From: Thunderous Tail Club
Segment 1: “The Watching-Stones at the Mouth of the Cave”
A note, before the matter proper. The reader will forgive an old man his preliminaries. I have been told, more than once, by superiors who possessed less patience than learning, that I begin too many of my chronicles with apologies and qualifications, and that this habit is the besetting sin of my order. To which I have always answered, courteously enough, that the besetting sin of the world is the opposite habit, and that I would rather be tedious than wrong. So permit me a footnote at the threshold.
Footnote, then, upon the unreliability of skaldic memory. It is the persistent and not altogether reasonable belief of the educated classes of our great island that the songs of the northern skalds are, by virtue of their formal construction (the kennings, the alliteration, the meter that locks each line into the shape of the next), more reliable than ordinary recollection. The argument is that a song which has been composed with such intricate craft cannot easily be misremembered, since to alter a single word is to break the meter, and to break the meter is to break the song. Therefore, the argument concludes, what comes down to us in saga-form must be very nearly what was spoken in the longhouses of the first witnesses. I will not say that this argument is wholly without merit. I will say that it is the argument of a man who has never sat in a longhouse and listened to two skalds disagree about a single phrase of a single song, each of them entirely certain that the other has corrupted the original, and each of them, on careful comparison with a third witness who can be persuaded to speak after enough beer has been poured, demonstrably mistaken in different particulars. The meter, you see, locks the line. It does not lock the meaning. One may substitute “wound-tide” for “blood-flood” without disturbing the count of syllables by a single foot, and yet have shifted the image entirely, since the first is the sea of a battlefield and the second is the rush of a single wound, and a saga in which the cliffs ran red with the wound-tide is not the saga in which a single warrior’s blood-flood watered the heather. I have seen this kind of substitution happen across two generations of singers, and I have seen the children of the second singer swear upon their dead that the song has not changed since their grandmother first heard it. Memory, even when armored in meter, is a soft thing.
I bring this up at the mouth of the present account because I am about to describe a journey I undertook in my sixty-ninth year, to the place known as the Cliffs of Falling Stars, in the south-westerly reaches of the great island of Hraevn-an-Ol, where the matter of Raptoris-Sol and the Sky’s Hammer is said to have come to its bloody conclusion some seventy years before my arrival. I carried with me three parchment-accounts of that matter. I will name them at once, so that the reader is not kept guessing, and so that the inevitable confusion of the body of the chronicle may be at least preceded by clarity of nomenclature. The first I have come to call the Northern Account, copied from a longhouse song-cycle in the hand of one Brother Audr of our sister-house in the north, who set down the song as he heard it sung by a great-grandson of one of Hrolv-Kan’s own hunters. The second I have come to call the Cliff Account, transcribed by a wandering brother of no particular renown from the oral testimony of an old woman of the cliff-folk, who claimed to have been a child witness to the events and to have lived a long life thereafter among her people, speaking of them rarely and singing of them not at all. The third I have come to call the Underworld Account, and concerning its origin I shall say only, for the present, that it was given to our library by a traveler whose business below the surface of the world I am not yet at liberty to discuss in detail, and that the parchment upon which it was written had been damp for so long that the ink in places had become the substance of the page.
Three accounts, then. Three witnesses, in the strict sense, although none of them were the people who held the spear or felt the bone. Three filters laid one upon another between me and the matter itself. And it had been my intention, when I set out from our scriptorium with my satchel of pencils and my small herb-pouch and the spectacles set in their three brass pivots, to determine, by careful comparison of the three accounts against the physical evidence of the place itself, which of the three was the most trustworthy. I had thought, as one does at the outset of an investigation, that this was a soluble problem.
The reader who has lived long enough to be patient with old men will already have guessed that it was not.
I came to the cliffs in the late afternoon of a day in early autumn, the wind sharp from the open sea, the gulls crying in their irritable fashion, and the light, the particular long red light of the southern coast in the third week of Buzzing, lying across the heather like a kind of slow blood. There is, at the foot of the cliffs proper, a great hollow in the rock, a cave that opens westward and faces the falling sun, and at the mouth of this cave a row of stones has been set upright by someone, long ago, in a half-circle that suggests both invitation and warning. The cliff-folk call them the Watching-Stones. They are not impressive in themselves. The tallest comes only to my shoulder, and I am not a tall man. They are weathered, their faces pocked with the small dark holes that salt and centuries together will work into any soft stone, and lichen has grown upon them in patches the color of old butter. But they have been set with care. The spacing between them is exact. The half-circle they describe opens precisely toward the place, some quarter-mile out along the cliff edge, where the great battle is said to have taken place. They were set, I think, by someone who wished to ensure that no traveler approached that place without first passing through the regard of the stones.
I sat down between two of them. I unfolded a square of waxed cloth and laid out upon it my three parchments, weighted at their corners against the wind with small flat pebbles I gathered from the cave-mouth. I took out my pencil. I took off the spectacles, polished them with the hem of my robe, and put them on again. I waited until my breathing had settled and the gulls had quieted enough that I could hear the surf below, far below, doing its slow thunder against the foot of the cliffs.
And I began, in the orderly fashion that has been the consolation of my profession for fifty years, to compare.
The Northern Account is a thing of hammered glory. It is the saga of Hrolv-Kan as his own people remember him, and it is the longest of the three by a considerable margin. In its telling, the hunt was a matter of righteous necessity. The thunder-beast had ranged too far south, had threatened the longships at their summer fishing-grounds, had killed (the saga is specific about this) a named girl named Astrid, daughter of one Gormun Two-Axe, while she was drawing water at a stream. The northern hunters, twelve of them, led by Hrolv-Kan, set out not in pride but in vengeance and in duty. The twelve days of the chase are recounted with great pleasure in the small obstacles and small triumphs of woodcraft. The capture of the tail with the thunderstone chains is described in a verse of such surpassing meter that I confess I read it aloud to myself, sitting between the Watching-Stones, and felt for a moment the old shiver of admiration that any well-made line of poetry will produce in a reader who has spent his life among books. The forging of the club is glorified. Hrolv-Kan’s deeds with the club are catalogued. And his end is described in a way that is neither evasive nor triumphant, but elegiac. He fell into the underworld, the saga says, because the gods had grown jealous of the use he had made of their gift, and because no mortal may hold the sky in his hand for long without paying the sky’s price. He is mourned. He is, in the Northern Account, a hero.
The Cliff Account is a much shorter document, and it is not, properly speaking, a saga at all. It is the transcribed testimony of one old woman, set down in the cramped hand of a traveling brother who, by the look of his marginalia, was not always certain he was hearing her correctly. In her telling, there was no Astrid daughter of Gormun. There was no killing at a stream. The northern hunters came south not in vengeance but in greed, having heard rumors of a beast whose tail-bone might be made into a weapon that would change the balance of warfare among the island nations, and they came hunting glory and resource, not justice. The twelve days of the chase are mentioned only in passing, as if the old woman could not be bothered with such details. The cornering of the beast on the cliffs is described in a single sentence: “They came to the place where the world ends and they did not stop.” The capture of the tail receives a longer treatment, but the focus is not on Hrolv-Kan’s prowess. The focus is on the cry of the beast. The old woman, who would have been a child of perhaps fourteen years at the time, remembered the cry. She said, according to the brother’s transcription, that the cry was not the cry of a beast but the cry of something being broken from itself. She said that her grandmother, hearing it from miles away, had laid her face against the earth and wept. She said that the men who held the chains did not understand what they had done, and that those men’s grandchildren still do not understand. The old woman did not speak of the club’s later deeds. She did not speak of Hrolv-Kan’s fall. She said only, near the end of her testimony, that the storm in the bone was still trying to go home, and that until it found its way home it would teach lessons to anyone foolish enough to lift it.
The Underworld Account is the strangest of the three, and I confess that I did not, at the outset of my journey, expect to give it the weight that I have come to give it. It is short, almost telegraphic in its construction, and its sentences are arranged in a manner that suggests they were spoken by someone for whom the act of speech was effortful and unhurried. There are no kennings. There are no metaphors. The names are given plainly. Hrolv-Kan is “the man Hrolv-Kan.” The beast is “the storm-in-the-bone.” The chase is not described at all. The account picks up only at the moment of the club’s last swing, the splitting of the earth, and the descent. And what follows is the longest passage in any of the three documents devoted to the question of what happened after Hrolv-Kan fell. According to the Underworld Account, the man landed in a deep pool of black water in a chamber of stone, and was not killed by the fall. According to the Underworld Account, he crawled. According to the Underworld Account, he crawled for a period of time which the account refuses to specify in years, and during this crawling he wept, and during this weeping he spoke aloud to himself in the dark, and during this speaking he came to understand the thing he had done, and during this understanding he was changed, and what wanders the underworld now, echoing the lost voice of thunder, is no longer the hunter-chief of the Northern Account, nor the greedy raider of the Cliff Account, but something else, something the Underworld Account names only as “the man who heard, at last.”
Three accounts. I sat with them spread upon the waxed cloth between the Watching-Stones, and I compared them, in the orderly fashion of my training, and I waited for the moment when the contradictions would resolve themselves into a hierarchy of credibility, with the most reliable account rising to the top and the least reliable falling away into the category of folk-error or partisan distortion.
The moment did not arrive.
I will tell you, reader, what I had expected. I had expected that the Northern Account, being a saga and therefore subject to the well-known mythologizing tendencies of the longhouse tradition, would prove the least reliable. I had expected the Cliff Account, being the testimony of a single old woman recorded directly from her own memory, to be more reliable in matters of small fact but less reliable in matters of motive, since the cliff-folk had every reason to portray the northerners unkindly. I had expected the Underworld Account, whose provenance I did not at the time of my arrival fully understand, to be the most reliable in some respects (since whoever composed it had clearly no investment in the reputation of either party) and the least reliable in others (since its claims about the man’s survival in the deeps could not, by any ordinary method, be verified).
This is what I had expected. I had expected, that is, to do my work.
What I encountered instead, as I read the three accounts against one another for the third and fourth and fifth time, the long red light of the cliff-evening sliding slowly down the faces of the Watching-Stones, was something I had not encountered in fifty years of comparative chronicling. I encountered the slow recognition that the three accounts did not, in fact, contradict each other in the way I had assumed they did. They contradicted each other in the way that three witnesses to a single event will contradict each other when each of them has stood in a different place and seen a different face of the event.
Consider. There is no reason, in principle, why a hunt cannot be at once vengeful and greedy. There is no reason why the hunters who set out from the north because the thunder-beast had killed a girl named Astrid could not also have been aware, in some quieter chamber of their thinking, that the tail-bone would change the balance of warfare. There is no reason why Astrid, daughter of Gormun, may not have existed and been mourned and been used. The Northern Account would emphasize her. The Cliff Account would forget her. Neither, on that point, would be lying.
Consider further. There is no reason why the capture of the tail cannot have been both a triumph of warriorhood, as the northerners told it in their longhouses, and an act of monstrous violation, as the cliff-folk heard it in the cry that broke the air. The same event, the same chains, the same severed bone, the same moment, lit from two sides. The Northern Account would see the iron. The Cliff Account would hear the cry. Both would be looking at the same thing.
And consider, finally, the man himself. The hero of the Northern Account, who fell because the gods grew jealous. The villain of the Cliff Account, who never understood what he had done. The penitent of the Underworld Account, who came at last to hear what he had refused to hear. Is it not possible, reader, that these are three temporally separated faces of one man? The man who set out in righteous purpose, who hardened himself across the years of his power, who in the moment of his fall recognized at last the shape of his ruin, and who, in the long crawl through the dark, became finally capable of understanding what he had done? The Northern Account tells the truth about his beginning. The Cliff Account tells the truth about his middle. The Underworld Account tells the truth about his end. Each is a slice through the life of the man at a different depth, and the contradictions among them are not the contradictions of falsehood but the contradictions of a long story told in three places, none of which had the patience or the standing to tell the whole.
This is the recognition that came to me, slowly, as the sun went down behind the Watching-Stones, and the cave-mouth at my back filled with the cold blue dimness of evening, and the gulls fell silent, and the surf alone continued its slow thunder below. It is a recognition that ought to have given me satisfaction. It ought to have felt, to a scholar of my training, like the solving of the problem. Three contradictory accounts, reconciled in a higher unity. The neat conclusion. The footnoted ending.
It did not feel like satisfaction. It felt, if I am honest with the reader (and at sixty-nine I have very little patience left for the alternative), like a small cold disquiet, gathering at the back of my neck, just under the collar of my robe.
Because if the three accounts are simultaneously true, then I cannot resolve them. I cannot rank them. I cannot say of any one of them that it is the trustworthy account, against which the others must be measured and found wanting. I must instead carry all three, hold them together in my mind, treat each as a partial truth that requires the others to complete it, and produce, if I am to produce anything at all, a chronicle that is itself three-voiced, three-witnessed, three-faced. I must, in short, abandon the method by which I have made my living for half a century. The method of comparison, by which the false is sifted from the true. The method assumes that there is a true and a false to be sifted. The method does not know what to do with a story whose truth is the chorus of its tellings.
I sat very still between the two Watching-Stones nearest me. I felt the cold of the cave-mouth at my back. I felt the warmth, very faint now, going out of the stones. I felt the small dry tremble of my hands, which has been with me for some years and which I have learned to ignore. And I felt, for the first time in my long life as a chronicler, that I did not know how to write the book I had come to write.
It was at that moment, reader, that the wind shifted. It came from the west, off the open sea, sharper than it had been, and it carried up the face of the cliffs a sound which I cannot in fairness describe to you because I am not certain I heard it correctly. It was a sound like a very low note held for a very long breath, a sound like distant thunder, except that there was no storm anywhere in the visible sky. It was a sound that came from below, from the foot of the cliffs, from somewhere further below the foot of the cliffs, from a depth that the cliffs themselves would not have admitted to possessing.
I have no doubt that the cliff-folk who set the Watching-Stones have heard this sound many times. I have no doubt that they have their own name for it, and that the name does not appear in any of the three accounts I have brought with me, and that if I asked them they would tell me, with the polite patience that small communities reserve for traveling scholars, that the sound is only the surf in the sea-caves, only the wind in the cliff-holes, only the ordinary voice of the place. I have no doubt that they would be partly correct.
I am also, however, an old man who has spent his life listening for the wrong kind of correctness. And what I heard, sitting between two stones at the mouth of a cave on the southwest coast of Hraevn-an-Ol, in the late autumn of my sixty-ninth year, was a voice. It was not a human voice. It was not, I think, even a living voice in the usual sense of that adjective. But it was a voice. And it was, if I may permit myself one final speculation in a chronicle that has been speculation from its first word, asking to be heard.
I folded the three parchments. I weighted them again with the small flat pebbles. I drew my hood up against the cold. I took out my pencil, the brass-capped one whose tip never blunts past usefulness, and I opened a fresh sheet of waxed parchment upon my knee. And I wrote, in the cramped careful hand that has been the same hand for fifty years, the following sentence: “It is the persistent and not altogether reasonable belief of the educated classes of our great island that the songs of the northern skalds are, by virtue of their formal construction, more reliable than ordinary recollection.”
I sat with the sentence for a long moment. Then I crossed it out. Not because it was untrue. I have already explained why I think it is untrue, and I stand by that explanation. I crossed it out because it was the wrong place to begin. The wrong place to begin, in a chronicle whose true subject I had only just, in the last hour of the long red afternoon, begun to understand.
I turned the sheet over. I began again. I began with what I had heard, and with what I had not yet heard, and with what I suspected I would hear, in the days to come, from each of the four other voices whose testimony this chronicle would require. And the sentence I wrote second, the sentence that stands now at the head of the book of which the present account is the first chapter, was this: “Three accounts came to me, and all three were true, and that was the difficulty.”
I put down the pencil. The voice from below the cliffs did not come again that evening. It would come again, in its time. The Watching-Stones, in their patient half-circle, watched. The cave-mouth at my back was dark. And I, Brother Eskil of the Watching-Order, sixty-nine years a chronicler and three hours a man uncertain of his trade, sat between the stones until the first stars came out, and tried to prepare myself for the long task of writing down what could not, by the methods I had been taught, be written down at all.
It is, I have come to believe, the only kind of book worth writing. Which is no comfort. But it is, in its small dry way, a beginning.
Segment 2: “Born of Scale and Storm”
There is a quiet down here that the surface does not know. It is not the quiet of empty places. The surface has empty places and calls them silent and they are not silent. The wind moves in them. The grass moves. Small things move that the standing folk do not bother to count. There is no silence on the surface and there never has been. Down here there is a different thing. Down here there is the quiet that water makes when it has been doing the same thing for a very long time. Drip and drip and drip. The stone receiving. The pool below answering. A patience that has outlasted weather. The standing folk would call it silence because they have no other word. We have a word for it. The word does not translate. The word is a pulse. I will not try to give it to you. I will tell you only that I am sitting now on a slab of cold limestone above a pool of black water in a chamber that no surface foot has ever touched and I am remembering what I was told by the one who told me and what she was told by the one who told her and so on back through a chain of tellings whose end I do not know. The story is older than I am and I am old. The story is older than my mother’s mother and her mother was old when she gave it to me and the chamber where she gave it to me was old when she was new. The story is older than the chain of tellings. The story is as old as the thing it tells. There is a kind of telling that becomes the thing it tells. This is one of those. I will give it to you now in the way it was given to me. I will give it to you slowly. I will give it to you in the dark.
Listen.
There was a time when the sky and the earth had not yet agreed where one ended and the other began. This is not a figure of speech. This is the way the old ones tell it and the way I will tell it because I have no better way. The sky in those days came down low. The sky in those days touched the high places and lay across them and the high places did not know whether they were still earth or had become sky. The mountains in those days were not the firm shapes you would know. The mountains in those days were arguments. The wind argued with the stone and the stone argued back and the line between them moved up and moved down depending on who was winning that hour. There were storms in those days that the surface folk would not be able to imagine. Storms that lasted for years. Storms that wore the tops off mountains the way a long rain wears the lettering off a grave. And there were calms in those days too. Long calms. Calms in which the sky lay still upon the earth like a sleeping animal upon another sleeping animal and you could not have said where one fur ended and the other began.
In one of those calms. In a high valley.
There was a valley high in a range whose name has not survived. The range itself has not survived. The range was worn down by what came later and is now only a scattering of low hills that no one remembers were ever mountains. But in the time I am telling of the range was tall and the valley was high and the valley was held between two ridges the way a cupped hand holds water. The grass in that valley was a kind of grass that does not grow now. The grass in that valley was pale and tall and the wind through it made a sound like someone speaking just below the threshold of hearing. There was a stream that ran through the valley and the stream came from a place higher up that no one had ever climbed to and the stream went down through a notch in the lower ridge and no one had ever followed it. There were no people in the valley. There were no people anywhere yet. The people had not come. There were creatures in the valley but they were small and they were quiet and they did their small quiet business among the pale tall grass and they did not look up much.
In the middle of the valley there was a stone.
The stone was not a small stone. The stone was the size of a longhouse standing on its end. The stone was shaped like an egg. I am not using a figure. The stone was the shape an egg is and the surface folk who later found that valley before the range went down all said the same thing about it which is that it looked like an egg. It was the color of old bone with a faint blue under the surface like the blue under the surface of a newborn animal. It stood upright in the grass. It was not buried. It was not perched on anything. It stood. The grass grew around it and did not touch it. There was a circle of bare earth at its foot the width of a man’s arm and the bare earth was warm. The old ones who told me this story said the warmth of that earth was the only warmth in the valley that did not come from the sun. They said you could put your hand on the bare earth at the foot of the stone and feel a heat moving in it that had nothing to do with the day.
The stone had been there for a long time. I do not know how long. The old ones did not know how long. The stone was there when the valley was made. The stone may have been there before the valley was made. There are tellings that say the valley grew up around the stone the way a wound grows up around a thorn but that the stone was not a wound and the valley was not the body and the figure does not quite hold. The stone was there. That is what can be said. The stone was there and the warmth at its foot was there and the grass that did not touch it was there and that is the way the valley was for longer than there is a way to count.
Then one day in a calm year in a calm season the stone cracked.
I have been told that the cracking was not loud. I have been told that the cracking was the sound a long thought makes when it finishes itself. There was no thunder. There was no announcement. There was a fine line that opened down the side of the egg-stone from the top of the curve to about two-thirds of the way down. The line was the width of a hair. It widened. It widened slowly. It widened over the course of what would have been a full day if anyone had been there to count days. The pale tall grass around the bare circle of warm earth bent very slightly toward the stone as the line widened and then bent very slightly away. The small quiet creatures of the valley left. They left in the way small quiet creatures leave when they know a thing is coming. They went up the ridges. They went down the stream. They got out of the cup of the valley and they did not come back for many days.
The crack widened.
Inside the stone there was a darkness that was not the darkness of an empty place. It was the darkness of a folded thing. It was the darkness of something that had been wrapped around itself for a very long time and was beginning to remember that it had a shape. The darkness moved. It is not right to say the darkness moved because the darkness was not a thing that could move. But something inside the darkness moved and the surface of the darkness shifted and from the shifting you could tell that what was folded inside was much larger than the egg-stone could have held. This is the part the old ones always pause at. They pause because the standing folk who have heard the story and asked questions have always asked this question. How could a thing larger than the stone be inside the stone. The old ones do not answer the question. They go on with the telling. I will go on with the telling. The thing inside was larger than the stone. That is what was. There are matters in the old time that do not obey the measurements of the new.
The first thing that came out of the crack was not a head. It was not a limb. It was a sound. It was a low sound and it was held for a very long breath. It was the kind of sound that you feel in the bones of your jaw before you feel it in your ears. The old ones who told me this story said the sound went up the ridges and the ridges leaned a little to listen. The old ones said the sound went down the stream and the stream slowed. The old ones said the sound went into the sky which was still lying low upon the high places in those days and the sky lifted a little. The sky lifted a finger’s width perhaps. But it lifted. And in the lifting there was made for the first time a clear and undisputed space between the top of the ridge and the bottom of the cloud. The old ones say this is the moment the sky and the earth began to agree where one ended and the other began. I do not know if that is right. I am only telling you what was told to me.
After the sound came the head.
The head came through the crack and the crack widened to receive it because the stone by then had decided to be a door rather than a wall. The head was the shape of a long narrow shape with eyes set wide and the eyes were closed. The scales of the head were the color of new metal that has never been struck. They were soft. The old ones were careful about this. The scales were soft in that first hour. They had not yet hardened. They were the color of new metal but they had the texture of something just born. The head turned slowly. The closed eyes turned with it. The head came out a little farther and the neck came after and the neck was long and slender and the scales along the neck were arranged in a way that the old ones said reminded them of the way light is arranged on the surface of moving water just before a storm. Then the shoulders came. Then the chest. Then the wings.
The wings were folded.
The wings were folded so tightly against the body that you could not at first have said they were wings. The old ones said the wings looked like a second layer of skin gathered at the shoulder. They said this was the way of the thing in its first hour. The wings would unfold later. The wings would unfold when the time came for them to unfold. In the first hour they were folded and the body of the creature pulled itself slowly out of the egg-stone and the body was long and the body was heavy and the body was the color of a sky that has been thinking about thunder for a long time. The body was longer than the egg-stone had been tall. The body was longer than the egg-stone could have held. I have already said this. I will not say it again. The body came out and lay in the pale tall grass and the grass that had not touched the egg-stone now received the new long heavy thing and bent under its weight and made a kind of bed for it.
Then came the legs.
Then came the tail.
I will say a word about the tail because the tail is what the rest of this saga is about and I want to be careful in what I say of it. The tail came out last. The tail was the longest part of the body and the tail was the heaviest part and the tail was the part the egg-stone had held most reluctantly. The crack in the stone widened one more time to let the tail through and when the tail was out the crack closed. I am not telling a figure. The crack closed. The stone became whole again behind the creature. The stone stood there in the valley empty of what it had held and the warmth at its foot went out slowly over the next few days like a fire that has been left untended and the bare circle of earth at its foot grew grass again and the egg-stone after a few years was just a stone in a valley and the people who came later did not always know that it had been a door.
The tail was long. The tail was as long as the rest of the body together. The tail was banded with scales that were heavier than the scales of the head or the neck or the chest and the bands along the tail were ridged in a pattern that the old ones said no one has been able to describe in words without losing something important. The tail ended in a knot. A heavy knot of bone and scale together. A knot that even in the first hour when the rest of the body was still soft was already firm. The tail when it came out of the stone struck the ground once. Lightly. The way a sleeping animal twitches a foot. The ground where it struck shook. Not much. But it shook. And from that small striking the old ones say a fine crack opened in the lower ridge of the valley and through that crack the stream which had previously gone down through a notch began also to seep into the earth and to find its way down through stone toward the deep places. Toward us. Toward me. The water in this pool I am sitting above. The water that drip and drips behind me as I speak. Some of it. Some of that water. It came first from the valley where the egg-stone stood. It came first from the moment the tail of Raptoris-Sol struck the ground in its first hour. The old ones say this. I have no way to know if it is true. I have no way to know if it is not true. The water has been drip and dripping in this chamber for as long as I have been alive and for as long as my mother’s mother was alive and so on back and there are stains on the limestone walls that say the water has been doing what it does for far longer than any chain of tellings could reach. The water came from somewhere. The old ones say it came from there. I will not argue with them.
The creature lay in the grass for a long time.
I want you to understand how long. The old ones who told me this story were careful about it. They said the creature lay in the grass and did not move and the sun went up and came down and went up and came down and the creature did not move. They said the small quiet creatures of the valley came back. They said the small quiet creatures of the valley came close. They said the small quiet creatures of the valley walked along the body of the new thing and the new thing did not move. They said the wind through the pale tall grass made its almost-speaking sound around the body and the body did not respond. They said this went on for what would have been days. They said the body in those days was hardening. The scales that had been soft were becoming the scales they would be. The wings that had been folded were settling into the place they would unfold from when the time came. The eyes that had been closed were preparing to open. There was no one to see this. The valley was empty of witnesses. The old ones who told me this story are telling me a thing that was told to them and that was told to those before them by the only witnesses that were there. The witnesses were the grass and the stone and the stream and the sky.
The sky was a witness.
I want to come back to that. The sky in those days was still uncertain of its own border. The sky in those days had lifted itself a finger’s width from the ridge when the first sound came out of the crack and the sky in those days was watching what came next. The old ones say the sky lay low over the valley for the whole of the hardening. The old ones say the sky did not move during those days. The old ones say the sky was waiting. There is a part of the old telling that says the sky was a kind of parent in those first hours. The sky lay low and gave warmth and gave shelter and the creature in the grass below took the warmth and the shelter and used them to harden into what it was going to be. The old ones say this is why the creature was called what it was called. Raptoris. A taker. Sol. Of the high places. A taker of the high places. The name does not translate cleanly. The old ones say no name from that time translates cleanly. The names of things in the time when sky and earth had not yet agreed where one ended and the other began are not the names of things in the time after.
The creature opened its eyes.
This is the moment the old ones pause at again. They pause because there is no good way to tell what happened in this moment. The creature opened its eyes and the eyes were the color of a storm that has not yet decided where it will fall. The eyes opened and they saw. They saw the pale tall grass. They saw the stone behind them which had been their shell and was now only a stone. They saw the ridges of the valley and the notch through which the stream went down. They saw the sky lying low overhead. They saw all of these things at once and they understood them and the old ones say this is the strangest part of the whole telling. The creature understood. There was no learning. There was no slow gathering of sense from sense. The eyes opened and the understanding was already there. The creature knew what the grass was. The creature knew what the stream was. The creature knew what the sky was. The creature knew what it itself was. The creature knew this in the first instant of having eyes and it lay in the grass with its new knowledge for a moment more and then it rose.
It rose without effort.
The old ones are clear about this. There was no struggle. There was no first uncertain rising and falling. The creature rose. The long body uncoiled from the grass and stood and the legs that had been folded under were straight and firm and the tail that had been laid out behind drew up and curled like a slow whip and the wings that had been folded against the shoulder unfolded.
The wings unfolded.
I cannot tell you how to imagine this. The old ones could not tell me how to imagine it. The wings unfolded and they were larger than the body and they were the color of the underside of a cloud at evening and they caught the low sky and held it and the sky which had been lying low across the high places for as long as anyone could remember stirred. The sky stirred. The sky lifted further. The old ones say this is the moment the sky truly began to be the sky. The wings unfolded and the air recognized that there was now a thing in the air to which it could belong and the air arranged itself accordingly. The wind in the valley which had been almost-speaking became actual wind for the first time. It moved. It went from the lower ridge toward the upper. It went up the body of the new creature. It lifted the wings further. The creature did not yet fly. The creature stood in the grass with its wings open and let the wind come and the wind came and the sky lifted and the line between sky and earth became for the first time a line that you could have pointed to. You could have said here is where the earth ends and there is where the sky begins.
That line had not existed before.
I am telling you a thing the old ones told me. That line had not existed before. The sky and the earth had not been separate before. They had been mixed. They had been arguing. They had been lying upon one another in the long calms and tearing at one another in the long storms but they had not been two things. They became two things in the hour when Raptoris-Sol opened its wings in the high valley. The world was made differently by that opening. The mountains afterward were firm shapes. The clouds afterward were above and the stone below and the line between them was a line. The world we know is the world that began in that hour.
This is what I have been told.
I want you to feel what I feel sitting here in the dark above the black pool with the water drip and dripping behind me and the long pale shape of my own tail laid out on the cold limestone behind me and the small bone-rings of my harness warming faintly against my hide. I want you to feel the hush. I want you to feel what it is to know that something came before. I want you to feel what it is to know that the world was not always shaped the way it is now and that the shape it has now was given to it by the opening of a pair of wings in a valley that no one alive remembers and no one alive can find. The valley is gone. The range is worn down. The egg-stone is broken or buried or lying in some field where farmers plow around it and curse the obstacle it makes and have no idea what it was. The pale tall grass does not grow anymore. The stream that began to seep into the earth in the first hour still seeps. Some of its water comes to me here. Some of its water makes the drip and the drip and the drip that I hear behind me as I speak. The water is a witness. The water remembers in the way water remembers which is not the way you remember and not the way I remember but is a way of remembering nonetheless.
The creature stood in the grass with its wings open.
The old ones say it did not fly that hour. The old ones say it stood for a long while in the grass with its wings open and learned the wind and the wind learned it. The old ones say it took a step at last and the step was forward toward the lower ridge and the second step was forward and the third was a kind of half spring and the wings beat once and the body lifted a little and came down and the wings beat twice and the body lifted further and on the third beat the creature was off the ground and rising and going up over the lower ridge and through the notch where the stream went down and out of the valley.
The valley was empty after that.
The egg-stone stood in the grass. The stream ran through the notch. The pale tall grass bent in the new wind that the sky now had to give. The small quiet creatures came back and resumed their small quiet business. The warmth at the foot of the egg-stone faded over days. The bare circle filled in with grass. No one came to that valley for a long time. When the people came at last, many lives later, they would not have known anything had ever happened there. They would have seen only a high valley with a stone in the middle of it. They would have thought the stone was old. They would have been right about that, in the way the standing folk are usually right, which is to say not quite right about the most important part.
The creature went up.
The creature went up and the old ones do not have much to say about the next part because the next part belongs to the surface and to the high places and to the long age in which Raptoris-Sol roamed the wild hills and the sky-rivers and learned what it was for. We will come to that. The standing folk will tell you that part. The standing folk like to tell that part. They like the part where the creature is great and the tail cracks the sky and the mountains bow low. They will tell that part and they will tell it well and there is nothing wrong with the telling.
But.
I have wanted to tell you this part first. The part before the cracking of the sky. The part before the mountains bowed. The part before there were people anywhere to bow or to crack or to tell anything. The part in the high valley. The part in the calm year. The part where a thing came out of a stone that was the size of a longhouse standing on its end and stood in the grass with its wings open and the air arranged itself around it and the sky lifted and the world was made the shape it is now.
I have wanted to tell you this part because no one else will. The standing folk do not remember it. The skalds do not sing of it. The chroniclers do not write of it. The old woman of the cliff-folk in her transcribed testimony did not know it. The hunter-chief in his longhouse certainly did not know it. The man Hrolv-Kan who fell down through the stone and came at last to this place where I am sitting did not know it even at the end of his crawling. The standing folk have always come to this story late. They have always come to it after the sky and the earth had already agreed where they ended and began. They have always taken the agreement for granted. They do not know what was given to them in the hour the wings opened. They do not know that there was ever a world without that line they walk under.
I know it because I was told it. And I am telling you now in the dark above the black pool because the next parts of the story are about what the standing folk did to the thing that gave them the sky. And before we go to that part I wanted there to be at least one telling in which the thing that gave them the sky is allowed to be what it was before they came. A long body in pale tall grass in a high valley. A pair of wings unfolding in the first calm hour. A line being drawn for the first time between what is above and what is below.
A taker of the high places.
Raptoris-Sol.
The water drips behind me. The chamber is cold. The bone-rings on my harness have gone almost as cold as the limestone. I will stop now. I will stop and let the quiet come back. The quiet that is not silence. The quiet that is the patience of water working on stone. The quiet that has been here as long as the water has been here. The quiet that began, in some part of itself, in the hour when a tail in a high valley struck the ground for the first time and a small crack opened in a lower ridge and a stream that had gone down through a notch began also to seep into the earth and to find its slow way toward this chamber and this pool and this old listening creature who has been told a story by those who were told it before him.
Listen.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
That is the first part of the saga. That is the part the standing folk do not know. That is what was, before there was anyone to name it.
Segment 3: “The Tail That Cracked the Sky”
The water is still drip and dripping. I have not moved. The cold has not moved. The chamber has not moved. Only the small things have changed which are the things that change down here. A new small wetness has gathered along the seam where the limestone meets the limestone above the pool. A small splash has come up from the black water where a blind fish has risen and turned and gone down again. A small shifting of breath has gone through my own gills as I have lain here on the cold slab. These are the changes. They are enough. They are how time passes in this place. You learn to count by them after a while. You learn that a thing has been going on for a long while because the small wetness has gathered enough to fall and you heard it fall. That is one count. You learn that a thing has been going on for a much longer while because the small wetness has gathered and fallen and gathered again and fallen again and you heard both fallings. That is two counts. There are no clocks down here. There is only the patience of water and the patience of stone and the patience of a creature like me which is a third kind of patience that learned itself from the other two.
I will go on with the telling.
The next part of the telling is the part the standing folk do know in some form. They know it the way one knows a story that has been told too many times by people who did not bother to remember the early parts. They know that the creature flew. They know that the tail cracked the sky. They know that mountains bowed. They have made songs of these things. The songs are not wholly wrong. The songs are like a hand holding water. The water that stays in the hand is not all the water. There was more. There is always more. I will give you what I was given.
The creature flew.
I told you in the part before that it went up over the lower ridge of the high valley and through the notch where the stream went down and out into the world that was just then becoming the world. I told you that the wings were the color of the underside of a cloud at evening. I told you that the air arranged itself to belong to the thing in the air. These are the things I told you and they are true as far as they go but they do not describe what flight was for that creature in that age and I want to describe it now because the standing folk have never described it well.
The creature flew the way water moves through a river. That is the way the old ones told it to me. The creature did not labor in the air. The creature did not push against the air the way the birds you know push against the air. The creature was in the air the way a fish is in the water. The air opened ahead of the creature and closed behind it and the creature went through. The wings beat slowly. The wings beat the way a heart beats. There was no hurry in the beating. The body was very long and the body was very heavy and yet in the air the body had a kind of lightness which the old ones said was not a lightness of weight but a lightness of belonging. The creature belonged to the sky in a way that the things that came later did not. The eagles did not. The herons did not. The bats of the deep places where I have sometimes traveled did not. None of the flying things that came after Raptoris-Sol belonged to the sky the way Raptoris-Sol belonged to it. The sky had been made for it. Or it had been made for the sky. The old ones could not agree on which way that sentence should run. I have never been able to settle the matter to my own satisfaction. I think the sentence runs both ways at once. I think the making went in both directions. The creature made the sky a place by being in it and the sky made the creature a creature by holding it up. They were two things that came to be themselves by being each other’s witness. This is not a thing I expect the standing folk to understand. I have tried to explain it once or twice to surface visitors and I have seen the polite blank look they take on when an old salamander says something they do not have a place for. I do not mind the look. I have learned to go on past it.
The creature flew over the high valley and then over the lower hills and then out over what would later be called the wild hills and what at that time had no name because there was no one to name it. The land was empty. I want you to feel how empty. The standing folk are accustomed to a world in which there is always someone over the next ridge. A farmer. A herder. A trader. A patrol of the local lord’s men. The wild places of the standing folk’s world are not really wild. There is always smoke somewhere on the horizon if you look long enough. There was no smoke on the horizon in those days. There was no horizon as the standing folk understand the horizon. There were only ridges and valleys and the high places where the stone had finished being argued with by the sky and had settled into the shapes it was going to keep. The creature flew over all of it. The creature looked down from a height that no living thing had ever looked down from before and saw what it saw and what it saw became the first looking-down that there had been. Before that hour nothing had ever looked at the world from above. The sun had been above but the sun is not a looker. The sun gives light. The sun does not see. The clouds had been above but the clouds do not see either. The creature was the first seeing thing that was higher than the high places. The world received its first regard from above in that flight. The old ones said this was a kind of birth for the world also. The world had been made shapes already by the wings opening but the world had not been seen from above until the creature looked down and saw it. The seeing was another kind of making. I do not have a better way to say it. The world became a thing-that-was-seen on that day.
The creature flew for a long time without coming down. The old ones did not know how long. The old ones said there are tellings that have it as days and tellings that have it as years and tellings that have it as something in between for which the old ones did not have a word. I will say it was a long time. I will say the creature learned the wind in that long flying and the wind learned the creature and between them they worked out the way the sky was going to be for the rest of the time the sky was going to be a sky. The creature found the high rivers of moving air that flow above the ridges and learned to swim them. The old ones called them sky-rivers. The standing folk have words for them now in the languages of those who fly the air-ships. The standing folk think they discovered the sky-rivers. The standing folk are wrong about this in the small way they are usually wrong, which is to say they discovered something that had been waiting to be discovered by them while not noticing that it had been used long before by other things. The creature found the sky-rivers and rode them. The creature went from one end of the world to the other on those rivers and back again. The creature learned where the rivers crossed and where they parted and where they slowed and where they sped up. The creature learned the weather. The creature became the first thing that knew what weather was, because before the creature flew above it the weather had only been a thing that happened. After the creature flew above it the weather was a thing that could be read. The old ones say Raptoris-Sol was the first reader. I do not know what to say about that sentence. I will pass it on as it was passed to me.
Then came the hunting.
The creature had to eat. This is not romantic and the standing folk’s songs do not dwell on it but it is true and the truth matters. The creature had a long heavy body and the long heavy body had to be fed and the air did not feed it and the wind did not feed it. The creature had to come down. The creature came down on the wild hills. The creature came down on the herds of large slow beasts that grazed the open uplands in those days. The herds were beasts the standing folk would not recognize. They were larger than the cattle the standing folk drive now. They had longer necks. They had shorter horns. They were slow and patient and they grazed in long lines across the uplands the way clouds drift across the sky in good weather. The creature hunted them. The creature came down from the sky-rivers in a long fall and the long fall ended with the wings spreading wide a finger’s breadth above the grass and the tail coming around in a sweep and one of the slow beasts going down in the sweep. The tail did the killing. The tail was the killing part. I want you to understand this because the rest of the story depends on it. The tail was already, in those first hunts, in the first uses to which the creature put itself, a thing that killed. The wings could carry the body. The eyes could see the prey. The mouth could open and take. But the killing was done by the tail. The tail came around in a wide sweep and the heavy knot of bone and scale at the end of the tail struck the slow beast at the base of the neck and the slow beast went down and did not get up. There was no waste of motion. There was no thrashing. The creature was very efficient. The old ones were careful about this. The creature was not cruel. The creature did what it had to do to feed itself. The slow beasts went down quickly. The herds did not panic the way the cattle of the standing folk would panic. The herds had not yet learned to panic because the creature was the first thing that had ever hunted them from the sky and they did not yet have in their long slow blood the memory of what to be afraid of. The old ones said the herds in those first years would watch the creature come down and would not run. They would only stand and watch and one of them would fall and the others would resume grazing. The fear came later. The fear came after generations of the slow beasts had been hunted and the fear was the first inheritance the creature gave to the things below it. The first thing Raptoris-Sol taught the world was fear. I do not say this to make the creature into a villain. I say it because it is what was. The creature taught the world many things and fear was one of them and the others came later.
The tail.
I want to come now to the matter of the tail. The standing folk’s songs of this part of the story all concern the tail and they concern it in a way that has always struck me as both right and not right at the same time. They say the tail cracked the sky. They say the mountains bowed before it. They say the storms came from it. These things are not wholly wrong. I will tell you what was right about them.
The tail had grown.
I told you in the part before that the tail in the first hour was already firm when the rest of the body was still soft. I told you that the tail was banded and ridged and that it ended in a heavy knot. I told you that the first striking of the tail on the ground in the high valley opened a fine crack in the lower ridge through which water began to seep down toward the deep places. These things were the first things the tail did. They were small things compared to what came after. The tail grew. The creature grew. The body lengthened and thickened over the years of flight and the years of hunting and the tail grew faster than the rest. The tail became the heaviest part of the body by a wide margin. The tail became the part the creature used for many things. It used the tail for killing as I have said. It used the tail for balance in the long turns of the sky-rivers. It used the tail to brace itself when it came down on the wild hills to feed. And it used the tail, in time, for something else.
The tail spoke.
The old ones were very careful about this part. They said the speaking was not speech the way the standing folk speak. They said the speaking was a striking. The creature would beat the tail against the air in a particular way and the air would receive the beating and the beating would travel through the air as a kind of pressure and the pressure would reach the ridges and the ridges would feel it and the pressure would reach the herds below and the herds would feel it and the pressure would reach the few small things in those days that had begun to gather in groups at the foot of the ranges, the very first ancestors of the small wandering folk who would much later become the cliff-folk, and those small things would feel the pressure also. The pressure was a kind of speech. It said certain things. The old ones said the creature in those years was not speaking to anyone in particular. The creature was speaking the way a young thing speaks to itself when it is trying out what its voice will do. The creature was learning its tail. The tail was learning the creature. They were working out together what the tail could say. And what the tail learned to say first was weather.
The tail brought weather.
This is the part the cliff-folk eventually knew. The cliff-folk did not know it for a long time because in the early years of the creature’s flying the very small ancestors of the cliff-folk were too few and too scattered to have begun to gather their knowledge. But after some long time, the old ones did not say how long, the small wandering folk at the foot of the southern ranges began to notice a thing. They began to notice that when the great shape passed overhead and the long tail beat the air a certain way the wind that followed was a wind from a certain direction. They began to notice that when the tail beat the air another way the wind followed from a different direction. They began to notice that the tail and the weather were tied. They did not at first know it was the tail doing the tying. They thought the tail was reading the weather rather than making it. This was the way they put it among themselves. They were not wholly wrong about that either. The tail was reading and making at the same time. The tail was part of the weather. The tail and the weather were two parts of one thing. When the tail moved the weather moved with it because the tail was the part of the weather that had a shape and a will. The old ones tried to explain this to me and I do not know if I have it right. The standing folk would call it cause and effect and would argue about which was the cause. The old ones would say that is the wrong way to ask the question. The tail and the weather happened together. They were not two things that touched. They were one thing that had two faces.
The small wandering folk began to read the tail. They became the first cliff-folk by this reading. They were not yet living on the cliffs in those days. They were living at the foot of the southern ranges in small camps. They learned to look up. They learned that when the great shape passed and the tail beat slowly and low to the body the weather would be calm for a long while. They learned that when the great shape passed and the tail beat fast and high above the body the weather would turn and a storm would come. They learned that when the great shape passed and the tail cracked once sharply against the air in a way that sent a clear pulse outward across the sky the weather would split. A storm would come on one side of the ridges and the sun would shine on the other and the line between them would be sharp. The old ones said the small wandering folk learned to plant their few crops and herd their few beasts according to the readings of the tail. The old ones said this was the beginning of the cliff-folk’s knowledge of the wind. This was the long inheritance that the girl Kaela, who would come much later and whom you have not yet met properly in this telling, would inherit through some hundred generations of grandmothers who had taught their granddaughters to look up and to know what they were looking at. The shells the cliff-folk later threaded onto sashes to read the wind. The bone listening-stones the cliff-folk later wore at their throats to feel the coming storm. The whole long craft of the cliff-folk’s weather-reading began in those years when the small wandering folk at the foot of the southern ranges learned that the great shape overhead was talking through its tail and that what it was saying was the shape of the next day’s sky.
This is the right thing the standing folk’s songs got right. The tail cracked the sky. It really did. It really cracked it. There were sharp clear lines in the air after a tail-stroke that the standing folk who can see such things have told me are still occasionally visible to careful observers in the high places of the world. Faint scars on the sky. Long-healed places where the tail of Raptoris-Sol once divided one weather from another. I have never seen them. I have not been above for many generations. The standing folk who have seen them tell me they are real.
The wrong thing the standing folk’s songs got wrong is the matter of the bowing. They say the mountains bowed before the tail. The mountains did not bow. The mountains do not bow. The mountains did something else that the standing folk did not have a word for and so the standing folk who came later took the closest word their language had and used it and the closest word was bow and so the songs say bow. What the mountains did was lean. They leaned the way a tree leans when a strong wind has been blowing against it from the same direction for a hundred years. The tail of Raptoris-Sol beat the air over certain ranges so often and so heavily across the long years of the creature’s life that the air pressed against the ridges and the ridges over time leaned. They leaned toward the south. The old ones who told me this story said that if you went now to the southern ranges of the great island of Hraevn-an-Ol and you found a place high enough to see the line of the ridges from above you would see the lean. The ridges all tilt very slightly to the south. The standing folk who study such things have noticed this and have proposed many explanations. None of their explanations are the right one. The right one is the tail. The tail leaned the mountains over a long age. The mountains did not bow. They leaned. There is a difference. Bowing is a thing you do once. Leaning is a thing that is done to you over time. The old ones were careful about this. The standing folk are not careful about it. The standing folk like the bowing. The bowing makes a better song. I cannot help that.
The creature lived in this way for a very long time. The old ones did not say how long. The creature flew the sky-rivers and hunted the wild hills and beat its tail against the air and the small wandering folk below learned to read the beating and called themselves by names that have not survived and worshiped what they did not yet know was a creature. They thought the great shape was a god or a weather or a thing the old places put out into the air the way a hot pool puts out steam. They did not at first know it was a living thing with eyes and a mouth and a body. They learned this slowly. They learned it by a few brave ones among them who climbed high enough on the southern ranges to see the great shape pass close and to see that it had eyes and that the eyes looked back. The brave ones came down from the high places and said what they had seen and most were not believed and a few were believed and the few who were believed began to teach. They began to teach that the great shape was alive. They began to teach that the great shape was a creature and not a weather. They began to teach that the weather came from the creature and not the other way around. They began to teach respect.
The respect was the second inheritance.
The first had been fear. I have already told you that. The creature taught the world fear and the slow beasts of the wild hills learned it across generations and that fear became the first inheritance. The respect was different. The respect was a thing taught by the small wandering folk to themselves about the great shape they had begun to know was a creature. The respect was not fear. The respect did not say run. The respect said look up. The respect said note the position of the tail. The respect said when the tail beats fast and high go inside. The respect said when the tail cracks sharply across the sky the line of the storm will fall along the place the crack pointed and you should plant accordingly. The respect was a kind of knowledge. The cliff-folk who came later inherited it and added to it and the old ones said the inheritance was the strongest gift the creature ever gave the standing folk, stronger even than the line between earth and sky which the creature had drawn in the first hour of its flying, because the line between earth and sky was a thing the standing folk could afford to take for granted and did and the inheritance of respect was a thing the standing folk could not afford to take for granted and almost did. Almost did. Almost. The old ones said this word almost in a particular way when they came to this part of the telling. They said almost and then they paused and the pause was the kind of pause that has another telling waiting inside it. I will come to that telling in a moment.
There was a long age then. There was a long age in which the creature flew and the small wandering folk grew into the cliff-folk and the cliff-folk built their first small dwellings on the southern coasts of what would later be Hraevn-an-Ol and the herds of slow beasts on the wild hills slowly learned to fear and slowly learned to scatter at the sight of the great shape and slowly thinned in numbers because the creature continued to hunt and the slow beasts could not breed quickly enough to replace what was taken. The creature itself did not seem to age. The old ones said this very carefully because the old ones did not want to say the creature was immortal. The old ones said only that the creature did not seem to age. There is a difference. Immortality is a claim. Not seeming to age is an observation. The old ones preferred observations to claims. I have inherited that preference. I will pass it on. The creature did not seem to age. The creature went on flying and hunting and beating its tail against the air for a length of time that the old ones could not measure and that I will not try to measure. Long. Long. Long.
And then came the first shadow on the horizon.
This is the part I have been arriving at and I want to come at it slowly because the slowness is the right way to come at it. The creature was on a sky-river that day. The old ones knew which sky-river. They named it in the old tongue and the name does not translate. It was a sky-river that ran along the southern coast of what would much later be Hraevn-an-Ol, high above the open sea, in the direction the sun comes from in the morning. The creature was on that sky-river and it was riding the river the way it had ridden the river ten thousand times before and the sea below was empty as the sea had always been empty except for the small fishing boats of the cliff-folk close in to the shore. The cliff-folk by then had begun to fish. They had built small boats of skin and bone and they went out in the calm weather and they came in when the tail of the creature beat in a way that said come in. The cliff-folk by then knew the readings. The cliff-folk by then were not afraid of the creature in the way the slow beasts of the wild hills had been afraid. The cliff-folk respected. They looked up. They read. They lived.
The creature was on the sky-river and looking down out of habit at the empty sea and the creature saw the first shadow.
The shadow was very far away. The shadow was a long way out from the shore. The shadow was on the surface of the sea and it was moving. It was moving in a way that the old ones said was different from the moving of clouds on water and different from the moving of the wind on water and different from the moving of any current the creature had ever seen in all its long age of flying above that sea. The shadow was made up of smaller shadows. The smaller shadows were narrow and long and they were arranged in a line and they were moving together. The creature watched the shadow for a long time. The creature did not yet have a word for what it was seeing. The creature had never seen ships. There had never been ships in the southern sea before that hour. The ships were new. The ships were a thing the world had not yet had. They were coming from the north. They had been built in the long fjords of what the standing folk later called the northern reaches and they had been launched into the open sea by men of iron and silver-skin and they had been sailing for many days and they were now far enough south that they had come into the sky of the creature for the first time.
The creature did not yet know any of this. The creature only saw the shadow.
The creature came down lower on the sky-river to look at the shadow. The creature came down slowly. The creature did not stoop. The stoop is for hunting and the creature was not hunting because the creature did not yet know what it was looking at and a creature that does not know what it is looking at does not yet stoop. The creature came down only a little. The creature came down to a height from which the smaller shadows in the line could be seen as smaller shapes and the smaller shapes had a curve along their length that suggested to the creature, in some part of its long understanding which had been built up across the long age, that the smaller shapes were not natural things. The creature understood, slowly, that the smaller shapes were made things. The creature did not have words for made things in the way the standing folk do but the creature understood the difference between the things that grow and the things that are put together and the small shapes on the sea were things that had been put together. The creature understood this. The creature did not understand who or what had put them together. The creature did not yet know there were such things as men of iron and silver-skin sailing south from a place called the northern reaches. The creature only knew that the shapes were made and that they were moving in a line and that they were coming toward the coast.
The creature watched.
The creature watched for a long while. The old ones said this is the part of the telling that ought to be loudest and most full of foreboding and yet they always told it in the quietest voices because what was happening was very quiet. The creature simply watched. The creature did not beat its tail against the air. The creature did not crack the sky. The creature did not send any reading down to the cliff-folk who would later have wanted very much to have had a reading at that moment. The creature just watched. The creature was uncertain. The old ones said this was the first uncertainty in the long age of the creature’s flying. The creature in all its years of riding the sky-rivers and hunting the wild hills had never been uncertain before. The creature had always known what it was looking at. The creature had always known what to do. Now there were shapes on the sea below that the creature did not know and the creature, after some long time of watching, did the only thing it could think to do, which was to go on flying. The creature went back up the sky-river. The creature continued on its way. The creature did not return for some time to the southern coast. The shapes on the sea below went on toward the shore and the creature did not stop them and the creature did not warn the cliff-folk and the cliff-folk did not know yet that anything had changed.
This was the first encounter. The old ones gave it the longest pause of the telling. They gave it the kind of pause that does not have another telling waiting inside it. They gave it the kind of pause that has only silence inside it. The kind of silence that is not the patience of water on stone. A different kind. A kind that does not belong down here. A kind that came down here for the first time on that day when a creature that had never been uncertain became uncertain.
The shapes reached the shore.
The shapes were drawn up onto the beaches in the small coves where the cliff-folk did not at that time live and the men of iron and silver-skin climbed out of the shapes and stood for the first time on the southern coast and the men looked around and the men did not look up. The men did not look up. This is the part I want you to feel. The cliff-folk in all the long age had looked up. The cliff-folk had read the tail. The cliff-folk had respected. The men who came out of the shapes on the beach that day did not look up. They looked along the shore. They looked at the cliffs. They looked at the small dwellings of the cliff-folk in the distance. They looked at each other. They did not look up. There was a great shape passing far overhead on the sky-river going north again and they did not see it. The shape passed and they did not look. The old ones said the moment when the men did not look up was the moment the long age of the creature began to end. The men did not know there was anything to look up for. The men had not been taught the inheritance. The men had come from a place where the inheritance did not exist. The men were not bad men in that moment. The men were only men who had not been taught. But the not being taught was the beginning of the end. Because the men would later be taught and the teaching would come too late and the teaching when it came would come not as the cliff-folk had been taught, by long generations of looking up, but as men of a different kind are taught, by greed and by fear and by the wanting of a thing they had heard of in rumor.
That was many years later. That is for a later part of this telling. The first encounter was only this. A creature on a sky-river looking down at shapes it did not know. Shapes on a sea drawing toward a coast they did not yet understand. A great shape passing overhead unnoticed by the men who would one day be the grandfathers of the men who would chase that shape across twelve days of singing woods and corner it at the Cliffs of Falling Stars and break its tail from its body with chains of thunderstone.
It started here. It started with not looking up.
The drip is going on behind me. The pool is black. The chamber is cold. I have been speaking a long time and I will rest now. The old ones who gave me this telling rested at this same place in the telling and I think they rested here for a reason and the reason was that what comes next is the part where the standing folk have to enter the story properly and the entrance is a kind of weight and one should gather oneself before taking it on. I will gather myself. The water will go on dripping. The blind fish in the pool below will rise and turn and go down again. The small wetness will gather on the seam in the limestone above me and at some point it will fall and I will hear it fall and that will be one count. By the time I have heard a few more falls I will have rested enough and I will go on.
For now.
There was a shape on a sky-river. There was a shape on a sea. The shape on the river did not understand the shape on the sea. The shape on the sea did not even know to look at the shape on the river. They passed by each other. The day was clear. The wind was a wind. The herds on the wild hills grazed. The cliff-folk made their small dwellings. The tail of Raptoris-Sol beat the air slowly and low to the body that day. The reading was calm weather for a long while. The reading was correct. The weather was calm for a long while. But.
A thing had begun.
A thing had begun and no one had read it because the reading of it had not yet been learned by anyone. The old ones said this is the most dangerous kind of beginning. A beginning that has no reader. A beginning that has no name. A beginning that passes by under a clear sky on a calm day and is not noticed by either of the two who are beginning together.
That was the day.
That was the first day.
The water drips. The cold settles. I rest.
Segment 4: “Fourteen White Shells and a Falcon’s Eye”
Many years later, when she was an old woman placing shells one by one upon a place where a creature had died before she was born, Kaela of the Cliffs would remember the afternoon her grandmother first laid the sash across her shoulders and told her to listen. She would remember it not as a single afternoon but as all the afternoons of her childhood folded into one, the way a long ribbon when it is set down too quickly upon a table will fold into a heap and become, for the eye that does not look closely, a single bright accumulation rather than the long thing it actually is. Childhood was like that for the cliff-folk. It was long when you were inside it and it was a single bright heap when you looked back from anywhere else. She had been told this by her grandmother and she had not believed it at the time and she had come, in the way one comes to all the things one’s grandmothers say, to believe it later, when there was no one left to tell about the believing.
She was six years old in the year the shells were first hung upon her, and she was very small for six, with the kind of smallness that her mother insisted was only a matter of time and her aunts privately worried over in the low evening voices women use for the small bodies of girls. Her hair was already the wild black mass of curls that would never, in the long course of her life, agree to lie flat, and her grandmother, whose own hair had been the same in its time and was now a single white braid the thickness of three fingers, had taken to calling her in the mornings by the affectionate insult cloud-headed-one. The cliff-folk’s words for affection were nearly all insults and the cliff-folk’s words for insult were nearly all affectionate and an outsider trying to learn the language had to pay attention to the eyes rather than the mouth or be wholly lost. Kaela learned the eyes early. She had to. She was the youngest of her grandmother’s seven granddaughters and the only one whose mother had been her grandmother’s youngest daughter, and there were certain things, in the long economy of cliff-folk family, that the youngest of the youngest inherited whether she had asked to or not. The sash was one of them.
The sash was old. The sash was older than her grandmother and her grandmother was older than anyone alive in their small village on the rim of the southern coast. The sash had been woven, the story said, by a woman seven generations back whose name had survived only in the sash itself because she had threaded her name into the weave in a pattern that the women of the family still recognized when they ran their fingers along the inside. The sash was the color of the sea on a clear morning, a blue-green that was both colors at once and neither of them separately, and along its length had been sewn fourteen white shells. Not twelve. Not fifteen. Fourteen. Her grandmother had been emphatic about this on the afternoon she laid the sash across Kaela’s small shoulders for the first time. Fourteen was the number. Fourteen was always the number. If a shell broke a new one had to be added within seven days or the sash forgot what it knew. If two shells were lost the sash had to be rewoven and the relearning would take a generation. Kaela had asked, in the manner of all six-year-olds, why fourteen, and her grandmother had laughed and said because that is how many it took the first woman to hear what she needed to hear, and Kaela had asked, because she had been the kind of child who asked the second question, what the first woman had needed to hear, and her grandmother had not answered. Her grandmother had only smoothed the sash where it lay across the small shoulder and tied it carefully under the opposite arm and said, in the low voice that meant the matter was both important and not yet to be explained, listen.
The afternoon of the first listening came back to Kaela across many decades as a single warm gold light. They had walked, she and her grandmother, along the cliff path that went south from the village to the great outcropping the cliff-folk called the Watcher’s Knee because of the way the rock bent forward over the sea like an old woman leaning down to wash her face in the surf. The light that afternoon was the light of late Buzzing, the seventh week of the month of Helmus, when the long warming of summer has begun to turn over into the gold and red of early autumn and the air carries in it a kind of sweetness that the older cliff-folk said was the smell of the year remembering itself. The grasses on the cliff top were tall and pale and full of the small dry rattlings of the insects that gave the week its name, and the gulls overhead had the particular irritability they always developed in late afternoon when the fishing boats below began to come in and there was no longer any chance of finding an unattended bit of fish on an empty deck. Kaela walked behind her grandmother and tried, as her grandmother had instructed her, not to make noise with her feet, and she failed in the small ways small children fail, scuffing the path here, kicking a pebble there, and her grandmother did not correct her. Her grandmother had stopped correcting her three steps out of the village. Her grandmother walked ahead with her white braid swinging gently across her back and her hands folded behind her at the small of her back and her bare feet making absolutely no sound at all on a path that had been packed hard by the bare feet of cliff-folk for so many generations that it had taken on a polish like a worn floor.
At the Watcher’s Knee her grandmother sat down on the warm stone and patted the place beside her and Kaela sat. The shells on the new sash clicked very softly against one another as she settled. Her grandmother reached over with one long brown finger and stilled the clicking with a small touch, the way one would still a small animal that did not yet know how to be still on its own. Now listen, said her grandmother. Listen to the wind. Tell me what it is doing.
Kaela listened. She was a serious child when serious things were asked of her and she gave the listening the full weight of her concentration. The wind was, she decided, doing several things. The wind was moving the grasses behind them in a long rustle. The wind was coming up the face of the cliff in front of them in a slow steady push that lifted the small hairs on her arms. The wind was carrying the sound of the gulls down toward them from above and the sound of the surf up toward them from below. The wind, she said carefully, was doing many things. Her grandmother nodded as if she had given an acceptable answer and said now listen to the shells. Tell me what the shells are doing.
Kaela had not, until that moment, considered that the shells might be doing anything. The shells were sewn to a piece of cloth. The shells, she had assumed in the way of six-year-olds, were decorations. She lowered her head and listened. At first she heard nothing. The shells were still where her grandmother’s finger had stilled them. Then, very slowly, as the wind continued to come up the cliff face in its slow steady push, she heard something. It was not a sound exactly. It was a feeling that the shells were beginning to want to be a sound. She held very still. She felt the wind reach the sash and pass through the small spaces between the shells and the cloth, and one shell, the third from the front along her right shoulder, gave a small dry chime, and then another, the seventh, gave a slightly different chime, lower and longer, and then nothing for a long breath, and then both at once. She looked up at her grandmother in something close to astonishment. Her grandmother was smiling the small smile that meant she had been waiting for the astonishment. Good, said her grandmother. Now I will tell you what they said.
Her grandmother told her. The third shell on the right side, the one that chimed first, said the wind is coming from the open sea this afternoon. The seventh shell, the one that chimed lower, said the wind is steady and will hold its direction. The two chiming together at the end said there will be no storm tonight. Kaela’s grandmother said all of this calmly, as one might describe what one had seen by leaning over to read a piece of paper held by another person. Kaela asked, again because she was the kind of child who asked the second question, how the shells knew. Her grandmother said, with a small and almost embarrassed laugh, that she did not know how the shells knew. Her grandmother said only that the shells had been listening to the wind on this coast for seven generations and the women of the family had been listening to the shells for seven generations and that across those generations the women and the shells had learned to read each other. Her grandmother said the shells did not know things in the way people know things. The shells only chimed in particular ways under particular winds, and the women had learned which chimes went with which winds, and what those winds tended to bring. Her grandmother said it was not magic in the way the inland people meant the word. Her grandmother said it was attention. She used the word attention several times that afternoon and Kaela did not understand it for a long time but she remembered the word and she remembered the shape her grandmother’s mouth made when she said it. Attention.
They sat at the Watcher’s Knee until the sun went down behind them and the sea below turned the dark slow color it turned at evening. Her grandmother taught her, in that one long golden afternoon, three of the simpler readings. The reading of the open-sea wind in summer. The reading of the land wind at dusk. The reading of the cross-wind that meant rain in the morning but only inland and never on the coast. Kaela learned all three by the time the first stars came out. She would learn forty more over the next six years. She would learn the readings of the storm winds and the readings of the calm winds and the readings of the small treacherous winds that ran along the face of the cliff and could pluck an unwary fisher-girl off the edge if she did not know to set her feet against the stone in a particular way. She would learn the reading her grandmother called the bird-wind, which the shells gave when a flock was about to pass overhead, and the reading her grandmother called the empty-wind, which the shells gave when nothing at all was going to happen for many hours, and the reading her grandmother called, in a voice that Kaela noticed even at the time was different from her voice for the other readings, the old-wind. The old-wind reading was a thing Kaela did not understand for a long time. Her grandmother would not explain it. Her grandmother said only that there was a kind of wind that had been blowing on the coast for longer than the cliff-folk had been on the coast, and that sometimes the shells would still hear it, and that when they did the proper thing to do was to be quiet and to listen and not to try to read it because it was not a reading the cliff-folk were meant to have. It was, her grandmother said, a wind that belonged to a creature that had once been in the sky and was no longer in the sky, and the shells remembered it because the shells were old and old things remember old things. Kaela did not understand. Kaela was nine years old when her grandmother told her this and she filed the explanation away in the part of her mind where the explanations of grandmothers go to wait for the years to bring them into focus.
Now I must tell you about the finger.
The finger was lost in her tenth year. She had been growing into the long-limbed cliff-girl she would briefly be before she stopped growing altogether at fifteen, and her family had begun the work of teaching her the second of the great cliff-folk crafts, which was the handling of birds. Her grandmother taught the wind. Her aunt Mira taught the birds. The cliff-folk kept falcons because the falcons hunted along the cliff in the early mornings and the falcons could be persuaded, with patience and with a particular kind of glove made of seabird hide cured in salt and pine smoke, to bring their catch back to the falconer rather than eat it themselves. The falcons were not pets in the way the inland people kept dogs. The falcons were partners. The falcons came and went as they liked. The falcons would refuse the glove for whole seasons if they were displeased and would return without explanation when they wished. Her aunt Mira had four falcons of her own and was, in the unspoken hierarchy of the village, the best falconer of her generation. Aunt Mira was small and sharp-tongued and had thin hands the color of weathered driftwood, and she had agreed, the spring of Kaela’s tenth year, to take Kaela on as a student.
