The Extremely Epic Viking Tale of Yondersaay

by Aoife Lennon-Ritchie

  “‘Do you think so?’ the rock asked.

  “‘I’m certain,’ Scathe replied. ‘I’m sure even Odin himself, if he ever passed by here, would have wanted to bury his treasure under you or near you, so that you could protect it.’

  “‘He did, as a matter of fact,’ the boulder began.

  “Mr. Scathe’s heart thundered in his chest. Maybe this was it! Barely drawing breath, Mr. Scathe nudged Fritjof Flat-Top to continue. ‘He did? He buried the treasure here, in your care?’

  “‘No, he didn’t,’ Fritjof said. ‘But he did want to. He spent many an hour evaluating this spot or that. But in the end …’

  “‘Yes … in the end?’ Mr. Scathe said.

  “‘In the end, he decided against it,’ Fritjof said.

  “Mr. Scathe was dejected. ‘And where did he go instead?’ he asked.

  “‘That I could not tell you, for he did not tell me. He did not tell anyone here. I can just tell you that the treasure is not buried within my sight lines. Or if it is, then it was all buried without me noticing. And I think that hardly likely.”

  “‘You do? Why?’ Scathe asked.

  “‘It is unlikely, isn’t it?’ the boulder said, looking like he was about to start sobbing. ‘You yourself said I was the bravest, proudest, and most respected rock along this riverbank. How could the bravest, proudest, and most respected rock fail to notice a huge haul of treasure being buried right beneath his nose?’

  “‘Of course, of course,’ Mr. Scathe said. ‘Literally impossible!’ But deep down, he didn’t think it at all impossible. So although Mr. Scathe considered it probable the treasure was not buried under the water or on the banks of the river or behind the waterfall, and although he came by there less and less, he didn’t stop going completely. He still carried out the odd evening digging session. Because you just never know.

  “Mr. Scathe figured out all on his ownsome the unlikelihood of the treasure being within one of the caves on Mount Violaceous. And, happily, it was in the most painful of manners that this certainty dawned on him,” Rarelief said, grinning the widest grin possible on a wooden face.

  “Late one night, long after dark, Scathe was digging holes in one of the cave tunnels beneath the mountain. He thought he heard a rumbling sound. He paused in his digging and looked up. He sniffed. He could hear something, and he could smell something—an ashy type of smell. Scathe put both the sound and the smell out of his head and returned to his digging, but the smell and the sound kept coming at him. He stopped once more to look up and think about what could be happening when he saw a bright light in the volcano end of the tunnel. Now, he was digging in the dead of night with only a small torch, so the light that was coming toward him now was startling to say the very least of it. It was blindingly bright. It was warm too; no, not warm—hot.

  “Mr. Scathe was overcome with a sudden realization. He dropped his shovel and scrambled to the exit of the cave. He sprinted as fast as he could, not stopping to pick up his torch or any of his digging materials. The volcano was erupting. It was shooting pent-up, fiery-hot bolts of lava from the belly of the mountain through the cave tunnels to the night beyond.

  “Mr. Scathe was very fast. He ran at a glacial pace that would have broken many land speed records had anyone been timing him. But he was not fast enough. A flicker of hot lava caught him right on the backside as he jumped out of the cave and swan dived down the side of the mountain. He landed in a heap of rubble at the bottom of a particularly rocky hill, which covered him in millions of cuts, scratches, and bruises. And he had a burned arse. He limped home covering his bare backside, for the lava had blazed through the back of his clothing. Luckily for him, it was nighttime and no one could see him. Happily for us, he was in a lot of pain.

  “Laid up for weeks, Mr. Scathe had plenty of time to have another think. By a process of elimination, he thought it likely that the treasure was not buried in the caves nor in the River Gargle nor on the Beach of Bewilderment. It could be buried in the Crimson Forest. But he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure. He couldn’t be sure, for example, that the treasure wasn’t buried near the River Gargle or in the hillocks behind the Beach of Bewilderment or buried deep underground in one of the caves of Mount Violaceous, out of reach of the burning lava. So he couldn’t stop looking in those places altogether.

