‘He took my sword.’
‘He said I could.’
‘I did not.’
‘You’re a liar.’
On it rolls. He feels a great weariness settle on him. He wants to topple over into the furs spread behind him, let his head sink into them. He would stretch his limbs out, arching his back. He wants to give himself up to thoughts of Eimhear as he first knew her, spread below him and laughing up at him. He would open his eyes to watch her son carry out a small task competently. He looks over to Gillecolm. The skin is peeling off the seal in one piece, leaving the strange, sad flesh behind. Blood pools in the indents of the rock, and the boys stick their fingers in it, to draw patterns on the white stone surface.
He watches the whorls of the younger boy, Fergus. Sigurd draws fighting stick men, their axes raised and blobby faces drawn of blood screaming defiance at one another.
‘Father, you must punish him.’
‘Me? You’re the liar and the thief.’
‘You are.’
He looks up, to where a skua fights the air currents. It battles elegantly, wings spread. It hovers, then concedes, letting itself slip sideways. Or is it pushed?
As he stands, the cup he holds falls to the ground and the last of the wine dribbles out.
The boys stop talking and watch it fall. He pushes past them. Ranald opens his mouth to say something, but stops himself. Somerled looks at them, confused. Is it pity he feels for them? Is it contempt? Perhaps it is guilt. Perhaps their scratching and snarling is his fault. Is it possible to be a king and have sons who love each other as Aed’s boys do? Is it possible to have power and bequeath it seamlessly? Can power pass joyously through generations, or will it always corrupt and embitter on its way?
He shakes his head to clear it. Angus and Ranald fall back, looking at each other and back at him.
Silent, he walks away from them, down to the shore. He feels the turf give to rock under his feet. The low clouds threaten rain, but it holds off for now, brooding over a sullen sea.
‘Can I help?’ he says. Gillecolm looks up. He grins.
‘Please.’ He gestures at the pile of seals to be skinned. Some ten of them, lying tumbled on top of one another.
Somerled squats beside him. He pulls his knife and reaches for the nearest body. Still warm, the creature. Only a great dent in its head to explain its passivity. Carefully Somerled makes the first cuts.
‘I haven’t done this for years,’ he says.
‘It’s not my favourite job.’
‘Aye, you always loved a seal.’ Like your mother.
‘Still. I’d not have the boys shiver through a winter because I’m too squeamish to skin one.’
‘Jesus, boy. Can you imagine if you refused? You’d never live it down.’
‘Lord. I can see the faces on my crew.’ They both laugh, and it feels good.
They work quietly, deftly. The pile of skins grows higher.
‘They say,’ says Gillecolm, ‘that the Maiden is earning his name. He does not lie with women.’
‘No? Men? Beasts?’
‘Nothing.’
Somerled whistles. His blade slips a little, nicking the skin. He curses.
‘I should shout at you for that ruined skin, Father.’
‘Just try.’
Gillecolm smiles and throws his last skin on the heap. He stands, stretching out of the crouch. ‘Father, will you come with the boys and me for some food?’
The boy has his own longhouse, as befits his status. Somerled ducks inside. Deirdre, coming forward from the fire, sees it is him and freezes. It takes Gillecolm and the boys coming in to unroot her. She finds her voice and welcomes him. They warm themselves by the fire, while she rushes about to rustle up an unexpected banquet. She ignores Somerled’s pleas for simplicity, pushing them off with trailing sentences.
‘No trouble. It’s a … an honour. Boys,’ she hisses. ‘Here.’
The meal passes quietly, pleasantly. Somerled is calm and easy in their company. He works hard with Deirdre, who he has largely ignored until now, and makes her smile.
Afterwards, he goes outside and stands still to breathe the sea. On the rocks where the seals were skinned, he sees the water come high, washing away Fergus and Sigurd’s seal-blood paintings. The water falls back, leaving no sign that the crimson army has ever been there at all.
I will go, he decides then, in that instant. I will go and find her.
RAGNHILD
I know where he is going. He thinks I do not. He is like a boy, bounding about. Excited. The old fool. He whispers in corners with Gillecolm. They go quiet when they see me. As if I am stupid. As if I do not know.
