The Extremely Epic Viking Tale of Yondersaay

by Aoife Lennon-Ritchie

  Granny and Dani didn’t know what to say. Dani walked all the way around Rarelief and looked him up and down. She picked one of his fallen leaves off the ground and examined it. “So you really exist!” she said.

  “You’re the guardian of Odin’s treasure!” Granny said.

  “I do. I am.”

  “But how is that possible?” Granny said. “People must have looked here for the treasure millions of times over the years. How could they not have found it?”

  “I know how to keep it safe,” Rarelief said and tapped his nose with a branch. “Those two fellas over there, by the bye, are Dizzie and Dozie, the incorrigible elm twins, who even though they’re many hundreds of years old, simply refuse to stop acting the cod. They do, however, do their haunting job fierce well, don’t you think? You have to hand it to them. You did feel haunted, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “Is that what they were doing? Haunting us?” Dani asked. “It’s sort of hard to feel haunted in a forest with no trees.”

  “Whisht, would you! You don’t want to hurt their feelings!”

  “No, of course not, no. They did an excellent job,” Dani said and shouted to the two elms, “Excellent job, you two, of haunting! excellent job!” She gave them two thumbs up. Granny smiled awkwardly and did the two-thumbs-up sign too.

  “But I sort of do see what you mean,” Rarelief said. “It’s not easy to do our job, you know, with entirely three trees in the whole forest. We only get to do this whole haunting lark one day of the year now as well. The island being all normal the rest of the year nowadays.”

  Rarelief looked disconsolately at the few acorns the elms managed to pitch at Granny and Dani. “But we do our best. The shrubberies are fantastic haunters, but I reckon they’re a little on the short side. You may not have noticed them scratching at you as you wandered past them. They also do a good oohing noise when the wind is up. But it’s not very windy today, sorry to say. As for the hundreds of thousands of tiny flowers, well, the less said about them, the better. Their idea of haunting is to look slightly less pretty than usual. Not very effective. But sterling efforts,” Rarelief said, stressing the last bit and saying “sterling efforts” very loudly. The flowers looked pleased and flickered for a minute so that all their colorful petals caught what little sun there was and transformed themselves, for that instant, from very pretty flowers to stunningly beautiful ones. Then they turned back into their haunting poses.

  “If you had a few more trees,” Granny was saying.

  “We do. There are thousands of trees,” Rarelief explained. “They’re just not here.”

  “Where are they?” Dani asked.

  “I’ve spent most of my life on this island, Mr. Rarelief, sir,” Granny said. “And I confess to never having seen more than you, Dizzie, and Dozie here, anywhere on the island, ever.”

  “But you say there used to be trees, Mr. Rarelief?” Dani asked.

  “Yes, thousands of us. Right here in the Crimson Forest. All the way from the dip in the valley beyond the village.” He pointed back the way Granny and Dani had come and turned a branch toward the mountain. “All the way to where the incline starts to become steep and where the lush earth becomes solid rock, this entire valley, was home to my family, our families,” he said, indicating the two elms. “Mostly elms and oaks and some other kinds too. But they’re all gone now.”

  “Where have they gone to?” Dani asked again.

  “They were stolen!” said Rarelief.

  “Stolen?” Dani repeated.

  “How could anyone steal thousands and thousands of trees?” Granny asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Rarelief said.

  Granny made to settle herself on the ground. “I love a good story,” she said.

  “But Granny, we have to find Ruairi!” Dani said.

  “The little red-haired boy who came hurtling through here under the arm of the massive, huge Viking?” Rarelief asked.

  “Yes,” Dani said.

  “Ah, I could tell you a thing or two about that as well. You have time—they won’t sacrifice him till the Great Yuletide Sacrificial Festival at sundown, and we’re hours away from that yet. You’re better off being armed with the knowledge of old Rarelief here before you go any farther. Many surprises lie up yonder that way.”

  “Sacrifice him?” Dani and Granny said together.

  “Yes, yes. Apparently he’s the Red King of Denmark,” Rarelief said by way of explanation.