There was a falcon. The falcon was a young female with the white throat and the rust-streaked breast of her kind and a left eye that was very slightly clouded from some early injury. Aunt Mira had not named her. The cliff-folk did not name their falcons. Naming a falcon, Aunt Mira said, was a way of trying to own it, and falcons did not allow themselves to be owned, and a falcon who heard a name being put on it would simply leave and never return. So the bird was only the bird. The bird with the clouded left eye. The bird had been working with Aunt Mira for two seasons and Aunt Mira judged her ready for a student.
It was a morning in the second week of Lathandus, in the month named for the god of birth and renewal, and the air over the cliffs was the clear cold air that came in those early-spring weeks before the warmth of summer had properly arrived. Kaela wore the small training glove her aunt had made for her, which fit her small hand badly and slipped slightly when she flexed her fingers. Aunt Mira had warned her about the slippage. Aunt Mira had warned her about the slippage three times that morning and Kaela had nodded each time with the impatience of ten-year-olds who have understood the first warning and resent the repetition. The bird came in on the wind from the open sea. The bird made her long curving approach the way the bird always made it, with the small adjustment of the wings at the last moment that brought her down soft onto the glove. Only that morning the bird’s clouded left eye misjudged. The wind, which Kaela’s grandmother’s shells had read as steady, gave a small unannounced gust at exactly the moment of landing, and the bird, who was relying on her right eye to read the glove and her left eye, the clouded one, to read the wind, did not catch the gust in time. The bird came in slightly off. The bird’s right talon, which was supposed to find the thick padded thumb of the glove, instead found the smallest finger of Kaela’s left hand, which Kaela had foolishly left curled outside the glove because the glove was too big and the curl had felt natural. The talon closed.
There was a moment, Kaela would remember all her life, in which she did not know what had happened. There was a moment in which the bird looked at her and she looked at the bird and the bird’s clouded left eye and her bright right eye were both, in their separate ways, full of an apology that was almost human. The bird knew. The bird knew immediately what she had done. The bird tried to release the talon but the talon was locked the way a falcon’s talon locks when it is committed and the only way to release it now was for the bird to settle her weight differently and reset the grip, and to reset the grip the bird would have to lift, and lifting with the talon still locked meant lifting with the small finger still in the grip.
The bird did the only thing she could do. The bird lifted, and the finger came with her, and the finger came off cleanly at the lowest joint, which is a thing a falcon’s talon will do when it has closed on something soft and the bird then pulls upward, and the bird flew a short distance with the finger still in her grip and then realized, in whatever way falcons realize such things, what she had taken, and she dropped the finger onto the cliff path and she circled back once over Kaela’s head, and Kaela, who had not yet started to scream because the pain had not yet arrived in the way pain arrives a few seconds after a serious injury, looked up and met the bird’s eyes a second time, the clouded one and the bright one, and saw the apology again, and watched the bird wheel away over the open sea and not come back. The bird did not come back that day. The bird did not come back any day after. Aunt Mira looked for the bird for three seasons and never found her, and Aunt Mira’s two younger falcons left in the same year, as if there had been a conference among the birds about the matter, and Aunt Mira did not take another student for the remainder of her life.
The pain arrived. The screaming arrived. Aunt Mira was there, holding the small bleeding hand, calling for Kaela’s mother in a voice that Kaela had never heard her sharp aunt use before, and Kaela was watching the small piece of herself lying on the cliff path some feet away with a strange detachment, as though the finger were a shell that had fallen off the sash and would need to be replaced within seven days or the sash would forget. They wrapped the hand. They carried her home. The old man of the village who had the bone-knowledge cleaned the wound and stitched the skin and gave her a paste of two herbs that took the pain down to a dull pounding, and she lay for three days in the sleeping-cot in her grandmother’s house with the sash hung on the wall above her where she could see it, and on the third day her grandmother sat down beside the cot and said, in the same low voice she had used for the explanation of the old-wind reading a year before, that there was a thing Kaela needed to know about the bird.
What the grandmother said was this. The bird had not made a simple mistake. The bird had made a mistake that was helped by something else. The wind that had gusted at exactly the wrong moment had been a wind the shells on the sash would have read, had Kaela been wearing the sash that morning. Kaela had not been wearing the sash that morning because the sash was a wind-reader’s sash and not a falconer’s tool and Aunt Mira had said it would only be in the way during the lesson. The grandmother did not blame Aunt Mira. The grandmother did not blame Kaela. The grandmother only said that the shells would have caught the gust and warned and Kaela would have braced and the talon would have closed on the glove as it was supposed to. The grandmother said it quietly and Kaela understood, even at ten, that her grandmother was not telling her this in order to make her feel guilty. Her grandmother was telling her this because her grandmother believed it was important for Kaela to know that the shells did what the shells did and that if you went out into the world without them, even for a small ordinary task, you were going out into the world without a kind of attention you might need. The grandmother said one other thing. The grandmother said that the bird’s left eye, the clouded one, had also been a kind of attention that had failed at the wrong moment, and that there was something to be learned about the way two attentions, hers and the bird’s, had each failed in their own way and combined in a way that took a finger. The grandmother did not draw a moral from this. The grandmother only laid it down beside the cot and let it sit there with Kaela for the rest of the recovery. Kaela would think about it many times across her long life. She thought about it on the day she returned to the cliffs as an old woman to lay shells on the place where the creature had died. She thought about it the day she finally understood, sixty years later, the explanation her grandmother had given her about the old-wind. There are some things you are told once at the right moment and they go on telling themselves to you for the rest of your years.
The hand healed. The space where the finger had been became, in time, the small absence Kaela would carry forever, no longer than a thumbnail at the edge of her palm, with a small puckered scar that ached in cold weather and twitched faintly when a strong wind came off the open sea. She returned to her grandmother’s lessons in the wind and she did not return to her aunt’s lessons in the birds. The cliff-folk did not insist. The cliff-folk understood that some students chose their crafts and some crafts chose their students, and that a girl who had given a finger to the birds had given enough and might be allowed to follow the wind for the rest of her days. Aunt Mira gave her a small carved bone falcon to wear on a thong around her neck, in the way one gives a child a marker of a thing she has narrowly survived, and Kaela wore it for many years and only stopped wearing it when she was taken north as a captive and the thong was cut from her neck by a man who thought it was something else. But that comes much later. We are still in the childhood. We are still in the long bright fold of afternoons.
I want to tell you now about the year of the gathering clouds, which was Kaela’s twelfth year, and which was the year the shells began to chime in a way her grandmother had never heard before.
The first of the strange chimings came in the third week of Selnus, the first month of the year, in a winter that had been milder than usual along the southern coast. Kaela was twelve and had been wearing the sash openly for six years and had learned thirty-one of the standard readings and could give them as quickly as her grandmother now, and her grandmother had begun, in small ways, to defer to her on questions of the smaller winds. They were walking the cliff path one cold morning when the shells gave a chime that neither of them recognized. It was a low chime from the fifth shell along the left side, followed by a higher chime from the eleventh, with a long pause between them, and then nothing more. Kaela waited for the second part of the reading. The second part did not come. She looked at her grandmother. Her grandmother was looking out to sea with the small frown that always meant a reading was not behaving correctly. They stood at the cliff edge for some minutes and the shells did not chime again. The wind that had produced the unfamiliar chime was a wind from the north and slightly east, which was a direction the shells did not often have to read on this coast, and Kaela’s grandmother said, slowly, that perhaps the chime had been only a fragment of a reading her own teacher had once described and that she had never properly learned. They went home. The grandmother did not eat much that evening.
The second of the strange chimings came two weeks later, and the third a week after that, and by the second week of Lathandus, the month of birth and renewal in which Kaela had two years earlier lost her finger, the strange chimings had begun to come almost daily. The fifth shell on the left and the eleventh shell on the right were the most frequent voices in the new readings, with occasional contributions from the first shell on the right and, very rarely, the central shell at the front of the sash, which Kaela’s grandmother said almost never chimed at all in the ordinary course of a year and was considered, in the old teachings, the shell of warnings. The central shell chimed three times in the spring of Kaela’s twelfth year. Each time her grandmother went quiet for the rest of the day.
Then came the clouds.
The clouds began to gather in the first week of Tyrus, in the month named for the god of justice. They gathered in a way the cliff-folk had not seen before. They were not storm clouds in the ordinary sense. They were higher and thinner than storm clouds and they did not bring rain. They gathered along the northern horizon and they stayed there. Day after day they stayed. They did not move closer and they did not blow away. The cliff-folk took to standing on the rim of the village in the long evenings and looking north at the line of cloud and shaking their heads. The old men of the village, who had each in their own way some piece of the long inheritance of cliff-folk weather-knowledge, conferred and disagreed and conferred again. The old women, who had each in their own way the longer inheritance through the women’s lines, conferred more quietly and did not disagree as much, but did not arrive at any conclusion either. Something was coming. Everyone agreed that something was coming. No one could agree on what.
Kaela’s grandmother spent more and more of the long evenings at the Watcher’s Knee. She would sit there from after the midday meal until the first stars came out, and she would listen to the sash, and she would write small marks on a scrap of leather she carried in her belt-pouch. Kaela went with her most evenings. They did not always speak. They mostly sat and listened. Kaela’s grandmother, in those evenings, began to teach Kaela the readings she had not taught her before. The readings of the old-wind. The reading her grandmother called the empty-shell reading, which was what the sash did when the wind that was blowing was a wind the sash had never been taught. The reading her grandmother called the long-warning, which was a slow gathering of chimings across days that, taken together, meant something larger than any one chime could carry. The grandmother said, sitting at the Watcher’s Knee one evening in late Tyrus with the clouds still standing along the northern horizon as they had stood for six weeks now, that the sash was giving a long-warning. The grandmother said the long-warning was not for any one storm or any one season. The grandmother said the long-warning was for something else and she did not know what. The grandmother said the last time anyone in her family had received a long-warning had been her own great-grandmother’s great-grandmother, and the warning that time had been for the great wave that took half the southern villages in a single afternoon, but that the present long-warning did not feel like the warning for a wave. The grandmother said it felt different. The grandmother could not say in what way it felt different. The grandmother could only say that it felt as if something was coming from a direction the cliff-folk had not built their readings for.
It was during this period, in the long slow gathering of the clouds and the long slow gathering of the chimings, that Kaela began to dream.
The dreams were not the dreams of a child. The dreams were not even, properly, dreams of her own life. She would lie down in the cot in her grandmother’s house at night and she would close her eyes and she would find herself in a high valley she had never seen, with pale tall grass moving in a kind of wind that was almost speech, and there would be a great stone in the middle of the valley shaped like an egg standing on its end, and the warm circle of bare earth at its foot would draw her forward, and she would not be able to walk to it because in the dreams her feet did not work the way feet work, and she would only stand at the edge of the valley and watch the stone, and the stone would not crack, and she would wake. She had this dream perhaps a dozen times across that summer. She did not tell her grandmother about it. She did not know why she did not tell her grandmother about it. She would think, in much later years, that she had not told her grandmother because she had known, at the level a twelve-year-old knows things without being able to put them into words, that the dream was not yet meant to be talked about. The dream was a thing being given to her in a slow trickle and the proper thing to do with it was to receive it slowly and not to try to hurry it.
There was one other thing.
It happened in late Helmus, in the same week and almost the same hour of the same day as her first listening at the Watcher’s Knee six years before. She was twelve. She was sitting at the cliff edge alone with the sash across her shoulders and the small carved bone falcon still at her throat in those days. The clouds along the northern horizon had been standing for nearly two months. The shells had given seventeen readings the village did not have names for. The central shell had chimed eleven times. Kaela was alone because her grandmother had been unwell for a week and was lying at home and had told Kaela to go to the Knee anyway and listen, because the listening had to continue.
Kaela was looking out to sea. The day was the very particular gold of late Buzzing, which the older cliff-folk said was the smell of the year remembering itself. The light lay across the surface of the open sea in a long flat path that began at the horizon and ended at the foot of the cliff. The gulls overhead were quieter than usual. The fishing boats below had come in early. The wind was the cross-wind that meant rain inland but not on the coast and the shells were reading it correctly, calmly, without any of the strange chimings of the past months. For one ordinary afternoon, the sash was behaving the way it had always behaved. Kaela had a small foolish thought that perhaps the long-warning was over. Perhaps it had only been a strange season. Perhaps the clouds along the northern horizon would blow away tonight and the world would return to itself.
And then, in the far distance, very far out on the sea, in the place where the long flat gold path of the sun’s light ended and the horizon began, she saw the shapes.
She did not, at first, know what they were. She did not know because no one in her family had ever seen anything like them and no story she had ever been told contained them and no chiming of the shells had prepared her for them. They were small. They were dark. They were spaced in a long line. They were moving together. They were moving slowly. They were moving toward the coast. She blinked. She rubbed her eyes. She looked again. They were still there. They were a little closer. They were ships.
She did not know the word ships. The cliff-folk had small boats of skin and bone for fishing close to the shore and they had no word for the larger thing she was looking at. She looked at the shapes for a long time and her mind tried to fit them into the shapes it knew and they would not fit. They were not clouds because they were on the water. They were not islands because islands did not move. They were not the great fish that sometimes broke the surface in calm weather because there were too many of them and they were too regular and they were moving in a line. She had no word for them. She would not have a word for them for some months yet, until the year she was thirteen and the ships had come and a man with iron rings in his beard had stood on the beach below the village and a child had pointed and the word had been spoken aloud for the first time. But that was the next year. That afternoon she was twelve and she had no word and she sat at the cliff edge and looked at the shapes that had no name and she felt, for the first time in her life, the very particular feeling of seeing something that her grandmother could not have prepared her for.
She looked down at the sash. The shells were silent. The shells gave no chime. The shells were doing the empty-shell reading, which her grandmother had taught her was what the sash did when the wind that was blowing was a wind the sash had never been taught. The wind that was blowing was the cross-wind that meant rain inland and the sash was reading it correctly. The sash was not reading the shapes. The sash could not read the shapes. The shells had nothing to say about the shapes because the shells had not been taught the shapes, because no one in seven generations of cliff-folk women had ever needed to teach the shells to read a thing that came across the open sea in a long line from the north.
She sat with this for a long time. The shapes did not come closer that afternoon. The shapes turned, at some point in the slow late-summer evening, and went back the way they had come, or perhaps only continued along the horizon and out of her sight. She watched until the long flat gold path of the sun’s light went out of the water and the surface of the sea turned the dark slow color it turned at evening, and then she rose and walked back along the cliff path to the village. She did not run. She did not hurry. She walked the way her grandmother had taught her to walk on the path, with the bare feet trying not to make sound, with the small care that meant the path was a thing that should be respected. The shells clicked very softly against one another as she walked.
She went to her grandmother’s house. Her grandmother was awake and propped up against the wall on the sleeping-cot with a cup of warmed milk in her thin brown hands. Her grandmother looked at her as she came in and the small frown that meant a reading was not behaving correctly was already on her grandmother’s face, before Kaela had said anything, before Kaela had even fully crossed the threshold. Her grandmother said tell me. Kaela sat down on the edge of the cot. Kaela said, slowly, that she had seen shapes on the sea. Her grandmother said what kind of shapes. Kaela said she did not know what kind. Kaela described them. She described the smallness of them and the darkness of them and the line of them and the slow movement of them toward the coast. She described the empty-shell reading the sash had given while she watched. Her grandmother set down the cup of warmed milk on the small table beside the cot. Her grandmother’s hand, when she set down the cup, shook very slightly. Kaela had never seen her grandmother’s hand shake before. She would, in later years, understand that this was the moment her grandmother knew, and that her grandmother knew not because of any specific piece of inherited knowledge but because of the long-warning that had been gathering for two months and the standing clouds on the northern horizon and the strange chimings and the central shell sounding eleven times and her granddaughter’s small calm voice describing shapes the sash had not been able to read. Her grandmother knew. Her grandmother did not say what she knew. Her grandmother only reached out with her thin shaking hand and laid it for a moment against Kaela’s cheek and said you will need to listen very carefully now. For the rest of your life. Do you understand me. Listen very carefully.
Kaela said she would. Kaela was twelve. Kaela did not yet understand what she had been told. Kaela would understand it slowly over the next year as the shapes returned and grew larger and turned out to be ships and brought with them men of iron and silver-skin who did not look up. Kaela would understand it more fully the year after, when the ships came back and the men climbed the cliff path and Kaela found herself being led north as a captive guide because she alone of the cliff-folk spoke both tongues, having been taught some words of the northern speech by a trader who had wintered in the village three years before and who had taken a strange interest in the small clever girl with the wind-sash and the missing finger. Kaela would understand it most fully, perhaps, when she was an old woman placing shells on a cliff-top where a creature had died before she was born, and the wind would come up off the open sea exactly as it had come up that gold afternoon at the Watcher’s Knee, and the shells, the new shells of her old woman’s sash, woven by hands she had taught, would give a chime that her grandmother had told her once, very long ago, would only come when the long-warning was finished, and Kaela would sit down on the warm stone and listen, and weep, very quietly, with the dry tears of someone who had carried the listening all the long way it needed to go.
But that is all later.
That evening she was twelve. She sat by the cot with her grandmother’s thin hand on her cheek. The light outside had gone the dark slow color of the cliff-folk’s evenings. The shells on the sash were still. The standing clouds along the northern horizon, which she could not see from inside the house, were still standing. The shapes on the sea, which she had no word for, had turned or had gone past. The dream of the high valley and the egg-stone, which she had been having all summer, was waiting in its slow patient way to be remembered tonight.
Her grandmother said one more thing before she let her go to her own cot. Her grandmother said, in the low voice that meant the matter was both important and not yet to be explained, that there is a kind of listening you do not learn in one summer. There is a kind of listening that takes the whole of a life and you finish learning it on the day you die and not before. The shells help. The wind helps. The dreams help. The small absences in your hand where things have been taken from you help. But the listening is yours. Do you hear me, cloud-headed-one. The listening is yours. No one else can do it for you. Not me. Not your mother. Not the shells.
Kaela said yes, grandmother. Kaela did not yet know what she was agreeing to. She would spend the rest of her life agreeing to it again, in different ways, in different rooms, with different shells on different sashes. The agreement that had been made at the Watcher’s Knee at six and made again on the falcon morning at ten and made again now at twelve in the low voice of her grandmother by the cot. The agreement to listen. The agreement that the inheritance the cliff-folk had built across seven generations was not a thing that could be handed down complete but a thing that had to be relearned in each life and that each life finished only partially and that the partial finishing was, in itself, the whole point. Attention, her grandmother had said in the gold afternoon six years before. Attention.
She walked across the small room to her own cot. The sash she folded carefully and laid beside her on the floor where she could reach it in the night. She lay down. She closed her eyes. Behind her closed eyes the high valley waited with its pale tall grass moving in its almost-speaking wind and its great stone the shape of an egg standing on its end and the warm circle of bare earth that her dream-self could never quite reach. The dream tonight would be different. She did not yet know it but it would be different. Tonight in the dream the wind would shift, only a finger’s width, and she would feel for the first time that the wind in the dream and the wind that came up the cliffs in the waking world were the same wind, were one wind blowing through both, and she would understand, in the way one understands such things in dreams without having any words for the understanding, that the long-warning the shells had been giving was a warning about something much older than the shapes on the horizon and much older than the men who would soon climb out of those shapes and onto her shore, and that the shapes and the men were only the small late visible piece of a thing that had begun a very long time ago in a high valley her dream knew and her waking life had never seen. She would not be able to explain this to her grandmother in the morning. She would not even try. She would only rise with the rest of the family and eat the small breakfast and walk again to the Watcher’s Knee with her sash across her shoulders and listen to the shells in the wind that came up off the open sea, and the standing clouds along the northern horizon would still be standing, and the year would go on, and the next year the ships would come back, and the year after that the men would climb the path, and her childhood, which had been long when she was inside it, would become the single bright heap her grandmother had told her about, and she would carry it with her into the rest of the story.
For tonight she only slept. The wind blew. The sea did its slow work below. The cliff-folk in their small village turned in their beds and dreamed their small dreams, and only one girl among them, the youngest of the youngest, with a missing finger and a folded sash beside her cot and a head full of pale tall grass and a stone that would not yet crack, was being given a piece of an inheritance she was not yet old enough to know she had received.
Listen, her grandmother had said. Listen carefully. For the rest of your life.
She did.
Segment 5: “Iron-Rings and the Oath at the Longfire”
Now the matter turns north. Now the saga must speak of Hrolv-Kan, son of Brand Iron-Hand, who was son of Audun Cold-Spear, who was son of Eskel of the Long Fjord, whose forefathers had hunted the high country of the northern reaches since before the lineage was reckoned. There are those who say the line goes back further yet, to the time before names were kept, and there are those who say it is impertinence to claim further than memory can be vouched for. The saga will not arbitrate. The saga will say only that Hrolv-Kan was the fourth of his name in the long hall at Aern-Vík, and that in his fifty-second winter he sat at his own longfire and swore an oath that the saga will now report, as it has come down through the songs.
The hall stood, then as now, at the head of the long fjord called Aern, on the western shore of the great island of Heid-Marka, three days’ rowing north of the Strait of Bones. It was built of pine and oak and the bleached ribs of a great sea-beast that Brand Iron-Hand had taken in his own youth, and the ribs arched above the longfire like a roof of bone within a roof of timber. The smoke went up between the ribs and out through the smoke-hole, and the soot of three generations had blackened the bones until they were the color of wet earth. The walls were hung with hides and with weapons, and along the long benches sat the hunters who had answered the summons. There were fourteen of them that night, of whom twelve would later ride south, and of those twelve, the saga is sorry to report, only seven would ride home. But that is for a later telling.
Hrolv-Kan sat at the high seat, which was a chair carved from a single piece of black oak by his grandfather Audun Cold-Spear, and his wolf-cloak hung from his shoulders, and his pale beard was woven that night with three iron rings, for three great hunts survived, and a fourth ring lay loose in his left hand. He turned the loose ring between his thumb and forefinger as he spoke. It was the habit of his speaking, and his men knew it, and they knew that when the loose ring went into the beard the speaking was done and the action begun. So they watched the ring, that night, more than they watched his face.
The food had been cleared from the boards. The bread was eaten. The bones of the deer were piled near the longfire to be burned later for luck. The ale was still flowing. The horn of Audun Cold-Spear, taken from an aurochs by his own hand and rimmed with hammered silver, had been passed three times around the bench, and each man had drunk according to his thirst, and Hrolv-Kan had drunk less than any of them, which was his way before a hunt. A drunk hunter, his father had taught him, is a hunter who has already given the deer one foot’s start in the morning. Hrolv-Kan had a long memory for his father’s sayings, and he kept them as a man keeps a stone in his pocket, to turn between his fingers when the road grew long.
It was Sigvör Ash-Daughter, his skald, who first spoke that night, for it was the skald’s right to open the speaking at any longfire of consequence, and she knew, as the men knew, that the night was of consequence. She rose from her place at the bench nearest the high seat. Her driftwood harp she did not bring up; she left it leaning against the bench behind her, which was her sign that what she would say would be said in plain speech and not in song. Her hair was braided in the two long ropes she wore in those years, weighted with bone rings, and her vest of cured seal-skin was the same blue-grey it had been for fifteen winters. She raised the horn she had not yet drunk from. She said, “Drink-friend, kin-friend, hall-friend. The night is long. The fire is good. The men are gathered. Now let the matter be named, that the naming may begin the doing.”
These were the old words of the skald’s opening. The men struck the boards with the flats of their hands, three times, which was the answer to the old words. Hrolv-Kan inclined his head to her. She drank, then, from the horn, a single careful draught, and sat down, and did not say anything else for a long while afterward. She would say one more thing later in the night, but it was a different kind of thing, and the saga will come to it.
Hrolv-Kan rose from the high seat.
He was tall, as has been said, and the shadow he threw upon the bone-ribbed roof was tall also, and the longfire below him gave his pale eyes the color of wet flint that night, not yet the clouded color they would take in his last years. He held in his right hand the spear of his lineage, which was called Gjafr-Bíta, the Gift-Biter, an old name with an older story behind it, and the head of the spear caught the firelight and threw it back the way water throws back the moon. The haft was iron-bound at the grip, with three small rings of iron set into the wood, for three great hunts survived; the spear and the man bore matching counts. He set the butt of the spear upon the floor of the hall with a small ringing sound, and the men quieted, who had been murmuring among themselves about the food and the ale and the small matters that men murmur of before the matter at hand has been opened.
He spoke. The saga reports his words as they have come down in the song of his cousin Snæ Two-Tongues, who was at the longfire that night and who sang of the oath afterward in his own hall for thirty winters, and whose song was set down in the time of Brother Eskil’s predecessors and is held now in the library at the Watching-Stones.
“Hear me,” said Hrolv-Kan. “Hear me, kin and bench-fellows. I will name the matter, and you will know the matter, and what is done at the name will be done by us together or not done at all. I will not have it said in this hall that I led men out under one matter and brought them home under another. So I will speak plainly, as my father spoke plainly, as his father spoke plainly, as the long line of speaking-plainly has come down to me.”
Here he paused, as was his manner, and turned the loose iron ring once between his fingers, and went on.
“There is a beast in the south. The traders bring word of it, and the cliff-coast people who have come north on the spring ships speak of it in their broken tongue, and the great fishermen of the southern fjords who have rowed past the cliffs of the southern coast have seen it themselves. It is a beast of scale and storm. It has wings the color of evening cloud, and it has eyes the color of a sky that has not yet decided where it will fall, and it has a tail. The tail is the matter. The tail is the meat of the matter, and the rest is only the bone the meat hangs upon. The tail of this beast, hear me now, is a thing of weather. The tail of this beast cracks the sky. The tail of this beast has been seen, by men whose word I trust, to split a storm so that the rain falls on one side of a ridge and the sun shines on the other. The tail of this beast, if it could be taken and bound, would be the greatest weapon any hall in the northern reaches has ever held.”
There was a stir along the benches. The men leaned forward. The horn was passed and not drunk from; the man who held it forgot it in his hand. Hrolv-Kan watched them lean and did not yet smile, for the speaking was not done.
“I will not lie to you,” he said. “I will not say to you that we hunt this beast only for the safety of our women and the protection of our halls, though the southern stories speak also of the harm the beast has done, and there is a girl, Astrid daughter of Gormun Two-Axe of the lower fjord, who was taken by it three summers past while drawing water at the stream above her father’s steading. The saga of Astrid is true, and we owe her father a hunt, and that hunt is part of this matter and is right. But I will not stand at my own longfire and tell you we ride only for Astrid. We ride for Astrid and we ride for what the tail will bring back. We ride for both. Any man who hears me say otherwise is hearing a song that has not been sung tonight.”
The men struck the boards. They struck them not three times but seven, which was the old answer for a chief who had spoken straight. The skald, sitting again at her bench, did not strike the boards. She looked at Hrolv-Kan over the rim of her empty horn with the small unreadable look that was her habit at the openings of great matters, and she did not strike. Hrolv-Kan saw her not strike. He did not show, in his face, that he had seen. He went on.
“Now I will name the men who will ride. I will name you by your fathers, that the naming may be remembered when the saga of this hunt is sung in halls we have not yet entered. Bjorn, son of Halvar Thick-Arm, son of Onund Sea-Walker. Stand.”
A man rose from the second bench. He was broad and short and his beard was a red so dark it was almost black, and he was thirty-eight winters old that year, and he had been on six hunts with Hrolv-Kan and had never asked to be left from any of them. He stood and did not speak, for it was not the custom to speak when one’s name was called at an oath-opening. He stood and waited. Hrolv-Kan nodded to him and went on.
“Ketill, son of Snorri Long-Reach, son of Asgeir of the West Stream. Stand.”
Another man rose. He was taller than Bjorn and thinner, with the long bony face of his father’s line and the same long bony hands. He stood.
“Ulf, son of Gisli Bone-Hand, son of Hroald the Quiet. Stand.”
A third man. Younger than the others, twenty-six winters, the youngest of those who would be named. His mother had been the daughter of Hrolv-Kan’s own father’s sister, and he was therefore a cousin twice removed, and the most loyal man of the hunting band, though not yet the most skilled. He stood.
“Thorir, son of Ragnar Crow-Eye, son of Ketil of the Three Rivers. Stand.”
A fourth.
“Halvard, son of Olaf Salt-Hand, son of Geir Foul-Mouth, who was nonetheless a great hunter. Stand.”
Here there was a small ripple of laughter among the benches, for Geir Foul-Mouth had been a man whose curses had been famous in three valleys and whose hunting had been famous in five, and the saying of his name at an oath-opening was a thing that always brought a small lightness with it. Hrolv-Kan permitted the laughter and did not join it, and went on when it had died.
“Vigleik, son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf, son of Solmund Wide-Beard. Stand.”
A sixth.
“Asbjorn, son of Hauk Far-Sight, son of Ivar Long-Memory. Stand.”
A seventh.
“Audun, son of Brand Two-Knives, son of Brand One-Knife, who lost the other knife to a wolf and lived to laugh about it. Stand.”
An eighth. Another small ripple of laughter. Hrolv-Kan permitted it again.
“Snorri Hard-Hand, son of Snorri Hard-Hand, son of Snorri Hard-Hand. Stand.”
A ninth. The Snorri line had been content with one name for four generations, and the men of the bench made the small dry sound that was their version of laughter at the naming, and Snorri Hard-Hand the youngest, who was fifty winters old and gray as iron and not given to laughter at his own name or anyone else’s, rose and stood and waited.
“Eystein, son of Olvir Sharp-Tooth, son of Vagn the Restless. Stand.”
A tenth.
“Hauk, son of Hauk One-Eye, son of Ari Goose-Foot. Stand.”
An eleventh.
“And last, Sigvör Ash-Daughter, daughter of Brand Iron-Hand, who is my own sister and the skald of this hall and of this hunt. Stand, sister.”
The skald rose. The benches were quiet for her standing. She was the only woman who would ride south, and she was also the chief’s sister by their father if not by their mother, who had been Brand Iron-Hand’s second wife, and there was no man on the benches who did not know that her tongue was the equal of any spear in the room. She stood. She did not look at Hrolv-Kan. She looked at the longfire.
Eleven men and his sister. Twelve in all. The number had been chosen, Hrolv-Kan said, because twelve was the number of his father’s last great hunt and his father had brought eleven home and lost only one, and the omens of twelve were better than the omens of any other number in his family’s reckoning. He did not say, because it did not need saying, that the missing thirteenth would have been his own younger brother Halldor, who had died at thirty of a fever in the second winter of Hrolv-Kan’s chieftainship and whose absence still sat at the longfire like a man on a bench no one would name.
The twelve stood. Hrolv-Kan let them stand a long moment. The bone-ribbed roof above them gathered the firelight and held it. The hides on the walls were dark. The longfire crackled. Somewhere outside the hall a dog began to bark and was hushed by someone, and the silence came back larger than before.
Hrolv-Kan lifted Gjafr-Bíta, the Gift-Biter, in both hands. He held it horizontally before him at the height of his chest. He spoke.
“I swear upon this spear, which is the spear of my father and his father and his father before him, that we shall ride south to the cliffs that the southern people call the Cliffs of Falling Stars. I swear that we shall find the beast that has been seen there. I swear that we shall bind the beast or break the beast or break ourselves in the attempt. I swear that the tail of the beast, if the gods grant it, shall come home with us to this hall, and that the tail shall be made into a weapon that will speak with a voice of men, and that the voice of men shall be the voice of this hall, and that the hall shall be greater for it by the count of all the halls that hear the voice and bend. I swear this upon Gjafr-Bíta. I swear this upon my own blood. I swear this upon the ring that is not yet in my beard.”
He did not yet put the ring in his beard. The ring went into the beard at the swearing-true of an oath, when the oath had been answered, and the oath had not yet been answered. The men knew it. They watched the ring in his hand.
He looked along the benches at the twelve. “Will you swear with me?”
“We will swear,” said Bjorn, son of Halvar Thick-Arm, who was the eldest of the named and whose right it was to answer first.
“We will swear,” said Ketill, son of Snorri Long-Reach, second by age.
So down the bench. Ulf swore. Thorir swore. Halvard swore, with the half-grin that had been his grandfather’s. Vigleik swore. Asbjorn swore. Audun swore. Snorri Hard-Hand swore in the single dry word of his lineage. Eystein swore. Hauk swore. And last, Sigvör Ash-Daughter, who had not yet looked at her brother and who looked at him now, said clearly, “I swear, brother, that I will ride with you, and that I will sing what is sung, and that I will sing what is true, and that I will not sing what is not true. I swear it upon the harp my mother gave me, which is the only oath-binding I have ever sworn and the only one I will swear in this matter.”
There was a small pause at the end of her swearing. It was not the swearing the other eleven had given. It was a thing the skald had done in her own way, as the skald has always had the right to do, but it was a thing Hrolv-Kan had not expected and the saga will not pretend he was pleased by it. He looked at her for a moment longer than he had looked at the others. She did not look away. He inclined his head once and said only, “It is sworn.”
He turned the loose iron ring once more between his fingers. He raised it to his beard. He braided it in beside the other three. There was a small sound from the men at the braiding, not a cheer, not a strike of hands upon boards, only a sound, the kind of sound a great hall makes when something that has been held in the air for a long moment has finally come down to rest. The ring was set. The oath was sworn. The hunt was begun.
Hrolv-Kan sat down again upon the high seat. The horn was filled and brought to him, and he drank, this time deeply, for the speaking was done and the drinking now was the drinking of the oath-binding and not the drinking of the meal. The horn went around the bench. The men drank. The skald drank, in her careful way. The ale was passed and passed again.
Now it would have been usual, in such a night, for the speaking to be done. The oath was sworn. The names had been called. The matter had been opened. What remained was the long slow tail of the evening, in which men told the small stories of small hunts past, and the skald might be persuaded after a while to take up her harp and sing something light, and at last the longfire would burn down to embers and the men would roll themselves in their cloaks on the benches or stagger off to their own beds, and the morning would come and the riding would begin.
The night did not end in the usual way.
There was a stranger at the longfire. The saga must report him now, though it has been the difficulty of every singer who has set this saga to song that no one afterward could quite remember the stranger’s face, nor his clothing, nor whose guest he had been, nor how he had come into the hall, nor when. He had been there. The men agreed that he had been there. They agreed on his having sat at the bench nearest the door, on the second bench from the back, on the western side of the hall. They agreed that he had been a thin man of indeterminate age, with hair that might have been the color of wet sand and might have been the color of pale river-stones and might have been the color of nothing in particular. They agreed that he had been wearing a traveler’s cloak, the dust-color of the open road, which was a common enough cloak in those years and gave away no clan. They agreed that he had eaten, and drunk, and been quiet. They agreed that no one had spoken to him during the meal because each man had assumed he was the guest of some other man, and the cliff-folk way of asking a stranger to declare himself was not in those years the northern way, and the northern way was to let a stranger sit and eat and speak in his own time. They agreed on all of these things. Beyond the agreement, the saga finds, the memory of each man who had been at the longfire that night diverged, and where it diverged it did so in ways that could not be reconciled. Bjorn, son of Halvar Thick-Arm, remembered the stranger’s eyes as being grey. Ulf, son of Gisli Bone-Hand, remembered them as being brown. Halvard, son of Olaf Salt-Hand, remembered them as being two different colors, one of each, but could not afterward say which was which. Sigvör Ash-Daughter, who was the most attentive of any of them, remembered, in the long after-years when she would think of the night a great many times, that she could not summon the stranger’s eyes at all, only the absence where the eyes ought to have been in her memory.
What the stranger did, the men did agree upon, was rise from his bench when the long slow tail of the evening was just beginning to settle into its rhythm. The horn had gone around the bench three times since the oath. The men had started telling small stories. Vigleik had told the story of the bear at the salt-lick, which he told at every gathering and which the men endured fondly. Halvard had begun the long anecdote of his grandfather’s curses at the wedding of Thora the Plain. The skald had taken up her harp and was tuning it without yet playing. The longfire was at the height of its evening burn, throwing the long orange light along the floorboards. And the stranger rose.
He did not speak loudly. The saga is clear about this. He did not raise his voice. He did not call for attention. He did not strike the boards. He rose from his bench at the western side of the hall, at the second bench from the back, and he walked, in unhurried steps, around the longfire, until he stood at a place perhaps five paces from Hrolv-Kan’s high seat. He was carrying nothing. He had set down his cup at his bench before he rose. His hands were empty and held loosely at his sides. The hall, which had been talking, quieted not because he had asked for quiet but because the men in the nearer benches had noticed him standing and had stopped to see what he would do, and the men in the farther benches had noticed the silence of the nearer benches and had stopped also, and the quieting had moved outward from him like the small ring on a pond that follows a thrown pebble. By the time he opened his mouth the hall was wholly still.
He looked at Hrolv-Kan. The saga reports that his look was not insolent. The saga reports that his look was, in some way that no one could afterward describe well, kindly, in the way a physician’s look is kindly when the physician is about to deliver a bad piece of news to a patient he respects. He inclined his head, very slightly, to the chief in the high seat. Hrolv-Kan returned the inclination, because the manners of the hall required it, though his pale eyes had narrowed already and his right hand had moved, in the small unconscious way of his line, to rest on the haft of Gjafr-Bíta where it leaned against the high seat.
The stranger spoke.
He spoke in a dry voice. The saga is firm on this. The voice was dry. It was not loud. It was not soft. It was not threatening. It was not respectful. It was the voice of a man reading aloud from a tally of accounts, who has read the same kind of tally many times before, and to whom the contents of the tally are no particular news. He said, in this voice, the following words. The saga will set them down as the song of Snæ Two-Tongues has preserved them, with the understanding that Snæ himself was uncertain, in his last years, whether he had the words exactly, but with the further understanding that the men of the hall agreed that these were the words, or very nearly these, and that the meaning, at least, was as the saga now reports.
“Hunter-chief,” said the stranger, “you have sworn well. I do not doubt the swearing. I do not doubt the hunt. I would only put one matter before the company, that the company may consider it as the long road goes on. The tail of the beast is a thing of weather. You have said so yourself. A man who takes a thing of weather into his hand takes weather into his hand. Weather does not become a hand’s thing because the hand has closed upon it. Weather remains weather. The hand that closes upon weather may close upon a great deal that the hand did not ask to close upon, and may not, at the end, open again the way it opened at the beginning. I do not say to you, hunter-chief, that you should not ride. I say only that the matter is not what you have called it. The matter is larger than the named matter. The matter is older than your line. The matter has, if you will forgive me, already been decided by the time you have sworn upon it, though the decision is one you have yet to read. I have read it. I will not tell you the reading. I will say only that the man who at the end of this matter walks back into this hall on his own two feet, and sits down in that high seat, will not be the man I see sitting in it now, and may not be a man at all in the way this hall would recognize the word. That is what I have come to say. I will say no more.”
He bowed once, the dry small bow of a guest who has overstayed without overstaying, and he turned, and he walked back around the longfire, and he sat down again at his bench at the second bench from the back on the western side of the hall, and he picked up his cup, and he drank from it, and he did not say anything else for the rest of the night. No one spoke to him afterward. No one struck him, which Hrolv-Kan might in another humor have done, for the words had been insolent in any plain reading; but Hrolv-Kan did not strike him, and the men of the bench did not strike him, and the skald did not strike him with the small flat of her hand which was her own way of striking when something needed to be struck. They all of them, the saga reports, sat very still for a long moment, and then the small stories resumed, but the small stories did not resume well, and the longfire seemed to burn a little lower than it had been burning, and the long orange light along the floorboards seemed to retreat by a small distance toward the longfire itself, and the men drifted, one by one, toward sleep, and the night ended in a quieter way than such nights usually end.
Of the stranger afterward, the saga can say only this. When the men woke in the morning, he was gone. No one had seen him leave. The door of the hall had been barred from the inside, as was the custom, and the bar had not been moved, and there was no other way out of the hall except the smoke-hole, which a man could not have climbed. The bench where he had sat held no cup, no bowl, no traveler’s cloak, no sign that anyone had sat there at all. The hides upon the wall behind that bench were undisturbed. The floor was unmarked. The men spoke of him for a little while, over the morning meal, and then they spoke of him less, and then they spoke of him not at all, because the riding south was the matter at hand and the matter at hand has always, in the lives of fighting men, a way of crowding out the matters that came before it. By the time they had crossed the Strait of Bones on the third day of the riding, the stranger had become, in the talk of the men, a thing that had happened that they were not sure had happened. By the time they reached the southern shore he was forgotten by most of them entirely, and remembered only by Sigvör Ash-Daughter, who set him down in her private songs but did not sing him to anyone, and by Hrolv-Kan himself, who never spoke of him to any man and who never, the saga must report, fully forgot him, though he would have died sooner than admit the fact aloud.
The saga returns now to the longfire on the night of the oath, in the last hour before the men slept, when only the chief and his skald were still awake at the high seat, the men having rolled themselves in their cloaks along the benches and begun the long even breathing of warriors who have eaten and drunk and sworn and have nothing more to do until morning.
Sigvör Ash-Daughter set down her harp. She had played, in the end, only one short tune, a thing of her mother’s, that did not need many strings and did not ask for many ears. She turned on her bench to face her brother. She said, quietly, “Brother.”
Hrolv-Kan was turning the loose place in his beard where the fourth iron ring had been threaded. He looked at her. He said, “Sister.”
She said, “What the stranger said.”
He waited.
She said, “Are you troubled by it.”
He considered for a long moment. The saga reports that he turned the matter in his mind as he turned the iron ring in his beard, with the same slow patience, and that what he answered her was not what he had first thought to answer. He said, at last, “I am not troubled by it. I will tell you why. A man who has not yet ridden the road can be told a great many things about where the road will end. The saying of them does not make them so. The riding makes them so or makes them not so. The stranger said what he said. He said it well, I will give him that. He did not raise his voice and he did not shake his fist. He said what he said in the way a man speaks who believes himself wiser than the company. There are such men in every great hall. Some of them are wiser than the company. Most of them are not. I have ridden out of halls where men spoke wisely against my riding and I have ridden back into those halls with the heads of beasts they said I would not take. I will not break my swearing because a man with no name and a dry voice has come to my longfire and told me my own ending in a tone he did not raise. The ending will come when it comes. If it is the ending he says, it is the ending. If it is not, it is not. I will not turn now.”
His skald looked at him for a long moment. The saga reports her face in this moment with care, for there are not many places in the saga where the face of Sigvör Ash-Daughter is reported, and this is one of them. Her face was, the song of Snæ Two-Tongues says, very still. Her eyes were down upon the harp at her knee. Her mouth was the small flat line that her mouth made when she was choosing among words. She said, finally, “Brother. I will ride with you. I have sworn it and I will keep the swearing. I will sing what is sung and I will sing what is true. I will not sing what is not true. That was the oath I gave and I will give no other. I will say to you only this one thing, in this hall, before the men wake. The stranger was not a man with no name. I do not know his name. But he was not a man with no name. There are men who come into halls before great matters whose names are not known and whose business is not known and whose words are not the words of men with no names. I have read of them in the old songs my mother taught me. I have not seen one before tonight. I would not have you ride out tomorrow not knowing that I have seen one tonight.”
Hrolv-Kan looked at her. He was, the saga reports, a hard man, but he was not a man who held his sister’s word cheap. He looked at her for a long moment. He said, finally, in a voice that was not unkind, “Sister. If I turn now, I cannot turn ever. If I turn now because a man with a dry voice has spoken to me in my own hall, I will be the chief who turned, for all the rest of my chieftainship. The men will know. The hall will know. The other halls will know. I would rather ride out tomorrow under the ending the stranger has named for me than sit in this high seat tomorrow under a name I had earned by turning. Do you understand me.”
“I understand you,” she said.
“Then ride,” he said.
“I will ride,” she said.
She rose. She picked up her harp. She walked across the floor of the hall to her own small chamber at the eastern end, behind the curtain of grey wool. She did not look back. Hrolv-Kan sat on at the high seat for some time after she had gone. The longfire burned lower. The men along the benches breathed the long even breath. The bone-ribs of the roof gathered the last of the orange light. Outside the hall the wind was the small steady wind that comes off the fjord in the second week of Selnus, the cold first month of the year, when the great riding south would be due to begin in three days’ time once the supplies had been gathered.
He turned the fourth iron ring in his beard. It sat there, freshly braided, with the warm small weight of a newly sworn thing. He thought of the stranger. He thought of the stranger’s dry voice. He thought of the stranger’s words, which he was already beginning to remember in a different order than they had been spoken, and which he would, in the weeks of riding to come, remember in still other orders, until the words themselves had become a thing he carried with him without quite being able to say what they were. He thought, too, of Astrid daughter of Gormun Two-Axe, whom he had never met, and whose father he had only met once, at a winter gathering five winters before, and whose death at the stream he had heard of in only the second-hand way of southern news brought north by traders. He thought of her because the men needed him to be thinking of her. He thought of her because his own thinking needed it also. He thought of the tail of the beast, and he thought of what a weapon made of the tail of the beast would sound like when it struck, and he thought of what halls would bend when they heard the striking, and which halls would not bend and would have to be made to bend. He thought of his father, Brand Iron-Hand, who would have ridden out on this hunt without a moment’s hesitation, who would not have heard the stranger at all because the stranger’s voice would not have carried to the ears of a man who had decided. He thought of himself, sitting at the high seat his father’s father had carved from a single piece of black oak, and he understood, in the small clear way a man understands a thing of himself in the last hour of a great night, that he had already decided. He had decided in the week the traders had first brought him news of the tail. He had decided before he had called the meeting. He had decided before he had named the men by their fathers. The oath had only been the saying of the decision. The decision was a thing that had been made in some prior part of himself that did not consult the rest of him and did not, the saga must say, consult the gods.
He set his hand on the haft of Gjafr-Bíta. The iron of the grip-rings was cool under his palm. The longfire burned. The men slept. Somewhere outside the hall a dog began to bark again and was hushed by no one this time, and the barking went on a long while in the cold dark, and Hrolv-Kan listened to it without rising. He listened to it as a man listens who has already chosen his ending and does not yet know it.
He sat at the high seat until the longfire was only embers. Then he rose, and he walked to his own bed at the western end of the hall, behind the curtain of black wool, and he lay down in his cloak, and he slept, the saga reports, without dreams. The saga reports this last detail because it is unusual. Most men who are about to undertake great matters dream of them the night the matter is sworn. Hrolv-Kan did not dream that night, or any night of the long ride south, or any night of the twelve days of the hunt, or any night after, until the night before his last battle, when he would dream at last a single dream, and the dream would be of a stranger with a dry voice standing five paces from a high seat in a hall he had not seen in many years; but that is for the saga to come to in its proper place.
For now the longfire is embers. The men sleep. The skald is awake behind her grey curtain, writing on a strip of birch-bark with her brass-capped pencil by the last red light from the fire, setting down the words of the stranger as best she can remember them, for she has guessed already, in the way of skalds, that those words will need to be remembered later by someone, and she does not trust the men’s remembering, and she does not trust her brother’s not-remembering, and she does not trust her own remembering either, but she trusts the birch-bark and the brass-capped pencil, which between them have never yet lied to her.
The oath is sworn. The names are called. The ring is in the beard.
The matter is, as the stranger said, already decided.
The riding will begin in three days’ time.
The saga goes on.
Segment 6: “Sound-of-Going at the Wharf”
The morning was the kind of morning that arrived in the third week of Selnus along the western shore of Heid-Marka and arrived in no other place. Sigvör had been observing the difference for fifty years and had never tired of it. The light came in across the fjord in long pale bands the color of buttermilk left too long in the cold-room, and the bands lay upon the dark water without warming it, the way a thin blanket lies upon a sleeping child without quite covering the child’s feet. Above the eastern ridge the sky was clear. Below the western ridge a long thin cloud the shape of a sleeping seal had taken up its position and would, she knew, stay there until the wind shifted at noon. The wind would shift. The wind always shifted at noon in the third week of Selnus. It was one of the small reliable things she had counted on for half a century, and she counted on it again that morning, because she needed the small reliable things to outnumber the large unreliable ones, and the large unreliable ones were many.
She walked down to the wharf with her driftwood harp slung across her back in its grey wool case and her bag of small belongings over her shoulder and her boots making the dry sound boots made on the frozen mud of the path. She walked alone. The men had gone down before her, in the way men did before a great riding, in clusters of two and three, talking too loud about small matters and not quite looking at one another. She had let them go. There were certain mornings on which a skald’s company was a kindness and certain mornings on which a skald’s company was a weight, and a morning of embarkation was always the second kind. The men knew that what they did and said on the path to the wharf would not be sung. They knew this because Sigvör had told them, once, ten years before, in plain words at a longfire, that she did not write embarkation walks, and that they were free, on the morning of any hunt, to be afraid in their own way without fearing that their fear would later appear in a song. The men had received this declaration with the small grunted relief that was their version of gratitude, and from that day forward they had let her walk down to the wharf alone, and she had let them go ahead of her, and the arrangement had served everyone.
The longship was at the third pier, where it always was on the morning of a hunt. Its name was Sound-of-Going. The ship had been named by Sigvör’s mother, who had been a skald before Sigvör, and who had argued for the name against the wishes of Brand Iron-Hand on the grounds that a ship needed a name a song could find its way to, and Iron-Bound and Wave-Cleaver and Wolf-Prow, which had been Iron-Hand’s three suggestions, were names a song would slide off of. Iron-Hand had laughed and given in, because he had been the kind of man who could give in on a small matter and had loved his wife better than he had loved any of his three named suggestions. The ship had been Sound-of-Going for thirty-eight winters now, and the name had outlived Iron-Hand and outlived Sigvör’s mother and would outlive, Sigvör had recently begun to suspect, most of the people standing at the wharf this morning.
She stopped on the wharf-end before she stepped down to the pier. She set her bag at her feet. She did not yet take the harp from her back. She looked out at Sound-of-Going for a long moment in the buttermilk light.
The ship was beautiful. There was no other word for it that the cliff-folk’s longer language had not had to invent, and Sigvör had spent a long time trying to invent one in the northern tongue and had not yet succeeded. The prow rose in the long high curve of all the ships of her grandfather’s making, narrowing to a carved head that was not, in the northern way, a dragon or a wolf or any of the other intimidating creatures with which other halls decorated their prows, but a heron. Her grandfather had loved herons. He had said, at the carving of this prow forty-odd years ago, that he wished his ship to enter a foreign harbor like a heron entering a tidepool, slowly, with consideration, ready to leave again. The other halls had laughed at him for the heron. The other halls had also, in the long career of Sound-of-Going, never once successfully boarded her in open water, because a ship that came on like a heron, it turned out, was very hard to catch.
The hull was black with the pitch of three recaulkings. The shields along the gunwale had been freshly painted in the colors of the hall, dark green and bone-white, in a checker pattern that was the mark of her father’s line. The mast was up but the sail was furled in its long grey roll along the yard. The oars were shipped, fourteen on each side, with their butts pointing inboard, ready to be drawn out when the wharf was cleared. On the deck, in the spaces between the rower’s chests, the supplies for the long ride were lashed under tarred hides: the salted meat in its barrels, the hard bread in its waxed sacks, the spare cordage, the spare oars, the four small casks of fresh water for emergencies because in ordinary conditions the streams of the coastal stops would suffice, the bundles of arrows, the spare shields, the long roll of canvas that would become the camp-shelter on shore. Everything was in its place. Everything had been gone over twice by Bjorn son of Halvar Thick-Arm, who was the ship’s master under Hrolv-Kan and the most reliable man in the hall for the inventories of an embarkation.
Sigvör looked at the ship. She did not yet step down. She breathed once, slowly, and then again, and the second breath she let out into the morning with the small word she had used since girlhood for the moment before she did a thing she did not want to do. The word was not a word in any language. It was a sound her mother had made before difficult tasks. She had inherited it the way she had inherited the harp.
She stepped down to the pier.
The men were at the ship. Some had already gone aboard and were stowing their personal gear in the small spaces under the rower’s chests. Some were standing on the pier with their families. Bjorn was bent over the stern-line, checking the knot for the third time, which was his way. Ulf was at the bow, holding the gangplank steady for the last of the boarding. Hrolv-Kan stood at the middle of the pier, by the ship’s waist, with his wolf-cloak about his shoulders and his spear leaning against his shoulder and his pale eyes already out on the water, on the line of the fjord that ran south to the open sea. His three braided iron rings caught the buttermilk light and gave it back the way old iron gave back any light, which is to say grudgingly. The fourth ring, the newly braided one from the oath two nights past, sat in the middle of the three older ones, slightly brighter, slightly newer, and Sigvör saw it from the wharf-end and saw also that he was, without thinking about it, in the habit of running his thumb along the four rings now, the way a man runs his thumb along the edge of a new tool he has not yet quite gotten used to.
She walked down the pier toward him. He saw her coming. He turned slightly to receive her, as a chief receives the approach of his skald on the morning of a hunt, with the formal small inclination of the head that they had used between them on every embarkation of his chieftainship and that they had used, before that, between themselves and their father on every embarkation of his.
She set her bag down beside a coil of rope. She unslung the harp in its grey wool case from her back. She set the harp upon the bag, which would keep it off the wet boards of the pier. She knelt, for she preferred to tune sitting low, and she opened the grey wool case, and she took out the harp.
The harp was not large. The cliff-folk would have called it a small harp, and the southern courts where larger harps were made would have called it a beginner’s instrument, but neither would have understood what they were looking at. It was made of driftwood. Sigvör’s mother had taken the wood, fifty-three winters earlier, from a beach south of the fjord where the great currents that came up along the western coast deposited the bones of trees that had grown nowhere on this island, trees from coasts that no one in Heid-Marka had ever sailed to. The wood was the color of old honey and had been worn smooth by the sea before her mother had ever touched it. Her mother had cut it, shaped it, dried it for two winters in the rafters of the hall above the longfire, and strung it with strings of woven sinew and silver wire. She had played it for nineteen years, and she had passed it to Sigvör on the morning she had died, and Sigvör had played it now for thirty-four years and had never replaced the strings with any but the same combination of sinew and silver, and the harp had become, in those thirty-four years, less a thing she owned than a thing she wore, the way a hand wears a callus.
She tuned it now. The tuning of a driftwood harp in cold morning air was not the same as the tuning of an indoor harp, and she had her own method. She loosened all the strings first, by a finger’s turn each, and then she warmed them with her breath, one at a time, blowing slowly along the length of each string until the sinew gave up its night-stiffness and the silver gave up its dawn-cold. Then she tightened them back, by feel, listening to each in turn. The wharf around her was not silent. There were the small noises of the men, the small noises of the families saying small farewells in the careful unfussy way of the northern reaches, the small lap of the water against the piles of the pier, the small creak of Sound-of-Going’s hull moving against the fender-ropes. She tuned the harp inside all of these noises, the way she had been taught, listening past them rather than through them. The first string she set against a memory in her own ear, which was the note her mother had given her thirty-four years ago and which she had carried in her ear ever since. The other strings she set against the first, by the intervals her mother had taught her, which were the old intervals and not the southern intervals, and which gave the harp the slightly unfamiliar voice that strangers at southern courts sometimes politely complained of and that no one in her own hall complained of because no one in her own hall had ever heard the southern intervals to compare.
She had tuned six strings of the seven when the chief came over to her. She had been expecting him. He always came over before a hunt, while she was tuning, and they always had the small private exchange that was the last private exchange before the riding, and they had had this exchange now twenty-two times in his chieftainship and twelve times in their father’s. She did not stop tuning. She did not look up. She knew his boots by the sound they made on the boards of the pier, which was a sound slightly heavier on the right side because of a wound he had taken in his thirty-eighth year that had not quite healed straight.
He stopped at the edge of her tuning. He did not crouch. He stood with the spear leaning against his shoulder and the wolf-cloak about him. He said, quietly, “Sister.”
“Chief,” she said. She did not call him brother on the wharf. She called him brother in the hall, and she would call him brother at the longfire on any night when the matter was a family matter, but on a hunt-morning at the wharf he was the chief and the proper word was chief, and the small distance the word made between them was a distance that the hunt required. He understood this and did not contest it.
He waited a moment. Then he said, “How is the harp?”
She plucked the sixth string. It sang the note it was supposed to sing. She nodded once, more to herself than to him. She moved her hand to the seventh, the last string, which was the deep one. She said, “The cold has been kind. It came back faster than I thought.”
“Good,” he said. He looked out at the fjord. The buttermilk light had begun to warm at the edges, the small slow warming that would lead, by mid-morning, to the actual sunlight of the day. He said, “We will be off the pier in the hour. Bjorn says the tide turns at noon and we want to be in open water by then.”
“You will be,” she said. She tightened the seventh string by a hair’s turn and plucked it. Not quite. She loosened it by half a hair and plucked again. Closer. She let it settle.
She felt him still standing there. She knew, without looking up, that he had something to say and had not yet decided whether to say it. He had been like this on every hunt-morning of his chieftainship. The men called him Iron-Brow behind his back for the certainty he wore in council, but his skald had known, since their childhood, that the certainty was put on like a coat over a body that was not always certain, and that the moment before embarkation was the moment the coat sat least well. He was not afraid. She did not mean that. He was, simply, in this last moment before the leaving, the brother she had grown up with rather than the chief she had served, and the brother she had grown up with had once, at nine years old, woken her in the night to tell her he was worried that the gods did not know his name. She remembered this. She had never told him she remembered it. It would have shamed him to know that she did.
She set the harp on her lap. She looked up.
He was looking out at the fjord, not down at her, which was his habit when the certainty was thin. His face in the buttermilk light was the face of a man two months from his fifty-second birthday, with the long pale cheekbones of his line and the small white scar at the temple from the bear and the four iron rings in the beard. His pale eyes were narrowed against the light. His mouth was the small straight line he wore when he was thinking. She had drawn this face in her mind so many times that she could have summoned it with her eyes closed. She did not summon it now. She looked at it.
She said, “Brother.”
He looked down. The word from her on the wharf was unusual. He met her eyes.
She said, “There is a thing my mother used to say.”
He waited.
She said it. She said it the way her mother had said it, which was the way a small kitchen rhyme is said, with the rhyme not quite landing and the meaning carried in the half-landing rather than in the landing itself. She said,
“What the sky will give, the sky will keep. The hand that holds the storm cannot, in the end, holding sleep.”
There was a small silence. She did not repeat it. She had said it once, plainly, in the small dry voice she used for proverbs, the voice that did not insist and did not perform, and that left the proverb to do its work in the hearer’s ear or not. She watched his face to see whether the proverb would do its work.
His face did not change. That was what she had expected. The work of the proverb, if it was going to happen, would happen later. The proverbs of their mother had always been like that. They sat in the back of the head and waited. They came forward at the right moment and not before. She did not know whether the right moment, for this proverb, would arrive in him in time to matter. She had not said it in order to have it matter. She had said it because she had to say it. There was a duty on a skald, her mother had taught her, to say the proverb that was wanted, even if no one wanted it. The wanting and the needing did not always go together. The proverb went between them, when it could, with no expectation of being thanked.
He said, after the small silence, “What did she mean by it?”
The question was a kindness. She heard the kindness in it. He had heard the proverb perfectly well. He had heard it, she suspected, in the same way she had heard the dry-voiced stranger two nights before in the hall, which was to say all the way down. He had heard it and he was going to ignore it, and he was offering her the courtesy of pretending he had not understood, so that she might explain it to him in the small teacher’s voice of an older sister, and the explanation would absorb whatever weight the proverb had carried in his ear, and the weight would not have to be acknowledged between them. It was a gentle thing he was doing. It was also, she understood, a refusal.
She accepted the refusal. There would be no point in refusing the refusal. She knew her brother. She had known him since he was small enough for her to carry on her hip, which she had done, though he had not in his adult years cared to be reminded, and there had never in his life been a moment when he had been turned by a piece of speech he had decided not to hear. The proverbs that turned him, if any turned him, would be the ones that came around to him later, in his own thinking, when no one else was watching. She would let this one go to its waiting.
She said, with the small teacher’s voice, “She meant that the weather is not a thing one can keep. One can stand in it, and one can be moved by it, and one can sail through it, and one can sometimes work with it. But one cannot keep it. The sky gives, and the sky takes back. A hand closed on the storm is a hand that thinks it has caught what it has only briefly touched.”
He nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “I see.”
He did not see. She knew he did not see. She also knew that her mother’s proverb had not, in fact, meant only what she had just said, and that she had translated it down for him because the larger meaning was too large for a wharf and would have asked of him an acknowledgment he could not, in front of the men, give. The larger meaning was the meaning that her brother’s hands, in the long months ahead, would close on a thing of weather, and that the closing would not end with the thing being held but with the hand being changed, and that the hand would not in the end be the hand that had begun the closing. The proverb was about him. She knew this. He, in some part of himself that was not allowed to come up to the surface of his face on this wharf in this buttermilk morning, also knew it. They both knew. Neither of them said it. The skald’s craft was, in part, the craft of knowing when the larger meaning could be carried in a half-rhyme and when it would have to be left at the half-rhyme and not pressed further.
She said, in a different voice, more ordinary, “The harp is ready. I will board now.”
He said, “Stay a moment more.”
She stayed.
He looked at her for what was, she thought afterward, the longest look he had given her in many years. He was not a man given to long looks. He was a man who had learned, in his chieftainship, to glance and to look away, on the principle that long looks at one’s own people invited long looks back, and that a chief who was looked at for too long was a chief whose certainty would not stand the looking. He had practiced the glance and the looking-away for thirty years. He set the practice aside now, on the wharf, in the buttermilk light, for some breaths.
He said, very quietly, so that the men a few paces away could not hear, “I have been thinking.”
“Yes,” she said.
“About the stranger.”
She said nothing. She let him go on.
“I have been thinking about him in the night,” he said. “I did not dream of him. I did not dream of anything. But I thought of him before I slept and I thought of him when I woke. He was an ill thing in the hall. I will not say more of him to anyone. I am telling you because you are my skald. I am telling you so that you know. I am not turning. I am riding south. I am sworn and I will keep the swearing. But I am telling you so that you know I have been thinking.”
She nodded. She understood the gift this was. He had given her, in the only way he knew how to give such a thing, a small piece of his uncertainty, to be held by her and not displayed. He was asking her to hold it, and not to sing it, and not to mention it again. He was asking her to be, for the duration of the hunt, the place his uncertainty could go and not be visible to anyone else. She had been this place for him for thirty years. She would be this place for him for whatever was left.
She said, “I will hold it, brother.”
“Chief,” he said, with the smallest of small smiles, which was the closest he had come to a real smile that morning.
“Chief,” she agreed.
He nodded once. He turned. He walked the four paces to where Ulf held the gangplank steady. He set his hand on the rail of Sound-of-Going. He stepped aboard in the long easy step of a man who had stepped aboard this ship a thousand times. He went to the stern. He spoke to Bjorn, who straightened from the stern-line and answered him, and the two of them turned to look down the pier at the few last men who had not yet boarded. The waiting was nearly over.
Sigvör did not yet rise. She sat on the boards of the pier with the harp on her lap and looked at her brother on the stern of the longship and felt, in her chest, the precise sensation she had felt at this point in every embarkation she had attended, and that she had attended now twenty-two times in his chieftainship and twelve times in their father’s. The sensation was a small tightness just below the breastbone, on the left side, the size of a closed fist. It was not pain. It was something less specific than pain. It was, she had come to think over the long years, the body’s way of saying that this might be the last time. The body did not know whether it was the last time. The body could not have known, when she had felt this sensation at the embarkation of her father’s eighth hunt, and her father had come home, and she had felt it again at his ninth, and her father had come home again, and so on twelve times until at last her father had not come home, on the thirteenth, of a winter sickness on the return voyage and not at all of the hunt itself, which had succeeded. The body had been right at the thirteenth and wrong at the previous twelve. The body was, she had long since accepted, not a reliable witness on the question of whether any given embarkation would be the last. The body only knew that it was possible. The body felt this possibility each time, identically, and reported it identically, and the only difference between an embarkation that turned out to be the last and one that did not was a difference visible only in retrospect.
She had stopped, many years ago, asking the body to be a more reliable witness. She had instead come to honor the body’s report as what it was, which was the body’s acknowledgment that the people you loved went away over water and the water did not promise to bring them back. The sensation under the breastbone was the body’s small honesty about the water. She felt it now. She held it.
She thought of the proverb she had not said.
There had been a longer version of her mother’s proverb, which her mother had taught her in the back of the kitchen one autumn when Sigvör had been nineteen and her mother had been already ill with the wasting that would take her two winters later. The longer version went,
“What the sky will give, the sky will keep. The hand that holds the storm cannot, in the end, holding sleep. What the sea will take, the sea will hide. The boat that hunts the wave cannot, in the end, hunting, ride. What the bone will know, the bone will tell. The man who breaks the bone cannot, in the end, breaking, well.”