  “But from that moment on, Silas Scathe devoted the majority of his treasure-finding attention to the area in and around the Crimson Forest.

  “There was a problem, however. Or to be more precise and specific, there were thousands of problems. So many trees grew all around here that it was nigh on impossible to search efficiently. It was going to take years of nighttime digging to find the treasure.

  “He eventually hit on a plan. Unfortunately, it was the trees themselves that aided Mr. Scathe in their undoing.

  “Mr. Scathe, rather than starting in straight away on a digging schedule in the Crimson Forest, decided a better way than blasting in with a shovel and an ax might present itself. He began taking long, leisurely strolls in the forest—he got used to the haunting. He picnicked here. He tried to befriend some of us in the way he had befriended the puffins and Fritjof Flat-Top—he talked to the trees, told us how powerful and beautiful and strong we were.

  “He soon realized it was not the trees but the shrubberies who were the real chatterboxes. They were all quite lively; some of them positively giddy. They talked and talked. They talked so much that it would have been a hard task indeed to keep them quiet if Mr. Scathe had wanted to keep them quiet. In fact, Mr. Scathe wanted nothing more than to have a million shrubberies shooting their mouths off all hours of the night, telling him everything he wanted to know.

  “Mr. Scathe cursed himself for not starting his search here. He had wasted years on the mountain and on the beach and by the river. The shrubberies told him a lot about the island. Some of what he learned was not new to him; he had heard it from his puffin friends and his boulder friends, or had picked it up from overheard banter in the settlement. But he did not let on; he pretended that all he heard was new information and that it was all very interesting.

  “Eventually, he started to hear things he hadn’t heard before. Scathe had known, of course, that there was treasure on the island, but in point of fact, he didn’t know what the treasure consisted of. He just assumed it was a great and wondrous haul of the most beautiful and valuable jewels and weapons the Viking world had ever seen. And of course he was right but not wholly right.

  “The shrubberies were able to talk in detail about some of the most fantastical and sought-after components of the treasury and about the traditions of the island and some of the other properties and powers Odin had bestowed upon it.

  “For instance, it wasn’t long before he discovered, and this was a big surprise for him, that the Gifts of Odin were not actually buried with the rest of the treasure. They had living purposes and would not be buried until the lord and master of the island no longer had a use for them or until it was certain that the final battle in Valhalla was about to begin.

  “Mr. Scathe desperately tried to find out more about these items, their secrets and properties. Of course, he wanted to find out where they were. The shrubberies knew the whereabouts of only one of the Gifts of Odin: the Black Heart, or as it’s now known, the Black Heart of the Dragon’s Eye, which has the ability to alter time. They knew where that was. It was the eye of the cycloptic dragon.

  “‘There’s a dragon?’ Mr. Scathe asked.

  “‘Yes. Have you not seen it?’ the shrubberies asked.

  “‘No!’ Mr. Scathe said.

  “‘You surely must have.’

  “‘I am sure I would have noticed a dragon. How can one miss a dragon?’

  “‘It usually sits on a plinth at the top of the harbor,’ said a little shrubbery from the back.

  “‘In the harbor? There’s a dragon in the harbor? Literally? In this harbor here, in Yondersaay? Are you cer
tain? A dragon?’ Mr. Scathe was stunned.

  “‘Yes. It’s the dragon that King Dudo gifted to Jarl Olaf Barelegs the Balding on Top upon his wedding to Queen Ursula,’ the first shrubbery said.

  “‘Oh, that dragon!’ Mr. Scathe groaned.

  “‘You know the one we mean?’ asked the little shrubbery.

  “‘Yeah, I know the one you mean,’ Mr. Scathe said.

  “‘Well, its eye is the Black Heart,’ the larger shrubbery continued.

  “‘And, em, how does it work, if one were to use it?’ Mr. Scathe asked.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dani interrupted. “There’s a dragon in this story? Really? A dragon?”

  “Yes, you’ll have seen it, of course,” said Rarelief.

  “Nuh-uh, I’ve never in my life seen a dragon—I thought they didn’t exist,” Dani said.

