The Winter Isles

by Antonia Senior

  He wriggles his damp feet in his boots, impatient to peel them off and set his pulpy skin to dry. But first, this absurdity.

  ‘The water, your majesty.’ A page, kneeling by the white-haired King David, pours the water into a bowl.

  ‘Your feet,’ says the king to the twisting man in the chair.

  ‘My feet?’ he says stupidly.

  The king snaps a glance across the page’s head to one of his retainers, who shifts his weight and slides his eyes to the side, fixing, by chance or design, on the mumbling priest.

  ‘How,’ hisses the king, in a voice rich with unuttered expletives, ‘am I supposed to wash your feet if you don’t put them in the water?’

  The man nods. The misery rolls off him. Somerled feels an answering sympathy for the beggar as he dips his feet gingerly into the bowl. He gasps, and pulls them back. The king looks up, and the man’s feet fall quickly back into the water with a violence that splashes the liquid over the sides of the bowl and on to the king’s fur-lined cloak.

  Somerled looks across to the retainer, clearly the man who fished this particular beggar from the town’s sewers. He sees the man’s eyes close, and his lips whisper a silent appeal.

  The beggar’s feet are not as foul as you would expect. Either the king’s men wash them first, or they line them up, the poor bastards, and choose the least revolting. Still, perhaps he will get a meal from it.

  Slowly, the feet are washed. The beggar, at a sign from the king, pulls them out of the bowl and places them on a cloth resting on the king’s bended knees. Slowly, and with studied care, the toes are dried. Still the look of acute misery sits on the man’s face. Sigrdrifa, his mother, would have laughed herself to tears at this tableau, thinks Somerled.

  The beggar wriggles, earning a tut from the kneeling king.

  ‘Poor bastard’s ticklish,’ Somerled hears Aed whisper to Gillecolm. The boy has the good sense at least to stifle his laugh. Somerled checks himself. Not a boy any longer; a man in his prime.

  At last the ordeal is over. A priest comes forward to bless the man and the king. The room claps. It is pie-stuffed with retainers, oozing sycophancy. Somerled and his band join with them politely. The beggar smiles nervously into the crowd, as if the applause is for him.

  David stands without a sound, but he pushes himself upright, hands on knees. Sixty-four, thinks Somerled. Twenty years on me. Will I make it to such an age? he asks himself. Christ, I hope not.

  David turns and sees Somerled. He pauses for a heartbeat, and Somerled finds that he is holding his breath. He breathes out, irritated with himself. Around them, eyes watch, waiting for the moment of judgement, the exact calibration of greeting that will show them how much respect is due to this big, shaggy barbarian from the west.

  ‘Lord Somerled,’ says King David, and walks forward, pulling him out of a bow and clasping arms, wrist upon wrist. Somerled feels the tension in his band slacken, feels the mental rubbing of hands as they calculate the better rooms, better drink and better women that will likely come their way now.

  ‘Your majesty,’ he says, looking straight back into the appraising brown eyes. Could he hazard a joke about his feet needing a bit of a scrub? No, perhaps not. Behind the king he sees the beggar being ushered out of a side door, his clean feet sinking into the rushes and grime of the castle floor.

  The king looks old, and he looks tired. He seems to have shrunk since Somerled last saw him, his neck sinking into his body and his shoulders rounding. The eyes are sharp in the furrowed face. A face carved by irritation into granite lines. He wears his grief like a breastplate, visibly weighing on him.

  It is more than a year now since the death of Henry, the old man’s only son and his heir. Somerled feels the bounce in his toes as he thinks of his own sons. Dugald, the eldest by Ragnhild, is fourteen now, and eager to row with the warriors. A good boy. Taciturn, strong. Ranald, the twelve-year-old, will be blooded on his father’s return. Angus is just eleven, but tries to seem older. A puzzle, that fierce, competitive child. Olaf, the youngest, is still happy jumping waves. Bethoc is too pious, like her mother. At her age she should be sighing after the warriors, not whipping herself into divine frenzies. None of them smile much, Ragnhild’s children, now he thinks of it. The boys can handle a sword, though, not like Gillecolm.

