‘Hi,’ barked a voice behind him, ‘stop looking at her as if she was your first girl and get on with pitching that seam!’ and he came back to himself and looking over his shoulder saw old Hrodni the master shipwright, and with him, wrapped in a sealskin mantle against the chill wind, the Lady Aud come down to see how the ready-making of her galley went forward. She did not say anything to the men at work along her curving clinker-built sides, but for a splinter of time her eyes met Bjarni’s, and as he got back to his pitch pot and Fionoula’s seams, he had the oddest idea that he could feel them still, resting thoughtfully on the back of his neck until, deep in talk with the master shipwright, she moved on.
It was the custom in the settlement long since agreed to by Thorstein the Red that each year the Lady Aud might name her own rowers, who also served her as bodyguard, for the Easter faring. For the most part she chose the same men year after year, but three days later when Verland Ottarson, who was always her captain and ship chief, called in the chosen ones, Bjarni was amongst them.
At first he did not believe it. ‘You have got the wrong Bjarni. There’s more than one of us on Mull.’
‘Only one cack-handed swordsman who sold his sword-service to the chief last harvest end, and him with a black dog lame in one paw.’
Bjarni looked about him at the chosen crew, knowing them all: a Christian crew for a Christian sea-faring. ‘I am not of the Lady’s faith,’ he said. ‘Tell her – she’ll have forgotten.’
‘Tell her theesen,’ growled Verland, ‘I’ve better things to do.’
He found the Lady Aud in the herb plot behind the bower, sitting on a turf seat and watching the first bees among the physic herbs that Muirgoed was tending, the two brindled hounds lying at her feet.
‘Lady,’ he began when he stood in front of her, and then checked, not quite sure how to go on.
She looked at him, her beautiful old hands relaxed in her lap. ‘Bjarni Sigurdson. There is a thing you wish to say to me?’
‘Verland, your shipmaster, called my name among your chosen crew for the Easter faring.’
She nodded in the way that she had, with her head a little to one side, with a trace of a smile. ‘That would be because I bade him.’
‘But, Lady, you are forgetting.’
‘What am I forgetting?’
‘Lady, all the other men that you have chosen are of the Christian kind; a Christian crew for a Christian feast-faring.’
‘It so happens, for this time,’ said the Lady Aud. ‘Yet there is no rule carved like runes in stone that says that I may not have a follower of the old gods amongst my rowers, and surely a man who has helped to make her ready for sea should have his place among Fionoula’s crew when they run her down from the landing-beach.’
Bjarni swallowed. He had to make sure that she understood, get the thing quite clear.
‘Lady, I do not feel any call to follow your god.’
‘Not now,’ the Lady agreed. ‘Time can change many things, but that will be for you to choose.’ Her face in the shadow of the sealskin hood lit into its rare, slow smile. ‘I never order any man to row my galley; I have had no need to. Instead, I ask – let you come as one of my rowers on this sea-faring.’
They took Fionoula out for sea trials next morning. And in squally weather two days later they hove out from the haven, bound for lona, following the inshore waters between Mull and the mainland, for the sake of the women under the awnings that had been rigged to give them some privacy and shelter from the wind and spray. Even so, Muirgoed was direly sick, and the Lady Aud not much better; and only Groa, the eldest granddaughter, being brought for the first time, seemed quite unaffected by the pitch and toss of the galley in the short steep seas, and came out with her kirtle bunched to her knees and her hair thrust back under a blue and russet striped kerchief, to scramble and balance her way between the rowers toward the bows.
She checked beside Bjarni, holding on to a stay to steady herself. ‘Where’s your dog?’ she asked, and glanced down as though half expecting to see Hugin at his feet.
He looked up at her through the hair that the wind was blowing across his eyes. ‘I left him to run with the hound-pack. He got used to that way of things these two past summers on Barra.’