It was not a beautiful poem. Her mother had not been a beautiful-poem skald. Her mother had been a kitchen-proverb skald, and her proverbs had been hammered out for use rather than for performance. The longer version had three movements, for the three things one could close one’s hand on that one could not, in the end, hold: the storm, the wave, the bone. Sigvör had said only the first movement on the wharf this morning. The other two she had kept in her mouth. She had kept them because the wharf had not been the place for them. She had also kept them because she had wanted, in her own way that was perhaps not a wholly admirable way, not to give her brother the full proverb at the moment of his leaving. The full proverb was a thing she would have given him in the hall a month ago, or a year ago, if she had thought it could land. She had not thought it could land. She did not think the second or third movements would land now. She thought, if anything would land, it would be the first, because the storm was the thing he had named in his own oath, and the storm was therefore the thing he had a chance, however small, of remembering the proverb about. The wave and the bone he had not yet named to himself. He would name them later. The proverb’s other two movements would, perhaps, be ready for him when he did.
She was a skald. She had been trained to husband what she said for the moment it was wanted. She husbanded these. The wave and the bone could wait.
Bjorn called, from the stern, “Skald. Aboard, if you please.”
She rose. She slung the harp in its grey wool case across her back. She picked up her bag of small belongings. She walked the five paces to the gangplank. Ulf, holding the plank steady, gave her the small bow that was his usual greeting, with the small twist of the mouth that was his particular sign of affection. She returned both. She stepped onto the gangplank. She walked up it in the small careful steps she had always used, because she had never been quite as steady on a gangplank as she was on solid ground, and the men knew this and had long since stopped offering her a hand. The hand had been offered, once, in her thirty-second year, by a young rower named Egil who had not known better, and she had taken it with such pointed gratitude that he had blushed for a fortnight and never offered it again. She had not, in fact, needed the hand, then or now. She liked to walk up the gangplank in her own time. She did so now.
She came aboard. The deck of Sound-of-Going was wet with the morning damp. She walked between the rower’s chests to her usual place, which was the small bench at the stern just to the left of the chief’s position, where the skald sat on a long voyage. She set her bag down. She set the harp on the bench beside her, in its case, where it would ride out the voyage. She did not take it out again. She would not play on the open water. The salt would not have done the strings good, even with the cover and even with the small oiled cloth she would wrap the case in when the spray came up. She would play, when she played, only in shore camps and in halls of stopover. The harp was for solid ground.
The last men boarded. Bjorn checked the bow-line, then the stern-line. He gave the small nod that meant he was satisfied. Two men on the pier untied the bow-line and walked it up the pier and threw the end aboard. Two men on the pier untied the stern-line and threw that aboard. The men on the pier stepped back, three paces, the customary distance for the moment of departure. The families on the wharf-end did not call out. The northern way was that one did not call out at the departure. The northern way was that one had said one’s piece in the hall the night before and on the path that morning, and that one stood now, in silence, and watched the ship leave. Sigvör looked up the pier at the wharf-end. There were perhaps thirty people standing there in the buttermilk light, in their winter cloaks, with their hoods drawn up against the cold. She could not, at this distance, make out individual faces. She did not try. She knew who they were. She knew which wives stood for which men aboard, which old fathers stood for which sons, which small children stood for which fathers. She had stood there herself, as a child, watching her father’s ship leave. The arrangement of the standing did not change between generations.
Bjorn called the rowers to their oars. The fourteen on each side took up their oars from the racks and dropped them into the oarholes with the small clean wooden sound that was the most pleasant sound a longship made, in Sigvör’s private estimation. The blades went down. Bjorn called the first stroke. The blades came up. The ship moved away from the pier, slowly, the way a heron lifts off a tidepool. The water beneath her gave the small under-the-hull rush that meant the ship was free of the pier and had begun to belong to the fjord again.
Sigvör looked once at her brother at the stern. He was facing forward, down the fjord, toward the open sea, with the spear set beside him in its rack and his hand on the steering-oar with the small steady grip of a man who had steered this ship out of this fjord some sixty times in his life and had never once let it touch the bottom. His pale eyes were narrowed against the brightening light. The four iron rings in his beard were small dark marks against the pale of the beard itself. He did not look back at her. He did not need to. They had said what they had to say. The proverb she had given him was in his ear now, whether he had decided to hear it or not, and the rest of it, the wave and the bone, were in her mouth, where they would stay until they were wanted.
She looked back, once, at the wharf-end. The thirty figures in their winter cloaks had not moved. They stood in the small loose line that was the northern way, and they watched, and they would watch until the ship was past the first bend of the fjord and out of sight. She raised her hand, briefly, to the wharf-end. She did not know whether anyone there could see her hand at the distance. She did not raise it for them to see. She raised it because it was the small private thing she did at every embarkation, in honor of her mother, who had raised her hand in the same way at every embarkation of Sigvör’s childhood, and who had told her, once, when she was twelve, that the wave was for the people who would not get one any other way. Sigvör had not asked her, at twelve, who those people were. She thought she understood now, at fifty-something, that the people who would not get one any other way were the dead her mother had been raising her hand to, all those years, beside the dead Sigvör herself was now raising hers to. Including, in a few breaths’ time, her mother.
The ship cleared the third pier. The blades took up their long even rhythm. The buttermilk light warmed at the edges another small degree. Above the eastern ridge the sky was still clear. Below the western ridge the long thin cloud the shape of a sleeping seal had not moved. The wind would shift at noon. She had counted on it. The small reliable things, she thought, were holding.
She sat on her bench at the stern. She put her cold hands inside her sleeves. She watched her brother’s back at the steering-oar. She watched the four iron rings in his beard catch the light when he turned his head slightly to give Bjorn an order, then turn back into shadow. She watched the wolf-cloak settle. She watched the long pale neck above the cloak and below the iron-banded hair, and she thought, with the small tightness still under her breastbone on the left side, of how dear he was to her, this stubborn man who would not turn, this brother who at nine years old had woken her in the night to ask about the gods, this chief who had received her proverb on the wharf with the small kindness of pretending not to understand, this man who was, by the saying of his own oath two nights ago and by the riding-out today, already partly gone. He was here. He was steering. He was alive. He was not yet what the proverb had described. But the proverb had described him. He had heard it, and not heard it, and the not-hearing was the doing of the proverb’s first work in him, the way the first turn of a key in a lock makes a small dry sound that is not yet the opening but is the beginning of the opening.
She loved him. She loved him as one loves a brother. She loved him as one loves a chief one has served well and would serve again. She loved him, also, in a third way that did not have a name in the northern tongue and would not have had a name in the cliff-folk’s tongue or in any tongue she had encountered in her wandering years. She loved him in the way one loves a person one has begun, in some quiet part of oneself, to mourn while they are still alive. It was not a thing one could say aloud. It was not a thing one wished to feel. It came anyway. It came on certain mornings in the buttermilk light when one watched a brother take the steering-oar and turn the ship down the long fjord toward an open sea he had decided, against the small dry voice of a stranger, to cross. It came and it sat under the breastbone on the left side. It would sit there, she suspected, for the whole of the voyage. It would sit there for the whole of the hunt. It would sit there for whatever came after the hunt, which she would not yet permit herself to imagine in any detail, because the work of a skald was to receive what came and not to invent it ahead of time.
She unwrapped the small oiled cloth from her bag and laid it over the harp-case beside her, against the coming spray. The fjord water below the ship had begun to take on the small white edges that meant they were approaching the first chop. Bjorn called the second pace. The blades quickened by a fraction. Sound-of-Going leaned forward in the very slight way she always leaned forward when she went from harbor-pace to fjord-pace, like a horse adjusting its gait.
Sigvör closed her eyes for a moment. She did not need to see. She knew the fjord by sound. The slap of the small chop against the hull. The creak of the oars in their holes. The small grunts of the rowers settling. The clear high note of a gull somewhere overhead. Bjorn’s voice. The wind, not yet shifted, coming down the fjord from the north and pushing slightly at her cheek on the right side. She listened to all of it. She let the listening do its work in her. She let the small tightness under the breastbone do its work also. She did not try to dismiss either. She held them, both, as a skald held the things that would later need to be sung.
What the sky will give, the sky will keep. She thought it, once, to herself, with the rhyme her mother had given her, in her mother’s small dry voice rather than her own. What the sky will give, the sky will keep.
She opened her eyes. The fjord was opening ahead of them. The ridges on either side were beginning to drop, in the way ridges always dropped as one came down a fjord toward its mouth, and the long pale band of buttermilk light had widened across the water, and the sleeping-seal cloud below the western ridge had not moved. The longship slid forward on the lengthened strokes. Her brother at the stern, with his four iron rings catching and not catching the light, did not look back.
She did not raise her hand again. The wharf was out of sight now, around the first bend, and the gesture would have been for no one. She let her hand stay inside her sleeve, warm against her wrist. She sat on her bench and let the morning be the morning.
The hunt had begun. The proverb had been given. The brother was steering. The ship was Sound-of-Going. The skald was Sigvör Ash-Daughter. The water was cold. The wind was steady. The sky was, for now, what the sky had agreed to be.
She would sing what was sung. She would sing what was true. She would not sing what was not true.
She had sworn it, on the harp her mother had given her, which had been the only oath-binding she had ever sworn.
She would keep it.
The blades came up. The blades went down. Sound-of-Going moved south.
Segment 7: “The Whale-Road North-and-Around”
Now the saga must speak of the voyage south. The voyage was long and the voyage was hard and the saga will not pretend otherwise. There are singers in the southern courts who have made of the voyages of northern hunting-ships a kind of pleasant adventure, with porpoises leaping at the prow and clear nights of star-counting and the men singing rounds at the steering-oar. The saga will say to such singers only that they have not been on a longship in the seventh week of Selnus rowing south against a wind that did not know it was supposed to turn at noon. The saga will say to them that they have not slept under a tarred hide on a wet deck with the spray coming over the gunwale every fourth stroke for three days running. The saga will say to them that they should sing what they know and let the matters of the open sea be sung by those who have crossed it. Then the saga will go on, because the matter at hand is not the failings of southern singers but the voyage of Sound-of-Going and the chief who stood at her steering-oar.
The first day was easy. The wind shifted at noon as Sigvör Ash-Daughter had said it would, and the new wind came from the north and was steady, and the sail was raised and held, and the men shipped their oars and rested. They cleared the fjord in the long afternoon and came out into the open sea by the second hour of evening. The sleeping-seal cloud that had lain along the western ridge in the morning came after them as the wind freshened, and by the time the first stars showed the sleeping-seal had grown into a great long bank of cloud that stretched from one horizon to the other and the stars showed only in the small breaks between. Bjorn son of Halvar Thick-Arm read the cloud-bank and said to Hrolv-Kan that weather was coming. Hrolv-Kan said that he had read the cloud the same way. They agreed that they would run with the wind for as long as it held and would shorten sail at the first sign of the wind changing. The men ate the first meal of dry bread and salt fish at the rower’s chests. The skald did not play. She sat at her bench with the harp-case wrapped against the spray and her hands inside her sleeves and her face turned forward and she did not speak. The first night passed.
The second day the wind held. Sound-of-Going made good way south. The sun rose pale through the cloud-bank and the men saw it only as a brightening on the eastern horizon and not as a sun in the sky. Bjorn took the steering-oar in the morning watch and Hrolv-Kan went forward to inspect the lashings on the supply-tarps, and finding two of them slackened by the night’s spray he had them retied by Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand and Audun son of Brand Two-Knives. The lashings were retied and inspected and Bjorn was satisfied. Hrolv-Kan returned to the stern. The skald passed him a strip of dried meat without speaking. He ate it without speaking. The day passed in this manner.
The third day the wind began to shift. By the second hour of morning the wind was coming half from the north and half from the west, which was a sign of trouble, and by the fourth hour it was coming three parts from the west and one from the north, which was a worse sign. Bjorn ordered the sail shortened. The men did the shortening in the careful way they had practiced through the years. The reef was set at the second band and the wind that had been pushing the ship from behind began to push her from the side. Sound-of-Going leaned. The men on the windward side leaned with her. The skald moved her bench three feet to the leeward to balance the trim. Bjorn said nothing about the move. The skald had been making such moves on Bjorn’s ships since before Bjorn had been ship’s master, and Bjorn had long since learned not to comment.
The fourth day the storm came.
The saga will report the storm in the manner the song of Snæ Two-Tongues has preserved it, with the understanding that storms at sea are difficult to render in song and that what follows is the storm as the men of Sound-of-Going remembered it in their later years, when they had told the tale of it many times in many halls and the telling had settled into its shape. The shape may not be the storm. The shape is what the men carried home of the storm. The saga will report the shape and let each hearer make of it what they will.
The storm came from the southwest, which was the worst direction for a ship running south along the western coast of Heid-Marka. It came in the second hour after noon on the fourth day of the voyage. The wind that had been three parts from the west became four parts from the west and rose by a third again in strength within the space of a single watch. The cloud-bank that had been overhead for three days lowered. The first heavy rain began in the middle of the second hour and within a half-hour the rain was the kind of rain that fell sideways and that filled the air between the rower’s chests so that a man at the bow could not clearly see a man at the stern. Bjorn ordered the sail down. The men brought it down with the care that a sail in a rising wind requires, two men on the halyard and four on the lines, and they had it down and lashed within the time it would take a man to count a hundred. Bjorn ordered the oars out. The men ran the oars out and took up the storm-pace, which was a slow heavy stroke designed to keep the ship’s head into the wind and the waves and not to make way. The blades dug. The hull lifted. The hull dropped. The skald wedged herself into her bench-corner with her feet against the stern-knee and her hands gripping the bench-edge, and the harp-case she had moved into the small lashed shelter beneath her bench earlier in the day. She did not need to be told to do these things. She had done them on her father’s ships and on her brother’s ships and her hands knew them without her having to consult her head.
The waves rose. The saga is not going to pretend to a count of how high they rose. The men of Sound-of-Going gave different counts in later years, and the counts ranged from twice the height of a man to four times the height of a man, and the truth, as Bjorn said in his old age, was that the waves were as high as the waves needed to be to make every man on the ship pray to the gods he had been taught to pray to in his childhood. They rose. They broke. Sound-of-Going took them. She took them in the way her grandfather had built her to take them, which was the heron’s way, with the long high prow rising into each wave and the narrow waist cutting it and the stern coming up under it and lifting. She did not roll. A lesser ship would have rolled. A southern ship of the kind that came up to trade in summer would have rolled within the first ten waves and would have been over within the first twenty. Sound-of-Going did not roll. She rose and dropped and rose and dropped. The men at the oars kept the storm-pace. The men kept it because Bjorn called it and because if they did not keep it the ship would broach and broaching in that sea would be the end of all of them.
Hrolv-Kan took the steering-oar from Bjorn in the third hour of the storm. He took it because the steering-oar in such a sea was the chief’s place by right, and because Bjorn had been on it for the first two hours and Bjorn’s hands were beginning to go. Hrolv-Kan was fifty-two winters old that year and his hands were not what they had been at thirty, and he knew it, and Bjorn knew it, but the chief’s place was the chief’s place and a chief who would not stand the steering-oar of his own ship in a storm was a chief who had no business being a chief. He set his hands on the oar. He set his feet against the stern-knee. He said, “Go, Bjorn. Take a rest. I have her.”
Bjorn went. Bjorn took the small space under the stern-tarp and he sat down in it with his back against a barrel and he closed his eyes and was asleep, the saga reports, within the time it takes a man to draw three breaths. This is the way of ship’s masters in storms. They sleep when they can and they wake when they must, and Bjorn was a master among ship’s masters in this particular craft, and his sleep on the stern-tarp through the worst of that storm became, in the songs sung later, a small comic interlude that the men were fond of for the way it set Bjorn’s calm against Hrolv-Kan’s not-calm. The saga will not make a comedy of it here. The saga will only say that Bjorn slept, and Hrolv-Kan steered, and the storm rose further.
Now comes the part of the voyage that the saga must report with the most care, for it is the part the song of Snæ Two-Tongues lingers upon, and it is the part that the men of Sound-of-Going argued over for the rest of their days, and it is the part that the skald set down in her birch-bark notes in a hand that was not quite her usual hand and that she did not afterward sing about, which was unusual, because the skald sang almost everything in time. The skald did not sing about this part. The part survives in the song only because Snæ Two-Tongues, who was present, sang it himself in his own hall later, and the skald did not contradict him, but the skald did not herself sing of it. The saga must therefore rely on Snæ. Snæ was not a careful witness in all matters, but he was a careful witness in this one. The saga will give what Snæ gave.
In the fourth hour of the storm, the wind rose again. The wind had been at the strength that uproots trees on land and the wind now went past that strength and entered the strength that does not have a common name because few are alive in the open to give it one. The cloud-bank above came down so low that the men at the mast said they could touch it if they reached. The lightning began. It came not in single strokes but in long ragged sheets that lit the whole sea around the ship for one brief instant at a time, showing the men, in that instant, the size of the waves they had been only feeling, and after each sheet the dark came back blacker than it had been before. The thunder came so close upon the lightning that there was no counting between them. Two of the rowers, Halvard son of Olaf Salt-Hand and Eystein son of Olvir Sharp-Tooth, began to call upon the gods aloud in the way men call upon the gods when they have run out of other things to call upon. Snæ Two-Tongues, who was at the seventh oar on the windward side, has reported that he himself was at this point in a condition he could not afterward describe in plain words, and that the only thing keeping him at his oar was the pace called by the ship’s master from under the stern-tarp where Bjorn had begun to call from his sleep, in the curious way some ship’s masters can, without quite waking. The pace held. The blades dug. The ship took the waves.
And here, Snæ Two-Tongues has reported, the chief began to laugh.
The saga will set this down as Snæ set it. The chief began to laugh. He stood at the steering-oar with his feet braced against the stern-knee and his hands at the oar and the long wolf-cloak wet and heavy on his shoulders and the rain coming sideways across his face and the spray coming over the stern at every fourth wave, and he laughed. It was not the laugh of a man who had been driven out of his sense, although Snæ has reported that this was his first thought, in the first instant of hearing it. It was the laugh of a man who had found something. Snæ could not afterward say what the chief had found. Snæ could only say that the laugh was a laugh of finding, the way a man laughs when he has been searching for a small lost thing in his clothing and has come upon it suddenly in a pocket he was sure he had checked. The chief laughed once, and then again, longer, and then he shouted into the wind, in the voice he had used at the longfire on the night of the oath two weeks before, the same voice that had named the men by their fathers. He shouted, “Is that all? Is that all the sky has for me?”
The wind did not answer. The wind only rose further, or seemed to. The saga will not vouch for whether the wind rose at this particular moment or only seemed to rise because the chief had spoken to it. The men at the oars believed the wind had risen in answer. The skald did not believe this. The skald wrote later, in her birch-bark, that the wind had been already at the height it would reach and that the seeming-rise was the men’s hearing and not the wind’s doing. The saga will allow each hearer to choose. What is agreed is that the chief, having shouted, did not stop laughing.
He shouted again. He shouted, “Take me if you take me. Take me if you take me. But you will not say I begged.”
This second shout was preserved exactly in Snæ’s song, with the doubled phrase that was the chief’s habit when he was carried away with himself, and the men at the oars remembered it the same way. The doubled phrase came down across two generations of singers in the same form, and the saga will set it down here with the same doubling, because the doubling is part of the matter. The chief said it as he said it. He did not say it once. He said it twice. The shouting twice was a sign, the skald wrote in her birch-bark, that the chief was already not wholly in the part of himself that decided things. He was in some other part, a part that doubled its own sayings without noticing, a part that was talking past the wind to something else.
He called for a rope. He called for a rope in a voice the men understood at once, and Audun son of Brand Two-Knives, who was nearest at the time and who was the steadiest of the men in such moments, brought him a length of stout hemp from the locker beneath the steering-bench. The chief took the rope. He set the steering-oar in the lock-bracket that the men used when no one was at the oar and the ship had to be allowed to find her own head for a moment. He tied the rope around his own waist. He tied the other end around the base of the mast, which was the nearest standing thing to the steering-oar that would hold a man against the wind. The knots he tied were the knots a ship’s master ties in such matters, double-bowline at the waist and round-turn-and-two-half-hitches at the mast, and Snæ has reported that the chief tied them with his eyes mostly closed against the rain and his hands knowing the work without consultation. When the rope was fast he resumed the steering-oar. He pulled the oar from the lock-bracket and braced his feet and took the ship’s head back into the wind.
The men at the oars saw the lashing. The men understood. The lashing meant that the chief was committing himself to the steering-oar through whatever was coming, and that if the ship went over he would go over with her, and that he would not be persuaded otherwise. The men returned the doubled commitment by leaning harder into the storm-pace. Sound-of-Going took the next wave. She took the next wave. She took the wave after that. The chief at the steering-oar laughed each time the prow came up out of a great wave and the spray came back over him, and his laugh was now a steady laugh, not a single bark but a long ongoing thing that fitted itself between the rising and falling of the ship like a song fitted to a pace.
This went on. The saga is reluctant to say for how long because the men did not afterward agree on the length. Snæ said an hour. Bjorn, when he woke under the stern-tarp at the height of it and looked up and saw the chief lashed to the mast and laughing, said only that it went on long enough. The skald wrote in her birch-bark that it went on for the time it would take a slow man to row across the fjord of Aern in calm weather, which was about three quarters of an hour. The skald’s count is probably the closest to the truth, the saga will say, because skalds count time in song-lengths and song-lengths are the most reliable count of duration that a longship in a storm has access to.
At the end of that time the storm broke.
The breaking did not happen the way the saga has heard stories of storms breaking in other places, with a clear lightening of the cloud and a single rainbow rising in the east. The breaking of this storm was more ordinary than that. The wind, which had been at the strength without a name, dropped to the strength that uproots trees on land, and then to the strength that takes off roofs, and then to the strength of a hard winter gale, and within the time it would take to row half a fjord-crossing the storm was a storm of the ordinary kind and no longer the storm without a name. The waves dropped also. The cloud-bank lifted to its three-day position above the mast. The rain continued, but the rain was now the cold steady rain of any winter day in the open sea, and not the sideways torrent of the worst hour. The men at the oars eased the storm-pace by a notch. Bjorn came out from under the stern-tarp, blinking and dry as a board, and took stock. The ship was whole. The mast was whole. The cargo under the tarps was wet but lashed. No man had been lost overboard. No oar had been broken. Two of the shields along the gunwale had been torn from their pegs and one was missing entirely. A third was hanging by a single peg and was retrieved and stowed. The damage was the small damage that an experienced ship of an experienced master takes in a storm of that size, and it was, by the standards Bjorn had been trained to, an unremarkably small damage. He said as much to the chief, who had by then untied himself from the mast and resumed the steering-oar in the more ordinary way.
The chief did not answer Bjorn at once. The chief was, the saga must report, in a state that the men had not seen him in before. He was breathing the long deep breaths of a man who has been laughing for three quarters of an hour and whose lungs were sore. His pale eyes were wide. His pale beard with its four iron rings was darkened by the rain and the spray to the color of old slate. The wolf-cloak hung from his shoulders like the hide of a dead animal still warm. He stood at the steering-oar and he was very still, although his ship was rising and dropping in the moderate way of a ship in a passing gale, and he stood with his hands on the oar and he looked forward down the deck at the men he had brought through the storm and he said, in a quiet voice that everyone heard because everyone had become very quiet to listen, “The gods have given us the road.”
Bjorn looked at him for a moment. Bjorn said, “Aye, chief.”
The chief said it again, the doubling habit returning, “The gods have given us the road. The gods have given us the road. They have looked at us in the storm and they have chosen us. They have spared us when they did not have to. They have shown us that the matter is theirs and that we are the hand of the matter. They have blessed the hunt.”
Bjorn did not say anything for a long breath. The skald, who had remained wedged in her bench-corner all through the storm and who had now begun to unwedge herself, did not say anything either. She was looking at her brother with a small fixed look that was not the look she usually wore, and the saga will not pretend to know what the look meant, but it will report that Snæ Two-Tongues, glancing aft from his seventh oar, caught the look and remembered it many years later and described it in his own hall as the look of a sister who has just understood a thing about a brother and is filing the understanding away for the longer reckoning.
The chief did not see her look. He was facing the men at the oars. He raised his right hand from the steering-oar, the small lift that signified a chief was about to address the company, and the men eased their stroke another notch to listen. He said, in a voice that was now neither quiet nor a shout but the full hall-voice he had used at the longfire on the night of the oath, “Hear me, kin and bench-fellows. The sea has tried us and the sea has failed. The storm has tried us and the storm has failed. We are sworn to a matter that the gods have blessed, and the blessing has been given us in the form of this voyage, that we may know we ride with the gods at our shoulders. I will say it once and not say it again. We will take the beast. We will take the tail. We will go home with what we came for. The storm has told us so. Take heart.”
The men at the oars did the thing men do in such moments. They struck the boards of their rower’s chests with the flats of their hands, three times, which was the small answer to a chief’s small speech, and they took up the storm-pace and ran it down into the ordinary-pace and they rowed on. The rain ran off their cloaks. The wind, now an ordinary wind, came down the deck. Bjorn went forward to check the mast-step for the working of the lashings, which he did after every great wind. The skald sat back down on her bench in the new ordinary motion of the ship and put her hands inside her sleeves and looked, briefly, at the harp-case under the bench to be sure it had not shifted, and then she looked up again at her brother at the steering-oar and her face was the careful neutral face of a skald in attendance, with nothing readable upon it, but the saga must report what the saga can report, and what the saga can report is that the small tightness she had felt under her breastbone on the wharf at Aern-Vík had become, in the hour of the storm, a much larger tightness, and that the larger tightness had not eased when the storm eased, and that she sat with it on her bench at the stern and did not let it show.
The chief did not see her tightness. The chief was looking forward. The chief, the saga is bound to say, had been changed by the storm in a way that he himself did not yet understand and that the men did not yet understand and that only the skald, perhaps, suspected. He had laid hold of the storm’s failing to kill him as a blessing. He had taken the survival as endorsement. He had heard, in the laughter he had laughed against the wind, an answering laugh from the wind itself, and he had counted the answering laugh as approval. The skald, in her birch-bark notes, set this down in a hand that was steadier now that the storm was over but still not quite her usual hand. She wrote, in the small private script she used for notes that were not for singing, the following sentence. The saga has the sentence from the birch-bark itself, which survived in the library at the Watching-Stones in a fragment that Brother Eskil’s predecessor pieced together from three torn pieces. The sentence read: he has mistaken the storm’s mercy for the storm’s friendship. The skald set it down and underlined the word mistaken once.
She did not write more on the matter that day. She did not have to. The mistaking was, she had judged, the kind of mistake that does its own work in time and does not require commentary. The mistaking would unfold in the chief over the days and weeks to come. The mistaking would find its expression in the way he gave orders, in the way he carried himself among the men, in the way he spoke of the hunt at evening fires when the men were tired and wanted small certainties and the chief now had a large certainty to give them. The mistaking, the skald wrote in her birch-bark a few days later, when she had had time to think about it, would become a coat that fit him too well, and that he would not wish to take off, and that he would not be able to take off, and that he would in the end die in. She wrote that sentence also in the small private script. She did not underline anything in it. The sentence underlined itself.
The voyage went on.
The fifth day was the day after the storm and was a day of mending. The men checked all the lashings. They retied the cargo. They replaced the missing shield with a spare from the stores. They patched the small tear in the sail that had been done by a gust and that had not been noticed in the storm itself. They dried the cloaks and the bread-sacks over a small charcoal brazier that Bjorn allowed on the deck only in flat weather. The chief moved among the men with the new certainty of one who had been blessed, and the men received the new certainty with the gratitude of men who had been through a storm and now had a chief who had brought them through it. The mistaking, the saga must note, was not a mistaking the men could see at this point. The men saw only that the chief had taken them through the storm and was now telling them they had been chosen. The men were happy to hear it. The men needed to hear it. A hunting band of twelve at sea in the third week of Selnus is a band that wants reasons to believe the hunt will succeed, and the chief was giving them the reason, and the reason was both warming and persuasive, and only the skald and perhaps, the saga is willing to allow, Bjorn son of Halvar Thick-Arm, who was the only man on the ship besides the skald who had been at sea long enough to have seen chiefs turned by storms before, kept private counsel on the matter.
The sixth day they sighted the southern tip of Heid-Marka and made the turn east. The wind was favorable. The sail was raised again. The men shipped their oars. The skald played, for the first time since the wharf, a single tune at the evening watch, a quiet tune that she had been working on for some weeks and that she did not yet have words for. The men listened to it in the small quiet they reserved for the skald’s tuning-tunes, the ones that had no words. The chief listened also. The chief said, when the tune was done, that it was a good tune. The skald inclined her head and did not say anything. She put the harp back in its case. She would not play again until they made shore, three days later, on the western coast of the small island called Vord, where they would take on fresh water and rest the men for a day before the long crossing to the cliff-coasts of the south.
The seventh and eighth days passed in fair weather and good wind. The crossing went quickly. The men sang the small rowing-songs they sang on easy days. The chief stood the second watch at the steering-oar each night and slept the first watch each morning. He ate well. He spoke often, and his speaking had taken on, the saga reports, a small new edge that had not been there before the storm, a small new way of making each sentence sound as though it were also a verdict. The men did not mind the edge. The men liked the edge. An edge in a chief at sea is a thing the men prefer to its absence, because the absence of an edge in a chief at sea makes the men nervous about the chief’s certainty, and the chief’s certainty is, in the men’s reckoning, the half of their own that they have not been issued.
The skald minded the edge. She did not say so. She wrote, on the birch-bark, a second sentence to go beside the first. The second sentence read: the edge is the place the storm got in. She did not underline anything in this one either.
The ninth day they made landfall on Vord. The cove was a small cove on the western side of the island and was known to Bjorn from previous voyages. The men beached the ship in the long sloping way that allowed her to be hauled up at high tide and floated again at the next. The men set up the camp-shelter under the long roll of canvas. The men ate a hot meal for the first time in nine days. The chief stood at the edge of the camp at evening and looked east, in the direction of the cliff-coasts that lay another four days’ sail across open water, and the men noticed that he stood there a long time and that he did not speak to anyone during the standing. Bjorn left him to it. The skald left him to it. The men ate their hot meal and made their small jokes and let their chief stand at the edge of the camp and look east without disturbing him. They understood that he was preparing himself for the next part of the matter, and that the preparation was the kind of thing a chief did alone, and that the small respect of letting him have the standing was the small respect they owed him for getting them through the storm.
He stood there until the first stars came out. He did not laugh. He did not speak to anyone. He looked east and turned the fourth iron ring in his beard between his thumb and forefinger, the way he turned a loose ring before a great speech in the hall, except that the ring was no longer loose and the speech was not for the hall but for himself. He turned it. He turned it. He turned it. He turned it some more.
He had, the saga is willing to say, in the storm and in the days since, begun the small inward work of becoming someone other than the man he had been. The work was not visible to the men. The work was perhaps not yet visible to the chief himself. The work was visible to the skald, who watched him stand at the edge of the camp with her careful skald’s eye, and to Bjorn, who had glanced at him only once and had then turned away, with the small grunt that was Bjorn’s version of acknowledgment, and had gone to check the lashings on the gangplank for the morning’s launch.
The voyage from Vord to the cliff-coasts took four days. The voyage was uneventful. The wind held. The skald did not write further in the birch-bark for those four days. The chief steered well. The men rowed when the wind dropped and shipped their oars when it returned. They reached the cliff-coasts in the afternoon of the thirteenth day from Aern-Vík.
The cliffs rose from the open sea in the way the southern stories had said they would. They were higher than the men had expected and longer than the men had expected and the cliff-folk’s small villages were spaced along the cliff-tops at intervals the men could see from the water as small clusters of pale roofs against the green of the cliff-grass. The cliffs were the southern wall of Hraevn-an-Ol. Bjorn made for a small cove that the cliff-folk’s traders had described to him many years before as a beach where a longship could be drawn up out of the surf, and they came in to it in the late afternoon, and they beached Sound-of-Going on the long sloping sand, and they made fast the lines to the boulders the cliff-folk’s traders had described, and they were ashore.
The chief stepped down onto the sand. He stood for a moment with his boots in the wet line where the small surf was running up. He looked along the cliffs to the south. He looked up at the cliff-tops to the north. He did not look up at the sky. The saga makes a note of this. The chief did not look up at the sky. He had looked at the sky a great deal during the voyage, and he had laughed at the sky during the storm, and he had read the sky each evening for the next day’s weather as any chief would. But on the sand of the cove, on the afternoon of his arrival on the southern coast, the chief did not look up. The skald, who was watching, set this down in her birch-bark when she had a moment alone with her pencil, in a third sentence that joined the other two. The third sentence read: he has stopped looking up. He has begun to look only along.
She did not underline it.
The men set about the work of making the shore-camp. The work was the ordinary work of beaching a longship in unfamiliar territory: posting a watch on the cliff-top to give warning of cliff-folk approaching from inland, gathering driftwood for a fire, hauling the supplies up the beach to the line of dry sand above the high-tide mark, securing the ship. The chief gave the orders and the men did the work. The work was done within the time it would take a slow man to walk twice around the cove. By dusk the camp was made and the fire was lit and the men were eating the first hot meal they had had since Vord.
The chief sat at the fire. He turned the fourth iron ring in his beard. He looked into the flames. He did not look up.
The saga has reported the voyage south. The saga has reported the storm. The saga has reported the chief’s laughter into the wind, and the lashing to the mast, and the speech to the men afterward, and the new edge in the chief’s voice, and the silent standing at the edge of the camp on Vord, and the not-looking-up on the sand of the cove on the southern coast. The saga has reported what can be reported. The saga will say one more thing before it goes on to the matter of the twelve-day chase, which is the next matter.
The saga will say that the storm did not bless the hunt. The saga will say that the storm did not curse the hunt either. The storm was, the saga has come to believe in the long reckoning of all the songs and all the testimonies, only a storm. It came as storms come. It tried what storms try. It failed to kill the men who were on Sound-of-Going that day because the ship was a good ship and the men were good men and the ship’s master slept under the stern-tarp in the curious way that ship’s masters can when the matter is in hand. The storm did not look at the chief. The storm did not laugh back at the chief’s laugh. The storm did not endorse anything. Storms do not endorse. Storms only pass.
The chief made of the passing an endorsement. This was his choice. The choice was his and not the storm’s and not the gods’. The choice fitted him because he had wanted such a choice to be available, and because the longhouse oath at Aern-Vík had been a thing that wanted a sign from the heavens to confirm it, and because the dry-voiced stranger at the longfire had said the kind of thing that demands a sign to refute it, and because the storm came at the moment when the chief was most in need of a sign and least in possession of his old ordinary uncertainty. The storm was, the saga will allow, conveniently timed. It is not the saga’s place to say whether the timing was the work of the gods or the work of chance or the work of something else. The saga will only say that the timing was convenient and that the chief took the convenience.
He took it. He carried it the rest of the way. He carried it through the twelve days of the chase. He carried it through the cornering at the Cliffs of Falling Stars. He carried it through the breaking of the tail and through the forging of the club and through every blow the club struck against every great beast and every foe in the years after. He carried it, the saga is sorry to say, all the way to the splitting of the earth and the falling.
The carrying began in the fourth hour of the storm at sea on the fourth day out of Aern-Vík. The carrying began with a laugh into a wind that did not laugh back.
The saga will now go on to the matter of the cliff-coasts and the twelve-day chase. The skald will write her fourth and fifth and sixth sentences in the birch-bark in the days and weeks to come. The men will rest on the beach. The chief will turn the fourth iron ring in his beard. The night will be cold and the fire will be hot and the cliff-folk on the cliff-tops above the cove will, in their small villages, hear the smoke before they see it, and will look at one another over their evening bowls, and will not yet send anyone down to see who has come, but will begin in their long careful way to take the measure of the visitors. Among them is a girl of thirteen, with a missing finger and a wind-sash and a head full of pale tall grass and a stone that has not yet cracked in any of her dreams. She will smell the smoke also. She will not know yet who has come. She will know within a day.
The matter goes on.
Segment 8: “The Girl Who Knew the Wind”
Many years later, when she was an old woman walking with the wind at her back along a coast that had forgotten most of what had happened upon it, Kaela of the Cliffs would remember that the smoke had come first. Before the boots on the cliff path, before the iron rings in the strangers’ beards, before the long pale fingers of the chief who took her by the wrist as gently as a man takes a bird from a snare, there had been the smoke. The smoke had come up the face of the cliff in the late afternoon of an autumn day, riding on a wind the shells should have read and had not, and her grandmother had stood at the threshold of the house with her white braid moving very slightly in the breeze that had carried the smoke, and her grandmother had said one word aloud, in the voice of a woman recognizing a thing she had been told about as a child and had never seen until that moment. The word her grandmother had said was pine. Not the cliff-folk’s word for pine, which was a soft round sound in the back of the mouth. The northern word for pine. Kaela had not yet learned that her grandmother knew the northern word for pine. Her grandmother had learned it, she would tell Kaela later in the same afternoon, from her own grandmother, who had heard it from a wandering trader sixty years before and had passed it down in the way the women of the cliff-folk passed down small foreign words against the day the words might be needed. Her grandmother had carried the word in her mouth for some seventy years for this one afternoon. She said it once at the threshold and never said it again, and Kaela would remember that single saying for the rest of her life, the way one remembers the precise sound of a door closing for the last time on a house one had thought one would always live in.
She was thirteen years old. She had been thirteen for the entire month of Helmus and was within a week of being fourteen. The standing clouds along the northern horizon, which had stood for a year and three months by then, were gathered that afternoon into a single dark bank that no longer hung on the horizon but had walked itself south across the open sea in slow steps over the long summer until it now stood directly above the village, an iron-colored ceiling that did not move and did not rain and did not break. The cliff-folk had stopped commenting on the cloud. There was nothing more to be said about a cloud that had been described every way a cliff-folk tongue could describe a cloud. The cloud was the cloud. It had become a feature of the place, the way the cliffs were a feature of the place. The shells of the sashes, hers and her grandmother’s and the three other practicing wind-women of the village, had stopped giving readings of the cloud also. They had given readings for the first six months. The readings had grown stranger and stranger until they were no longer readings the women could interpret. The shells had then gone quiet on the matter of the cloud, in the way an old dog goes quiet when it understands it cannot help. The shells still chimed for the ordinary winds, the cross-wind and the open-sea wind and the small treacherous wind along the cliff face. They did not chime for the cloud. The cloud was outside what they had been taught.
The smoke came up. Her grandmother said the word. Kaela came to the threshold to stand beside her. They did not speak for a long moment. There was a kind of stillness in the house behind them, the small stillness that fell across a cliff-folk household when one of the elders had recognized a thing and the others were waiting to be told what the recognition meant. Kaela’s mother had stopped at the loom in the corner with the shuttle in her hand. Kaela’s two younger cousins, who had been playing the small clattering game with shells on the threshold-stone, had stopped also and were looking up. The fire in the hearth in the center of the floor had not stopped, but it seemed quieter than it had been a moment before, as fires sometimes seem when the people around them have stopped breathing in their ordinary way.
Her grandmother said, in the cliff-folk tongue, in a voice not raised, “Go down to the cove.”
Kaela said, “Now?”
Her grandmother said, “Now. Walk. Do not run. The wind is on the cliff-face and the small treacherous one is up. You know how to set your feet. Do not look down at the path. Look out at the sea. Come back and tell me what you see in the cove.”
Kaela said, “Should I wear the sash?”
Her grandmother said, “Yes.”
Her grandmother said one more thing, very quietly, almost not to Kaela at all. Her grandmother said, “I think they have come.”
Kaela took the sash from the peg by the door and laid it across her shoulders and tied it under her opposite arm in the way she had been tying it for seven years. The shells along its length clicked softly. The fourteen white shells were the fourteen white shells they had been since she was six, although one had been replaced in her ninth year after it had cracked, and another in her eleventh, and the replacements were the same shells in the way that the river is the same river. She set out along the cliff path that led south from the village to the head of the cove where Sound-of-Going had been beached. She did not know, that afternoon, the name of the ship. She did not know the name of any ship. The cliff-folk had small boats and the small boats had small names if they had names at all, and the great long thing on the beach below would not have a name in her mouth until much later when she had spent enough time among the men who sailed it to hear them call it by its name often enough to remember.
She walked. The wind was on the cliff-face as her grandmother had said. The small treacherous wind that her grandmother had taught her in her tenth year, the wind that could pluck a girl off the path if she did not know to set her feet against the stone in the particular cliff-folk way, was up that afternoon. She set her feet. She had been setting her feet against the small treacherous wind for three years now and she did not have to think about the setting. She walked. The fourteen white shells clicked very softly against one another. The wind from the open sea brought the smoke up to her in long pulses, and the smoke was the smoke of a fire built of driftwood and something else, something the cliff-folk had not in their lifetimes burned in their own fires, and her grandmother had given a name to the something else and the name had been pine. She knew, as she walked, that what she was smelling for the first time in her life was the burning of pinewood, which grew nowhere on the cliff-coast and was not traded south in any quantity Kaela had ever seen, but which grew, the traders said, in great long stands along the northern fjords, and which the northern peoples used for many things, among them the making of cooking-fires and the smoking of meat and the cutting of the long planks they built their ships from. The smell was not unpleasant. It had a resinous sweetness that the cliff-folk’s driftwood fires did not have. It had also another smell, mixed into it but distinct from it, that she did not have a word for at all. The smell that was not the pine. The other smell. She walked another twenty paces along the cliff path before she understood what the other smell was. It was metal. It was iron. It was the smell of iron in a fire. The cliff-folk had iron, but the cliff-folk’s iron was scarce and was kept in small pieces in small leather pouches at the belts of the older men and was not, ever, in their lifetimes, put near a fire to take on the smell that the smoke from the cove was carrying up to her now. The northerners, the smoke said, had iron in their fire. The northerners had iron enough that some of it was, perhaps, in the fire by accident, or perhaps in the fire on purpose for some reason her grandmother had not yet thought to teach her. Iron in a fire. Pine in a fire. The two smells came up to her braided together, and she walked along the cliff path setting her feet against the small treacherous wind, and she felt, with her shells clicking softly at her shoulder and the iron-and-pine air in her nostrils, the particular sensation she had been told about by her grandmother but had never until that moment experienced, which was the sensation of one’s life ending while one was still walking through it.
It was not a frightening sensation. Her grandmother had warned her about this also. Her grandmother had said that the moments when one’s life turned over were not the moments of greatest fear. The moments of greatest fear came later, when the life had already turned, and one looked back at the turning and understood what it had been. In the moment itself there was usually only a strange calm, like the calm of standing at the edge of a high place and looking out at the long view, where the body, knowing it was in danger, simplified its responses to the few that would keep one upright. Kaela had not believed her grandmother at the time. She had been ten, then, and had been told the saying in the long recovery after her finger had been taken by the falcon, and she had thought, in the way ten-year-olds think, that her grandmother was inventing a kindness to make her feel less foolish about how calm she had been when she had watched her own small fingertip lying on the path some feet away from her hand. She had thought the calm had been only her own particular failing, the failing of a child whose feelings had not yet caught up to the events around her. She thought now, walking down the cliff path at thirteen with the iron-and-pine smoke coming up at her, that her grandmother had not been inventing anything. The calm was a real calm. It was the calm of a body that had understood, before the mind had fully understood, that what was happening was large and would not be improved by panic. She walked. She set her feet. She breathed the iron-and-pine air. She did not run.
She reached the head of the cove. The head of the cove was a small rounded outcrop of stone that the cliff-folk had used, for many generations, as a place from which to watch the sea without being easily seen from below. There was a low place along the rim where a person, lying flat, could look down at the beach. Kaela went to the low place. She lay flat. The shells clicked once and then went silent against the stone beneath her. She looked down.
What she saw was a ship.
She had to make herself understand it. She had heard, the year before, that the shapes on the horizon had been ships, and her grandmother had explained to her what a ship was, and Kaela had nodded and had said she understood, but the nod had been the nod of a child agreeing to a description in a language that does not contain the thing being described. There was no word in the cliff-folk’s tongue for ship. There was the word for the small fishing boat. There was the word for the larger flat-bottomed thing that the trader of three winters past had brought into the cove and which had been called by the trader, in his accented cliff-folk speech, a coaster. There was no word for the long high thing with the carved prow and the line of shields and the mast standing up taller than the cliffs of the cove’s southern wall. Kaela looked down at the thing on the beach and she made the slow internal adjustment that her grandmother had told her would be required, in which the word she did not have was replaced, in her mind, by the description her grandmother had given, and the description took the shape of the actual thing and married itself to the actual thing, and the marriage produced, in the back of her head, the small dry click that was the cliff-folk’s signal of a new piece of knowledge taking its place beside the older pieces. A ship. That was a ship.
The ship had been pulled up on the long sloping sand of the cove at the high-tide line. Its lines were tied to the two great boulders the cliff-folk’s traders had described to its master many years before. The carved figure at the high prow was, she noted with a small surprise, not a wolf or a dragon or any of the warlike creatures the traders had said decorated the prows of northern ships, but a heron. The heron’s long beak pointed up the beach. The heron’s eye, painted in a single dark stroke, was looking, she thought, at her. She knew it was not looking at her. She knew the heron was a carved piece of wood and did not see. But the angle of the heron’s eye was, she would always remember, the first thing about the ship that gave her the feeling of being noticed, and the noticing was, in some way she would only understand later, a kind of welcome. The heron was a polite creature. It had not been carved by a man who wished his ship to terrify the people whose harbors it entered. It had been carved by a man who wished his ship to be received the way one receives a long-legged bird wading into a tidepool, with a small wary respect.
The men were on the beach. There were twelve of them. She counted them twice and got twelve both times, and her grandmother had taught her always to count twice when she was looking at men, because men were the kind of thing it was easy to miscount. Eleven were doing the work of setting up a shore-camp. Three were dragging driftwood. Two were unrolling the long roll of canvas that would become the shelter. Two were laying out a circle of stones for the fire-pit, although the fire was already burning some distance up the beach in what she now saw was a smaller temporary fire-pit dug in the sand. Two were carrying barrels up from the ship. Two were setting up a small frame of poles that she did not at first understand the purpose of and that her grandmother would later tell her was the frame for hanging wet cloaks to dry. The eleven were moving in the easy practiced way of men who had done this work many times and did not have to think about it.
The twelfth man was standing apart.
He was standing at the edge of the temporary fire-pit, just where the sand began to be touched by the smoke. He was tall. He was the tallest of the twelve. He was wearing a long dark cloak that looked, at the distance, like the hide of a wolf, and the cloak hung from his shoulders to his calves, and his pale beard fell across the front of the cloak in two ropes, and in the ropes, even from this far, she could see the small bright marks where four iron rings had been braided into the beard. His back was to her. He was looking at the fire. He was, she observed without yet understanding what she was observing, doing something with his right hand near his beard, a small repetitive motion that her grandmother would identify, when she described it to her later, as the turning of a ring. The ring was being turned. The man was turning a ring in his own beard while looking at a fire. The man was the chief of the twelve. She knew this without being told. The cliff-folk had no chiefs in the way that her grandmother said the northerners had chiefs, but the cliff-folk knew, as all peoples knew, the small signs by which one person at a gathering becomes the still center around which the others move. The eleven were moving. The twelfth was still. The twelfth was the chief. She knew this within the first breath of looking down at the beach, and she would not, in the long unfolding of the afternoon, find any of her early conclusions about him to be wrong.
There was a thirteenth person also. She had not at first seen the thirteenth, because the thirteenth had been seated at the edge of the temporary fire-pit on the side opposite the chief, and the eleven moving men had been between them. She saw the thirteenth now as one of the men carrying a barrel walked past and the line of sight opened. The thirteenth was sitting on a flat stone. The thirteenth was wearing a vest of cured seal-skin and a long traveler’s cloak of grey wool. The thirteenth was a woman. She had two long ropes of braided hair, the color of beach-driftwood, with bone rings at the ends, and on her lap she had a wrapped bundle the shape and size of a small harp in its case, and she was, Kaela observed, not looking at the fire or at the men or at the sea, but at the cliff-tops. She was looking up. She was the only one of the thirteen who was looking up. Her face from this distance was small and pale and Kaela could not read its expression at all. The woman did not move. She sat on the flat stone and she looked up at the cliffs and she did not move.
Kaela understood, in the same small dry click of new knowledge, that the woman with the harp-bundle was looking up because the woman with the harp-bundle was the kind of person who looked up. The woman was paying the cliff-tops the regard that the cliff-tops were due. The eleven moving men were not paying the cliff-tops any regard. The chief at the fire was not paying the cliff-tops any regard. He was looking at the fire. The other eleven were looking at their work. The woman alone was looking up, and her looking up had the quality, Kaela could see even at the distance, of the practiced looking that her grandmother and her aunts and her own mother had taught her was the proper way to enter a strange place. One looked up before one looked along. One read the cliff-tops before one read the beach. The woman with the harp-bundle was doing the right thing. The other twelve were doing the wrong thing, which was not, Kaela was careful to note, the same as doing a hostile thing. They were doing the wrong thing in the way a guest in another’s house might do the wrong thing by not removing his shoes, not because he meant to give offense, but because he had not been taught.
This was the third sensation of her arrival at the head of the cove, and it sat alongside the first sensation, which had been the strange calm of life turning over, and the second sensation, which had been the small dry click of the word ship taking its place in her vocabulary. The third sensation was a sensation of pity. She would think about it many times in the years to come. She was thirteen years old and was lying flat on a stone outcrop above a cove watching twelve men and one woman she did not know set up a camp on her people’s beach, and what she felt, in the back of her chest below the strange calm and beside the small dry click, was pity. She pitied them. She pitied them because they had not been taught to look up. She knew, with the certainty of a tide, that her people’s whole long inheritance, the inheritance of the seven generations of women who had taught one another to read the wind through fourteen white shells and to set the feet against the small treacherous wind and to look up before looking along, was a thing these twelve had not been given. They were going to do harm. She did not yet know how. She did not yet know to whom. She knew it the way one knows a coming storm from the chime of a shell at one’s shoulder, without having seen the storm. They were going to do harm. They were going to do harm because they had not been taught not to. And she pitied them, the way her grandmother had said one ought to pity those who had not been given an inheritance one had been given oneself, because the absence of an inheritance was a kind of poverty that the rich did not know they were rich against. She pitied them the way a wind-woman pities those who walk through their lives without ever hearing the shells. It was not a pity that lessened her fear of them. The two sensations were not in competition. She pitied them and she was afraid of them at once.
She lay on the stone for a long time. The shadow of the cloud above the cove darkened slowly as the late afternoon went on. The men below continued their work. The fire grew. The smoke continued to come up the cliff-face. The woman on the flat stone did not move and continued to look up. At one point the woman’s gaze passed across the outcrop where Kaela was lying, and Kaela held very still, the way one holds very still when a heron is wading near one’s small boat, and the woman’s gaze went past her and continued along the cliff-top and came back, and the second time the gaze came back the woman, Kaela was almost sure, paused, for a single breath, on the place where Kaela was lying. The woman did not point. The woman did not call. The woman did not change her expression. The woman only paused. Then her gaze moved on. Kaela understood, in the same back-of-the-head way she had understood about the chief, that the woman with the harp-bundle had seen her. The woman had seen her and had chosen not to say so. The seeing-and-not-saying was, Kaela was almost sure, a gift. The woman was giving her a small piece of time. The small piece of time was the time it would take Kaela to crawl back from the edge of the outcrop and return up the cliff path to the village before the eleven moving men were sent inland to find out who lived above the cove.
Kaela took the gift. She crawled back. She rose only when she was below the line of sight of the beach. She walked back along the cliff path setting her feet against the small treacherous wind which had risen another notch since she had come down. The shells clicked at her shoulder. The iron-and-pine smell followed her up the path for some distance and then thinned and was gone. The cloud above held its iron color. She came back to the village in the long blue dusk of late autumn evenings on the southern coast and she found her grandmother sitting on the threshold-stone of the house, which her grandmother had not done in many years because the threshold-stone was the place where the children played and her grandmother had reserved her sitting for the bench inside the door. Her grandmother had been waiting. Her grandmother looked up as Kaela came down the small dirt lane. Her grandmother said one word, which was the cliff-folk’s word for tell.
Kaela told. She told what she had seen. She told the count of twelve and the carving of the heron and the chief at the fire with the four iron rings in his beard turning a ring with his right hand, and she told about the eleven moving men, and she told about the thirteenth, the woman with the harp-bundle, and she told about the woman looking up, and she told about the woman seeing her on the outcrop and not saying so. Her grandmother listened with her eyes closed. Her grandmother had taught her, many years before, that the proper way for an elder to listen to a report of a new thing was with the eyes closed, because the eyes when open would search the speaker’s face for the report and would miss the report itself in the searching. Her grandmother kept her eyes closed through the whole telling. When Kaela was done her grandmother said, “The woman looked up.”
Kaela said, “Yes.”
Her grandmother said, “Only the woman.”
Kaela said, “Yes.”
Her grandmother said, “Then the woman is the one who will help you.”
Kaela had not understood, at the time, what her grandmother had meant by this. She would understand it later, in the small dry way one understood the sayings of one’s grandmother, in increments across the months and years that followed. The woman would help her. Sigvör Ash-Daughter, who would in the days to come be revealed as the chief’s sister and the band’s skald, would help her in a hundred small unstated ways across the long months of the captivity that was about to begin, and would help her also in one or two large stated ways at the moment of greatest need, and would be, in the entire span of Kaela’s experience of the northerners, the one whose looking up had been the first kindness done to her on the day the northerners came. Her grandmother had read all of this from the single fact of the woman looking up at the cliff-tops. Her grandmother had read it the way Kaela’s grandmother read winds. Kaela did not at thirteen know how to do such reading on her own. She would learn it. The learning would begin tonight.
Her grandmother opened her eyes. Her grandmother said, “Come inside.”
They went inside. Her grandmother went to the small wooden chest at the foot of her own sleeping-cot, the chest that the household called the grandmother-chest because it had been her grandmother’s mother’s chest and her grandmother’s mother’s mother’s chest before that, and which contained the small things of the women’s line that did not go on the shelves with the household goods. Her grandmother lifted the lid. Her grandmother took out a small bundle wrapped in red cloth. Her grandmother laid the bundle on the floor at Kaela’s feet and unwrapped it. Inside the bundle was a thing Kaela had not known her grandmother possessed. It was a small carved wooden bracelet of four strands of braided sea-grass and bone, with four small knots along its length, and Kaela understood, looking down at it, that this was the kind of object her aunt Mira would have called a name-keep, an object the cliff-folk gave to their daughters at the moment when the daughter was about to leave the family for a long while, and that the four knots on its length were the four named dead of her grandmother’s line, the four ancestors whose memory the bracelet had been made to hold, and that her grandmother was giving this to her now, before she knew whether she would be leaving.
Kaela said, “Grandmother. They have not yet come for me.”
Her grandmother said, “They will come for you. The chief has not yet seen you. The chief has not yet asked any question of any cliff-folk man. The chief is at his fire turning his ring. The chief will rise in an hour or two and he will send some of his men up the cliff path to find the village and to ask whether anyone among us speaks his tongue. There is only you. The trader of three winters past taught only you. The chief will ask. He will be told. You will go down. I will not stop them taking you because I cannot stop them, and because if I tried to stop them they would harm the village in the trying. I will let them take you. You will go with them. You will be the only person in this village who can speak to them, and you will be the only person among them who will know what they are saying to one another when they think we cannot hear. That is a value they will take from you. I cannot prevent the taking. I can give you this.”
She lifted the bracelet from the cloth. She held it out. Kaela held out her left wrist, the wrist of the hand with the missing finger. Her grandmother tied the bracelet on. Her grandmother said, “There are four knots. Each is a woman of our line. The first is my own grandmother, Sela of the Long Hair. The second is her own mother, Pirin of the Bird-Tongue. The third is Pirin’s mother, Kael of the Long Walk. The fourth is Kael’s mother, Mer of the First Sash, whose hands made the sash you wear now. You wear the sash she wove. You wear the bracelet that names her. When you are far from us, touch a knot. Touch them in order if you can. They will help you. They will not appear. They will not speak in any way you can hear. They will help you the way the wind helps the gull. The gull does not see the wind. The gull does not hear the wind in words. The gull only knows the wind is holding it up. You will be the gull. They will be the wind. Do you hear me, cloud-headed one. They will be the wind.”
Kaela said, “Yes, grandmother.”
Her grandmother said, “There is one more thing. Touch the fourth knot last. The fourth is Mer of the First Sash. She is the strongest of them. She was the one who made the listening. Do not touch her early. Do not touch her except when you are at a place from which you cannot return. She will give you what you need at that place. She will give you only once. Keep her for the once.”
Kaela said, “Yes, grandmother.”
Her grandmother sat back on her heels. Her grandmother looked at her for a long moment. Her grandmother said one more thing, which was not in the cliff-folk tongue, and which was not in the northern tongue either, and which Kaela did not at that moment understand. The saying was a single phrase in the old-wind language her grandmother had spoken of in her ninth year, the language her grandmother had said was not for the cliff-folk to learn but only to listen to when the shells gave it. Her grandmother said the phrase aloud once and looked at Kaela and did not translate it and did not say it again. Kaela would remember the phrase for the rest of her life. She would not learn what it meant until she was forty-three years old and a stranger she met on a road would say a similar phrase in passing, and she would ask him, and he would translate it, and she would weep for an hour on a roadside in a country she had no business being in. But that is for very much later. On this evening, at thirteen, on the threshold-floor of her grandmother’s house, she only received the phrase, the way one receives a stone pressed into one’s hand by a person who cannot explain what the stone is for, and she put it away in the back of her head where her grandmother’s other unexplained gifts had been put, and she did not ask.
The men came as her grandmother had said they would, in an hour, perhaps a little more. There were three of them. They came up the cliff path in the late blue dusk with the iron-and-pine smell hanging on their clothes. They did not draw their weapons. They came up the path the way men come who have been told there are people above and who wish to find them, not the way men come who wish to take. They reached the small square at the center of the village. The villagers had been told, in the time after Kaela’s return, that the men would come, and the villagers had decided, in the rapid quiet way the cliff-folk made decisions, that they would meet the men at the square without bringing out the small weapons they had, because the small weapons they had were not the kind of weapons that would have helped against twelve men with iron in their fire. The cliff-folk men of the village stood in a loose half-circle. The cliff-folk women stood behind them, in a smaller half-circle. The cliff-folk children had been put inside the houses. Kaela stood between her grandmother and her mother, in the women’s half-circle. She wore the sash. She wore the bracelet on her left wrist. Her right hand was inside the sleeve of her tunic, where the small bone falcon she still wore at her throat was hanging on its thong. She was, the saga of her life would say later, calm. The strange calm of the watching-her-future-arrive sensation had not left her since the moment on the outcrop. It would not leave her for the rest of the evening. It would not even leave her, fully, when the chief came up the path himself an hour later, after the three first men had returned to him with the report that there was indeed a girl in the village who spoke broken northern.
The three first men spoke in the northern tongue. Two of them spoke loudly and slowly, in the way the cliff-folk had observed that strangers to their tongue spoke when they wanted to be understood by foreigners, on the misguided theory that loudness and slowness would render meaning where vocabulary would not. The third, a man younger than the others, with a long bony face and long bony hands and the look about him of a younger cousin who had been sent on the harder errands of his line, spoke more quietly, asking the others to let him speak. He spoke a few cliff-folk words. They were the cliff-folk words for hello, for greeting, for stranger-friend, and for the cliff-folk’s small ritual phrase that a guest used at the threshold of a house. He had clearly learned them, in some recent few days, perhaps in the camp on the beach, perhaps on the ship, from a source the cliff-folk did not yet know about. His pronunciation was poor but the effort had been made, and the older man among the three nodded approvingly at him as he spoke, and Kaela understood, in the same back-of-the-head way she had understood other things that afternoon, that this younger man, whose name she would later learn was Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand, was a man capable of the small kindness of learning four words of someone else’s tongue before barging into their village, and she set this knowledge alongside the knowledge that the woman with the harp-bundle had been the kind of person who looked up at the cliff-tops. She had now, before the chief had come, identified the two people among the thirteen who would be the first to be of use to her. She did not at thirteen think of it in this way. She thought only that the bony-handed man and the harp-woman were the ones she would not have to fear in the first instant. Her grandmother’s reading was already taking shape in her, the small careful reading of which of the strangers had been given some part of the inheritance her people had been given more fully.
The bony-handed man asked the village, with the older man translating and with the third man making occasional cliff-folk-style hand gestures, whether there was any here who could speak the northern speech. There was a small pause. The cliff-folk men did not turn to look back at the women, because turning to look at the women in such a moment would have given away which woman was the answer, and the cliff-folk had agreed in their rapid quiet decision that the giving-away should be delayed as long as the giving-away could be delayed. The cliff-folk’s elder of the village, a man named Hren of the Stone-Hand, stepped forward and said, in his own cliff-folk speech, “We have one. She is a girl. She is young. She has spoken with traders. She will speak with you. You will not harm her.”
The bony-handed man, who had clearly been instructed in advance to expect such a condition, said in the northern speech that no harm was intended, and the older man translated, in the loud slow manner, “No harm. We do no harm. We wish only to speak.”
Hren of the Stone-Hand nodded once. He turned and looked at Kaela. He did not call her name. He only nodded. Kaela understood. She walked forward through the women’s half-circle. Her grandmother did not take her hand. Her grandmother had taught her many years before that the moments of a daughter’s going-out from the family were moments the family did not touch the daughter, because the touching would communicate that the family did not believe the daughter could go out, and Kaela’s grandmother had always taken great care to communicate, by the absence of touching, that the daughter could go. Her mother did not touch her either. Her younger cousins, who were in the houses, were not there to touch her at all. She walked forward alone through the gap in the half-circles of cliff-folk and she stopped in front of the bony-handed man.
She said, in the small careful northern she had learned from the trader of three winters past, “I speak some. I speak little. I will speak with you.”
The bony-handed man’s face did not change exactly, but a small piece of relief came into it, the kind of relief a person feels when an errand they have been worried about turns out to be possible after all. He inclined his head to her, in the small respectful inclination that she had seen earlier on the beach when the chief had inclined to the woman with the harp-bundle. He said, slowly, in the northern speech, “I am Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand. My chief is below, on the beach. My chief asks if you will come to him. He asks if you will guide. He says we do not know this coast. We must speak with one who knows. Will you come?”
Kaela did not need to think before answering. She had already, on the outcrop, thought through all the answers that were possible. There were three. She could refuse, and the cliff-folk would suffer for the refusal. She could try to deceive, by going with them and giving them poor guidance, and the cliff-folk would also suffer for the deception when the deception was discovered. She could go and guide truly. The third was the only path that protected her village. The protection was not large. The protection was only that the village would not be sacked tonight for her refusal, and would not be burned in a week for her deception. The protection did not extend to the larger matter of what the chief would do once he had finished his hunt. About that matter she could do nothing, in the position she was in. Her grandmother had taught her the cliff-folk’s saying for this position. The saying was: when the small choice is given to you, take the small choice and watch for the large one.
She said, in her careful northern, “I will come.”
Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand inclined his head again. He said, “We thank you. You will come down with us now. The chief is waiting. You may bring with you what you would take on a short walk. We will return to the camp before night is full.”
She did not believe the part about returning to the camp before night was full. She believed they would in fact return before night was full, but she did not believe they would let her come back up to the village afterward. She had known, from the moment she had seen the eleven moving men setting up a shore-camp with the careful efficiency of men who intended to stay for at least one full season, that this was not a visit of a single afternoon. She had known the chief would not have brought such a band south for a single afternoon’s question. He had come for a hunt. The hunt was a long hunt. He would need a guide for the long hunt. He had found his guide. The guide would not be sent home. The understanding sat in her with the strange calm and did not make her tremble. She turned to her grandmother, briefly, with the small movement of the head that was the cliff-folk’s silent farewell among women. Her grandmother returned the small movement. Her mother returned it also. Her grandmother’s mouth made the shape of a single cliff-folk word without quite voicing it, and the word was listen, and Kaela understood. Listen carefully. For the rest of your life. The instruction her grandmother had given her at twelve in the low evening voice was being given again now in the small voiceless movement of the lips, and Kaela received it and would carry it.
She went to her own sleeping-cot. She picked up nothing from it. She had nothing on it she needed. She walked back across the floor of the house. She passed her mother at the threshold. She passed her grandmother on the threshold-stone. She did not look back. She walked out of the house and down the cliff path with Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand and the two older men, and the iron-and-pine smell grew stronger as they descended, and the small treacherous wind had risen another notch and she set her feet against it without thinking. The fourteen white shells clicked at her shoulder. The bracelet with the four knots sat on her left wrist. The small bone falcon on its thong was at her throat under her tunic. She walked.
