brother. I can smell blood and sweat on him; and the kiss of the sea. He is hard and unfamiliar, but he reminds me of home, and so I twine my fingers behind his broad back and I hold on and on.
Later we will talk of Oona, my sharp-eyed friend. We will talk of his children, and his pride in them. We will, perhaps, talk of Somerled. But first there is my boy, scudding towards me across the sea. My shining boy. My face pressed into Aed’s chest, I swallow down the torrent.
Little Sigrdrifa must be here. Aed says he will find her, and I whisper garbled directions to the bay on the other side, where she is hunting for mussels clinging to the low-tide rocks. He moves off, unpeeling himself from me. Our words are an irrelevant babble of joy and friendship and promises. His big gap-toothed grin, and his shaggy beard are like sunshine ripping through cloud in this Island of Women.
He w
alks away, and here I am.
And here, suddenly, is my boy. My son.
He runs forward and pushes into me, burying his head in my neck. He is nearly as tall as me, all elbows and limbs. He is unmistakably, unbearably mine. I push myself into him, reaching for the soft skin at the nape of his neck where the hair grows in chestnut down. I pull back to search his face, but cannot bear the air between us. I pull him close again, inhaling him. I adjust to the new size of him, the new shape of him, and I whisper his name again and again until the words run into each other like tears.
~~~
When you are in a boat in rough seas, the first thing they teach you is to keep one hand for the ship and one for yourself. The hand for the ship anchors you; keeps you safe from the capricious bucking of the seas.
That is how it is in this week with my son. I must keep one hand on his skin to feel safe. I can sense, after a while, that it annoys him a little – this constant amazed touching. But I cannot help it, and he knows this. His kindness outweighs his irritation. He lets me run his fine chestnut hair through my fingers. He lets me kiss his neck as I pass him on the way to fetch things to feed him. He is so thin, my boy. I press food on him. Curds and cured things. Red meat still rich with blood. All manner of things from the sea and the soil. Anything I can find, I offer up to him.
Little Sigrdrifa sits near him. I see their two heads bent together over a book, their hair different shades of the same brown. The two of them together in one place, under one roof, by one fire. Safe.
They catch me watching them and look at each other, amused by me.
There is no point trying to explain to them. No use in articulating this desperate joy. I don’t need them to understand, or to love me back. I just need them to be unblemished and fire-flushed, sitting together reading a book.
‘Mother,’ he says, in the see-saw voice of a boy trying to seem old.
‘Hmm?’ I watch his lips as they move; try to imprint each plane of his maturing face on my mind.
‘You know I must leave tomorrow. The winds being fair, Aed will come for me.’
‘I know.’
‘I wish I could stay here with you.’
‘And I too. But it’s no use to wish it. How could you become a man in this place? Who will teach you to fight and boast and be a boor?’
He smiles, but I don’t quite trust in it.
‘What is it, Gillecolm?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Is it her?’
He laughs. ‘No. It’s not her.’
‘Is she kind to you?’
He looks straight at me. ‘No. But she is not happy, so it is hard to hate her.’
‘Does happiness matter so much in this life?’
‘It’s easy to say that, Mother, when you have a gift for happiness. She does not.’
I catch my breath. When did he become old enough to say things like this; to have compassion for his tormentor?
‘But I wish I could stay here.’
He is childish suddenly. I want to gather him up, but I take his hand.
‘I wish you could stay too,’ says Sigrdrifa. She burrows into him, like a puppy.
I look at him and see something elusive about him, something sad.
‘Is there something else bothering you, my darling boy?’
No, he says. No, again, with greater emphasis. But I don’t trust him. He wants to please me. My child wants to protect me; and that is the saddest thing I have ever known.
~~~
He sails on a clear, fine day. The sea takes the smell of him first. Then his voice. He becomes a blur. A speck. Then the horizon settles to a clear unbroken line, and he is gone.
1148
SOMERLED
The years become fluid, interchangeable, as you grow older. So Aed and Somerled tell each other as they creak to standing, trotting out the old man’s platitudes they never thought would be theirs to own.
The seasons come with new births. A daughter to follow Dugald, then three more boys. They snap at each other’s heels from the instant they can crawl. Each child adds a physical layer to Ragnhild, like an onion putting its skin back on.
The distance between them grows.
She tried, he thinks. Poor Ragnhild. Oh God, how she tried. At first.
He tried.
Did he?
He doesn’t know.
How men can filter their memories. How men can slant their actions, re-imagine their intent. The extraordinary myopia of being human.
He can tell when other men con themselves. He can tell when other men soothe themselves with lies, dulling the pain of their shortcomings with whispered, twisting salves.
He can recognize it in others. He knows that Gillecolm tells himself that he does not mind being a hapless warrior. He knows that Brian tells himself he is waiting for the right girl. He knows that Ragnhild believes that their snarling sons will look after each other, that their love for her will conquer their pride, their ambition.
