Obsidian

by Suzie Wilde

  There was a long, shrill screech and a sea eagle landed on the guts. Good omens, eagles, and she thanked him.

  A week later the tallest mountain’s cloud lifted and revealed itself as a billow of grey smoke. Now everyone worried. Sigrid urged Bera to tell folk about her vision but then saw that it would only stoke the gossip, so promised to keep her mouth shut. Drifa, however, reminded them of the lamb with two heads.

  ‘Crops will fail, all right,’ said one of her cronies.

  ‘It wasn’t the only monster, was it?’ said Drifa, watching Bera to see if she flinched.

  She gritted her teeth, handed the baby to Sigrid and took herself off to the river.

  Heggi followed. ‘Aren’t you feeding her anymore?’

  ‘I need to think,’ she told him and bent to pick a buttercup. ‘Alone.’

  He whistled for his dog and they ran off.

  Your milk will dry up.

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  She heard splashes and her heart leaped. When Bera turned round, Faelan jumped off his horse and came straight to her. His white face told her he too had seen the smoke.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered.

  He swallowed hard and Bera knew.

  ‘It’s starting, isn’t it? The eruption. What can we do?’

  ‘My mother says only you can save us.’

  ‘How can I? It’s too huge.’

  ‘She says you made the quaking start again, Bera, only this time it will be worse, like it was before the settlings. She says the ash clouds killed folk as far as Iraland. It’s why the Others started looking for new lands.’

  ‘Then they came to the wrong place.’

  ‘They went all over. Now you must help us, Bera.’

  He didn’t need to remind her of her promise, or that he had helped them all, but kept his blue eyes wide, open to scrying. He was trying to show he trusted her but her instinct told Bera that even if it was possible, it was too dangerous to delve into a man’s mind.

  ‘Tell me who you really are and what happened at the ruins.’

  He rubbed his chin. ‘I was brought here by the Others, in a way.’

  Bera was suspicious. ‘What “others”? You don’t look like any of us.’

  ‘The Others came to build a community and pray.’ He picked up some soil and rubbed it between his fingers. ‘Our folk are the Westermen, as some call them. They were here an age before you Northmen. Look at this soil: rich and black and fertile.’

  ‘So what happened to them?’

  ‘The pool wept.’ The memory coursed through him. ‘A boy was in the top pasture and he saw the lake weep white tears that ran down the valley and killed them all while they slept.’

  Bera’s deep mournfulness in this place was answered. ‘You were that boy, weren’t you? Why were you the only one awake?’

  ‘I was a slave – a thrall.’

  ‘Seabost thralls were always shorn. You have long hair.’

  ‘I’m a slave no longer.’

  ‘Don’t you get nits? Sigrid keeps saying we have nits and combs our hair with the new sharp comb until my scalp bleeds.’

  ‘More likely midges down here. They can send you mad. I’d cut my hair if I could but it’s my sixth sense.’

  ‘What sixth sense? What do you do, with long hair?’

  ‘I track. Animals… and folk.’

  ‘So there are dangerous folk round here?’

  ‘You know I would keep you safe. Those white tears were Hel’s and I can’t let it happen again. If you—’

  She stopped his words with a finger. ‘What do I have to do, and when?’

  ‘The mountain will tell us when we must leave.’

  ‘Leave?’ Bera was aghast. ‘I can’t move my folk, not again!’

  ‘Not them. You and I must go alone. That’s what my mother says.’

  Bera was tired of taking orders from his mother. ‘I shall ask my Valla ancestors what must be done but I’m not going anywhere until I know my folk are secure.’

  Bera went inside to feed the baby. Her breasts hurt and as soon as her daughter saw her she started to cry. Bera held out her arms.

  ‘Let me have her. Sorry I’m late.’

  Sigrid held on to her. ‘I can cope, easy. She’s more settled, both bairns feeding together.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like it. Anyway, I need to stop feeling like this.’ Bera doubled over, to show how her breasts weighed her down.

  ‘You need to let me do it all the time, then.’

  ‘I’ll have a wash first.’