  “You can’t be serious. You’ve never seen a dragon?” Rarelief asked. Dani shook her head. “How did you get here then?” Rarelief asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘how did we get here’?” Dani asked.

  “Didn’t you get here on a dragon?” Rarelief wanted to know.

  “No,” Dani said. “We came on the early Yonder Air flight in a Yonder Air plane.”

  “So you didn’t come by boat then?” Rarelief said.

  “No,” Granny and Dani said together.

  “Wait a minute,” Dani said.

  “Yes?” said Rarelief.

  “Is a dragon a type of boat?” asked Dani.

  “Of course. What else?” said Rarelief.

  “Ah, I see,” said Dani. “You mean that dragon. The one on the plinth in the harbor.”

  “What else could I possibly have meant?” Rarelief asked. “You didn’t think I meant a massive animal that flies about on wings and breathes out fire, did you?” And Rarelief burst out laughing.

  “No! Of course not,” Dani muttered. “I knew you didn’t mean that. Obviously. I just didn’t know you meant a Viking longship. Why do they call them dragons?”

  But Rarelief was laughing too hard to answer straight away. “If I could ROFL, I’d be ROFLing so hard right now. A dragon!” A smattering of leaves was shaken loose by Rarelief’s hearty laughter and wafted down on top of Granny and a stone-faced Dani.

  “This from a talking tree!” Dani said.

  “It’s all down to the figurehead carved in the prow,” Rarelief said, wiping away a tear of mirth from his eye. “It’s shaped like a dragon’s head.”

  “So it is,” Dani said. “I remember now. And the one in the harbor only has one eye.”

  “And is it still there?” Granny asked.

  “Is what still where?” asked Rarelief.

  “The Black Heart of the Dragon’s Eye! Is it still the dragon’s eye?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Rarelief said. “You haven’t been to a funeral lately, have you?”

  Granny thought for a bit. “No, not for many, many years,” she said.

  “And all your old friends are still lively as ever, even though they’ve been alive for over a hundred years?” Rarelief asked.

  “Well, yes,” Granny said, “but I thought that was because of our modest diets of only seven square meals a day and our habit of taking exercise in the form of a ten-minute stroll along the promenade of an evening.”

  Rarelief burst into laughter again. “The Black Heart of the Dragon’s Eye has an effect on time—how it is perceived and how it is utilized,” he said. “No one except for Odin knows all of its uses. It’s mostly used to heal wounds quickly or to stave off death, which is why people rarely die here. Mr. Scathe found two more uses for it. That we know of …

  “The first has to do with why the islanders are Vikings one day of the year and only one day of the year. And the second has to do with my friends and family—all the trees of the Crimson Forest.”

  All the Trees

  “Silas Scathe had decided the easiest and quickest way to hunt for treasure in the Crimson Forest was to get rid of the trees. All the trees. But he couldn’t fell them. The islanders would notice, and there was no way they’d put up with that nonsense. He would have to create a diversion. Then he would have to get rid of all the trees all at once and be nowhere near the forest afterward so he couldn’t be blamed.

  “He devised his plan and settled on a day.

  “The plan was this: Mr. Scathe would utilize the powers of the Black Heart of the Dragon’s Eye to make all the villagers believe they were behaving in their normal Viking way, all day, on this day. When the sun came up twenty-four hours later, every single incident and event from that day, every thought even, would be lost to their memories, never to be recalled again.

  “The day Silas Scathe chose as the day for this to happen was Christmas Eve. Everything was all set up and prepared and ready. Except for one thing. In order to move thousands and thousands of trees on one day, even with the help of the Black Heart, which would speed up the task no end, the job would, on balance, all things considered, go a lot more smoothly if the trees agreed to the move. It’s not an easy undertaking, uprooting a hundred-foot-high, hundred-year-old, hundred-inch-wide oak whose roots are clinging desperately to the earth. Much better to have them ready and willing and happy to help.