When she came onto the beach in the last of the blue dusk, the chief was no longer turning his ring. He had stopped turning it some moments before. He was standing at the temporary fire-pit with his right hand at his side. He turned to face her as she came down onto the sand. He was taller than she had thought from the cliff-top. He was very pale. His beard had four iron rings in it as she had counted, and the fourth was, she could see at this distance, slightly brighter than the other three, and she understood that this meant something about its having been braided in more recently, although she did not yet understand what.
He looked at her. He looked at her for what was, she would remember later, a long moment, the kind of long moment a chief gives only when he is making a decision he has not yet quite made. His pale eyes were not unkind. They were, she would always remember, the eyes of a man who had wanted, when he had set out from his own hall, to be a fair man, and who had been, in some part of himself that he had not yet acknowledged, frightened by the storm at sea and by the dry-voiced stranger at his longfire and by a few other things she did not yet know about, and who was now standing on a beach a great way from home with a thirteen-year-old girl in front of him and trying to remember what fair looked like in such a moment. He did not, in that long moment, decide. The decision would be made over the coming weeks. The girl in front of him would be treated, by the standards of northern hunting bands far from home, fairly enough. She would be fed. She would be sheltered. She would be spoken to politely by most of the men. She would be taken with the band when they left the cove, eventually, to guide them inland in pursuit of the beast. She would not be harmed. She would not, in the long run, be returned. Her grandmother had been right about the return. The chief did not, that evening on the beach, decide on the non-return. The non-return decided itself, as the non-returns of captives often did, by the accumulation of small decisions over time that each individually were not refusals to return her, but that together added up to a refusal. The first of these small decisions was made now. The chief inclined his head to her, in the same small inclination the bony-handed man had used, and he said, in the northern speech, slowly, the way he had been told one should speak to a foreign child, “I am Hrolv-Kan, son of Brand Iron-Hand. I am the chief of this band. I am told you speak some of our tongue. I am glad of it. I would ask you some questions about this coast and what is upon it. Will you sit?”
She said, in her careful northern, “I will sit.”
He gestured. Ulf brought her a small flat stone from the edge of the fire-pit, which had been warming there and which would keep her warm if she sat upon it for a while. The kindness of the warmed stone was, she noted, Ulf’s kindness and not the chief’s, and she set this knowledge alongside her other knowledges, in the back-of-the-head place where her grandmother’s readings were beginning to gather. She sat. The chief sat opposite her, on his own flat stone. The fire was between them. The other men of the band moved at a small respectful distance, finishing their work on the canvas shelter, not looking. The woman with the harp-bundle had set her bundle down and was, Kaela now saw, standing some paces away with her arms folded across her chest, looking, again, up at the cliff-tops in the failing light. Looking up. Not looking at the questioning. Giving the questioning, by her not looking, a small piece of privacy.
The chief asked his first question. The first question was, what was the name of this part of the coast. She answered. The second was, were there other villages nearby. She answered. The third was, had anyone in her village seen a great beast in the sky, in the past year or in any year before. Kaela paused for the first time at the third question. She had known the question would come. She had been preparing for it on the cliff path down. She had decided, in the small careful way of a girl who had been taught by her grandmother to use the truth as a weapon when she could and as a shield when she had to, that she would answer the third question truthfully. She would tell him, yes. There had been a great beast in the sky, although not in her lifetime nor in her grandmother’s, nor in the lifetime of any cliff-folk woman she knew. The beast was in the old songs. The beast had been gone for a long while. There were stories, however, that the beast had recently been seen again, in the distance, by some of the inland herders, in the high country to the east. She would tell him about the inland herders, because the inland herders had said as much to a trader who had passed through her village six months ago, and the trader had told her grandmother, and her grandmother had told her, and the saying was, as far as the cliff-folk knew, true. She would give him a true direction. The direction would take him east, into the high country, in pursuit of a creature whose recent sightings were rumored but unverified, and the pursuit would be a long pursuit, and the long pursuit would buy time for the cliff-folk to send runners to other villages along the coast and to warn them, and it would buy time for her own family to gather and to decide what to do, and it would buy time, perhaps, for the creature itself, if the creature could be warned in some way she did not yet know how to imagine.
The truth, she had decided on the cliff path, was the safest deception available to her. The chief would believe the truth because the truth was checkable and would check out. The chief would set out into the high country, in due course, and the chief would find evidence of the creature having been there, and the chief would press on, and the press would carry his band far inland for many days, and the cliff-folk would be left with some space to act. It was the smallest help she could give the cliff-folk and the creature and herself all at once. It was, she suspected, the only help she could give. She gave it.
She answered, in her careful northern, the third question. She told him about the inland herders, and the high country to the east, and the rumored sightings of the past six months, and the direction the trader had said the creature had been moving when last seen, which had been further east still, into the wild hills. She watched his face as she told him. His face did not move much, but the small piece of relief she had seen in the bony-handed man’s face came also into the chief’s face, the relief of an errand turning out to be possible. He had crossed the open sea on a hunt and had landed on a foreign coast in the third week of his voyage, and now in the first hour of his landfall a girl on a beach was telling him that the creature he had come to hunt was somewhere east of where he stood, and could be reached, and could be tracked, and that she would guide him to it. The chief, the saga of her life would record later, accepted this gift the way men in such moments accept gifts. He did not interrogate it. He nodded slowly. He said, in the northern, “Thank you. You have been useful. You will continue to be useful. We will speak more in the morning. For tonight you will sleep at this camp, with my sister, who will look after you. We will not return you to the village tonight, because we will set out east in two days’ time and we would prefer that you remain with us until the setting-out. We will treat you well. Do you understand?”
She said, “I understand.”
He looked at her another moment. He said, slowly, in a voice that the saga of her own life would describe later as the gentlest voice she would ever hear him use, “What is your name, girl?”
She said, “Kaela.”
He said, “Kaela. That is a good name. You will be Kaela of the Cliffs to my band, as long as you are with us. Will you accept the name?”
She said, “I will.”
He nodded. He rose. The questioning was, for the evening, done. The woman with the harp-bundle, who had been standing at her small distance, came over now, and the woman knelt down beside Kaela, and the woman said, in a much better cliff-folk speech than the bony-handed man’s, in a careful low voice that the chief did not hear, “I am Sigvör. I am the chief’s sister. I will look after you. I am not him.”
Kaela understood. Kaela inclined her head, in the cliff-folk style. Sigvör inclined her head in return, having clearly been taught the cliff-folk style by some trader long ago, in the same way Ulf had been taught the four words. The two of them stood. Sigvör reached out, with a hand whose palm was upturned and open in the gesture the cliff-folk used for offering, and Kaela placed her own hand, the left one with the missing finger, into the open palm, and Sigvör closed her fingers gently around it, and led her up the beach toward the canvas shelter the men had finished setting up. They walked slowly. The fourteen white shells of the sash clicked very softly at Kaela’s shoulder. The four-knot bracelet sat on her left wrist between Sigvör’s gentle fingers, and Kaela was aware, with the small dry click of new knowledge, that Sigvör had felt the bracelet under her fingers and had recognized it for what it was. Sigvör had been to a cliff-folk village before. Sigvör had been there long enough to know what a name-keep looked like under one’s fingers. Sigvör did not say anything about the bracelet. Sigvör only walked her, slowly, up the beach to the shelter, where there was a small fur laid out on the sand, and Sigvör helped her sit on the fur, and Sigvör sat beside her on her own fur, and Sigvör drew a heavy wool blanket around Kaela’s shoulders, and Sigvör said, quietly in cliff-folk speech, “Sleep if you can. The morning will be long.”
Kaela said, “I will sleep.”
She lay down on the fur. She drew the wool blanket up to her chin. The iron-and-pine smell of the fire was very strong now that she was close to it. The cloud above the cove was the iron color of the long year-and-a-half of standing. Above the cloud, somewhere she could not see, the standing-clouds-and-the-empty-shell-readings and the long-warning and the dreams of the high valley and the egg-stone and the pale tall grass were all, in their way, gathered into this one moment of a thirteen-year-old girl with a missing finger and a bracelet on her left wrist lying on a fur on a beach next to a kindly woman she did not yet know was the one her grandmother had said would help her.
She thought of her grandmother on the threshold-stone. She thought of the small voiceless word her grandmother’s lips had made. Listen. She thought of the four knots. She did not touch the fourth. She would not touch the fourth except at a place from which she could not return. She touched the first knot, briefly, with the thumb of her right hand. The first was her grandmother’s grandmother, Sela of the Long Hair. She felt no answering anything. She did not expect to. The wind was not seen by the gull. The wind only held. She had been told this. She believed it.
She closed her eyes.
Far above the cove, in the iron-colored cloud that had been standing for a year and three months, something not unlike a great shape passed slowly south, but she did not see it, because her eyes were closed, and the woman beside her did not see it, because the woman was looking down at her, and the men around the fire did not see it, because they were finishing their work and looking at the fire, and the chief did not see it, because he was, again, turning his ring and looking at the flames.
The wind would shift in the night. The shells did not chime to say so. The shells were against her body under the blanket and had been muffled. But she felt the shift in her chest, in the strange calm that had not left her, and she knew the shift was coming. The shift was always coming. Her grandmother had taught her this. The wind shifts, and one sets one’s feet, and one does not run.
She slept.
The smoke of the iron-and-pine fire rose up the cliff face all night. Her grandmother on the threshold-stone of the house did not go in until the moon had set, which was very late in the second week of Helmus in those years, and her grandmother sat there alone on the cold threshold-stone and the white braid moved very slightly in the small treacherous wind that came up the cliff face in the small hours, and her grandmother did not weep, because the cliff-folk did not weep at the going-out of a daughter, but her grandmother held in her hand, the saga of Kaela’s life would later report, a single shell from her own sash, a fifteenth white shell that her grandmother had kept all her life in case one of the fourteen on her sash should break and need replacing within seven days, and she turned the fifteenth shell between her thumb and forefinger in the same small repetitive motion that, on a beach below, a chief was turning a fourth iron ring in his beard, except that the grandmother’s turning was for a different purpose, and the grandmother’s turning would, in time, be remembered, and the chief’s turning would, in much less time, be forgotten by everyone who was not bound by oath or affection to remember it.
The wind shifted at the second-to-last hour before dawn. The shells on Kaela’s sash, against her body under the blanket, chimed once, very softly, almost not at all. It was a chime the shells had given her many times. It was the chime that meant rain at noon. The rain at noon would, in fact, come. The rain at noon would, in fact, fall on the cove and on the cliff-folk village and on the canvas shelter and on Kaela’s sleeping face. The shells had read it correctly. The shells had read the small thing they had been taught to read.
The larger thing they had not been taught. The larger thing was passing south, slow and high, in the cloud above. The larger thing was the matter that the cliff-folk had no readings for. The larger thing was what had come up the cliff face that afternoon in the smell of pine and iron and the smoke of a long-traveled fire.
She slept. She did not dream, that night, of the high valley. The high valley took the night off, in the way the high valley sometimes did. The high valley would come back the following night, and the night after, and the egg-stone in the dream would, in time, begin to crack. But not yet. Not on this first night. On this first night she only slept the strange calm sleep of a girl whose old life had ended at the threshold of a house some hours before and whose new life had not yet begun in any specific way, but was waiting, at a small distance, like a long ship pulled up on a beach, with its carved heron’s eye looking up at a cliff-top.
Far above, far above the cloud, far above the cliff and the cove and the smoke, the high sky that Raptoris-Sol had once flown in was clear. The stars came out. The standing cloud held its position. The girl slept. The skald sat awake beside her for some hours, the saga of the skald’s life would later record, with the harp-case across her knees, watching the small even breaths of the foreign child she had been told to look after, and writing nothing in her birch-bark, because there was nothing yet to write.
The matter of the hunt would begin properly in the morning.
For tonight there was only this. A girl. A wind. A bracelet. A fire of iron-and-pine. A pity that did not lessen a fear. A future arriving from a great distance, and an old woman on a threshold-stone turning a fifteenth white shell.
She slept.
Segment 9: “Sigvör Names the Hunt”
A skald begins the song of a thing while the thing is still happening. This is the first and oldest of the skald’s difficulties, and the one Sigvör had been thinking about for thirty-four years without coming to any settled view of it. To wait until the thing is over would be wiser, certainly. One could see, then, the full shape, and one could choose the angle of approach with a free hand. But the trouble was that by the time the thing was over the small details had already begun to slip. The particular green of a cloak on a particular morning. The pitch of a man’s voice when he had not yet decided whether to be angry. The smell of a fire built of foreign wood. These things did not survive the wait. By the time one could see the shape, one had lost the texture, and a song without texture was a song that could have been sung about anything. So a skald began while the thing was happening, and the price of beginning was the risk of being wrong. One named the hunt, and then the hunt unfolded, and the naming might or might not turn out to fit. The unfit names had to be quietly retired in the years afterward, and the skald, if she had been honest, had to admit to herself which ones she had had to retire and why. Sigvör had retired several over her career. She did not enjoy the retirements. She had come to think of them as a small private tax the craft levied on its practitioners for the privilege of beginning early.
She began the song of this hunt on the second morning after the cove. She had not been ready on the first morning. The first morning had been the morning of decisions, with the band breaking camp on the beach and the cliff-folk girl Kaela being formally invited (the word was the chief’s; the skald’s word for the same event would have been different) to remain with them as guide, and the band setting out east up a narrow path that the girl had pointed out, and the cliff-folk villagers standing in their loose half-circle at the rim of the small square watching the column go without calling out. The first morning had been too full of small visible matters for the skald to attend to anything beyond them. The naming would have been a luxury she could not afford. She had spent the first morning observing. The shells on the girl’s sash had clicked when the girl had walked. The girl had set her feet against the cliff-face wind in a way that her own villagers had not commented on but that the skald had recognized as a trained motion, a thing one was taught and not born to. The bracelet on the girl’s left wrist with its four small knots had been tied that morning by an old woman on a threshold-stone, and the skald had seen the tying from a distance and had not commented. The chief that morning had walked at the head of the column with his wolf-cloak across his shoulders and his hand resting, not at the haft of Gjafr-Bíta, which was carried slung at his back for the inland walking, but at the upper edge of his own beard, where the four iron rings had begun to be turned, very slowly, by the thumb that the saga had already given more than enough attention to. The skald had walked four paces behind the chief on the first morning and had filed all of these observations in the part of her mind reserved for naming.
By the second morning she was ready.
They had camped the first night at a place the girl had called, in her small careful northern, the empty-place, which had turned out to be a flat shelf of grass set back from the cliffs by perhaps half a mile and ringed by low stones that the skald suspected, from their arrangement, had once been the foundation of a small cliff-folk shrine. The girl had not commented on the stones. The men had not seen them. The chief had ordered the camp made in the center of the shelf and had not noticed that the men were laying out their sleeping-furs across the line of the foundation. The skald had moved her own sleeping-fur, quietly, to a place outside the ring, and the girl had moved hers also, and the two of them had slept on the grass at the western edge of the shelf, where no foundation-line passed beneath them. Nothing had come of it. The men had slept fine. The skald did not believe in the small malevolent ghosts that her grandmother in her old age had begun to credit. She had moved her fur not from belief but from a kind of professional consideration, the way one would not write a song in a hall where a quarrel was in progress, not because the quarrel would harm the song but because the song would be incomplete in some small way that one would later regret. The cliff-folk ground was not unfriendly. It was only undisturbed, and they were disturbing it, and the small move of the sleeping-fur had been a private courtesy.
The second morning came clear. The standing cloud that had hung above the cliffs for over a year had thinned overnight to a long pale wash, and for the first time in fourteen months the actual sun rose above the eastern horizon and laid its actual gold across the actual grass, and the men in their sleeping-furs sat up, one after another, and looked at the sun with the small surprised look of those who have forgotten how much they had been missing it. The skald sat up also. She drew her grey wool cloak around her shoulders and went a short distance away from the camp to the small fold of ground she had identified the night before as a good morning-place, and she sat there on a flat stone with her birch-bark folded across her knee and her brass-capped pencil in her right hand and the harp-case set beside her not for playing but for the comfort of its presence, and she began.
A song begins, in the cliff-folk tradition, with the question of its name. Sigvör had been taught the cliff-folk tradition only in part, by the wandering trader who had spent a winter at the village of Hraevn-an-Ol some twenty years before her brother’s hunt, the same trader who had taught a few words to the bony-handed man for use on landfall. The trader had taught her, among other things, that the cliff-folk’s wind-women began each season’s reckoning with a name for the season, set down in a small mark on a leather strip, and that the name was sometimes changed mid-season but never lightly, and that the wind-woman who changed a name twice in a season was thought to have been careless in her first naming. Sigvör had liked this rule when she had first heard it. She had never adopted it formally into her own practice because the northern skald tradition did not work that way, but she had adopted a private version of it for her own use across the years, which was that she allowed herself one change of name per major undertaking, and one only. The first naming was the work of the second morning. The change, if it came, would come once, and would be marked, and would not be undone.
She wrote, at the top of a fresh strip of birch-bark, four possible names. She wrote them in her small private script. They were:
The Hunt of the Tail. The Hunt of the Sky’s Hammer. The Hunt that Was Already Decided. The Hunt of the Mistaking.
She looked at the four for a long while.
The first was the simplest name, and the kind of name her father would have chosen, and the kind of name that the song would naturally settle to in the singing-halls if she did not give it another. It would survive. It would also fail to say anything not already said in the chief’s own oath at the longfire. It would be the name of a hunt as the chief understood the hunt. It was a serviceable name. It was not, she felt, the right name.
The second was the better northern name, and the one that the men would have preferred had they been asked. The Sky’s Hammer was the chief’s own kenning for the weapon he intended to make from the tail. He had used the kenning once at the longfire on the night of the oath and twice more on the ship and the men had taken it up. The men were already, at the morning fire on the cove beach, calling the future weapon by the name. They had not seen the weapon. They had not seen the tail. They had not, most of them, even seen the beast. But the name had taken among them in the way a good kenning takes, and the skald had observed the taking and had noted it. The Sky’s Hammer was a powerful kenning. It would carry. The song that adopted it would also carry. The song would carry too easily, she thought, for what she had begun to suspect was the actual shape of the hunt. It would carry the men’s wanting, not the matter itself. She set it aside.
The third was a sharper name. The Hunt that Was Already Decided was a name that pointed at the dry-voiced stranger at the longfire and at her brother’s choosing not to turn and at the storm at sea and at her brother’s laughter into the wind and at the small fixed certainty that had been in her brother’s face since the morning of the cove. It was a name that told the listener that the matter had not in fact begun on the beach of the cove or even on the deck of the ship but in some prior chamber of her brother’s life that he had not consulted anyone about, and that the hunt was the working-out of the prior decision rather than a new undertaking. It was a true name as far as she could tell. It was also a name that would not be welcome in any northern singing-hall, because it would be heard as a name that diminished the hunt rather than glorified it, and the audience for the song would walk out before the second verse. The skald had thought about audiences her whole career. She did not believe an unsung song was a useful song. A song that would walk its audience out before the second verse was a song that would not be a song; it would be a piece of birch-bark in a drawer. She set the third name aside also, although she did not throw it away. She kept it in the drawer-of-private-naming where her birch-bark sentences from the wharf and the storm had been put. The third name might become useful at some later time, in some other reckoning that was not a song.
The fourth was the one she sat with the longest.
The Hunt of the Mistaking. It would have to be explained, the way a kenning needs explaining, which was actually a thing that worked well in the northern singing tradition; the explained kenning was an old and respected form, and a song that opened with a kenning whose meaning unfolded across the verses was a song the halls would listen to. The Hunt of the Mistaking would be the mistaking of many things by many people. It would be the chief’s mistaking of the storm’s mercy for the storm’s friendship, which she had already written down on the bark of the voyage. It would be the men’s mistaking of their chief’s certainty for the favor of the gods. It would be the cliff-folk’s mistaking, which she would have to come to in due course, of whatever they had mistaken; she did not yet know it but she suspected the cliff-folk had a mistaking of their own, some old assumption about what the standing clouds along their northern horizon had meant, that would turn out, in the unfolding, to have been wrong. It would be, perhaps, even the beast’s mistaking, if the beast was the kind of creature that could mistake; she had not yet decided whether to grant the beast the kind of mind that mistook, and she would not decide until she had seen it. The Hunt of the Mistaking was a name that allowed the song to do its work by accumulating mistakings rather than by celebrating prowess. It would be a different kind of song than her father would have sung. It would be a song the halls might not at first know what to do with, but that they would listen to, because the unfolding kenning would draw them, and because the men in the song would be honored not for being right but for being held within the shape of a thing they had not understood, which was a thing the older listeners in any hall, the listeners who had outlived their own certainties, would recognize. She thought, sitting on the flat stone in the second morning’s clear light, that the Hunt of the Mistaking was the name.
She set it down on the bark. She did not write the other three on the same bark. She wrote them on a second strip, smaller, and folded the second strip and put it into the inner pocket of her vest where her small notes lived. The first strip, with only the chosen name at the top, she put on the front of the small bundle she would carry across her shoulder for the rest of the inland journey. The chosen name was the marker that the song had begun.
She permitted herself, then, a small ritual. She drew the harp from its case. She did not play. She only laid her hand across the strings and pressed them gently in a single quiet chord, the chord her mother had taught her was the chord of beginnings, which had no name but which the cliff-folk’s wind-women, when they had heard her play it many years ago, had nodded at as though they recognized something. She held the chord with the small flat of her palm until the strings had stilled, and she put the harp back into its case, and she closed the case, and the work of the song had been begun. There would be no going back from the beginning. The song would, from this morning, be the song. It would gather to itself whatever happened over the coming weeks and months, and it would shape what it gathered, and it would be the version that survived in the singing-halls if she lived long enough to bring it home and to sing it. She did not yet know whether she would live that long.
She rose. She returned to the camp. The men were breaking the camp now in the same easy practiced way they had broken the camp on the beach the morning before, the long roll of canvas being folded by two, the supplies being repacked by another two, the fire being kicked apart and covered with sand. The chief was standing at the eastern edge of the shelf, looking out at the path that led inland, which was the path the cliff-folk girl had pointed out to him the previous afternoon. The girl was standing a few paces from him with her sash across her shoulders and her hands at her sides and her face turned not toward the chief but toward the rising sun, and the skald saw, with a small piece of her professional attention, that the girl was reading. The girl was using the morning to take readings she had not been able to take in the long blue dusk of yesterday’s landing. The girl was finding out what kind of day this was going to be. The skald watched the girl read for a moment and then went to her own bundle and packed her birch-bark and her pencil and her harp-case and her sleeping-fur and her grey wool cloak which she would wear over her vest for the day’s walking.
The column set out within the hour. The chief walked first. The girl walked second, a few paces behind him, with Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand at her right shoulder, which had been the chief’s arrangement, and which the skald had observed and approved. Ulf was the kindest of the men, and Ulf was the one with the four cliff-folk words, and the chief had recognized that the girl would be most useful and most pliable if she were placed beside a man she had reason to find tolerable. The chief had made the decision the previous evening at the fire, and Sigvör had seen him make it, and she had seen also that Ulf himself was both pleased and a little uneasy at having been chosen, because Ulf understood what was being asked of him, which was a small ongoing kindness that would not be allowed to become a fondness, since a fondness would interfere with the chief’s use of the girl. Ulf was being asked to be friendly within limits. Ulf would do it. Ulf would do it well. Ulf would do it with the small dry sadness of a man who knew that the friendliness he was being asked to perform was bounded by a purpose he had not chosen. The skald had seen, when she had looked at Ulf’s face the previous evening, the small shadow of this knowledge, and she had filed it in the back of her head as one of the things the song would have to make room for.
Behind Ulf walked Bjorn son of Halvar Thick-Arm, the ship’s master, who had been left with three men to keep the ship and the cove and to watch the cliff-folk village above. The skald notes here that Bjorn had not in fact come on the inland walk; Bjorn had stayed with Sound-of-Going. The eight men who had come inland with the chief and the skald and the girl were Ulf and Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf and Asbjorn son of Hauk Far-Sight and Audun son of Brand Two-Knives and Snorri Hard-Hand and Eystein son of Olvir Sharp-Tooth and Hauk son of Hauk One-Eye and the chief’s cousin Thorir son of Ragnar Crow-Eye. Eight, plus the chief, plus the skald, plus the girl. Eleven walked east. Four stayed with the ship. The eleven who walked were the ones whose movements the skald would be observing for the duration of the inland journey. She had known seven of them all her life. She had known Ulf for fifteen years. She had known the girl for one evening. The girl was the new thing in the company. The girl was what the song would have to make room for.
The path went up. The cliff-folk land east of the cove rose in long slow steps, in a way that the men had not been expecting and that the skald had been expecting because the cliff-folk’s land was always rising or falling somewhere; the cliff-folk did not have flat country, and a foreigner walking in their interior had to give up on the small mental flatness that the foreigners had carried with them from their own coast. The men gave it up, with grumbling. The chief did not grumble. The chief walked the rising path with the long easy stride of his line and turned his fourth iron ring with his right thumb and did not say much. The girl walked behind him in the small light step of one who had grown up walking such paths, and Ulf walked behind her in the careful step of one who had not grown up walking such paths but was trying not to show it. The skald walked at the middle of the column, where the skald belonged on a march, and the men of the rear half walked behind her, and they all of them went east.
The first three days of the inland walk gave the skald what she needed to begin.
The chief had been changed by the storm. This was the first and clearest observation, and it was an observation she could now make at her professional distance because the storm was a week behind them and the changing had had time to settle. The man who walked east at the head of the column was not the man who had stepped onto the gangplank of Sound-of-Going at Aern-Vík. The differences were small and visible only to those who had known him before. He turned the fourth iron ring more often than he had used to turn loose rings before the oath. He looked at his men with a small new confidence that was not the same as his old confidence; the old had been the confidence of a chief who knew himself, and the new was the confidence of a chief who knew the gods, and the new was the more dangerous of the two, because a chief who knows the gods does not consult his men. The chief had begun, in small ways, not to consult his men. He had ordered the eight inland without taking the customary turn at the council-fire of asking each man’s opinion. He had set the pace of the march without asking Bjorn, although Bjorn was not on the march and could not have been asked, but the chief used to send word to Bjorn before such decisions and on this occasion had not. He had given the girl her cliff-folk-of-the-band name without consulting Sigvör, which was a small thing, but the skald had given the names at every previous hunt of his chieftainship, and the omission was an omission. These were small. They added.
The men were changing too. The men were responding to the change in the chief, in the way men in a band always respond to a change in their leader. The men had taken on a small new swagger of their own, the swagger of warriors who believed they had been chosen by the gods to do what they had been set to do. The swagger was not unkind. It did not, in the first three days, lead to any harm. The men remained the men she had known, with their small quirks and their small jokes and their small unkindnesses to each other that were the substance of any hunting band. But the swagger was there. It showed in the way they spoke about the beast at the evening fires. They spoke of it now as a thing already half-taken. They spoke of the tail as a thing they had already touched. They spoke of the future weapon, the Sky’s Hammer, as a thing they would already be carrying home, and they spoke of carrying it home with the small relish of men who had begun to imagine the look on the faces of their wives and brothers and rivals when they returned. The relish had not been there at Aern-Vík. It had not been there on the ship. It had begun, the skald thought, somewhere between the storm and the cove, and it had grown in the cove, and it was at its first full bloom now in the long inland walk. The men were hungry for the prize. The hunger was new. It was a particular kind of hunger that the skald had read about in the old songs of her grandmother’s grandmother but had not, in her own years of attendance on her brother, seen at first hand. It was the hunger that came when men began to believe a great thing was theirs before they had earned it. It was, she wrote on her bark on the third evening in her small private script, the most dangerous hunger of a hunting band.
The girl was changing also, but slowly. The girl walked. The girl spoke when she was asked. The girl gave directions when she was asked. The girl ate at the evening fires with Ulf at her right and Sigvör at her left, the arrangement having settled itself by the end of the first day and remaining in place by the chief’s quiet preference. The girl said very little beyond what was asked of her. The skald did not press her. The skald had been a captive once in her youth, in a small affair that had ended quickly and that she did not often speak of, and she remembered the small careful economy of speech that a captive practiced in the first weeks of captivity, the giving of nothing unasked-for, the keeping of every internal observation private. The girl had this economy already, at thirteen. The skald respected it and did not interfere with it. She watched the girl, however. She watched the girl’s hand at the bracelet of four knots, which the girl touched briefly with the thumb of her right hand at certain moments, in a pattern the skald had begun to suspect was not random. The girl touched the first knot in the mornings before walking. The girl touched the second knot in the evenings before sleeping. The girl had not yet touched the third or the fourth in the skald’s observation. The skald did not know what touching the knots was for. The skald suspected, from the small inheritance of cliff-folk lore she had been given by the wandering trader in her youth, that the knots were names of dead women, and that touching them was a kind of prayer, and that the prayers were arranged in some order that mattered to the girl. The skald made a note of the touchings on her bark. She wrote, the girl touches the first knot in the morning and the second knot in the evening. She does not touch the others.
There was a thing the chief did at the evening fires that the skald wrote down also. The chief, beginning on the second evening of the inland walk, had taken to addressing the company at the evening fire on the matter of the beast. He had not done this on the ship. He had not done this at Aern-Vík. He had, in his life as a chief before this hunt, not been a chief who gave speeches at evening fires; speeches at evening fires had been her father’s habit, not his, and the chief had inherited the high seat without inheriting the speech-giving, which had been a thing the men had been grateful for. The chief had now begun to give them. They were short. They were not stirring. They were calm and certain and detailed. He spoke each evening of the beast. He described it as the southern stories had described it. He spoke of the tail. He spoke of the cracking of the sky. He spoke of the moment when the men of the band would close on it and would, with the chains of thunderstone that were lashed in two large bundles on the pack-horses, catch the tail in the moment of its lashing. He spoke of this moment as though he had seen it. He spoke of it in the small calm voice of a man describing an event in his own past rather than predicting an event in his own future. The men listened. The men were not, at the second evening’s speech, made bolder by it; they were, the skald saw, made smaller. The chief’s calm certainty did not lift them up; it placed them, gently but firmly, inside a story that had already been written. The men had not minded being placed there. The placing had been a relief to them. The chief had given them a small fixed role in a matter whose ending he had already decided. They had been freed, by the placing, from having to worry about the ending themselves. They could attend to their small immediate jobs of walking and watching and cooking and sharpening, and the chief would attend to the ending. The skald saw the giving of the smallness and the receiving of it, and she wrote of it on the bark, and she understood that this was the deeper change in the men. The hunger was the surface. The smallness was beneath.
She wrote, on the third evening, in her private script: he has taken the deciding from them, and they have given it to him gratefully, and they will not know they have given it until they are asked, at some later moment, to give back something they no longer have.
She underlined the word something.
The girl on the same third evening was sitting at her shoulder. The girl was eating in her usual quiet way. The girl had heard the chief’s speech that evening, as the girl had heard the chief’s speech the night before, and the skald had watched the girl listen. The girl had listened in the same careful empty way she had listened to the chief at the cove. The girl’s face had not moved. The girl was, the skald was now sure, taking in everything and giving back nothing, and the girl was doing it with a discipline that would have done credit to a skald twice her age. The skald had begun, on the third evening, to wonder whether the girl had been trained for this, in some inheritance of the cliff-folk that the wandering trader had not passed on, or whether the girl was simply, at thirteen, the kind of person who would have done this without training. The skald did not yet know which. She would observe further.
The girl, that evening, after the chief’s speech and after the men had begun to settle into their small evening business, leaned over very slightly toward the skald, in a way that suggested she had a small question she was uncertain whether to ask. The skald turned her own head slightly to indicate that the question would be received if it were asked.
The girl said, in her careful low northern, “Skald. What you write. Is it the song?”
The skald considered the question for a long breath before answering. It was a sharper question than it had sounded. The girl had observed the writing, had inferred that the writing was the work of the song-craft, and was now asking, in the most polite possible form, whether her own captivity was at this moment being made into a song. The skald had been asked this question, in some form, by every previous captive she had ever attended. She had answered it differently each time. She would answer it this time, she decided in the breath she took before speaking, with the truth.
She said, in the cliff-folk speech she had learned from the wandering trader long ago, in the low voice that did not carry past Ulf at the girl’s other shoulder, “Some of it is the song. Most of it is not. Most of it is notes for the song. Notes do not always become song. Some notes I write so that I will remember them if I need them, and then I do not need them, and then they are only notes. Other notes I write knowing they will be in the song. I do not always know which is which. I make a decision later.”
The girl said, in cliff-folk, “Will I be in the song?”
The skald said, in cliff-folk, “Yes.”
The girl said, “How?”
The skald said, “I do not yet know. I am still learning you. The song does not yet know how to hold you. The song will know in time.”
The girl said, “Do I have a choice?”
The skald looked at her then. The girl was looking at her with the careful empty look. The look did not change as the question landed. The question had been asked in the same low careful voice of the previous questions, and the girl’s hand was on the bracelet at her left wrist, the thumb laid gently along the second knot, which the girl had touched earlier in the evening for her usual touching. The girl was, the skald saw, asking the question that mattered. The girl was asking whether she would have any say in what she would become in the song the skald was beginning to make of her, and the asking was the asking of a person who had understood that her body had been taken by men and that the only thing left to be taken was the version of her that would survive in others’ mouths after she herself was gone. The girl was at thirteen asking the question that the skald had thought, when she had first formed it for herself at twenty-five, was the question only adults asked.
The skald said, slowly, in cliff-folk, “You have some choice. Not all. You can tell me what you would have me sing of you. I will hear it. I will not always be able to do what you ask, because the song must also be true, and what you ask may not always be true. But I will hear it. And I will tell you, if I cannot do what you ask, that I cannot. I will not lie to you about the song. I will tell you what I have decided about you when I have decided it, and you may answer me, and I will hear your answer, and the song may change. This is the most I can promise.”
The girl considered for a long breath. The girl said, in cliff-folk, in the same careful low voice, “Then I will tell you one thing now. I am not afraid. Do not sing me afraid.”
The skald felt the small fist tighten and then loosen below her breastbone. She did not let the tightening show in her face. She said, in cliff-folk, “I will not sing you afraid. You are not afraid. I have watched you. I will sing what I have watched.”
The girl said, in cliff-folk, “Thank you.”
The girl said one more thing. The girl said, “Skald. You should know. Two days from here we will reach the high meadow where the herders are. They will tell the chief what he wants to hear. They will tell it true. The chief will be glad. After that we go further east. After that I do not know what we will reach. The cliff-folk’s lore stops at the high meadow.”
The skald said, in cliff-folk, “Thank you for telling me.”
The girl said, “I tell you because the song should know.”
The skald wrote that night on her bark, in cliff-folk transliterated into her own script for safekeeping, the girl said I tell you because the song should know.
She underlined the words the song should know.
It was, she thought, sitting at the edge of the firelight on the third evening of the inland walk with the bark across her knee and the men of the band already mostly asleep in their furs and her brother at the far side of the fire still upright with his fourth iron ring being turned slowly in his beard, the cleanest moment she had had in many years of attendance on her brother. The girl had given her something the men had not given her in two weeks of voyage, and that her brother had not given her since they had been children. The girl had given her the assumption that the song mattered, and that the song would survive, and that the song deserved to be told what it needed to know. The girl was thirteen. The girl had been taken from her village a day and a half before. The girl had touched two of her four knots and was saving the other two for later. The girl had said do not sing me afraid, and had said it plainly, and had then volunteered information about the herders and the meadow and the limit of the cliff-folk’s lore. The girl, in the small space of one evening, had become a collaborator in the song, in a way that nobody in the band had become, and that the chief in particular had not become, and that the skald had begun to suspect the chief would never become because the chief had stopped, at some point in the storm, treating her as the skald and had begun treating her as a sister who happened also to be the skald, which was not the same thing.
She wrote one more note on the bark before she closed it for the night. She wrote: the song now has two namers. Myself and the girl. I will hold the larger naming. She will hold the smaller. We will give each other space.
She underlined the word two.
She closed the bark. She wrapped it in its small waxed cloth. She put it in her bag. She drew the grey wool cloak around herself and lay down on her sleeping-fur and did not sleep at once. She lay for a while with her eyes open looking up at the sky above the camp, which on this third inland evening was clear, the cloud that had stood above the cliffs for fourteen months having now thinned to almost nothing and the actual stars being visible for the first time on the journey. She picked out, from habit, the small group of stars her mother had taught her was called the Skald’s Knot, four stars in a small square at the western edge of the visible sky, which her mother had said marked the place where a skald should look when she had begun a song and was uncertain whether the song was true. Her mother had said you would not get an answer from the stars. Her mother had said the stars only marked the place to look. The looking was the answer. The looking was the way a skald asked herself, in the small dark of an honest hour, whether the song she had begun was the one she ought to be making.
She looked at the Skald’s Knot for a long while. She did not feel that her song was wrong. She felt that her song was hard. The Hunt of the Mistaking was a hard song. It would tell, when it was sung, of men she loved making a mistake she could see them making and that they could not see themselves making, and it would tell of a brother of hers walking into an ending he had decided on without consulting her, and it would tell of a thirteen-year-old girl with a missing finger and a wind-sash who had asked, on the third evening of her captivity, not to be sung afraid. The song would not be a song she sang lightly. The song would not be the song the halls expected. The song was, she felt, looking at the Skald’s Knot, the song that needed to be sung, and the four small stars in their square at the western edge of the sky did not, in their long-uncommunicative way, contradict her.
She turned her head. Across the embers of the fire her brother was still sitting upright. He had not lain down. He was turning the fourth ring. His pale eyes were on the fire. He did not see her looking, or if he saw, he did not turn. He had, in his certainty, stopped looking back at her at the small private moments when he had used to look back, which was the smallest and most personal of the changes she had been recording, and which was the one she would not put into the song, because the song was for the world and not for him, and there were some changes a sister recorded only in her own keeping.
She closed her eyes. She slept.
The fourth morning came clear. The march went on east, up another rise, into another fold of cliff-folk country that the girl had not been to but had heard of from her uncles. The chief turned the fourth ring with his right thumb. The men carried their swagger. Ulf walked at the girl’s right shoulder with the small dry sadness of a man performing kindness within limits. The skald walked at the middle of the column with her bag of birch-bark and her brass-capped pencil and her harp in its case and her grey wool cloak.
The song had a name. The Hunt of the Mistaking. The girl had volunteered her piece. The chief was making his pieces nightly without knowing he was making them. The men were giving the chief their deciding nightly without knowing they were giving it. The cliff-folk country rose toward the high meadow where the herders waited, where the small mistakes of the cliff-folk would, in their turn, begin to show themselves to the skald’s careful eye.
The work had begun. The skald walked. She watched. She wrote, in the evenings, in her small private script. She did not sing yet. The singing would come later, in some hall a long way and many years from here. Maybe. If she lived. If she did not, the bark would survive her, perhaps, in some library at the Watching-Stones or in some niche at her brother’s hall, and the song would be made by another, who would find her name for it on the first strip and would honor the name, or would not. She did not control what came after the bark. She controlled only the writing.
She wrote. The hunt unfolded. The naming, she thought, was holding.
It would hold all the way to the cliffs of the south coast, where it would be tested. The testing would come in its own time. For now she walked east with her band and her brother and the cliff-folk girl who had asked not to be sung afraid, and the morning was clear, and the sun rose, and the song had begun.
Segment 10: “Twelve Days Through Singing Woods”
Now the saga must speak of the chase. The chase was twelve days long, and the saga will tell of each day as the saga has learned to tell of long pursuits, which is in order, with the small encounters set down at the days they happened, and with the larger matters held to the days they decided. The song of Snæ Two-Tongues was full at this point in its setting-down, and Brother Eskil’s predecessors at the Watching-Stones used in their compilation also a second source, the song of one Vagn Three-Fingers, who was a hunter of the lower fjord who had heard the matter from Audun son of Brand Two-Knives in a hall near the Strait of Bones in the winter following the hunt, before Audun’s death of the wound from the chase. The two songs agree on the days. They disagree on the small encounters. The saga will give the encounters as the songs agree, and where the songs disagree the saga will give Snæ, who was present, with a note for Vagn’s variation. The saga will not pretend that twelve days of pursuit across cliff-folk country can be reported in full. The saga will give what was kept.
The first day was the day of leaving the high meadow. The herders the cliff-folk girl had named were Stenn and Brik and a younger man whose name the songs do not preserve, and they kept their thin small cattle on a flat above a stream at the head of a long valley that the girl said had no name in cliff-folk because no cliff-folk lived there full year-round. The herders were not afraid of the company. The herders had seen northern traders before and the company, with the girl at the front beside Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand, was taken at first for traders. When the matter was named by the chief and the question of the beast was put, the herder Stenn nodded slowly and said, in a cliff-folk tongue the girl translated for the chief, that the great shape had passed over their flat in the previous month, three times, all of them by night, and that on each passing the cattle had not slept for the whole of the next day. The herder Brik agreed with this account. The younger herder confirmed it also. The chief asked which direction the great shape had been flying. The herder Stenn said east-and-south, toward the wild hills beyond the cliff-folk country, where the cliff-folk did not go and the cliff-folk’s lore did not reach. The chief asked whether the herders had seen the shape come down. The herder Stenn said no. The herder Brik said no. The younger herder said he had seen, once, what he thought was the shape coming down on a far ridge, but he had been alone at the time and was uncertain. The chief thanked them. The chief gave the herders a small payment of cliff-folk silver from a pouch he had brought for such payments. The chief took the direction east-and-south.
The company went down out of the high meadow that same afternoon and into the first of the strange woods. The woods east of the meadow were the kind of woods the songs preserve as singing woods, not because there was song in any ordinary sense, but because the wind among the trees in those woods carried a sound that the men did not know what to make of. The sound was not the wind in branches. It was a sound that lived along with the wind in branches and that came from somewhere lower down, near the roots, and that did not stop when the wind stopped. The chief listened to the sound at the first camp on the first evening and said to the men, “It is the wind in the holes of the stones beneath the trees. It is a thing of the place. Do not mind it.” The men did not mind it that first night. The men were tired from the climb out of the meadow and slept well. The skald wrote on her bark, the saga reports from the fragment that survived, the words sound is not wind. The skald did not underline them this time.
The second day the company crossed the first of the singing woods and came out of it onto a small rise where the cliff-folk girl, climbing a tree at the chief’s order to see the country ahead, said that the next valley was a valley of the kind the cliff-folk called sleeping-light. The chief asked her what she meant. The girl translated, in her careful low northern, that the valley was a valley in which the light of the sun did not move across the floor at the rate it moved on the ridges above. The light, the girl said, sat in such valleys longer than it sat in other places, and one could walk into such a valley in the late afternoon and walk out of it in what seemed like the same late afternoon though three hours had passed in the world above. The chief did not believe her. The chief said so, in plain words, in the northern tongue, and Ulf flinched at the saying because Ulf had observed by this point that the girl did not lie. The chief said, “Cliff-folk stories. The light is the light. We will go through and we will come out and we will see.” The girl did not protest. The girl led the company down into the sleeping-light valley.
The men walked. The walking was ordinary. The light along the floor of the valley was the late-afternoon gold of the cliff-folk country in mid-autumn, slanted, warm, with the small honey-color the cliff-folk’s stories ascribed to such valleys. The company walked across the floor of the valley in what seemed perhaps half an hour. At the eastern rim of the valley they climbed up, and Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf, who had been carrying the small sand-glass that the men used for timing the watches at sea, took out the glass and looked at it and his face did the small unfamiliar thing of going slack. The sand in the glass had run for the time the company had been in the valley, and the time was, by the glass, three full turnings of the half-hour glass, which was an hour and a half, not half an hour. The chief looked at the glass. The chief did not say anything for a long breath. The chief turned the fourth ring in his beard, slowly, twice, and then said, “The glass is fouled. Salt got into it on the voyage. We will discard it tonight.” Vigleik did not contradict the chief. Vigleik knew the glass. Vigleik had cleaned the glass two days before and had checked the salt-fouling at the cove. The glass was not fouled. Vigleik did not say so. The chief discarded the glass at the second night’s camp by throwing it over a small embankment into a stream. Vigleik watched it go without expression. The skald wrote on her bark, the saga reports from the fragment, the chief has thrown away the glass that disagreed with him. The skald underlined disagreed.
The third day was the day of the wolf.
The company had set out in the morning down a long fold of land toward what the girl said was the second of the singing woods, a thing the men were not glad of, because the first had been bad enough at night. The path entered the second wood through a low cut between two rises and the cut was narrow, the kind of narrow the cliff-folk’s herders sometimes used to drive a few sheep through one at a time. The company strung out into a line of single men through the cut. The girl was at the front, with Ulf behind her, and the chief just behind Ulf, and the skald in the middle as was her place, and the other men in the order they had taken to walking. The wolf came at the front of the column.
The wolf was a large grey wolf of the cliff-folk’s high country, which was a kind of wolf the men had been told about by the wandering traders but had not themselves seen, and the wolf was not, the saga must report, behaving in the manner of an ordinary wolf. It did not come from cover. It walked out onto the path some twenty paces ahead of the girl and stopped in the middle of the cut and sat down, the way a dog sits to wait for a master, and it looked at the column with eyes that were, the men afterward agreed, much too steady for the eyes of an ordinary wolf. The girl stopped. Ulf stopped behind her. The chief came up to stand at Ulf’s shoulder. The men behind drew their spears.
The chief said to the girl, in northern, “What is this?”
The girl said, in careful northern, “A wolf. I do not know more.”
The chief said, “Is it one of yours?”
The girl said, “We do not keep wolves.”
The chief said, “Is it a wolf-of-this-place?”
The girl said, “I do not know this place. I have not been east of the meadow before.”
The chief did the small calculation a chief does in such a moment. The chief weighed the cost of going forward against the cost of going around. The cut was the only easy passage through to the second wood for some long distance in either direction. The chief did not wish to lose the half-day going around. The chief raised his spear, slowly, and said to Asbjorn son of Hauk Far-Sight, who carried the company’s bow on this day, “Asbjorn. Send it off. Do not kill it. Wound it if you must. The wolf is to leave the path.”
Asbjorn stepped forward through the column. Asbjorn was the company’s best bowman. Asbjorn nocked a small arrow. The wolf in the path watched Asbjorn nock the arrow and did not move. Asbjorn drew the bow. The wolf watched Asbjorn draw the bow and did not move. Asbjorn aimed at the ground a pace in front of the wolf, which was the proper aim for a warning shot, and Asbjorn loosed.
The arrow flew. The arrow did not strike the ground where Asbjorn had aimed. The arrow, the saga has from both Snæ and Vagn, went past the wolf, three handsbreadths to the side of the wolf, and continued past the wolf and into the trees on the far side of the cut where it struck a small alder with a small dry sound. The wolf did not flinch. The wolf had not moved its eyes when Asbjorn drew. The wolf now turned its head slightly to look at the alder where the arrow had struck, and then turned its head back to look at the company, and the wolf, the saga must report, smiled. The wolf smiled in the way a dog smiles when it has understood a small joke that has been made to it. The men of the company saw the smile. The men of the company did not, none of them, make any sound for a long breath afterward.
The cliff-folk girl said quietly, in her own tongue, a single word the skald did not at that moment catch. The skald asked her later, at the night’s camp, what the word had been. The girl said the word had been the cliff-folk’s word for not-wolf. The girl said the cliff-folk had no other name for such a thing than that. The girl said it was a kind of thing the cliff-folk’s grandmothers spoke of in stories and that the cliff-folk’s grandfathers did not believe in, and that it was rare even in the stories. The girl said one did not engage with such a creature. One walked past it. One did not look in its eyes. One did not speak to it. One went around if one could and through if one could not, and one did not turn one’s head as one passed it.
But the chief at the moment of the wolf in the path did not know what the girl had whispered. The chief saw only a wolf that had not flinched at an arrow, and the chief was, the saga must report, in the place the chief had been since the storm, which was the place of a man who had been blessed and who would not be denied. The chief raised his spear. The chief said, “Stand aside, Asbjorn. I will kill it.”
The girl turned, slowly. The girl said to the chief, in her careful low northern, “Chief. Do not kill it. It is not a wolf. Walk past.”
The chief looked at her. The chief had not been spoken to by the girl in this tone before. The girl’s tone had been the careful low captive tone for all the days of the journey. The tone was now different. The tone was the tone of an instruction from a smaller person to a larger one, given in plainness, without supplication. The chief took it in. The chief did not strike her, which the saga must say in his honor he did not, but the chief did not lower the spear. The chief said, “It is a wolf. The cliff-folk have stories. I have a spear. Stand aside, girl.”
The girl said, in her careful low northern, “I will stand aside. I have warned you.”
The girl stepped to the side of the path. Ulf stepped with her, not because Ulf had been told to but because Ulf had the habit by now of stepping where the girl stepped. The chief walked forward four paces. The chief raised the spear high. The wolf in the path watched the chief raise the spear and the wolf did not move, the smile still on its face, and the chief threw.
The throw was a true throw. The chief had thrown Gjafr-Bíta many thousands of times in his long career and the throw was not in question. The spear went straight at the wolf’s throat. The wolf at the last possible moment, in a motion that the men afterward said was not the motion of any animal they had seen, lifted its head only slightly, only by a fingerwidth, and the spear passed under its chin, and the spear continued past, into the trees on the far side of the cut, and the spear struck a young oak with a small dry sound and the spear stood there in the oak, quivering, for the count of three breaths, while the wolf in the path looked, again, slightly aside at where the spear had struck, and then looked back at the chief, and the wolf rose, and the wolf walked, in unhurried steps, across the path, between the chief and the rest of the company, and the wolf went into the trees on the opposite side of the cut from where the spear had gone, and the wolf was gone.
The chief stood in the middle of the cut with his right hand still extended in the follow-through of the throw and the empty hand looking, the men afterward agreed, very much like the hand of a man who had thrown and missed for the first time in many years. The chief’s pale eyes had gone wide. The chief turned, after a moment, and walked to the young oak on the far side of the cut and pulled Gjafr-Bíta out of the oak and inspected the head of the spear and the haft, and the spear was undamaged. The chief returned with the spear to the path. The chief did not speak about the wolf. The chief said only, “We go on.”
The company went on. The girl walked at the front of the column with Ulf, and the girl did not look back at the chief, and the chief did not call for her to look back. The skald wrote that night on the bark, the saga reports, the chief threw and missed, and he will not speak of it, and the men will not speak of it, and the missing will become, in their mouths if they ever speak of it later, a different missing, in which the wolf was much larger or the throw was much harder or the wolf was, at the last, struck after all. The skald underlined the words will become.
The fourth day was a day of unremarkable walking. The girl led them along the eastern edge of the second singing wood and through a small pass between two low ridges and into a country the cliff-folk did not have specific lore for but that the girl read by other signs, by the bend of grasses, by the direction of small streams, by the pattern of certain low shrubs that the girl said marked the boundary of the cliff-folk’s recognized country. They camped that night in a flat above a stream where the country had begun to feel, the men afterward agreed, different. The trees were the same kind of trees. The grasses were the same kind of grasses. But the air had taken on a small unsteadiness, the kind one felt in a hall where two people were having a silent argument that they would later have aloud, and the men were quieter than usual at the evening fire.
The fifth day was the day of the fox-spirit.
The saga is reluctant to give this matter the name of fox-spirit, because the saga is aware that the cliff-folk have many names for such creatures and that the northern tongue’s word fox-spirit may not be a translation of any of them. But the songs of Snæ and Vagn both name it so, and the saga has not been able to determine a better name in the cliff-folk’s tongue from the surviving fragments, and so the saga will use fox-spirit, with the understanding that this is the men’s name for it and not the cliff-folk’s.
The fox appeared at the second hour of morning. The company was walking along a low watercourse the girl had said would lead them east-and-south for the rest of the day. The fox was small and reddish and walked alongside the column on the far bank of the watercourse, at a distance of perhaps fifteen paces, keeping pace with the men. The men noticed the fox after some quarter of an hour. The men found the fox amusing at first. The fox walked at the same pace they walked. The fox stopped when they stopped. The fox went on when they went on. The men began to make small jokes about the fox. Vigleik named the fox the chief’s third dog, after the chief’s two dogs at Aern-Vík, and the men laughed, and the chief did not laugh, but the chief did not forbid the laughter either.
In the third hour the fox crossed the watercourse and joined the column from the rear. The fox walked at the rear of the column at a distance of perhaps three paces behind Audun son of Brand Two-Knives, who had the rear of the column that day. The men became less amused. The men did not say so aloud. Audun did not turn to look at the fox, because Audun knew that turning to look at a thing that was walking behind him on a path was a thing not to be done in his own country and so probably not to be done in this country either. The fox followed for an hour. The fox did not close the distance. The fox did not draw back.
In the fourth hour the fox spoke.
The saga is not going to pretend that all the men of the company heard the same words. The men of the company gave different reports afterward and the songs of Snæ and Vagn differ on this point in particulars. What is agreed is this. The fox at some moment in the fourth hour opened its mouth and made a sound, and the sound came out in something that all the men afterward agreed had been, for each of them individually, a phrase in his own most private language, the language of his own kitchen as a child, the language his mother had spoken to him before he had been weaned. Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf, hearing it, stopped and turned and said aloud, the saga reports, “Mother?” and then, after a moment of looking at the fox, “How are you here?” Asbjorn son of Hauk Far-Sight stopped also and put both his hands over his ears for the count of perhaps ten breaths, which was a thing Asbjorn had never done in his life and which his fellow men later said had been the most surprising of the day’s surprises. Audun son of Brand Two-Knives, who was closest to the fox, did not move at all. Audun afterward would not say what the fox had said to him. Audun would only say, when asked at a winter hall some months later by Vagn Three-Fingers, that the fox had said something he had wanted very much to hear, and that the wanting to hear it had been the thing he could not afterward forgive himself for. The saga will leave Audun’s matter at that. Audun, the saga must mention here, would die in the chase, of a wound, and the wound was not given to him in the day of the fox; but the day of the fox was the day Audun’s spirit, in the small private accounting of his hunt-mates, had begun to leave him, and the wound nine days later would only complete what had begun.
The chief at the front of the column heard the fox also. The chief did not turn. The chief did not stop. The chief was, the songs report, very pale in that moment, but the chief walked on, and the chief said, in the northern tongue, in the carrying hall-voice he had used at the longfire and again at the storm and at the cove, “We do not listen to the fox. The fox is not what it appears. We do not listen. We walk.”
The men walked. The fox followed for another hour. The fox spoke again, twice more in the course of that hour, and each time the words were heard by each man as something different, and each time the chief at the front said, “We do not listen. We walk.” The girl at the front beside Ulf walked with her sash across her shoulders and the fourteen white shells silent against her body, and the girl did not turn to look at the fox at any time during the hour, although Ulf, the saga must report, turned twice, and the second time he turned the girl reached up and laid her hand very lightly on Ulf’s sleeve, in the same place where the bony-handed man wore the small leather guard against his hawking-glove, and Ulf turned forward again and did not turn afterward. The girl did not speak about the matter. The girl’s left thumb the saga reports was at the third knot of her bracelet during this hour, which was a knot she had not touched before, and she touched it lightly and steadily for the duration of the fox’s following.
The fox left at the end of the fifth hour. The fox simply turned aside from the path and walked off into the underbrush on the right-hand side and did not return. The men of the column watched the fox go and did not say anything for a long while afterward. The chief at the front did not call a halt. The chief walked on. The men followed. The chief did not address the matter of the fox at the evening fire that night. The men did not ask him to. The men ate their hard bread and salt fish and lay down in their furs, and the skald wrote that night on her bark, the saga reports, the chief did not stop and the men did not stop. They walked through. This was, perhaps, the only right thing he has done since the storm.
The sixth day the company climbed a long ridge and saw, from the top of the ridge, at the limit of vision in the east, a single white peak that the girl said the cliff-folk called the Old Tooth, and that the girl said marked the rough boundary of any country the cliff-folk had reliable lore for. East of the Old Tooth, the girl said, was the wild hills country, where the cliff-folk did not go and where the cliff-folk had only stories that the cliff-folk’s grandmothers told. The chief looked at the Old Tooth for a long while. The chief asked the girl whether the great shape had been seen near the Old Tooth in the herders’ account. The girl said yes, twice in the past summer, both times by a herder cousin of Stenn’s whose name the songs do not preserve. The chief said, “We go to the Old Tooth, then to the wild hills.” The chief turned the fourth ring in his beard and the men below the ridge agreed with the small grunted agreement of men who had been walking for six days and would walk for many more and had accepted that the chief was leading them where the chief was leading them.
The seventh day a quarrel happened. The quarrel was between Eystein son of Olvir Sharp-Tooth and Snorri Hard-Hand. The matter of the quarrel was small. It was the kind of quarrel that begins between two men who have been walking too long in the same company and who have begun to grate on each other in the small accumulated ways that long walking will produce. The matter that the songs preserve as the spark was a piece of dried meat. Eystein had taken a piece of dried meat from the common bag at the evening fire and Snorri Hard-Hand had said, the saga reports, “That was my piece. I had set it aside.” Eystein said he had not seen any set-aside piece. Snorri Hard-Hand said the set-aside piece had been the piece with the small notch in the corner, which had been the piece Snorri had cut to mark as his. Eystein said he had not noticed the notch. Snorri said this was the third evening Eystein had taken a notched piece. Eystein said Snorri was a stingy man. Snorri said Eystein was a thief. The two men stood up at the fire. The men around them stopped eating.
The matter could have ended in the way such matters often end at evening fires, with one of the older men putting a hand on the shoulder of one of the quarrelers and saying the small calming thing that older men say. The matter did not end this way. The matter escalated, the saga must report, because the men had been carrying for seven days the small unspoken weight of the wolf and the fox and the chief’s miss and the chief’s silence and the air that had taken on its unsteadiness, and the small weights had been pressing on every man’s chest, and a small spark in such conditions could become a fire. Eystein’s hand went to his knife at the belt. Snorri’s hand went to his knife at the belt. The men around them rose from the fire. The skald rose. The girl rose. Ulf rose. The chief did not rise. The chief sat at his place at the fire and turned the fourth iron ring with his right thumb and watched the two men.
The skald looked at her brother. The skald had known her brother at hundreds of evening fires across his chieftainship, and she had seen him handle quarrels at fires before, and the handling had always been the same. The chief would rise. The chief would say, in his hall-voice, the small calming words a chief says, which were words that took the quarrel from the men and made it the chief’s. The chief would settle the matter, often by giving both men a small piece of his own ration as a way of taking the substance of the quarrel out of the matter, and then by making a small joke about both of them that they could carry forward as a kind of shared embarrassment that would bind them together against further quarrels. This was the chief’s old way and it had worked at every evening fire of the seven years of his chieftainship. The chief did not do it now. The chief did not rise. The chief watched.
Eystein took a half step forward. Snorri took a half step forward. The knives were almost out. The skald moved. The skald walked forward into the small open space between the two men at the fire, with no weapon, with her hands open at her sides, in the careful walking she had used twenty years before when she had been a captive herself in a small affair she did not often speak of and had had to walk between two foreign warriors who had begun a quarrel over which of them would have the disposition of her. She walked between Eystein and Snorri now. She stopped between them. She turned her body half toward each of them, the way a skald did when she was about to speak to two people at once.
She said, in the northern tongue, in the small dry voice she used for proverbs, “Hard-handed men. I will say a thing my mother taught me. Listen if you will.”
Both men, the saga reports, lowered their hands by a fraction. The lowering was not yet a stand-down. The lowering was only the small space a man’s hand makes when a voice he has known a long time has spoken to him in a tone he respects.
The skald said the proverb. The proverb was one her mother had taught her at the same kitchen in the same autumn that the longer proverb of the storm and the wave and the bone had been taught. The proverb of the quarrel ran,
“Two hunters quarrel for a piece of meat. The meat will rot. The hunters will eat The shame of the day they could not see That the meat was meat and the hunters, three.”
The proverb landed in the small dry way her mother’s proverbs landed, with the rhyme not quite landing and the meaning carried in the gap. The men did not, at the saying, set down their knives. The men did, however, look at each other across the space the skald held between them. Snorri Hard-Hand, the saga reports, made the small dry sound that was the Snorri line’s version of laughter at any saying that was at the line’s expense. Eystein looked at Snorri’s small dry sound and his mouth, after a long breath, did a similar small dry sound back. The two men stood there making the small dry sounds. The knives, the saga reports, did not come out.
The chief at his place at the fire said nothing.
The skald turned her head toward her brother for the briefest moment, and then turned back. The skald said, in the northern tongue, “Eystein. Sit. Snorri. Sit. The meat was the meat. There is more in the bag. I will cut a fresh piece for each of you with my own hand and you will eat it together and the matter will be ended.”
She cut. She gave Eystein his piece. She gave Snorri his piece. The two men, the saga reports, ate their pieces sitting cross-legged at the fire on opposite sides of it, and they did not speak to each other for the rest of the evening, but they did not draw their knives either, and by the morning the quarrel had been absorbed into the small embarrassment that the older men of any band carry with them after such a matter, and Eystein would later, the saga must report for the sake of completeness, save Snorri Hard-Hand’s life at the cliffs of the south coast, eight days later, in a moment when Snorri’s footing failed at the very edge of the rocks and Eystein caught him by the collar of his cloak and hauled him back. The quarrel had ended in the way such quarrels do when they are properly ended. The proverb had done its work.
But the chief had not risen. The chief had sat at the fire and turned the fourth ring and watched, and the skald had done the chief’s office. The skald wrote that night on her bark, the saga reports from the fragment, he is not, in any meaningful way, the chief tonight. I have done his work. He has not noticed. The men have noticed. They will not speak of it. The skald underlined the words have noticed.
The eighth day was a day of rain. The men walked through it. The rain was the cold steady cliff-folk autumn rain that the girl said came in the fourth and fifth weeks of Helmus every year and that the cliff-folk did not begrudge because it filled the small high cisterns of their inland reach. The men walked through with their cloaks weighted by water and their boots making the small wet sound boots make in such conditions. The chief walked at the front. The chief did not speak. The chief turned the fourth ring. The day passed.
The ninth day they reached the foot of the Old Tooth and found, at a small flat below the white peak, a place where the great shape had been. The girl saw it first. The girl pointed to a wide oval of grass where the grass had been crushed in a particular way, and where the cliff-folk’s eye for such matters identified, in the pattern of the crushing, the marks of a great body that had lain down and then risen, perhaps three weeks before, on a clear day, when the grass had been already half-trampled by a herd of slow beasts that had since moved on. The chief looked at the oval for a long while. The chief knelt in the grass and ran his hand over the crushing. The chief said, in the northern, “It has been here.”
The men gathered. The men, the saga must report, were lifted by the seeing. The men had walked for nine days through singing woods and sleeping-light valleys and the country of the wolf and the fox, and the men had begun, in some part of themselves they had not yet acknowledged, to wonder whether the great shape was a story. The oval of crushed grass was not a story. The oval was a real thing in a real meadow with real grass and real edges, and the great shape had been there, and the men were now closer to the matter than they had been in all the days since they had left Aern-Vík. The chief stood up from the kneeling. The chief looked at the men. The chief said, in the hall-voice, “We are close. The beast is in this country. We will find it. We have a day, perhaps two. The matter will resolve at the Cliffs of Falling Stars.”
The chief did not, the saga is bound to note, ask the girl whether the Cliffs of Falling Stars were east of where they stood. The chief had decided that the Cliffs of Falling Stars would be where the matter resolved, and the chief had so spoken, and the speaking was the deciding, and the men received the speaking and took heart. The girl looked at the chief. The girl said nothing. The girl had touched the third knot of her bracelet during the kneeling and the touching had been long, and the skald had observed the long touching and had filed it.
The tenth day and the eleventh day passed in the wild hills east of the Old Tooth. The country was strange. The country was the country no cliff-folk lore reached. The hills rose and fell in a pattern the men’s eyes could not predict. The streams ran in directions that did not match the slope. The trees in some valleys were of a kind none of the men had seen in any northern or cliff-folk wood, with bark the color of old copper and small dark leaves shaped like small open hands. The girl walked at the front. The girl did not pretend to know the country. The girl read what could be read, the bending of grasses, the direction of streams, the small dry tracks of the slow beasts that had passed through in the previous month, and the girl followed those tracks east. The men followed the girl. The chief walked behind the girl. The chief turned the fourth ring. The men walked behind the chief in the small loose column they had taken to over the long days.
On the eleventh evening the company camped at the edge of what the girl said had to be the last fold of the country before the cliffs. The girl said this because the wind that had been at their backs for the long inland walk had begun, in the last hour of the day, to carry on it the small distant sound of surf, the kind of surf that runs against high stone, and the wind had begun also to carry the salt that the cliff-folk’s coastal nostrils had been trained from infancy to recognize and that the girl recognized now even after eleven days of inland air. The chief asked her, in the northern, “How far?” The girl said, in the northern, “Half a day’s walking. A morning.”
The chief said, “Then in the morning we will find the cliffs.”