  What Bera longed for was a bath, alone, with no demands. She pictured being in the bath hut at Seabost, in a tub of blood-hot water, with soothing herbs and flowers and a thrall to soap her. Then hot stones and birch switches, clean of body and smooth of mind. Now she had to make do with a quick splash of face and hands from a bucket before going to her screaming child. As she suckled, the pain subsided. Then it struck Bera that her fears were well-founded: her daughter truly was taking all her Valla powers away to use for herself. She tried to find softness in the child’s face but her determined frown and the set of her jaw was too like her father’s. Bera looked instead at the fluffy down on the top of her head and stroked it until, finally, the baby’s lips grew slack and she dozed.

  Waves of tiredness crashed over Bera.

  A boat was standing up on end, boarded like a hut, with a small door.

  ‘Crowman is here, waiting for you.’

  The crow voices, again.

  ‘Here, give her to me.’ Sigrid swept up the baby. ‘Who’s Sigrid’s pretty baby girl, den?’

  Bera took her back. ‘I was feeding her!’

  ‘You weren’t; you were fast asleep.’

  The dream had to be important. Perhaps the Crowman could explain and heal any link between the birth and the earth’s spasm.

  Sigrid began singing a lullaby to her baby boy and she was glowing, full of a love that Bera had never seen in her before. Her throat ached with the pain of it and yet she could not name any of her strong feelings and only knew that she had to hug her baby tight.

  Bera watched the curl and uncurl of tiny fingers like some small sea creature. She gently kissed them, and then her baby’s forehead that was as downy as a fawn’s. A memory came to her, of her mother singing a lullaby to her, but the words had gone. Something about a raven, as she had named the boat. She had never made the connection before.

  Her child had a perfect curve of cheek, as sweet as any boat hull made by her father, swept by dark lashes. This time there was no mistaking the wave of love that coursed through Bera, terrifying in its absolute and feral compulsion to protect. Her own small Valla. Was this welter of feeling usual? She properly understood how Sigrid must feel to have lost her first son, Bjorn.

  Bjorn. He was the only one who had ever loved her exactly the way she was. There were times when she didn’t like herself very much, but she was a different person now. Better. Kinder.

  ‘It’s these spring nights,’ Sigrid said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘You get crabby when you can’t sleep. Always have. And you’re even worse in the bright nights.’

  The baby gave a small hiccup then stared at her with wide, unfocused eyes. Bera could while away years like this, gazing back.

  ‘What are you going to name her?’ Sigrid asked. ‘She’s the spit of her father.’

  ‘She’s not! Anyway, I want to get to know her first.’

  ‘Birla? Birna?’

  ‘You want it to start with B.’ Bera’s hand went to the bead with the rune on it. There had been enough trouble.

  ‘Why not name her after your mother?’

  Bera shook her head. She looked down again at her daughter’s face, hoping for inspiration.

  ‘Alfdis!’ cooed Sigrid.

  Something old and knowing peered at her from her baby’s eyes. Bera gasped. How could Sigrid think of naming her after Alfdis, knowing too well how Valla power also brought an urge to possess – in e
very way.

  ‘She’s been on this earth before,’ said Sigrid.

  It was just a saying but Bera did not like it. The baby was awake and unnaturally quiet; her eyes were glazed, as if she were listening to something a long way away.

  Bera said, ‘You see it?’

  Sigrid said, ‘She’s hearing something from another world,’ and drew a hammer on her throat.

  ‘Perhaps Dellingr could find a small piece of iron to protect the crib.’ Bera passed her the baby. ‘We need to name both our children soon, keep them safe.’

  One day they would be strong, with a homestead full of light and food and everything to make life easy. Dellingr would have his iron sooner than that. She would make sure of it somehow. She had to – because smoke was pouring from the Gateway to Hel and she had to believe that Crowman, whoever he was, could stop it.

  7

  Bera’s first duty was to protect the homestead. She liked the snugness of a covered way protecting the outbuildings, with or without Drorghers, but there were other predators. She paced the whole settlement, from byre to forge, saying words of shielding. She held her Valla necklace tight, to bind them. All the folk were gathered to watch, except Farmer and his wife.