  “Mr. Scathe came into the Crimson Forest the night before Christmas Eve to talk to all us trees. He used the shrubberies to help him, to vouch for him, and tell us what a decent fellow, in all fairness, he was. He told us he had an offer for us. He told us he had found the long-lost Fjorgyn Thunderbolt and had mastered its transformational powers. He could not show it to us because he could not move it. He said it was embedded deep within the belly of Volcano Mount Violaceous.

  “‘I, Mr. Silas Scathe, of Denmark,’ he said that night, ‘will grant each and every one of you majestic specimens the ability to walk.’

  “We were all taken aback. Could he really do this? Would he really do this? Why would he do it for us? We had not been very overly friendly with him. In fact, most of us hadn’t stopped trying to haunt him.

  “‘Over these past years, I have come to love the entire island and all life on it,’ he said to us. ‘But most particularly the forest with its pretty flowers, its friendly shrubberies, and its powerfully magnificent oaks and elms. I am more than a little annoyed, however,’ he continued, ‘at the way the trees are outrageously mistreated. The islanders do not accord you the respect you deserve. I am outraged by this inequality. Outraged! And with your permission, I will stand for this oppression no longer!’ He paused for effect. We trees grumbled agreement.

  “‘Why should the humans be able to walk and not us?’ was whispered back and forth.

  “Mr. Scathe went on, ‘I will change your lives, your destiny, your very nature. But I can only do it tomorrow, and I can’t do it here because although I have mastered the powers of the thingummy, I can’t move it—it’s embedded in the mountain—so I’ll just move you all, one by one instead.’

  “We trees talked among ourselves for a bit; we sent our leaves twittering to and fro in quiet whispers so Mr. Scathe could not hear our conversation.

  “‘What do we have to lose?’ we asked ourselves. ‘If he can’t give us the ability to walk, which, let’s face it, is something we’d all sort of like, then we’ll just come back here, the day after tomorrow, no harm done.’

  “The deliberations took a long time. All the oaks and elms and other trees talked, discussed, and argued all through the night. In the end, just as the sun was rising on the allotted day for moving, that first Christmas Eve, we called Mr. Scathe back and said, ‘Yes. We consent to being moved by you and your men, so that we can be given the ability to walk.’

  “Mr. Scathe’s men, operating under his leadership, closely followed his persnickety instructions. They did an inventory of all us trees first, took our names, and wrote down our dimensions and so forth so as to better order us into groups to make our removal less of a hardship.

  “It was
nearly midmorning before the inventory-making men made their way over to my side of the forest. I was very excited about being able to walk, I can tell you. We all were. Every one of us was as accommodating as could be. Every one of us except muggins here.” Rarelief pointed a skinny branch at himself.

  “When Mr. Scathe’s man, Harofith the Officious, came by with his clipboard, I stood to attention, ready to answer all his questions. It was on the first question that I went wrong or got confused. Either way, something happened.

  “Sometimes, when I think back on it, I feel myself hearing Odin’s voice whispering into my leaves or I can feel the touch of the claws of one of his old ravens on my branches. I don’t remember being aware of it at the time, so it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to say that there’s a chance I’m imagining things, but I feel, deep within my sap, that Odin was there with me, the whole time, whispering to me when I answered that first question.

  “Harofith stopped before me and looked up. He poised his pen over his clipboard and said, ‘What is your name?’

  “Now, this is an easy question. What is your name? Look.” Rarelief turned to Dani and said, “What is your name?”

  “Daniela Octavia Miller,” Dani said.

  “See? Easy,” Rarelief said. “But on that day I did not say to the officious man with the clipboard, ‘Rarelief the Splendiferous.’ I did not say ‘Rarelief,’ or even ‘Liefie,’ which is what my dear father still calls me, or would if he was here beside me. No. What I said was ‘Freakylief the Diseased.’”

  Granny and Dani gasped.

  “Harofith stepped back from me immediately and turned up his nose. He wrote on his pad while saying aloud, ‘Freakylief the Diseased.’ He didn’t ask any more questions. I saw him underlining ‘Diseased’ again and again.

  “‘No, wait!’ I cried out. “It’s not really Freakylief the Diseased, not anymore! It’s Rarelief the Splendiferous!’