The chief turned the fourth ring. The chief did not sleep that night, the saga reports from the song of Snæ Two-Tongues, who himself did not sleep well that night and who was awake to observe. The chief sat at the edge of the fire long after the men had gone to their furs and the chief turned the ring and the chief looked into the embers and the chief, the saga must report, did not look up at the stars, which were that night unusually clear above the camp, with the cloud that had stood above the cliffs for fifteen months now finally gone, and the Skald’s Knot visible in the west, and the long band of small stars the cliff-folk called the Bird-Road visible in the north. The chief looked at the embers. The chief did not look up.
The skald saw him not looking up. The skald wrote that night on her bark, the saga reports, the embers are below. The stars are above. He has not looked up for eight days. I have counted.
The girl, in her own sleeping-fur a few feet from the skald’s, did not sleep either, the saga has from the skald’s notes. The girl had touched the third knot of her bracelet twice that evening. The girl was, in the back of the skald’s careful watching, beginning to prepare for the touching of the fourth, which the girl had been told was for a place from which she could not return. The skald understood, with the small back-of-the-head click of a skald who has finally seen the shape of a song that has been forming in front of her for many days, that the cliffs of the south coast tomorrow would be such a place for the girl, and that the girl knew this, and that the girl was, in the small careful way of one who had been raised by her grandmother to use the small choices when the large ones were taken away, choosing to face the morning with the fourth knot still untouched, in reserve.
The chief turned the fourth iron ring in his beard. The girl held the fourth knot of her bracelet at her wrist. The two fourths, the saga has noted, were not the same fourth. The chief’s fourth was a new addition to a count that had been growing for many years, a thing taken on. The girl’s fourth was the oldest of her count, the named Mer of the First Sash, who had been the one who had made the listening, and who was the strongest of the four. The chief’s fourth was a thing he had added in the certainty of swearing. The girl’s fourth was a thing she had been given against the day she would need it. The saga sets them down side by side here because they will, in the morning, both come into play, and the saga wants the reader to have them in mind.
The twelfth day broke clear.
The company rose in the cold morning. The fire was kicked apart. The supplies were repacked. The men ate their hard bread and salt fish standing rather than sitting, in the small sign that they understood the day was the day. The chief did not give a speech that morning. The chief said only, “We walk.” The company walked.
The country fell away in long folds toward the east, and the smell of the sea grew stronger with each fold crossed, and within the hour the men could hear, with their own ears and not only on the wind, the surf running against high stone. The girl led them down a long descent through a wood of the strange copper-barked trees, and out into a wide flat of pale tall grass that rippled in the sea-wind, and beyond the flat the land rose again, to a long high ridge, and beyond the long high ridge, the girl said, were the cliffs.
The company crossed the flat. The men’s mood was the mood of men at the very end of a long approach, which was a mood the saga must report as a complicated one. The men were tired. The men were hungry. The men were also more alert than they had been in many days, because the matter was at last about to come within reach, and the small unsteadiness of the air that had been with them since the day of the wolf had now, in the clean sea-wind, mostly gone. The men were near the end. The men were ready.
They climbed the long high ridge. They reached the top. They looked east.
The cliffs were below them, falling away in a single long sheer drop to an open sea that ran out to a horizon as flat as a hall’s table. The grass on the cliff top was the same pale tall grass that had grown in the high valley, ten thousand years before, where an egg-stone had stood; but no man of the company knew this, and the girl knew it only from her dream, which had not yet shown her the egg-stone breaking but had shown her, over many nights of the inland walk, the pale tall grass moving in its almost-speaking way. She recognized the grass. She did not say so to the chief or to the skald. She put her hand on the fourth knot of her bracelet, briefly, and did not yet press it.
Above the cliffs, against the open sky, a long shape was wheeling.
The shape was very high, perhaps three or four hundred fathoms above the cliff top, and the shape was moving in a long slow spiral in the way the cliff-folk’s eagles spiraled on rising air. The shape was much larger than an eagle. The shape was, even at the great height, plainly winged. The wings were the color of the underside of an evening cloud. The body below the wings was long and dark and had a tail.
The chief looked up.
The chief looked up for the first time in eight days, the saga must report, and the chief saw the shape, and the chief’s pale eyes went wide, and the chief did not speak for a long breath. The fourth iron ring in the chief’s beard was, at this moment, motionless under the chief’s right thumb, which had stopped its turning for the first time the skald had noticed since the cove. The chief stood at the top of the ridge with the rising sea-wind blowing back his wolf-cloak and his pale beard and his pale eyes wide on the sky, and the chief said, the saga has from both Snæ and Vagn, the same three words.
The chief said, “Hear me, sister.”
The skald, behind him, said, “I hear you, chief.”
The chief said, in the carrying hall-voice that had not been heard from him since the morning of the cove, “It is here.”
The skald said, “Yes, chief.”
The chief said, “The matter resolves today.”
The skald said, “Yes, chief.”
The chief turned, then, and faced his men. The chief said to them, in the same hall-voice, “We have walked twelve days through the country of the cliff-folk and through the country of no folk at all. We have walked through singing woods and sleeping-light valleys. We have met what we have met and we have walked on. We are now at the cliffs. The beast is above us. The beast will come down. We will be ready. We have chains of thunderstone and spears of iron and a chief who has been blessed by the gods of his line, and we are twelve, and the beast is one. Today is the day. Hear me. Today is the day.”
The men struck the flats of their hands against the boards of their shields. The shields had been carried slung at the back for the inland walking and were now unslung for the descent to the cliffs. The striking was the small old answer to a chief’s hall-speech and the men gave it.
The chief turned back to face the cliffs. The chief did not look at the girl. The chief did not look at the skald. The chief looked up at the wheeling shape and the chief’s right hand returned to his beard and the fourth iron ring began, again, its slow turn.
The saga reports the chief’s iron exhaustion at this moment, which had been growing across the twelve days and had reached, on the twelfth morning, a kind of brittleness. The chief was tired in a way the saga must name. He had not slept the previous night. He had not eaten much that morning. He had walked the long inland walk with the burden of every day’s small encounter pressing on him in ways he had refused to acknowledge, refused to acknowledge the wolf, refused to acknowledge the fox, refused to rise at the quarrel, refused to look up at the stars, refused to ask the girl about the cliffs. The refusals had not made the weights lighter. The refusals had made the weights heavier, because what is not acknowledged in a chief becomes a thing he carries blind, and a blind weight is the kind that breaks the back. The chief was at the breaking. The chief did not yet know it. The chief had taken the iron exhaustion of twelve days’ refusal and had named it, in his own private accounting, the rightness of a man who had been chosen by the gods. The naming was a wrong naming. The saga will say so plainly here, since the saga has waited many segments to say it. The chief had mistaken exhaustion for righteousness. The mistaking had been growing since the storm. The mistaking would carry him through the last hours of this morning and through the breaking of the tail and through the years to come and through, in the end, the splitting of the earth.
But for now, the saga must report, the chief stood at the top of the ridge above the Cliffs of Falling Stars in the clear morning of the twelfth day, with the great shape wheeling above him, and the chief turned the fourth iron ring in his beard, and the chief raised Gjafr-Bíta in his right hand, and the chief began to walk down toward the cliff.
The men followed. The skald followed. The cliff-folk girl walked behind the skald with her hand on the fourth knot of her bracelet, not yet pressed. The pale tall grass moved in the sea-wind in its almost-speaking way. The cliffs lay ahead. The matter was about to resolve, as the chief had said it would.
The saga now goes on to that resolving, which is the next matter, and which the saga must take up in the next telling, after this telling has rested. The chase is done. The twelve days are done. The matter has come, as all such matters do, to the moment in which the named hunt meets the actual creature, and in which the chief who has been blessed and the girl who has been listening and the skald who has been writing and the men who have been swaggering must all of them stand on the same cliff in the same hour and learn what the matter actually is.
Segment 11: “Where Light Sleeps”
Many years later, when she was an old woman teaching her own granddaughter the seventeenth reading of the wind in a kitchen that smelled of dried thyme and woodsmoke, Kaela of the Cliffs would say that the valley where the light slept had been the place where she had learned the difference between being seen and being looked at. The granddaughter, who was seven, would not understand the distinction at the time, and Kaela would not press her. The understanding had come to Kaela herself only across many years, and she had been a long time accepting that there were some pieces of inheritance one could only hand to the next generation in the form of a sentence whose meaning would not arrive in them until they were old enough to need it. This was the cliff-folk way. One said the sentence aloud. One let the sentence wait.
The valley had come on the second day of the inland walk, on the evening the saga had named in its other reckoning the second night’s camp, although in Kaela’s own telling of the matter the valley was always the only thing that happened on that day, the walking before and after being only the small preparation for the entering and the small recovery from the leaving. The valley was called, in the cliff-folk tongue, the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps, and the cliff-folk’s wind-women had been teaching their daughters about it for as long as the cliff-folk had been on the southern coast. The teaching was not for going into the valley. The teaching was for knowing what the valley was if one ever found oneself in it without having chosen to be. The cliff-folk did not, willingly, choose. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers had been emphatic on this point. The valley was a place where the cliff-folk’s drowned dead came up, the cliff-folk said, when they wished to walk under sky again, and the cliff-folk had no business interrupting the walking of their drowned dead by bringing their own living feet into the floor of the valley while the dead were using it. The cliff-folk skirted the valley by long routes when their hunting took them that way. The cliff-folk did not look down into the valley from the ridges that bordered it, not because looking would have been forbidden, but because looking would have been impolite. The cliff-folk practiced, in general, the kind of politeness that was less about not giving offense than about not entering rooms in which one had not been invited, and the valley was, in their reckoning, a room.
She had not chosen. She had walked into the valley in the small column of northerners who did not know what a valley was for, behind a chief who had not been taught to read the cliff-folk’s signs in the grasses at the rim, with Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand at her right shoulder and the skald at her back somewhere in the middle of the column, and the chief had ordered the descent because the chief had wanted, in the small way the chief had wanted many things over the past three days, to save the half-day it would have taken to go around. She had not protested. She had learned, in the small careful economy of her captivity, that her protests carried weight only when they were rare. She had spent her one early protest on the day of the wolf, eight days ahead of where the calendar now stood for the column but in the order of her memory inseparable from the descent into the valley, and the wolf-protest had been received in the manner she had expected, which was not received at all. She would not waste a second protest on the matter of a valley the chief had decided to enter. She had walked down with the column. She had set her feet against the small downhill wind in the way her grandmother had taught her. The fourteen white shells of the sash had clicked very softly at her shoulder. The bracelet of four knots had sat on her left wrist, and she had not, on the descent, touched any of the knots.
The light in the valley was not, Kaela would say later in her kitchen to her granddaughter, the light of any time the column had been walking through. The column had entered the valley in what was, by the world above the rim, the middle of the afternoon. The light in the valley was the light of evening. Not the late evening of dimming. The early evening of the gold hour. The light was golden and slanting and the small dust of the cliff-folk country, the small dust that hung always in the air of the cliff-folk’s autumn afternoons, hung in the valley in long visible lines, each line lit along its length by the golden light, as though someone had drawn the lines with a brass-capped pencil across the air. The men noticed. The skald wrote on her bark, Kaela would learn later, the words the light in the valley does not match the hour. The chief did not notice. The chief did not look up at the lines of dust in the slanting gold. The chief looked along the path that led across the valley floor. The chief turned the fourth iron ring with his right thumb. The chief walked.
The valley floor was flat. It was a long oval of pale tall grass, ringed by low ridges that rose only a little above the floor, and the floor itself was perhaps a thousand paces from rim to rim at the widest. A small stream ran along the southern edge, in a notch of the southern ridge, and the stream made no sound that Kaela could hear, although she could see, when she looked at it, that the water was running, in the way water always ran. The stream ran silently. The grass moved slowly under a wind Kaela could not feel on her cheek. The light hung in its slanting gold lines and did not move with the sun, which was, in the world above the rim, well past the middle of its day. The valley was, Kaela understood with the small dry click that had become her way of receiving new knowledge, a place where the rules of the world above had been suspended for the duration of the cliff-folk’s drowned dead’s walking. The dead were walking. She could not yet see them. She knew they were walking. The valley was occupied.
The column went down the path. The path was a thin line of beaten earth that crossed the floor of the valley from the western rim to the eastern, and the path had been beaten by something, although Kaela was not certain by what, since the cliff-folk did not use the valley and no animal she knew of walked in a straight line across an oval of grass. The path was there. The column followed it. The chief walked at the front. The chief’s wolf-cloak hung from his shoulders. The chief turned the fourth ring. Ulf walked behind the chief. Ulf had taken to looking at the back of the chief’s wolf-cloak in the way Kaela had observed Ulf doing for the past three days, in the small careful way of a man who was trying not to look at the country around them. Ulf, Kaela thought, was less comfortable than he had been at the cove. Ulf had begun, since the day of the wolf, to suspect that the country they were walking through was not entirely the country he had been told he would walk through. Ulf had not said so. Ulf was a man of restraint. Ulf walked behind the chief and kept his eyes on the wolf-cloak and did not look up at the lines of dust in the slanting gold light.
Kaela walked at the right of the column with the small space between her and Ulf that had become her walking-place. She did look up. She had been raised to look up. Her grandmother on the threshold-stone the night the column had taken her had used the small voiceless mouth-word, listen, and Kaela had understood that listen in the cliff-folk’s tongue did not only mean to use the ears. Listen meant also to use the eyes and the skin and the small dry place at the back of the head where the click of new knowledge happened. Kaela was listening with all of these now. The lines of dust in the air. The slow movement of the grass under a wind she could not feel. The silent running of the stream. The valley was speaking. The valley was speaking in the only way a valley could speak, which was by arranging itself in a way that drew the attention of those who had been taught to attend.
She saw the first ancestor at perhaps the third hundred paces of the crossing.
She did not, at first, understand what she was seeing. She had been looking ahead along the path, in the way captives must when they wish to keep track of a chief’s footing, and she had let her gaze drift to the left, toward a stand of the pale tall grass that grew somewhat higher than the rest, and in the grass she had seen a figure. The figure was the figure of a young man. The young man was wearing a fishing-vest of the kind the cliff-folk’s young men wore when they went out in the small skin boats for the first runs of the autumn, and the fishing-vest was wet, in a way that did not catch the slanting gold light. The light went around the wet. The wet did not glint. The young man was looking, not at the column, but at a small place in the grass beside his foot, as though he had set something down there and was thinking about whether to pick it up. The young man did not appear to be breathing.
Kaela understood. She understood with the small dry click that did not feel small or dry in her chest, but felt instead like the slow lifting of a hand from her sternum. She understood that the young man in the wet vest was a cliff-folk young man, and that he was a young man who had drowned, in some season she did not know, in waters she did not know, on a fishing run that had not come back, and that he was standing now in the pale tall grass of the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps because this was the place his memory had brought him to walk in the evening of his deathlessness, and that he was looking at a small thing beside his foot because that was a thing he had been about to do at the moment his life had been interrupted. The young man, the click told her, had not noticed the column passing. The young man was not in the same hour as the column. The young man was in his own hour, an hour that had been sleeping in the valley since the day he had drowned, however many years ago that had been, and the valley was lending the young man the hour the way a kind hostess lends a room.
She did not stop walking. She did not turn her head sharply. She did the small careful thing one did when one was an unexpected guest in a room. She walked past with the polite small inclination of the head that her grandmother had taught her to give to elders. She gave it. She walked on. The young man in the wet vest did not return the inclination. The young man did not look up. The young man was, in his way, busy.
The column did not see him.
She would think of this, the not-seeing, for the rest of her life. The column walked past the stand of pale tall grass with the young man in it at a distance of perhaps fifteen paces, and not a man of the column turned his head, and not a man of the column slowed his step, and the chief at the front turned the fourth iron ring and looked along the path, and Ulf looked at the back of the chief’s wolf-cloak, and Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf, who walked perhaps two places behind Ulf, glanced once toward the stand of grass and then looked back at the path, his face giving no sign that he had seen anything, although the saga in its later reckoning would never know whether Vigleik had in fact seen and was choosing not to acknowledge, or whether the glance had been only the small habitual glance of a hunter to a tall stand of grass that might or might not have held something. The skald, somewhere behind in the middle of the column, did look. The skald had a habit of looking. The skald turned her head, once, toward the stand of grass, and the skald’s face, Kaela would observe later when she had time to consider it, had on it for a single breath the look of a woman who had registered something she could not name. Then the skald looked forward again and walked on.
Sigvör would write that night on her bark, Kaela would learn much later, the words there is a presence in the valley that the men do not see, and that I do not see clearly, and that the girl, I think, sees. The skald would underline the word girl.
Kaela walked. The column went on. She saw the second ancestor at perhaps the fifth hundred paces.
The second was an old woman. The old woman was sitting on a low flat stone at the right of the path, perhaps twenty paces from the column’s line of march, and the old woman was wearing a sash. The sash had on it many shells, more than fourteen, perhaps twenty or twenty-five, in the style of the very old sashes, the ones that had been worn before the cliff-folk’s wind-women had settled on the count of fourteen as the count that worked best. The shells on the old woman’s sash were not the white shells of Kaela’s own sash. The shells on the old woman’s sash were grey and brown and dark, the colors of the shells the cliff-folk had used before the white-shell tradition had been refined. The old woman was looking out across the valley, not at the column, not at the young man in the wet vest, not at anything Kaela could see. The old woman’s face had on it the small careful empty expression of a wind-woman taking a reading. The old woman was reading. The old woman was, the click told Kaela, one of her own predecessors. The old woman was a wind-woman of the cliff-folk from a time before the fourteen-shell tradition. The old woman might be Mer of the First Sash, the fourth knot of Kaela’s bracelet, the strongest of the four, the one who had made the listening, although Kaela was not certain, because she had not been told what Mer had looked like.
She did not, at the second ancestor, walk past with only the small inclination. She did the second cliff-folk thing one did when one had unexpectedly entered a room and recognized an elder of one’s own line. She paused in her walk for a single breath. She did not stop fully, because stopping fully would have drawn the attention of the column. She paused. She inclined her head more deeply. She held the inclination for the breath. She walked on.
The old woman did not look up.
Kaela understood. The old woman was busy taking her reading. The old woman would, perhaps, have looked up at another time. The valley was the valley. One did not interrupt a wind-woman at a reading. The cliff-folk’s politeness extended even to one’s own dead.
The column went on. Kaela walked. The men did not see the old woman.
She saw the third ancestor at the seventh hundred paces. The third was a child. The child was perhaps five years old. The child was sitting cross-legged in the path itself, directly ahead of the column, and the child was playing with a small clattering game of shells on the beaten earth between her crossed legs. Kaela recognized the game. It was the small clattering game her own younger cousins had been playing on the threshold-stone of the house the afternoon the smoke had come up the cliff face. The child in the path was playing the same game, with the same kind of shells, in the same arrangement. The child was, Kaela understood with the click, a cliff-folk child who had drowned, in some season she did not know, and who had come to the valley to play her game in peace, and the child had been playing the game in the same path for, perhaps, a long time, and the child did not look up when the column approached.
The column did not see the child either.
The chief walked into the place where the child was sitting. The chief walked through the place where the child was sitting. The chief did not appear to notice anything. The child did not appear to notice anything. The shells of the small clattering game did not appear to be disturbed. The chief continued along the path. Ulf walked through. Vigleik walked through. The men one by one walked through.
Kaela approached the place. She slowed her steps. She did not stop. She did the smallest of the cliff-folk’s gestures, the one a girl gave to a smaller girl whose game one had been invited to admire, which was to touch the small flat of one’s hand against one’s own collarbone, once, briefly. She gave the gesture as she walked past. The child in the path looked up. The child in the path looked up for the first time of any of the ancestors Kaela had seen in the valley. The child’s eyes were the dark cliff-folk eyes of her line, and the child’s eyes met Kaela’s eyes, and the child smiled. The smile was the small unstudied smile of a five-year-old who has been recognized by someone who knows the game she is playing. The child did not speak. The child did not rise. The child watched Kaela walk past, and the child returned to her game, with the small dry sound of the shells beginning again in the path beneath her.
Kaela walked on. Behind her, she heard, in the small place behind her left ear where the bracelet’s first knot lay, the click of the small clattering game continuing. The click was very quiet. The click was only for her.
The column went on. The light in the valley held its slanting gold. The lines of dust held their patterns. The grass moved under the wind she could not feel. The stream ran silently.
She saw the fourth ancestor at the ninth hundred paces. The fourth was a man of middle age. The man was wearing the trader’s cloak of three winters past, the cloak the wandering trader who had taught her the four words of broken northern had worn when he had come into the village in the autumn of her tenth year and had stayed through the winter, the cloak that had been her introduction to the existence of foreign men with strange tongues. She recognized the cloak. She recognized, then, with the click that was becoming familiar, the man in the cloak. The man in the cloak was the trader himself. The trader was supposed to be, in the world above the rim, alive, and trading along the eastern coast of Hraevn-an-Ol, where her grandmother had heard, by other traders’ report, that he had a small house and a wife of the eastern cliff-folk. The trader was not supposed to be in the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps. The trader was here. The click in Kaela’s chest, this time, was not dry. The click was a small wet pressing, and she understood, with the same wet pressing in the back of her throat, that the trader had drowned, in some recent season, perhaps the most recent run of the autumn, perhaps later, on his way along the eastern coast, in some manner no one had yet brought word of to her own village, and that the news had not yet traveled the seven cliff-folk villages and would not, perhaps, travel them for another month or two, and that she had now seen the news before her grandmother would see it, and that the news was, in the small particular way of news, both true and ahead of itself.
The trader in the valley was standing on the path. The trader had been walking. The trader was now standing, looking around, in the small puzzled way of a man who had been on a journey and had stopped because he had remembered something. The trader, Kaela understood, was perhaps still in the small adjusting of the recently drowned, who had not yet, the cliff-folk’s grandmothers said, fully understood that they had drowned. The trader looked at the column as the column approached. The trader looked at the chief. The trader’s face on seeing the chief did the small dry thing that Kaela had seen on the trader’s face only once before, in the winter at her village, when a piece of news had reached him by another trader that he had not liked. The trader’s face had done the small dry thing then, the small flat thinning of the mouth that meant the trader was making an assessment he would not share. The trader was making such an assessment now, looking at the chief.
The chief walked past the trader. The chief did not see the trader.
The trader watched the chief walk past. The trader’s eyes followed the chief, and the trader’s face held the small dry assessment, and the trader said, softly, in the cliff-folk’s tongue, a single phrase that the wind, the click told Kaela, would not carry to anyone but her. The trader said, “Ah. So that is the one.” The phrase landed in Kaela’s hearing with the precision of a phrase spoken into her own ear, although the trader was some twelve paces from her on the path, and the chief between them did not turn, and Ulf did not turn, and the skald, who had been turning her head toward small things across the valley, did not turn either. The phrase was for Kaela alone.
The trader turned then. The trader looked at Kaela. The trader’s face changed. The small dry assessment fell away, and the trader’s face, which Kaela had known three winters before across the small kitchen of his hosts, with the cliff-folk firelight on it as he had spoken to her in his accented cliff-folk tongue the four northern words she would carry forward, returned to the affectionate puzzled look she remembered from those evenings. The trader was looking at her with recognition. The trader had recognized her. The trader spoke her name.
The trader said, “Kaela.”
The trader said it in the small careful pronunciation he had used in her tenth year, with the cliff-folk’s particular long final vowel that the northerners shortened. The trader said her name as her own grandmother had said it. The trader said her name as her own mother had said it. The trader said her name in a way that the wind carried only to her own ear, and Kaela, walking along the path with the small column of northerners on either side of her, did not stop, did not turn her head, did not respond outwardly in any way that any other person could have seen. Inside, she heard her name. Inside, she understood that the trader was speaking her name not as a greeting but as a piece of news he was returning to her. He was telling her her own name. He was telling her her own name in the cliff-folk’s way, the way it was supposed to be said, in case the next part of her life, the part in which the northerners called her Kaela-of-the-Cliffs in the shortened way, made her forget. He was reminding her.
She did not stop. She did not turn. She walked on. The trader, behind her, turned his face slowly to the east, in the direction the column was walking, and resumed his standing in the path, looking around in the small puzzled adjusting way, and Kaela walked past him at the close distance of perhaps four paces, and as she passed she lifted her right hand, only slightly, and touched the small flat of her own collarbone once, the same gesture she had given the child with the shells. The trader, with the corner of his eye, saw the gesture. The trader did not turn. The trader did not need to. The gesture was received.
She walked on. The column went on. The slanting gold light held. The valley held.
She would think, in her later years, about the trader’s small returning of her name. She would think that the trader had given her, in that small moment in the valley, the thing her grandmother had wished her to be given but had not been able to give, which was a witness from outside the family who had spoken her name in the cliff-folk way at the moment when the cliff-folk way of speaking it was about to disappear from her hearing for many months and perhaps many years. The northerners would call her by the shortened name. The northerners would, in their kind moments, call her Kaela. In their less kind moments they would call her cliff-girl or guide-girl or, on at least one occasion that the saga of her later life would set down with care, less kind names than those. They would not, in their best efforts, get the long final vowel right. The cliff-folk’s long final vowel was a sound that the northern mouth was not built to make. The vowel would, across the next months and years, slowly fade from her own hearing, and she would, slowly, begin to think of herself by the shortened name, in the way a person who has lived too long in a foreign country begins to think of themselves by the foreign mouth’s version of their name, until the original sound is something they have to recover deliberately when they return home. The trader in the valley had given her the original sound at the last possible moment, with a perfect pronunciation, in a wind that carried it only to her, and she would carry it forward in the small dry place at the back of her head where her grandmother’s gifts had been put, for whatever years she would need to carry it. She would, eventually, return to her own coast as an old woman, and she would hear the long final vowel spoken by a young woman of the cliff-folk in a market, and she would remember the trader, and she would understand at last what he had given her.
But this was for very much later. In the valley she only walked.
She saw two more ancestors in the last three hundred paces of the crossing. The first was a thin woman of middle age, standing at the right of the path, dressed in the cliff-folk’s older funeral linen, with her hair unbound and falling about her shoulders, who looked up at the column as it passed and watched it pass with no expression, and who did not look at Kaela in particular. The second, near the eastern rim, was a small group of cliff-folk men, perhaps four or five of them, standing in a loose circle on the path itself, gesturing among themselves in the small careful way of cliff-folk men in council, and the column walked through the loose circle without disturbing it, and the men in the circle continued their gestures without acknowledging the passage. Kaela gave the inclination of the head to each of these as she walked past. None of them returned it. None of them needed to. They were busy. The valley was occupied. She was a passing guest.
The column reached the eastern rim. The path went up out of the valley in a slow rising ramp through the pale tall grass, and at the top of the rim the slanting gold light gave way, with no transition that Kaela could mark, to the late afternoon of the world above. The sun was, the click told her, perhaps two hands above the western horizon, which was where it should have been after the half-hour of walking the column had done in the valley, although it had been many hours of slanting gold to her perception, and although, by the saga’s other reckoning, Vigleik’s sand-glass would have measured the time at an hour and a half. The valley had been holding the time the way the valley had been holding the light. The valley released both as the column came up over the rim. Kaela felt the small change at the back of her neck. The light became the ordinary light. The wind on her cheek became a wind she could feel. The fourteen white shells on the sash gave a single small chime that they had not given in the valley, the chime that meant the wind was the wind it was, and Kaela understood that she had returned to the world.
She did not look back. The cliff-folk did not look back at such valleys. She kept her gaze ahead. The column walked on. The chief at the front did not say anything about the valley. The chief did not, the click told her, fully realize he had been in one. The chief had walked through the slanting gold light and through the long lines of dust and past the child and the trader and the wind-woman and the young man in the wet vest, and the chief had seen none of them. The chief was, in the small accounting Kaela had been making of him over the days, a man who had become more and more enclosed in the small chamber of his own deciding, and the chamber did not have a window. The chief turned the fourth iron ring. The chief walked.
Ulf, at the rear of the chief now since they had reformed slightly on the rim, did look at Kaela briefly. Ulf’s eyes had on them the small puzzled question of a man who had walked through something and was not certain what. Ulf did not ask the question. Ulf would not have known how to ask it in the cliff-folk tongue, and he would not have asked it in the northern tongue, because he did not know if his question would be received. Ulf, Kaela thought, had perhaps half-seen. Ulf had perhaps glimpsed a single one of the ancestors out of the corner of his eye, and Ulf was now adjusting himself to the small possibility that he had seen what he had seen. Ulf would not speak of it. Kaela approved. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers had always said that men who half-saw and did not speak were the kindest men of any foreign country, because they were the ones who understood that some things were not theirs to acknowledge aloud.
The skald, behind Ulf in the new ordering of the column, was writing in her bark as she walked, which Kaela had observed her do only twice before in the long inland walk. The skald was not stopping to write. The skald was walking and writing, in the small skald’s manner of catching a phrase before the phrase escaped. The skald, Kaela thought, had seen something also. The skald had not seen what Kaela had seen, but the skald had seen the absence of seeing in the rest of the column, and the absence of seeing was its own kind of seeing, and the skald was catching it in the bark before it left her.
The column walked east for another half-hour and reached the small flat above the stream where the chief had ordered the second night’s camp made. The men set about the work of the camp. The chief sat at the place that became the fire-pit and turned the fourth iron ring. The skald set out her sleeping-fur in the place outside what Kaela now saw was a ring of low stones that had once been the foundation of a small cliff-folk shrine, and Kaela understood that the skald had read the stones, and Kaela set out her own sleeping-fur beside the skald’s. The men of the column set out their furs across the line of the foundation without noticing, as men of any country who had not been taught will do. The fire was lit. The supper was made. The men ate. The chief ate little. The chief did not speak.
The girl, the saga of Kaela’s life would record later in her own kitchen across many decades, ate her supper that night sitting beside the skald, with the bracelet of four knots on her left wrist, with the small bone falcon on its thong at her throat under her tunic. The girl did not touch any of the knots that evening. The girl had touched the second knot at the second hour of the walk that morning, which had been her ordinary evening touching, but she had not touched any knot in the valley itself, and she did not touch any knot at the supper. The valley had not been a place she had needed the knots for. The valley had given her, in the small phrase of the trader, what she had needed from it. She did not, in the evening, need anything more.
She lay down on her sleeping-fur. She drew the wool blanket up to her chin. She looked, for a long while, at the sky above the camp, which was the ordinary cliff-folk autumn sky of late Helmus, with the standing cloud thinning at the edges and the first true stars beginning to be visible in the west. She did not see the great shape pass. The great shape did not pass that night above this part of the country. The great shape was, somewhere east of where they camped, sleeping or hunting or doing what the great shape did in the wild hills. The great shape was not the thing on her mind in the small dark before sleeping. The thing on her mind was the trader.
She thought of the trader. She thought of the cliff-folk vowel. She thought of the small dry assessment that had been on the trader’s face when he had looked at the chief. The assessment had been clear. The trader had recognized the chief, in some way Kaela did not understand, and the trader had judged him, in the small private way of a wind-walker who had seen many men in many countries, and the trader had said softly, ah, so that is the one. The phrase, the click told her, had not been a phrase about the trader’s own drowning. The phrase had been a phrase about the chief. The chief was the one. The trader had been making the trader’s small dry assessment of the chief in the cliff-folk’s way of assessing those who would, in the trader’s reckoning, do harm. The trader had decided that the chief was such a one. The trader had not warned the chief. The trader had warned, in the smallest possible way, the only person in the column who could hear, which had been Kaela.
She thought of her grandmother on the threshold-stone. She thought of the fourteen white shells. She thought of the four knots. She thought of the small voiceless mouth-word, listen. She had been listening. She would go on listening. She had been seen by her own dead and unseen by the living men around her, and the seeing-and-not-seeing was a thing she would carry for the rest of her life, and it would not get smaller. The aching wonder of being seen by the dead while remaining invisible to the living was, she understood with the click she had been having all evening, the truest description of what a captive was. The captive was the person who was visible only to those who were already gone. The living around her, the chief and the men, had not seen her at the cove and had not seen her at the village and had not seen her in the valley, except in the small instrumental way they saw a guide. They had not seen Kaela. They had seen a thing they called Kaela that walked at the front of their column. The dead in the valley had seen Kaela. The trader had said her name with the cliff-folk vowel. The child with the shells had smiled at her. The old woman at the reading-stone had not looked up but had been, in the click’s testimony, aware of her in the way wind-women were aware of one another even without looking up. The young man in the wet vest had been busy. The cliff-folk men in the circle had been in council. None of them had looked at her with the empty instrumental gaze of the living northerners around her. All of them, in their small ways, had been aware.
She would carry this. She would carry the aching wonder of it. The cliff-folk did not have a word in their tongue for this particular kind of aching wonder, but the cliff-folk had a phrase that came close. The phrase was, in the cliff-folk’s old language, walking among the wakeful with one’s eyes open. The phrase was used by the cliff-folk’s grandmothers to describe the experience of being a wind-woman in a country full of people who had not been trained to listen, and Kaela had heard her grandmother use the phrase only twice, both times in her grandmother’s last year, when her grandmother had been very tired. The phrase fit the valley. The phrase would fit, Kaela understood now, the rest of her life among the northerners and, in a different way, the rest of her life among her own people after she returned, if she returned. There were two kinds of awake. There were the wakeful, and there were the looking-but-not-seeing. She was, in this column, walking among the looking-but-not-seeing with her eyes open. The dead in the valley were the wakeful. The dead had seen her because the dead, in their freedom from the small busy hurry of the living, had nothing else to do but see.
She closed her eyes. She tried to sleep. Sleep came slowly. When it came, she did not dream of the high valley and the egg-stone for the first time in many nights. She dreamed instead of the trader. The trader in the dream was standing at the eastern rim of the valley of sleeping light, and the trader was lifting his hand in the small cliff-folk gesture of farewell, and he was saying, in the dream, the same phrase he had said in the valley, with the same precise vowel: Kaela. Just her name. Just the long final vowel. He said it three times in the dream, and each time the wind in the dream carried it to her and only to her. After the third saying the trader turned and walked back into the slanting gold light of the valley, and the slanting gold light closed around him, and the dream ended.
She woke in the middle of the night. The fire in the camp was banked. The men were sleeping. The chief at his place near the fire was sitting upright, turning the fourth iron ring, looking at the embers. The skald beside her was awake, sitting up on her sleeping-fur, with her bark across her knee and her brass-capped pencil in her hand, writing. The skald saw her open her eyes. The skald set the pencil down. The skald leaned over slightly and said, in the cliff-folk tongue, very low, “Did you see them?”
Kaela said, in the cliff-folk tongue, very low, “Yes.”
The skald said, “All of them?”
Kaela said, “I saw six. There were more.”
The skald said, “I saw the edges of two.”
Kaela said, “You saw more than the men.”
The skald said, “The men saw none.”
There was a small silence between them. The skald, in the small dark, with the bark across her knee, looked at her with the careful skald’s face. The skald said, in the cliff-folk tongue, in the same low voice, “Did any of them speak to you?”
Kaela considered. She considered for a long breath. She considered whether to give the skald the trader. The skald was the woman her grandmother had said would help her. The skald had given her a wool blanket and a fur and a place outside the foundation-ring. The skald was writing the song of the hunt and had asked, at the third evening, that the girl tell her what the girl wished to be sung. The skald was, in the small careful accounting Kaela had been making of the people in the column, the only one of them who was wakeful in the cliff-folk sense, and the trader’s phrase in the valley had been about the chief, not about the skald. The skald was not the chief. The skald was the chief’s sister and was bound by oath to the chief but was not the chief. The skald might be told.
Kaela said, in the cliff-folk tongue, very low, “Yes. One spoke to me. A trader. A man I knew, who had wintered at my village three years ago. He has drowned, I think, recently, although the news has not yet come to my village. He spoke my name. He spoke the cliff-folk vowel at the end, the way it is supposed to be spoken. He looked at the chief and said, in our tongue, ah, so that is the one. He said that part loud enough for the wind to carry. The wind only carried it to me.”
The skald, in the small dark, was very still. The skald said, in the cliff-folk tongue, after a long breath, “And what did you understand by the trader’s saying?”
Kaela said, “That my dead have made an assessment of your chief. That the assessment is not favorable. That they have warned me, in the only way the dead can warn the living from a valley, which is by speaking softly in a wind that goes only to the person they wish to warn.”
The skald sat for some breaths with this. The skald said, finally, “May I have it for the song?”
Kaela thought. Kaela said, “Yes. But do not name the trader. The trader’s wife on the eastern coast does not yet know. Do not name him in the song. Say only that a man of my people who had wintered at my village spoke softly in the valley. Do not name him until he has been named by his own family.”
The skald said, “I will not name him.”
Kaela said, “And do not sing me afraid in the valley. I was not afraid in the valley. I was held.”
The skald said, “I will sing you held.”
There was a small silence again. The skald, in the small dark, picked up her brass-capped pencil and wrote a few lines on the bark in her small private script. The skald did not show them to Kaela. The skald did not need to. The skald put the pencil down. The skald said, in the cliff-folk tongue, very low, “Thank you for telling me.”
Kaela said, “Thank you for asking.”
The skald lay down. The skald did not sleep, Kaela thought, for a long while. Kaela lay down also. Kaela did not sleep at once either. She lay with her eyes open looking at the small dark above the camp, and she thought again of the trader’s small returning of her name, and she thought of the child with the shells smiling up at her, and she thought of the long lines of dust in the slanting gold light, and she touched, briefly, with the thumb of her right hand, the first knot of the bracelet, which was Sela of the Long Hair, and Sela did not appear, of course, because the wind was not seen by the gull, but Kaela felt, in the small dark, the smallest of the small confirmations, which was that she was being held up.
She slept.
She did not dream of the high valley that night either. The high valley took the night off. The high valley would come back the night after, and the night after that, and the egg-stone in the dream would begin, finally, to crack on the eighth night of the inland walk, which was the night before the day of the wolf, but on this night the high valley took the night off, perhaps in deference to the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps, which had given the night its own kind of dream. The dream had been the trader at the rim, saying her name three times in a wind that did not carry it elsewhere. The dream had been enough.
In the morning the column would walk on, and the country would change again, and the small unsteadiness in the air that had begun on the third evening at the camp on the small flat above the stream would deepen across the days that followed, until it gave them the wolf, and the fox, and the quarrel, and the long climb up to the Old Tooth, and the wild hills, and the morning of the twelfth day at the top of the ridge above the cliffs where the chief would, for the first time in eight days, look up. The column would go on. The chief would carry his fourth iron ring forward. The girl would carry her four knots forward. The skald would carry her bark forward.
But the night of the valley would not leave her. It would sit at the back of her head with the other gifts her grandmother had put there. It would sit there for sixty years. It would sit there until the day she walked, an old woman, along the cliff path to the Watcher’s Knee, with a sash of new shells across her shoulders and a granddaughter walking behind her, and the granddaughter would ask her, in the small piping voice of a seven-year-old learning her first reading, whether the cliff-folk’s drowned dead really did come up to walk in certain valleys, and Kaela would say yes. And the granddaughter would ask whether Kaela had ever seen them. And Kaela would say yes, once, when she was very young, when she had been walking among the wakeful with her eyes open.
The granddaughter would not understand the phrase. Kaela would not press her. The understanding would wait.
For now, in the small dark of the second night’s camp east of the cove, the girl slept, and the dead did not visit, and the skald sat awake beside her writing in her bark, and the chief at the fire turned the fourth iron ring, and the wind in the camp was the wind it was, and the fourteen white shells of the sash, against her body under the blanket, were silent because the wind was steady, and the long final vowel of her own name was held in the small dry place at the back of her head, where the trader had put it, and where she would carry it, for the rest of her life.
She slept.
Segment 12: “Drip-Drip-Drip in the Deep Roots”
I have not moved. The water is still drip and dripping. The pool is still black. The chamber is still cold. The seam in the limestone above me has had time to gather its small wetness and to let the small wetness fall, and I have heard it fall, and that is one count. I have heard it fall again. That is two. The counting has gone on while I have been resting and gathering myself for the next part of the telling. The standing folk would say I have been silent. The standing folk would be wrong about that, in the small way the standing folk are usually wrong, which is to say not quite wrong about everything but wrong about the most important part. I have not been silent. I have been listening. Listening is not the same as silence. Silence is a thing the standing folk imagine. Listening is a thing the deep places do.
I will tell you what I heard.
I will tell you what I heard a long while ago, in the time that the standing folk above would have called the autumn of the year the men of iron and silver-skin came down out of the north to do their hunting. I was younger then. Younger is a word I will use carefully. I have lived a long time. Younger for me is a thing the standing folk would not recognize as young. Younger for me, in that autumn, was perhaps two hundred and forty winters. I had been in this chamber for the latter part of those winters. I had been listening in this chamber for the latter part. The chamber was already old when I came to it. I have said before that there are stains on the limestone walls that show the water has been doing its work for far longer than any chain of telling could reach. The chain of telling reaches what it reaches. The chamber is older than the chain.
I was lying then where I lie now. On the long slab of cold limestone above the black pool. My harness of cave-silk was newer in those days. The bone-rings along the harness were paler. The dark scale at the collar was set in its place. I had been given the dark scale by my mother’s mother in her last winter, and she had been given the dark scale by her own mother’s mother in a winter that was very many before mine, and the dark scale had been in our line for as long as the line had a memory of itself. The dark scale was a piece of Raptoris-Sol. The dark scale had been recovered from the underworld roots by an ancestor of mine after the man Hrolv-Kan had been swallowed into the dark, and the dark scale had stayed with our line ever since, and on the day I am about to tell you of, the dark scale had not yet had any reason to warm or to grow cold or to hum. The dark scale lay on my collar in the small steady cool way it had lain for two centuries of my life. The dark scale was waiting. The dark scale, like me, was waiting. Neither of us knew at that moment what we were waiting for. But waiting is the deep places’ way. One does not learn how long one has been waiting until the thing one was waiting for arrives.
It arrived.
I will tell you how.
I felt them through the stone.
I will say that again because the standing folk often do not hear it the first time, and the standing folk’s not-hearing is the matter I want you to understand. I felt them through the stone. I did not hear them through the air. The air down here is the air down here. It is heavy. It does not carry the sounds of the surface. The surface sounds die at the rim of the cave-mouth and come no further. The way I know about the surface, the way I have always known about the surface, is through the stone. Stone carries. Stone is not the dead thing the standing folk imagine. Stone is a long slow conducting medium. Stone takes a footfall on its surface and translates the footfall into the smallest of small pressures and passes the pressure down through itself in a way that takes a long while but loses very little of the pressure. A footfall on the cliff top above this chamber will arrive at my throat-stud as a small pressure perhaps a quarter of an hour later. A footfall in a wood several miles away will arrive perhaps an hour later. A footfall along the long path my ancestor had once traveled to recover the dark scale will arrive in many hours, but the footfall will arrive, and I will know it, and I will know which path it came along, because I have been here long enough to know the paths. I am not the only one of my kind. There are perhaps thirty of us in the deep places under this part of the world. We do not see each other often. We do not need to. We listen, and we know where the others are, and the listening is our way of being with each other.
In the autumn of the year I am telling of, I was lying on the slab and listening through my throat-stud which is the small worked piece of mineral the standing folk’s smiths have named for me, after I described what it does to one of them once, the listening-pulse-throat-stud. The name does not matter. The function matters. The function is that the stud sits at the place where my throat-pulse comes out, and the stud amplifies the pulse, and the stud also receives pressures from outside, and the stud, taken together with my own long training, gives me the sense the standing folk call tremorsense, which is a poor name for it but it is the name the standing folk’s books have settled on and I will use it because arguing about names is a thing I have learned to stop doing in my latter centuries. Tremorsense. I had it then. I have it now. Through it I felt them.
I felt them first at the third hour of the morning.
The hour was not a thing I would have measured at the time, but I have measured it since, by working back from when I later felt the company come to the rim of the high cliffs, and the hour of the first felt-footfall was the third of the day above. They were perhaps eleven miles inland from where I lie. They were walking down out of a high meadow toward the first of the singing woods. The pressures I felt were the small pressures of eleven sets of feet moving in a column. The pressures were not the pressures of cliff-folk feet. I will say that plainly. I know cliff-folk feet. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers and the cliff-folk’s grandfathers and the cliff-folk’s smaller herders and the cliff-folk’s hunters have all been walking the country above me for many centuries, and the pressures of cliff-folk feet are a thing I learned to recognize in my second century. Cliff-folk feet walk softly. Cliff-folk feet are bare or are clad in soft sandal-wraps of sea-grass or are clad in soft hide boots that have been cured in the cliff-folk’s particular way. Cliff-folk feet do not strike the ground. Cliff-folk feet meet the ground. There is a difference. A foot that strikes leaves a particular kind of pressure in the stone that travels in a particular kind of way, sharp and brief and slightly skewed in the direction of the next step. A foot that meets leaves a pressure that is rounder and slower and more centered under the foot’s own weight. Cliff-folk feet meet. The pressures I felt that morning struck. They struck in the kind of striking that comes from a boot. The boots were heavy. The boots had a particular kind of sole, the standing folk’s iron-nailed sole that wears on the front edge and the back edge differently. The pressures showed me both the wears. I felt the heavier wear on the back edge of every foot. The boots had been walking. The boots had been walking for a long while. The boots had crossed a great distance. The boots had not been made for this country. The boots had been made for some other country with harder ground. The boots in this country made small slipping pressures at the edges of each step, because the soles were not the right soles for the cliff-folk’s soft inland tracks. The slipping pressures, taken together with the striking, told me clearly. These were not cliff-folk feet. These were the feet of men of iron and silver-skin. The kind I had been told would come.
I will be honest. I knew before that morning that they would come. The chain of telling that gave me the prelude of Raptoris-Sol, the part of the saga I told you in my first two tellings, also gave me a piece of the rest. The chain of telling had been clear about it. The old ones who taught me the first parts told me that in some autumn, in some year my mother’s mother did not know how to name in advance, the men of iron and silver-skin would come down out of the north and would do the hunting that the chain of telling could not prevent and could only describe. The old ones had been telling each other this for many generations. The old ones had been waiting for the autumn. The old ones had not seen the autumn in their own lifetimes. Each old one had passed the waiting on to the next old one. The waiting was, in the small accounting of our line, a thing as much a part of us as the dark scale at the collar. The autumn would come. The autumn would arrive when it arrived. I had been told all of this in my younger time, and I had carried the knowing for two centuries, and in the small slow way of the deep places’ patience I had not given the knowing much surface attention, because attending too closely to a thing that is coming but is not yet here is the kind of attending that wears a creature down, and I had wanted to be fresh when the autumn arrived. The old ones had told me to be fresh. They had said: when you feel the boots, that will be the autumn. They had said: do not waste the centuries beforehand with worry. They had said: be the chamber. Be the slab. Be the dark scale at the collar. Wait. I had waited.
The boots struck. The autumn was here.
I did not move.
This is the part the standing folk will find hardest to understand. I did not move at the third hour of the morning when I felt the boots first. I did not move at the fourth hour. I did not move at any hour that day. I did not move for many days. I have lived long enough to know that the wrong response to the arrival of the long-awaited thing is to leap up and begin doing things. The standing folk leap up and begin doing things. The standing folk regret the leaping later. The leaping is, in the deep places’ reckoning, a kind of premature decision. One feels the autumn arrive and one wants, in the small surface excitement of the body that has been waiting too long, to act, to react, to do. The doing in the wrong moment is the doing that makes the thing worse. I did not move. I lay on the slab. I let the boots’ pressures come through the stone and arrive at my throat-stud and be received. I let the receiving teach me. The receiving was the doing. The doing was the listening. Listening is not silence. Listening is the first action.
I learned, by the listening across that morning, several things.
The column was eleven feet. I have said. The eleven were walking in the order of a hunting band. There was one set of feet at the front. The one set was heavier than most of the rest. The one set was a man with a high-status weight, which is to say he carried the small added weight of one who has been given the chief’s place and who has not been asked to carry equal share of the packs. The boots of the chief had a small uneven landing on the right side. The landing told me of an old wound in the right ankle, perhaps fifteen winters old, that had not healed quite straight. The wound did not impede the walking, but it left its mark in the pressure. A second set of feet was just behind the chief’s, and that set was a man’s also, with a different boot, a boot worn at the front edge more heavily, the boot of a man who walked on the balls of his feet because his work in his own country had been the work of an archer or a tracker, a man who placed his weight forward at each step. A third set was just behind the second, and the third was a younger man’s, lighter, less worn, less practiced. There were eight more sets behind, in the small variations that I will not list because the listing would not interest you. They were eleven men. Eleven sets of striking heavy boots.
Eleven and a twelfth.
The twelfth was different. The twelfth was not at the rear, where I would have expected the most junior man of a hunting band to walk. The twelfth was in the middle, between the third set and the fourth. The twelfth was smaller. Much smaller. The twelfth was, in the pressures it left in the stone, light. The lightness was the lightness of a young person, perhaps half the weight of any of the men. The lightness was also the lightness of bare feet. Or not quite bare. Soft sandal-wraps. The twelfth was wearing soft sandal-wraps of cliff-folk sea-grass.
I knew the pressure at once. I knew it because I had felt many such pressures across the centuries. Cliff-folk feet. A cliff-folk child or a cliff-folk young one. Walking with the men. Walking among the eleven striking boots. Walking. Not running. Not being dragged. Walking, the small even meeting pressures of cliff-folk feet that had been taught to walk paths in the cliff-folk way, set against the small slipping striking pressures of the iron-nailed boots of the men. The twelfth was a captive. The cliff-folk did not walk with strangers willingly except as guests, and the men of striking boots were not in this country to be received as guests, and there was no cliff-folk guesting in the small accounting of the eleven and the twelfth. The twelfth was a guide. The twelfth had been taken. The twelfth was walking because the walking was the work the twelfth had been set to.
This is the part where I want you to feel what I felt. I am not going to dress it up. I am going to tell you flat. The twelfth was a cliff-folk young one. I have lived two centuries above the cliff-folk’s coast. I have felt the small even pressures of cliff-folk young ones passing along the cliff paths for so many years that the pressures are the closest thing to family I have. The cliff-folk are not my kin. I am not their kin. We are different kinds of creatures and we have never met face to face and we may not meet in this lifetime of mine or in any lifetime to come. But the cliff-folk’s young ones have been the small steady drumming above the long chambers where I have lived, and I have learned, in the small slow way of one who has been listened-to all his life, that the cliff-folk’s young ones are mine in some way that does not require a meeting. I have felt them. They have walked above me. I have learned their gaits. When I felt the small even meeting pressure of a young one’s sea-grass sandal-wraps among the eleven striking boots, what came to me was a dread that I did not let surface for a long while because the surfacing of dread is a thing that wastes one’s response.
I will say it now and let the saying do the work. There was a cliff-folk child walking in the column of the men of iron and silver-skin, and the cliff-folk child was a guide, and the cliff-folk child had been taken from a village I knew the pressures of, perhaps the village above the cove on the south coast, perhaps the next village over. The cliff-folk child was light. The cliff-folk child was perhaps thirteen winters. The cliff-folk child was walking. The cliff-folk child was the one the old ones had not told me about. The old ones had not told me about the cliff-folk child because the old ones had not known. The chain of telling had said the men would come. The chain of telling had not said they would come with a cliff-folk guide. The cliff-folk guide was a new piece of the matter.
I lay on the slab. I let the new piece arrive. I let the new piece settle. I let the dread surface in its own slow time, in the controlled way I had learned to let surfaces happen across my long life. The dread was patient. The dread was distilled. The dread was the dread of one who has been told the shape of a coming thing and has now seen the shape arrive with one small detail the telling did not include, and the small detail is the kind of detail that changes everything but does not change the outcome. The outcome of the matter was the outcome. The cliff-folk child being among the eleven did not change the outcome. The cliff-folk child being among the eleven changed the texture of the outcome. The cliff-folk child made the outcome a thing that would happen to a young one as well as to the men. The cliff-folk child made the outcome a thing the cliff-folk would carry afterward in a way they would not have carried it had only the men come and gone. The cliff-folk child would, in the small accounting of the inland walk and the cliffs and the hunting, be present. The cliff-folk child would see. The cliff-folk child would carry. The cliff-folk child was the witness from the country the matter was happening in, and the chain of telling had not given me a witness from that country, and now there was one, and the having of one changed how I would listen for the rest of the autumn.
I will tell you what I did with the dread.
I let it settle. I let it sit on my hide like the small layer of cool mineral that gathers on the hide of a salamander who has not moved in many days. I did not act on it. I did not call out to any of the others of my kind in the deep places. I did not, for the first three days of the column’s walking, do anything but listen.
The listening taught me more.
The column walked through the first singing wood and out the other side. The pressures of the singing wood are familiar to me, because the wood sits above one of the long chambers my kind have used as a meeting-place over the centuries, and I know the pressures that the wood passes down into the chambers. The wood is a wood that the standing folk find strange because the wind in the wood carries a sound the standing folk cannot place. The sound comes from the way the wind moves across the small holes in the limestone karst beneath the wood’s roots. The karst is full of holes. The wind goes into the holes and the holes resonate the way an empty jug resonates when one blows across its neck. The sound is the wind in the jugs. The sound is not, the standing folk’s grandmothers say, the spirits of the wood. The sound is the wind in the jugs. The standing folk’s grandmothers are correct on the matter and so I will not contradict them, although I will say that the spirits of the wood do exist, in a different sense, and are not the makers of the wind-in-jug sound. The spirits of the wood are quiet. The spirits do not make sounds. The spirits are perceived only by those who have been taught the small attention that perceives them. The standing folk have, mostly, not been taught the small attention, and so the standing folk hear only the wind-in-jug, and the standing folk find it strange, and the standing folk call the wood a singing wood. The name is fine. The name is wrong about the spirits, but the name is fine.
The eleven and the twelfth went through. I felt them go through. The pressures of the eleven told me they were uncomfortable. The pressures had begun to land with the small added weight of men who are trying not to look around. Men who are trying not to look around walk slightly heavier than men who are looking around, because the heaviness is the body’s way of pretending the body is not on alert. The pressures of the twelfth, the cliff-folk child, did not change. The twelfth had been raised in country where the spirits of the woods existed and were perceived, and the twelfth was, in the small steady meeting pressures, not afraid. The twelfth was paying her respects. The pressures said as much. The twelfth was walking with the careful even gait of one who knows the wood she is in and is offering it the small inclined head of a cliff-folk young one who has been taught.
I have said her. I will not pretend it was a guess. I knew by the pressures she was a girl. The cliff-folk’s boys and girls walk differently at thirteen. The girls’ weight distribution is along the inside line of each foot, a little more, and the boys’ is along the outside line. The pressures along the inside lines, the small even meeting along the inside lines, told me she was a girl. A cliff-folk girl of thirteen winters. A guide. The chief of the column had taken her. Probably from the village above the cove. The probable village had a small set of cliff-folk pressures that had been walking above me for thirteen winters with a particular small skip in the right foot, which had been a girl’s right foot, and the skip had developed in her tenth winter and had settled by her eleventh into a slight favoring of the left, and the favoring was, the small steady receiving told me, the favoring of one who had lost a small piece of weight from the left hand. The girl had lost a finger. The favoring was the body’s compensation for the asymmetric weight distribution between the hands. I had felt the favoring across three winters of her walking above the coast, and I knew it now in the pressures of the twelfth. The twelfth was that girl. The same girl. The cliff-folk girl whose family lived above the cove. The girl with the missing small finger of the left hand. The girl was now walking inland with the eleven heavy striking boots, and she had been raised, the receiving had told me across her three winters of skip-and-favoring, to listen.
I will say the rest of the dread now. The dread had two parts. The first part was the dread of the cliff-folk girl being among the eleven. I have given that. The second part was the dread of the chain of telling having missed her. The old ones had not warned me about the girl. The old ones had been told the eleven would come. The old ones had been told the hunting would happen. The old ones had been told the man Hrolv-Kan would, in the end, be swallowed by the dark and would crawl to this chamber and would be heard by one of my line. The old ones had not been told that the eleven would walk with a cliff-folk child between them. If the chain of telling could miss the girl, the chain of telling could miss other things. The chain of telling was, I understood for the first time in my two centuries, not a complete account. The chain of telling was the best account the old ones had been able to compile across many generations, but it was a compiled thing, and it had gaps. The gaps were where the new things would happen. The girl was the first new thing. There would be more.
I did not know what the more would be. I did not need to know yet. I only needed to know that they would come, and I needed to be ready to receive them through the stone the way I had received the eleven and the twelfth. I lay on the slab. I let the dread settle. I let the listening go on.
The column came out of the singing wood and walked east. I felt them across the rest of that first day. They camped at a small flat that I knew from the pressures of cliff-folk children, who had played there in summers gone, and where the cliff-folk’s herders had sometimes built their shrines. The column did not know the flat was a shrine-place. The men set their sleeping-furs across the line of the foundation without noticing. The girl moved her own sleeping-fur, the small careful meeting pressure I felt at the western edge of the flat, off the foundation line. So did one of the eleven, a heavier set of pressures with a particular harness-creak I had felt come and go three times in the column’s small arrangements, who I would later understand was the skald. The skald moved her sleeping-fur off the foundation also. The other ten lay across it. I noted the noting. The girl and the skald were the two among the eleven and the twelfth who had been taught the small attention that perceives. I filed the noting in the deep place where my noting goes.
The second day they walked into the country of the sleeping-light valley. I felt them enter. I felt them cross. I want you to know what it is to feel a sleeping-light valley from below. The valley sits in a small fold of the country where the karst beneath the floor is honeycombed in a particular pattern, and the pattern, the old ones taught me, holds light the way a sponge holds water, and the holding of light bends the time of the surface above. The valley is a kind of pause in the world. The pause is, in the cliff-folk’s reckoning, where the cliff-folk’s drowned dead come up to walk under sky again. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers are correct about this. The drowned dead come up. The drowned dead use the pause. The drowned dead are themselves, I have come to think, a kind of compressed listening. The drowned dead are creatures of memory that have refused to disperse, and the valley gives them the space to walk without dispersing.
The eleven and the twelfth walked through the valley. The pressures of the eleven told me they did not perceive the valley as the cliff-folk perceive it. The pressures of the eleven were the pressures of men walking across an ordinary oval of grass. The pressures of the twelfth told me she perceived. The twelfth gave, at certain points in the crossing, the small additional pressures that a cliff-folk young one gives when she inclines her head at a stranger she has met in a polite place. The small additional pressures are the foot resettling for a moment as the head moves. I felt three of them across the crossing. Three inclined heads. Three meetings with the dead. The twelfth had met three of her own in the valley, and had inclined her head to each, and had walked on. The skald gave me one such pressure also, near the middle of the crossing. The skald had met one of her own, or one of the cliff-folk’s whom she had recognized. The skald was a careful listener, in her own way. I filed her also.
The chief of the column gave no such pressure. The chief of the column, across the entire crossing, walked the same striking heavy iron-nailed boots in the same forward-leaning gait with the same small uneven landing on the right ankle. The chief did not incline. The chief did not meet. The chief did not perceive. The chief had stopped, the pressures told me, looking around. The chief was walking inside the small chamber of his own deciding. I will not need to tell you what kind of chamber that was. You have heard it described in other tellings. The skald’s bark, which I am told survives in fragments at the library at the Watching-Stones, gives a careful account. The chief in his chamber. The chamber without a window. I have not read the bark. I have only felt the boots. The boots in the sleeping-light valley were the boots of a man who had stopped looking. The boots, I noted in the deep place where my noting goes, would in due time take the man past every kind of looking, until the man would be in the deep dark of the underworld roots with no looking left.
I did not yet know that the man would arrive in my chamber. The chain of telling had told me he would arrive somewhere below, but the chain of telling had not been clear that he would arrive in my own slab-and-pool. The chain of telling was, I had now come to understand, an incomplete document. The chief might arrive in my chamber. The chief might arrive in another’s. I would be ready either way. The dark scale at my collar had not yet warmed and had not yet cooled. The dark scale would tell me when the time came. The dark scale always told.
The column came out of the valley. The pressures resumed their ordinary striking gait. The column camped that night on a small flat above a stream. The girl moved her sleeping-fur off the foundation-line of the second cliff-folk shrine, which the standing folk again had not noticed. The skald moved her own beside the girl. The other ten lay across the foundation. I noted.
The third day. The fourth. The fifth. I will not give every day. The chain of telling has the small encounters, the wolf at the cut, the fox in the watercourse, the quarrel at the evening fire, and the saga has them better than I can give them. I felt all of these. I felt the wolf as a small pressure on the path that was not a wolf’s pressure. The wolf moved like a man, in its small spacing of footfalls, but its weight was a wolf’s. The pressure told me the creature was a not-wolf, in the cliff-folk’s old word, although I had no need of the word, because the pressure was already its own description. I felt the fox as a smaller pressure following the column, and I noticed when the fox spoke, by the small change in the men’s pressures, the way an arrow’s nock changes the pressure of an archer’s foot. I felt the quarrel at the evening fire by the small step-forward pressures of Eystein and Snorri Hard-Hand as they raised their knives, and I felt the skald walk between them, and I felt the small pressure of the skald saying her mother’s proverb of the meat and the hunters. I felt the chief not rise. I felt the chief sitting at his place, turning the small dry weight of an iron ring against the small wet weight of his right thumb-pad, and I noted, again, that the chief was not rising.
The chief not rising at the quarrel was, in my noting, the moment I understood the shape of what was coming with the surface clarity I had been holding back. The chief was no longer a chief in the way the eleven needed him to be. The chief was an exhausted man who had begun to confuse exhaustion for righteousness. The chief would carry the eleven and the twelfth to the cliffs, and the chief would do what the chief had decided to do, and the chief would not be turnable. The skald could not turn him. The skald had tried and the trying had been a thing the skald had done in a half-rhymed proverb on the wharf at the chief’s home harbor, and the chief had not heard. I knew the wharf-proverb because the chain of telling included a version of it, which the old ones had been given by a cliff-folk grandmother who had heard it sung once in her own youth by a wandering trader who had come back from a northern voyage with strange songs. The half-rhymed proverb of the storm and the wave and the bone. The chain of telling had given me the proverb. The chain of telling had been right about the proverb but had been wrong about whether it would land. The proverb had not landed.
The girl had not yet been able to turn him either. The girl had not been in a position to. The girl was a captive guide and was not turning anyone. The girl had been doing the small careful work of the captive, which was the work of giving the chief just enough true guidance to remain useful while protecting what could be protected of her own people. She had told him the herders. She had told him the Old Tooth. She had not told him about the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps, or rather, she had not told him to avoid it. The chief had decided to enter the valley. The girl had not stopped him. The not-stopping had been, the cliff-folk’s grandmothers would say, a small careful gift to the dead, who got to walk among the eleven for one slanted gold afternoon while the eleven did not see them. I will not contest the cliff-folk’s grandmothers on this. I will say only that I felt the dead in the valley also, in the small density-changes that the karst beneath the valley passes down to me when the drowned come up. The density of the karst increases very slightly during such walkings. The increase is the same as the increase one would feel if a body of average size lay against a piece of limestone at the surface. I felt seven such density-changes during the crossing. Seven of the cliff-folk’s drowned were up in the valley that afternoon. The eleven walked past them. The girl inclined her head to three of them. One of them spoke to the girl, in a way that the wind carried only to her, and I felt the small pressure of the speaker as he turned to look at the chief and made his small dry assessment, and I noted that the speaker had been a wandering trader in his living days, by the particular foot-roll of his pressure, the foot-roll of one who has crossed many countries. The trader was a recent drowned. I had felt the trader on the cliff path above me three winters earlier, in his living days, and now I felt his pressure changed, recent-drowned. The cliff-folk did not yet know.
I noted. I noted. I noted. The noting goes into the deep place. The deep place holds. I will say to you now, sitting on this slab in the cold above the black pool with the water dripping, that the noting from those days has not faded. I can give you the foot-roll of the trader still. I can give you the small skip in the right foot of the cliff-folk girl. I can give you the chief’s iron-nailed boot with its uneven right ankle. The noting holds.
The sixth day they reached the Old Tooth. I felt them climb it. The Old Tooth has its own particular karst pattern beneath it and the pressures from its slopes are sharper, more easily read, because the karst is denser there. I felt the chief kneel in the meadow below the white peak. I felt the chief’s right hand go down onto the crushed oval of grass where Raptoris-Sol had lain. I felt the small intake-pressure of the chief’s gathered breath. I felt the man’s certainty arrive, in the small forward press of his weight, that the beast he had come to hunt was real and was within reach. I felt the eleven gather behind him. I felt the skald not press forward, and the girl not press forward, and the two of them stand at the small distance that the careful keep from the certain. I noted all of it.
The seventh and the eighth, the column walked through the wild hills east of the Old Tooth. I felt them pass through country I had not had to feel for in many years, because the cliff-folk’s herders did not go there and I had not had reason to listen for the wild hills’ karst. The karst is thinner there. The pressures arrive more faintly. I had to listen harder. I listened harder. I lay on the slab and I tilted my head, in the small slow way I tilt it, to bring the throat-stud into closer contact with the limestone, and the small turning of my head caused a small ripple in the black pool below, and I felt the water move and I heard, with my ordinary ear, the small wet slap of the pool against the slab’s lower lip. The wet slap was the only motion I had made in many days. I would not need to make another. I had set my body the way I needed it, and the listening would go on from there.
