The Winter Isles Read online

  She shuddered, and he saw that she was beginning to cry. She never cried, his mother. Not even in the days after they landed here first from Ireland, two years ago. The days when their initial rush at the usurpers had been rebuffed, and they had found themselves living in caves so cold that freezing water dribbled down the walls and icicles stood to attention at the entrance.

  He squirmed at the sight of the tears.

  ‘Father Padeen says that children sit at Christ’s right hand,’ she said. ‘I told him he was using my grief to befuddle me with fairy tales. He said—’

  ‘And here he is himself,’ said Somerled, looking over her shoulder to the doorway, where the great bulk of the priest paused.

  She turned and smiled at him, and he walked forward. Somerled could not fathom these two: priest and pagan. They spent their days wrangling endlessly. She clung to the gods of her grandfathers, resisting the near-universal pressure to convert. She was convinced that they had spoken to her, the gods, in a fever dream, when she was young and sick and expected to die. On her recovery, her faith had become unshakeable, despite the pressure of her mother and her husband, and the motley band of priests and wise men both had sent to fight repeatedly for her soul.

  Yet they liked each other, Father Padeen and Sigrdrifa, the jarl’s natural daughter from Orkney. Somerled suspected that if ever he won the battle for her soul, Father Padeen would be disappointed at losing his sparring partner.

  Father Padeen crouched by his side, sighing heavily as he eased into the squat.

  ‘And how is the Culdee himself?’

  ‘Don’t be filling his head with that nonsense, you oaf of a priest.’

  ‘What is a Culdee, Father?’ asked Somerled.

  ‘A holy man, boy. Who seeks to find God in the wilderness. Some live on islands like yours. For years, not just a few days.’

  His mother grunted.

  Father Padeen said: ‘They model themselves on the desert monks of the Great City.’

  Somerled looked a question, and Padeen, his great moon face smiling, said: ‘Well, then. They believe, these godly men, that they can be closer to God in the quiet of the wilderness. Did not our Lord stay in the desert forty days and forty nights? The desert is hard to picture in this fruitful land of rain and bog. It is a place all of sand, where no rain falls. And the first and greatest of them all, boy, was St Simeon Stylites. He lived on top of a pole for forty years, praying and singing, and telling the Lord of his love.’

  Fascinated in spite of herself, for she loved Padeen’s tales of life beyond the seas, Sigrdrifa listened. Aedith crept forward, keeping to the shadows.

  ‘A pole,’ said Father Padeen, ‘so wide.’ He held his hands as wide as a butter churn.

  ‘And how did he eat and drink?’ asked Sigrdrifa.

  ‘Forty years!’ whispered Aedith.

  ‘The people loved him, and they put food and drink in a basket and he hauled it up to the top of the pole.’ Padeen mimed the people watching the basket rising, necks craned. Aedith’s head followed, and she stared at the ceiling, where the meat hung in the smoke reaching the rafters, her mouth a great round O, the awe as real as if Simeon himself perched in the beams like a pious bat.

  ‘And then,’ said Sigrdrifa, ‘he shat on their heads.’ She laughed, a great roaring laugh that drew Aedith and Somerled in, and even Padeen’s face cracked a little, though he tried to look severe.

  ‘You are hopeless, and faithless, woman,’ he said.

  ‘True, true,’ she said. ‘But what a ninny. What a berk, sitting up there on that pole for forty years. If that God of yours has any sense, Padeen, he was pissing himself laughing. If you can show me proof that your tortured Christ found it funny, that stupid man wasting his life praying on top of a pole, then I will let you put the cross on my forehead.’

  He spread his hands in defeat, and she moved back to poke at the fire, still laughing and muttering. ‘What a fool, what a fool!’

  Padeen shook his head in exaggerated despair and turned to Somerled.

  ‘We were worried, boy.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No matter. And what have you learned?’

  ‘Learned?’

  ‘Yes. For what use are misadventures if we do not learn from them?’

  Somerled thought for a moment. ‘That prayer comforts us. That I must not always trust my own judgement. I thought I could weather the island, and I was wrong. Desire to do it clouded my weighing of the risks.’