Groa was silent awhile, gazing ahead into the squally distance. ‘This is so good,’ she said at last, ‘I wish we could sail on and on – round lona and out between the islands to the open sea, beyond Ireland – beyond Iceland, maybe . . .’
‘Careful, tha’d have to be,’ Bjarni warned her. ‘Nobody knows what happens out there: we might fall off the edge.’
‘But how if there isn’t an edge?’ Groa said, seemingly more to herself than to him. ‘The sea might be like the Mid-Land Sea that Leiknen One-eye talks of, only much, much bigger with more land on the far side of it, and another great city like Miklagard, waiting to be found – and good farming land . . .’
It was not the first time that she and Bjarni had talked together since the day that he had brought Hugin to the Lady Aud’s threshold, but he had never known the bairn launch out into this kind of daftness before. Maybe it was the effect of being at sea. If so, he wished she would just go away and be sick like the other women; it wasn’t lucky, this kind of talk, not on ship-board.
‘There’s other islands out there too, so they say – St Brendan’s Isle, with trees covered with white birds instead of blossom, every bird singing like the evening star. If I were a man I’d build a ship of my own, and go to see.’
‘And if you were a man, I’d come with you,’ said Bjarni, suddenly, not caring whether the talk was unlucky or not. Certainly this Easter faring had a strangeness to it not like any sea-faring that he had known before.
‘Lift her! Lift her!’ came the voice of Verland at the steering oar, giving the rowing time.
Next day, after a night passed at one of the fisher-villages along the coast, they had a fair wind and were able to raise sail as they came coasting down the Ross of Mull towards the low green shores of lona.
9
The Bay of the Coracles
THE LADY AUD, her granddaughter and Muirgoed were housed in the gull-grey stone beehive huts of the guest lodgings, a little apart from those of the Holy Brothers themselves, and the crew of Fionoula made their own camp under the ship’s awnings rigged in the lee of the white sand dunes that fringed the landing-beach. And there they passed the first of the four nights that they were to spend on St Columba’s Isle. The next day was a day of quiet before the fasting and the mourning of the White Christ’s Friday. For the Lady it was a day of retreat and prayer and quiet ready-making; for her crew a rest day of nothing much to do but sprawl in the long dune grasses or around the ship, telling stories and playing fox and geese with pebbles on a game-board finger-drawn in the sand. At noon they fed on salt fish and barley stirabout from the monastery kitchen, washed down with thin beer, and not much of it.
‘Best make the most of it,’ Verland told Bjarni. ‘It’s all tha’ll get today, and tomorrow will be leaner still.’
And another man, with his mouth full, added, grinning, ‘Doesn’t seem fair, does it, that you should go empty-bellied for a god that’s none of yours, hanging on his tree.’ And there was a general laugh.
It was all perfectly good-natured; the men of Thorstein’s ships and settlements were too well used to the mingling of faiths to worry too much about it in these days when, if the Northmen raided a Christian holy place, they did it not because it was Christian but simply because it was rich.
But it made Bjarni feel shut out from their company, all the same.
‘Odin hung on a tree for nine days,’ he said to the world at large. Pushing his last bit of fish into his mouth, and chewing on the dry saltiness of it, he got to his feet, and strolled off to keep his own company.
He wandered southward along the coast until in a while he came down to a cove at what looked to be the southernmost end of the island. And there, for no good reason – he had passed other c
oves and inlets whose sand was as white and whose rocks were as warm in the sun – he sat down. There were small dark sheep, ring-straked and dappled, grazing on the machair behind him. He could hear the shrill bleating of a lamb, and the deeper call of its mother in answer. The dunes at his back kept off the wind, and it was warm in the sunshine. It was not always like this, he knew; lona had its fair share of wild weather. Haki, whose oar was next ahead of his, had told him how a couple of years ago a black squall had blown up just as they had lost the shelter of Mull, and the seas breaking over them amidships as they came in to land, so that it had been all they could do to get Fionoula safely beached, and the Lady and her women ashore, drenched but not actually drowned. But today the tide crooning and creaming among the rocks and fingering the sand was green glass in the shallows, deeply blue farther out. Kingfisher’s colours. And the light was not quite like the light he had known anywhere else. Maybe such a light would lie on the Islands of the Blessed, far out towards the sunset, where the Old People believed that their souls went after death. Maybe over Groa’s isle with the trees of white birds, each singing like the evening star . . .
