by Suzie Wilde
‘Hel wants me, doesn’t she? But now I have no Obsidian to take with me.’
Her skern pointed. There was a blinding flash and Bera closed her eyes to let the redness pass. When she opened them she saw what had caused it.
Egill was at the stern of the dragonboat, angling the black glass to reflect the sun. She slowly turned to face Bera, laughing.
34
Ruin.
Egill’s talk of sacrifice had come to nothing because of one man, who was on the deck of the Raven, dying. Egill had the black stone Hefnir craved and now she had come for him. They must have planned to escape with it together from the start. Bera could not look away from Obsidian. It sucked in light and threw it back at her with a gloaming malevolence. Even at this distance the looking-glass called to Bera, making her anger and jealousy worse, tempting her to take revenge on Hefnir for his treachery. Love? There was no love in the twilight world of Obsidian. It belonged to no one except Hel herself. Bera tugged herself away to look at her son.
‘It’s not going to ram us!’ Heggi cried out with relief.
The dragonboat cut ahead and was moving away at speed. Nothing was worse for Heggi than being taken again in this moment.
Egill must have looked in the glass and now she could not withstand the urging to her dark nature. She had seen what she was and the knowledge had sent her mad. There would be no catching them and recovering the glass, or using it for good. Bera knew now that Obsidian wanted to be evil.
Nothing counted: the effort and pain, her baby, Heggi, Rakki, the wolves, everything gone. The earth yawned and rumbled beneath the hull. Hel had been cheated and the known world would suffer.
‘I believed Egill when she said she wanted to die. To pay the blood debt to her father.’
Egill lies to herself, even before she took the glass. It doesn’t mean it’s not true when she says it.
‘So what do I have to do now?’
I only know that there is worse to come.
‘There always is.’ And Bera was weary of it.
‘What must I do now?’
What you always do.
Go forward.
All the teeming life of the ocean was gone. There were no seabirds in the darkening sky, no leaping backs of dolphins or play of seals. No life. Despite the breeze, the sea was strangely calm. Ahead, the dragonboat had slowed, leaving an odd, shadowy wake. Bera went to the side and looked at the flat water. The waves were not still, but like an oil-slicked sea they were too heavy to roll. The water was thick. Dirty. Going forward was like sifting through a midden. After a while there began to be long, tarry streaks in the water that gradually grew thick enough to slow the boat’s speed. The dragonboat must have met the same state before them.
She called Heggi to the rail. Her voice echoed, as if they were in a room, not out at sea.
‘It’s like lumpy gruel, look,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it’s a kind of mud.’
This was no sea path; the dirt was grainy and crackled beneath the hull.
‘I feel sick,’ Heggi said. ‘It’s Hel’s breath again.’
He was right, and if the grinding unclenched some nails they would be just as lost as in a storm. Bera was in turmoil: the same deadlock between saving Heggi but sacrificing herself.
Heggi ran to his father. ‘Papa, wake up! This is your boat, help us!’
‘This is Ottar’s boat,’ said Bera, ‘and he is dead.’
‘Look, Bera!’ Heggi pointed at a plume of white smoke beyond the dragonboat.
At first Bera thought it was a whale spout but then realised it was something much bigger, further out to sea.
‘The Skraken!’ Heggi shouted.
‘It can’t rise.’ Or had she seen it in a vision?
The wind was urging them forward, filling the sail woven by her mother with words of power. But the sail told her it was coming from the wrong direction and she realised that they were being sucked into something, along with the other boat. Too late to turn back, even if they had the strength to row. Was Obsidian drawing them? She found her beads and held on to the amber.
Amber, that holds the black bead in check.
She prayed for the living but had no name for who she was asking for help. Doubt crept in. Egill’s Fetch had appeared to Bera, so had it come to foretell Bera’s death? That she could only be ‘fetched’ in a dream? The boat stalled. Dead in the water. Bera lurched, managed to grab the rail and looked down on the beach where she and Hefnir had their honeymoon. Prickles under her feet, the hope of love. But this was pale and porous sand, like ground brymstones.
That’s exactly what it is.
Very slowly the Raven began to go forward, leaving a swathe of clear water through the floating layer in its wake. The air thickened with the stench. Bera looked towards the mast where Hefnir lay dead; she had been too occupied to see his skern join him. There would be time to mourn, but not now. She would not die here, at sea that was land, muddled; she had to protect Heggi. He would be alone in the world if she died. She needed to forge a proper bond with her daughter. Sigrid – and Dellingr – were right. How to do it all?
