Stars and a Wind- The Complete Trilogy

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “And no one else will catch it?”

  “Of course not. And I’m sorry about Tovhilda,” said Skarga, with sudden and perverse shame.

  Ogot was impatient. “Grab the boy. I’ll deal with the girl.” His fat fingers pinched Skarga’s arm. By now the long summer daylight was waning and there was no dazzle of sun on leaving the hall’s shadows. Skarga was thrust forward, the bundle of prepared food pushed into her hands. She faced her brothers.

  Asved had Egil gripped by the back of the neck, as a captured wild cat or a wolf cub was dragged to the slaughter. Egil hung submissive. In Asved’s clasp, it was better not to struggle. Ogot pushed Skarga forward again from behind, “Say the words,” he demanded. “I need to hear you say it.”

  “Give me Egil first,” she said, “and I’ll swear anything you like.” She had looked around and seen no sign of Grimr. There was only one more step needed.

  Asved was grinning. “Say the words, bitch.”

  Egil had closed his eyes but now something seemed to jerk him conscious. He stared upwards into the final grey haze of light. Already the peaks of the mountains were silhouetted ready for the long evening dimming. From the highest pinnacle an eagle was flying. Below and much closer, another was hovering, judging its prey before the stoop. It was a dark winged giant, a golden eagle, the bird Egil loved most. But the faster eagle soaring higher was a different kind, one of the huge sea eagles with its tail white dipped like an arrow dragged through snow, and a beak more vicious than any spear.

  Egil was still watching the birds when Skarga said, “By mistletoe and Loki’s fire, by Fafnir and the Midgard serpent, by the hags and the trolls, the witches and dragon’s blood, I lift the curse. I swear the pox will fade and Tove will recover by next sun up. There! Now I want Egil back.”

  Ogot frowned. “How do we know those are the right words?”

  Skarga had thought it sounded quite convincing. “Of course they are. I ought to know.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know,” said Hakon.

  And Ogot continued, “When we see how things are by sun up, then we’ll send the boy on. If Tove’s fully recovered and there’s been no new sickness, I’ll let the boy go. Take the pony cart south, so the boy knows which way to run after you. You can stop somewhere and sleep in the cart and wait for him.”

  Egil’s eyes were back on the ground and Asved had not released him. Skarga sighed. She could think of no further argument. She nodded. “You swear it? You’ll let him come after me?”

  “I’ve given my word and I’ll not repeat it,” glared Ogot. “It’s not for you to question me. But you keep your side, and I’ll keep mine.”

  Skarga looked at Egil. Egil lifted his chin and stared back. “Hurry up, lady,” he whispered. “I’m getting cold.”

  Skarga looked back at her father. “Where’s Grimr?”

  “More questions?” Ogot grabbed her arm and slung her towards the waiting pony cart. It was already harnessed, the pony kicking a foreleg as it chewed at the stubby tussocks. “Get in and get going,” Ogot shouted at her. “Before I change my mind.”

  The golden eagle was no longer hunting. It had landed in the top branches of the old pine on the far cliff edge and was watching them, the glint of its stare caught by the last light. Skarga began to climb reluctantly into the cart. She had her wolfskin cloak clasped tight, the small bundle of food under her other arm, grabbling with the extra length of her new warm shift and the unwieldy spread of her outsized boots. Inside the cart she sat on the front box and took the reins. She was free.

  “Get going,” ordered Ogot.

  Skarga looked down at Egil. He had neither boots nor stockings and his only clothing was a coarse flaxen tunic, torn, soiled and thin. Someone had taken his great white fur. His bare toes twitched. His neck, where Asved still gripped him, looked blue. “Hurry up, mistress,” said Egil. “Time to test that luck we talked about. I’ll be alright and tomorrow I’ll come after you.”

  “On the southern vik path,” said Skarga. “I’ll wait.”

  “Don’t wait,” said Egil at once. “I’ll catch up. Promise you won’t wait.”

  “Silly boy,” said Skarga fondly and began to turn the cart. “I won’t desert you, you know. Not ever.”