  ‘I have made us safe and strong,’ Bera said. ‘We look prosperous – and that may bring danger. Watch for raiders coming from the east.’

  ‘Why east?’ asked Ginna.

  ‘They always do, land or sea.’ So her father had always said.

  Asa snorted, then took Ginna and went out with the other settlers. Dellingr said they wanted to get up to the smithy before it was fully dark.

  ‘Ginna’s got it into her head that there are ghosts up there.’

  ‘Well, we both know there is something.’

  ‘We can’t move the smithy. It’s the old magic to forge iron in fire on a hill above the meeting of roads.’

  ‘It’s the field edge that’s the trouble, you said. I’ll ask Faelan why.’

  ‘I can tell you. Corpses. That’s their idea of custom over here.’

  ‘That’s Drifa talk.’

  ‘Then ask him.’ Dellingr spat over one shoulder. ‘And why is he being so helpful? He’ll be after something.’

  ‘Settlers are different,’ Bera went on. ‘It will bring bad luck, Dellingr, to fall out with our neighbour.’

  Dellingr started to go. ‘You mark my words. I don’t like his horse-arse black hair and sneaky eyes, neighbour or not. There’s bad blood in there.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as bad blood!’

  He set off again. ‘Then tell me you don’t care about Heggi’s kin.’

  After supper, Bera felt Sigrid staring at her while she was feeding the baby.

  She knew what it would be. ‘We’ve talked about the smoke, Sigrid, and it won’t help. There’s trouble brewing and I may know what to do.’

  Sigrid gave her a look. ‘There’s trouble with you, more like. You’ve a baby now and there you are, all cow-eyed over Faelan.’ She held up a hand. ‘Don’t bother denying it. I saw the same with your mother. Bad things happen around Vallas.’

  Bera was angry. ‘First it was my father, now you! When will I be trusted?’

  ‘Something else you should know,’ Sigrid went on. ‘Asa says Dellingr wants to move.’

  ‘She might. But he’s just explained why the smithy can’t be moved.’

  ‘Some pedlar told him there’s a heap of iron up on the other parcel of land left by a settler who died and he’s going up there.’

  ‘We need him here!’

  ‘You never sound like we do.’

  ‘He wants a fight.’

  Sigrid said, ‘You click your fingers and Dellingr would jump; he’d never even ask how high.’

  Had that ever been true?

  Bera could not get to sleep. She looked at her daughter’s lips, golden in the oil-light.

  ‘What is your name, little one?’

  The whine of a biting insect drilled close to her ear and made her feel trapped in a strange land, surrounded by folk she hardly knew anymore. If there was a boat she would have been straight on it, alone, out to sea and free. How she wished she could be like a man: to father a child and then sail off to wherever the wind took him. To Egill’s Iraland, where she had begged Hefnir never to go. Iraland, where the Serpent King was waiting. Or was he here, to look for Hefnir?

  She felt a warmth at her throat. It was her skern, stroking the place where once Hefnir kissed her.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s irritating.’

  I always irritate you.

  She slapped her cheek, where she felt the insect.

  You missed it.

  ‘Will Dellingr go?’

  He has to be cross with you, sweet one. It makes him think he doesn’t need you.

  Heggi came in, checked to see where the baby was and then carefully got in beside Bera.

  ‘You’re too big for this now, boykin.’

  He was damp with sweat.

  ‘Are you feeling well?’ She kissed his hairline. He did not smell ill.

  ‘Rakki was digging at the field edge and he found a bone. You know what he’s like and I didn’t want him to choke on a splinter.’

  The field edge. Bera shivered. Perhaps Dellingr was right. ‘What bone?’

  ‘Oh, you know, a leg bone or something.’ He waved his hand breezily. ‘A bit of pig, I expect. Anyway, Ginna came out and said Dellingr wanted them to move.’

  ‘Sigrid said—’

  ‘But just now I had a bad dream and it all got muddled and Asa was shouting and it was Ginna’s body that was buried. Oh, Mama, it was awful. Her eyes sprang open and she was this Drorgher…’

  ‘I’m here, shh.’ Bera hugged him tight to comfort herself as much as him.