  “He’s not the Red King of anything! He’s my little brother!” Dani said.

  “It will do no use to insist on it. They’ll have made up their minds,” Rarelief said.

  “We’d better get after him then, Granny,” Dani said.

  “You have time, and I have things to tell you that will save you more time in the long run. Things you cannot know about the island and her secrets.”

  “All the same, Mr. Rarelief,” Granny said. “We’d really much rather get on. Good-bye now.”

  “Good-bye,” Dani said. They ran off in the direction of the River Gargle.

  Rarelief hummed a little hum to himself. He swept the snow off one of the knobbly roots that stuck out of the ground and piled dry leaves on top of it.

  “What are you doing?” Dizzie called over to him.

  “I’m making a comfy bench for the girl and the old lady.”

  “But they’ve gone, Rarelief. They couldn’t get out of here fast enough. You’ll not see them again,” Dozie said.

  “Wanna bet?” Rarelief asked.

  The elms bent toward each other and whispered. They looked up and said, “Yes, we do!”

  “Oh, goodie,” Rarelief said. “If they’re back within five minutes, you take that family of squirrels that are forever tickling me every time they go up and down my trunk and give them a comfy new home in your branches.”

  “Deal,” Dozie said, “and if they’re not back within five minutes, you take all the new birds that are hatched from nests in our branches until they’re potty-trained.” With this, Dizzie and Dozie turned their lower branches so that Rarelief could see white splashes of bird poo all along the length of the wood.

  “You’re on!” Rarelief said.

  A puffy green shrubbery a little way off in a clearing said he had a very good view of the sun and would be official timekeeper. All three trees, so all the trees in the entirety of the Crimson Forest and all the shrubberies and all the pretty flowers turned and looked toward the river. And waited.

  A couple of minutes passed. Everyone was tense; no one made a sound. Even the pooping baby birds stayed still in their nests and watched.

  The shrubbery in the clearing disturbed the silence. “Just let me know when to begin the countdown.” Dizzie, Dozie, and Rarelief let out loud sighs and rolled their eyes. “I’m only joking. I’m only joking,” the shrubbery called back, chuckling to himself. “Two minutes left.”

  “You are easily amused,” a flat gray shrubbery near him said. The plants turned back to look in the direction of the River Gargle, and as they did so, Granny and Dani, soaking from head to foot, trudged up the bank and made their way back to the base of Rarelief the Splendiferous. They slumped down onto the bench that Rarelief had prepared. Dizzie and Dozie sighed. Rarelief beamed.

  “Well now. What brings the two of you back here so soon?” Rarelief asked Granny and Dani.

  “We couldn’t get across the river,” Dani mumbled.

  “Excuse me? I couldn’t quite catch that. A wee bit louder please,” Rarelief said, trying his best not to sound smug.

  “We couldn’t get across the river,” Granny said. “We walked over the bridge, but we didn’t get more than halfway when it stood itself up on one side, and we slid all the way back to where we started. It was sort of fun at first—”

  “We did it a few times,” Dani admitted.

  “—but then the bridge started to get angry and started shaking and lurching first, and then it just
flung us back onto this side of the river,” Granny said.

  “It hurt,” Dani said.

  “So then we did what we saw Hamish do,” Granny said. “We came down the bank a bit and tried to wade across, but the water started flowing in the wrong direction. It swooshed us into the whirlpool.”

  “And the whirlpool swung us around and around and around until I thought we’d drown or get sick,” Dani said.

  “Or both,” Granny said.

  “Or both, exactly,” Dani said. “Then the whirlpool rose right up and spat us out on the bank again.”

  “We only did that once,” Granny said.

  “I’m sure,” Rarelief said.

  “It was quite scary,” Dani said.

  “Very scary,” Granny agreed.

  “I hear you,” Rarelief said.

  “We thought we’d try one more thing then,” Dani continued. “We thought we’d try to walk behind the waterfall. But that didn’t work either.”

  “I don’t believe it!” the oak said, barely suppressing a laugh.

