Obsidian

by Suzie Wilde

  They were both riding this time and Bera had her arms round Faelan’s waist. She felt the heat coming through his clothes and thought about the elven skin underneath. Unearthly – and both of them on a deadly task. She wanted to be safe, a normal settler, but those days were gone.

  ‘Will it be too late?’ she asked.

  ‘We’ll get there before dark,’ he said.

  He kicked his horse and Miska steadily picked a way across the river. The gathering shadows suggested forms and strange night calls began to whisper warnings. What did she really know of Faelan? Had the Watcher come to warn her about him? No, that was nonsense. Yet how did Faelan know about the bead and poison? Was the Watcher the one to trust? Or Faelan? Bera took her arms away from the man in front. She had only seen good in him by day, when he had substance, flesh and blood. Here, in the long, grey twilight, his outline was indistinct, as if he were a creature that drank darkness in order to find its shape.

  He half-turned. ‘Why did you let go?’

  ‘I’m stretching my back.’

  ‘It’s an uneven ride if you’re not used to horses.’

  ‘Where are we? I ought to know the way to the forge. Are we lost?’

  ‘Trust me, Bera.’ His voice was smooth. ‘It’s a shortcut.’

  They rode on.

  ‘Why do you bury your dead at boundaries?’ she asked.

  ‘Twilight’s not the time to be talking about it. Let’s just say we have ghost fences here.’

  ‘What do ghost fences keep out?’

  Faelan said, ‘Put your arms round me and hold tight. The next bit is downhill and a bit rough.’

  ‘This land is different, even in the dark. Especially then. Black and white,’ she muttered into his back.

  Bera thought of corpses being buried at the margins; Rakki digging up bones. Boundaries were thresholds, after all. Then they were there. A smudge of smoke was coming from the forge huts and Bera wanted to wipe out the past anger; not just with Dellingr but all of his family. She even pitied Asa in this moment. Then they moved on. It was their future she must safeguard.

  Bera asked Dellingr and his bellows-boy to bring shovels and join them. Dellingr did not look at Faelan.

  ‘I’ll leave Miska here,’ said Faelan. ‘Horses are as scared of the undead as we are.’

  ‘Best keep her near the anvil then,’ Dellingr said, smoothing her flank.

  Faelan tied her loosely. Miska pushed at the smith’s arms for more. Bera had forgotten how good Dellingr was with horses and she liked seeing it again. Then they set off.

  It was the long hours of twilight, when the living world fell silent to hear the whispers of the dead. Well before they reached the ravine they heard it. Above the sound of trickling water was a ghastly whining and cracking; grunts, groans and wails. It was too much for the boy. He threw down his shovel and ran.

  ‘He’ll be safe enough in the smithy,’ said Dellingr. His lips were set in a grim line. ‘The tools will protect him, if he has the wit to go in there.’

  ‘Did you put any iron in the grave?’ asked Faelan.

  ‘There is none to spare,’ Bera cut in. ‘I don’t know what we shall find there but this must be done, and quickly, before dark.’

  Around them, light was thickening, pressing them on to the place they did not want to be. There were no birds here, flying to their roosts, no sound other than the long hiss of evil ahead. The shame of the lack of ritual hit Bera hard. She had been right to feel it was dangerous.

  She held her beads when they stood looking at the grave pit.

  ‘If they have not already risen our first danger is poison, which will be seeping through their skin,’ she said. ‘The smell was bad then; it will be worse now.’

  ‘It’s only hours from the ninth day,’ Faelan said. ‘Best be quick.’

  They tied cloths over their faces and put on mittens. Bera was glad to feel her skern move swiftly to the bare skin of her neck.

  ‘These shrubs are still in place,’ said Dellingr. ‘They’re still in there.’

  ‘But restless. Listen.’ Faelan stuck a shovel into the ground.

  ‘They’re not far down,’ said Bera.

  Dellingr began to dig and the other two joined him. The noises stopped. Were the women holding their breath, pretending to be dead?

  Don’t stop now!