  She looked back twice. It was strange to be free again. There was wind in her hair and the smell of brine in her face. She would soon see the stars rise, if cloud did not obscure them, and the polished sickle moon.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  With sickness across the land and the evenings drawing in, the pastures were empty. Wives were nursing their husbands, husbands their wives. Servants and slaves tended each other in the byres and brewery quarters, children moaning in their closed cots. The village was quiet but a pack of dogs from the hall was snarling over a hare caught in the grain field. No shadows striped the ditches or the distant crags, and looking back, Skarga saw only Egil, hanging in Asved’s grip like a sad little weed pulled from the ground. Then everything disappeared into the gathering gloom; night’s shroud.

  The golden eagle remained roosting at the top of the old pine, its head now tucked, a little forlorn, under one wing. The larger eagle had flown on into the high cloud, one last hunt perhaps, out at sea. The pony slumped, snorted and dragged its hooves, sensing a long road. Skarga took the same path she had taken the first time she had escaped her family at the beginning of summer. She had not gone far then. She had a deepening conviction that she would get no further this time.

  The wind had swung to her left, channelling in from the sea and the rising tide. It became cold and the rumble of the wheels was monotonously rhythmic. The water-bound horizon drifted into darkness, the cut between sky and water now only a suggestion. To her left the horizon was hidden behind the mountains, the farms with their high waving crops, the thin wheat hardening its stalks in the long wait for the protracted harvest and the tangle of rye weed ready for baking, all now well behind her. Now there was not even the low scramble of thistle and nettles. Bending, twisting, fading into a handful of pebbles, trampled scrub and sudden bracken or gorse, the path curved and angled until the village of her home was quite gone. She had passed the wind-bent, blighted trees where once the other Grimr had waited for her. She had broken destiny’s weave and was free once more. She was on her way south. Skarga stopped the cart.

  She sat for a moment, then pulled the pony further in from the craggy edge and sheltered under the first rise of the pines. There was the soft call of an owl sounding absurdly wistful. Egil would have known which type it was. He would have been able to hoot back, for he could mimic the calls of a hundred birds. Skarga smiled, missing the sweetness of his small bones cuddled close, and snuggled beneath her cloak with the wolf fur up over her cheeks and the smell of tanned hide against her nose. Then she shut away doubt while waiting for Egil’s release in the morning.

  The dream came at once. She was drowning and the water surged into her mouth and her eyes and her ears. It was colder than axe or ice and very dark. Her ankles were weighted. She was dragged down. Then something came against her. She was knocked, spinning sideways, caught in a whirling maze of bubbles and swirls of water. She saw the hugeness come against her, a shining blaze of white mottled in black swimming from the distant depths and battering against and under her, lifting her from the inevitable horrors below. She dared reach out and touch it and its skin was as smooth as forged steel and as beautiful as silver. Then it opened its vast mouth and its teeth were rows of spikes more terrible than any spear, and it took her. She thought she would be ripped, but she felt no pain. She felt only a strange tenderness, and relinquished her own will, accepting death.

  When she woke, very suddenly and crying relentlessly, it was still night. The narrow moon had barely risen and the light was pale pearl. She had slept for only a short time and had a long wait still ahead. The wind had dropped. The pony, tethered to a low branch, drowsed as it stood so Skarga climbed from the cart and stretched. Keeping her cloak tight about her she walked a l
ittle, peering over the cliff edge to the waves below. The tide had begun to turn as she left the village, and now it was high and angry. The waves were white tipped like the tail of the sea eagle which she could see again now, far out, riding the thermals, wings spread like a ship’s sails, barely ruffled as it soared and dipped, silhouetted against the moonlight. The crashing of the ocean had always disturbed her, had always seemed threatening, the insidious carrier of death. She watched the sudden dive of the sea eagle, and turned quickly away.

  It was as she turned that she saw the black shape rise, the flag that sliced the waves, peaking like an arrow head, then sinking again and lost from sight into the murk. It was the dorsal fin of the great sea beast from her dream and it had surfaced where the eagle had plunged. With the sea crashing its waves against the cliff sides, Skarga’s ears drummed and her belly lurched. She curled her toes, gripping inside her boots. Then she saw the fin rise again, cutting upwards and aiming directly for the beach. Entirely enclosed by the night’s shadows, it was only afterwards that she saw the boat. Then she started to run.