  “It spat at us,” Granny said.

  “It spat at you?”

  “The waterfall, yes,” Dani said. “It turned itself clean around and sent big jets of water into us, knocking us backward onto the rocks on the ground. So we thought we might just come back here, Mr. Rarelief, sir, and take you up on your offer, if you didn’t mind terribly. And we thought that we’d, you know—”

  “Listen to what you had to say,” Granny finished. “We thought you could help us after all. If you didn’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind one bit. Sit there and dry yourselves, and I’ll tell you all my knowledge about this day.” And Rarelief peeled off big sheets of dry moss from between his roots, which Granny and Dani used as towels.

  “This day?” Dani asked.

  “Christmas Eve. And all the Christmas Eves. And don’t be anxious. You will be off again in search of the Boy King—”

  “The Boy King?”

  “The boy. What did you call him earlier? Small Brother King of Nowhere?”

  “No, I mean, he’s not a king—a Boy King or a Red King. He’s no kind of king. He’s Ruairi. His name is Ruairi, and he’s my little brother.”

  “Fear not, small girl. You’ll be back on your way after him in no time at all.” And Rarelief began to tell Granny and Dani all they needed to know to help them get safely onwards, across the island.

  All the Christmas Eves

  “Things started going downhill after King Dudo the Mightily Impressive’s fiftieth year. You realize, of course, that fifty years old in Viking times is getting on to being ancient,” Rarelief began.

  “Fifty in our times is getting on to being ancient,” Dani muttered to herself.

  Granny turned and looked at her. “You might think so, Dani, but I know a lot of fifty year olds and indeed sixty, seventy, and eighty year olds who would disagree vehemently with you.”

  “Of course they’d think fifty isn’t ancient. It’s all relative, Granny,” Dani explained.

  Rarelief chuckled. “A fifty-year-old oak tree is a sheer baby.”

  “By the way,” Dani said, “just one quick question.”

  “Ask away,” Rarelief said.

  “So King Dudo and Queen Ursula didn’t stay here on Yondersaay?”

  “They spent a lot of time here over the years, but after the big splash wedding in the harbor, the Mightily Impressives went back to the king’s castle in Denmark. He had a kingdom to run, you know, and of course, no one there knew for sure that he hadn’t died a gruesome and bloody death on the ice floe at the hands of the ravenous bear. He had to get back to let his people know he was alive and kicking.”

  “Ah, I see,” Dani said. “Another quick question?”

  “Shoot,” said Rarelief.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but my brother has been kidnapped and all. Is there any chance we can hurry this along?”

  “I’ll skip ahead where I can. Now … where was I?” Rarelief said.

  “You and he have a lot in common,” Dani muttered to Granny.

  “Fast-forward a bunch of years,” Rarelief continued, “and King Dudo the Mightily Impressive had grown rather fond of the quiet life at home with his Heart’s True Love of a wife and their gorgeous wee daughters.

  “He was so content he didn’t keep himself on top of state affairs the way he used to. Someone made the suggestion to him that he hire a secretary, and so he did just that. Alas the secretary, who had come highly recommended, took advantage of his position and abused the power King Dudo gave him. He signed decrees and made orders in King Dudo’s name without consulting King Dudo.

  “Things got quite dire. King Dudo and Queen Ursula came back from their summer holidays on Yondersaay one year to find the people of Denmark rioting in the streets. Dudo got his council together. The secretary said the riots were a result of certain particular investments coming to nothing. Right there and then, he ran through a long list of risky loans and investments made with the Danish sovereign coffers, which had shriveled up or disappeared.

  “Dudo shook his head; he had no recollection of making any of these decisions. But the secretary had Dudo’s ear now. He convinced Dudo that the mistakes were Dudo’s and Dudo’s alone. Many believe, but none have a shred of proof, that this secretary used potions and charms to weaken Dudo’s mind and make him doubt himself. But, like I say, there’s no proof of that.

