They stand in loose confederations. The Dubliners and the Manxmen apart, the men from different isles grouped clannishly. He spots Ragnar, the chief’s son from Coll. He is grown now, a warrior flushed with youth and immortality. He sees Somerled’s eyes on him, and he grins, taking Somerled back to the small boy who set sail with a stranger and called him lord.
Somerled nods to him. Nine years ago. Lord, how fast a man races to his grave at the end. Nearby is his nephew, Malcolm. Absurdly old, with grizzled grey hair that astonishes Somerled each time he sees the man. His face is grave, watchful. A misting of rain coats them all. Out in Loch Aline, more than a hundred ships ride on their anchors. You could walk from one shore to another across their tight-packed decks. Dance on the heads of the prow beasts. His steward has aged a decade since the host arrived, with the settling, feeding, loading, seething of one hundred and twenty-four galleys, each full to bursting with fractious, belligerent men scraping on each other’s honour like flesh on barnacles.
Still, thinks Somerled. What point is there in being the lord if I cannot make the headache and minutiae of supplies someone else’s problem? Poor sod. He almost smiles, but catches himself in time. He looks out again at the awesome jumble of galleys. He thinks of Padeen’s quiet voice telling him the tales of Troy. The Greek host, sailing the wine-dark sea. He shivers at the thought. Ten years to win the bloody battle, and ten years to get home. What a waste.
He wrenches himself back to the present, where he is standing on a rock, facing them all, feeling old and tired and faintly ridiculous. An echo tugs at him, of the boy he once was. The boy who felt like a fraud but swaggered like a jarl and convinced them all, the fools.
He reaches for his armlet, a thick-worked gold piece of a snake eating its own tail. He is aware that he has been silent too long, and the restless scratching of the heather beneath hundreds of feet signals their impatience.
He holds up his hand for silence. In Gaelic and Norse and the jumbled sailor’s chat that straddles both, he lays out the plan. Sail south with the tide. Keep close. If they are separated by the weather, meet here. If not here, there. Camp at the mouth of the Clyde. Before dawn, oars out and a dash upriver. Burn anything made by man. Kill anything that squeals. Make the bastards frightened of us. At Renfrew, we will destroy this castle Walter FitzAlan is building, a provocation to all men of the west. Plunder. Women. All yours.
Then?
He leaves the great question hanging, knowing that only a few – Gillecolm, Ragnar, Brian – will have moved past the thought of the plunder and the women to consider it.
It is a bald speech, a bad speech. No matter. He climbs heavily down from the rock, trying not to wince as his crumbling knee jars. Pain shoots through his body, sending sparks into his head.
‘My lord?’ says his steward.
Somerled grunts and pushes past him. Time to sleep a little before the tide. To be warm. He thinks, briefly, of sending for a girl. He finds to his astonishment that he misses Ragnhild. He would have liked to go inside now, talk idly with her. Let her fuss him and irritate him and cloy him. He still feels the coils of their long, binding twist of a life together. Who is left from his youth now? Why is he the only one?
~~~
As soon as it begins, all feels wrong. He has his host, he has his plans. He has three of his sons by him: Gillecolm, Angus, Olaf. He has his champion. He has more than a hundred galleys pulling up the Clyde, stuffed with men. But something is awry. A net cast in the wrong waters; a broken arrow in a still-running deer.
He can’t fathom it, but it is making him cross-grained and irritable. They are scared to approach him. Even warier than usual. He has one man whipped for smirking, not recognizing his own voice as he raps the order. He has another demoted, another beached. He doesn’t know why, even as he orders it. He is becoming irrational, but the rational part of him watches on and flounders.
They reach Glasgow before dawn. Christ, but what must it seem like to the people who live there? The unimaginable host of longships clamouring out of the dusk. The warriors jumping down into the soft mud of the riverbank, surging up towards your miserable hovel. The glittering screech of two thousand swords pulled, the screaming of your parents, your children, your cousins. Your pigs. The host outnumbering the people, and every single warrior wanting his sword blooded, so that each God-forgotten peasant is punctured and pricked with a multitude of wounds like a stuck pig. The long lines of warriors queuing for the odds and sods of womanhood they have found hiding, their fingernails black from scrabbling at the dirt, trying to escape, their throats raw and red from the screaming.