He watches the weave of other people’s lies and yet cannot untangle his own. He looks for them, his hidden lies. He turns on his memory suddenly, trying to surprise it, to catch it unawares, so that it will yield its secrets without flattering its only audience.
Here, then, is what he thinks is true: he did try, but not hard enough. He had other concerns; she is the wrong woman in the wrong skin.
She has never had any sense of what he did, no notion of his machinations, political or military. And he has never tried hard enough to teach her, even as he grew frustrated by her lack of foresight. Slowly, sentence by sentence, word by word, they have stopped talking of anything much. She saves her words for God, with a growing and desperate fervour. A zeal fed by loneliness, perhaps, the poor soul.
He saves his words for his men. Mostly, he is silent.
He has found space enough, on occasion, to lust after her. They have met, sometimes, in frenzied couplings; usually prompted by another man’s appraisal of her. She was good-looking, after all. Blonde and pink and curving in all the right places. They have been quite remarkably fecund together. He barely had to touch her for her belly to swell.
He can pity her, too. Pity her the absence of that flooding love that he has known elsewhere. But most of all, when he notices her at all, it is with a consuming irritation. He flinches when she talks, feels the prickles of rage crawling about his skin like spiders. It is not her fault that the way she speaks, with its high-pitched rounded-out vowels, clenches his stomach. Not her fault that her laugh, which cascades with a self-conscious prettiness, makes his hands ball into tight fists. It is not her fault that she is an essentially humourless creature who laughs at wit only when she sees others laughing. It is not her fault that she bears children so easily, with a wide-hipped, slick rushing that leaves Somerled feeling irrationally anticlimactic. It is not her fault that when he meets her tired eyes over the squirming lightness of each new baby, he feels … nothing.
It is not her fault that she is not Eimhear.
~~~
Eimhear. Each year, Gillecolm goes to spend a few weeks with her and little Sigrdrifa on the Island of Women. Let the boy be cosseted by women sometimes, thinks Somerled. He gets little enough of it from his stepmother. She wears her resentment of him openly. He gets the place farthest from the fire. He gets the milk that is on the turn, meat that is more gristle than flesh.
Somerled has tried to counter her little barbs, but there is a silence, too, between him and his son. Gillecolm’s utter haplessness with a sword or axe is the problem. His failure in this one great and necessary skill has put up a barrier between Somerled and his son. When not with the other boys his age, Gillecolm spends his time with Padeen, with Aed. When Somerled comes near, the boy flinches, as if expecting another homily on the use of weapons, or the duties of a warrior. Somerled has stopped trying to tackle the boy over it. He stopped, in fact, as soon as Gillecolm grew to eye level with him; but the distance and the flinching linger.
Each year, as he sets off for
his mother’s place with the bard at his side, he springs aboard with a lightness, an infectious happiness, that has jaded oarsmen grinning in their seats. Each year, Somerled watches him go, torn and made harsh in his goodbyes by something he refuses to name as envy.
Each year, the bard returns with the boy and a message from Eimhear. Just one line. Each one a marking of time, like the first call of the cuckoo. Each one a sear on Somerled’s scalded heart.
My knees are like an oarsman’s hands from all the praying.
Do you think God is as bored of hearing all these fucking hymns as I am of singing them?
Can you drown in boredom?
1153
SOMERLED
Somerled watches the man crumple into an ornate chair. He is too small for it; his fingers flutter nervously on the gilt-edged rests. The man does not know where to look, and fixes his horrified gaze at some mid-point on the ceiling. It is doubtless higher, more ornate than any he has seen. Who knew that stone could arch and bend like this? Who knew that men could walk inside without crouching, with eyes unclogged by peat smoke? Who knew that a man could be so wretched with embarrassment that his old body twists and coils of its own volition?
The white-haired man kneeling clicks his tongue, irritated. ‘Hold still,’ he whispers sharply. As an afterthought: ‘My child.’ The hall is hot; the great fire stoked continually by a boy so that even the corners are warm. The smell of pigs and crusted dirt rolls off the seated man in the heat. Sweat betrays him; shameful beads on his forehead.
Somerled feels light-headed. He and his small band have just walked into the castle, out of an unyielding drizzle. The dry and the fire set their wet wool cloaks to steam, and they stand, a little foolishly, amidst the white puffs. Water pools in the hollows of the rushes between their feet; it drips off the straggling ends of their beards.
The room is full of crisp, dry men. Some thirty hangers-on, standing in a respectful semicircle around the tableau at the front, where the grimy, rag-clad beggar offers his feet to a king. A low chatter in French behind them; a slow intonation in Latin from a priest beside them. The priest bends his tonsured head, and Somerled can see the dried scab of a shaving cut. A hole in his hair like a reverse halo. Not like the old way of the high shaven forehead. And what was wrong with the old ways?
The Winter Isles Page 21