The Winter Isles

by Antonia Senior

  The band rest on their oars. They can’t row forward anyway, churning the water with those slight bodies there. The drama grips them. A gasp as an arm grabs a handful of hair and pushes it down, under the spumy waves. He hears the whispers of bets being placed, wagers laid.

  ‘Let me go after them in the curragh,’ Aed whispers behind him. ‘Stop this.’

  ‘Too late,’ says Somerled. His heart is pumping. ‘Would you baby them, Aed? They have a kingdom to carry between them.’

  ‘What if they kill each other?’

  It looks violent out there in the water. They twist into each other, the rippling bodies. They pull each other back, and drag each other under. They could be playful dolphins. They are not playing.

  ‘They won’t.’ But suddenly he is not sure. He grips the forestay fiercely, watching this thing that he has created. Admiring their ambition. Regretting it.

  ‘Father,’ says Gillecolm. Somerled can’t bear his anguish. Olaf’s face is buried in his brother’s neck.

  ‘Stop your whining. All right, then.’ He nods at the pilot. ‘Bring her in. Slow. Half-strokes. Back up on my call.’

  They creep behind the boys, gliding slowly across the water.

  The women and the warriors left behind have come outside, watching the galley come in. He sees a woman run to the water’s edge. Ragnhild, his wife. He can tell her by her bulk, the awkward judder of her body as it wobbles in the unexpected motion. He will pay for this later in cold silences and muttered complaints. No matter; he has learned to think round her chatter and her silence alike.

  The boys in the water have separated now. Dugald is the fastest. He’s making for the jetty. Angus trails behind him. Ranald is taking the shorter route, towards the black rocks at the base of the hall. It will be fiercely hard to climb out there, with this swell rushing and sucking the jagged, sharp stone. He reaches the rocks at the same time as Dugald grabs hold of the smooth wall of the jetty.

  Dugald pulls himself out with ease, Angus coming in behind him. Ranald has more difficulty, but he’s nearer the hall. On land, they race, and it seems to the men on the boat that the older two reach the door at the same time, pounding its wood before sinking into the grass. Even from here, they can see that Ranald is in a bad way. His torso streams with salt water and blood. He has cut himself ragged on the sharp edges of the rock, the swell crushing him, dragging him along the barnacles and the sharp limpet shells.

  Angus sits on the end of the jetty, trying not to cry. ‘It’s not fair,’ he shouts, as the galley comes alongside. ‘Their arms are longer.’

  Somerled runs towards the boys, and stops short, shy suddenly, as they turn and look at him with fierce eyes. Behind him, he can hear Angus’s plaintive cry. ‘It’s not fair.’

  Over their heads their mother looks at him blankly. A fat, grey-haired stranger. Ranald’s blood, diluted with seawater and her own tears, smears her white cheek.

  He is furious at their collective silent reproach. It was the boys’ choice to rise to his challenge. Their choice. He pushes past them, raging now, into the darkness of his hall.

  RAGNHILD

  I wipe the blood from my son’s skin. The bowl is red with it. He tries not to cry as the cloth presses against the scratches. I want to cry for him, but I bite my lip to hold it in.

  They sit close to the fire, warming themselves, blankets thrown over bare skin. I want to move among them, my sons, and press my nose into their salty skin. To smell them, and weep over them, and hold them until their bones crack.

  I do not. Boys do not need their mother’s love. They need her ferocity. Boys need to be told to get up when they fall; to stop weeping when they cry; to hold their chin high and their shoulders square. What use is such tearful tenderness to them? So I fold it inside this stranger’s fleshy body.

  Bethoc brings more blankets. She stops first at Ranald, the one she likes best, though no one else can get close to him.

  ‘Stop slouching, girl.’ I snap at her and watch her flinch. She pulls herself up, however. She is awkward with her changing shape, and hunches over her shoulders to disguise her new breasts. I remember my mother’s voice. 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.

  I never saw her again before she died. They are lucky to have me, these children. I will prepare them.

  A small voice in my head mutinies. It did not work for you.

  I round on it fiercely, pushing myself upright from the stool and pacing the room. What dent could I make on a heart that was already promised? Did my father know, when he sent me here? Did he care?

