The Winter Isles Read online

  Soon he would have to admit that his self-appointed mission, which he had laden with boasts and empty prophecies, was a failure. That he, Gillebrigte, son of Gilleadoman, was a failure. That he was no Fionn mac Cumhail, nor even close. Just a small, unsuccessful man living in a leaky hall with reluctant retainers who were themselves out of options.

  There were just twenty left of the forty who had set out from Ireland four years before. Gillebrigte of the Caves. It was a good name, for a man backed into a corner. A man riven by the chasm between his ambition and his abilities.

  But Somerled owed him loyalty. And, he supposed, love. He watched his father with the little bastards, throwing them skywards until they giggled, tickling them, chasing them. It brought back memories as soft as dreams of his own infant-hood, before all the expectations of the clan fell on him – the only true-born son.

  He turned away from his father, to Father Padeen on the other side. Padeen had welcomed him back from his first kill with a smile and a pat, and a reserve that had seemed excessive to the jubilant, elated boy. Now, with the warriors’ roaring turning sour for him, he sought the priest.

  He leaned across to him, putting his head close to the priest’s ear. Without preamble he said: ‘What makes a leader?’

  ‘Lord, boy. And what a question. The ability to win fortune and glory for his followers.’

  Somerled and Father Padeen talked quietly in Latin, the boy thankful now for all the hours they had spent on the language. Knowing his young pupil, Padeen had taken the lessons outside. They had invented a new technique for salmon fishing, boring the poor bastards to sleep with the endless conjugating and declaiming before hooking them out. God knows what use it would be in his life, but he liked being able to talk to Father Padeen quietly.

  ‘But what is that ability made of?’ he asked the priest.

  ‘Skill at arms, cunning, the power to read men.’

  ‘Can you learn these things?’

  ‘The first, yes.’ Padeen spread his arms wide. ‘The others are God’s gift.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Something …’ the priest paused, ‘indefinable.’

  ‘Define it.’

  ‘Puppy,’ said Padeen, smiling. ‘All right. Luck, I suppose. A sense inspired in others, real or imagined, of divine favour.’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ Somerled leaned forward. ‘So you can do everything right, and not have that luck?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said the priest slowly. ‘But some men can forge it for themselves.’

  ‘Who? How?’

  ‘Well, Alexander. Octavian.’

  Somerled waved a dismissive arm. ‘Them! Ancients. But how?’

  Padeen shrugged. ‘A mystery.’

  Somerled slumped backwards.

  Padeen, his voice slow and considered, said: ‘Alexander shared his men’s hardships – he asked nothing of them that he would not do himself. Yet the emperors in the Great City never see the common people. They are separated by a tribe of eunuchs.’

  ‘Eunuchs?’

  ‘Men with their parts cut out.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Somerled shivered.

  ‘Boy! Although perhaps the blasphemy is, in this instance, understandable.’

  He laughed loudly. Somerled sensed Gillebrigte leaning in to catch the joke, and he turned closer in to the priest.

  Padeen, the hint taken, lowered his voice. ‘My point, boy, is that the people of Constantinople expect their king to be distant, impossibly regal. If he jumped down from his palanquin and tried to share their pot, they would assume his wits were gone. The Macedonians wanted one thing, today’s Greeks another. To lead a people, you must first understand how they want their leader to be.’

  ‘You must play a part?’

  ‘Yes.’ They were silent for a space, both, perhaps, thinking of Gillebrigte. But Somerled would not voice his thoughts even to Father Padeen.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Padeen, at last, ‘the part can only be played convincingly if the player feels conviction.’

  ‘So the playing becomes real?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A voice barrelled into their midst. ‘Now is not the time for God, boy.’