Vallas command Fate.
How often had she chanted that but never quite understood it? A Valla could also command other Vallas, to make their Fate. Bera was in her full power. She stood tall, grasping her necklace, spreading out her body and mind to fill the broadening sky.
‘What are you doing?’ Heggi asked in a small voice.
‘Watch.’
Another spout and this time the plume was black, rising high and making a squid-ink cloud that snatched the watery sun and began to spread its blackness, frilled as an eel-mouth over all the whale roads. It was colossal, as urgent and rending as the moment of birthing. This was the vision Bera had had then but this time she was making herself as one with it. The past and future had become the present. ALU. She was an eagle, flying over the Raven; a figure in a seascape was become the land. When Valdis had arrived, Bera had let go. Now she used her inner core of strength to resist looking backwards in weakness and instead she willed herself to drive onward into the weave of Fate she was telling, aloud, in hope.
‘Hel! You will not have me. If you want Obsidian, take it. I will never be used by it.’
The Raven crunched aground on shingle and stopped. They were beached, far out to sea. The sky was black and the sea molten gold, like waves painted on an obsidian bowl. Orange sparks flew past them, beautiful burning.
‘Like firebirds!’ cried Heggi with joy.
Like waters breaking. Another birth.
Then Heggi screamed.
A tidal wave was forming out at sea; a monstrous wall of water bulging up into the shadowed sky. The fate Bera chose had summoned the Skraken. Steam creamed off the edge of giant waves as the monster reared up from the deep like a gale. The dark mass fumed off three giant fins that poured clouds into the day, making it deepest night. The monster gave a terrible roar out of its abyss, splitting its belly wide, bones cracking apart.
Blood always calls to blood.
And black to black.
At the brink of catastrophe stood Egill.
Bera could read her friend’s thoughts: Fear. Triumph. Despair. Hope. On, off, on, off, like a signalling beacon. Light, dark. All, nothing. Beneath them was a white-hot river of liquid earth. A new world. Egill was poised on the threshold between the old world and the new, always had been. Liminal. Alone amongst others, as ever, and Bera pitied her with all her heart – and was her reflection. Bera stood alone, straight as the prow, unbending in delivering the fate that Egill had brought on herself and had yearned for. Bera was pinned there by the pain of loss.
‘Goodbye, my friend.’
The Skraken flexed and coiled, making a hole in the deep as it dived. The dragonboat went straight down, swallowed whole, without listing. Gone. Dropping, like a toy boat down a well. The whole ship, its crew, Egill and Obsidian taken into the heart of Hel.
‘It’s not finished. Tie yourself to the mast,’ she t
old Heggi.
The Raven was steady while beyond them a maelstrom boiled and hissed. It was the making of new land. Bera felt that she was seeing the beginning of time; she could feel its heat on her face and smell its birthing.
‘Hold on.’
A roiling wave fanned out, pushing the boat backwards through the thick water. Bera trusted her father’s boat build; bow or stern first, the Raven would not sink. Sure enough, the longship soared through the breakers and then they were out into a clear sea path.
Now she could breathe. She untied Heggi and they looked behind them at the new island, waiting to be named. Bera knew what it would be. There was only one thing it could be.
New land brings new hope, like the birth of a child.
One day it would be studded with brave cliff-edge sheep and home to thousands of seabirds. She sensed them returning to their roosts and whales singing about homecoming on the long roads north.
Relief washed over her, an ordinary woman again. Their settlements were saved. Their old home on the Ice-Rimmed Sea. Iraland, the Marsh Lands saved too. Those other lands that Hefnir had seen, that she had not. Perhaps there were even more somewhere on the jewelled globe that no one yet knew. All of them, safe. Huge processes beneath the earth continued; plates under the earth’s crust shifted but did not collide. Three of them. Deep below that, the Skraken threshed, but this time he would not devour the known world.
35
‘Where is the stone?’ Hefnir’s thin voice.
Alive.
And his first thought was Obsidian. Bera felt anger and regret like the ringing of iron on iron, a true but tinny noise after what had gone before.
He picked feebly at the ropes that held him safe. ‘Let me touch it!’
‘I wouldn’t, even if I could, Hefnir. Egill has Obsidian, as you planned all along. Except you’re here with me – and she is with Hel.’