  Gillecolm enters, carrying little Olaf on his shoulders.

  ‘Mother,’ shouts Olaf happily. ‘There was a race, did you see it?’

  ‘Shh, little man,’ says Gillecolm. I wind my fingers into my skirt, to keep from striking him. God curse his tact, his rueful smile, his easy ruffling of Dugald’s wet hair.

  ‘I tried to stop it,’ he said.

  ‘Not hard enough.’

  ‘Do you think he meant it?’ asks Angus, his face tear-streaked.

  ‘Meant what?’ I ask Gillecolm the question and his face darkens.

  ‘No matter.’

  ‘Tell me. Dugald?’

  Dugald’s newly broken voice cuts past Gillecolm. ‘He said that the first to the castle would be his heir.’

  ‘I was first,’ says Ranald.

  ‘Liar. I was first.’

  They bristle at each other. Gillecolm moves between them. ‘Easy. I don’t think he meant it. He is in a strange mood. The death of David …’

  He trails off, looking at me apologetically. I turn away.

  The boys are still fighting over who was first, and Gillecolm tries again to calm them.

  Dugald spits at him. ‘You were not even in the race. And you a bastard.’

  Gillecolm meets the barb with that easy smile, and I hate him anew. I like to see my sons’ spears find their targets.

  ‘Aye,’ says Gillecolm. ‘You boys are welcome to fight over it. Just let me have a ship, whichever of you wins, and I’ll be happy.’ In another man it would be a lie, I think, as he wanders off whistling. To find Sigurd’s daughter, I expect, who gazes after him like a seal puppy at a culling club.

  The boys simmer down after he leaves. I feed them and clothe them. Bethoc bustles between them with pitchers and platters.

  We sit by the fire for a while, at peace. Somerled is out there somewhere, seeing to the docking and to his men. I relish the last of the time without him.

  ‘Tell us a story, Mother,’ says little Olaf.

  ‘Which one, my princeling?’

  ‘The one where you and Father met.’

  I tell them. I tell them how he saw me at a feast and fell madly in love. I tell them how my father would not let me go. I tell them how Somerled took my father and his warriors out on his galley and deliberately scuttled it in mid-channel, drawing out a great iron pin from its hull. My father could not swim. Let me marry your daughter, said Somerled, or I will let you drown. So my father was tricked and defeated, and I married the prince.

  Olaf sighs happily at the end of the story, as he always does. I see Dugald watching me over his cup, with eyes so adult, so scathing, that my stomach lurches. I look away and into the fire, watching the leaping flames in silence.

  SOMERLED

  It comes the next day, the news. Driving all other thoughts before it like a winter storm. King Olaf of Man is dead. His father-in-law. The man who held the power in the Irish Sea. The man who sat in his stronghold like a wizened sea-spider, his commands strung across the sea, passed from headland to bay, across the waves and through the wind. The man at the centre of it all, his body bent and crouching, his mind thrumming, seething with strategies and plans.

  Gone. It is the type of news to suck the air from their discourse. A pause, where speculation and boasting
should be.

  Olaf’s nephews, exiled, came home and struck the old man down. They came under a promise of repentance and peace, and splattered his brains across his own table.

  ‘Death is stalking lords this season,’ says Somerled to Aed, later that night. They listen to Ragnhild’s quiet sobbing creeping through the hall.

  ‘David, then Olaf.’

  Somerled nods. ‘East and west of us. Hard bastards, but stable. Now what? Stormy times, Aed.’

  ‘They say that King Stephen’s son and heir is ill down south. Like to die,’ says Aed. ‘Then it will be coming at us from three sides.’

  The hall is quiet; huddles of men drink softly. Eyes turn to Somerled, as if he will wear his thoughts on his brow. They sit, the lord and his champion, nearest the fire, their heads inclined to each other. Easy with one another.

  ‘Ragnhild thinks I should avenge him,’ says Somerled.

  ‘His son is in Norway?’

  ‘Godred, yes. A snake of a man. Perhaps I should. Olaf was my father-in-law.’

  ‘But not a friend, Somerled.’

  ‘Pah. Friends are for boys. Children.’