  Bera’s shovel connected with something that softly gave way and she fell backwards, retching, as some putrid fumes escaped. The men carried on, until a jutting shoulder made them stop.

  ‘The winding sheet is gone,’ she said.

  They brushed away the remaining earth with bushy twigs, to expose all three corpses. Their bodies glowed faintly in the gloom, like the sunless sea creatures Bera had seen once in a vision.

  ‘We’re only just in time,’ Faelan said.

  Two were fatter than they had been in life but recognisable, apart from dark red stains on one side of their face. Drifa was closer to the surface and it was her bloated corpse that Bera had struck. Her mouth was gaping, as though she might batten on Bera and swallow her down whole.

  ‘Now what?’ Dellingr asked Bera.

  Faelan said, ‘We take her head off.’

  Dellingr pushed him aside. ‘These are our folk.’

  He stood right over the corpse, raised his shovel and brought it down hard on the woman’s neck. Then again. Her head rolled to one side, as though turning away in shame.

  Faelan raised his eyebrows at Bera. Would she like him to take over? She shook her head. Dellingr was right: it was her Valla duty too, and she had not done enough before. She steeled herself.

  The woman’s head was as heavy as a flensing hook and Bera was clumsy in mittens.

  ‘Steady,’ Faelan said.

  She managed to right the head and then carefully placed it between the thighs. Faelan passed her a large stone and as she jammed it between the teeth Drifa’s grim smile flickered on, off. The men gasped.

  ‘Take the heads off the others,’ she said, ‘then put them face down.’

  They buried all three deep, while Bera said some fast words of peace. As soon as their grim work was done they headed back towards the forge without speaking. Dellingr stopped Bera while Faelan mounted his mare and went on towards his farmstead.

  ‘That was no sight for a woman,’ Dellingr said, spitting the words at Faelan’s back.

  ‘A Valla presides over Life and Death,’ Bera said, then softened. ‘I had to make myself do it. I feel sick.’

  Dellingr touched her arm. ‘Will it work? It’s filthy, not like bright flames.’

  ‘Faelan showed me other bodies, the ones you found, and they were dry bones, weren’t they?’

  He conceded her point. ‘What other threat is coming, though? And when?’

  ‘I need time to plan.’

  ‘I hope there is time.’ He took the shovels and turned for the forge huts.

  She could not tell Dellingr she was planning to leave. He would insist she should stay with the folk she had brought here. And he would be right.

  Or will he go himself, as he planned? Her skern looked at one long hand, then the other, and shrugged.

  The western sky was gashed with blood-red light and there was a second sun in the north, rising from a distant black cone. Bera felt muddled and unclean, blighted by the stinking rush of foul gas. So she took the path towards Faelan’s land, up to the waterfall, to see the way forward.

  Going liminal, are we? Good scheme.

  ‘If that doesn’t work, I’ll visit his mother.’

  Near the falls, Bera stopped. She tried to get a sense of the spirit of the mountain to see if the land itself might give her a direction. Nothing. She had no language here. All the years of gradual learning were made useless.

  Stop thinking about the sea and listen.

  As grindingly slow as a glacier, she got it: something inscrutable and ungovernable; not tied to this place but somewhere darker and older. An unseeing blackness that lived forever both under and
inside the known world. If she sensed it, so would it be sensing her.

  It doesn’t care, you know. You’re a midge to it. But you feel it, don’t you?

  ‘So whatever I decide doesn’t matter?’

  It matters to you. So try standing behind the waterfall, like you want to.

  She had to scramble over some polished rocks to get there. The crashing plunge of water made her ears ring and she had the sensation of falling, so she crouched and felt her way through the soaking mist. The air was an intense version of what she always felt on Ice Island and every hair on her head tingled. She put a hand to it to make sure it wasn’t rising upwards. And then the falls became one solid sheet of water making the world beyond as glaucous as looking through her glass fire stone. For the first time since giving birth to Valdis, she felt a separate person again. Like being far out to sea, she felt alive.