The children spitted to stop their crying. The priest calling for his God as they laugh and taunt him. The smell, everywhere, of split stomachs and steaming blood. The emptiness that comes afterwards, as some men nurse their shame, and others count their pathetic gleanings from the hovels; the small lifetime hoards prised from their hiding places.
Somerled, pleading his knee, sits it out. They don’t need him. There is no army here, just a confusion of peasants offering themselves to the slaughter. His galley sits beached on the riverbank, and he watches, morose, as the blood trickles in rivulets down the low-tide foreshore to curdle in the shallows. Gillecolm is with him.
Somerled does not say: ‘I talked of this to Padeen once. I told him that this was the price a lord must pay to be followed. Besides, we will win if they fear us.’
Somerled does not say: ‘I would stop it if I could.’
Gillecolm watches on, his body rigid with pity and contempt. He tries to busy himself with the work of the boat: recoiling untidy ropes, splicing a frayed end here, planing away the splinters there. Each task is unfinished, trailing, and he sits still at last, next to his father. Silent, they watch the day fade and the first crackles of fire breaking out across the rooftops of Glasgow. Sparks reach for the sky.
~~~
The next morning, the smoke still hangs over the land like a shroud, catching in throats raw from last night’s drinking. Men stumble, bleary-eyed, when the alarm sounds. There is panic and puke spreading among Somerled’s men, caught by the sudden appearance of Walter FitzAlan at the head of a host. How could he have assembled such a force so fast?
Treachery. He knew of their coming.
Somerled looks through the smoke to the blue sky beyond. He has been praying for rain. They are on flat ground here, and the soil is dry, hard-baked by the sun. Perfect for hooves. Perfect for the metalled horses gathered over there.
He stands with his sons, watching the enemy preparing to break upon them.
Suddenly he is laughing. Laughing so hard, he bends over and grasps his knees, the tears falling from him on to the dry ground. They crowd round him, worried. The thought that they imagine he is cracking up makes him laugh all the harder, so he can’t breathe. At last he manages to spit it out, watching Gillecolm’s face split with the joke while the others remain bemused.
‘Rain,’ he splutters. ‘Rain. It never stops raining in this fucking country. And now, now the sun shines.’
~~~
They come together in a screech of fury and fear. Walter sends in his foot soldiers first, leaving his horses to pick at the stragglers. From the off, Somerled knows that he has miscalculated. He has eschewed his usual trickery, trusting in the power of his numbers. Yet they have no advantage of surprise and they are fighting on ground so favourable to FitzAlan that he must believe God is kissing his brow.
Perhaps he is, thinks Somerled, as his men begin to fall. Perhaps God is a Norman. Or perhaps he does not care whom slaughters who. He just sits drinking mead from a golden goblet, attended by angels, watching; just as we watch dogs fight for sport.
He is slow. Too old for this. He lets others push on past him, screaming defiance, spitting at the odds.
~~~
A sudden memory catches him off guard, reels him backwards. So sharp, so clear that he is there, not here on this doomed and bloody battlefield.
They are lying s
ide by side on a flat rock, leaning over. They are at the head of Loch Aline, near where the big river tumbles and splays into the water. The ripples of it do not reach this far. The surface of the loch is flat, so smooth it is as if the dwarves themselves have polished up silver.
They watch their faces. Four of them. Reflected back up. Somerled. Eimhear. Gillecolm. Little Sigrdrifa.
They are quiet, even Sigrdrifa, whose chatter is usually a constant amused and bemused commentary on the world. It is a deep marvel, to see their own faces looking back up at them.
‘Hello,’ says Sigrdrifa, quietly.
‘They’re us, stupid,’ says Gillecolm, his reflected face smiling wide.
‘I look old,’ says Eimhear.
‘You are as fair as the day I met you.’
‘You’re not. You are older and uglier.’ She laughs so deeply, it catches all four of them.
He tickles her, and Gillecolm joins in. She falls on to her back, laughing and protesting. Sigrdrifa snakes her arms around his neck, pulling with all her might, like a mouse restraining a bear. ‘No, Daddy. My Daddy.’
Her voice floats like a wraith across the battlefield. He reaches for it, tries to catch it with his sword.
He feels the pity of his younger children’s solemnity. Their great and vicious hatred of each other. He imagines the contained delight that the boys will feel at his death.