  Gillecolm. The blasted boy never stops smiling. A smile like his mother. Did she smile so often, so provokingly? At sea, with his legs spread in the easy, rolling way he has and the wind catching his hair and the spray shining his face, Gillecolm wears a smile so wide it will pull the gods’ wrath on them all. A smile so fierce it will tear through the clouds and fall upon heaven as a challenge: do your worst, do what you will; this soul is beyond your malice.

  Yet he is twenty-three now, not a boy. He should put away his smiles and learn how to hold a sword like a Christian. God’s blood, but he is hopeless in a fight. He’s only alive because Aed, the ageing champion, sticks to him limpet-tight, cutting down his opponents and dodging the boy’s own clumsy, ineffectual hacks.

  All Somerled’s glee at beating David in the matter of sons leaks away, and a familiar irritation settles on him. What kind of lord’s son holds his sword like a virgin on her wedding night?

  David, meanwhile, has ushered forward a pale, slight boy. Not yet shaving. Eleven, perhaps?

  ‘This, Lord Somerled, is my heir, Malcolm. My grandson. Returned from a tour of the kingdom.’

  The boy’s eyes widen. He looks as if it is the first time he has heard himself spoken of as David’s heir. It is the first time Somerled has heard it from the old man’s lips. The maiden, they call the boy. And is there not a womanish cast to his handsome face? No surprise that he will be king. The old bastard has introduced every English notion going, stuffing his court with French knights and English monks and lawyers. Why would he not now insist on their way of doing this: the throne passing down through the eldest in the male line, no matter if the male line is worthy. Or even bearded.

  Malcolm is thin and pale and terrified. The hand gripping his shoulder is white at the knuckles, and the boy looks as if he would shy away if he could. Lord, thinks Somerled. The old man had better last a few years yet – this boy needs time.

  ~~~

  Somerled sits at the feast and imagines himself young. It becomes more of an effort with each passing year. He watches the shadows dance on the wall of the king’s hall, and wills them to shape themselves into a boy-shaped wraith. Are you pleased? he asks the shadow. Do you know me? Do you know who I am?

  The sound of a harp breaks his spell. The shadow melts into a mocking twist of shapes. The king’s bard is standing to sing. A song from the Gaelic lands, in honour of the guests. With the first chords Somerled feels his stomach tighten, feels the churning helplessness of being trapped. It is the Lay of Deirdre. He sees Aed register it, and look anxiously towards him. The song has been banned in Somerled’s presence, in his own halls. Visiting bards are taken to one side, whispered into submission.

  Why? they ask.

  Because he doesn’t like it.

  Why?

  What’s it to you? It’s enough to know that he won’t have it. Try crossing Somerled, stranger. See where it gets you.

  So they sing him different songs, and thank the bardic gods for the warning, as they watch his grim face and imagine that cold eye turning on them in anger.

  Somerled knows that he terrifies men. It is useful. He catches sight of himself, sometimes, in mirrors, in rare calm waters. A stranger looks back. A glowering man. A man held taut between contempt and rage. A man who has never turned handstands in a cold sea to make a girl laugh, who could never even conceive that such an act was possible.

  He is like a mussel in a tapped shell. Unreachable.

  And now here, in this court, where he cannot dictate the bard’s choices, he will have to listen to it. Jesus, Lord. Let me be no man’s vassal. I cannot bear this.

  Worse, the bard knows his trade. He is clear and beautiful of tone.
The French knights, even though his words are a jumble, are as rapt as the rest as he sings of all the beauty of the world and how it came to rest in one woman, Deirdre.

  The bard sings as if it were true. As if all the beauty of the world was not Somerled’s own, once; held in his hands as he cupped his lover’s face with oar-calloused palms.

  Somerled has the twofold agony of remembering how she loved this song, and how they were both wrong about its moral. How they failed to understand its portents. What use a seeing eye? Men choose blindness. It is easier that way.

  Even the music failed to irritate her, tone deaf as she was. The dear one. She followed the poetry of the words. He remembers her eyes glinting in the firelight, and how she would turn to him, unfailingly, as the bard sang of Deirdre’s enchanted season with Naoise, her beloved, on the shores of Loch Etive. She would throw him a secret smile as the bard built Deirdre a bower above a waterfall. There on a flat rock big enough for two, she could sit with her beloved and listen to the water’s ripple, watching the moon shine in silver promises on the loch.

  Jesus, it is hot in this hall. He sweats, shifts his slick arse on the bench, trying to get comfortable. Aed is trying not to look at him. The big man’s fingers tap out the beat on his thigh.

  They thought, Somerled and his lover, that the song foreshadowed them. That it spoke across the centuries to their bower on the hillside, to the nights they spent, the two of them, entwined in each other while the business of life continued far below them in the bustling hall.

  They thought it was their song, and so it turned out to be.

  The bard is ratcheting it up now, introducing the serpent into paradise. Deirdre’s dream foretells the doom: how Naoise and his two loyal brothers will end their tale. Small portents of impending grief sidle into their loving hearts.

  At last, the spurned King Conor, who loves Deirdre, comes for the brothers. A druid calls a flood, and the three brothers are caught, neck deep in the waters. They beg that their heads should be cleft from their necks in one stroke.

  Around Somerled, the warriors are moved. Gillecolm has never heard the tale sung, banned as it is from his father’s hall. No. That’s not right. He heard it there when it was her hall too. Probably sat on her lap, curling her long hair around his fingers, skin against skin. Pushed his face into her neck to breathe her in, as children do to their mothers. And their mothers let themselves be breathed in.

  The boy is openly crying, and Somerled wants to wipe the tears. He wants to slap the boy for crying. But his own miserable soul needs some attention. For this is the bit he hates most. The bit where Deirdre has the courage to seek her lover’s head, to clean it and to kiss the staring eyes. The strength to leap down into his grave and die with him, clutching his lifeless body to her.

  Jesus, why am I so base? Somerled cries the question silently into the bottom of his cup. Why so cowardly? Why so alive?

  The music falls to its end. Silence in its wake like an offering. Somerled is caught in this flood of wretchedness, of a self-loathing so profound it makes him clasp the knife in his palm tight enough to cut. He sees Gillecolm turn to him, a smile beginning to form on his tear-tracked face.

  ‘Why must you insist on shaming me?’ hisses Somerled. The words cling to the boy like leeches. Somerled watches the colour bleed from his son’s face and closes his fist tighter around the blade. The blood drips, shocking and red, on to the king’s white tablecloth.