  Bera shut her eyes and the roar of the water was the deep howl of a wolf. It was a summons. She was inside…

  … A hut, slatted with blue light that came through loose boards. There was something beyond; a lumpen shape that crouched in the shadows. It started upright and came towards her, striped with light and moving strangely. Bera saw, then couldn’t see, what was coming.

  ‘He’s purblind and humpbacked, like a whale,’ said someone.

  The way the humpback moved his head reminded her of Blind Agnar. The figure was questing about, sniffing, and then held out a hand.

  ‘So you have come.’ His voice was as cracked as his shape. ‘My name is Crowman.’

  Bera shivered. She was soaked by the fine spray – but cleansed. She went through to the other side. The wolf howled again and she followed its call by the moon’s path to a still pool far beyond the falls, which were only a distant throb. The full moon shone on its dark surface. She waited for the wolf to come.

  A man stepped from behind one of the white rocks, naked.

  Faelan. Wolf by name.

  Bera could not look away from his skin. It was mother-of-pearl, like the glistening surface of a butchered bone. He carefully lowered himself into a shock of silver and gasped as he ducked under. The water was glassy, beyond clear, and every hair on his body glowed in quicksilver precision. He looked like a water elf of unearthly beauty and Bera saw herself tearing off her clothes and jumping in. It was so real that it took her breath away. Then he surged upwards in a shower of savage crystal, shrieking.

  He clambered out, slapping himself with his hands to get warm. Then turned and saw her.

  Bera ran, as if the elves were chasing, but then her speed restored to her the joy and freedom of childhood. She ran faster – until she tripped and sprawled, spread-eagled on the springy grass. She was already drenched by the waterfall, so she rolled amongst clover, heartsease and thyme, smelling their crushed scent, more potent by moonlight.

  Faelan had not followed her. The Valla part of her wished he had; to have taken her there, bodies ice to ice, in one swift possession.

  When Bera looked up, the Watcher was there – and so she met Faelan’s mother at last.

  She was as beautiful as Bera had supposed but her pearly flesh glowed in a way that made Faelan’s white skin obviously natural – and living.

  ‘Can you speak?’ Bera asked.

  Her cracked lips parted slightly. ‘I am come to fetch her home.’

  Bera refused to be afraid. She crossed the short distance between them and took her hand. She expected it to be corpse-cold but instead it was soft with illness and burned like a hot stone. It reminded Bera of her own mother dying. She let go.

  You’re pushing back the memory. One day you will have to face it.

  ‘Do you become the person you’ve come to fetch?’ she asked.

  ‘A copy, with a message for you.’

  Although the Fetch’s eyes were dark hollows, there was a shrewdness that was like Faelan’s. She, too, had long hair, as black and glossy as obsidian. Bera was sorry that she had not grown to know her and work beside her. She was being given a glimpse of another life, one she might have had, that could only be scried and not lived. Bera wished she could comfort the woman in her dying.

  It’s a comfort to her to know you are with her Fetch.

  ‘So is her skern with her?’

  They are from Iraland. They don’t have them there anymore.

  ‘What happened to them?’

  He shuddered and unclasped, leaving her in pain, with a puzzle.

  The Fetch gave a rattling sigh. ‘It’s close. So now your skern has gone, listen.’

  Bera thought it reasonable that one twin spirit could see another. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘The wolfsbane that poisoned your folk came from Iraland. It’s grown at the farmstead, as is its remedy, but did not come from there.’ Her eyes flickered. ‘Faelan knew nothing until I told him. Trust him. Get to… Abbotry. Obsidian.’

  The Fetch’s face was screwed up with pain.

  ‘Don’t speak if—’

  ‘Brid,’ she said, surprised, and then lay on the ground.

  ‘I will look after Faelan,’ Bera said, hoping it would get through to his mother’s dying body. ‘I wish you had your skern with you.’

  Her own skern returned. Don’t think of sending me.

  ‘If you comforted her Fetch, would that work?’

  No idea but let’s try.

  He cradled its head. In that moment the body that had seemed already empty lost something impossible to describe, as if it had been waiting. Whatever the Fetch had been, it was no longer there.