  Gillebrigte stood and raised his horn. ‘My son!’ he shouted. They drank again, noisily. As Gillebrigte sat down, he glanced across at Somerled, who thought he saw something ugly in the old man’s gaze; something hidden and vicious.

  ~~~

  As soon as he could slip out unnoticed, Somerled left the hall. He had long been anticipating the sensation of stepping outside. By Christ, it felt good. The cold air licked his forehead, the quiet was soft on his ringing ears.

  He walked down to the beach, easy in the darkness. The familiar stones crunched underfoot. It was a soft, enveloping night. He could see the white of the breakers in the darkness. Above, the stars were just where they should be, unconcerned that he had killed a man. He had killed a man.

  Suddenly he felt a bubble of something rising in him – shame? Fear? It was hard to name, but it came spewing out of his mouth in a froth of mead and mutton juice. He knelt on the stony path and retched.

  ‘Better?’ A small voice behind him.

  He nodded.

  She ran down to the sea, becoming more indistinct as she neared the luminous breakers. For a terrible second he thought she meant to swim away, to join the sea fairies and leave him here, on this beach, alone. Just as he stumbled to his feet, he saw her coming back through the gloom. She had a cloth, wet with seawater, and she used it to wipe his face, to smooth the hair back from his forehead. He ran his tongue across his lips, eager for the salt.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  They sat in silence for a while, on the flat-topped rock beside the dune. Her knees were pulled up under her chin, and she looked up, beyond him, to the stars. She liked watching for the shooters, on clear nights like this one.

  A new song thrummed in his head.

  I am Somerled. Puke-heaver, boy-killer, death-fearer.

  He looked towards her, his skinny, freckled shadow.

  Otter-lover.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Christ love me,’ he said, ‘but it felt good.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was dead, and I was alive. And him being so dead made me more alive.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Who was he, do you know?’

  ‘He looked well-born. Cattle raiders, Father said, but …’ He trailed off.

  ‘But?’

  ‘I thought they could be scouts. It’s raiding season.’

  ‘They were Northmen?’

  He nodded. ‘Not newcomers, from the look of them. From Man, perhaps, or the Outer Isles.’

  ‘But if they were scouts …’ She paused, and looked at him.

  He nodded. ‘Father said no. But if it were me, I would be posting proper sentries. Waiting before I unleashed the mead stream.’

  ‘They needed a victory,’ she said, and they paused to listen to the chorus of a drinking song, seeping out of the hall.

  ‘Yes,’ said Somerled. ‘Perhaps he is right then. But if it were me …’

  ‘And yet it is not.’

  ‘No.’

  He remembered another day, when they were younger, when he had boasted of what he would do when he was a man, and King of Argyll. And she had not mocked him, but had asked him to explain it all to her. So he had drawn a map in the sand, like the one Padeen had taught him from. He had drawn the contours of the Great Sea, and the islands stretching down from the strange, wild Norse ones at the top, past holy Iona and giant Mull, down past Islay and all the way to Man. The islands were misshapes in the sand, Mull too big and Man too small. ‘And yet,’ he had said, ‘the power in the isles comes from Man. Olaf Crovan, whose father was Godred, the Norse warrior of warriors. He came out of Dublin, the stronghold of the Norse – here.’ He pointed to the mainland.

  ‘My father went there once,’ she said, nodding.

  ‘Well, Godred Crovan, from t
he tree of Ivar, took Man in our grandfathers’ time, and now it takes tribute from the southern islands.’

  He traced the finger of Kintyre down to where it pointed at the Irish mainland. ‘We are here,’ he said. ‘Not far from where we first landed.’

  She looked up at this.

  ‘Once, it is said, we ruled, in name at least, from here to here.’ He pointed from the tip of Kintyre, up along its ridge, towards the great sea lochs, and over them into Morvern and across to Ardnamurchan. ‘But my grandfather, Gilleadoman, lost these lands thanks to Macbeth, the traitor, and his brother Donald Ban, and their weasel dealings with the Northmen, the Lochlannaich. Here, in the north, he lost the last of it, when Magnus Barelegs came rampaging through the isles from Norway.’

  ‘That was when you came to Antrim?’

  ‘I was not born. But yes, my people came to Antrim, to our cousins descended from Colla Uais, the High King of Ireland.’

  ‘And here you are.’

  ‘Here we are. We’ve claimed back this beach, hey. And the warriors dribble away. The whole coast is a pit of rival groups, Lochlannaich and Gael all mixed and snarling at each other. It should have been ripe for the taking. It should have been.’

  A giant roar from the hall. They were still going. He leaned against the Otter on the flat-topped rock. Silent and comfortable, back to back. I am Somerled. Puke-heaver, mead-dodger, soft-bellied, Otter-lover.

  He remembered the fierce twelve-year-old boy who had railed against his elders’ weaknesses. But was the twelve-year-old so wrong? They had landed with a host, but caution and attrition had whittled down the band. They were clinging on now. Another small thane with a few cows and a straggle of followers.

  It should have been one throw. One bold bid for the queen. One fierce king-move on the tafl board.

  Again, was he being fair? Father Padeen always said that it was easier for the young to gamble, because they never truly believed in the possibility of failure. Ageing, he said, was the wearying accretion of small failures.

  They heard the dogs barking, the sound drifting down across the machair.

  He felt the Otter stiffen. ‘That’s Cip,’ she said. She loved the dogs, the Otter, and they loved her, pushing their wet noses into her hands, fighting to be the one to lick her.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He does not bark for fun, Somerled. Never.’

  The boy scrambled to his feet and grabbed her hand, and they ran back towards the hall. Thinking as he ran, Somerled veered up the steep bank to the right of the hall before they reached the door, which streamed with light. He wanted to preserve their night vision, find out what was happening. They flitted up the path, their childhood games turning serious now. At the bluff, they crouched, wordlessly, and inched forward.

  Somerled looked out, scanning the dark horizon. Nothing. He felt the Otter move away, along the top of the low cliff. He scanned, straining his eyes to see. The moon was a sliver, and hidden anyway behind a dark cloud with silvering edges. Nothing. He relaxed, aware suddenly that the heather was wet, and seeping through at the knees. He cursed softly.

  Suddenly the Otter was back. Sliding next to him, she put her mouth to his ear, so close her words tickled.

  ‘A boat. Some sort of galley. Beached in the bay across.’

  ‘Mary and Joseph,’ whispered Somerled. They had beached, and now they must be circling. The small crew this afternoon had been scouts. Jesus, the boy he’d killed could be the jarl’s son. His firstborn.

  ‘Stay here,’ he said to Otter. She made to stand, and he gripped her skinny shoulders. ‘Stay the fuck here.’ He hissed the words, and she nodded.