  ~~~

  He tries to remember. Her skinny legs waving above the water. Her serious face watching him, ethereal somehow, like a selkie. No. That’s not right. He shakes his head, trying to get it straight. Around him, the business of making camp. The galley beached, the early summer sun dwindling to a polished gold.

  Out in the Sound, a fin breaks above the calm waters. A small fin in a great grey back that catches the late sun on its shining surface and throws its sheen back to the watching men on the shore. Late May. Minke whales, perhaps. He turns away, back to his thoughts, noting Gillecolm’s cry and his scamper down to the rocky edge of the sea. Somerled sees the delight on his son’s face. Like his mother. She loved a whale. Why does that thought not spark a rush of love? Why only this cold irritation?

  He drinks, absently. Imagining her pressed against the heather, watching the clouds. She would have run down to the sea to watch the whale. Would she not?

  Has he remembered her right? He knows that some of it must be true. He has told himself the stories of her again and again, and they are fixed in his head. Like the North Star.

  But the words are brittle things. He can’t smell her, or taste her. He can’t hear the exact quality of her laugh. He tells himself it was beautiful. He tells himself she was beautiful. But her image is constructed of words, not flesh. She is pieced together by his cold memory.

  And here is the question. Was he really happy then, or is he dreaming it? Is he using her memory, as a proxy for a joyous soul? Can he blame his questing, unsettled nature on her? Can he shift the burden of his sour life on to her lost shoulders? Perhaps he is just made this way. Perhaps his misery is of his own making. Not hers.

  Or perhaps she really was a shining joy. Perhaps it is true that when she was lost, he was lost. There was a boy who dangled his feet in rivers, and lay still to watch the otters play. There was a boy who turned handstands in freezing seas. He existed once. Didn’t he?