The ninth day they camped at the last fold of country before the cliffs. I felt the small distance, in the karst, between their camp and the rim of the cliffs above me. I knew, by the karst’s distances, that they would reach my own cliff-top tomorrow morning. I knew the great shape would meet them there. I knew the great shape was, that night, hunting in the wild hills, perhaps two valleys north of where the column lay, on the slow beasts that still grazed in the high country. I felt the great shape’s pressures, faint, infrequent, the way the great shape always felt to me, like the heartbeat of a thing too large to perceive at full strength. The great shape did not come close enough that night for me to feel it strongly. The great shape did not need to. The great shape was approaching its own appointment with the morning, and the great shape was, in the small slow steady way of all things that have lived a long time, ready.
I waited.
The chief sat at the embers of the camp that night and did not sleep. I felt the small steady pressure of his sitting. I felt the small turning of the iron ring against his thumb-pad. I felt the small absence of his sleeping. The other ten slept in the small steady pressures of sleeping men. The girl did not sleep at first either, and then she slept. The skald did not sleep at first and then slept. The chief sat. He sat. He sat. He sat. The autumn would arrive properly in the morning.
I will say one more thing about the night.
In the deep hours of the dark, I felt a single pressure I had not felt before. The pressure was small and slow and was on the surface above me, perhaps directly above this chamber. The pressure was the small careful meeting pressure of a single set of cliff-folk feet, walking alone, at the third hour before dawn, along the cliff path. The pressure had a particular slow tread that I knew. The tread was the tread of an old woman of the cliff-folk’s wind-women, walking along the cliff path with a single shell in her hand. I felt the small additional pressure of her thumb turning against the shell’s edge. I had felt the same pressure many times across the past nights, since the autumn began. The old woman had been going to the cliff-edge each night for many nights and turning a shell in her hand and looking out at the open sea. The old woman was the cliff-folk girl’s grandmother. The grandmother was, in the small steady careful tread, doing her own waiting. The grandmother and I had never met. The grandmother had not known I was below her cliff. The grandmother had not needed to know. The grandmother was turning a fifteenth shell that she had kept all her life against the breaking of a fourteenth. The grandmother was holding the shell as a kind of bracing of her own waiting. The grandmother was, in the deep place where I file such things, my counterpart. We were both listening. We were both turning small mineral objects in our hands or against our hide. We were both waiting for the morning. We were the two grandmothers of the matter, if I will let myself use the word for myself, which I will, because there is no other word in any tongue I know for what I was being that night. I was a grandmother. The cliff-folk’s grandmother was a grandmother. The two of us were holding the matter in our slow steady ways while everyone else in the country slept or sat or walked toward what the morning would bring.
I will say it again: drip, drip, drip.
The morning came.
I felt the column rise. I felt the eleven repack the supplies. I felt the chief set his weight forward in the first step of the last walk. I felt the girl walk at the front beside Ulf, in the small light pace I had now learned to recognize from any other pace in the country. I felt the skald walk behind them with the small additional weight of the bark and the brass-capped pencil. I felt the column descend through the wood of the strange copper-barked trees. I felt the column cross the wide flat of pale tall grass. The pale tall grass. The same grass, my chain of telling had said, that had grown in the high valley where Raptoris-Sol’s egg-stone had stood. The grass had crossed the world by the slow seeping of seeds in the wind, or by some other way the chain did not give. The grass was here. The column walked across it. The grass passed under their boots the same way it had passed under the wings of Raptoris-Sol’s first hour, and the standing folk did not perceive the matching, but I perceived it, and I perceived that the girl perceived it also, because the small additional pressures of her right thumb at the bracelet on her left wrist had told me, over the past nights, that the girl had begun to recognize her own dream-grass in the world above. She had touched the third knot, often, in the last two days. She had not yet touched the fourth.
I felt the column climb the long high ridge. I felt the column reach the top. I felt the chief look up.
I felt the chief look up.
I felt it because the chief’s body changed at the top of the ridge in a way I had not felt from the chief in many days. The chief’s weight shifted onto his heels. The chief’s iron-nailed boots flattened down into the cliff-top grass in their fullest distribution, in the way a man’s boots flatten when the man has stopped to take in a thing larger than he had expected. The chief was looking up. The chief was seeing the great shape above the cliffs. The chief’s right thumb stopped turning the iron ring. The chief was still. The chief was, for the first time since the storm at sea, still.
The great shape was wheeling above the cliffs. I felt its slow circles in the karst, even at the great height, because the karst has a way of receiving wing-pressure when the wing is large enough. The wing was large enough. The great shape was beginning its slow descent toward the cliffs.
The autumn had arrived properly.
I lay on the slab. The dark scale at my collar was beginning, for the first time in two centuries, to warm.
I will say to you what the warming felt like. The warming was not a heat. The warming was a slow change in the way the scale lay against the small hard ridge of my collarbone. The scale’s temperature had been the temperature of the chamber for as long as I had worn it. The temperature was changing, very slightly, toward the temperature of the surface above. The surface above, that morning, was the cold autumn temperature of the cliff-top in late Helmus. The scale was tuning itself, in the small slow way of such scales, to the place its parent body was at. The scale was answering the great shape. The scale was waking.
I did not move. The scale would do its waking in its own time. The scale would tell me what it needed to tell me when it needed to tell me. The patience of the deep places does not interrupt the patience of the scale.
I will tell you the rest of the morning in the next telling, because the rest of the morning is the breaking of the tail, and the breaking of the tail deserves its own telling, and I will need to rest before I give it. The breaking is the part I have lived for. The breaking is the part the chain of telling has spent the longest time preparing me to receive. I will receive it in its own hour.
For now I lay on the slab. The water dripped. The pool was black. The scale at my collar was warming, very slowly, toward the cold of the cliff-top.
I had been listening for the autumn for two centuries. The autumn had arrived. I was ready in the way only a thing that has waited two centuries can be ready, which is to say not eagerly, not bracingly, not with any kind of forward press, but with the long slow open posture of a creature that has set itself down on a slab and has agreed to receive what is coming.
I received.
The drip went on. Drip. Drip. Drip.
The morning continued above me.
I listened.
Segment 13: “Cornered at the Cliffs of Falling Stars”
She came over the last fold of the ridge with the rest of the column and stopped, and the world she had been walking in for thirteen days was no longer the world she was in. This was the difficulty with great moments. They did not, as the longhouse songs claimed, arrive with a sound. They arrived with a small private adjustment of the air around one’s shoulders, in which one understood, before any of the larger faculties had had time to catch up, that the air was now arranged differently. The skald felt the rearrangement in the moment she crested the ridge. She felt the sea-wind come up at her cheek with the precise sharpness it had carried all morning, and she felt also a second thing inside the wind, a held thing, the way a cup of cold water holds a single drop of warm oil at its center. The held thing was the presence of the beast. It was already in the wind. The wind had been carrying it for some time, perhaps since they had begun the long descent through the copper-barked wood at first light, and she had been receiving it without recognizing what she was receiving, the way a person in a long-occupied house receives the small unique smell of the house and stops noticing it. She noticed it now. The wind was occupied. The wind had a tenant. The tenant was wheeling above the cliffs.
She looked up.
She had not, she would think later, fully decided to look up. The skald in her was simply trained to look up before looking along, by the same long inheritance her mother had taught her and by the small recent additional teaching of having watched a thirteen-year-old cliff-folk girl look up at the cliff-tops on the evening of the cove. One did not arrive at an unfamiliar high place without first taking the measure of the sky. The sky was the first room of any new house. She lifted her face. The sky above the Cliffs of Falling Stars was a clear pale autumn sky, the standing cloud of fifteen months gone entirely, and the sun was at perhaps two hands above the east, where it ought to have been at the second hour of morning in late Helmus, and the air at this height was the cold thin air of cliff-tops everywhere. And in the middle of that ordinary autumn sky, the beast was wheeling.
She had been told what it would look like. She had been told by traders, by the cliff-folk girl Kaela in fragmentary descriptions over the inland days, and by her brother at the longfire on the night of the oath when he had named the matter for the men. She had carried, in the small back-of-the-head place where a skald keeps the shapes she expects to need, an image assembled from these tellings: wings the color of evening cloud, body long and dark, tail long and heavy, eyes the color of an undecided storm. The image she had carried had been a serviceable image. The image had not prepared her for the actual creature. This was, she thought, with the small dry click that the cliff-folk had given her a word for, the way it always was. The skald gathered her descriptions in advance because the description was the only thing the skald could prepare. The thing itself, when it came, was always larger than the description, or smaller, or shaped along an axis the description had not anticipated. The thing itself was the surprise. The describer’s job was to receive the surprise and to begin, in the small first moment of receiving, the work of finding new words for it.
The beast above the cliffs was larger than her image had suggested. The wings were not the wings she had imagined; they were not the wings of any bird she had ever seen, and they were not the wings of any of the small dragon-figures she had observed in the trader-brought carvings of the southern courts. The wings were long and narrow at the body and broadened at the outer reaches, with a curve at the tip that made the air seem to fold around them rather than be displaced by them. The wings did not flap. They were spread wide and held flat, riding a column of rising air the way the cliff-folk’s hawks rode the columns above the cliff-paths in the middle hours of the day, but the column the beast rode was a column the skald could not have detected with her own senses, and the beast rode it with the small unhurried steadiness of a creature that had been riding such columns for longer than the cliffs themselves had been standing. The body below the wings was long, longer than she had imagined, the length of perhaps three of her brother’s longships set end to end, and it hung from the wings in a way that did not suggest weight. The body was not pulling the wings down. The body was, somehow, riding the wings. The tail came off the body in a long slow curve that went on for as far again as the body itself, and the tail ended in a heavy knot of bone and scale that even at this height she could see was the part that mattered.
The color of the wings was not the color of evening cloud. The traders had been wrong, or the traders had been right but had been using a phrase that did not fit what she was seeing. The wings were the color the sea took in the moment after a stone broke its surface, in the small dark spreading from the broken place outward, mixed with the color of the cliffs themselves at the moment of sunset. They were the color of a place where two things were meeting. The skald, who had been making her professional living for thirty-four years out of finding the names of colors, knew that she would not find a name for the color of those wings, and that the longhouse audiences would have to take whatever name she chose, and that they would not, looking up at any sky they themselves had access to, see what she had seen. The color was for this morning only. The color was a single occurrence in a single life. She let the color sit on her eyes and did not try, yet, to convert it into words. The conversion would happen later. The conversion would happen at a fire, perhaps, in a hall she had not yet entered, perhaps not at all.
The eyes she could not see at this height. The eyes were too far. The traders had said they were the color of a storm that had not yet decided where it would fall. She would have to believe them about the eyes for the time being. She might, in the next hour, see them more closely. She might not.
The beast wheeled. It wheeled in a long slow circle, perhaps a half-mile across at the widest, centered over the cliff-edge in front of them, and the circle was descending, very slowly, by perhaps the height of a tall pine each turn. The beast was coming down. The beast was, the skald understood with the small click, choosing this ridge for some reason she did not yet know, and was preparing to come to ground, or to come to a hovering pause that would not quite be ground, somewhere on the cliff itself. The beast had not flown away at the sight of the column on the ridge. The beast had seen them. The skald had no doubt that the beast had seen them; a creature whose eyes had been built for the perception of slow beasts at hunting distance would have seen eleven men and a girl on a long high ridge a half-mile away in the clear morning light at a glance. The beast had seen them and the beast had not fled. The beast had, instead, begun to descend.
She felt, in the small careful place she kept for such recognitions, that the beast was coming to meet them.
This was not a thought she would have shared with her brother. Her brother had been preparing for thirteen days, and for many days before the embarkation, to encounter a beast that would attempt to escape him, and that his hunters would, by skill and by the chains of thunderstone and by his own blessed certainty, manage to corner. The narrative of the cornering had been the central narrative of the chief’s planning. The cornering was the part of the saga the chief had been rehearsing in his small evening speeches, the part where the men would close in and the beast would have nowhere to go. The chief had not, in any of his preparation, prepared for the possibility that the beast would not need to be cornered. The chief had not prepared for the possibility that the beast would come down to them. The skald understood now, watching the long slow descending circle, that the beast was coming down to them.
The beast knew what was happening. The skald did not know how she knew that the beast knew, and she did not, at the moment of recognition, try to justify the knowing. There would be time later for justification. The recognition was its own evidence. The beast had seen the column at the top of the ridge. The beast had recognized the column for what it was. The beast had recognized the column, perhaps, in the way a creature that has lived very long recognizes the patterns of approach that have preceded other significant moments in its life, and the beast had decided, in the small unhurried way of a creature that did not need to flee, to come down and to face what was approaching it. The beast was not afraid. The skald could see this in the unhurried descending of the circle. A frightened creature would have stooped, or would have climbed, or would have turned the circle the other way to put the ridge behind it. The beast was doing none of these. The beast was descending in the steady spiral of a creature that had decided where it would be.
The skald, in the small dry click of professional recognition, understood that she had been wrong about the song.
She had named the song, on the second morning of the inland walk, the Hunt of the Mistaking. She had named it because she had judged the matter to be a matter of mistakings, the chief mistaking the storm’s mercy for the storm’s friendship, the men mistaking the chief’s certainty for the favor of the gods, the cliff-folk perhaps having mistaken something she had not yet identified. She had named it well, she had thought, for the kind of matter she had thought it was. The matter she was watching now from the top of the ridge was not the kind of matter she had thought it was. The matter was something else. The mistaking was not the center. The mistaking was, perhaps, one of the rooms in the matter, but it was not the building. The building was something larger. The building was the meeting between her brother’s column and a creature that had lived a great many ages of the world, and the creature had chosen to come down to meet them, and the matter had been, in some part of its largeness, the creature’s matter as much as her brother’s. She had been treating it as her brother’s matter. The naming of the song had reflected that. The naming had been a naming from the brother’s side of the matter. The naming had not made room for the side of the beast.
She had a choice. She knew it within the same breath she had the recognition. She had told herself, on the second morning of the inland walk, that she would permit herself one change of name per major undertaking, and only one. The change, if it came, would be marked, and would not be undone. The change was here. She would change the name. She would change it before the matter at the cliff-edge was done. She would change it now, in the small first hour of seeing the beast in the actual sky, because she would not allow the song’s name to be the wrong name during the most important hour of the matter. The change would be the only change. She would choose the new name carefully.
She thought of three possibilities in the small space of the next three breaths. The first was the Coming-Down of the Sky’s Hammer, which would honor the descending circle and the eventual breaking, and which had the virtue of being recognizable to the men. It would lie about the side of the beast, however, because it would name the tail by its weaponized form, and the tail in this morning was still the beast’s tail, and the song should not name the tail by its weaponized form until the tail had been weaponized. She set this aside. The second was the Hunt of the Beast Who Came Down, which named the side of the beast plainly, but which sounded, on her ear, like a hunt-song in which the beast was a passive party, when the beast was not being passive at all. The beast was choosing. The naming should reflect the choosing. She set this aside also. The third was the Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer, which contained two meanings, the choosing of the descending creature to come down, and the choosing of the men below to do what they were about to do, and which gave both choosings their proper weight. The two choosings were the matter. The matter was about which choosing would, in the larger reckoning of the song, turn out to have been the choice that mattered. The skald considered this third name for the space of one full breath, and decided it was the name, and held it, and set it down in the back-of-the-head place where her song-names lived.
The Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer. The new name was the name. She would write it on the bark at the next chance. She would mark the old name with the small dry cross-stroke of the retired-name. The song would, from this moment on, be the new song. The matter had been opened. She would not change it again.
She came back to the world. The world had not gone anywhere. The men of the column were still standing at the top of the ridge in the small loose line they had formed at the cresting, with their eyes mostly on the beast, although Audun son of Brand Two-Knives was looking, the skald noted, not at the beast but at the cliff edge below, in the small careful way of a man calculating distances, which was probably the most useful thing Audun could have been doing. Ulf was at her brother’s right shoulder. The cliff-folk girl Kaela was at Ulf’s right shoulder. The girl’s left hand was at her right wrist, on the bracelet of four knots, and the girl’s thumb was at the fourth knot, the skald saw, but not yet pressed. The girl was holding the fourth in reserve. The girl had walked thirteen days carrying the fourth in reserve. The fourth had been for the place from which she could not return, and the place was now beneath her feet, and she had not yet pressed.
The skald, looking at the girl’s thumb at the fourth knot, felt the small tightness under her breastbone become, for a single breath, something larger. She had been carrying that tightness for the whole of the journey since the morning at the wharf at Aern-Vík, and she had become accustomed to its weight, and the weight had been a useful weight, a small heavy companion that had kept her honest about what she was seeing. The weight grew now. The growing was for the girl. The girl had walked into the place from which she could not return without pressing the knot, which meant either that the girl had decided this was not yet the place, or that the girl had decided the place was the place but that the press would not yet be useful. The girl was, the skald understood, holding her gift back for some moment yet to come within this hour. The girl had been raised to use small choices when the large were taken away. The girl was, at thirteen, doing the small choice work of a wind-woman three times her age. The skald wanted, in the small unprofessional part of herself that the professional part had been told to keep quiet, to take the girl by the shoulders and to lift her, bodily, off this ridge, and to carry her back down the inland path to her own village above the cove. The skald could not do this. The skald was not the chief. The skald was the skald. The skald was bound by oath to her chief and bound also by her own deeper oath to her harp and to her mother’s voice and to the work of the song, and the work of the song required that she stay and see what would happen and find words for it. She stayed. She did not move toward the girl. She held the small heavy companion of the tightness and let it grow.
Her brother spoke. Her brother had been silent since the cresting. Her brother had been looking up at the beast with his pale eyes wide and his right hand on the haft of Gjafr-Bíta. The fourth iron ring in her brother’s beard was, again, motionless. The fourth had stopped its turning at the cresting and had not resumed. The skald noted this. The note was significant. The fourth had not stopped its turning since the storm, except in the moment at the cresting. The fourth was, the skald thought, doing some small unconscious work for her brother, a kind of self-soothing that had taken the place of his earlier ways of carrying his uncertainty, and the fourth’s turning had been a sign that the uncertainty was being managed inside him. The fourth was not turning now. The uncertainty, perhaps, was not being managed. The uncertainty was, perhaps, being permitted out into the open for the first time since the wharf. Or, the skald thought, with a different kind of click, the uncertainty was no longer being felt at all, because the certainty had become total, and the small unconscious self-soothing was no longer needed. She could not tell which from where she stood. She would watch.
Her brother said, in the carrying hall-voice he had been using all morning, the same voice he had used at the longfire on the night of the oath, “We will move down the ridge to the cliff-edge. We will form the line. We will set the chains.”
He gave the order with the small clear practical economy he had used at every previous deployment in his chieftainship. The men received it the way men always receive a familiar order. They began to move. The two pack-horses, which the company had picked up from the herders at the high meadow and which had been carrying the heavy bundles of the thunderstone chains for the past nine days, were brought forward by Snorri Hard-Hand and Eystein, who had between them, since the quarrel of the seventh evening, become the unofficial keepers of the horses by a kind of mutual unspoken agreement that the skald had noticed and approved. The two of them led the horses down the slope of the ridge with the slow careful steps that horses required on cliff-grass. The other men followed. Ulf walked at the chief’s right. Kaela walked at Ulf’s right, the chief not yet having said anything about whether the girl was to come down with the column to the edge, and the girl having decided, the skald saw, to walk forward unless told to stay. The decision was the decision of a witness who had chosen to be a witness. The skald approved of this also, and noted that her approving was itself a piece of the song’s becoming, because the song was learning to receive the girl on the girl’s own terms.
They walked down the slope of the ridge. The pale tall grass of the cliff-top moved around their boots in the sea-wind. The cliff-edge was perhaps four hundred paces ahead. The beast wheeled. The beast was, by the skald’s estimation, perhaps a hundred fathoms above the cliff-top now, and descending still in its long slow circle, and the descent was timed, the skald thought, with the column’s descent down the ridge slope. The beast was coming to meet them at the cliff-edge. The beast had timed it. The beast knew what it was doing.
The skald walked at the middle of the column with her bag of birch-bark at her hip and her harp-case slung across her back. She had not taken the harp out. She would not take it out today. The harp was not for the cliff-edge. The harp was for halls, much later, perhaps. She walked. She looked. She noticed.
She noticed many things in the four hundred paces. The skald’s craft required the noticing of many things at moments of consequence. She noticed that Asbjorn son of Hauk Far-Sight, who had the bow today, was holding the bow in the small loose ready way that meant he could draw it within a single breath but had not yet decided to. She noticed that Audun son of Brand Two-Knives was still doing the small distance-calculating glances at the cliff edge. She noticed that Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf had the small chains of thunderstone in their second bundle slung across his own shoulder in addition to the larger bundle on his pack-horse, the way a man does when he is uncertain whether the larger bundle will be enough. She noticed that Halvard son of Olaf Salt-Hand was making the small dry sound that was his grandfather’s habit before any difficult task, the small dry curse-mutter that meant he was preparing himself and would not, the skald knew from long observation, lose his nerve. She noticed that Thorir son of Ragnar Crow-Eye, who was the chief’s cousin twice removed and the youngest man on the hunt, was very pale, and was walking the slope with the small forced evenness of one who is determined not to show his fear. The skald noted Thorir particularly. Thorir was the man most likely to do something foolish in the next hour. The skald would keep an eye on Thorir.
She noticed her brother most of all. She had been noticing her brother for the whole of the inland walk and she would continue noticing him for as long as the hunt lasted. Her brother walked down the slope with the long easy stride of his line. The fourth iron ring was, she saw now, beginning to be turned again, very slowly, by his right thumb. The turning had resumed. The self-soothing had resumed. The uncertainty was, then, back in management. The certainty was not total. There was still a piece of him, somewhere inside the chamber of his deciding, that was unsettled. The skald felt, at the noticing, the small wave of love for her brother that she had been keeping in reserve, the same love she had felt at the wharf when he had asked her to stay a moment longer, and the love rose now and sat behind her sternum alongside the tightness, and the two of them, the love and the tightness, made a small uncomfortable room there. She let them sit. She walked.
They reached the cliff-edge. The cliff-edge at this point was a clean drop of perhaps thirty fathoms to the open sea below, with no shelf, no rockfall, no broken terrace. The drop was straight. The sea below was the dark blue-green of the southern coast in late autumn, and the surf ran against the cliff’s foot in long slow swells that were the surf the beast had been able to hear, on quiet nights, for as long as the beast had been riding the sky-rivers of this coast. The cliff-top at the edge was a slightly wider expanse of the pale tall grass, perhaps thirty paces wide at the broadest, and beyond the grass the ridge sloped up again on the inland side, and on the seaward side there was nothing but the air and the long fall. The chief stopped the column ten paces back from the edge. The chief gave the small hand-signal that meant form the line. The men formed the line. They formed it in the order the chief had drilled them in many times at Aern-Vík, with the chief at the center, Ulf and Bjorn-of-the-line on his right, Vigleik and Asbjorn and Audun on his left, the other men forming the second line behind the first. Bjorn was not here, of course; Bjorn was at the cove with the ship. The chief had reassigned Bjorn’s place to Halvard son of Olaf Salt-Hand on the inland walk, and Halvard now took Bjorn’s place on the right of the line with the small dry mutter still going under his breath. The skald did not form the line. The skald stood at the rear with the girl. The girl had walked down with the column and had not been told to stay, and now stood at the skald’s left, the bracelet at her right wrist with the thumb still at the fourth knot, the small fingers of the right hand laid lightly across the bracelet in the way one laid one’s hand across an animal one was preparing to release.
The beast was very close now. The beast had descended in its slow circle to perhaps twenty fathoms above the cliff-top, which was a height at which the skald could begin to see details she had not seen at the higher altitudes. The beast’s wings at this distance were larger than she had been able to take in from the ridge. The wings were so large that, when the beast banked at the inland edge of its circle, the inner wingtip passed at perhaps ten fathoms above the men of the line, and the men, the skald saw, all looked up, and three of them flinched, and Thorir son of Ragnar Crow-Eye took an involuntary half-step backward and then, with great effort, stepped forward again into the line. The wing did not strike them. The wing did not need to. The beast was, in the slow circling, demonstrating reach. The demonstration was, the skald thought, a kind of communication. The beast was telling the men what it could do without yet doing it.
The eyes she could now see. The eyes were the color of a storm that had not yet decided where it would fall. The traders had been right after all. There was no other phrase for the color. The eyes were large, set wide on the long narrow head, and they were looking, the skald saw, at her brother. The beast had identified the chief. The beast had identified the chief at the first descent and had been looking at him from a distance throughout the circling, and now at this height the looking was direct, eye to eye, between a creature whose age the skald could not estimate and a man of fifty-two winters who had walked thirteen days inland to meet it. The chief did not look away. The chief, to his credit, did not look away. The chief held the beast’s gaze with the same pale flint-colored gaze he had used at the longfire and at the cove and at the morning crest of the ridge, and the chief’s right thumb at the fourth iron ring stopped, again, its turning. The chief was, again, still.
The beast made a sound.
The skald would, for the rest of her life, struggle to describe this sound. She would attempt the description in seventeen different versions of the Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer across the next forty years, in seventeen different singing-halls, and she would never feel that any of the seventeen had captured it. The sound was not a roar. The sound was not a bellow. The sound was the sound the air had made in the high valley, ten thousand years before, in the first hour when the wings had opened and the air had arranged itself to belong to the thing in the air. The skald did not know this. The skald could not have known this. The chain of telling that gave Murn-the-Listener his prelude did not extend to her. But the sound was the sound. The sound was the sound of the air arranging itself, again, around the creature that the air had been made to hold. The sound came up from below the body of the beast and went out across the cliff-top and out across the open sea and back across the ridges of the cliff-folk country and down through the karst beneath the cliffs and into the deep chambers where Murn-the-Listener lay on his slab, and the throat-stud at Murn’s throat received the sound and the dark scale at his collar, which had been warming all morning, completed its warming and was now, the chain of telling has it, the temperature of the cliff-top above. The scale was awake. The scale answered. The scale gave the small returning pulse that was the chain of telling’s word for what one piece of Raptoris-Sol does when it perceives the rest of itself. The sound on the cliff-top went out and the answering pulse came up, although neither the men of the line nor the skald nor the cliff-folk girl perceived the answering pulse, and only the beast itself, with the small fluttering of attention along its scales, registered that one of its lost pieces was still in the world and was, at this hour, listening.
The sound on the cliff-top went into the men. The skald saw it go into them. The sound was not a sound that struck them and bounced off. The sound was a sound that entered them, through the open avenues of the chest and the throat, and arranged itself in their bones the way the air had arranged itself in the high valley. The men, the skald saw, were changed by the sound. The change was small. The change was a slight loosening of the small forced certainties they had been carrying since the morning of the cove. Thorir’s flinch came again, this time in the small loosening of his shoulders rather than the half-step backward. Halvard’s dry mutter stopped. Asbjorn’s bow, in his loose ready grip, sagged by a small handsbreadth. The men were being addressed. The beast had spoken, and the speaking had been a thing the men’s bodies recognized as speech, even though none of them knew the language. The chief, the skald saw, was changed also. The chief’s pale eyes did the small involuntary widening of a man receiving an unexpected piece of news. The fourth iron ring stayed motionless. The chief did not, the skald saw, look away. The chief’s hand on the haft of Gjafr-Bíta tightened by a fraction. The chief was holding himself in the certainty he had been holding all morning, but the certainty had been touched, and the touching had left a small visible mark.
The skald felt it also. She would not pretend later that she had not. The sound entered her chest along with everyone else’s. The sound arranged itself in her bones. The sound did not change her mind about the song. The sound confirmed her mind about the song. The sound told her, in the way only the wind in one’s own bones can tell, that she had been right to change the name. The Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer. The two choosings. The choosing of the descending creature to come down. The choosing of the men below to do what they were about to do. The song’s name was the song’s name. The new name was correct.
She made, in the moment after the sound had passed, the second of the decisions she had been preparing to make all morning. She would have to be honest with herself, all the rest of her life, about which decision had been the larger; she would lean, in her old age, toward saying the second had been the larger. The first decision had been the name. The second decision was the loyalty.
She decided, in that moment, that she was going to be the beast’s skald.
She would not stop being the chief’s skald. She had sworn an oath at the longfire on the night the chief had named the matter, and she would keep the oath in the form she had given it. She had sworn to ride with him. She had sworn to sing what was sung. She had sworn to sing what was true. She had sworn not to sing what was not true. The oath had said nothing about whose side of the matter she would render with greater fullness. The oath had left her free, in the small careful gaps a skald keeps in any oath she signs, to make her own decisions about the rendering. She would render the chief truthfully. She would not flatter him. She would also render the beast truthfully, with the fullness she would normally have given a hero. The song would have, when it was sung, two centers. The chief would be one. The beast would be the other. The men of the line would be small figures around the chief, and the cliff-folk girl would be a small figure between the centers. The song would not be a hunting-song in the longhouse sense. The song would be a song of meeting. The meeting was the matter. The meeting was what the beast had come down to do, and what the chief had walked thirteen days inland to do, and the meeting was the only thing the song would be honest in describing.
The decision was a hard decision. The skald did not pretend, even to herself, that the decision was easy. The longhouse audiences would not, at first, like the song. The longhouse audiences wanted hunting-songs in the longhouse sense. The longhouse audiences wanted a hero and a quarry. The hero was on the cliff-top in front of her with his hand on Gjafr-Bíta. The quarry was in the air. The longhouse song would have made the hero large and the quarry larger only so that the hero’s largeness would be larger in the overcoming. The skald was about to make a song in which the quarry was a center equal to the hero, and in which the overcoming, when it came, would be, in the song’s reckoning, an act done by the smaller center to the larger. The song would be, in the longhouse sense, an indictment of the hero. The song would be received in the longhouse with the small uncomfortable shifting that audiences gave to songs that made them feel something they had not paid the skald to feel. The skald would have to live with that. She would have to sing the song anyway, because the song was the song the matter required. The song could not be the song her brother wanted. The song could not be the song the men wanted. The song could be only the song that was true.
She set the decision down in the back-of-the-head place where the song now lived. The decision was the second irreversible decision of the morning, after the name. The decision would not be undone. The decision was the foundation on which the rest of the song would be built.
She felt, with the decision in place, a small unfamiliar emotion arrive. The emotion was a kind of relief. She had been carrying, since the wharf, the small weight of a skald who has begun to suspect that her chief is taking the band to a place she cannot accompany him in spirit. She had been managing the weight by keeping it private. The weight had been heavy. The weight now lifted, in the moment of the decision, because she had stopped pretending to herself that the song would manage to be loyal to both sides. The song would be loyal to one side and would render the other side honestly without being its servant. The skald had finally, after fifteen days of small private compromises with her own craft, given herself permission to choose. The choosing was, in the way only the deep crafts can be, freeing. She felt the lifting. She let the lifting happen. She did not show it in her face.
The beast above the cliff-top descended one more slow turn. The beast was now perhaps ten fathoms above the cliff. The beast’s wing-tip passed over the line of men at a height that the men could have touched if any of them had thrown a spear straight up at the right moment, and none of them did, because no man on the line wished to be the first to break the small quiet that had fallen over the cliff-top since the sound had passed. The chief held Gjafr-Bíta in his right hand. The chief did not throw. The chief was waiting. The chief had ordered the chains of thunderstone made ready, and Vigleik and Snorri Hard-Hand had brought the bundles forward, and the chains were now uncoiling on the cliff-grass beside the men of the line, the heavy black links glittering in the sea-light, and the chief had drilled the men on the throwing of the chains and the men knew their roles. The chief was waiting for the beast to come within the range of the chains, which was the range of perhaps three fathoms above the cliff-top. The beast was at ten and descending. The chief would have his moment soon.
The skald looked once at the cliff-folk girl beside her. The girl was looking up at the beast with the same careful empty look she had worn at the cove and on the inland walk, but the careful empty look had become, in this hour, less careful and less empty. The girl’s face had on it the small awe that the skald had seen on the faces of cliff-folk wind-women in the records the wandering trader had once described, the awe of a person who is being shown, in life, a thing she had been told about by her grandmother but had not believed she would see. The girl was being shown. The girl’s thumb at the fourth knot of her bracelet had begun, in the descent of the beast’s last turn, to press more firmly. The girl had not yet pressed the knot fully. The girl was holding the press in reserve still. The skald, looking at the girl’s thumb, understood that the girl had decided to press the fourth knot only at the moment when the moment from which she could not return was upon her. The moment was not yet upon her. The girl, somehow, had calibrated more finely than the skald had calibrated, and the girl knew that this was not yet the final hour. The girl was waiting. The skald approved of the waiting. The skald turned her face back to the air.
The beast came down to three fathoms above the cliff-top. The beast was, at this height, almost within the range of the chains. The men of the line had taken the small braced posture that meant they were ready to throw. The chief had not yet given the order to throw. The chief was looking up at the beast and the beast was looking down at the chief and the air between them was, the skald thought, full of all the things the longhouse songs had never made room for. Years would later make the skald aware of how many such moments there had been in the lives of all the heroes of all the longhouse songs of her line, the moments before the hero acted, the moments in which the air between hero and quarry held something that no longhouse song was equipped to carry. The skald would, across her remaining years, write versions of this single moment into all of the songs she made of older matters, into the songs of her father’s hunts and her grandfather’s hunts and the saga of the great whale at the Strait of Bones, and the audiences of her old age would, slowly, come to recognize the moment, and would, slowly, come to ask for songs that contained it. The Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer would be the first such song. The skald, on the cliff-top with the moment in front of her, did not yet know that the future of her craft would unfold from this single hour. She knew only that she was watching the moment, and that the song would carry it.
The beast did not strike first. The beast did not strike at all in this descent. The beast hovered, as much as a creature of that size could hover, at three fathoms above the cliff-top, with its wings held wide and a small spilling of air from the trailing edge of each wing that the skald could see in the way the pale tall grass at the cliff-edge bent and bent again in slow waves. The beast hung in the air above the chief. The beast was, the skald thought, still choosing. The beast was holding the third of its slow turns at a place where the chief’s chains could reach the tail if the chief gave the order. The beast was, in the small slow way of a creature that has lived long enough to understand the meaning of waiting, allowing the chief to make the choice that the chief had been preparing to make for thirteen days and for many days before. The beast was not making the choice easier. The beast was not making it harder. The beast was holding the air at the height of the choice, and the choice was the chief’s.
The chief raised his right arm. The arm went up slowly. The skald had seen the chief raise his right arm in this way many times across the years of his chieftainship. The arm went up before any great signal a chief made at a hunt. The arm was about to fall and the falling of the arm would be the order to throw the chains. The chief’s pale eyes were on the beast. The fourth iron ring in the chief’s beard was motionless.
The skald felt the cliff-folk girl beside her press the fourth knot of her bracelet.
The press was the smallest motion. The skald felt it because the girl was at her left and the girl’s right hand was at the girl’s right wrist and the girl’s right thumb made a small additional pressing of the small bone knot, and the skald in her professional attention saw it. The girl had decided the moment had come. The girl had decided this was the place from which she could not return. The girl had reached, with the press, for the fourth ancestor, Mer of the First Sash, who had made the listening, the strongest of the four, the one to be kept for the once. The girl had used her once.
The skald did not see what the girl received. The skald did not need to. The skald only saw the girl’s face after the press, and the girl’s face was, for a single breath, full. The careful empty look was gone. The full look was the look of a person who has been given, in the smallest of the small ways, the thing she has been waiting for. The girl drew in one long breath. The girl held the breath. The girl, the skald saw, was about to do something.
The chief’s arm fell.
The order was given. The chains went out from the men of the line in the long arcs the chief had drilled them in. Two chains went out from Vigleik. Two from Snorri Hard-Hand. Two from Halvard. Six chains in all, the heavy black thunderstone links flashing in the sea-light, the long lengths uncoiling in the air as they went, each chain weighted at the far end with a hooked iron grapple. The chains went out toward the long slow curve of the beast’s tail.
The beast moved.
The beast moved in the same small unhurried way it had been moving all morning, with the same lack of any visible alarm, but the moving was, the skald saw, decisive. The beast lifted its tail. The tail came up out of the line of the chains and the tail brought up with it the long curve of the body and the wings beat once, just once, in a slow downward push that sent a wave of air across the cliff-top that bent the pale tall grass to its roots, and the beast went up. The beast went up perhaps three fathoms in the single beat, and the chains, having gone where the tail had been, found no tail there, and the chains passed under the tail and continued out into the air over the open sea, and the grapples at the ends of the chains, the skald saw, snagged each other in the air in the way long thrown chains will snag, and the six chains became, in the moment, three pairs of tangled iron, and they fell, all together, in a long heavy fall, into the surf at the foot of the cliffs.
The men of the line stared.
The chief stared.
The skald saw, in the men’s faces, the small new piece of news that the morning had now given them. The news was that the beast was not a beast to be cornered. The news was that the chief’s plan had been built on an assumption the morning was about to dismantle. The news was that the chains, in which the men had placed the substance of their faith for the inland walk, were now in the surf at the foot of the cliffs and would not be recovered. The news was that the men, with their spears and their bow and their cousins by their fathers’ fathers, were on a cliff-top with a creature who had just demonstrated, in the smallest possible way, that the men’s preparation had not anticipated the creature.
The girl beside the skald let out the long breath she had been holding.
The cliff-folk girl had pressed the fourth knot, and the fourth knot had not, as far as the skald could see, summoned any visible ancestor, and the fourth knot had not parted any sea, and the fourth knot had not done any of the things that an outside observer would have recognized as the press doing work. The fourth knot had, the skald understood, done its work in the way the wind helped the gull. The girl had been holding herself for the moment. The girl had received the small confirmation that she was being held. The girl had used the long breath she had been holding to do, the skald saw with the click, a thing she had been preparing for the whole inland walk to do. The girl took the long breath she had let out, and drew in a fresh one, and stepped forward, past the skald, past the rear line of men, past the chief’s left shoulder, to a place perhaps two paces in front of the line of men, where she would be plainly visible to the beast above. The girl did not have any weapon. The girl was thirteen, small for her age, with a missing finger of the left hand, and a sash of fourteen white shells across her shoulders, and a bracelet of four knots at her right wrist, and a small bone falcon at her throat under her tunic. The girl raised her right hand, the hand without the missing finger, and she touched the small flat of her own collarbone once, briefly, in the cliff-folk’s gesture of greeting, the same gesture she had given the cliff-folk child with the shells in the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps.
The girl said, in the cliff-folk tongue, in a voice that did not carry far but that the skald could hear plainly because she was the nearest person, “I see you.”
The beast above the cliff-top, hanging now at perhaps six fathoms with its wings held wide, looked down.
The beast looked at the girl. The skald saw the long narrow head of the beast tilt very slightly, in the small movement of a creature attending to a thing that has greeted it. The beast’s eyes, the color of an undecided storm, were on the girl, and the girl was looking up at the beast, and the air between them held something the skald did not have a word for and would not, she suspected, find a word for. The thing in the air between the beast and the girl was not the thing in the air between the beast and the chief. The thing between the beast and the chief had been recognition without acknowledgment, the recognition of one large will by another. The thing between the beast and the girl was acknowledgment without recognition, the acknowledgment of one creature who had been taught the inheritance of attention by another creature who had given the inheritance, in some long past, to her ancestors. The girl was being seen. The girl was, finally, after the long day in the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps and the long inland walk and the long week of captivity, being seen by something that had not stopped seeing.
The beast made a second sound.
The sound was smaller than the first. The sound was, the skald thought, a sound only for the girl. The sound was perhaps even meant to be heard only by the girl, although the skald and the men of the line and the chief and probably Murn-the-Listener in his deep chamber all heard it, in different ways at different distances. The sound was the small acknowledging pulse of a creature that has decided to acknowledge a greeting. The sound went out across the cliff-top and the cliff-folk girl, the skald saw, smiled. The smile was the small unstudied smile of a person who has been given, in the smallest possible way, the answer she has been waiting for. The girl’s smile was, the skald thought, the second most beautiful thing she would see that hour.
The first was the beast’s choosing.
The beast chose, in the moment after the sound, to descend the last three fathoms. The beast came down. The beast did not come down to the cliff-top itself, because the cliff-top would not have held the beast’s full weight, and the beast had lived long enough to know what stone would and would not hold. The beast came down to the cliff-edge, the long curve of its body lying along the air above the edge, with the wings half-folded and braced against the rising sea-wind, and the great heavy knot at the end of the tail came to rest on the cliff-top itself, in the pale tall grass, perhaps fifteen paces from the line of men. The beast lay across the air. The beast was, in the way only a creature of that size could be, at rest. The beast had not been cornered. The beast had chosen to land at the cliff-edge, in a place where the men of the line could not surround it but could reach the tail-knot if they came forward, and the beast was now within the reach of the chief and his men in a way that the wheeling above had not been.
The chief, the skald saw, did not move for a long breath.
The chief looked at the beast lying along the cliff-edge in front of him. The chief looked at the tail-knot resting in the pale tall grass at fifteen paces. The chief looked at the long slow heave of the beast’s flank as it breathed. The chief, the skald saw, understood, in the smallest possible way, what had just happened. The beast had not been cornered. The beast had come down to the cliff-edge by choice. The beast was now, in a sense the chief could not articulate but could feel, offering the chief the thing the chief had come thirteen days inland to take. The beast was offering the tail.
The skald did not know, in that instant, what the offering meant. She did not know whether the beast was offering itself in submission, in some old way she had no inheritance for, or whether the beast was offering itself in a kind of dignity, in the way one offered one’s neck to a kinsman one had decided to allow to kill one. She did not know whether the beast was offering itself at all, or whether the beast was simply choosing the place of the meeting on its own terms and the offering was the skald’s reading. She did not need to know yet. She would have years to work out what the offering had been. She had now, in the moment, only the work of receiving what she was seeing.
She decided, in the same moment, the third decision of the morning. She would, when the song was made, not pretend to know what the offering had been. She would describe the offering as the offering and let the audiences make of it what they would. The song would not impose her reading on the matter. The song would carry the moment in the form it had been given. The skald who had been trained to find names for the colors of wings would not, in the matter of the beast’s intention, name the thing that had not given her its name. She would say only what could be said. The beast had chosen to land at the cliff-edge. The tail-knot had rested in the pale tall grass at fifteen paces. The chief had stood, holding Gjafr-Bíta, for a long breath without moving.
The chief moved.
The chief raised Gjafr-Bíta. The chief did not, the skald saw, throw it. The chief held it raised. The chief looked at the tail-knot in the grass. The chief, the skald saw with the small click that had been with her all morning and that became, in this moment, the heaviest click of her professional life, made the choice that the song would have to carry. The chief chose. The chief had been making this choice in small ways for many days. The chief now made it in the large way. The chief lowered Gjafr-Bíta and reached, instead, for one of the loose ends of the broken chains at his feet, which had not gone over the cliff because the men of the line had been carrying the second bundle as backup, the bundle Vigleik had been keeping across his shoulder all morning, and which Vigleik had set down on the cliff-grass when the line had formed. The chief picked up the second bundle. The chief lifted it in his right hand, and Vigleik, behind him, lifted the second of its grapples in his own hand, and the chief looked once at Vigleik, and Vigleik returned the look, and the two of them moved together, slowly, with the small careful pace of men approaching a wild thing that might or might not allow itself to be approached, toward the tail-knot in the grass.
The beast did not move. The beast lay along the cliff-edge with its wings half-folded and its long flank heaving in the slow breath of a creature at rest, and the beast watched the chief and Vigleik approach. The beast’s eyes followed them. The beast did not lift the tail. The beast did not pull the tail back along its body. The beast lay with its tail extended onto the cliff-top, the heavy knot in the pale tall grass at the place where the beast had chosen to leave it, and the chief and Vigleik came forward with the second pair of chains.
The skald, watching, understood that the breaking had begun.
She did not, even now, know whether the beast was permitting the breaking or whether the beast was simply unable to prevent it. She did not know whether the beast had chosen the cliff-edge knowing the chains would come, or whether the beast had chosen the cliff-edge to make some other meeting that the chief had refused. She did not know whether the second sound the beast had made, the small acknowledging pulse for the cliff-folk girl, had been the beast’s only act of choosing in the matter, and whether the rest was now to be the chief’s matter. She did not know. She would not know for many years. She would, in fact, never fully know. The not-knowing would, she understood with the same heavy click, be the song’s center. The song would carry the not-knowing the way a great hall carried a long beam at its highest point. The not-knowing was the matter.
She did one thing she had not planned to do. She unslung the harp-case from her back. She did not open it. She held it in her arms at her chest, the way a mother held a sleeping child. The case was heavy. The case was familiar. The case had been her companion across the voyage and the inland walk. The case was warm against her own chest. She held the harp not to play it, but because she needed, in the moment, to hold the thing that would, in some hall she had not yet entered, perhaps in some hall she would never enter, carry the song she was about to begin to make. She held the harp the way one held a witness. The harp was a witness. The harp was made of driftwood from the southern current that had brought its tree-bones from coasts she had never sailed to, and the harp had been strung by her mother with sinew and silver wire, and the harp had played the chord of beginnings on the second morning of the inland walk above the eastern rim of the high meadow, and the harp would, when she opened it next, in a hall many months from now, play the song that this morning had given her. She held the harp. The harp held still.
The cliff-folk girl beside her, who had stepped back from her two-paces-forward position to stand again at the skald’s left, was looking at the beast. The girl’s right hand had returned to her right wrist. The girl’s thumb was no longer on the fourth knot. The girl had used the fourth knot once and would not use it again. The girl’s thumb rested on the band of the bracelet itself, between the knots, in a small idle position that the skald understood meant the girl had finished her work. The girl had done what the girl had come to do, which was to be seen by the beast. The girl had been seen. The rest of the matter was, in the girl’s careful small accounting, the chief’s, and the skald’s, and the men’s, and the beast’s. The girl was a witness from this point. The girl had earned, by the press of the fourth knot, her place as a witness who had not been only an instrument.
The chief and Vigleik reached the tail-knot. The chief raised the second pair of chains. The chief, the skald saw, took a long slow breath. The chief looked down at the heavy knot of bone and scale in the pale tall grass at his feet. The chief looked up, one last time, at the long flank of the beast lying along the cliff-edge, and at the long narrow head turned to watch him, and at the eyes the color of an undecided storm. The chief, the skald saw with the heaviest click of the morning, did not lower his eyes. The chief was, the skald thought, looking at the beast as one looks at a thing one is about to betray and is asking, without quite asking, to be permitted to do it.
The beast did not lower its eyes either. The beast watched the chief with the steady gaze it had carried all morning. The beast did not nod. The beast did not blink. The beast did not give any sign that the skald could read as a permission. The beast simply held the chief’s gaze.
The chief made the small motion of his right hand that meant Vigleik should set the first chain. Vigleik moved. The chains began to be set around the tail-knot.
The skald, holding the harp at her chest, watched the chains go around the knot. She watched the second pair of grapples find their bite in the heavy bone-and-scale of the tail’s end. She watched the chief’s careful slow setting of the chain, the way a man set a snare he had practiced for many years to set. She watched the beast not move. She watched the beast’s slow breath continue along the long flank at the cliff-edge. She watched the cliff-folk girl beside her watch the beast, with the small full look the girl’s face had taken on after the second sound. She watched her brother, the chief of her father’s line, do the work of binding the tail of the creature that the morning had shown her she would have to make the second center of her song. She did not look away. She owed the moment the watching. She did the watching. She held the harp.
The wind on the cliff-top was the steady sea-wind. The pale tall grass moved around the beast and the chief and Vigleik and the chains and the heavy tail-knot. The morning was clear. The sun was at perhaps two and a half hands above the east. The standing cloud of the past fifteen months was gone. The world above was, for the first time in many seasons, the ordinary world of late Helmus on the southern coast of Hraevn-an-Ol, and inside the ordinary world was the matter of the binding, and inside the matter of the binding was the song, and inside the song was the skald, and inside the skald was the decision that the song would be true to the beast.
She would, in the next telling of the saga, have to describe what happened when the binding was complete. She would have to describe the breaking. She would have to describe the cry that shattered the air. She would have to describe what the chief did with the broken tail. She would have to describe the long carrying of the trophy back through the inland country, and the voyage home, and the forging of the club, and the rest of the matter. She would have to describe it all.
For this telling, in this segment, in the small hour at the cliff-edge that began with the cresting of the ridge and ended with the setting of the second pair of chains, she had done her work. She had named the song. She had decided the loyalty. She had decided the third decision, that she would not impose her reading on the beast’s choosing. She had received the morning. She had let the morning enter her bones. She had held the harp.
The chains were set.
The chief looked at her once, across the cliff-grass, in the small private way her brother had looked at her at the wharf at Aern-Vík. The skald, holding the harp, did not return the look in the way the chief might have wanted. She returned it in the way the skald had now decided to return all such looks for the rest of the matter. She returned it with the small clear neutrality of a skald in attendance, with nothing readable upon her face, and nothing in her eyes but the slow steady recording of a witness who had taken her oath and would keep it.
The chief, the skald saw, registered the change in her look. The chief did not understand it yet. The chief would understand it, perhaps, much later, perhaps in the long crawl through the underworld roots, perhaps not at all. The chief turned back to the tail and gave Vigleik the small motion of his hand that meant set the second.
The second chain was set.
The skald held the harp. The beast watched. The cliff-folk girl, at the skald’s left, did not press any knot. The wind blew. The morning held. The Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer, the new song, was a real song now. It had a name. It had a center. It had a witness. It had a skald who had decided to whom she would be loyal in the rendering.
The work of the song had truly begun. The skald held very still. She watched the rest of the binding. She held the harp at her chest. The matter went on toward what the matter was about to do.
Segment 14: “The Sky Splits with Fire”
Many years later, when she had become the kind of old woman whose grandchildren accused her, gently, of remembering too much, Kaela of the Cliffs would say that the only honest way to describe the moment the sky split open was to admit that no description would do it. She would say this in the kitchen of her own daughter’s house, on an afternoon in late Helmus, with a small fire of cliff-driftwood burning in the central hearth and the wind outside doing the small treacherous business it always did along the cliff face at that hour, and her grandchildren would not understand what she meant. They would think she was being modest, in the way old women sometimes were when pressed to recount the great events of their youth. She was not being modest. She was being precise. The moment of the splitting had not, in her experience, been a thing that words had reached. The moment had reached past her, into a place behind the place where words were made, and had laid itself down there, and had remained there for sixty years, and the only way she had been able to live with the laying-down had been to leave it alone. She had described, across the long years of her telling, many of the smaller moments of that morning. She had described the cresting of the ridge with the column. She had described the slow circle of the beast above the cliffs. She had described the press of the fourth knot of her bracelet, the one for Mer of the First Sash, and the answering small fullness that had risen in her at the press. She had described the cliff-folk gesture at her own collarbone and the small voice in which she had said, I see you. She had described the second sound the beast had made, the small acknowledging pulse that had been meant only for her. All of these she had been able to set down for those who asked. The splitting she had not described. The splitting she could not. She would say, when pressed, only that the sky had split, and that the splitting had been with fire, and that the men of the column had been thrown like grain, and that the beast had looked at her, and that the looking had been the thing she had been chosen for. The rest of the splitting she would not give, because the rest of the splitting was not hers to give, and the part she would give was already, in the giving, more than the words could honestly carry.
She would say, in the kitchen, that perhaps the truest thing she could say about it was that she had thirteen years old at the time, and that thirteen-year-olds saw things in ways adults could not. Thirteen was an age at which one had only just begun to learn that the world had a back and a front, and one had not yet developed the small adult habit of pretending that the front was the whole of it. A thirteen-year-old, when the front of the world tore for a moment and the back showed through, did not have any explanations ready. The thirteen-year-old only looked, and the looking entered her unprotected by any habit of management, and the looking laid itself down in the place behind words because that was the only place spacious enough to receive it. She had been thirteen. The splitting had laid itself down in her. The laying had been the act of being chosen.
She would not say more than that. The grandchildren would press, in the way grandchildren press, and she would smile, in the way grandmothers smile, and she would change the subject to whether the wind that afternoon was reading rain at noon or only damp. The grandchildren would let her change the subject. They would understand, in some way they had not yet learned to articulate, that they had been told a thing in the form of a refusal, and that the refusal was the form in which the thing had to be told. She would die at ninety-one in the same kitchen, and her grandchildren would, after her death, talk among themselves about the great matter of the cliffs, and they would not press. They would understand. The understanding would be her last gift to them, although she had not, herself, considered the not-telling to be a gift at the time. She had only considered it to be the truth.
She had stood at the rear of the line on the cliff-top in the small space the skald had left for the two of them, with the harp held now at the skald’s chest in the careful way the skald was holding it, and she had watched the chief and Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf walk forward together toward the tail-knot of the beast in the pale tall grass. She had watched the chief set the first chain. She had watched Vigleik set the second. The grapples had bitten into the heavy bone-and-scale of the tail’s end with small dry sounds, the way a goat’s bite into a young branch makes a small dry sound, and the chains had run back from the tail to where the other men of the line waited with the loose ends in their gloved hands, ready to brace and to pull when the chief gave the order. The beast had not moved during the setting. The beast had not lifted the tail. The beast had not pulled the tail back along its body, the way an ordinary creature would have pulled back a part of itself from a thing that was binding it. The beast had lain along the cliff-edge with its wings half-folded against the rising sea-wind and its long flank heaving in the slow breath of a creature at rest, and the beast had let the chains be set.
Kaela had thought, watching this, in the small careful private way she had been thinking all morning, that the beast was waiting. The beast was waiting for the chief to finish what the chief had begun. The beast was, in a way she did not have words for, giving the chief the opportunity to commit himself fully. The beast knew what the chief was doing. The beast knew what would happen when the chief gave the order to pull. The beast had decided not to prevent the setting. The beast had decided to let the chief make his choice in the form the chief had been making it in for the past fifteen days, since the storm at sea, in the long inland walk, in the small evening speeches, in the not-rising at the quarrel, in the not-looking up. The beast was permitting the chief his last choice. The beast was, in the small unstated way of creatures who had lived very long, treating the chief with a kind of dignity that the chief had not earned.
She had watched the chief set the first chain. She had wanted, in the small unprofessional part of herself that she had been managing all morning, to call out. She had wanted to step forward again past the rear of the line, and past the chief’s left shoulder, and to lay her hand on the chief’s right wrist, and to say in cliff-folk or in her broken northern, whichever came faster to her tongue, that the chief should not do this. She had wanted to say that the beast had come down to the cliff-edge by choice. She had wanted to say that the choice had been a gift the chief was about to refuse. She had wanted to say that the second sound the beast had made, the small acknowledging pulse, had been the beast’s acknowledgment that there was at least one person on the cliff-top who could hear it, and that the chief, who had been the one chosen by the beast for the first looking, had not been able to hear, and that the matter could yet, in the small narrowing window before the chains were set, be turned by a chief who took the offering for what it had been.
She had not called out. She had not stepped forward. She had not laid her hand on the chief’s right wrist. She had not said any of the things she had wanted to say. She had stood at the rear of the line with the skald beside her, and she had watched. She had understood, with the small dry click at the back of her head that her grandmother had taught her was the cliff-folk’s signal of a piece of knowledge taking its place, that her not-calling-out was itself the keeping of an inheritance. Her grandmother had said, many years before, that the cliff-folk did not interrupt a wind-woman at a reading and did not interrupt the dead at their walking and did not, in general, interrupt anyone or anything that had been given the room to do what it was doing. The chief was doing the thing the chief was doing. The chief had chosen the doing. The chief had been given the room. To call out would have been to interrupt. The interruption would not, perhaps, have changed the chief’s choice. The interruption would only have placed Kaela herself between the chief and the choice, and the chief would have moved her aside, with the small careful hand of a man who did not wish to hurt her but who would not be deflected, and the choice would have been made anyway. The interruption would have used up her small remaining power in the matter without altering the matter. The matter would happen. She would witness. The witnessing was, she understood with the small dry click, her own choice in the matter, and her choice was not the small choice of standing aside but the large choice of being the one through whom what was about to happen would be carried forward. The beast had seen her. The beast had acknowledged her. The beast had, the small fullness in her chest told her, given her the work of remembering. She would not waste the work by interrupting it before it had been done.
The chief gave the order to pull.
The order was the same small motion of the chief’s right hand that he had used at every previous deployment in his chieftainship, the small chopping motion downward that meant pull, in the way a chief gives an order in a moment when speech is no longer fast enough. The men on the chains braced their feet and pulled. The grapples bit. The chains went taut. The tail-knot in the pale tall grass moved, not toward the men, because the men could not have moved the tail of a creature of that size by their own strength, but a small fraction of itself, because the grapples had set well into the bone-and-scale and the chains had transferred the pull to the beast’s own body. The beast felt the pull.
The beast moved.
Kaela would say, in the kitchen, sixty years later, that the beast’s movement at this moment had been the moment she had stopped having the kind of normal time everyone else had and had begun to have the slower kind of time that the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps had once given her for an afternoon. She did not know how to explain this further. She would say only that the beast had moved, and that the moving had taken what would later, by other people’s clocks, have been counted as perhaps three breaths, and that for her the three breaths had been a long unfolding event of perhaps several minutes, and that during the unfolding she had had time to see many things she would not, in normal time, have had time to see. She had had time to see the small flexing of the muscles along the beast’s long flank as the beast prepared to lift the tail. She had had time to see the first small twitch in the beast’s wings as the beast considered what it would do with the air. She had had time to see the chief’s pale eyes go wide for the second time that morning, the first having been at the cresting of the ridge, and the second being now, at the small first registering of what the beast was about to do. She had had time to see the skald beside her lift the harp-case a fraction higher against her chest, in the small protective way one lifts a child closer when the child is about to see a thing the child should not be seeing. She had had time to think, very briefly, that her grandmother on the threshold-stone, far back in the village above the cove, was probably standing on the threshold at this very moment with the fifteenth white shell in her hand, and that her grandmother knew, in the small careful cliff-folk way, that the matter at the cliffs was happening now, and that her grandmother was, in her own way, helping her. She had had time to think all of these things.
Then the tail came up.
The tail came up not in the slow careful lifting the beast had used for descending, but in a single long whip-crack of motion that began at the base of the tail where it met the body and traveled along the tail’s whole length in a wave, the way a wave travels along a rope when one holds one end and snaps the other. The wave traveled the long length of the tail in what would later have been less than a single breath of ordinary time. The wave reached the tail-knot. The tail-knot went up.
The chains went with it.
The men who had been holding the loose ends of the chains went with the chains. They had braced their feet against the cliff-grass and locked their gloved hands on the chains’ ends in the chief’s drilled formation, and the formation had been built for a pull that would come from the men’s side. The pull came from the beast’s side. The men were not braced for a pull from that side. The men were braced for the side they were on. The chains went up, and the loose ends went with them, and the men’s gloved hands locked on the loose ends went up with the loose ends, and the men themselves, anchored by their locked grip, went up with their hands.
Snorri Hard-Hand went first. He was nearest to the cliff-edge. The whip of the tail snapped the chain Snorri held, and Snorri’s gloved hands did not let go, because Snorri Hard-Hand had been called Hard-Hand by his line for three generations and his grip was a thing that did not, in his understanding of himself, let go, and Snorri was lifted off the cliff-grass in a single sudden arc and was thrown perhaps fifteen paces outward over the cliff-edge, into the open air above the long fall, with the chain still trailing from his hands and his cloak flying back from his shoulders. Halvard son of Olaf Salt-Hand went next, on the second chain, and was thrown perhaps ten paces outward, his small dry curse-mutter still going on in the air, the saga of his line would later record, although whether anyone could actually hear it in the air above the cliff is a matter the songs do not agree on. Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf, who was second from the chief, was thrown by the third chain to a place farther along the cliff-top, perhaps twenty paces inland from where the chief still stood, and Vigleik landed on the cliff-grass in a long tumble, and the saga is not yet ready to report whether Vigleik rose from the landing or did not. Thorir son of Ragnar Crow-Eye, the chief’s young cousin, was thrown also, and Asbjorn son of Hauk Far-Sight, and Hauk son of Hauk One-Eye, and Audun son of Brand Two-Knives, and Eystein son of Olvir Sharp-Tooth, all of them. The men of the line were thrown like grain.
Kaela would remember the phrase. She had heard the phrase, like grain, in the trader’s accented cliff-folk three winters before, when the trader had described to her, in one of the long evenings of his winter at the village, the way the northern men spoke of the sowing of a field. Like grain. The grain went out from the sower’s hand in a long arc and fell where it fell. The men of the line went out from the cliff-edge in long arcs and fell where they fell. The phrase was the phrase. She would never afterward use the phrase for any other purpose. The phrase belonged, in her private accounting, to the morning of the cliffs.
Some of the men, the ones thrown over the cliff-edge, fell into the air. They did not land on the cliff-grass. They fell. The fall was a long fall, of perhaps thirty fathoms, to the open sea below, where the chains they had been holding fell with them and weighted them down into the dark blue-green water that ran at the foot of the cliffs. Snorri Hard-Hand let go of his chain at perhaps half the height of the fall, the saga would later report from the testimony of Eystein son of Olvir Sharp-Tooth, who had been thrown inland and had watched from his landing place, and Snorri’s let-go was the let-go of a man who had finally understood that some grips could not be kept, and Snorri fell into the surf without the chain and was, by Eystein’s later report, seen briefly to swim. Halvard let go also, at a lower height. Audun, the saga is sorry to report, did not let go, and was carried into the water with his chain still locked in his hands, and was not seen to surface. Two others, the songs do not agree on which, did the same. The cliff-edge held five of the men in the moment of the throwing, and lost four to the air, and the four who had been lost to the air would, the songs would later count, never be recovered as living men, although Snorri Hard-Hand, against all the cliff-folk’s predictions for a man of his weight and his cloak, would be found in the small hour of the late morning clinging to a sea-stack a hundred paces along the cliffs from where he had been thrown, having swum the distance, and would be helped back up the cliffs by his fellow surviving hunters later in the day. The cliff-folk had not, in their grandmothers’ reckoning, expected a heavy northerner to swim. Snorri had been an exception. Snorri would carry the exception with him into his old age, in the long winter halls where he would, decades later, sit and tell the story of the swim to his great-nephews, who would not always believe him, but who would not say so, because Snorri Hard-Hand at seventy-eight had retained the kind of grip on his stories that he had once retained on his chains.
But this is much later. The throwing of the men was not yet over. The whip of the tail had not been a single motion. The whip had begun with the lifting and the throwing, but the whip had continued, the way a long rope continued to move after one snapped one end of it, and the tail came down on the cliff-top a second time, in the place where the chains had been set, and the tail came down with a force that the cliff-top had not been built to receive. The cliff-top received it anyway. The cliff-top did what cliff-tops do when they are made to receive a force they were not built for. The cliff-top cracked.
This was the moment Kaela would, for the rest of her life, decline to describe.
She would say only what the others had said. There had been fire. The fire had not been a fire of any wood-burning kind she had ever seen. The fire had been the fire that came from inside the stone of the cliff when the stone of the cliff was broken at a depth the cliff itself did not know it had. The fire was the small private fire of the cliff’s own heat. The fire had come up out of the crack in the cliff-top as a long thin line of light, and the light had run upward, into the air above the cliffs, in a way that the air had not been built to receive either, and the air had cracked also, in answer, the way a piece of dry leather will crack when it has been stretched too far. The air’s cracking had been the sky’s cracking. The sky had split. The split had run from the cliff-edge upward and outward, in a long thin line of light that had gone on, the saga of her later life would later report, for what looked like a great distance, although how far could not afterward be measured by any of the cliff-folk’s instruments. The sky had split with fire. The split had been brief. The split had closed again, perhaps in the time it would take a person to count to seven, by the saga’s reckoning. The sky had healed itself. The cliff-top had not. The cliff-top still bore, sixty years later when Kaela the old woman returned to lay shells, a long thin scar where the stone had been broken by the tail’s coming-down, and the scar was filled with a slightly different color of grass than the rest of the cliff-top, and the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had a name for the kind of grass that grew in such scars, and the name was not a name Kaela would translate.
The men of the column who remained on the cliff-edge had been thrown either over or back. The chief had been thrown back. He had been holding Gjafr-Bíta in his right hand and had not been holding any chain, and the whip of the tail had passed over him rather than catching him, but the second coming-down of the tail had thrown the air around the cliff-edge so hard that the chief had been lifted off his feet and thrown perhaps twelve paces inland onto the cliff-grass, and he had landed badly, on his left shoulder, in a small heap of wolf-cloak and iron-banded beard and pale flint-colored eyes that had, for a long moment, looked at the sky without seeing.