  Bera said, ‘That was kind. But will Faelan’s mother have to face the darkness alone? Can her Fetch go with her?’

  It is her choice.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I felt it when I clasped her. A Fetch is a thing: something they send away, to do a task. He shivered. It becomes whatever folk believe.

  The thought was like falling off a big wave. ‘I could never send you away.’

  You know you must go with Faelan soon, don’t you?

  ‘Alone?’

  You always have me.

  Faelan arrived, as she knew he would.

  ‘She doesn’t need anyone now,’ he said. ‘She wanted to see you, to tell you something important.’

  Bera nodded. ‘I’m sorry you have lost her but all loss also brings freedom.’

  He looked away. ‘What if I don’t want to be free?’

  ‘I long for it,’ said Bera. ‘But my duty lies in taking care of my folk – and you. Her Fetch told me I have to journey and I think you know where.’

  ‘We will be partners in this, Bera. My mother said you would understand when we get there – but I know where we have to go.’

  ‘Take me to her, Faelan. I’ll do the Valla’s last service for the dead.’

  When Bera went into the billet to begin her vigil the woman lay cold as ice, her nose a hard ridge on sunken cheeks. She prepared her for burial, turning the body so that she could wash her. Bera plaited her black hair and there, on the nape of the neck, was a tattoo of Faelan’s obsidian cross, with its serpent coils. A sudden vision of an axe cutting through the sign made Bera snatch up the woven cloth and wind it round the corpse, tight.

  She called Faelan in. ‘Do you have wood enough for a pyre?’

  He shook his head. ‘It must be burial.’

  ‘You can’t behead your own mother!’

  Faelan agreed. ‘We will dig her grave in the mire. It’s not frozen now so will be easy work – and she will be held by water and unable to cross it to land.’

  Bera hoped he was right.

  11

  After the burial Bera wanted to go home directly and alone.

  ‘I need time with my baby and to not think about death or loss, or the future.’

  Faelan insisted they had to set off at once. ‘Look at the mountain. It’s thicker again today.’

  ‘The Fetch gave me a message, something like Abbotry.’

  He nodded. ‘You’re needed at Smolderby first a
nd I’ve been told to take you.’

  Bera supposed his mother had told him more, perhaps even about Crowman. She liked feeling Fate was binding their futures.

  Faelan carried on. ‘It’s a long journey, so I’ll bring two horses.’

  ‘Can’t we go in your boat?’

  ‘The yole’s not seaworthy. I’ve a better boat in Smolderby and we’ll do the final stage in that.’

  Bera’s spirits rose still further. ‘You can show me the way and how to ride a horse.’

  ‘I’ll bring a quiet mare but if you slow us down you can ride behind me like you did before.’

  Hel could take her before she would make a whole journey as a passenger.

  Careful. We’re making very free with Hel these days.

  ‘You vanish sometimes,’ said Faelan. ‘Your face looks empty. Is it what Vallas do?’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Bera said.

  While they were collecting the tackle from the byre, an idea came to her.

  ‘Do your folk pay the vigilant and gravedigger?’

  ‘Maybe someone rich, back in Iraland… I don’t know.’

  ‘Would you pay a Valla who performed these duties?’

  He grinned. ‘Just say what you’re after.’

  ‘All right, I want iron.’

  He raised an eyebrow in the way she liked.

  ‘It’s for Dellingr,’ she explained.

  ‘There’s plenty here, old tools, ploughs. I’ll get my lads to take some to the forge.’

  ‘He mustn’t know it’s yours. His pride’s hurt enough – and besides, I’m trying to keep him at the homestead.’

  ‘So if they scatter it in a rift near the ghost fence he’ll think it’s a present from the mountain.’

  ‘Someone told Dellingr the old settler left a heap of iron on his land. He’ll think it’s that.’ Bera crossed her fingers again.

  Wrong can come out of kindness.

  ‘And nothing for yourself?’ Faelan asked.

  She thought about it while they rounded up the horses.

  ‘Of course! Wolfsbane! I’ll take some remedy plants with me.’