He was half asleep, when there came a flounder of feet and slipping sand over the dune slope, and someone in a brown habit sat down rather wearily beside him. Glancing round, he saw a thick-set man of middle years, his face broad and bony under the bald dome of his tonsured forehead: a warrior’s face, Bjarni would have said, rather than a monk’s, but with something extraordinarily peaceful in the gaze of the very blue eyes.
‘I saw you go by,’ said the newcomer, ‘but I was busy with the sheep. They’ll do well enough, now. You looked as if you had things to be thinking about. But you will have had a while for thinking and will not mind if I come to share the bay with you.’
‘It’s your bay, and none of mine,’ said Bjarni. He had not meant to sound so surly, but he was not yet in any mood for company.
‘It is nobody’s, and all the world’s,’ said the man, his gaze drifting out to sea. ‘This is the Bay of the Coracles, the place where St Columba and his few monks landed when first they came from Ireland.’
Bjarni had heard something of this holy man from Ireland who had brought the new god to Scotland, but he had not really listened. Now, in this place of quietness and light, he suddenly felt that he would only have to look up to see the monks landing on the sand, and the interest quickened in him. Not wishing any misunderstanding with the brown-clad man, he said, ‘I am one who holds by Thor and Odin, but on Mull I have heard much of this holy man, and of the settlement he planted here. That would be a long time ago?’
‘More than three hundred years.’
‘And there have been holy men following after him here, all that while?’
‘Almost all that while: there have been times when the raiders came, and afterwards for a while there was no one here but the sea birds. Once, more than a lifetime ago, the relics of St Columba, which had lain here since his death, were taken back to Ireland for greater safety than we could give them here and housed for a while in our mother abbey of Kells. But later, we brought him home. We have had quieter times of late with the cloak of Thorstein Olafson for our shelter. But there is a savage wind blowing among the islands, a restlessness that can be felt even here – a load of good land for the taking in Ireland – the Northmen have ever been a folk with their eyes on any farther shore.’ He sat silent a few moments, trickling white sand through his fingers. ‘One day Thorstein will be gone from us, in one way or another, and then the raiders will come again.’
‘So what will you do when that day comes?’ Bjarni asked, thinking in terms of underwater stockades and maybe even a bought bodyguard of men like himself. Everybody said that the abbey was rich, despite the brothers’ simple way of life.
‘Die, as our brothers died before us,’ said the man beside him, the monk who looked like a warrior.
Bjarni opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it again.
And the man brushed the last of the sand from his fingers, and turned toward him with a wary smile. ‘But all this can have little interest for you. Tell me of yourself, how you who follow Thor and Odin come to be one of the Lady Aud’s rowers this Easter faring?’
From some people it might have seemed too probing, but from this man Bjarni took it for honest interest, and did his best to answer truthfully. ‘I think the Lady Aud hopes that you – the brothers – this place – might make a Christian of me.’
The monk sat thoughtful a few moments, then asked, ‘And how would that seem to you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bjarni told him. ‘Sometimes I feel one way, sometimes the other. Sometimes I still feel in my belly that I am Thor’s man, Odin’s man, sometimes I feel that they are finished with me and I am finished with them.’ Trying to explain, he found himself telling the old story yet again, to another total stranger – and when the story was done, sitting with hands round updrawn knees, staring at a small yellow sand-flower, and wishing that he had not told it. Because now of course the man would try to show him that his old gods were not good for following, and drag him over to the faith of the White Christ, and something in him flinched from that as from some kind of invasion that he had left himself open to.