Vigleik landed near him. Eystein landed near him. Asbjorn landed farther. Thorir, the chief’s young cousin, landed nearest to Kaela and the skald, perhaps five paces away, and Thorir lay in the grass making a small high sound that was not quite words and not quite weeping but the sound of a young man who had been thrown by something he had not been trained to be thrown by, and Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand, who had been at the chief’s right shoulder during the setting and who had not been thrown over the edge, ran to Thorir and knelt beside him and laid a hand on Thorir’s chest and said in the northern, “Lie still, cousin. Lie still.” Thorir lay still. The small high sound continued for a moment and then stopped. Thorir was, the saga would later report, alive, but had broken his left arm at the landing, and would not be able to lift Gjafr-Bíta or any other weapon for two months afterward, and would not, in fact, ever again be quite as quick on his feet as he had been before, although these matters are for later.
The skald beside Kaela had not been thrown. The skald had been at the rear of the line, with Kaela, ten paces back from where the chains had been set, and the force of the tail’s coming-down had washed over them as wind only, lifting the skald’s grey wool cloak from her shoulders for a single breath and then dropping it again. The skald had held the harp-case against her chest through the whole of the throwing. The harp-case had not, the skald would later confirm in private to Kaela, opened or been damaged. The skald and Kaela had been the only two people on the cliff-top who had not been thrown by the second coming-down of the tail, and the not-being-thrown had been, Kaela would always understand, a thing the beast had managed deliberately, in the way creatures of that age were able to manage the placement of force at the level of a single body within a crowd.
The beast had not thrown her. The beast had not thrown the skald either.
The reason the beast had not thrown them was the reason that Kaela would, in the kitchen many years later, decline to describe.
The beast had looked at her.
It had looked at her in the small slow time of the unfolding, in the same long slow time the morning had been moving in since the tail had come up. It had looked at her after it had thrown the men and after the sky had split with fire and after the cliff-top had cracked. It had looked at her in the moment just after the second coming-down. Its head had been turned along the cliff-edge in her direction, perhaps fifteen paces from where she stood, and its long narrow face with the eyes the color of an undecided storm had been turned toward her, and the eyes had met hers.
The eyes had been close enough, at this distance, that she could see in them what she had not been able to see from the higher altitudes. The eyes had not been the color of any single weather. The eyes had been the color of every weather she had ever seen the cliff-folk’s wind-women read, and many weathers she had not. The eyes had been the gray of the standing cloud that had hung above her village for fifteen months. The eyes had been the gold of the slanting evening light in the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps. The eyes had been the dark blue of the cross-wind that meant rain inland. The eyes had been the small pale lavender of the late-Helmus dawn over the open sea. The eyes had been all of these at once, and she had understood, in the small long moment of the looking, that the eyes were a kind of library, the way the harp at the skald’s chest was a library, and the bracelet at her wrist was a library, and the fourteen white shells of her sash were a library, and that the eyes of the beast contained the readings of every wind the beast had ever flown in across the very long age of its life. The eyes were the cliff-folk’s whole inheritance carried in a single pair of looks, except that the inheritance had been gathered not in seven generations but in many thousands.
She had met the eyes. She had not looked away. She had remembered, in the small calm part of herself that had carried her through the long inland walk, her grandmother’s instruction about the dead in the valley, that one did not interrupt a creature that was doing the work of regard. The beast was doing the work of regard. The beast was looking at her. She would not interrupt by looking away.
The beast had spoken, then, the third sound it had made on the cliff-top.
She would say in the kitchen, sixty years later, that the third sound was the sound she had been most reluctant to describe, even more reluctant than the splitting. The sound had not been loud. The sound had not been a roar or a bellow. The sound had been small, almost a hum, and the hum had been pitched at a frequency that her ears had not received in the ordinary way her ears received sound. The hum had entered her chest through the small flat of her own collarbone, where she had touched her hand in the cliff-folk’s gesture of greeting at the moment of the I see you. The hum had used the gesture as its door. The hum had come in through the door her gesture had opened. The hum had laid itself down in her, in the place behind the place where words were made, and the hum had said, in the way only such hums could say, the thing she would not, for the rest of her life, repeat.
She would say, when pressed by the grandchildren, only that the hum had told her she had been chosen. She had been chosen to remember. The remembering would be her work. The work would last her life. She would not need any other work. The work of remembering the beast was a work that took, in the small inheritance the beast had given her at the moment of the hum, the whole of a human life to complete. She would not run out of work. She would not, in her ninety-one years, ever feel that she had done enough work. The work was the work. The work was the chosen burden. The burden was the gift. The gift was the burden.
She had received the hum. She had received the chosen-ness. She had received the work. She had stood at the rear of the line with the skald beside her holding the harp, and the cliff-top scarred with the long thin crack and the men of the column scattered like grain in the cliff-grass and the chief lying on his left shoulder in his wolf-cloak twelve paces inland, and the beast had lain along the cliff-edge with the chains of thunderstone still bitten into its tail-knot and the long thin trail of the chain that had not let go of Audun son of Brand Two-Knives going over the edge into the sea below, and the eyes had been on her. The eyes had been on her for what could not have been more than a single breath of ordinary time but had been, in the slowed time of the unfolding, what felt to her like an entire afternoon. The eyes had held her. The eyes had given her the hum. The eyes had said, in the part of her behind the words, you will remember this. You will be the one. The cliff-folk are mine and you are theirs and the line runs back through the seven generations of your wind-women and back through the long age of my flying and back through the high valley where the egg-stone stood and back through the first hour when the wings opened, and the line ends in you for this morning. You are the end of the line for this morning. The work of carrying this morning forward begins with you. Begin.
She would not say, in the kitchen, that this was what the hum had said. She would say only that the hum had spoken. She would say that the speaking had been a great honor and a great burden and that she was not sorry to have received either.
The eyes had then closed.
This was the part of the morning that the saga of her later life had always given the smallest space to in any of its telling. The eyes had closed. The beast had not yet died. The beast was not, at the closing of the eyes, going to die for some hours yet. The closing of the eyes had been a separate act from the dying. The closing had been the beast’s small considered withdrawal from the work of looking, after the looking had been completed. The beast had looked at the chief in the descent. The beast had looked at her at the cliff-edge. The beast had given the chief the chance to make his choice and the beast had given Kaela the chosen-ness, and the beast had finished what the beast had come to the cliff-edge to do, and the beast had closed the eyes the way a teacher closes a book at the end of a long lesson. The beast was, after the closing of the eyes, no longer engaged in the work of attention. The beast was now engaged in the work of being what was about to happen to it. The work of being what was about to happen was a different work and required the closing of the eyes, the way the cliff-folk’s own dying-people closed their eyes for the last hours of the dying. The beast had closed its eyes for the same reason. The closing had been a small dignity. The closing had been the beast’s last act of dignity.
What happened after the closing of the eyes is what the saga of the chief’s line tells, and the saga has told it in the way the saga tells such things, with the chief rising from the cliff-grass and being helped to his feet by Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand, and the chief shaking himself like a wet dog and finding his pale eyes again, and the chief looking at the scattered men of the line and counting them and finding that four were over the cliff-edge and five were on the cliff-grass and that one of the five was Thorir with a broken arm and one of the five was Vigleik who had landed badly and would not rise easily, and the chief looking at the long thin scar in the cliff-top, and the chief looking, finally, at the beast lying along the cliff-edge with its eyes closed and the chains of thunderstone still set in its tail-knot. The chief had walked, the saga reports, in the small careful steps of a man who had been thrown and had risen, to the place where the tail-knot lay in the pale tall grass. The chief had stood at the tail-knot. The chief had raised Gjafr-Bíta in his right hand. The chief had looked once at the beast’s long flank, which was still heaving with the slow breath of a creature that had not yet died, and the chief had not looked at the beast’s eyes, because the eyes had been closed, and the chief had perhaps not been able to look at them even if they had been open, because he had been changed by the throwing in a small way the saga of his line would later carry forward.
The chief had brought Gjafr-Bíta down on the place where the tail met the body.
The cut had taken many strokes. The bone of the tail at that junction had been the heaviest bone the chief had ever cut, and Gjafr-Bíta, while a good spear, had not been built for the cutting of bone of that size, and the cut had been a thing the chief had done in the long slow work of perhaps half an hour, with Ulf and Eystein and Asbjorn helping at intervals, and with the beast, the saga must report, not moving during the cutting. The beast had lain with its eyes closed and its long flank heaving and its tail-knot under the chains and the chief had cut, and the beast had not moved.
Kaela had watched. Kaela had not looked away. The skald beside her had not looked away either. The skald had not made any sound during the cutting. The skald had only held the harp at her chest and had watched, with the small careful skald’s face she had been wearing all morning, and Kaela had stood beside her with the bracelet of four knots at her right wrist, the fourth knot used and the others not yet to be used again, and the small bone falcon at her throat under her tunic.
The cut had completed at last with a small dry sound that was the sound of the final fiber giving way. The tail had come free from the body. The chief had stood, breathing hard, with Gjafr-Bíta in his right hand and the tail-knot at his feet, and the chief had looked at the tail with the small wide-eyed look of a man who had just done a thing that he had been planning for fifteen days but had not, perhaps, fully prepared himself to do. The chief had then, with the help of Ulf and Eystein, lifted the tail. The tail had been heavy. The tail had taken the strength of three men to lift. They had lifted it. They had carried it back from the cliff-edge to a place inland where they could lay it on the cliff-grass for the long carrying that would begin the next day. They had laid it down.
The beast had remained at the cliff-edge for some time after the cut. The beast had not, the saga reports, immediately died. The beast had lain along the cliff-edge with its wings half-folded and its long flank heaving in slower and slower breath, and the eyes had remained closed. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers would say, later, in the long re-telling that would happen among the cliff-folk’s villages in the months and years to come, that the beast had remained on the cliff-edge for as long as it had taken the cut to fully reach into the beast’s own understanding of itself, and that this had taken perhaps an hour, and that during the hour the beast had been completing the small slow work of letting go of its own body. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers had been right about many things. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers were probably right about this. Kaela had not stayed on the cliff-top for the full hour. The chief, after the cut, had ordered the company to retreat from the cliff-edge to a small flat further inland where the wounded could be tended and where the tail could be wrapped for the carrying. The company had retreated. The skald had retreated with them, with the harp still held at her chest. Kaela had retreated with the skald, because she had been told to. The skald had held her hand on the small walk back from the edge, and the skald had not spoken, and Kaela had not spoken, and the two of them had walked together inland through the pale tall grass and away from the cliff-edge and away from the beast, and the last Kaela had seen of the beast had been the long shape lying along the air with the eyes closed and the long flank moving in the slowest breath of any breath she had ever seen any creature take.
The beast had died on the cliff-edge later that morning. Kaela had not seen the dying. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers had said, in the later re-telling, that the beast had died at the moment when the wind shifted from the open-sea wind that had been blowing all morning to the cross-wind that had brought the rain at noon, and that the rain at noon had been the cliff-folk’s wind-women’s reading of the beast’s last breath, and that this had been the reading the shells of the cliff-folk’s wind-women had been giving for the whole of the standing-cloud year and three months, in the way the shells had been giving readings the cliff-folk’s wind-women had not been able to interpret. The readings, the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had said, had been readings of this single morning, all along. The shells had been telling the wind-women of the coast that there would come a morning in which a great breath of the world would end and a smaller breath would be chosen to continue carrying, and the wind-women had not understood, because the readings of such a morning had not been part of the shells’ usual inheritance, and the wind-women had given up trying to interpret. The shells had then gone quiet, in the way an old dog goes quiet when it understands it cannot help. The shells had not given the readings for the standing cloud after the sixth month because there had not been any more readings to give that the wind-women would have understood. The morning had come. The reading had completed itself. The cloud had gone. The wind on the southern coast of Hraevn-an-Ol had become, in the afternoon following the morning, an ordinary cliff-folk autumn wind, and the wind-women had taken their sashes off their pegs in their houses and had put them on again and had walked to the cliff-edges of their villages and had read the wind, and the wind had read as the cross-wind that meant rain inland but not on the coast, and the shells had chimed in the small clear way they had not chimed in fifteen months. The cliff-folk had heard the chiming. The cliff-folk had wept, in the small dry cliff-folk way, in their houses, that afternoon. The chiming had been the answer to a long-warning whose meaning the wind-women had not understood until the morning. The chiming had been the small letting-go of the readings that had been held in reserve for the long fifteen months.
Kaela had not heard the chiming on her own village’s cliff-edge. She had been many miles inland with the chief’s column, and the column had not had any wind-women in it but herself, and her own fourteen white shells had been against her body under the wool cloak the skald had laid across her shoulders at the small flat where they had retreated, and the shells had given the small clear chime against her body, and only she had heard. She had heard the chime. She had felt the chime in the small flat of her own collarbone where the beast’s third hum had earlier entered. She had understood, with the small dry click at the back of her head, that the chime was for her, in the same way the second sound and the third hum had been for her, and that the chime was the cliff-folk’s wind-women’s whole long inheritance saying yes, you heard it, you carry it now, the reading was you. The reading had been her. The chime was the confirmation.
She had then, the saga of her later life would report from her own telling decades later, finally wept.
The weeping had been the small dry weeping of the cliff-folk, the kind that did not produce many tears, but that produced a small steady wetness at the corners of the eyes for some hours, the kind of weeping the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had called sea-mist weeping, because the wetness did not run but only sat at the edges of the face the way the sea-mist sat on a calm morning at the foot of the cliffs. The skald beside her had seen the weeping. The skald had not asked. The skald had only laid her own grey wool cloak across the cloak the skald had already laid across Kaela’s shoulders, and the two cloaks together had been warm, and Kaela had wept quietly under them while the men of the column at the small flat had tended the wounded and wrapped the tail and lit a small fire for the cooking of the midday meal that no one would, in fact, eat.
She had wept for the beast. She had wept for the chief, who had not been able to receive the offering the beast had made. She had wept for the cliff-folk’s wind-women across the seven generations, who had carried the inheritance forward without ever, perhaps, knowing that the inheritance had been a gift from a creature whose tail had been being broken in this morning. She had wept for her grandmother on the threshold-stone of the village above the cove, who had turned the fifteenth white shell all the long fifteen months and who would, this very afternoon, hear the small clear chime on the village’s cliff-edge and understand that the long-warning had completed itself. She had wept for the men of the column who had been thrown like grain, even Audun son of Brand Two-Knives, who had not let go of his chain and who would not be recovered as a living man. She had wept for the four lost into the sea. She had wept for the skald beside her, who had held the harp at her chest through the whole of the throwing and who had not been able to look away. She had wept for herself, at thirteen, for the work she had now been given and for the work she would carry for the rest of her life.
She had wept for a long time. The cloaks had warmed her. The sea-mist at the corners of her eyes had remained for the rest of the afternoon. The chief at the small flat had not noticed her weeping. The chief had been busy with the wrapping of the tail and with the counting of his losses and with the small dry mutter, like Halvard’s grandfather’s mutter, that he had begun to make under his breath in the hour after the cut, and the chief had not had attention to spare for the weeping of a captive cliff-folk girl at the edge of the camp. Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand had noticed. Ulf had walked past her at the edge of the camp once, in the small careful way Ulf walked when he was not sure whether his approach would be welcome, and Ulf had not said anything, but Ulf had set down a small wooden cup of warmed water at the cloak beside her, and had walked on. The small warmed water had been the kindness within limits Ulf had been performing all the inland walk. Kaela had drunk the water. The water had warmed the small empty place in her stomach. She had been grateful, in the small careful way of a captive who had been raised by her grandmother to mark every kindness and to forget no offerer of one.
The afternoon had gone on. The rain at noon had come, exactly as the chimes against her body had read. The rain had fallen inland of the cliffs in a long cold steady wash, and the cliff-folk’s wind-women across the southern coast had been right about the reading, and the men of the column had pulled the small lengths of canvas over the wounded and over the wrapped tail and over the small fire that no one would, in fact, use, and the column had settled into the wet afternoon and had begun the small work of preparing for the next day’s long carrying.
Kaela had sat under her two cloaks. The skald had sat beside her. The harp was still at the skald’s chest, although the skald had now finally lowered it a small handsbreadth, into a more comfortable position. The skald had not spoken to Kaela in some hours. The skald had spoken once, late in the afternoon, when the rain had begun to slacken, and the skald had said, in the cliff-folk tongue, in a voice so low that only Kaela could hear, “Will you tell me what you saw?”
Kaela had considered. Kaela had said, after a long breath, in the cliff-folk tongue, “Not yet. Maybe later. Maybe never. I will need to carry it for a while first. I think the carrying will be a long carrying, and I do not yet know how much of the carrying can be shared with another person.”
The skald had nodded. The skald had said, in cliff-folk, “I will not press you. I will say only that the song will hold the place open for whatever part of it you decide, in the end, to share. The place will not close. The place will be there for the rest of my life. If you come to me, in any year, even very late, and you wish to give me a piece of it, the place will be there. Do you understand me.”
Kaela had understood. Kaela had said, in cliff-folk, “I understand. Thank you. I will, perhaps, give you a piece, one day.”
The skald had nodded again. The two of them had not spoken further that afternoon.
Kaela would, in fact, give the skald a piece some seven years later, when she was twenty and had found her way back to her own village above the cove and the skald had, against the small probabilities of long voyages and old age, returned alive from the northern reaches with the harp still strung and the bark still in her bag, and the two of them had sat together in the kitchen of Kaela’s grandmother’s house, with Kaela’s grandmother long dead and Kaela’s mother now the eldest of the women’s line, and the skald had asked again, gently, after the very long passage of years and the small visible scars on both of their hands and the small invisible scars on both of their other places, whether Kaela would give her a piece. Kaela had given her, that afternoon, a piece. The piece had been the description of the second sound, the small acknowledging pulse the beast had made for the cliff-folk gesture at the collarbone. Kaela had given the skald the sound in cliff-folk and had explained, slowly and carefully, what the sound had been. The skald had written it down in her bark, which by then had grown to many barks, with the brass-capped pencil. The skald had not, that afternoon, asked for the third hum. The skald had understood that the third hum was the piece Kaela was not yet ready to give, and that the third hum might in fact be the piece Kaela was never going to give to anyone, and the skald had accepted this. The skald had taken what was offered and had not pressed for what was not. The skald had been, all the long way along, the kind of skald the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had said the cliff-folk could trust. The kind that looked up.
But this is for seven years later.
For now, on the small flat inland of the cliffs of the south coast, on the afternoon of the morning in which the beast had died and the chief had cut, with the rain at noon slackening into the long cold steady wash of an ordinary autumn afternoon and the men of the column tending their wounded and wrapping their trophy and counting their losses, Kaela of the Cliffs sat under two grey wool cloaks beside the skald of the chief’s line, with the bracelet of four knots at her right wrist and the fourteen white shells silent against her body and a small wooden cup of warmed water from Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand emptied at her feet, and the small chosen burden of the work the beast had given her began, in the small slow way such burdens begin, to settle into her chest in the place behind the place where words were made, and the work would, from this afternoon forward, be the shape of her life.
The eyes the color of an undecided storm would never, in her remaining seventy-eight years, fully close in her memory. The closing she had seen the beast do at the cliff-edge had been the closing of the beast’s own eyes, but in her memory the eyes remained open, looking at her, holding her in the long slow library-look, and she would carry the looking for the rest of her life, and the carrying would be the work, and the work would be the gift, and the gift would be the burden, and the burden would be the gift.
She would, in the kitchen of her daughter’s house at ninety, on the very last afternoon of her life, say to the granddaughter who was nearest to her, in a voice that the granddaughter would later report had been almost a whisper but very clear, “Cloud-headed one. Listen. I was seen, once. By something very large. The seeing was the gift of my life. Do not waste your own seeing if it comes to you. Look up. Look up. Look up.”
The granddaughter, who was eleven and had been called cloud-headed-one by her grandmother only twice before, would say, “I will, grandmother.”
Kaela would say, “Good.”
She would die that evening, peacefully, in her sleep, with the small bone falcon her aunt Mira had given her at ten still on the thong at her throat, and the bracelet of four knots, the original one her grandmother had tied on her wrist on the threshold-floor of the house the evening the smoke had come up the cliff face, still on her right wrist, none of the knots ever to be touched again by any cliff-folk thumb. The four ancestors would, in the small careful cliff-folk accounting of such matters, walk her down into whatever the cliff-folk’s drowned dead walked in. Mer of the First Sash would walk in front, the strongest of the four, the one who had made the listening. Mer would carry her. Mer had carried her since the press of the fourth knot in the morning on the cliff-top sixty-eight years before. Mer would carry her the rest of the way.
But this is for the very end.
For now, the afternoon went on. The rain slackened. The cloaks warmed. The skald sat beside Kaela holding the harp. The work began. The work, which would be the shape of her life, settled. The eyes the color of an undecided storm remained, in her memory, open. She did not look away. She had not looked away on the cliff-top. She would not look away now. She would not look away ever. She had been chosen.
She carried.
Segment 15: “Chains of Thunderstone”
Now the saga must come to the matter of the cut and the lifting and what the chief did when the bone first hummed back against his hands. The saga has come a long way to this matter. The saga has been preparing for it across many segments and across the long inland walk and across the morning at the cliff-edge, and the saga will not now hurry through it merely because the matter has already been described, in part, from other tellings. The chief had his own knowing of it. The chief’s knowing is what the saga must give in this segment, because the chief was the one for whom the matter was, in his own reckoning, the great making of his life, and because the saga of his line has been bound, from the night of the oath at the longfire at Aern-Vík, to set down the matter in the form the chief’s line carries it. The other tellings will sit beside this one. The reader, as Brother Eskil’s segment foretold, will hold them together. The saga itself will give the chief’s reckoning straight and let the holding be done by those who hold.
The chief had been thrown by the second coming-down of the tail. The chief had landed on his left shoulder twelve paces inland of the cliff-edge. The chief had lain in the pale tall grass for a time that he could not afterward measure but that the saga, by the testimony of Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand who reached him first, gives as perhaps the length of seven or eight breaths. The chief had then opened his eyes. The chief had seen the sky above him. The sky above him was the ordinary cliff-folk autumn sky of late Helmus, clear and pale, with a small thin streak running from the cliff-edge upward at an angle that no ordinary sky ever ran a streak in. The streak was the closing remnant of where the sky had split with fire. The chief saw the streak. The chief, the saga must say in his own honor, registered the streak. The chief did not pretend, even to himself, in that first moment of returning to consciousness, that what had happened at the cliff-edge had been an ordinary thing. The chief had been thrown by a creature that had cracked the sky with the swing of its tail. The chief took this in. The chief, even in his certainty, was not so far gone in the chamber of his deciding that he could not register what his pale eyes had seen.
Ulf was beside him, kneeling, with a hand on the chief’s chest. Ulf was saying, in the northern, the small careful phrases a man says when he is checking whether his chief is alive. The chief said, in the northern, in a voice that the saga reports as hoarser than the voice he had used at the cresting, “Ulf.”
Ulf said, “Chief.”
The chief said, “Help me up.”
Ulf helped him. The chief rose to his feet in two stages, with Ulf’s shoulder under his right arm for the first stage and the chief standing on his own for the second. The chief shook himself like a wet dog, in the way the saga has already reported, and the chief’s pale eyes did the small careful focusing of a man returning to his command from a brief absence. The chief looked along the cliff-top. The chief saw the scattered men. The chief counted them. The chief saw five of his line on the grass within his sight, with Ulf at his own elbow. He did not see Snorri Hard-Hand or Halvard son of Olaf Salt-Hand or Audun son of Brand Two-Knives or the man Hauk son of Hauk One-Eye, who had been at the leftmost grip of the third chain. The chief did not, at this moment, know that Snorri would, against all prediction, be found later that day clinging to a sea-stack. The chief, in this moment, counted four men over the cliff-edge as lost. The chief did the small inward counting that a chief does at such moments, which is the counting of the kin one has lost to the kin one has brought. Four was a heavy count. Four was a count the chief had not expected to take on this hunt. The chief had expected to take perhaps one, in a worst case, in a moment of bad fortune. The chief had taken four. The chief, the saga must report, did not weep at the counting. The chief had been raised not to weep at countings until the countings were done. The countings were not yet done. The hunt was not yet finished. The chief would, in the small careful way of his line, complete the matter and then take the count back to the longfire at Aern-Vík where the count would be received and the small dry weeping of his hall would happen in its proper time, and the chief would carry the count with him for the rest of his life as a thing that had been the price of the matter.
The chief turned then to look at the cliff-edge.
The beast was lying along the cliff-edge with its wings half-folded against the rising sea-wind, and the long flank of the beast was heaving in the slow breath of a creature at rest. The beast’s eyes were closed. The chains of thunderstone that the chief and Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf had set around the tail-knot were still set. The grapples were still bitten into the bone-and-scale of the tail’s end. The chains ran back from the tail-knot to where the men of the line had been holding them, but the men of the line were no longer holding them, because the men of the line had been thrown like grain. The chains lay in the pale tall grass with their loose ends free. Four of the six chains were gone over the cliff-edge with the men who had been thrown over, and the chief did not see those four. The two chains he could see were the two that the chief and Vigleik had set last, the second pair, the pair that had bitten well and had held when the others had been carried away.
The chief looked at the tail-knot. The chief looked at the long shape of the beast at rest along the cliff-edge. The chief looked at the beast’s closed eyes. The chief understood, in the small careful way of a chief who has been thrown and risen, that the matter had now reached the part the chief had been preparing for across the long inland walk and across the voyage and across all the weeks at Aern-Vík before the embarkation. The matter had reached the cut. The cut was the chief’s. The cut was the work the chief had to do himself. The chief gathered himself. The chief turned to Ulf and to Eystein son of Olvir Sharp-Tooth, who had risen and come to the chief’s side, and to Asbjorn son of Hauk Far-Sight, who was holding his left ribs as he walked because Asbjorn had landed on a small flat stone in the cliff-grass and had bruised himself, and the chief said, in the northern, in the carrying hall-voice that had returned to him as he had risen, “We will cut. Ulf. Eystein. Asbjorn. With me.”
The three men inclined their heads. The chief looked at Vigleik, who was sitting up in the cliff-grass with one hand on the back of his head where he had landed badly, and the chief said, in the northern, “Vigleik. Stay with Thorir. Watch the boy.” Vigleik inclined his head. Thorir son of Ragnar Crow-Eye lay nearest to where the skald and the cliff-folk girl Kaela stood at the rear of where the line had been, and Thorir’s left arm was, by the way Thorir was holding it against his body, broken, and Vigleik would do what could be done for Thorir while the chief did the cut.
The chief walked toward the cliff-edge.
He walked in the small careful steps of a man who had been thrown and was now testing whether his footing was still sound. The footing was sound. The chief had not, in the throwing, broken anything, although his left shoulder would, by the small dry account of the cliff-folk’s bone-knowledge man two months later when Hrolv-Kan’s column reached a friendly port on the way north, have a small chip taken from the place where the shoulder met the upper arm, and the chip would set itself crooked in the healing, and the chief would carry, for the rest of his life, a small reduction of the reach in his left arm that he would not, in his own private accounting, ever admit. But this was for later. In this moment, the chief walked. His pale eyes were on the tail-knot. His right hand was on Gjafr-Bíta.
Ulf, Eystein, and Asbjorn walked behind him.
They reached the tail-knot at twelve paces. The tail-knot lay in the pale tall grass with the two chains of thunderstone bitten well into its bone-and-scale. The tail-knot was, the chief now saw in the close way one sees a thing one has been planning for a long time, larger than he had imagined. The tail-knot was the size of a small longhouse hearth. The bone of the knot was heavier than any bone the chief had ever cut. The scale that ran along the upper surface of the knot was the color of the underside of an evening cloud, the same color as the wings, although the chief had thought, before the morning, that the tail would be of a different color from the wings. The scale of the tail was the color of the wings. The chief noted this. The chief would, in the long years to come, have many such small notings of the tail’s actual qualities versus the qualities he had carried with him before the morning, and he would set the notings aside in the small private accounting where such notings went, and the notings would, in his old age, become a thing he wished he had attended to more carefully at the time.
The chief raised Gjafr-Bíta.
He did not, in this moment, throw the spear. The chief had thought, at the cresting of the ridge, that he might throw Gjafr-Bíta at the beast. The throwing had not happened. The chief, in his own reckoning, had not thrown because the beast had descended within the reach of the chains and the chains had been the better choice. The chains had not, in fact, worked as the chief had planned them to work. The chains had set, and four of the six had gone over the cliff-edge with their men, and the two that remained had held the tail-knot only by the bite of their grapples. The bite was enough. The bite was the part the chief needed. The chief lowered Gjafr-Bíta from the raised position and reversed his grip on the haft and brought the head of the spear down toward the tail-knot, not in a throw but in a cut, the way a man cuts at a great bone with a long-hafted axe.
The first cut was not a cut. The first cut was the small testing strike a man makes when he wishes to learn the resistance of the material before him. The chief brought Gjafr-Bíta’s head down on the tail-knot at a place perhaps a forearm’s length from the heavy end, at a place where the bone of the knot was joined to the bone of the tail’s last vertebra. The head of the spear struck. The chief felt the strike travel up through the haft into his hands. The chief, even in his certainty, was not so far gone in the chamber of his deciding that he could not register what he felt. The bone of the tail was not the bone of any creature the chief had cut. The bone of the tail rang.
It rang.
The saga must say this carefully because the saga has come to one of the small matters that the chief did not, in the course of his long chieftainship afterward, give any account of in any hall, but that Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand gave to Vagn Three-Fingers in the winter following the hunt, in the hall near the Strait of Bones, in the same telling Vagn used for the saga of his song. The bone of the tail had rung. The cut had not bitten. The head of Gjafr-Bíta had glanced off the tail-knot at the first strike and had left only a small bright scratch on the bone where the iron had passed. The bone had rung in the way a bell rings when struck with the wrong weight at the wrong angle. The ringing had carried through Gjafr-Bíta’s haft into the chief’s hands. The ringing had been not loud. The ringing had been, the chief would say to himself many times in the years to come, the ringing of a thing that did not want to be cut.
The chief had registered the ringing.
The chief had not stopped.
This is the part the saga must give straight. The chief had been thrown by the tail. The chief had seen the sky split with fire. The chief had counted four men lost over the cliff-edge. The chief had now learned, by the first testing strike, that the bone of the tail rang at the wrong cuts. The chief had been given, in the small careful way the gods give such things to men who are about to commit themselves past the point of return, several pieces of news in the space of a quarter of an hour. The chief had had time to put down Gjafr-Bíta. The chief had had time to walk back from the cliff-edge. The chief had had time to look at the beast at rest along the cliff-edge with its eyes closed and to consider that the beast had let itself be bound and had then thrown the men of the chains and had then lain down again, and to ask himself whether the matter he had come for was the matter that was actually before him.
The chief had not asked.
The chief had set his teeth. The chief had adjusted his grip on Gjafr-Bíta. The chief had moved his cut a hand’s breadth along the tail toward the body, to the joint where the last vertebra of the tail met the second-to-last, and the chief had brought Gjafr-Bíta down on the joint, and this time the cut had bitten. The bone of the joint was softer than the bone of the knot. The bone of the joint was the kind of bone Gjafr-Bíta had been built to cut. The chief had cut.
The cut took, the saga reports, perhaps half an hour, although the half-hour did not feel to the chief like a half-hour. The half-hour felt to the chief like the longest hour of his life. The cut was hard. The chief cut, and Ulf cut, and Eystein cut, and Asbjorn, despite the bruised ribs, came forward and cut, and the four of them cut in shifts, with the others holding the chains taut so that the tail-knot would not roll under the cutting and the cut would stay in its line. The blood of the beast, when the cut went deep enough to reach the inner tissues of the joint, was the dark blue-green color of the southern sea, and the blood ran down across the pale tall grass in a small slow river that pooled in a depression in the cliff-top and stayed there for several hours, and the cliff-folk’s wind-women across the southern coast later that day, when the rain came at noon, would say that the rain had run colored in places along the coast, in small dark blue-green streaks where the cliff-water had picked up the pool’s overflow, and that the running had been the beast’s signing of itself across the cliff-folk’s country, the last reading the beast had given. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers had been right about many things and were probably right about this. The chief did not know about the running. The chief knew only that he was cutting through a thing that did not want to be cut, and that the not-wanting was a thing he could feel in his hands every time Gjafr-Bíta found a new fiber.
The beast did not move during the cutting.
The saga must report this also because it was the matter that, in the long years to come, sat with the chief most heavily. The beast did not move. The long flank heaved with the slow breath. The eyes remained closed. The wings did not flex. The tail did not lift again. The beast lay along the cliff-edge as a creature that had decided to let the cut happen, and the cut happened, and the beast did not move. The chief cut for half an hour, and the beast did not move. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers would later say, in their re-tellings, that the beast at this point in the morning had already begun the small slow letting-go of its own body, and that the body had remained on the cliff-edge only because the body had not yet been finally vacated, and that the letting-go was the dignity the beast had chosen. The chief did not know about the dignity. The chief cut. The chief noted, in the small private accounting where he kept his notings, that the beast was not fighting. The chief did not, in his certainty, ask himself why. The chief had been given many opportunities to ask. The chief had not asked. The not-asking was, in the saga’s reckoning, the small repeated act by which the chief sealed his doom across the half-hour of the cut. The chief did not know he was sealing it. The chief was, in his own reckoning, doing what he had come to do. The chief had been chosen by the gods. The chief had been blessed by the storm at sea. The chief had walked twelve days through the singing woods and the sleeping-light valleys and the country of the wolf and the fox, and the chief had brought his men to the cliff-edge, and the beast had been there, and the chains had been set, and the cut was happening. The cut was the matter. The matter was the work. The work was being done. There was no room in the chief’s own accounting for the question of why the beast was not fighting. The not-fighting was a piece of information that the chief did not have the cognitive shape, at this point in his chieftainship, to receive.
He cut.
The cut completed at last with a small dry sound that was the sound of the final fiber of the joint giving way. Gjafr-Bíta’s head sank a final time, and the small dry sound came up from the cut, and the tail was free of the body.
The chief stood, breathing hard. Ulf and Eystein and Asbjorn stood with him, breathing hard. The four of them looked down at the cut. The tail was free. The tail-knot lay in the pale tall grass with the two chains of thunderstone still set in it, and the long curve of the tail lay across the cliff-grass between the knot and the body, and the place where the cut had been made was the small dark blue-green pool the saga has already described. The chief stood. The chief, the saga must report, did not, in this moment, look at the long flank of the beast. The chief did not look at the beast at all. The chief had cut through perhaps the last connection that bound him to the small careful regard he had been raised to give large creatures by his father, and the chief, in the moment after the cut, was not yet able to look at the thing he had cut from. The looking would come later, in moments much later in his life that the saga will give in their proper places. In this moment the chief looked only at the tail.
He looked at it for a long breath.
The breath was, the saga has come to think, the breath in which the chief crossed from the man he had been into the man he would now be. The man he had been was a chief of the northern reaches, fifty-two winters old, of the line of Brand Iron-Hand, with a sister he loved and a hall he had inherited and a fourth iron ring that had been freshly braided into his beard. The man he would now be was a chief who had cut the tail from a creature that had not fought, and who would carry the cut for the rest of his life, and who would, in the carrying, become a man his sister would no longer fully recognize. The crossing happened in the breath. The chief did not feel it as a crossing. The chief felt it as the small clear satisfaction of a task at last accomplished. The crossing was hidden inside the satisfaction. The satisfaction was the cover the crossing wore. The crossing would not show itself in the chief for many days, perhaps for many weeks, but the crossing had happened in the breath.
The chief reached down.
He reached with his right hand. He set Gjafr-Bíta into the cliff-grass at his feet, with the haft upright and the head pointed down in the small careful way a chief sets his spear when he has finished a cut and wishes to use both hands for what comes next. The chief reached with both hands, then, and laid his palms on the tail.
He laid his palms on it.
The tail at the cut end was hot. The chief had not expected it to be hot. The chief had cut many creatures in his life and the cut ends of dead creatures were ordinarily already cooling by the time the cut completed. The cut end of the tail was hot. The heat was the heat of a thing that was still alive in itself, even though the thing had been cut from the body of the creature that had carried it. The chief noted the heat. The chief did not, in his certainty, register what the heat meant. The chief lifted.
The lifting was the work of three men. The tail was heavy. The chief and Ulf and Eystein together lifted the tail at the cut end, and the tail-knot at the other end remained on the cliff-grass for a moment because the knot was the heaviest part and could not be lifted by the men’s strength at the cut end alone, and Asbjorn came forward, despite his bruised ribs, and the four of them together lifted the tail-knot from the grass and brought the whole tail up to chest height, and the chief, in the smallest of the small private moments of the morning, said in the northern, in a voice that none of the others heard because it was not for them, “I have you.”
The tail was at his chest.
The chief did the thing he had been preparing to do across the long fifteen days and across the embarkation and across the storm and across the night of the oath at the longfire. The chief raised the tail aloft.
The lifting aloft was the work of more than three men, but the chief was, by long custom of his line, the one whose hands had to be the highest. The chief held the cut end of the tail in his own hands and raised it above his head, and Ulf and Eystein and Asbjorn supported the long length of the tail in their hands at the lower positions, with Asbjorn at the heaviest end with the knot. The four of them together held the tail aloft above the cliff-top in the moment that the chief had been preparing for. The chief raised his face to the sky. The chief’s pale eyes were, by the saga’s report from Ulf’s later telling, wide and bright with a brightness that Ulf had not seen in them before. The chief gave the cry.
The cry was the cry the chief had been preparing to give. The chief had not, in his preparation, rehearsed the words. The cry was not a thing of rehearsed words. The cry was a thing of the long pent breath of a chief who had completed the great matter he had set himself, and the breath came out of the chief in the small carrying hall-voice he had used at the longfire and at the storm at sea and at the morning of the cove and at every moment of importance in the matter, and the cry was the words his line had given him to say in such moments, and the words came out as they had been given to him by Brand Iron-Hand and by Audun Cold-Spear before that and by Eskel of the Long Fjord before that.
The chief cried, “Now we hold the sky’s power. In our hands lies the strength to fell the mountains.”
The cry went up from the cliff-top. The cry was the cry of a man who had been raised on the songs of his line and who had now come, by long labor and great cost, to the moment in which the songs of his line would name him in their own future. The cry was, in the chief’s own reckoning, the cry of victory. The cry was the cry that would be remembered in the longhouse at Aern-Vík for all the winters of the chief’s chieftainship and for many winters after the chief’s chieftainship had ended. The cry would be remembered. The cry would be repeated. The cry would be set down by Snæ Two-Tongues in the song of the hunt that Snæ would sing for thirty winters in his own hall before the song was set down by the predecessors of Brother Eskil at the Watching-Stones. The cry would be the line by which the saga of the chief’s hunt would be opened in every hall that received it. The cry was the chief’s. The cry was, in this moment on the cliff-top, the chief’s victory.
The bone hummed back.
The saga has come to the matter at last. The saga must give this matter with the care it deserves. The bone hummed back. The chief held the cut end of the tail in his own hands above his head, and the heat that he had noted at the cut had begun to do something the chief had not expected. The heat had begun to vibrate. The heat had begun to make, in the bone of the tail at the cut end, a small steady humming that was not a sound the ear heard but a sensation the hands felt. The chief felt the humming. The chief felt it in his palms first, in the small steady vibration that passed up into his wrists and into his forearms and into his elbows. The humming was not unpleasant. The humming was, in the small careful private way of the chief’s first feeling of it, almost a kindness. The humming was the kind of vibration that a man might feel if he had been holding a thing he had been wanting to hold for a long time, and the thing had begun, in his hands, to acknowledge that it was now being held. The humming was the bone of the tail acknowledging the chief.
The chief, the saga must report, did not understand what the humming was.
The chief understood only that the humming was a thing he had not expected and that the humming felt good. The humming felt to the chief like the gods’ confirmation that the matter had been the matter the gods had blessed. The humming was the third great sign the chief had received from the gods, after the storm at sea and after the sound the beast had made on the cliff-top. The chief had received the first two with the small private exultation that had been growing in him since the storm. The chief received the third with a great wave of the same exultation. The chief, in the moment the bone first hummed back against his hands, felt the small chamber of his deciding, in which he had been living since the storm, open out into a great hall of certainty, and the great hall of certainty was full of the small steady humming, and the chief stood at the center of the great hall with the tail of the beast above his head and the long pent breath of his life finally coming out of him, and the chief, the saga is bound to report, laughed.
The laugh was not the laugh he had laughed into the storm. The laugh he had laughed into the storm had been a laugh of finding, the laugh of a man who had been searching for a small lost thing in his clothing and had come upon it suddenly. The laugh on the cliff-top was a different laugh. The laugh on the cliff-top was the laugh of a man who had received the small lost thing and had put it on, and the thing fit. The laugh was a laugh of dressing. The chief had dressed himself in the chamber of his deciding, and the chamber had opened out into the great hall, and the great hall was full of the humming, and the chief stood at the center wearing what he had decided to wear, and the wearing fit. The laugh was the laugh of the wearing.
Ulf and Eystein and Asbjorn, holding the long length of the tail with the chief, heard the laugh. The three of them, the saga reports from Ulf’s later telling, did not laugh with the chief. The three of them stood holding the tail and looked at the chief with the small careful neutral looks of men who had served under their chief for many years and had, in the moment of his laughing on the cliff-top, suspected for the first time that the chief they had served was beginning to be a different chief. The looks were not disloyal looks. The looks were the looks of men who had observed a thing in their chief and had filed the observation in the small private place where such observations went, and the observations would, in the long years to come, accumulate. Ulf would carry the observation forward most carefully of the three. Ulf would, in his old age many decades later, tell Vagn Three-Fingers in the hall near the Strait of Bones that the moment the chief had laughed on the cliff-top with the tail above his head had been the moment Ulf had first understood, in the small careful way Ulf understood such things, that the chief who would lead them home from the cliffs was not the chief who had led them south, and that the change had been irreversible. Ulf would say this with the small dry sadness of a man who had served a chief he had loved across a change that had not been a change for the better.
But Ulf in the moment of the laugh did not say anything. Ulf and Eystein and Asbjorn held the tail. The chief laughed. The bone hummed.
The skald, behind the chief at the rear of where the line had been, with the cliff-folk girl Kaela beside her and the harp at her chest, heard the laugh. The skald, by the saga’s report from her own bark which survives in fragments at the library at the Watching-Stones, wrote that evening at the small flat where the company retreated, in her small private script, the words he has laughed for the second time. The first laugh was in the storm. The second is now. The two laughs will become, in the song, the two notes that mark the chamber of his fall. She underlined the word fall.
The cliff-folk girl Kaela, beside the skald, did not laugh and did not speak. The girl had been chosen, the saga has come to understand from the previous segment, and the work of the chosen had begun. The girl, the saga reports, looked at the chief with the small full face she had taken on after the third hum of the beast, and the girl’s face held no judgment that the saga can read, but the girl’s face held also no agreement with the chief’s laugh. The girl was, in the small careful witness’s posture she had taken at the moment of being chosen, simply watching. The girl’s witnessing did not contain laughter. The girl’s witnessing did not contain weeping. The girl’s witnessing was the witnessing of a creature who had been told, by something larger than her, that she was to remember, and she was remembering.
The chief did not look at her. The chief did not look at the skald either. The chief looked, for some long moment, only at the sky above his head, with the tail of the beast held aloft and the humming in his hands, and the long pent breath of his life still coming out of him in the form of the laugh, and the cry of his line still hanging in the air of the cliff-top.
The chief brought the tail down.
The bringing-down was the work of the four men, in reverse of the lifting. They brought the tail down slowly so as not to drop the heavy knot in the pale tall grass. They set the tail down. The chief stood over it, breathing hard, his hands still humming with the small vibration that had begun to fade now that the chief was no longer holding the cut end at chest height. The vibration was still there, but it was smaller. The chief, the saga must report, did not want the vibration to fade. The chief wanted to hold the tail again, to feel the humming come back. The chief did not, in this moment, hold the tail again. The chief was disciplined enough still to know that the tail had to be wrapped for the long carrying back to the ship, and the wrapping had to be done first. The chief said, in the northern, in a voice that was almost ordinary but had on it the small new edge that the skald had noted at the cove and that had been growing since, “We wrap it. The canvas. Bring it.”
Eystein went to fetch the canvas from the cliff-top supplies that had been laid down before the chains had been thrown. Asbjorn went with him. Ulf stayed at the chief’s side, in the small careful way Ulf had been staying since the morning of the cove, with his eyes on the chief and not on the tail. The chief, the saga reports, did not notice Ulf’s looking. The chief was, in this small moment between the cry and the wrapping, looking at his own hands. The hands were vibrating still, in the small steady humming. The chief flexed the fingers. The humming remained in the flexing. The chief opened the hands and closed them. The humming remained. The chief understood, with the small bright pleasure of a man who has been given a gift he has not yet examined, that the humming had transferred from the bone of the tail into his own hands, and that the humming would be his to carry until he could pick the tail up again. The humming was, in the chief’s reckoning, the small ongoing gift of the matter to the man who had completed it. The chief was glad of the humming. The chief would, in the days and weeks and months to come, miss the humming whenever he was not holding the tail-bone. The chief would, in time, begin to keep the tail-bone always within arm’s reach, even at meals, even at evening fires, even at his own bed. The keeping would not, at first, be a thing the men around him noticed. The keeping would become a thing the men noticed at perhaps the third month after the return to Aern-Vík. The skald would notice it sooner. The skald would set the noticing down in her bark in a sentence she would not show anyone. The sentence, the saga reports from the surviving fragment, read, the humming has him, and he does not know that the humming has him, and he will not know for a long time, and by the time he knows, the humming will be the only thing he has left.
But this is much later.
In the moment of the cliff-top, the chief flexed his hands and felt the humming and the chief was glad. Eystein and Asbjorn returned with the canvas. The men wrapped the tail. The wrapping was the careful work of four men, with the heavy knot at one end and the cut end at the other, and they laid the tail along the cliff-grass on a long piece of canvas the company had brought specifically for this purpose, and they folded the canvas over the tail in the long careful folds that would protect the tail from the weather for the long inland carrying back to the cove, and they tied the canvas in place with the long lengths of cordage that the company had also brought. The work took perhaps an hour. The chief supervised. The chief did not lift the tail again during the wrapping, because the wrapping did not require him to. The chief stood at the side and gave the small directions in the northern, in the carrying hall-voice that had returned to him for good. His hands, while he supervised, twitched slightly. The skald would note this in her bark later in the evening at the small flat where the company retreated. The chief’s hands twitched. The twitching was the humming continuing in the chief’s hands at the small lower level, the level that did not require the holding of the bone but only the recent memory of the holding. The hands missed the bone. The hands were learning to miss it.
The wrapping completed. The tail was now a long canvas-wrapped bundle on the cliff-grass, with the heavy knot at one end and the cut end at the other. The bundle would, the chief had decided, be carried on the two pack-horses the company had brought from the herders, slung between them in a rigging the men would set up that afternoon at the small flat further inland where the company would retreat. The chief gave the order to retreat. The chief said, in the northern, “We pull back. We tend the wounded. We rig the carry. We make camp.”
The men obeyed. The men were tired and bruised and had lost four of their own line over the cliff-edge. The men, the saga must report, were also, in some small private part of each of them, lifted, because the matter had been completed. The chief had cut the tail. The chief had raised the tail aloft. The chief had given the cry of his line. The matter the men had walked twelve days inland for had been done. The men were tired and grieving and lifted, all at once. The men carried, between them, the wounded. Ulf and Vigleik carried Thorir son of Ragnar Crow-Eye, whose left arm was broken, in a small careful chair-carry between them, with Thorir’s good arm around their shoulders. Eystein and Asbjorn helped each other along, the one with bruised ribs and the other with the small twist in his left ankle from his landing. The chief walked at the front, with Gjafr-Bíta in his right hand and his pale eyes ahead and the small steady humming in his fingers. The skald walked at the middle of the small retreating column with the harp at her chest and the bag of birch-bark at her hip and the cliff-folk girl Kaela at her left, in the small careful walking of a woman who had decided to be the beast’s skald as well as her brother’s, and who had now seen what she had decided to render and was beginning, in the small back-of-the-head place where the song lived, to find the first verses. The two pack-horses came at the rear with the tail-bundle slung between them in a temporary rigging Vigleik had improvised. The horses, the saga must mention here, did not like the tail-bundle. The horses had not liked it from the moment the men had begun to load it onto the rigging. The horses had snorted and pulled at the leads and laid their ears flat against their heads, in the way of horses who have been asked to carry a thing they would rather not carry. Eystein and Snorri Hard-Hand, who were the unofficial keepers of the horses, were not present, because Snorri was missing and Eystein was helping Asbjorn, so Audun’s substitute on the horses had been a man who did not know horses as well, and the man had had a difficult time getting the horses to accept the rigging. The horses had eventually accepted it. The horses had carried the bundle inland with them, walking slowly, with their ears still flat against their heads. The saga notes the horses’ reaction here because the saga will need it later in the matter of the inland walk back to the cove, in which the horses would, on the fourth day, refuse entirely.
The chief did not notice the horses’ reaction. The chief was walking at the front. The chief was thinking, the saga reports from his own later accounts in his hall, of the forging that would happen when the tail was brought back to Aern-Vík. The chief had been planning the forging for many weeks. The chief had been planning the forging in the same way he had been planning the cut, in the small careful repetition of the procedure in his mind. The chief had a smith at Aern-Vík, a man named Halvar son of Geir No-Voice, who was the best smith of the northern reaches and who had been told by the chief, before the embarkation, to expect the tail’s arrival in the autumn or early winter. Halvar No-Voice had been preparing. Halvar No-Voice had been gathering the materials for the binding of the tail-bone into a weapon. The chief had specified, in the conversations with Halvar No-Voice before the embarkation, that the weapon should be a club. The chief had been clear about the form. The club would be heavy. The club would have the tail-knot at the striking end. The club would be wrapped along its length with the scales of the beast’s body, which the chief had also intended to bring back, although the chief had not, in the morning’s cutting, also taken any of the scales, because the cutting of the scales would have required additional time and the chief had not, in the moment, judged the additional time worth the cost. The chief would, in the long inland walk and the voyage home, regret this small omission. The chief would compensate, in the forging, by having Halvar No-Voice use scales from a lesser beast that the chief’s hunters at Aern-Vík had taken in the previous winter, and the scales would not be the same color, but the chief would tell himself, in the small careful way of a man who is making the best of an omission, that the lesser scales would be sufficient. The club would have, at the haft end, a grip wrapped in leather treated with the chief’s own line’s oils, in the way the line’s weapons had always been gripped. The club would be named. The chief had not yet decided on the name. The chief was considering, on the cliff-top retreat, several names. The chief was leaning, in his own private thinking, toward the Sky’s Hammer, which was the kenning he had used at the longfire on the night of the oath and which the men of the band had taken up. The Sky’s Hammer was, the chief thought, a good name. The chief would, in the forging at Aern-Vík several months later, settle on the name.
The chief walked. The men followed. The horses came behind with their flat ears. The skald walked at the middle with the harp at her chest. The cliff-folk girl walked beside the skald. The cliff-edge fell behind them. The beast at the cliff-edge, the saga has reported from the previous segment, would remain at the cliff-edge for some hours yet, with its eyes closed and its long flank moving in the slowest breath of any creature, until the rain at noon came and the breath stopped and the cliff-folk’s wind-women across the southern coast heard the chiming of their shells. The chief did not look back. The chief did not, in fact, look back at any time in the retreat to the small flat. The chief, the saga must report, would not look back at the cliffs of Falling Stars at any time for the rest of his life. The cliff-edge was, in the chief’s own private accounting, finished. The cliff-edge had given him what he had come for. The cliff-edge was now to be left behind. The chief was carrying forward what he had taken. The chief would not, ever again, return to where he had taken it from.
The retreat reached the small flat. The men set down their burdens. The men set up the small canvas shelter. The men laid the canvas-wrapped bundle of the tail in the center of the camp, where the chief could see it from his place at the fire. The men tended their wounded. Vigleik wrapped Thorir’s broken arm in the small careful way he had been taught by his mother, who had been a healer in their village. Asbjorn nursed his bruised ribs by sitting against a small tree. Eystein nursed his twisted ankle by elevating it on a folded cloak. Ulf moved among the men, doing the small careful work of a man who had become, in the morning at the cliff-edge, the second-in-command of the column without anyone having said so aloud. The chief sat at the fire when the fire was lit and watched the canvas-wrapped bundle.
His hands, all the time, twitched.
The rain at noon came, exactly as the cliff-folk’s wind-women had read it would. The rain fell on the small flat in a long cold steady wash. The men pulled the canvas over the wounded and over the tail-bundle and over the small fire. The men ate the midday meal, which most of them did not, in fact, eat. The chief ate. The chief ate, the saga reports, more than he had eaten on any day of the inland walk. The chief had a great hunger after the cutting, in the way men have a great hunger after the completion of great works, and the hunger was a thing the chief satisfied by eating most of his portion of the salt fish and a piece of Asbjorn’s also when Asbjorn would not eat. The chief drank water from his cup. The chief sat at the fire under the canvas with the rain falling around the canvas and the tail-bundle within his sight, and the chief’s hands twitched, and the chief, the saga must report, was content. The contentment was the contentment of a man who had completed his great work. The contentment was the small clear feeling of a man who has done the thing he set out to do and who has not yet begun to learn the cost of having done it.
The skald sat at the edge of the camp under the cliff-folk girl Kaela’s two grey wool cloaks, with the harp at her chest, and watched her brother eat. The skald, the saga reports from her bark, wrote that afternoon, in her small private script, the sentence he is content. I have not seen him content in many years. The contentment is the worst of all the things I have seen in him this morning. She underlined the word contentment.
The afternoon went on. The rain slackened. The men slept where they could. The chief did not sleep. The chief sat at the fire. The chief, in the small private moments of the late afternoon, leaned forward and unwrapped a small corner of the canvas around the cut end of the tail, and the chief laid his right hand on the exposed bone, and the chief felt, with great pleasure, the small steady humming come back to his palm. The chief sat with his hand on the bone for some long while. The chief, the saga must report, was almost smiling. The chief, the saga reports from Ulf’s later telling, sat with the small almost-smile and the humming hand for what Ulf judged to be perhaps an hour in the late afternoon, and Ulf, watching from the other side of the small fire, understood what he was seeing and did not say anything.
The afternoon completed. The evening came. The men ate the evening meal, which most of them ate this time, because the long day had finally worked on their hunger. The chief ate again, with his good appetite. The chief gave the small evening speech he had been giving on the inland walk, although the speech that evening was different from the previous speeches. The previous speeches had been speeches of preparation for the matter. The speech that evening was a speech of completion of the matter. The chief said, in the northern, in the carrying hall-voice, “We have done what we came to do. We have lost four of our line. We will honor them in the long carrying home and we will honor them again at the longfire at Aern-Vík when we return. We will carry the tail back to our hall and Halvar No-Voice will forge it into the weapon that will speak with our voice for many winters. The matter has been completed. The gods have blessed us, as they blessed us in the storm at sea. We will rest tonight and tomorrow we will begin the carrying. Hear me. Hear me. The matter is ours.”
The men, in the small loose order around the fire, struck their hands against their shields in the small old answer of his line. The skald did not strike. The cliff-folk girl did not strike. Ulf, the saga reports, struck once and did not strike a second time, which was the smallest of the small dry sounds and the most careful of the small careful witnesses of the evening. The chief did not notice. The chief sat at his place at the fire with the canvas-wrapped tail-bundle within reach of his right hand, and his right hand on the bundle now openly, with the canvas not wrapped fully around the cut end any longer, and the humming in his palm, and the chief was content.
The chief slept that night for the first time on the inland walk. The chief slept, in fact, well. The chief slept with his right hand still on the bundle. The chief slept, the saga reports from Ulf’s telling, with the small almost-smile still on his face.
The skald sat awake long into the night. The cliff-folk girl Kaela slept beside her under the two grey wool cloaks. The skald wrote in her bark by the light of the small banked fire, in her small private script, several sentences that would later survive in the fragment Brother Eskil’s predecessor pieced together. The sentences read, the matter has been done. The chief has done it. The chief is content. The bone hums in his hands. The bone has him. He does not know. He will not know for a long time. The song will know. I will write what the song knows. The song will be the Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer. The chief has chosen. The beast has chosen. The chief has not known what either choosing meant. The song will hold both. I will hold the song.
The skald underlined the word both.
The night went on. The rain at noon had been the only rain of the day. The sky after the rain had cleared. The stars came out above the small flat. The Skald’s Knot was visible in the west, in its usual small square at the western edge of the visible sky. The Bird-Road was visible in the north. The chief slept. The men slept. The horses, at the edge of the camp, did not sleep. The horses stood with their ears flat against their heads and their eyes on the canvas-wrapped bundle in the center of the camp, and the horses did not move for the whole of the night. The horses, the saga reports, would not eat the next morning. The horses would walk, but the horses would not eat. The horses would refuse food for the entire four-day inland walk back to the cove, and the horses would, on the fourth day, refuse to walk also, and the men would have to leave the horses behind on a small flat above a stream where the herder Stenn of the high meadow would find them three weeks later and recognize them and take them back to his own herd, where the horses would, in time, recover their appetite, although the horses would never, the saga reports from a cliff-folk re-telling, fully recover their willingness to carry packs of any kind. The horses were marked by the carrying. The saga sets the matter of the horses down here because the matter of the horses is the small early evidence of the cost of the matter beginning to be paid by creatures other than the men, and the saga will, in time, set down more such evidence.
For now the chief slept. The bone hummed. The matter was complete.
The chief had, the saga must say in this segment because the segment will not be returned to, sealed his doom in the moment he had laughed on the cliff-top. The chief did not know he had sealed it. The chief would not know for many years. The chief would carry forward into the long years his small clear contentment, his great hall of certainty, his humming hand, his carefully forged club. The chief would, in the years to come, wield the club against many great beasts and many great foes, and the club would speak in the thunder-tongues the men of his hall had imagined it would speak in, and the chief would become, in the small accounting of the northern reaches, a chief of a kind the songs of his line had not produced in many generations. The chief would be, by all the measures the longhouse halls used, victorious. The chief’s own line would not, in the years of his living, see his fall. The chief’s fall would come at the very end of his life, in his last battle, in a moment the saga will give in its proper segment, in which the chief would strike the earth with the club he had made and the earth would split and swallow him into the dark, and the chief would crawl through the underworld roots toward a chamber where an old salamander named Murn-the-Listener would receive him.
But the fall was the fall. The sealing was the sealing. The sealing happened in this segment, on the cliff-top, in the moment the bone first hummed back against the chief’s hands and the chief laughed and the chief mistook the humming for the gods’ confirmation. The mistaking was the seal. The chief sealed his doom by mistaking it for victory. The saga has said this plainly. The saga will not say it again. The saga will only, from this segment forward, render what came of the mistaking, in the form of the long forging and the long wielding and the long unraveling that the chief’s own line will, in the segments to come, suffer for him.
The chief slept. The bone hummed. The night went on.
The matter was, in the chief’s reckoning, complete.
The matter, in the larger reckoning of the saga and of the song the skald was writing in her bark and of the work the cliff-folk girl had been chosen to carry and of the chain of telling the salamander in the deep chamber had received from his mother’s mother, had only just begun.
Segment 16: “What Remained on the Cliffs”
She did not go back to the cliffs immediately. There was a discipline in waiting that her mother had taught her, and that she had been refining for the whole of her career as a skald, and it was needed now perhaps more than it had ever been needed in her life. The discipline was the discipline of letting a thing settle before one approached it. Her mother had said, in the small dry kitchen-voice she had used for the deeper teachings, that there were three kinds of approaches a skald could make to a great event. The first was the immediate approach, in which one went to the place while the place was still hot, and one risked being burned by the heat and bringing the heat back into the song where it would scorch every listener who came near. The second was the late approach, in which one waited until the place had wholly cooled, and one risked finding nothing there but the small dry remnants that any old place yielded, and one came away with a song that was a song of any place rather than the song of this place. The third was the middle approach, in which one waited until the heat had begun to leave but had not yet wholly gone, and one walked into the warmth that remained and let the warmth tell one what it could without burning, and one came away with the song that was the song of the place at the hour of its leaving. The middle approach was the difficult one. The middle approach required judgment about how long to wait. Her mother had said that the judgment was the work of one’s whole life and that one would, in the long course of one’s craft, make the wait too short more often than one would make it too long, and that the too-short waits would be the songs one would, in old age, regret.
She thought about her mother’s teaching while she sat at the edge of the small flat that had become the company’s evening camp, with the cliff-folk girl Kaela curled in the small careful sleep of a thirteen-year-old at her left and the two grey wool cloaks across the girl and the harp in its case at her own chest and the small banked fire perhaps ten paces away where her brother slept with his right hand still on the canvas-wrapped bundle of the tail. The rain that had come at noon had passed. The afternoon had been the long cold steady wash. The evening had cleared, and the stars above the small flat had been the ordinary autumn stars of late Helmus, with the Skald’s Knot in its usual small square at the western edge of the visible sky and the Bird-Road in the north. She had been writing on her bark by the light of the banked fire for some hours, and she had set the bark aside an hour ago, and she had sat since then with her hands folded across the harp at her chest and her eyes on the small flat where her brother slept and the men slept and the horses stood at the edge of the camp with their ears flat against their heads and their eyes on the bundle.
She had decided, in the long evening, that she would go back to the cliffs in the night.
She did not tell anyone. She did not need to tell anyone. The chief was asleep, with his small almost-smile and his humming hand. Ulf, who would have noticed her leaving, had finally fallen into a careful exhausted sleep at the third hour after the meal. The men were sleeping in the small loose pattern they used at hunt-camps. The horses would notice her leaving but the horses would not say so. The cliff-folk girl Kaela was sleeping the deep sleep of a child who had been chosen and had carried the chosenness for too many hours of one day, and Sigvör would not wake her. She set down the harp very gently at the girl’s side. She rose, slowly, in the small careful way she rose at her own age now, with her left hand pressing against her left knee to take some of the weight. She drew her grey wool cloak around her shoulders. She tied the cloak with the small bronze pin her mother had given her at twenty. She picked up the bag with the bark and the brass-capped pencil and slung it across her chest. She did not pick up the harp. The harp would not come with her to the cliffs. The harp was for halls, much later, and the harp had done its work for the day by being held against her chest through the throwing and the cutting and the lifting and the cry, and the harp was now at rest beside the sleeping girl, and she would let it rest. She walked very quietly out of the small flat camp toward the path that led west to the cliffs.
The path was perhaps a mile long. It rose gently along the eastern slope of the long ridge they had come down in the morning, and at the top of the ridge it leveled off, and then it descended again along the western slope to the cliff-top where the morning had happened. The path was the path the company had walked back along that afternoon, with the wounded and the tail-bundle and the slow horses. The path was, she found as she walked, easier in the dark than it had been in the daylight. The dark hid the small visible reminders of the company’s passage. The dark gave her only the path itself and the small steady sound of her own boots on the cliff-grass and the wind off the open sea that had returned in the evening to its ordinary cliff-folk autumn rhythm of small steady cross-wind with a soft inland edge. The wind was clean. The wind had been clean since the rain at noon, which had carried the last of the morning’s smoke and dust and the small dark blue-green streaks the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had described.
She walked. She did not hurry. She had perhaps four hours before the men of the camp would begin to stir for the morning, and she did not need all four. She would walk the mile out, and she would do what she had come to do, and she would walk the mile back. If she walked at the slow careful pace she preferred at her age, the walking would take perhaps three quarters of an hour each way, with whatever time she needed at the cliff-top in between. The arithmetic was simple. She had done the arithmetic at the camp before rising. The walk was the walk.
She reached the top of the ridge at perhaps the second hour after midnight. The moon was a little past full and was low in the western sky, and the moon was lighting the cliff-top below the ridge with the small pale silver that the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had a word for that did not translate into the northern tongue but that the wandering trader had once tried to render for her as the milk of the dead. The phrase had stayed with her. The phrase was the right phrase for the light. The light was the milk of the dead. The light lay across the cliff-top in long pale bands and along the cliff-edge in a clearer brighter line, and the line picked out, even from the top of the ridge, the dark shape that lay along the cliff-edge in the place where she had last seen it.
The beast was still there.
She had not been sure that she would find the beast still there. She had thought, walking, that the beast might have rolled into the sea, or might have crumbled into the small dry residue the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had once spoken of for creatures that had been broken from their living shape, or might simply have been gone, in some way that she could not have predicted. The beast had been a thing she had not had any inheritance for, and her predictions about what such a thing would do after dying were the predictions of a guess. The guess had been wrong. The beast was still there. The beast lay along the cliff-edge in the moonlight, in the same long shape she had seen at the morning, with the wings half-folded against the sides of the body in the way she remembered, and the long neck stretched out toward the west, and the long body lying along the air above the cliff-edge in the way it had hung in the morning. The body was still there. The body was, even from the top of the ridge, smaller than it had been.