  Aed grins at him through his great shaggy beard. Somerled feels awash with affection for him.

  ‘Fool,’ he says. ‘You know my meaning.’

  Aed smiles, looking into the fire’s sparkling heart.

  ‘Last night, Somerled, I had a dream. I was a fisherman. Do you think of the other lives we might have led? Do you think of all those moments that spin on a sword’s arc, or a woman’s smile, or a vicious sea?’

  ‘You sound old.’

  ‘I am old. I creak when I fart.’

  ‘You never stop creaking, man.’

  ‘The Manxmen, then. What will you do?’

  ‘I think I will wait. When I was young, I thought waiting was cowardice. Yet sometimes …’

  Aed nods. ‘The nephews have no chance. No support, no backing. Godred will return.’

  ‘Aye, with a Norwegian army at his back. No. Let this play out, I think, like a bard’s lay. There can only be a tragic end.’

  Aed turns towards him, with that familiar sharpness strangers do not suspect him of. ‘A tragic end for whom, Lord Somerled?

  ~~~

  He talks to Ragnhild of her brother Godred. The news has come that he is sailing back to reclaim his father’s land from the murderous nephews. She straightens from her work, putting down the skeins of wool with careful hands.

  ‘He is my brother. I should not talk ill of him.’

  ‘And I am your husband. You should talk the truth to me.’

  ‘Really?’ She looks at him, and he feels a familiar unease. Sometimes, when she arches her brows at him, he feels as if he is standing, disorientated, on a foggy clifftop. The disquiet is hard to pin down. He thinks, in the pause, that it springs from his underestimation of her. He is so accustomed to seeing only the surface. The wrinkled and crêped skin of her face. The fat that clings to the lithe body of his memory. Sometimes he watches her lumber from sitting with an air of puzzlement that she is not springing. She looks down with astonishment at her own thick thighs, her stranger’s stomach.

  Sometimes, as now, she regards him with a face that could be amused, or could be contemptuous; he doesn’t know. It is sad that he cannot read her, he thinks. Sadder still how little he really cares.

  ‘Godred,’ she says slowly, as if to a foreigner, ‘is devil-spawned. Godred is cruel. Godred is hard and vicious, like a blade turned for evil. Is that what you want to hear?’

  He sends letters to his friends in Man. Thorfinn Ottarson and others. Not pointed letters. Just to remind them he is there. He mentions Dugald, Olaf’s grandson, oh so casually. How strong he is, for a boy. How accomplished. He does what he can imagine Olaf doing – he nudges, hints, prepares.

  But first, the Maiden.

  ~~~

  The rebellion is fierce, pulsing. They push the Normans and the men of Alba back, fighting the way they do best. Small wars on the fringes. Lightning raids. Vicious, bloody little affrays.

  They choose ground that wrong-foots the Norman horses. Boggy, heathery ground. Vertiginous slopes that leave them skittery and vulnerable. They aim for the beasts, for their bellies and their legs. On foot, the Normans are more easily taken; great lumbering metal men who stand, feet planted wide in the heather, as Somerled’s men dance round them like nimble wolves, sharp-toothed spears seeking out the holes, the weak links in the chain. Once the skin is nicked, they sink slowly, these metal men, bleeding to death in their own metal coffins.

  Sometimes, when they do not have time to strip the bodies, they leave them there on the hillside. Somerled imagines them slowly rusting from the outside in, confusing the scavengers, who love a battlefield. The smell of blood and ruptured skin and emptied, shit-scared bowels. Yet the wolves’ teeth will scrape on the metal; the birds’ talons screech across the links.

  ~~~

  His nephews are tall, violent boys. They believe they have as good a right to Alba as the Maiden. They are older than their cousins, war-tested. In the evenings, they talk long and hard about their birthright until it is a thing unquestioned – a shiny, bright truth that must be fought and died for.

  Gillecolm hates this war. Hates being inland. He was born with salt in his veins, that boy. There is something else troubling him. He has lost his sparkle. Somerled takes time to notice. He is so used to the boy’s laugh grating at him when he is trying to think that its absence is a single discordant note at first. It sets him on edge and he doesn’t know why. It sends him snapping for extra scouts, more lookouts.

  There it is at last, made obvious. The boy sits at a fire, surrounded by his shield brothers, their boasts and banter a constant thrum, and his face alone still and quiet, lost in staring at the flames.

  Somerled wants to ask him what is wrong. He wants to put an arm across the boy’s shoulders, whisper in his freckled ear, ‘What ails you, my son, my boy?’

  He rises from the fireside, the bones in his legs crackling with effort, the muscles tight. His face is warm and red from the fire, but standing it catches a breeze, which cools him down and makes him pause.

  He looks across again, his face cast in the shadow of distance from the flames. He watches his boy’s misery and hugs it to himself. Silent.