  Padeen nodded. Silently the boy added: That left alone I am not as brave as I thought I was. That if no one watches, I weep like a girl. That I want songs to be sung of me. That fame and bravery go hand in hand; the two cannot exist without each other.

  Aloud, he said: ‘But most of all, Father, I learned that I must learn how to swim.’

  ~~~

  Padeen pulled the girl out from behind his back. She was, at first sight, unpromising.

  ‘They call her the Otter,’ said the priest.

  Somerled eyed her. She was small and red, and fiercely freckled. One of the little ones he paid no heed to. Despite his father’s lack of progress in subduing his birthright, his followers remained with him, their families deposited here in the safest of the glens. A gaggle of children ran wild under the benign hand of Father Padeen, the distracted mothers and the few slaves left of those they had brought over the sea. Somerled ignored the littler ones, mainly. He ran with the boys, and, when they would let him, the older girls. This little sprite was one of his younger sister Brigte’s friends.

  ‘Your father?’

  She twisted a little, and he thought her shy until he realized that she was squirming from the priest’s grasp. Level-eyed, she said: ‘My name is Eimhear. My father is Fhearghais, son of Fionn.’

  He nodded. One of the lordless Antrim warriors who were following his father more in hope than expectation. If, by the grace of God, Gillebrigte won back these lands, despite the odds against him and despite, the boy whispered to his private heart, his weakness, then they would be rewarded. In the meantime, this little freckled otter was wearing a gown too small and a cloak so patched you could not tell what colour it started at. About nine, he thought. Ten perhaps.

  ‘And you can swim?’ he asked her.

  ‘Aye,’ she shrugged.

  ‘How?’

  She raised her shoulders again. ‘If a seal can do it, how could I not? The daft creatures.’

  Father Padeen laughed. ‘Watch this one,’ he said.

  Together they walked towards the shore. With no preamble, she shrugged off her cloak and her dress and stood in her undergown, wind-whipped and tiny against the vastness of sea and sky, smudging together in shades of grey. She glanced at him and threw a silent challenge, then turned and ran straight at the surf. She skipped over the first few waves, and flung herself forward under the biggest, bobbing to the surface with an inarticulate shout to the sky.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Somerled!’

  ‘Sorry, Father. Are you coming?’

  ‘If the good Lord had wanted us to swim, would he have walked on the stuff?’

  Somerled stripped down to his tunic and started to walk in. ‘God’s bones, but it’s cold!’

  Father Padeen began to laugh.

  ‘Go quicker!’ shouted the Otter. ‘It’s the only way.’

  ‘Wait until it reaches your balls, boy,’ said Father Padeen behind him, through great sobs of laughter.

  He’s right, thought Somerled, fighting to keep going. Lord, but he’d like to run out again.

  With the water at waist height, the pain of the cold began to ease.

  ‘Like this,’ she said, showing him. He flung himself at the water, only to sink in a whirl of bubbles and fear.

  He felt a small hand grabbing his chin, pulling him up. She wasn’t laughing. Her fine-boned face was serious, contained. ‘Let’s float first,’ she said. ‘Imagine you’re made of driftwood. You’re just trying to bob. On your back, like this.’ Her freckled n
ose poked up from the water as she rippled on the waves. Clear brown eyes appraised him.

  She held his head, and he lay back in the water.

  ‘Trust me,’ she rapped as he began to panic and twist. ‘Trust me. Just let every muscle relax. It only works if you give in to it. Listen to the sea. Can you hear it?’

  He heard the scrape of the pebbles beneath the waves, and the rushing hiss of where the water met the land.

  ‘Lie still, Lord.’

  She let go, and for a moment he felt suspended between sky and sea, his body undulating on the swell like seaweed. Then the strangeness overtook him, and he began to tense, caught between laughter and fear. He lost his sense of balance, his closeness to the sea, the waves. He began to turn and sink, the bubbles rising and the salt water rushing up his nose.

  She pulled him up again, and this time she was smiling. ‘Do you fight better than you float, Lord Somerled?’

  ‘I find floating doesn’t answer when the swords are singing,’ he said, liking her. He wanted to keep her smiling, he realized. This strange otter child, with her solemn eyes and shining smile.

  ‘Shall we try again, Lord?’ He nodded and lay back, her small hands holding his head above the cold water.