Lord Jesus. Sometimes life seems like one long fucking funeral.
The dead parade like ghosts on inspection before him. Gillebrigte, Sigrdrifa. His first and best band, with Aed leading, Sigurd and Ruaridh behind, making obscene gestures about the angels to make him laugh. Ragnhild; poor, miserable, unloved Ragnhild. And Eimhear. Oh my love.
The dead. Where are they? Where am I going? Jesus, who knows.
~~~
He sees it then. He sees Gillecolm’s beloved body lying on a pyre of mud and blood. He is crooked; all his angles off slightly, as if he is a boy playing a trick, bending his limbs to see how far they can move. Beneath his helmet, his brown beard is blood-crusted.
He was so proud of that beard, of its slow and determined advance. He watched for it years before it could hope to appear, stroking his face compulsively as if to hurry its growth. Anointed it with oils, and combed it, amid the mockery of the other boys.
The lance has pierced his neck. Somerled struggles to look at it. For all the corpses he has seen, for all the blood, for all the eviscerating, shattering ways a man can die, this is the worst. The horror. The bright spill of his son’s life leaking out on to a shit-strewn floor.
He remembers Gillecolm’s mother holding the baby up to him; the fierce joy and pride on her face that blazed through that storm-racked night like a beacon. And he remembers her half-forgotten voice. ‘In essence, my summer heart, it is all meaningless. This life, this death.’
Standing lost on the battlefield, his son’s body at his side, he still does not know. Was she right all along? Was the question even worth asking? ‘Why? Because we are here, because we are here,’ she said.
His head is a fog. He can’t think; can’t breathe. Gillecolm dead, and the others snarling like wolf cubs, waiting for him to die so they can fall on each other, teeth bared and searching for the nearest brother’s throat.
He kneels by Gillecolm and lifts his son’s head from the mud. His blood is too precious to fall on this cursed flat plain. It should be in the sea, his poor boy’s blood, floating on the tide. Somerled puts his mouth to the wound, and drinks. He swallows Gillecolm’s blood, tasting the warmth of it, feeling it sink through his throat, down into his stomach. They shall not have my son’s blood. They shall not have it.
He can hear the thrumming of the horses’ hooves now. They are coming in again, the bastards. And he looks around at his men, the few that are left, with the fear rolling off them in sour waves of shit and muttering. We will lose this, he thinks. Those bastards on their great horses, with their French lisps and perfume, they will beat us. We are done.
He thinks then of the other men who have thrown and lost. Donald Bane, the land-stealing bastard, blinded and mocked by his nephew. Fergus of Galloway, humiliated and being slowly bored to death in some grim English monastery.
Jesus wept.
That’s not for me, you bastards. Not for me. He lies Gillecolm back down. He is slow, deliberately tender.
He pulls off his helmet, and the cold wind sweeping in from the sea meets his clammy forehead, filling him with a delicious, sensual pleasure. His mouth is sticky with blood.
He stands, turning to his men, the best of them right there with him. Olaf, God be praised, is at the back somewhere. Angus looks at him with wide eyes. He reaches out a hand to touch the boy’s cheek. No time for this, no time.
‘Run,’ he shouts. ‘We are done here.’
‘Lord!’ screams Brian from a bloody beard. ‘Fuck. What? Fuck.’
You inarticulate fucker, thinks Somerled, smiling. I hope you make it.
‘Run!’ he shouts again. Angus looks at him. A face flushed with fear. ‘Go, my boy,’ says Somerled. He wishes he has time; wishes for a space to sit and tell the boy to be good to his brothers. Don’t fight. Don’t tear it all apart. But the end is coming fast, too fast, so he screams at them once more. And so ingrained is his command that they begin to move, avoiding each other’s eyes, giving in to the fear that calls them to run, run fast and far. He turns away from them, from his living son, towards the pounding beat of the hooves that shake the ground beneath his feet and roar inside his head.
He has time to think one last thing before the horses are upon him. He thinks, yes, there was death. But there was joy. He screams it at the horses coming for him, his legs planted wide in the heather.
‘There was joy!’
The lead knight, implacable behind his black helm, holds up his sword, and Somerled raises his bare head, watching its point glinting in the sun.