  ~~~

  He ran into the hall, shouting for silence.

  ‘To arms!’ he screamed, his voice cracking into a high note. ‘An ambush.’

  A heartbeat of stunned silence, and then a roaring, swearing panic. At the head of the maelstrom stood his father, still and silent. Why wasn’t he moving, the daft old bugger? Move.

  Aed, huge and mead-crazed, like something out of the legends of the north that his mother spun, jumped across a table and stood near him. ‘Where are they, boy?’

  ‘Their boat is beached on the strand beyond the bluff. They are coming.’

  ‘Do we have time?’

  ‘I don’t know. No.’

  All around them were the muttered curses of men trying to find their gear and their wits. And still Gillebrigte stood motionless. At the far end of the hall, the women were shushing the clutch of children, whose wails were fuelling the panic. Somerled ran over to them. His own mother, bright-eyed but calm, came forward to him.

  ‘Take them out. Hide in the far dunes. The watchword for friends is “Otter”. Do not emerge until you hear the word.’

  She nodded, and turned. From behind him, a voice. ‘Giving orders, are you, boy?’

  He looked at his father, at the broken veins in his flushed cheeks and the watery eyes. ‘Are you?’ he asked, lightly.

  Aed shouted: ‘We are ready, lord.’

  They both turned to look at him. The men were ranged up, helmeted and swaying, the firelight glinting off their steel, shining from their mead-rich eyes. Along with them were some of the boys, Somerled’s unblooded childhood friends. Domnall, Diarmait and Ruaridh. Where they had found their arms from, he did not know. Ruaridh, yet to grow, was dwarfed by his helmet, which tipped over his eyes, giving him a raffish air. Somerled would have laughed at him, called the banter down on his head, but now was not the time. Father Padeen, his helmet covering his tonsured forehead and his great axe jumping from hand to hand, nodded at him, then hazarded a wink.

  Gillebrigte stood next to him, breathing heavily. Suddenly he sank to his knees and began to puke noisily on the heather-strewn floor. Jesus wept, thought Somerled. He waited a pause for someone else to speak; Aed or Iehmarc. He looked at Iehmarc, the weasel man, his father’s pet sycophant, who raised an eyebrow.

  Jesus. Breathe. Straw leader. Fake warrior.