  “Not wanting to believe that this trusted confidante could have deceived him so despicably, Dudo accepted the blame for all the troubles that had befallen his beloved country. He apologized profusely to his subjects and took to his castle, defeated, and ashamed.

  “The secretary said he would take care of everything and refused to allow Dudo to see anyone, including his council. Dudo’s men, those close to him, those who’d fought with him, were not fooled by this secretary and did their very best to help him. They sent secret messenger pigeons to the castle. But Dudo, convinced utterly and surely of his guilt and tied to the secretary who never left his side, sent the pigeons back, unanswered.

  “Dudo, who had lived his entire life with the welfare of his people as his primary concern, finally accepted that this man had undone all his good work. But it was too much to bear. Dudo, known for being a man of action, did not act.

  “It wasn’t long before Dudo started to get letters from fuming creditors in other lands. He responded with messages promising that the pennings were in the post. The messages kept coming. When pressed, he sent out messages saying that the first boat with the pennings was pillaged, that he was sending another boat with more pennings. But of course there were no boats. There were no pennings. The state coffers were as empty as the head of the man who ran by here a wee while ago, Hamish Sinclair, who runs the butchers.

  “When the creditors started arriving at King Dudo’s castle in person to ask after their payments, Dudo took to hiding himself in his quarters. When the king of Groenland came, Dudo sent a parchment out to the hallway where he was waiting. Written on the parchment were the words ‘I’m not here. I’m off in Antwerp pillaging diamonds to pay you back. Kind regards, Dudo.’

  “The king of Groenland was an old adversary of the Danish king’s. Each had great respect and admiration for the other. Sensing something was not quite right, the king of Groenland forced his way past the guards in the castle hallway and stormed into King Dudo’s quarters. The secretary, at the door, made only a vague attempt to stop the king from bursting in.

  “The king of Groenland slammed open the door to find King Dudo in his bath, up to his armpits in bubbles, with nothing on except for his large, golden, winged helmet and a pair of stripy blue armbands. Dudo was playing with a flock of yellow rubber duckies and a longship bubble machine.

  “‘Leave us!’ the king of Groenland said to the secretary, and the secretary, for once, retreated. The king and the king talked in private. Eventually, the Groenlandish king emerged and
demanded to be taken to the kitchens for a bite to eat before he was to make the long journey back to his kingdom.

  “The secretary spoke quietly to Dudo while the king of Groenland was eating in the kitchens. He told King Dudo that he would make all his problems disappear and would negotiate on his behalf with all Denmark’s creditors. He would do it, he said quietly to King Dudo, in return for one miniscule favor.

  “King Dudo, all dried and dressed, asked what the secretary wanted. The secretary stooped down in that crooked way he had, he put his lips to Dudo’s ear, and he whispered with his soft yet high-pitched voice.

  “King Dudo listened and took a moment to think. ‘I assent, I agree to this request on the understanding that you will undo all the strife you have caused, go to this place at once, and never come back to Denmark.’

  “‘I promise,’ said the secretary, bowing low. He left the king’s quarters and made his way to the kitchen where he spoke to the Groenlandish king.

  “You see, the secretary hadn’t squandered everything at all. He just made it look that way. He had actually stolen it all and hidden it away.

  “He told the Groenlandish king there had been a big misunderstanding, and he took him to where all the jewels and pennings were kept. He paid him back, and he gave him enough to give to all the other creditors.

  When all Dudo’s debts were paid and all the hungry people of Denmark were fed, the secretary went to King Dudo’s quarters to bid him farewell. ‘It is settled,’ the secretary said.

  “‘Then we are agreed.’ Dudo looked him square in the eye and said, ‘I hereby invite you to Yondersaay, I bestow the title ‘jarl’ upon you, and I allow you the right to attempt to claim it as yours.’”

  “No!” said Granny.

  “No!” said Dani.

  “He did not just give away Yondersaay to that scheming, double-crossing—” Granny said.

  “—poisonous, lying, two-faced—” Dani interrupted.

  “—calculating, conniving, underhand—” Granny continued.