  ‘Don’t ever leave me, will you?’

  If she stayed, she might condemn them all to death.

  ‘Mama?’

  ‘I won’t let Dellingr go, Heggi. Even if he did, you could still see Ginna sometimes. The old settler’s land is not much further than the farmstead.’

  ‘No – Farmer’s going up there to better pasture. Ginna’s going right away, Mama, for good, to some big smouldering place that the pedlar told Dellingr about.’

  The pedlar seemed determined to get all the important men away. She felt there was something she had missed, through tiredness, or when her senses were dull.

  ‘Have I seen this pedlar?’

  He nodded. ‘That fat rider one.’

  She had to have it out with Dellingr and early next morning she set off for the forge. The fields had a blush of green where Faelan’s seeds were pushing up, rapacious for the short season of sun. The land was as fertile as she had foreseen. Why should Dellingr want to leave? But Hel’s Gateway was a stark reminder of what was to come, so perhaps her smith was right. It was only a question of when the earth would finally shake them off.

  ‘Should we all go with him? Or force him to stay and go alone with Faelan? Stay or go?’

  Her skern was fighting off a mist of tiny insects that danced in front of her face. Faelan said it was the midges that would drive them mad. The black flies were bad enough, compared to home. Maybe the horses brought them. Some got right into her hair, biting. Was this what prickled her scalp or was it a sign of nearing danger?

  When she came to higher ground Bera stood still with her eyes closed, to let other senses sharpen. There was still no feeling that Drorghers had found them and yet her unease was growing and it was hard to remember the exact smell when one was near. Heggi’s dream bothered her; she should have asked him more about finding a bone. Animal or human? It had always been hard to unpick true premonition from groundless fear – until the fear became real.

  Fields of suffocating ash, the livestock dead. See?

  Pearly bones and grey dust.

  Bera quickly opened her eyes. Before her was the river, full of big, white-fleshed fish. Pastures getting greener. The ash was the future. She had to find out how
to stop it happening – and that might force Dellingr to stay and keep folk safe.

  He was inside the forge, alone. With no fire, its heart was gone.

  ‘I think it’s time to tell me everything, Dellingr.’

  He rubbed his hands, as though he still worked iron, wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  ‘We used to have Thorvald protecting us,’ she went on. ‘You saw his virtues when I did not. Do you think he would want you to abandon Sigrid or Heggi now? The babies?’

  ‘Who’s abandoning anyone?’

  ‘I don’t know, Dellingr. I’m waiting for you to be as honest as I thought you.’

  He flinched. Bera expected him to walk away but he stayed. What would he say? That he couldn’t bear her leadership? That, like Asa, he couldn’t look at her without thinking about his baby son? The silence was thick with both their thoughts.

  She decided to be totally honest with him. ‘I thought I was dying when I had the baby.’

  Dellingr looked at the doorway. ‘Asa thought so too, with our first.’

  Bera was impatient. ‘This was different. It was as if I was the earth itself and both of us ripped apart, dying.’

  ‘We had the tremors…’

  ‘Come outside.’

  Dellingr followed her but looked nervously at the huts.

  ‘We are in plain view, Dellingr, Asa can hardly mind that. Look at the smoke. It’s getting thicker and it’s coming from the Gateway to Hel. I saw its ice cap cracking. It blew sky-high and then burning black fire streamed down towards our homestead.’

  ‘That’s one of Egill’s tales.’

  ‘Egill saw her father die here, burning in the sea like a grease taper.’

  ‘Well, she’s gone to Iraland with Hefnir.’

  ‘That’s past. What is our future here? What will you do?’

  Dellingr faced her. ‘I owe my family, Bera. You want the truth, so here it is, though it will hurt you. There are signs that we got this wrong. There’s that’ – he gestured at the smoke – ‘and bones coming up and Drifa says you having that dead scrap of a twin…’

  ‘Don’t blame me for any of this, Dellingr! I will not have you fools thinking you know, when – when…’