What will he do with her? With me? Will he bring her back here, set her over my head? Will he turn me out? Should I take my boys and flee? But I have nowhere to go. Man is his. The islands are his. I could not get to Alba without him tracking me down first. He could not take the direct affront of his wife sheltering with his greatest enemy. Galloway is no use; it has its own problems fighting the king in Alba.
There is nowhere for me to go. I have lived on this spit of land my entire adult life. I have birthed and raised my children here. I have cried here. It is home, but it has never been home.
I sit entombed in flesh that does not belong to me. Wearing clothes that are too tight. Wearing the heavy gold and silver pieces he fits around my neck and arms because it is expected of him.
Sometimes I dream of another girl, who married Baldur the Beautiful and raised children who had no great birthright to hate each other over. She is slender still. She wears flowers in her hair, not precious stones. Her necklace is a cheap trinket, worn and given in love. She smiles often and does not understand loneliness.
Then I round on myself. Baldur the Beautiful is probably Baldur the Bald and Grumpy now. He probably beats his wife. Her hands are chapped and sore from chores; her back is crooked and her eyes weak. Her children are contemptuous, as the young always are in their secret hearts. Ragnhild the Fair has become Ragnhild the Fat and Sad in every possible life.
So what can I do but stay here? I will stay while he goes off chasing fairies and phantoms. I will weave and work. I will pray and fast. I will see to his household. I will keep his bed warm. I will settle his fractious children. And I will wait for him to decide my fate, like some divine potentate pulling on a string.
Patience.
This is what I teach my daughter. Raging does not help – I learned that a long while since. Embrace your passivity, my daughter, it is the only way. Learn to let the minutes, the hours, slip by. Thank the Lord for uneventful days. Learn to bear, as bear you must, your inability to alter your fate. Men have blunt tools in the face of God’s wrath, to be sure. But they have something. We stand defenceless and wait. Wait.
1157
SOMERLED
His kingdom stretches from Ardnamurchan Point down to the Mull of Kintyre. He sets sail to tour his realm; an itinerary designed to end in Iona. A roundabout way to the Island of Women, but one he can justify without reference to his great fear. How can he be fearful of one woman? Even the sea is his. No ship can pass through the sea roads without his knowing, without his approval.
He is the sea god, Aegir. He is older than giants. He is father of the nine wave maidens. His storm-happy daughters carry him to his land-based dominions. The clear wave. The blooded wave. The pitching wave. The frothing wave. The rising wave. The billowing wave. The welling wave. The foam-flecked wave. The cool wave.
Lord, how rich he is now. Silver seems to cream from the surface of the sea, filling his hall, clinking on his men’s arms, hanging in drops from his latest girl’s ears; weighing tighter, harder, in ever greater chains around his neck.
Padeen has told him of the great king in Byzantium whose crown was so heavy it could not rest unaided on his skull without crushing it. The towering weight of the gold and jewels was suspended on silken ropes hung from the ceiling above the throne. At some point, thinks Somerled, a bare-
headed little man must crawl beneath that crown, bring his head up to meet its golden rim and then, only then, call himself a king.
Somerled misses Padeen. He is still in Rome, the creature. The longed-for pilgrimage granted by Somerled after the rebellion against the Maiden. He will think of that war again now that he is Lord of the Isles. The hasty peace he agreed with the Maiden, as his nephew Mael Coluim wailed and vowed to fight on alone, will he keep it? Perhaps.
They start at the far south of his lands, down on Kintyre. They pass the place where his father’s hall stood, its charred black skeleton covered now by a fine skin of sand. He stamps down the memories, tramples them viciously. He allows himself, only once, a moment to think about his mother. He waits until no one is watching, just in case he cries. He does not cry; instead he rages, grimly silent. When he tries to find her face, her dear, red-cheeked, flour-smeared face, it is not there. It eludes him, his mind a blur of other things, other features.
Up into Islay, then, where he raises a finger, like a god, and orders a castle built on a nub of rock by a lovely bay. A second Ardtornish, to rule the southern seas. One sentence is all it takes these days.