  ~~~

  There is a pause between battles. A breathing time. They make camp by a loch. They comb out their long, matted hair and see to their kit.

  He finds Gillecolm lying on the grass at the edge of the water. The boy is holding a flower, studying it. Somerled stands, for a space, watching him. The boy looks like him, everyone says it. But Somerled can only see Gillecolm’s mother. He feels a great rush of tenderness.

  Gillecolm turns, a smile on his face. When he sees Somerled, the smile fixes, and he jumps to his feet, the flower hanging limply at his side.

  ‘Sit down, boy,’ says Somerled, and although he means it to be an invitation, it spins on his tongue to become a command. Gillecolm sits, squinting up at him, the sun in his eyes.

  ‘They were your grandmother’s favourites,’ he says, easing himself down next to the boy. He should not call him a boy, he supposes. How old is he now? In his twenties anyway.

  ‘Really? I was looking closely. Do you ever think, Father, that we don’t look hard enough at the small things?’

  ‘I have big enough things to look at,’ says Somerled, leaning back on his elbows. It’s the first warm day of the year. The first day you can feel the sun etching itself on to your skin. He raises his head to it, sighing a little.

  They are quiet for a while. Gillecolm stares into the depths of the pink flower, past the soft petals and into its heart. Somerled thinks of the campaign to come. He thinks of the orders he must give. He remembers, suddenly, that he has forgotten to check that the salted meat supplies are holding up.

  ‘Look, Father.’ Gillecolm grips his arm. Overhead, an eagle hangs in the still air. Impossibly large, its feathers are muddied a
nd bedraggled, but it soars above them with a careless grace. Beside him Gillecolm is holding his breath, the bird’s beauty reflected in his rapturous face.

  Somerled smiles, feeling his son’s hand gripping his arm, watching the eagle’s imperious flight. Gillecolm drops his hand, the eagle moves on and there is a distance between them again.

  ‘It’s about Deirdre,’ says Somerled.

  The boy turns to look at him.

  ‘Sigurd’s daughter,’ says Somerled.

  ‘I know who she is.’

  ‘Be civil, boy. Of course you know who she is. You’re barely able to go five minutes without a hand on her arse. Is she why you are moping about the place like a calf who’s lost the teat?’

  Gillecolm’s face sets rigid. He looks away, towards the sea. ‘We love each other,’ he says.

  ‘Well. And that is fine. I will talk to Sigurd. Smooth it all out. A handfasting, and if there are children, we will make sure they are cared for.’

  ‘I want to marry her.’

  ‘Marry her? Be serious. She is the daughter of a thrall.’

  ‘I love her.’

  Somerled snorts. ‘Did I say you couldn’t? But you are not to marry her. I have other plans.’

  ‘But what of my plans?’

  ‘What of them? You are my son, and you will marry for the family.’

  ‘I am a bastard.’

  ‘You are my bastard.’

  Gillecolm stands, brushing the grass and mud from him.

  ‘And if I will not?’ he says, looking down on Somerled.

  ‘Everything you have comes from me.’

  ‘And yet everything I am disappoints you.’

  Somerled begins to deny it, but he looks into his son’s face and falters. ‘Not everything,’ he says.

  Gillecolm smiles, suddenly absolving him. ‘So who is it you want me to marry?’

  ‘The chief of the Russ of Mull. One of his girls.’

  ‘Does she have the family nose?’

  Somerled laughs. ‘And if she does?’

  Gillecolm crouches on his heels beside his father. He looks earnestly at him. ‘It is a question of heart,’ he says.