  Back along the track, she knew now where the path led straight down the rock face to the sea where the first Grimr had taken her to his ship anchored in the bay. Now she knotted up her skirts, flung off Asved’s cloak and struggled downwards, grabbing at the grassy hillocks to steady herself. Her knees turned to frumenty but she did not fall. At the bottom where the last pebbles slid into rock pools, the water swirled, throwing up scatters of moonlit spray. Then Skarga ran straight into the waves, her hair in her eyes and her heart in her mouth as she saw before her the little fishing skiff and the fin of the sea beast and Asved hurling Egil over the boat’s gunwales into the terrible seas.

  Banke and Gunulf were rowing. The small boat crested each wave like a leaf carried and tossed, but never aimless. Banke and Gunulf were strong shouldered and strong armed and rowed far out against the tide. It was Asved who had been holding Egil curled in the prow. Rocks had been roped to both his ankles and another rope around his neck, knotted beneath his chin. He did not make any attempt to escape. He seemed resigned, almost as though he slept, like an eagle with its head beneath its wing.

  He was such a little bundle. It was easy to haul him up and toss him overboard like useless flotsam the waves took him. For a moment the child floated, the skinny arms reaching out, fingers extended. Banke and Gunulf stopped rowing.

  Asved reached his hand out to the boy’s head where the little dark curls bobbed like seaweed. A small gurgling swirl of darkness turned, encircling, catching moonlight. Asved kept his hand firm, then plunged it down. The water became suddenly turbulent. At last Egil struggled, but Asved’s hand held him under and the stones dragged at his feet. Then the great heave of the incoming waves brought the boat towards the shore and Asved’s hold slipped away. Where Egil had been, bubbles rose to the dark surface, breaking in tiny circles until they were done.

  Skarga battled against the deeps like a berserk warrior, but the tidal surge, with far greater strength than her own, slung her back towards the beach like broken driftwood. She scrambled up to the rocks and turned, hurling herself again into the water. Before she went under, she saw the dorsal fin of the sea creature rise up from the watery shadows, directly beside the boat. Then she was beneath the waves.

  She had shut her eyes. Now she found they were open. As if somehow there was more light beneath the ocean than in the sky above, she saw a myriad of crystalline pictures, disjointed, merging, separating, embracing again like the tides themselves. On the sea bed around her she saw the scattered jagged rocks, thick with waving silky weed, fanned, ferny, drifting, sleek green as the forest. On one flattened plateau of sand were two rocks held with rope. The rope was frayed and broken as if the weight of the sinking stones had burst their twine. Beside them the white opalescence of a small body lay curled, buffeted a little by the surging current but without movement of its own. The small face was turned away, the arms limp in the buoyancy of the swell. The child had found his own eternal peace.

  Skarga stretched out desperately and repeatedly, struggling, kicking against the swell, reaching, distraught, her cries forced back into her throat with unexpressed fury, but was pulled again and again away from touch and salvation. She gagged, still striving. Her desperate fingers battled forward but the current dragged her back and down, caught by the great power of the tide and tossed like a moth in the wind. Another force was moving against her. Below water the giant bulk of the sea creature emerged once more from the blackness and even from the depths its white blazons created light. Then she saw the bottom of the little boat where the clinkered keel curved above her. Tip tilted and battered, one side was almost below the waves, the other swung high. The sea monster crashed it again, ramming against the thin planks. The keel shattered. The plunging of the oars ceased, falling in a splintered twist of flying wood and spray.

  Now splashing backwards from the tumult, Skarga saw. She watched as the sea beast took her brother’s arm and tossed him from the leaking boat. She knew it was Gunulf for she saw his open mouth and gaping, terrified eyes as he hurtled high into the air like a spinning toy, before crashing back into the ocean. Two great rows of pointed teeth took him. Then Skarga saw only blood. Pumping clouds discoloured the waters, the deep crimson shimmering in the moonlight before everything turned to pitch.