But seemingly the man knew it: for he said only, after a long pause, ‘Remember it was not Thor who demanded the life of your dog, but his priest. Priests are but men. This one was a man with a daughter, foolish and vengeful but probably much loved.’
And there was a trace of a smile in the voice, though his face was grave when Bjarni looked round at him. ‘Surely you are not like most of your kind? I thought that you were supposed to hate the old gods, not defend them.’
The man returned his look, the smile that had been in his voice creeping into his eyes. ‘The thing is not so plain as that. I made my prayers to Thor in the God-House when I was a boy, before I followed my foster-brother west-over-seas. We came to raid, and stayed awhile as raiders sometimes do. I fell sick, and so came under the hand of a solitary holy man who had healing skills . . . I had hopes that my foster-brother would stay, too; but he went back to Norway and his own kindred, his own gods who were no longer mine. Yet when we parted, he swore for my sake that all followers of the White Christ would be safe within his boundaries for all time; so there was something gained after all.’
Bjarni had an odd feeling in the belly as though something had jolted him there. Yet he had no sense of surprise. In this island of the clear light, nothing, no wonder, could be really surprising. ‘What name was he – your foster-brother?’ he asked.
‘Rafn – Rafn Cedricson. I have often wondered what the pattern of his life has been.’
Bjarni was silent a short while, looking down at his linked hands. Then he said, ‘This much I can tell you. He is – two years ago, when I last saw him – he was Chieftain of a settlement far to the south of here, where the three great rivers of the Lake Country come to sea.’
He was aware of a sudden great stillness beside him, but he did not look round, feeling that whatever he might see in the face of the man beside him was no affair of his. ‘Your settlement,’ the monk said quietly, out of his stillness; and nothing more.
‘Yes,’ Bjarni said, and was silent. There was a long, slow-passing silence, while the knowledge grew in him that he must tell this story also. ‘Until two years ago,’ he said at last. ‘Then – there was a holy man – not like you. He kicked my dog – that was another dog – and I tipped him into the horse-pond and held his head under for a while to teach him the unwisdom of that. He was old, and I suppose I held him under too long.’
‘And so he drowned,’ said the man beside him.
Bjarni nodded. ‘I had been only a few months there. I did not know – or I had forgotten, it did not seem a great matter – about the Chieftain’s oath. So I made him an oath-breaker. He gave me a sword and bade me out of the settlement for five years, until he could bear to see my face again.’
A sea bird swept close
above their heads, its wings warmed with sunlight, and they both watched it bank, and swing out over the bay.
‘When the five years are up and you go back, tell to your Chieftain that Gisli his foster-brother forgives him the oath-breaking,’ the monk said simply.
‘I will tell him,’ Bjarni said; and surprised himself by asking, ‘But what for me?’ scarcely knowing what he meant.
‘For you? The five outlaw years shall have earned you your quittance.’
Far off, borne on the wind, Bjarni caught the faint shepherd clang of the church’s bell, and Gisli drew his legs under him and got up. ‘It is time for Vespers. I must go my way.’
When he was gone, Bjarni sat on, arms crossed on updrawn knees, gazing out over the white sand and the creaming shallows, thinking more deeply than ever he had thought in his life before. He had come on this Easter faring with half an idea at the back of his mind that he might do as the Lady Aud would have him. Now he took the idea out, looked at it and was not so sure. It was the sensible thing to do. At least going halfway and getting prime-signed was the sensible thing to do; many of the merchant kind and the mercenaries had found that. Once prime-signed by a Christian priest you were accepted into the following of the White Christ, which made life much simpler if for instance you wanted to take sword-service with a Christian chief; but you were still free to turn back to your own gods in time of real need. It was a thing quite easily done. At least, he had thought so. But now suddenly he was seeing it as something that could not – should not – be easily done at all. This whole matter of which gods one held to . . . In his inner eye he saw Rafn and Gisli tearing their lives apart from each other over it. A thing that mattered as much as that . . .