  ~~~

  By the end of that autumn, he could float unaided, swim confidently as long as the tide was with him and even, when the spirit took him, turn icy somersaults and come up laughing. The Otter liked to dive beneath the waves and jump up behind him when he was not expecting it. She turned back somersaults too, staying under to walk on her hands across the shingle, only her skinny white legs poking up above the waves. Sometimes she climbed up on to his shoulders and plunged into the water head first and arms extended.

  They liked it best when the seals came to play. Soon Somerled was comfortable enough to swim beneath the water, his eyes open and salt-stung, watching the irresistible rippling of their underwater bodies. They would come close, the seals, so close. He watched the Otter once, treading water, as a young pup came so near their noses were almost touching, before it swam away and left her laughing so hard she had to fight to float. The seal would laugh if it could, he knew.

  They swam until their lips turned blue and the shivering became uncontrollable. The evenings were the best time, after his lessons and her chores. He soaked away the Latin in the cold water, forgot the roll call of the ancestors and the great reams of poetry, the swordplay and archery. She left her spindle, forgot the hated loom; forgot even the plaque made of whalebone which she used to straighten the linen as it lay in damp mounds from the washing.

  Until, at last, the days grew shorter and it was too cold even for the Otter. Then they had to make do with talking instead. They hid in the dunes, bunkering down where the wind did not reach. It was better to hide; the boys did not understand his friendship with the little girl. But they did not know her fierce, searching mind. They did not know that within the small freckled package sat a questing soul so insatiable for life, for knowledge, for experience that Somerled felt humbled when he allowed himself to think of it.

  They travelled, those two, hunkered down in the hollows. They went to Vinland, the fabled land so far beyond the horizon a man could die of hunger on the way. They went to Miklagard, the Great City that the Franks call Constantinople, sharing tales of emperors and intrigues, of coups and decadence, of pleasure gardens and sewers. They tried to make sense of it by looking at the stars, that all those people could crowd into one small place, living on top of each other, side by side. They travelled to the lands of the Rus, and to the far north, where white bears ruled. They talked of Rome; of the fountainhead of their faith. And even of Jerusalem, where the Lord pulled down the Temple. But most of all of Miklagard, where the emperor ruled from a golden throne.

  ‘One day,’ he said. ‘One day, I’ll take you.’

  And she looked at him, fierce and trusting all at once, so that he swelled with the pride of being the anointed one, the one who could take her roaming.

  In the spring, their thoughts turned to the water again. One night, on the beach, waiting for the whistle home to bed, she said: ‘My father says that I am becoming too old for the swimming.’

  ‘You’re a scrap still, Otter. Tiny.’

  ‘He hates that I’m the Otter. Says a woman must stick to her given name.’

  ‘You are not yet a woman. Besides, men find their own names.’

  ‘Men find their own everything.’

  ‘Would you rather be a boy, Otter?’

  ‘Of course. Foolish question.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Who would not want to settle their own fate?’

  ‘I cannot, and I am a boy.’

  ‘Oh, I know. Poor, poor you. To be the chief’s son. To be the chosen one, the tanist. To be put in the way of fame and glory and riches.’

  ‘And failure.’

  ‘Pah. That’s what worries you? Don’t fail, then.’

  ‘What of you?’

  ‘They will marry me off to some fool who goes off raiding, leaving me at home to pray he is knocked on the head, while I spin and weave and pickle and smoke, until at last they bury me with my spindle, so I can spend eternity as well as this life being bored witless.’

  The moon was bright, and he looked sideways at her. She scanned the skies with restless eyes. She took him off guard, this imp. He could not always tell when she was speaking seriously, or to amuse herself. She was so unlike the other ten-year-olds. He thought back to himself at ten; how simple and uncomplicated seemed this world, bordered by sea and moor, with all the joys in between.