He screams his defiance and begins to run forward. In his head, for the first time in too many years, he hears his song. I am Somerled. Death-bringer. Life-giver. Norman-killer. Otter-lover. I am Somerled. I am joy. When the scream finishes and the Norman sword begins its arching downward slice, he hears an echo, a vibration.
He hears her laughter, drifting towards him on the salt-wet wind.
HISTORICAL NOTE
This afternoon, I went walking.
Up past the ruins of Armadale Castle, the base of Somerled’s descendants, Clan Donald. Up through woodland and then grazing land. Past the sheep and on to open moorland. Along a muddy track, and up a heathered slope to the top of Armadale Hill.
The sun shone, the clouds lifted. Across the Sound of Sleat, the summits of Knoydart shrugged off their usual fog shroud. The browns and greens twisted and tumbled down the ancient rock towards a cold blue sea. At that heart-stopping moment, a problem resolved itself.
From the very beginning of this project I have been dogged by a sense of hubris. I should not write about this place; this wild tip of our islands. I do not belong. My heritage is Ireland and Yorkshire, mangled through a London childhood. There is an absurdity in floating in to the Highlands, wafting about the hills and scuttling south when the nights grow long and dark.
But today, on Armadale Hill, the final draft of The Winter Isles buzzing on my laptop in the Clan Donald library far below, I realized that none of my concerns really matter. Hubris be damned. What counts, as Father Padeen once said to Sigrdrifa, is love.
I have been visiting the Highlands and Islands of Scotland since I was fifteen, when I first fell in love with all the intensity of a teenager. My passion was sparked by the remote, boggy hills near Cape Wrath. I have since explored much of the Western seaboard where this story is set. From the Summer Isles to Lewis, Iona to beautiful Barra and beyond. It was on Islay with my husband – obviously a Scot – that I first began to read about the tangled mesh of Viking and Gael cultures which produced the early Lords of the Isles.
Not much is known about the real Somerle
d. He is, like all the best heroes, a conflation of myth, conjecture and a few facts. MacDonald legend has him as a Gaelic warrior fighting to expel the heathen Norse. But this is not a straightforward tale of colonization and revolt; it is a tangled to-and-fro of violence, absorption and assimilation. Somerled himself seems to typify this. His name was Norse but his father and grandfather had Gaelic names. Recent DNA studies on Somerled’s army of descendants suggest that he had a Norse patrilineal heritage.
In these waters, power counted for its own sake; not as an expression of an anachronistic nationalism. The best works I have read on the era include: Domination and Lordship (Scotland 1070–1230), Richard Oram; From Pictland to Alba (789–1070), Alex Woolf; Irish Sea Studies 900–1200, Benjamin Hudson; The Kingdom of the Isles, R. Andrew MacDonald; The Sea Kingdoms, Alistair Moffat; Early Medieval Ireland, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín; Viking Pirates and Christian Princes, Benjamin Hudson; and Somerled, Hammer of the Norse, Kathleen MacPhee. I am particularly indebted to Somerled: And the Emergence of Gaelic Scotland, John Marsden.
If this book inspires you to buy another, please make it The Triumph Tree, edited by Thomas Owen Clancy. A collection of early Scottish poetry from 550AD to 1350AD, in Gaelic, Norse, Latin, Welsh and Old English, it contains some extraordinary, evocative lines.
The legend of Somerled was forged in the world of The Triumph Tree. The legendary Somerled lived in a cave with his dispossessed father. He was fishing for salmon when he was asked to fight the Vikings. He invented the stern rudder which characterized the birlinn – a craft which came to dominate the Irish Sea. He tricked the Vikings with the old trick of swapping the cow hides to make his men appear more numerous.
Somerled only appears in records towards the end of his life. He seems to have participated in various rebellions against the Anglo-Norman influenced Canmore Kings. By 1160 he is referred to in Scottish records as Somerled sit-by-the-King at a Christmas feast. His death in 1164 at a battle in Renfrew appears in a number of places. Two Clan Donald traditions suggest that he was betrayed, or even assassinated on the eve of battle. ‘Carmen de Morte Sumerledi’, a near contemporary Latin poem by a cleric hostile to Somerled, claims that he died in battle early on. I have chosen this latter fate; clan historians dislike their heroes falling in battle – far better to have them betrayed or tricked.
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