  Knowing she was drowning, Skarga struggled once again, effort waning as she lost consciousness. She saw swirling blackness, and then nothing at all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Skarga woke amazingly alive and gulping frost. Sodden and shivering, there was no warm reassurance of wolf pelt cloak and no shelter of the cart, but she was on land and breathing air. She wedged herself slowly, her head pounding, up onto one elbow and looked around. The untethered pony was grazing in the long grass just beside her. The cart, shafts to the ground, was at some distance behind him. It was daylight and a bleary sun was already high behind the tree tops. Skarga flopped onto her back and looked straight up at the clouds. A sea eagle was flying north, very fast, a streak of grey wind in the high mists. A little way behind another eagle followed, smaller and darker in colour, a golden eagle perhaps, of the sort that Egil had loved most of all.

  Skarga cried for a long time. Her eyes stung and her face became as wet as her clothes. Utterly exhausted, she stayed prone, sobbing and refusing to think. It was the chill that eventually moved her. Although the sun had a saffron tinge, the ground beneath her was a soft slush moulded to the wet coil of her body. She rolled over and staggered upright, brushing some of the mud from her tunic, Tovhilda’s clothes, a great kindness since the woman owned barely enough to dress herself and these were probably her best. The leather belt remained undamaged and the little knife still rested safe.

  Skarga re-harnessed and clambered into the cart. She could not remember ever having released the pony previously, nor, if it came to that, could she remember escaping the waves or struggling back up the cliffs, but nothing except Egil’s death now troubled her. She took up the reins and guided the reluctant horse back onto the path, again heading south. After a moment she saw her own cloak lying discarded on the ground, and she dismounted quickly and gathered it up. Although sure she had left it quite elsewhere, such minor problems did not stay in her mind.

  The breeze dried her hair and some of her clothes and the pony picked up speed. She was further along the southern track than she had ever been and could recognise no landmarks, when she saw the eagle again. It was very high amongst the branches of a bent yew and was gazing down at her through the leaf spangle. Skarga began to cry and this time could not stop, though the cart rumbled on its way as the sun finally sank into its long grey twilight. She had come to no township when she stopped finally for the night, and those few outlying farms along the way, with their fields dipping down towards the milder winds, did not tempt her to explore. She was approaching kinder lands of greater warmth where freedom, even alone and desperately lonely, would have a solid worth though hap
piness seemed no longer possible, for all her thought was of Egil. With her cloak around her, she slept beneath a tree, but it was memory that she felt herself wrapped beneath, and the memories, although often warm, kept her very cold. Egil’s small and unimportant history now seemed of more value than all the sagas, and of far greater worth than her own pointless struggle through these nineteen years of her life until now; its moment of greatest sadness.

  Many new born children were abandoned on the isolated slopes of the mountains where the harsh winds and storms would kill them quickly before they became too attached to the pleasant habit of breathing. But Egil had not been new born. He had been a fat child, well formed and well fed, some several months of age at least, and already chuckling. There was no bed made for him, no nest of leaves or grassy hollow to make his death more bearable. Even parents refusing the burden of another child into a famished family, would fashion some guilty comfort for the child they left alone for wolves and eagles, to snow and gale. Even those malformed like Tovhilda, the legless infants, the blind or blemished, would often be wrapped in wool and laid carefully sheltered beneath some tree or bush.

  Skarga had discovered Egil, yelling lustily, on the ice shaved foothills between hillocks. Kicking fat legs and demanding an attention which would bring wolves quicker than any protector, he was naked and noisily fierce. Skarga had swept him up and carried him home. The baby’s arms had clasped her neck, his mouth had clamped wet and hopeful against her cheek and he had smiled. She had not let go of him for many days except to make him clothes and feed him.

  In that time she had not been hated by her family. That had come soon after. As a headstrong step-child she had never been loved by Tove, nor by the straddle legged toddler Asved who had always resented her motherly efforts. Her father preferred she keep out of his way, but her three elder brothers, especially the eldest Hakon, had shown a careless and spasmodic affection with brotherly teasing, whacking, tripping, punching and chasing. Skarga learned to defend herself. How much fondness she exhibited in return while examining her bruises, was unremembered.