  He tried to explain it to her. How, that now he was growing, the world was becoming troublesome.

  ‘Is it me, or is it the world? Which is becoming complicated?’ he asked.

  She turned her face to him, smiling and sad all at once.

  ‘It’s you, stupid. You’re learning to see the shadows.’

  EIMHEAR

  Last night, I thought about being young. I remembered Somerled promising to take me to Miklagard. How he turned to me in the darkness and said it with a solemnity that made sense under the stars. ‘I will take you,’ he said, and I believed him.

  A blessing on that little freckled sprite that was me. One thousand kisses for her frowning brow; her trusting face. I can see her in my daughter. I love my child in her every mood, but the one that makes me jolt, that makes me think of falling backwards from a high cliff, is her serious face. That point of concentrated innocence. Absorbed in her letters, or her wool-work, she pushes her hair from her eyes. A single line, off-centre, creases her forehead. She is unaware of me, of the background hum of wave and wind. There is only the quick working of her hands and a quietness of soul. Her mother, standing unnoticed behind her, rages at the trials she will face, the scratches to skin and heart, the violent intent of the world to crush her grave joy.

  Breathe, Eimhear, breathe. Perhaps she will be unscathed. Perhaps she will sail through the storms flecked with gold, the wind behind her, dolphins dancing in the bow waves. Perhaps.

  What made me think of Somerled’s promise? We had a visitor last night. A pilgrim on his way to Iona. It was late and rough-waved when he arrived, and he stayed the night. Fussed over and cosseted by the women, who were desperate for news, for stories, for anything he could give.

  He was old, tanned bronze from a stronger sun than ours. He had the unwarranted pomposity of a man who thinks himself clever among the clattering of women. But, after all, he had come from Miklagard. He was an envoy for the king over in Alba, he said. Sent to treat with the emperor. He shifted in his seat as he said this, and I caught Eua’s sliding eyes and we tried not to laugh openly at him. He was a servant to the envoy perhaps. Rough hands; a creaking way of talking, like a man unused to being heard.

  Still, he had been to Miklagard in the past year. I have been to the beach on the far side of the island; and that only once. We listened to him talk, threading gold in our heads from his halting weave.

&n
bsp; He told us of the size of it – he said it would take a day to walk from the first house to the last; and the houses all crowd on top of each other. Families live above families above families. We stared in wonder, and I tried to imagine it, but I couldn’t. How could that be? I looked up into the rafters and imagined a whole other floor beyond, and another beyond that. Like ants, they must be. But do they know themselves ants, or do they think themselves gods? If I lived in Miklagard, perched on top of other people’s souls, I would think myself a god.

  He told us of gold, and silks. Of strange beasts with green spit and humped backs. He told us of men with black faces, of priests and warriors. Then he said: ‘There is a princess, there, named Anna. She is an abomination.’

  How so? we asked, thinking salacious thoughts of a high-born whore. It was long since we had seen a man worth tupping.

  He leaned forward, looking around at us, enjoying the pause. Doubtless imagining himself as the tupper.

  ‘She is more learned than any man in Christendom,’ he said, in a low and growling voice. ‘She fancies herself a philosopher. What is a man? she asks. What is God? She knows more about the stars than the priests. She does magic with numbers, thinks herself a healer. She has seven tongues, they say. She reads old poets; stuff where heathens boast about their false gods.’

  He built each sentence on the tutting of the women, waiting for their disapproval before starting the next.

  ‘She is not even ashamed of this. She boasts of it. She parades herself as a scholar and a teacher. She runs a hospital, where she tends to sick people, even men.’

  Exhausted at last by his invective, he sat back. I stood then, disorientated, a pitcher of hot water in my hands. I swayed and quivered with the urge to throw it at him, to douse the irritating, pompous bastard. I moved forward, feeling like the champion of this foreign princess, as if her honour rested with me. Lord help me, I would have done it too. But Eua, sensing something in my mood, stood suddenly between us, hands on ample hips.