‘No, I…’ He looked at her with eyes rimmed with filth.
Bera bathed them and wet his lips and then wolfsbane took him back into the grey world.
There was something she had to do, to keep Hefnir alive, that she did not want… The knowledge refused to return but now she was certain this was what Egill’s Fetch had told her. Having a Fetch at all meant Egill had revoked her skern to choose what they believed in Iraland. Bera felt her own skern’s leaving and shuddered. Was that why Egill could hear Bera’s skern? Had she tried to steal him, as well as Obsidian? Bera would never know. Egill had talked of Brid. If keeping Hefnir alive had anything to do with Brid he was lost.
Heggi curled up next to his father like a dog and Bera told him to keep wetting his lips. Your dog will lie beside you in a storm, Faelan had said. She had coaxed, battled and woven Fate long and hard, and now she was tired. Let it unravel the future. She left thoughts of Rakki and Faelan along with her husband and son. She would use her natural weather knowledge and the boat skills given to her by her father to get them safely home.
At some point she sang:
The raven made twelve pairs of rope from the twists and turns of its bowel;
its claws were long and thin and sharp and made six pairs of trowel;
the beak was a black and shiny ship that cut the Ice-Rimmed Sea;
the feathers oars that tipped the waves as they flew across at speed…
The wind slapped her awake and she got back on course. The raven song. That was it, her mother’s lullaby that she had tried to remember, right at the start with her baby. A savage sort of lullaby her daughter would like, if she had anyone to sing it to her.
The grey smudge of land.
Bera should be glad, yet she kept the helm on a steady course south, when she should be heading eastwards for home.
Off a distant headland stood the Stoat. He was her sentinel, not a rune stone like her mother had placed to mark home. So why did she not steer for it?
You know what Egill’s Fetch said in that dream on the beach.
‘She called me Brid and said only I could get Hefnir home.’
And will you?
‘I don’t know where his home is. Or mine.’
Only the sea path. Perhaps she could sail on and on and never make landfall. This boat was her home. Out here, life was simple. All you had was one decision, made by the weather. On land were people with separate demands. Expectation and uncertainty. Conflict. Even amongst her own folk, the settlers, there was division. Or worse. Who would have died? She flinched from the thought of charred bodies. And what if they were now Drorghers? The pain of loss; the guilt.
Her baby.
The power of three.
‘Meaning?’
It’s a strong number.
‘I know. But I’m still not Brid.’
You know now that you can be who you like. What you like.
Bera longed to be a child again, before she knew what being a Valla meant.
She thought of Sigrid, proudly nursing two babies; of Dellingr taking charge. Did they need her? Was Faelan still alive? If he was, he would be more scarred than Thorvald. Perhaps he never got out of Smolderby.
What if everyone she loved was dead? She dreaded knowledge.
Out here everything was possible: Rakki could be scampering along the sand, young and fit, chasing birds. She wanted him to be full of joy like that forever and ever and never die.
Heggi left his father and made his way to her.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked.
‘Home.’ Although, as yet, she had no idea where that would be.
‘We could be home for Brightening,’ he said, his little face washed with hope.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I salute Dan Kieran and Liz Garner for keeping the faith. Liz makes editing creative fun and releases the story from the tangle of Good Ideas. Iceland Writers Retreat helped turn a vague Norse setting of Ice Island into the precise magic of Iceland whilst enhancing my writing in workshops with international authors. Alistair Moffat told me about naming ancestors as ghost soldiers at warriors’ backs. Reading his wonderful book The Sea Kingdoms: The History of Celtic Britain and Ireland reversed land and sea to explain where power lay. SCBWI has my back.
I return often to saved images on Instagram, especially sagatrail_iceland, ravenmaster1, rannvajoensen and urwarsdalkarl, but anything like #iceland #faroes #vikinglife #norsemythology #historyvikings are inspirational.
Above all, I thank my friends and family. I didn’t mean you to have to do the heavy lifting again, but if Sisyphus had you holding the stone at the top, his torment would be over.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Suzie Wilde is the author of The Book of Bera: Sea Paths. She grew up in Portsmouth, studied English at UCL, has an MA with distinction in creative writing and taught for over ten years. Whilst living aboard a sailboat she began writing full-time. She is married for the second time, with a supporting cast of Labradors.
Website: suziewilde.co.uk
Twitter: @susiewilde
Facebook: @suziewildeauthor
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