  She wasn’t mystical, nor mythical. She bled monthly, and each time railed against it with absurd pointlessness. She was irritable sometimes. She crumbled a little more each year he knew her with the drudgery of eking a life under that wide, forbidding sky. She snapped and raged at small irritations. Sometimes they grew so taut with each other that breaking seemed the only fate. But other times, other times … Oh my Lord. Oh Lord, you were witness to that joy. You saw. He does not dream it. He does not pull phantoms from his hopeful youth, and call them her name. Does he?

  They bustle around him. He is all stillness, and he knows that it unsettles them. Let them be unsettled, the bastards. He is the lord here.

  Fires are made and tended. Food is shared. The low hum of chatter. Around him, a high wall of silence. Respect and deference. He could have it no other way. And yet. Yet. He thinks about calling Aed over, but he sees the big man talking to Gillecolm. He leaves them.

  But now, something new. Round the headland comes a galley, fighting hard against the winds. It pulls in, close to shore. Somerled recognizes the big man standing in the stern – one of the king’s men. Left behind in the court only days before. The galley skims as close as it dares, and the big man mounts the galley’s side, one arm holding the backstay, leaning out over the oars’ surging.

  ‘The king is dead,’ he shouts. ‘The king is dead.’

  Somerled ignores the buzzing behind him. Like bees in a poked hive.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two days after you left him, Lord Somerled. Malcolm is to be crowned. I am sent to spread the word. Spread it, Somerled. Malcolm is our king.’

  Somerled waved the galley off, his face impassive.

  ‘Malcolm the Maiden?’ says Aed, coming up behind him. He moves quietly, for a big man. It never fails to surprise Somerled, after all these years.

  ‘We shall see,’ said Somerled. Beside him, the big man grins.

  1153

  SOMERLED

  A curragh pulls alongside as they sweep towards home with stretched oars and aching backs. Somerled leans over to see his sons looking up at him from the boat. The sun is behind him, and they have to squint. The four of them are crammed in. Olaf, the littlest, grabs a rope thrown by Somerled’s pilot, and fastens it to the curragh. Dugald, the eldest, snaps an order from the tiller, and Ranald pulls down the heavy sail.

  Angus leaps aboard, leaving the curragh rocking violently behind him.

  ‘Did you hear, Father? About King David.’

  ‘We did.’

  Angus deflates a little at this. His brothers clamber up the side to stand with him. Olaf ru
ns to Gillecolm, jumping up at him, wrapping his skinny legs around the young man’s waist. The older boys ignore their brother, looking at their father intently.

  ‘Well?’ says Dugald, at last.

  ‘Well what, boys? We are hungry and tired, and want to get home.’

  Somerled thinks of teasing them, but looks at their shining fierce faces and decides against it.

  ‘Lord help us,’ he says, tetchy. ‘Would I tell you my plans before they are made? We have your cousins to think of. Mael Coluim and Domhnall.’

  ‘They have the same right as the Maiden,’ says Angus.

  ‘King David believes in primogeniture,’ says Dugald.

  ‘And are we Normans?’ Ranald turns, facing his older brother, bristling. ‘Why should it be the elder? It should be the best.’

  ‘What if the elder is the best?’ says Dugald.

  Their squabbling is grating on him. He wants to savour this moment, the first sight of home. His first pulse-quickening view of the black rocks falling away into the sea, of the hall behind that he helped to build, of the hills where he has roamed and hunted. Where he loved.

  Wordlessly, he picks Dugald up. The boy is nearly as big as him now; he couldn’t manage it without the aid of surprise. He tips him backwards over the side of the boat. Ranald next, who flails a little. They float, spluttering and shocked, in the long, slow swell. It must be cold, thinks Somerled. It will force them awake.

  ‘Let’s see, then,’ he says. ‘Swim home. The first to touch the door shall be the first among you.’

  ‘Lord Somerled,’ says Aed behind him, his voice oddly formal.

  He almost regrets it then. But the boys are off, swimming with wild, violent strokes towards the hall. Something rushes by him, a small body. Angus jumps on to the low side of the galley and flings himself at the water in a graceful arc, hovering above the water like a gull spying a herring. In he glides, with barely a ripple.