  ‘Storm out,’ he shouted. ‘Defensive shields, in a half-circle. They’ll see us better than we’ll see them as we come out. We need to get the women away. Mother, come out behind us.’

  ‘Aren’t they safer here?’ asked Iehmarc.

  ‘We don’t know how many there are. If they fuck us up first, what’s the next thing they’ll do?’

  ‘We’ll take our chances with the night faeries, Iehmarc,’ shouted his mother. ‘Not wait here to be spitted.’

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  ‘Now!’

  Outside was shockingly quiet. For the second time that night, Somerled felt the cold air slap him alert. In the rounded half-circle, they paused, taking stock. Behind them, the women and children flitted. The baby – Aed’s child by his pocket-sized wife Oona – shrieked, breaking the silence. The warriors flinched, waiting for the spears. They stood in close, shields up, fidgeting and grumbling softly, checking their hastily donned gear, looking out over the tops of their shields into the darkness. The mountains loomed black against the ink-blue sky, the summits circling in on them like crook-backed ancients. From behind them came the the susurrant hiss of a calm sea.

  Slowly, the tension began to unwind.

  Somerled peered out at the nearest shadows, where rocks lurked in tricksy silhouettes and hillocks promised cover to phantoms.

  Beside him, Aed shifted weight from one foot to the other, the pebbles scrunching with the movement. The grumbling became a little louder – fewer muttered incantations and more whispered whines.

  So, thought Somerled. Would I rather be wrong and look foolish, or be right and be facing a horde? It was, he thought, an interesting question; one to unpick later.

  Thorfinn the Catcher, a big man with more Norse than Gael, was the first to speak. ‘Well, little lord,’ he said. ‘And did I not have a full horn of mead? Are we done with your joke?’

  Aed grunted his disapproval.

  ‘Hold fast,’ said Somerled.

  ‘There!’ shouted Iehmar
c.

  Somerled whirled round.

  ‘’Tis a fairy coming to murder us,’ Iehmarc hooted. ‘Show it your arse, Aed, that’ll send the bugger running.’

  The laughter ran through the line. Somerled felt Aed grappling for a comeback.

  ‘Sheep-raper,’ said the giant.

  ‘Is that your best?’ said Thorfinn.

  ‘Hush!’ hissed Somerled. He closed his eyes tight, and counted to five. Opening them again, he found the scene clearer; the shadows resolving themselves into recognisable shapes. He heard, somewhere, the crunch of a foot on stones. The women?

  Iehmarc began to sing a quiet song about drinking. Somerled had noticed that when his father was not around, the steward seemed to widen and coarsen, as if the man burdened with flattering Gillebrigte had a counterbalance, a shape-shifted identity who lashed his tongue at underlings and kept his smiles on a tight leash.

  This drunk, rash Iehmarc was a new thing. His song grew louder and louder, until at last he was shouting through Somerled and Aed’s shushing. As the chorus came, Iehmarc’s brother, young Niall, stepped forward out of the line, holding his shield above his head like a serving tray. He danced a jig designed to make his few mates laugh, and they obliged.

  ‘Well then, puppy,’ said Iehmarc, grinning at Somerled. ‘Are we done? Can we bring back the women?’

  He was still grinning when the spear took his brother in the throat, with a savage tearing that sent the boy reeling to the floor. They came like summer rain then, spitting on to the raised shields, seeking out bare flesh.

  Behind the spears came the men. It was, in the darkness, like being attacked by something mythical. A sea serpent with coiling metal scales that flashed and screamed and bit. It snaked round them, screaming, screaming, a great looping ululation that drove the wind from Somerled’s stomach and wiped his mind blank. Sparks showered in the black night air as steel clanged on steel. Around him, men were falling.

  Not Aed; oh God set a flower upon his head. Not Aed. The warrior screamed back, and whirled and danced with death, his great shaggy coat soon matted with blood. His own? Theirs? Somerled screamed too, and the screaming helped him push forward; to parry and hack and thrust with the roar pounding in his head like a fist. A man’s face, close. Not his man. He jerked his shield up, taking his opponent’s nose with it, watching it spread across his face, watching the blood spraying like mucus and the man’s crazed eyes above. His sword came from under, and took the stranger in the ribs. Punching and slicing, and pulling back, his grip on the pommel slippery and slimy.