Build me a castle, he says, and there is nodding, and bowing. Orders ripple down a line, whose end he cannot even see. Once, he stood, pick in hand, and ripped up the peat to set the foundations of his own hall. He remembers the joy of watching it rise from the heather, and how Eimhear and his mother whirled around the finished vaulted room. Arms clasped, they spun in tight circles, like a child’s hoop spiralling down a hill.
On Islay, exploring hall by hall, they gather in the tributes. No longer for Godred of Man, but for Dugald, grandson of the dead king. Somerled watches his son accepting the bowing and scraping as if he were born to it. But he only holds it in trust. No one doubts who is really their lord, as their eyes slide past the smooth-faced boy to the glowering man behind him.
They come, on Islay, to an inland loch. Surrounded by low hills, it is, to Somerled’s mind, an eerie place. Reeds whisper in the corners; the wind ruffles the fresh water. There are two or three small islands at one end; at the other, the hills taper off to close in the valley.
Ranald turns to him with a shining, raptured face.
‘This,’ he says. ‘This is where we should build.’
‘Here?’ The borrowed horses rake at the grass, snorting and juddering. Dugald reaches down and pats his mare’s neck.
‘On those islands,’ says Ranald, pointing down.
‘But we are inland,’ says Somerled slowly, as if talking to a child, not a boy of sixteen.
‘But think, Father,’ says Ranald. ‘Think how easy it would be to protect those islands on the loch. No sea attack. No one could get close without you seeing them. And even if they did, they couldn’t get at the islands. Nor keep you from fresh water.’
Somerled can see the sense in that. But what a place it is. Overlooked. Imagine setting up your home somewhere without a salt breeze. Imagine the eyes in the darkness, watching.
‘What about the waste, the sewage?’ he asks, thinking of the low-tide rocks at Ardtornish that serve as a latrine, washed clean twice a day.
Ranald waves an impatient hand, as if such a concern is beneath the notice of a king. Somerled opens his mouth to rebuke the boy, but pauses. He will learn soon enough that concern for his men’s bowels is as much a part of kingship as ring-giving. To a king, shit matters like silver.
‘If you like it, it is yours,’ he says mildly, ignoring the silent start of Conn beside him. ‘What is this place anyway?’ he asks.
‘Finlaggan, Lord Somerled,’ Conn says.
Somerled nods, and turns back towards the sea.
~~~
The next day they move on to Jura, with its men as ferocious as its midges. Perhaps, he thinks, their ferocity comes from the constant jibing at their island’s geography: the two great hills rising like breasts above the sea. The men who live in the shadow of the Paps of Jura have heard all the jokes before, and they are dour, touchy with strangers.
~~~
In Mull, they climb the big hill there for the sport of it. Its strange conical summit is visible from Ardtornish. She always said they would climb it together one day, but he does it, at last, without her. It is cold at the top, clammy with low clouds. Just below the cloud line, on the ridge before the summit, he sits with aching legs and looks out across the Sound to his home. Will it do, now? Now that he is lord of all of it. Lord of the Isles.
He can’t see it from here. Iona. The holy isle of Iona that sits, a precious pearl, in the turquoise sea off the tip of Mull. Can he bear it? He has not been there since he lost her.
When he has time, he will breathe life into Iona again. He will reinvigorate its fading abbey. Set a good man at its head. David may be dead, but his legacy is persistent. The tonsured monks of the Roman church are spreading. Monasteries are pushing their roots into the alien heather. It is said that in Alba, the Culdees are in retreat, forced out by the Continental orders. Prayers are barked in Latin. The God of these seas should hear them in Gaelic.
Iona. The pulsing heart of the church he knows and loves. The cadences of its prayers in God’s own language. The play of sea and sky, cycling through blues and greens and greys. The golden sand on its beaches. The scudding low clouds and the piercing shafts of light that tear a rent in the grey to glint upon the sea. The smallness of the island against the raging of a winter gale. Men clinging on to its heathery safety.
A place to hear God. To see his creation in every changing colour of the place.
But before God, the island like a teardrop in the bay. The Island of Women.
EIMHEAR
I am with child. I thought I was too old. I am past forty-five, I think. But I am with child. I know it, and the knowledge is a kind of madness. I am sick all day. My breasts are tender. I feel a great and furious lethargy that pulls me down towards the heather as to a bed.
His child. Godred’s child. A thing spawned of violence and fear. How can I love it? How can I bear the shame?
I pray and I pray. But perhaps God does not hear me. Or he laughs. Peers over the edge of his cloud and says: what now, my tiny plaything? What will you do with your free will now, my child? Will you stay to bear the shame? The abbot’s fury, the women’s whispering?
Will you throw yourself from the cliff, my child? Hah! You could land on your belly and rip Godred’s child out, to bob on the tide like a tadpole. Will you tell your daughter, who does not know that you parted your legs to keep hers closed? Oh, but I will enjoy watching that conversation. He laughs, sending waves of thunder barrelling across the seawater.
I sit, watching the water. I will the waves to numb my mind, which returns, traitorous thing, to Godred. To the stink of his breath. To his spit sliding down my cheek. To the blood on my thighs. To my shaking hands and violent sobs. To my passive, still body, which let him do that to me.
The waves are high today. White-flecked. The sea is that strange steel-grey that promises blue but does not quite get there. The light on Iona is golden; a gap in the clouds has opened up like a flower. Perhaps so He can watch my tortured flapping. My struggle for breath. You can’t even see the horizon from here. I have been hemmed in by Mull and Iona for nearly twenty years. How have I borne it?
A ship rounds the headland. With a lurch, I recognize the emblem it carries. The sign of the otter. Perhaps it is Gillecolm. It is not his time. Lord, how I would love to see him. It would be such a blessed relief to tell someone what has happened. I will not tell him, though, I know it. I will pull on a mask and hope he can’t see through it.
I watch her glide into the cleft in the rock that passes for a bay. She backs her oars and drops anchor, and a man jumps into the shallows. Not a tall man, but broad. He raises his head to look about him, and I recognize him with a shock. Somerled.
I am running down the hill. My foot catches on heather and I nearly fall. I am close to him now. I can see the lines at the corners of his eyes.
The grey in his hair. I see the gold and silver clanking on his arms and neck. I see his air of prosperity, the smug bounce in him as he clears the last of the shallows.
I fly at him.
He sees me and begins to smile. It seems to me the final insult, and I slam into him. I scratch him and bite him. My arms flail at him again and again. I spit at him and scream a gibbering nonsense. You are too late, too late. The scream is a thing apart from my body; loud and wild and alarming. The thing inside me that calls itself a baby seems to rise like bile in me, and I am fury.
He staggers backwards. He looks sideways to his ship full of men, and I realize he is embarrassed, and that drives me wilder. Embarrassed. I am a wailing, screeching embarrassment to this great lord, this great fucking potentate who has deigned to drop from the sky.
I hit him again and again, until he falls backwards into the surf. I stand over him, panting and sobbing.
He sits on his arse in the surf and grins. Grins, the bastard.
‘Are you happy to see me, then, my Otter?’ he says.
I look up at the grey sky, trying to find my breath. I am laughing, I find, not sobbing. Laughing, for all love. He laughs too, until I splash his face with icy water. His ship is heeling over at its anchor, as all the oarsmen stand starboard-side to gawp at this spectacle we make. Two old fools fighting in the cold shallows.
He puts up his hand and I pull him upright.
‘Is there a fire? Jesus, but it’s cold,’ he says, for all the world as if it is twenty days not twenty years.
~~~
I tell him straight away, with no preamble. I tell him what Godred did.
He looks thunderous. He moves as if to hold me, but I put up a hand. I cannot, I will not be touched by anyone. I try to explain it to him. How my skin is not my own. I pull the blanket around my shoulders, hating even its rough scratch against my skin.
‘I can wait,’ he says. ‘I have had enough practice at not touching you, Eimhear.’
The Winter Isles Page 28