She walked down the western slope toward the cliff-edge.
She walked slowly. The walking was not because of any caution. The walking was the slow walking of a woman who was approaching a thing she had decided she could not approach quickly, because the quick approach would have been the immediate approach her mother had warned against. She walked at the middle approach. She walked at the pace of a person whose footsteps gave time for the small considerations to settle between each step. The small considerations were many. The first was that the beast was a thing she had decided, on the morning of the cliff-top, to make a center of her song. The deciding had committed her to a relationship with the beast that she had not yet examined closely. The relationship was a relationship between a skald and her subject. The relationship was supposed to be a professional relationship of the kind she had been trained for. But the subject was not an ordinary subject. The subject was, the small dry click at the back of her head told her, a creature that had been seen by the cliff-folk girl Kaela in a way that the rest of the company had not been able to see it, and the seeing had given the girl the small full look that the girl had carried all afternoon. Sigvör had not been seen by the beast in the same way. Sigvör had been spared in the throwing, along with the girl, and Sigvör had judged, from the sparing, that the beast had spared them both for the same reason, but Sigvör had not had the third hum directed into her own collarbone, and Sigvör had not been chosen in the way the girl had been chosen. Sigvör was not the chosen one. Sigvör was the skald. The skald’s relationship to the chosen was the skald’s relationship to the chosen. The skald’s relationship to the chosen creature was a different relationship. Sigvör was walking down the slope to think about what that relationship would be.
The second consideration was the consideration of her own brother. Her brother had cut the tail. Her brother had laughed. Her brother had received the humming with the small bright pleasure of a man who had been given a gift. Her brother had slept that evening with his hand on the bundle and his small almost-smile and his good appetite at the meal. Her brother was, in the small reckoning she had been making of him through the bark for fifteen days, very much further along the path of his change than he had been at the cresting of the ridge in the morning. Her brother had crossed, in the breath after the cut had completed, into a different man, and the different man was the man who would lead them home and who would forge the club and who would, in the long years to come, wield the club. The different man was not the brother she had walked the wharf with at Aern-Vík. The brother she had walked the wharf with had been the brother she had given the half-rhymed proverb to. The brother had not heard the proverb. The brother had crossed. She was walking down the slope to do, in some small way, the thing she had not been able to do at the wharf, which was to mark the crossing on the side of the matter where the marking would actually be received. She could not mark the crossing in her brother. Her brother was not receiving any marking. She could mark the crossing in the place where the crossing had happened, which was the cliff-top, with the body of the creature her brother had cut. The body would receive. The body was, in the way only a body that had been cut from its own life could be, available to receive. She would mark the crossing there.
The third consideration was the consideration of the song. The song was the Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer. The song had two centers. The song would be, when it was made, the song that named the choosings on both sides. She had decided on the cliff-top in the morning that she would render the beast honestly, in the way one rendered a hero. The rendering would require, in the back-of-the-head place where the song was being made, that she have at some point laid her hand on the actual flank of the actual beast. The laying-on of the hand was the small physical commitment that her craft required when the craft was going to attempt a rendering of this size. She had laid her hand, in her career, on many bodies. She had laid her hand on the body of the great whale at the Strait of Bones, the whale her father had taken in his eleventh hunt, on a beach in midwinter with the whale’s blood freezing on the sand around it and her father’s men cutting the long strips of blubber away. She had laid her hand on the body of the bear that her cousin Snorri Two-Tongues, who was a different Snorri from the one of the cliff-top, had taken in the high country in her thirty-fourth year. She had laid her hand on each of the great bodies whose songs she had later made, in the way her mother had taught her. The laying-on was the commitment. The laying-on was the small physical thing that the song required of the skald to mark that the skald had been present at the body and was not making the song from a distance. She had not yet laid her hand on the beast of the cliffs. The song could not be fully made without the laying-on. She was walking down the slope to do it.
The fourth consideration was the consideration that she did not have any right to do it.
This consideration was the one she had been carrying most carefully across the long evening at the camp. She had been thinking about it in the small private way one thinks about the things that complicate the simpler matters. The right to lay one’s hand on a slain creature was the right of the hunter who had slain the creature, or of the skald commissioned by the hunter to make the song. She was the skald of her brother’s hunt. She was, by the small careful inheritance of her craft, entitled to lay her hand on the beast. The entitlement was professional. The entitlement was not personal. The professional entitlement said she had the right of the skald. The personal entitlement said she had no right at all. She had not loved the beast in the way the cliff-folk girl had loved the beast across the long history of the cliff-folk’s looking up. She had not been chosen by the beast in the way the girl had been chosen. She was, in the personal accounting, a stranger to the beast, a participant in the band that had killed it, and her laying-on of the hand would be the laying-on of the hand of one of the killers. The killers did not, in the small careful cliff-folk reckoning, have the right of touching what they had killed in any way other than the small practical way of harvesting. Her brother had touched the tail-bone, by his right as the chief of the hunt. The other men had touched the tail-bone in the carrying. None of them had laid a hand on the flank in any way that was not practical. She was walking down to lay her hand on the flank in a way that was not practical. The laying-on would be the laying-on of someone who had no right to do it but was going to do it anyway.
She had wrestled with this in the camp for some hours before rising. She had come to the small conclusion that the lack of right was the reason she would do it. The right of the killer was not the right she wanted to exercise. The right of the chosen was not a right she had. The lack of right was the position she actually occupied, and the laying-on from that position would be a different laying-on from any she had ever done. The laying-on would not be the small confident commitment of a skald to her craft. The laying-on would be an apology. She would be laying her hand on the flank not to claim the song but to offer the small private apology of a skald who had been present at a killing she could not have prevented and who could now only do the small after-work of saying, by the touch, that she was sorry the killing had happened, and that she was sorry she had not been able to do anything to stop it, and that she was sorry she would, in the small forward unfolding of her professional life, continue to be the skald of the man who had done it.
The apology had no right to itself either. She knew this. An apology one had no right to make was an apology that was, in the strictest accounting, a self-indulgence. The cliff-folk girl Kaela was the one who should have made the apology, if anyone should have. The cliff-folk girl had not, in the long retreating to the small flat, gone back to lay her own hand. The cliff-folk girl had not seemed, in the small careful witness’s posture she had taken on, to feel the need for the apology. The cliff-folk girl had been chosen. The chosen did not, perhaps, need to apologize. The chosen was held in some different relation to the killing that did not require apology, in the way the survivor of a great flood was not asked to apologize to the dead. Sigvör had not been chosen and had not been a survivor in that sense. Sigvör had been a participant. The participant’s apology was the apology that had no right to itself. The participant offered it anyway. The participant offered it because the participant could not, in any conscience, not offer it. The offering was the cost the participant paid for having been present. The offering would not make anything right. The offering would only mark, in the small physical way the laying-on of a hand could mark, that something had happened that the participant had been unable to make right and would not, in pretending it could be made right, dishonor by leaving unmarked. The offering was the small honest thing the participant could do.
She had decided, at the camp, that she would do the small honest thing.
She walked down the slope. She reached the level of the cliff-top at the foot of the western descent. The pale tall grass that ran across the cliff-top was thinner here, having been trampled by the company’s morning passage, and the moonlight picked out the small flattenings in the grass where men had landed when they had been thrown. She walked past these. She did not stop at any of them. The men who had been thrown were either dead or had been recovered. She walked toward the cliff-edge.
The body lay along the cliff-edge as it had at the morning, but smaller. Smaller was the word she had used at the top of the ridge, and the word was the right word. The body was smaller. She did not know how to account for the smallness. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers, the saga of her later life would later report from a conversation she would have many years on, would say that the body of such a creature began, in the hours after dying, the small slow letting-out of what had filled the body across the long life, and that the letting-out was the body’s own version of the dignity the beast had shown in not moving during the cut. The body was, in the cliff-folk’s grandmothers’ phrase, returning what had been borrowed. The borrowing had been the long substance of the beast’s life. The returning was the body’s small slow contracting toward the size of an ordinary creature, in the way the wind that had filled a sail returned to the air after a ship had been hauled up on a beach. The body would, the cliff-folk’s grandmothers would say, continue to contract for some hours yet, until it had reached the size of an ordinary great creature, and at that point the body would be only the body, and the rest, whatever it had been, would have gone.
Sigvör did not know any of this in the moment she stood at the edge of the cliff-top in the moonlight. She knew only that the body was smaller than it had been. The wings, half-folded against the sides, were no longer as long as they had appeared in the morning. The long neck stretched toward the west was shorter. The flank that had heaved in the slow breath of a creature at rest no longer heaved. The flank lay still. The body was a body. The body was, in the small flat way of all bodies, no longer a person. The thing that had looked at her brother and at the cliff-folk girl was no longer in the body. The thing had gone, or was going, or had been going since the rain at noon, when the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had said the wind had shifted and the cliff-folk’s wind-women had heard the small clear chiming. The thing was not in the body now.
She walked closer.
She walked past the place where the chains of thunderstone had been set, where the heavy dark blue-green pool of the beast’s blood had pooled in the depression in the cliff-top in the morning. The pool had thinned in the rain at noon and had spread along the cliff-top in long thin streams that had now dried into long thin stains the color of slate. The stains lay across the pale grass in the moonlight in a pattern that she did not, in the moment, attempt to read. The cliff-folk’s wind-women could read such patterns. She could not. She walked past.
She stopped at the place where the body lay along the cliff-edge.
The body was, at close range, even smaller than it had appeared from the top of the ridge. The flank that she had thought, from the morning, was perhaps twelve paces long, was now perhaps eight paces. The wings were perhaps six paces each at full extension. The body had contracted to perhaps two-thirds of what it had been in the morning. The contraction was the contraction the cliff-folk’s grandmothers would later describe. She did not, in the moment, have a word for the contraction. She had only the small dry click at the back of her head that told her she was looking at a creature that had been one thing and was becoming a different thing. The smaller body was not the beast. The smaller body was the body the beast had used during its life. The beast itself was no longer in the body. The beast was somewhere else, or was nowhere, or was, perhaps, in the form of the dark scale at the collar of an old salamander in a deep chamber below the cliff, whose own listening had received the morning. She did not know about Murn-the-Listener. She would never know about Murn-the-Listener. The chain of telling that Murn carried did not extend to her, in the same way her own bark did not extend to Murn. She would lay her hand on the body without knowing about the dark scale. The laying-on would, in some way she would not perceive, complete a small loop with the dark scale that was, at that very moment, lying against the salamander’s collar far below, in the deep dark, growing slowly cool again now that the body above had stopped its warming.
She stood for a long moment at the flank of the body without laying her hand. She wanted to take the moment of standing before the moment of laying. She had been trained, by her mother, in this small careful preparation. The preparation was the small drawing-in of breath one took before any committal of one’s craft to a great body. The drawing-in allowed the body to be received, by the eye and by the small careful skin of the standing skald, in the form it actually had, before the laying-on changed the body into a body that had been touched by the skald and was therefore in a different relation to the skald than it had been before. The body before the laying-on was the body of itself. The body after the laying-on was the body of itself and the skald. The two bodies were different bodies. The body of itself was the body one needed to receive first, by standing.
She received it. The body in the moonlight was the body of a creature that had been very long-lived and that had decided, on this morning, to come down. The scales of the flank were the color she had been trying to find a name for in the morning, and even in the moonlight, which thinned colors to the small narrow range of silvers and grays the cliff-folk’s grandmothers called the moon’s spectrum, the color of the scales was visible. The scales were the color of two things meeting. The scales were the color of a sea breaking on a stone. The scales had been the color in life and were the color still. The contraction had not taken the color out of them. The scales had become, in fact, in the small slow contracting, slightly more vivid, as the body had compressed itself toward its final size and the color had concentrated. The flank was the color of a sea breaking on a stone, magnified, held close, set against the long pale grass of the cliff-edge. The flank was very beautiful. She had not expected this. She had expected, perhaps, in some part of her professional self, that the flank of a dead beast would be less beautiful than the flank of a living beast. She had been wrong. The flank was more beautiful. The flank was the small concentrated essence of what the wings in the morning had carried lightly. The beauty was, she thought with the small click that had been with her all day, the beauty of a thing that had returned, in the small slow contracting, to its truest form before going wherever such forms went next. The beauty was a beauty she would have to find a way to render in the song. She would have to find a way that did not patronize the beauty by overdescribing it. She would have to render it by the small careful indirection her mother had taught her, in which the listener was given enough to imagine and not enough to be told. The rendering would be a challenge. She set the challenge aside in the back-of-the-head place where the song’s problems lived. The song would solve it in its own time, perhaps not for years.
She stood. The body did not stir. The flank did not heave. The wind off the open sea moved the long pale grass at her feet but did not move the scales of the flank, which were heavy enough that the wind would not have moved them in any case, and even if they had been light the contracting body did not respond to wind in the way a living body did. The body was, in this respect, already a stone. The body was becoming a stone. The body would be, by the morning, very near to the form a stone could take. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers would later say, in their long re-telling, that the body of the beast had become a thing that could not be cut for trophy in the hours after dying, because the substance of the body had hardened into something between bone and stone that no axe could bite, and that the cliff-folk of the southern coast had, in the months and years following the matter, made the cliff-top a small pilgrimage place where they came to lay their own hands on the dark stone-like remnant for blessing. Sigvör did not know about the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage was for the cliff-folk. She was not cliff-folk. She would not be part of the pilgrimage.
She would, in this hour before the body fully hardened, be the only northerner who would ever lay her hand on the flank in the way she was about to.
She drew in the small breath. She lifted her right hand from her side. She brought her right hand forward across the small space between her and the flank, perhaps the length of her forearm, and she laid her palm against the flank of the body.
The flank was warm.
She had not expected the warmth either. She had thought, in some private part of herself, that a body so far along in its small slow contracting would already be cool, in the way the bodies of all dead things eventually became. The flank was warm. The warmth was not the warmth of a living creature. The warmth was the warmth of a thing that had been very hot for a very long time and had only begun, in the past few hours, to cool. The warmth was, perhaps, the warmth she remembered from her childhood at the longfire at Aern-Vík when she had laid her small palm against the great central stone of the hearth in the morning after the fire had burned all night and the stone had retained the heat. The warmth was that warmth. The warmth was the warmth of a long carrying. The flank had carried the heat of the beast’s long life, and the heat was still leaving the body, and the heat would not be fully gone for some hours yet. She laid her hand against the warmth.
She did not speak.
She had thought, walking down from the ridge, that she might say something. She had thought she might say a small phrase of her mother’s, or a small line of her own, or perhaps only the name she had now given the song. She had thought she might say the song’s name aloud to the body, as a kind of dedication. The thinking had been the thinking of a skald who had been planning the moment. The moment, when it arrived, did not want any of these. The moment wanted only the hand. The hand was the speaking. The hand was the small concentrated phrase that did not need any words. She did not speak.
She kept her hand on the flank for a long time.
She did not measure the time. The time was not something one measured at such moments. The time was the time the moment took. The moment took, by her best later reckoning when she had returned to the camp and had thought about the matter, perhaps the length of a long song’s first verse. Perhaps a little longer. She kept her hand on the flank. She felt the warmth move slowly out of the flank and into her palm and up through her wrist and into the lower part of her arm. The warmth did not, in the small fanciful way the longhouse songs sometimes claimed for such moments, communicate any thoughts to her. The warmth was only warmth. The warmth was the heat the body was releasing on its way to its final cooling, and the heat passing through her palm was a small share of that release, the share the body had not had any objection to giving her. The body was, in its small dignified way, releasing the heat to whoever stood near. She had stood near. She had received a share.
She thought of the beast.
She thought of the wings the color of evening cloud, which had not in fact been the color of evening cloud but had been the color of two things meeting, the color of a sea breaking on a stone. She thought of the long slow descending circle, the way the beast had come down through the morning sky toward the cliff-edge in the unhurried steady spiral of a creature that had decided where it would be. She thought of the first sound, the long held note that had been the air arranging itself again around the creature the air had been made to hold. She thought of the second sound, the smaller acknowledging pulse that had been meant only for the cliff-folk girl Kaela. She thought of the descent to the cliff-edge and the lying along the air with the wings half-folded and the tail-knot resting in the pale tall grass at fifteen paces. She thought of the eyes the color of an undecided storm, which the girl had said in the kitchen sixty years later had been a library, although Sigvör would not, in this hour, know what the girl had thought of the eyes, because the girl had not yet given her the description and might never give her the description. She thought of the small lifting of the wing-tip in the moment of the throwing of the chains and the way the wing-tip had passed under the chains and the chains had snagged each other in the air and fallen into the surf at the foot of the cliffs. She thought of the moment the beast had looked at her brother, and the moment the chief had raised Gjafr-Bíta, and the moment the chief had lowered Gjafr-Bíta and reached for the second pair of chains, and the moment the beast had not moved while the cut had been made. She thought of the dignity. She thought of the choosing. She thought, with a small heaviness that she had been holding off all evening and that she now let arrive, of the fact that the beast had let it happen.
She did not know why the beast had let it happen. She had decided on the cliff-top in the morning that she would not impose her reading of the why on the song, and that she would describe what had happened and let the listeners hold whatever they would hold. She would keep that decision. She would also, in the small private hour at the flank with her hand laid on the warmth, allow herself the thinking she would not put into the song. The thinking was the thinking of a skald off-duty. The thinking was that perhaps the beast had been very old. Perhaps the beast had been older than any of the cliff-folk’s grandmothers’ stories had reached. Perhaps the beast had been the last of its kind, or the only of its kind, or had been a kind that did not, in the small accounting of kinds, have a count. Perhaps the beast had been ready, in some way the body of a creature that has lived too long becomes ready, to set down the long carrying. Perhaps the beast had come down to the cliff-edge because the cliff-edge was the place where setting-down would be possible, and the setting-down required, by some rule the beast had been raised to or had reasoned into during its long life, that another creature complete the small final motion of cutting the tail from the body. The cutting was the motion that no creature could do for itself, because the tail was the part of the body the creature most strongly held to, and the holding-to was what kept the creature in the world. The cutting was the small kindness another creature would have to do for the beast. The beast had come down to find another creature that would do it. The beast had found her brother. The beast had perhaps not found exactly what it had hoped to find. The beast had found a chief who would cut without understanding what the cutting was for, and who would mistake the cutting for victory, and who would carry the tail-bone home and make of it a weapon. Perhaps the beast had been disappointed in this. Perhaps the beast had been past disappointment. Perhaps the cutting had been the cutting regardless of who had done it, and the regardless was the small dignity the beast had carried into its last hour, that any creature would do, and the doing would be the doing.
She did not know which of these was true. She did not need to. She was thinking them as the off-duty skald, with her hand on the flank in the moonlight. The thinking was for her own carrying. The song would not contain the thinking. The song would contain only what could be said with the small honest indirection her mother had taught her. The thinking would sit in the small back-of-the-head place where the off-duty thinking lived, and would, in the long forward unfolding of her life, perhaps become a different kind of thinking, perhaps not, perhaps fade. She would let it sit. She would let it do what it would do.
She thought of her brother.
The thinking of her brother in this moment was a different kind of thinking. The thinking of her brother had on it the small bright pain of a sister who had loved her brother since he had been small enough to carry on her hip. She had carried him. She had taught him, in the small ways an older sister teaches a younger brother, the things their mother had not had time to teach him before their mother had died. She had been at his oath at the longfire when he had inherited the high seat at twenty-three, and she had been at his wedding, and she had been at the burial of his wife who had died young of the same wasting that had taken their mother, and she had been at his second wedding which had not produced children either, and she had been at every hunt of his chieftainship as his skald. She had loved him. She loved him still. The love was the love. The love was not the kind of love that could be turned off by his having become a different man in the breath after the cut. The love was the love of a sister, which was older than the chief he had been and older than the different chief he was becoming, and the love would, in the small careful long way of sister-love, persist past whatever else he became. She would love him at the end of his life. She would love him at the splitting of the earth, if she lived to see it, and she did not yet know whether she would live to see it. She would love him in the long crawl through the underworld roots, if any of that long crawl became known to her by some chain of telling, and she did not yet know whether it would. The love would persist.
She also, with her hand on the warmth of the flank, allowed herself a small private acknowledgment that she had not been able to make at the camp. She acknowledged, to herself only, that she was not going to be able to save him. The acknowledgment was a hard one. She had carried, in some quiet back chamber of herself across the long inland walk, the small unstated hope that she might at some point in the matter find the words that would turn him. She had given him the half-rhymed proverb at the wharf. The proverb had not landed. She had given him the private exchange after the storm at sea. The exchange had not turned him. She had given him the small consultations on the inland walk, in the small careful skald’s voice she had used for the daily readings of his planning, and the consultations had not changed his course. She had given him, in the small unrepeatable last way, the look across the cliff-grass after he had set the second chain, the look she had answered with the small clear neutrality of a skald in attendance. The look had been the last small chance. The look had not turned him. There were no more looks. The cut had happened. The lifting had happened. The cry had happened. The humming had begun. Her brother was now on the path of the humming, and the humming would carry him forward into whatever he would become, and the carrying would not be turned by any further proverb or any further look or any further exchange. She had done what she could do. She had done it with the small careful proportion her craft and her sisterhood permitted her. The doing had not been enough. The doing was, perhaps, never going to have been enough. The matter had been, as the dry-voiced stranger at the longfire had said before the embarkation, already decided. The skald’s words could have, at most, given the chief small chances. The chief had not taken them. The chief, perhaps, in some part of himself that had been buried in the chamber of his deciding since long before the storm, had never been able to take them.
The acknowledgment was hard. The acknowledgment was, she understood with the small click that came at moments when she finally accepted a thing she had been refusing to accept, a kind of release. She had been carrying the small unstated hope as a small added weight on the long fist below her breastbone, and the hope had been pressing against the fist for the whole of the inland walk and the whole of the morning at the cliff-edge. The hope was now, in the moment of the acknowledgment, set down. The setting-down was not a pleasant feeling. The setting-down was a heavy and rather lonely feeling. The setting-down was the feeling of a person who had given up a long-held wish and was now, in the moment of giving up, learning to live without it. She would learn. She would, in the long forward unfolding of her life, learn how to be the skald of a brother she had stopped trying to save. The learning would be slow. The learning would take, perhaps, the rest of her own life. She would not be done with the learning at the end. She would, at the end of her life, still be working on it. She had time. She would use the time.
She kept her hand on the flank.
The warmth was leaving the flank more slowly than she had expected. The warmth was not, perhaps, going to leave the flank entirely for some hours yet. She did not need to wait for the warmth to leave. She had received her share. She would, in a moment, lift her hand and walk back along the cliff-top and up the slope of the ridge and along the path to the camp, and she would lie down beside the cliff-folk girl Kaela in the small flat with the harp at her chest, and she would sleep, if she could, before the men woke for the morning’s beginning of the long carrying. She would do all of this. She would do it in a moment. She had a moment more at the flank. She wanted the moment.
She allowed herself, in the moment, the small thing she had been holding back across the long evening.
The small thing was that she was sorry. She was sorry the morning had happened. She was sorry her brother had been the one to do the cutting. She was sorry the cliff-folk girl had been taken from her village and brought across twelve days of singing woods and sleeping-light valleys and country no cliff-folk lore reached, to be present at the morning of the cliff-edge, to be chosen by the beast, to carry the chosenness for the rest of her life as a thing her village would never fully understand. She was sorry the chains of thunderstone had been set and that the men had been thrown like grain and that Audun son of Brand Two-Knives had not let go of his chain and was now in the surf at the foot of the cliffs with his chain still in his locked hands and would not be recovered as a living man. She was sorry Halvard’s grandfather’s curses had stopped in the moment Halvard had been thrown. She was sorry Thorir son of Ragnar Crow-Eye, the chief’s young cousin, would carry a broken arm for the rest of his life and would never again be quite as quick on his feet. She was sorry Snorri Hard-Hand had had to swim. She was sorry the horses had had to carry the bundle and would never again be willing to carry packs of any kind. She was sorry the long thin scar in the cliff-top would remain in the cliff-top for sixty years and would grow a slightly different color of grass. She was sorry the rain at noon had run colored in places along the southern coast and that the cliff-folk’s wind-women had heard the small clear chiming of their shells and had wept in their houses. She was sorry the cliff-folk girl’s grandmother on the threshold-stone of the house above the cove had turned a fifteenth white shell all the long fifteen months of the standing cloud and had been right about the standing cloud and would not be celebrated for being right because the right was the right of a long-warning that no one would ever fully understand. She was sorry the beast had lain along the cliff-edge with its eyes closed and had let the cut be made and had given the chief the chance the chief had not taken. She was sorry, in the smallest private way of the sorries she could not say aloud, that she had been raised to be the skald of a hall whose chief had made this his great work. She was sorry to be the skald of the hall. She was not sorry to be the skald herself. The skald in herself was the thing her mother had given her and was the thing she would carry to her own death and would not, even in this hour at the flank, give up. But she was sorry, in the way of a person who has been given a long inheritance that she would have to use for purposes she did not approve of, that the hall in which she had been raised had become the hall that would receive the tail-bone and the forging and the wielding and would honor her brother for the doing of all of it.
She kept her hand on the flank a moment longer. The warmth was still warm. The flank was still still. The wind off the open sea moved the long pale grass at her feet. The moonlight lay across the cliff-top in the small pale silver the cliff-folk called the milk of the dead. The beast did not stir. The beast was not going to stir. The beast was a body. The body was warm. The body would, by morning, be cool. By the next afternoon, the body would be hard. By the next week, the body would be a long dark shape along the cliff-edge that the cliff-folk would walk out to see, and would lay their hands on, and would, in the small slow way of the cliff-folk’s grandmothers’ inheritance, begin the small unspoken pilgrimage that would last the rest of the cliff-folk’s habitation of the southern coast. The body would, in some way that did not require her to know it, become a thing the cliff-folk had after the matter, in compensation for the cliff-folk girl who would not come back to her village for seven years and the long-warning that had completed itself and the wind-women’s tears in their houses on the afternoon of the rain at noon.
She was not part of any of that. She was the skald of the hall that had killed it. She was, in the moment at the flank, only a participant who had no right to the apology she was making, and was making it anyway.
She let her hand stay a moment more. She said, in her mind only, not aloud, the small private phrase that her mother had taught her was the phrase one said to oneself when one had done a thing one regretted but could not undo. The phrase, in her mother’s small dry kitchen-voice, was, well, the doing is done. The phrase was not a phrase of justification. The phrase was a phrase of acknowledgment. The phrase said, the matter has happened, and you have been part of it, and the part you have been will not be reduced by any amount of wishing. You have done what you have done. You will live with it. You will use what you have learned from it. You will not pretend you did not do it. The phrase had been her mother’s gift across many years. She had used the phrase many times. She used it now.
She lifted her hand from the flank.
The lifting was slow. The lifting was the small careful reverse of the laying-on. She lifted in the same small steady way she had laid down, with the same drawing-in of breath, with the same careful preservation of the moment in her memory so that the moment would survive in the small back-of-the-head place where the song would later need it. She would need this moment. The song would need it. The song would not, perhaps, render the moment directly, because the moment was hers and was not the song’s. The moment would inform the small careful indirection by which she would render the body in the song. The moment was the foundation. The song would stand on it.
She lowered her hand to her side. She stepped back a single pace. She did not turn. She gave the body, in the small careful cliff-folk way she had learned from the cliff-folk girl in the long inland walk, the small inclination of the head. The inclination was the cliff-folk’s small gesture to elders. She inclined to the body. The body did not return the inclination. The body was a body. She had not expected the inclination to be returned. She had given it because the giving was the small honest thing.
She turned. She walked back across the cliff-top, past the long thin stains of the dark blue-green that the rain had thinned and spread, past the small flattenings in the pale grass where men had been thrown, past the small dark depression where the chief’s blood had pooled. She walked at the same slow careful pace she had walked at on the descent. She climbed the western slope of the ridge in the small steady steps of a woman who had done what she had come to do and was carrying it back. She reached the top of the ridge. She paused for a single breath. She did not look back. She had decided, in the moment of turning, that she would not look back. The looking-back would have been the small self-indulgence that she had been working all evening to refuse. She had laid her hand. She had given the inclination. The matter, between her and the body, was complete. The looking-back would have added nothing. She walked over the ridge and down the eastern slope and along the path to the camp.
She reached the camp at perhaps the third hour after midnight. The moon was now lower in the western sky and was about to set behind the inland hills. The small banked fire had burned almost down to embers. The men slept. The horses, at the edge of the camp, still stood with their ears flat and their eyes on the bundle. The cliff-folk girl Kaela slept under the two grey wool cloaks with the harp at her side where Sigvör had left it. Her brother slept beside the bundle with his right hand still on the cut end, with the small almost-smile still on his face.
She approached very quietly. She picked up the harp from beside the girl. She held the harp at her chest. She sat down at the same place she had sat for the long evening, with the girl at her left. She set the bag with the bark and the brass-capped pencil down at her feet. She did not, at this hour, write. The writing would happen tomorrow. The writing for tonight had been done. She had walked to the cliff and back. She had laid her hand. The song had what the song needed for this part of itself. The song would, in the long forward unfolding, find the rest of what it needed in the small careful daily writing she would do for the rest of the matter. The song was, in this moment, complete in the part that the cliff-top required, and she would let the song rest along with everyone else.
She held the harp at her chest. She let her eyes close. She did not, immediately, sleep. She sat with her eyes closed and the harp at her chest and the cliff-folk girl at her left and the small slow breath of the girl’s sleeping at her side, and she let the moment of the flank settle into her, in the small slow careful way her mother had taught her was the way to let a great moment settle. The moment had to be allowed to find its place. The place would be the place from which the song would draw, for as long as she would sing the song. The moment would not be used up by the drawing. The moment would, if anything, deepen with each drawing. The moment was now hers. The moment had been an apology that she had no right to make. The moment had also been, she allowed herself to acknowledge in the small private way, a kind of homecoming for some part of her that had been homeless in her brother’s hall for many years. She had been raised to be the skald of a hall. The hall’s chief had become, in the morning, a chief she could not, in good craft, fully serve. She had laid her hand on the body of the creature her brother had killed. The laying-on had been, the small click told her, a sort of leaving. She had not left her brother’s hall. She would not leave the hall. She would serve as the hall’s skald for whatever years remained to her. But she had left, in some smaller private way, the small unstated assumption that her loyalty was wholly her brother’s. The loyalty was now divided. The division was the division she had decided on at the cliff-edge in the morning, when she had decided to be the beast’s skald as well as her brother’s. The decision had been a decision in the back-of-the-head place. The laying-on of the hand had been the small physical confirmation of the decision in the body. The body knew now that the decision had been made. The body would carry the knowledge forward.
She would, the saga of her later life would report, sing the Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer for the first time at a small hall in the Strait of Bones some seven months later, on the long voyage home, when the company stopped at a friendly port for the winter and the chief asked her to give a song to the hosts, and she would sing the first part of the song, the part that ended with the cresting of the ridge above the cliffs, and her brother in the hosts’ hall would, she would observe with a small clean professional satisfaction, recognize that the song had two centers, and her brother would not, in fact, speak to her about it that night. Her brother would speak to her about it perhaps three nights later, in the small private way of a chief consulting his skald, and would ask her, gently, if she had considered whether the song’s name might be revised. Sigvör would say, in a voice as gentle as her brother’s, that she had considered, but that the name was the name, and that she did not, by her own oath at the longfire on the night of the oath, change names of songs lightly. Her brother would receive this and would not ask again. Her brother would continue to be her chief for the rest of his life and would never explicitly say that he disliked the song, because that was not her brother’s way, but Sigvör would understand, in the small careful way a sister understands her brother, that the song had become a thing between them that they would not, in the years to come, speak of openly, and that the not-speaking would be the form of their continuing love. The not-speaking would be the form by which her brother kept her as his skald even as his skald had become also the skald of the beast he had killed, and the form by which she kept him as her brother even as her brother had become a chief she could not save. The form would hold. The form would hold until the very end of her brother’s life, when at his last battle he would strike the earth with the club and the earth would split, and Sigvör in another hall many days away by news would receive the report of his fall and would, the saga of her later life would report, write in her bark in her small private script the sentence, the doing was done, and the doing is now finished, and the song goes on without him. She would underline the word on.
But this was for very much later.
For now, in the small flat of the company’s evening camp at the third hour after midnight, she sat with the harp at her chest and the cliff-folk girl at her left and the small slow breath of the girl’s sleeping at her side, and she let the moment of the flank settle, and at some point she did sleep, in the small careful way of a woman of fifty-something at the end of a very long day, and she slept until just before the dawn, when she would wake and rise and pack the harp into its case and prepare with the others for the beginning of the long carrying back to the cove and to Sound-of-Going and to the voyage home.
The body of the beast remained at the cliff-edge for the rest of her life and for many lives after. The body of the beast did, in the small slow careful way the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had predicted, become a thing the cliff-folk walked out to lay their hands on. The pilgrimage continued for as long as the cliff-folk lived along the southern coast. Sigvör Ash-Daughter never returned to the cliffs after the morning of the cutting. She had laid her hand once, in the moonlight at the third hour after midnight on the night following the matter, and the once had been the once. The once had been enough.
The doing was done.
The song would go on.
She slept.
Segment 17: “The Forging at the Longhouse”
Now the saga must speak of the return north and of the forging that came after. The return north was a long matter and the saga will not give every day of it, because the days were many and most of them were the small ordinary days of a return voyage from a great work. The saga will give what the songs of the chief’s line have preserved, in the order the songs have preserved them, and the saga will dwell only at the moments that the line has thought worth dwelling at. The first of those moments was the carrying back to the cove. The second was the long voyage along the coast and the wintering at the Strait of Bones. The third was the spring crossing back to Aern-Vík and the arrival at the hall. The fourth, and the longest, was the forging itself, which the saga must give with care because the forging was the matter at which the tail-bone became the Sky’s Hammer and the chief became, in the form he would carry for the rest of his life, the man the line would remember.
The carrying back to the cove was four days. The company left the small flat above the stream on the morning following the cutting, with the wrapped tail-bundle slung between the two pack-horses in the rigging Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf had improvised. The horses did not, the saga has already mentioned, like the bundle. The horses walked the first day with their ears flat against their heads. The horses walked the second day in the same way. The horses walked the third day with their ears still flat and a small new tremor that had begun to come into their flanks at the fourth hour of each day’s walking, which the men noted but which the chief did not, in his certainty, attend to. The men noted because the men were closer to the horses. The chief was walking at the front of the column with Gjafr-Bíta in his right hand and the cliff-folk girl Kaela at his elbow as guide and his hands, when they were not holding the spear, twitching slightly in the small steady rhythm that the chief did not yet recognize as the humming continuing in him.
On the fourth day of the carrying, the horses refused.
The horses had walked perhaps half the morning, in the slow careful way they had been walking since the cliff-top. The horses had reached a small flat above a stream that the cliff-folk girl said was the same flat where the company had camped on its third evening of the inland walk, on the evening before the day of the wolf, perhaps half a day from where the company had first met the herders at the high meadow. The flat had been the place where Kaela had said the country began to feel different. The horses came onto the flat. The horses stopped. The horses did not, the saga reports, refuse with any drama. The horses simply stopped and would not be moved. The men pulled at the leads and the men spoke to the horses in the small clucking northern tongue used for horses and the men eventually used the small switch the horse-handlers carried for such occasions, and the horses would not be moved. The horses, the saga reports, did not run. The horses only stood with their flat ears and their tremoring flanks and their eyes on the canvas-wrapped bundle in the rigging, and the horses, in the small careful way only horses can refuse, were done.
The chief stood at the leads for some time. The chief was the kind of chief who understood, when his own command was failing to move a creature, that further command would not move it. The chief was not, by his own line’s reckoning, a man who beat horses. The chief looked at the horses. The chief looked at the bundle in the rigging. The chief looked at his men. The chief, the saga must report, considered for a long breath. Then the chief gave the order to unload the horses and to take the rigging off them and to leave the horses at the small flat with what supplies the horses would need to feed themselves for some weeks, and the chief gave the further order that the men would carry the bundle themselves on poles. Eystein son of Olvir Sharp-Tooth and Vigleik and Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand and Asbjorn son of Hauk Far-Sight and Snorri Hard-Hand, who had been recovered alive from the sea-stack on the afternoon of the cutting and was now walking with the company though with a small cough that had not been there before, would take the bundle in shifts of four men at a time on two long poles cut from the strange copper-barked trees of the eastern wood. The men would carry the bundle the rest of the way to the cove.
The men did the carrying. The carrying took the rest of the fourth day and the whole of the fifth and most of the sixth, where without the horses the small remaining distance had to be done slower. The men did not complain. The men had agreed, in some unspoken way the saga reports, that the bundle was a thing each of them would carry now, in turn, with whatever strength they had left from the throwing, and that the carrying would be the work the company finished together. Even Thorir son of Ragnar Crow-Eye, whose left arm was broken and bound, took a turn at the pole with his good arm at the second day of the carrying, in the small careful way of a young man who had been thrown and needed to do something with himself to recover his place. The chief permitted it. The chief, the saga must say, walked at the front with Gjafr-Bíta and with the cliff-folk girl Kaela at his elbow, and the chief did not himself take a turn at the poles. The chief was the chief. The chief had cut. The chief did not carry. The saga sets this down without comment because the matter is what the matter was.
The skald, the saga reports from her own bark, walked at the middle of the column with the harp at her chest and the bag of birch-bark at her hip. The skald wrote, in the small private script, the sentence, the horses refused. The chief did not register why. The men registered. The horses are wiser than the chief in this matter. She underlined the word wiser.
They reached the cove on the evening of the sixth day. The cliff-folk village above the cove was, as Kaela had warned the chief, no longer inhabited. The cliff-folk had used the long time of the inland walk to send runners and to make their small careful arrangements, and the families had moved to the next village along the coast, taking what they could carry, leaving the small empty houses and the threshold-stones and the small clattering shells the cliff-folk’s children had played with on the day the smoke had come up. The chief, the saga must report, did not visit the village. The chief had no interest in the village. The chief returned directly to Sound-of-Going at the beach, where Bjorn son of Halvar Thick-Arm and the three men of the rear guard had been waiting through the long autumn, and the chief gave Bjorn the report of the matter in the small carrying hall-voice of his line, and Bjorn received the report, and Bjorn’s face, the saga reports from Ulf’s later telling, did the small dry thing of a ship’s master receiving a chief’s report that has not gone wholly as planned, although Bjorn did not, at the receiving, say anything about it. Bjorn was a man of restraint also.
The wintering at the Strait of Bones is for another telling. The saga will say here only that the company sailed up the western coast in a voyage that took perhaps three weeks of fair weather and one of bad, and that they made the Strait of Bones in the second week of Kelemus and were welcomed at a friendly port by a chief of the Strait, a man named Vetr Bear-Friend, who had been a companion of Brand Iron-Hand’s in their younger years and who received Hrolv-Kan’s company with the warmth that the friendship between halls had required. The Strait of Bones was where the company wintered, because the open crossing back to Heid-Marka was not safe in the winter months. The company stayed at Vetr Bear-Friend’s hall through the months of Kelemus and Helmus-of-the-Winter and Sharus. The saga has from Sigvör’s bark that during the wintering she sang the first part of the Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer at a small evening fire in Vetr Bear-Friend’s hall, in the form the saga has already mentioned, and that the chief recognized that the song had two centers, and the chief asked her three nights later whether the song’s name might be revised, and the skald said no. The saga sets this down for the record without further comment.
The cliff-folk girl Kaela stayed with the company through the wintering. The chief had not, the saga has previously reported, ever formally decided not to return her, and the not-returning had decided itself by the accumulation of small decisions. The cliff-folk girl was at the wintering, and was housed in the small chamber at Vetr Bear-Friend’s hall that the chief permitted Sigvör to share with her, and was, by the small careful arrangement the skald had set up, treated by the men of the hall with the kindness within limits that Ulf had been performing on the inland walk. The cliff-folk girl, the saga reports, did not run away during the wintering. The wintering hall was many weeks of bad coast from the southern cliff-folk country, and the girl had no skill in northern winter walking, and the running would have been a running into death. The girl did not run. The girl stayed. The girl, the saga has from Sigvör’s later bark, learned during the wintering more of the northern tongue, by the small steady work of conversations with Ulf and with Sigvör, and the girl became, by the spring, fluent enough in the northern speech that she could conduct a long conversation with the chief himself if she had to, although she did not, by her own preference, do so. The girl learned. The girl carried. The girl waited.
The spring crossing back to Aern-Vík was made in the third week of Lathandus of the following year, with fair weather. The voyage took eight days. The chief stood at the steering-oar for most of the daylight hours, with Gjafr-Bíta in its rack beside him and the canvas-wrapped tail-bundle lashed in the center of the deck where the chief could see it from the steering-oar. The chief, the saga reports, looked at the bundle often. The chief did not need to look at the bundle to know it was there. The chief looked at it from a kind of pleasure that had developed across the wintering, in which the looking at the bundle was a thing the chief did the way a man looks at a thing he owns and has not yet stopped noting that he owns it. Bjorn at the prow noted the chief’s looking. Sigvör at the stern noted it also. Ulf, who walked the deck on his small careful errands, noted it. The men of the company, the saga must say, did not all note it, because the men were busy with the work of the crossing and the looking was a small thing only the close witnesses would have observed. The chief looked. The chief looked at the bundle. The chief, the saga must say in this segment because the segment will be the segment of the forging, was already beginning to be a man whose looking at the tail-bone was the central act of his day.
The company made landfall at Aern-Vík on the eighth day. The hall came out to receive them. The wives and the brothers and the old fathers and the small children whose fathers were among the four who had not returned came down to the wharf in the small steady stream of returning-day. The chief gave his report at the wharf, in the short formal way the line required, and named the four lost, and the small dry weeping of the hall began. The chief said also, in the same short formal way, that the matter had been completed, and the tail of the beast had been brought home, and the tail would be forged into the weapon the hall had been promised. The men of the hall struck the wharf-boards with the flats of their hands. The chief turned the fourth iron ring in his beard, which he had been turning across the whole of the wintering and which he was turning now openly. The chief led the way up from the wharf to the hall, with the tail-bundle carried behind him by four of his men on the same poles they had used at the inland walk back, and the procession arrived at the longhouse at the head of the long fjord called Aern in the small late afternoon of a fair spring day in Lathandus.
The bundle was set down in the center of the hall, on a long trestle the chief had ordered the carpenters of his hall to build during the wintering and which Halvar son of Geir No-Voice, the chief’s smith, had set in place in the middle of the longfire’s far side, in the place of greatest honor in the hall short of the high seat itself. The bundle was unwrapped that evening, in a small ceremony the chief presided over with his line’s elders watching, and the tail was laid out along the trestle in its full length, with the heavy knot at the seaward end and the cut end at the inland end. The hall, the saga reports, went very quiet at the unwrapping. The tail in the firelight was not the small contracting body the skald had laid her hand on in the moonlight at the cliff-top. The tail in the firelight was a different thing. The tail had hardened over the winter, in the slow way the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had predicted, and the bone-and-scale had become, in the months since the cutting, a substance that no axe could bite. The chief had tested this himself, in the small private experiments he had conducted at the wintering, and the chief had confirmed it, and the chief had set the experiments aside in the small private accounting where his confirmations went. The tail was unworkable by ordinary means. The tail was, in the way of all great relics, a thing that would require the great skill of the smith to be transformed.
Halvar No-Voice was that smith. Halvar No-Voice was the smith of the line, the third of his name to hold the smithy at Aern-Vík, and he was so called because Halvar had been born without the use of his vocal cords and had communicated his whole life through the small gestures of his hands and through writing on bark when writing was needed. Halvar No-Voice was perhaps the same age as the chief, fifty-two winters, and was small and dark and had hands the size and shape of a much larger man’s. Halvar No-Voice had been preparing for the tail’s arrival across the whole of the chief’s absence. Halvar No-Voice had gathered the materials. Halvar No-Voice had gathered the alchemical lacquer the saga of the Sky’s Hammer’s later crafting would call the Arcane Resonance Lacquer, prepared from powdered Zephyrstone and Mythril dust by an alchemist of the chief’s hall named Frey Powder-Hand. Halvar No-Voice had gathered the Stabilizing Leather Wraps, prepared from cured hides treated with alchemical oils. Halvar No-Voice had gathered the small Thunderstone Fragments, mineral shards from the deep mines of the inland country that naturally generated low-level vibrations and that would, set into the bone, stabilize the shockwave properties of the future weapon. Halvar No-Voice had gathered, most importantly, the medium-sized Concussive Quartz crystal, which the chief had paid a great price for to a trader from the eastern reaches in the winter of the wintering, and which had been carried across the spring crossing in a small leather case in Halvar No-Voice’s own hand because Halvar had not trusted any of the chief’s men to carry it. The materials were all in place at the smithy when the company returned. Halvar No-Voice had been ready. Halvar No-Voice would now do the work.
The forging began in the fourth week of Lathandus. The chief, on the morning the forging began, went down to the smithy himself and stood in the open doorway and watched Halvar No-Voice and the smith’s two apprentices, who were young men named Geir and Ari, do the first work, which was the careful smoothing of the cut end of the tail with the smith’s small files until the cut was clean and even and the join with the rest of the bone could be planned. The chief watched for perhaps three hours that morning. The chief did not speak. The chief did not give any instruction. Halvar No-Voice did not need any instruction. Halvar No-Voice was the smith. The chief was the chief. The chief was there to be present at the work. The being-present was the only role the chief had in the forging. The chief took the role with great seriousness. The chief came down to the smithy every morning of the forging, which would last from the fourth week of Lathandus until the third week of Helmus, perhaps four months in all. The chief was, in his own private reckoning, the king attending the birth of a son. The chief had no children of his own, the saga must say here for the record. The chief’s first wife had died young of the wasting before any children had come, and the chief’s second wife had not produced children either, and the chief had reconciled himself, in his late forties, to the line going on by his cousin Thorir’s line rather than by his own. The reconciliation had been a hard one and had taken some years. The chief had not, in his small private reckoning, ever quite finished the reconciling. The forging was the forging of the thing the chief would, in his small private way, treat as the child he had not been given. The saga must set this down because the matter is at the heart of the segment.
The forging proceeded in the steps the songs of the crafting later set down in detail. The saga will give the steps in summary because the steps are matter for the songs of the smithing-craft, not for the saga of the hunting-line, but the saga will give them in their order, with the chief’s role in each.
The first step was the shaping of the bone core. Halvar No-Voice and the apprentices, with the small smith’s hammers and the chisels and the long files, shaped the tail-bone into the club-like form the chief had specified. The shaping was the work of perhaps three weeks. The bone was hard. The bone resisted the shaping in the way the cliff-top had said it would. Halvar No-Voice did not, in his small careful way, complain. Halvar No-Voice did the work in long sessions of bent concentration, with his great hands moving the small tools across the bone in patterns the apprentices learned to recognize and to assist with. The bone, when shaped, was about three feet long with one end tapering slightly toward the cut and the heavy knot retained at the other end. The chief watched. The chief said nothing. The chief turned the fourth iron ring in his beard while he watched. The chief, the saga reports from a small report Halvar No-Voice gave to Ulf at the end of the forging, did not, across the three weeks of the shaping, speak to the smith once. The not-speaking was, in the chief’s own reckoning, the small respect a king gives a midwife. The not-speaking was, in Halvar No-Voice’s own reckoning, the small piece of news that the chief had become a man who looked at his work without addressing those who did it. The not-speaking was the second small piece of evidence Halvar No-Voice gathered of the chief’s change. The first, Halvar No-Voice told Ulf later, had been at the unwrapping, when the chief had laid his right hand on the bone and the chief’s face had done a small thing that the smith had not seen in the chief’s face before, a small thing the smith had no word for and would not, when pressed by Ulf, give a description of.
The second step was the carving of the runic channels. Halvar No-Voice, with his arcane stylus, engraved long grooves along the length of the shaped bone, in the patterns the line’s tradition required for the directing of energy flow. The carving took perhaps four days. The chief watched.
The third step was the application of the scale plating. The scales the chief had brought back from the cliff-top had not been the scales of the beast itself, because the chief had not taken any scales in the morning’s cutting. The chief had compensated, as the saga has previously reported, by having Halvar No-Voice use scales from a lesser beast that the chief’s hunters had taken in the previous winter, the scales of a sea-serpent that had washed up on the western coast and that the chief’s father had set aside in the hall’s stores for some future great work. The scales were not the color of the underside of an evening cloud. The scales were a deep green-black. The chief had told himself, in the small careful way of a man making the best of an omission, that the lesser scales would be sufficient. The chief was, in this matter, lying to himself, the saga must say. The scales were not sufficient. The scales were the wrong color and the wrong texture and the wrong size, and they did not, when laid against the bone of the tail, lie flat as scales of the beast itself would have lain. Halvar No-Voice did his work. Halvar No-Voice heated the scales in the alchemical furnace until they were pliable, and pressed them onto the bone core, and coated them with the Arcane Resonance Lacquer. The scales bonded to the bone, in some way, because the lacquer was a thing of great craft. The bonding was not, in Halvar No-Voice’s own private reckoning, a clean bonding. The scales sat slightly raised in places where they should have lain flat. The lacquer pooled in the seams in small ways that the lacquer should not have pooled. The chief watched. The chief did not, in his certainty, register the small imperfections. The chief looked at the bonded scale-coating along the bone of the tail and the chief saw the weapon he had been planning to see across the long fifteen months, and the chief’s pale eyes did the small bright shining of a man whose vision is being fulfilled in front of him, and the chief turned the fourth iron ring in his beard, and the chief was content.
The fourth step was the embedding of the Concussive Quartz. Halvar No-Voice, in the enchanter’s brazier at the side of the smithy that had been built specifically for this stage, heated the medium-sized quartz crystal until it began to hum with the stored energy that was its nature, and the smith used his arcane tongs to place the quartz into a specially carved socket near the head of the club, the place near the heavy knot where the runic channels gathered. Halvar No-Voice performed the small basic enchanting ritual, the one the line’s tradition specified, binding the quartz to the bone’s runic channels. The ritual took perhaps half a day. The ritual was the work that allowed the quartz’s stored energy to amplify the shockwave when the club should strike a surface. The chief watched the ritual. The chief, the saga reports from Halvar No-Voice’s later telling, leaned forward at the moment of the binding, in a small unconscious motion of the body, in the way a man leans toward a thing he wishes to receive. The leaning was the leaning of a man who was beginning to want the weapon for himself in a way that went past the wanting of the line. Halvar No-Voice noted the leaning. The smith did not speak.
The fifth step was the integration of the Thunderstone Fragments. Halvar No-Voice inserted three small thunderstone shards into grooves near the head of the club, positioned to reinforce the Concussive Quartz. The integration took perhaps two days. The chief watched.
The sixth step was the wrapping of the handle. Halvar No-Voice soaked the Stabilizing Leather Wraps in the remaining lacquer and wrapped the handle of the club tightly, in the careful patterns the line required for the grip. The wrapping took perhaps a day. The chief watched.
The seventh step was the final enchantment and balancing. Halvar No-Voice, at the enchanter’s brazier, performed the long enchanting ritual that would harmonize the energy flow between the bone core, the scales, and the quartz. The ritual was the most difficult of the rituals and took perhaps two full days, in which the smith worked almost without sleep and the apprentices took turns assisting and the chief stood in the open doorway watching. The ritual completed in the small hour before dawn of the second day. Halvar No-Voice tested the club’s balance by swinging it in the open doorway of the smithy, with the apprentices standing well back, in the careful controlled way the smith always tested the balance of any weapon he had made. The club’s balance was, the smith reported with the small gesture of his hand to his apprentices that meant good, sound. The shockwave from the test-swing was, however, not yet present. The final scale had not yet been set. The shockwave would come at the setting of the final scale, in the way the line’s tradition specified.
The chief, the saga reports, came into the smithy at this point. The chief had been watching from the doorway for the whole of the two days. The chief now stepped across the threshold, which the chief had not done across the four months of the forging. The chief walked to the long workbench where the club lay, with the small final scale at its side ready to be set. The small final scale was the smallest of all the scales, perhaps the size of a man’s palm. The scale would, when set, complete the coating of the club at the place where the bone of the tail’s last vertebra had been cut, at the cut end, opposite the heavy knot. The scale was the closing of the coating. The setting of the closing was the moment the shockwave would, the line’s tradition said, first speak in the bone.
Halvar No-Voice held the small scale in his great hand. The smith looked at the chief. The smith inclined his head, in the small smith’s inclination that asked whether the chief wished to set the final scale himself.
The chief took the scale from the smith’s hand.
The chief held the scale in his right hand. The chief stood at the workbench. The chief looked at the club. The club was three feet long, with the heavy knot at one end and the cut end at the other, with the green-black scales bonded along the length and the small bright pool of the Concussive Quartz set near the heavy end and the three Thunderstone Fragments showing in their grooves and the leather wraps handsome on the handle. The club was, in the chief’s reckoning, complete in everything but the small final scale. The chief had thought about this moment for a long time. The chief had, in fact, the saga reports from a small confidence the chief had given to his cousin Thorir at the wintering hall, thought about this moment from before the embarkation. The chief had thought he would feel, at the setting of the final scale, the small clear satisfaction of a man whose great work had been brought home. The chief had not anticipated the humming. The humming was something the chief had been carrying for the whole of the four months of the forging in the form of the small steady twitching of his hands at every moment when the hands were not in contact with the tail-bone. The humming had become, in the four months, a thing the chief sought out at quiet moments by laying his hands on the bone. The chief had, on perhaps thirty separate occasions across the forging months, found small private excuses to come down to the smithy at night and to lay his hands on the developing club. Halvar No-Voice had noted each occasion. The smith had not spoken. The chief had, the smith later reported to Ulf, looked at the club at these night visits with the small bright shining of a man who was being given a thing he had not believed he would receive, and the chief had laid his hands on the bone with the small almost-smile that had first appeared on the chief’s face at the small flat camp on the evening following the cutting, and the chief had stood there with his hands on the bone for sometimes an hour at a time, and the chief had left the smithy looking, the smith reported, refreshed in the way a man is refreshed by a long drink of cold water after a hot day.
The chief now held the small final scale in his right hand.
The chief leaned forward and set the scale.
The setting was the small precise placement of the scale into the position Halvar No-Voice had prepared at the cut end of the club. The scale slid into the position with the small dry sound of a thing finding its home. The chief, the saga reports, pressed the scale into place with the small careful pressure his line had taught him for the setting of finishing pieces. The lacquer at the seams bonded to the scale. The bonding was instant. The scale was set.
The club spoke.
The saga must give this carefully. The speaking was not a sound that the ear heard in the ordinary way. The speaking was a low rumble that came up through the workbench from the club and entered the smithy through the floor and the walls and the small windows. The speaking was the thunder-tongues the line’s tradition had foretold. The thunder-tongues were the speaking of the club. The thunder-tongues said, in the way only thunder says anything, the small low statement that this was the club. This was the weapon. This was the thing that had been made of the tail of the beast. The thunder-tongues were not words. The thunder-tongues were a confirmation. The thunder-tongues said yes. They said it for the length of perhaps three breaths, in a long low rolling that the apprentices Geir and Ari, standing well back, felt in their teeth and in their breastbones. The thunder-tongues said yes, and yes, and yes, for the three breaths, and then they fell silent.
Halvar No-Voice, the saga reports, made the small gesture of his hand that meant complete. The smith did not, in his own private reckoning, share the chief’s bright shining at the speaking. The smith had heard, in the speaking, a thing the chief had not heard. The smith had heard, in the long low rolling, a small undertone that should not have been present. The undertone was the undertone of a weapon whose coating was not quite right, whose scales were of the wrong color and the wrong size, whose bonding had not been clean. The undertone was the small ongoing complaint of the materials against the materials, the kind of complaint a smith trains for years to hear, and which most people never hear at all. The smith heard it. The smith filed the hearing in the small private place where his hearings went. The smith did not speak.
The chief had not heard the undertone.
The chief had heard only the rolling yes, and yes, and yes. The chief, the saga must report, stood at the workbench with his right hand still extended over the small final scale he had set, and the chief’s face did the thing his face had not done in the smith’s seeing across the four months of the forging. The chief’s face did not laugh. The chief’s face did not, in the way of the chief’s face at the cliff-top, give the small almost-smile. The chief’s face did, instead, a thing that the smith would later describe to Ulf in the small smith’s gesture as the face of a man tasting a thing he had been hungry for and finding the thing more satisfying than the hunger had prepared him for. The face was a face of taste. The chief was tasting the speaking. The chief was, the smith reported, deeply pleased.
The chief lifted the club from the workbench.
The lifting was easier than the lifting at the cliff-top had been. The club, while heavy, had been balanced by Halvar No-Voice for one man’s grip, and the chief lifted it in his right hand and felt, in the same moment, the humming that had been continuing in his hands for four months come up out of the bone into his palm at a strength he had not felt since the morning at the cliff-top. The humming was stronger than it had been at any night visit. The humming was, in fact, perhaps stronger than it had been even at the morning. The humming had been concentrated in the four months of the forging and had now come out in the small bright concentrated form of the completed weapon. The chief held the club. The club hummed. The chief’s hand around the leather-wrapped handle felt the humming come up through the grip into the wrist into the forearm into the elbow into the shoulder. The chief’s whole right arm was humming. The chief, the saga reports, made a small involuntary sound. The sound was almost a laugh and almost a sigh and was not quite either. The sound was a sound the chief had not made in the smith’s hearing before. The sound was, Halvar No-Voice later told Ulf, the sound of a man who had been hungry for a very long time and had finally received what he had been hungry for, and the receiving had not satisfied the hunger but had only awakened it more completely.
The chief carried the club out of the smithy and up the hill to the longhouse.
The carrying was the small triumphant procession the line had been waiting for. The hall of Aern-Vík came out to receive the chief at the longhouse door, and the men of the line and the women of the hall and the children gathered, and the chief stood at the longhouse threshold with the club raised in his right hand, and the chief gave the cry of his line for the second time, the same cry he had given at the cliff-top in the morning of the cutting. The cry was, “Now we hold the sky’s power. In our hands lies the strength to fell the mountains.”
The hall, the saga reports, struck the longhouse doorframe with the flats of their hands in the small old answer the line required. The chief turned the fourth iron ring in his beard and entered the hall with the club. The chief walked to the high seat. The chief sat. The chief set the club across his lap, with the heavy knot to his right and the cut end to his left, in the small careful way a chief sets a weapon of state. The chief, the saga reports, did not put the club aside that evening. The chief held it across his lap through the long evening meal of celebration, with the small old toasts and the small old stories and the singing of his cousin Snæ Two-Tongues, who had been at the longfire on the night of the oath and at the storm at sea and at the cliff-top and at the cutting and at the wintering and was now at the hall and had begun, in his own way, to sing the early form of the song that would later be called by Snæ’s hall the Saga of Hrolv-Kan and the Sky’s Hammer, in which the tail had been broken from the body of the beast and the beast had been a thing the line could be proud of having brought low. Snæ’s song was not the same song as the skald’s song. The skald’s song was the Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer. The two songs would coexist at the hall for the rest of the chief’s life and would coexist in the songs-rooms of the line for many years after, and the saga must say here that the two songs were two different songs about the same matter and that each had its hearers.
The chief sat at the high seat with the club across his lap. The hall ate and drank and sang. The skald sat at her usual bench, with her harp at her shoulder, and the skald did not sing that evening, because the skald’s first singing of her own song had been seven months earlier at the wintering hall, and the skald did not sing the Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer at Aern-Vík for many years. The skald watched. The skald, in her bark which she wrote that night at her small chamber at the eastern end of the hall behind the curtain of grey wool, set down the sentence, the club spoke. The chief was pleased. The chief’s face is changed in a small new way. He has tasted. The hunger that was small at the cliff-top is now larger. It will grow. She underlined the word grow.
The cliff-folk girl Kaela, the saga must mention here, was at the hall that evening. The girl had been brought to Aern-Vík with the company at the spring crossing and was now, by the chief’s decision and by the skald’s quiet sponsorship, living at the hall in the small chamber the skald shared with her. The girl was fifteen winters that spring. The girl had grown some during the wintering. The girl’s missing finger on the left hand had become, by the steady use of the hand for the small domestic tasks the hall required of her, less noticeable. The girl wore the same sash she had worn on the cliff path, with the fourteen white shells, and the bracelet of four knots on her right wrist, and the small bone falcon at her throat under her tunic. The girl sat that evening at the small bench near the skald, in the small careful witness’s posture she had taken on at the cliff-top and had maintained through the long months. The girl, the saga reports from the skald’s later bark, did not look at the club during the evening celebration. The girl looked at the small banked fire and at the small carvings on the longhouse beams and at the cliff-folk-style braids the women of the hall had begun, in the wintering, to wear in the small adoption of cliff-folk fashion that traders’ contact had brought into the line. The girl did not look at the club. The girl had not, the skald observed, looked at the club at any point since the morning of the cutting. The girl had carried the tail in the inland walk in the small careful way of one who had a job to do, but the girl had not laid her eyes on the tail in any sustained way, and the girl had not laid her eyes on the forging club at any of the times during the forging when the girl had had occasion to pass the smithy. The girl, the skald wrote in her bark, was avoiding the looking. The avoiding was, the skald wrote, a small careful keeping. The girl was keeping the memory of the beast separate from the small daily reality of the weapon her brother was making, and the girl would, the skald suspected, keep them separate for the rest of her life. The keeping would be the work the beast had given her. The looking at the weapon would be a betrayal of the keeping. The girl would not look. The girl did not look.
The chief noticed the girl’s not looking only once, the saga reports, perhaps in the third hour of the evening celebration. The chief had been turning the club across his lap to feel the humming from various positions, and at one such turning the chief glanced down the hall at the small bench near the skald, and the chief’s pale eyes met the girl’s eyes for a single breath. The girl, the saga reports, did not look at the club. The girl looked at the chief’s face. The chief looked at the girl’s face. The two of them, for the single breath, held the look. The chief, the saga reports, registered in that breath that the girl was not looking at the club, and the registering was the small piece of information the chief had not until that moment received. The chief did not, in the moment, react. The chief turned the club again in his lap and looked back at the longfire and resumed the singing he was listening to. The chief did not speak to the girl that evening. The chief did not, in fact, speak to the girl across the long forging months either, beyond the small daily greetings of a chief to a captive guest of his hall. The chief and the girl had become, over the long matter, two parties who did not need to speak to each other directly, because each understood, in the small careful way of long parallel inhabitants of the same hall, the position the other occupied, and the speaking would have been an interruption of that understanding.
But the chief, in the small private place at the back of his mind, noted the not-looking. The chief filed the note in the small private accounting where his small private notes went. The chief, the saga must say, would not, ever again across the rest of his life, ask the girl to look at the club. The chief had received, in the single breath of the look, the small piece of information that the girl would not look. The chief accepted it. The accepting was the small dignity the chief retained from the man he had been before the cutting, and the saga must give him this dignity because the dignity is what is true. The chief had become, in the four months of the forging, a man who needed the club. The chief had also retained, in some smaller chamber than the chamber of his deciding, the small piece of his old self that knew the cliff-folk girl was the one who had been chosen by the beast, and that knew the not-looking was the form the chosenness took in the girl, and that knew the asking would be an asking the chief had no right to make. The chief did not ask. The chief turned the club. The hall ate. The evening went on.
The chief slept that night with the club beside his bed, the saga reports from the report of his second wife who was still living at that time and who told the report later to Sigvör in a small private confidence the skald wrote into her bark in the small private script. The chief slept with his right hand laid on the club through the night, in the same way he had slept with his right hand on the canvas-wrapped bundle in the small flat camp the evening after the cutting. The chief slept well. The chief slept with the small almost-smile.
The hunger, the saga must say in this segment because the segment will end here, had now fully entered the chief. The hunger had been small at the cliff-top. The hunger had been the small clear pleasure of a man who had been given a gift. The hunger had grown across the wintering, in the small bright shining at the bundle, in the looking at the bundle from the steering-oar, in the small private experiments at Vetr Bear-Friend’s hall when the chief had unwrapped the bundle at night and laid his hands on the bone to feel the humming. The hunger had grown across the four months of the forging, in the night visits to the smithy and the small private looking at the developing club. The hunger had now, in the setting of the final scale and the speaking of the thunder-tongues, become the hunger that the chief would carry for the rest of his life. The hunger was not the hunger of an ordinary man for an ordinary thing. The hunger was the hunger of a man for the humming that the bone of the tail produced when the man’s hands were on it. The hunger was for the humming. The humming had become, in the chief’s accounting, the thing the chief required to feel like himself. The chief had not yet recognized the requirement. The chief would not recognize it for some years. The chief would, in fact, never fully recognize it. The recognition would have required the chief to see himself from outside his own deciding, and the chamber of the deciding did not have a window. The chief had been in the chamber since the storm at sea. The chief was now in the chamber with the club. The club was the new center of the chamber. The chief and the club would, from this evening forward, be in the chamber together, and the chamber would not have a window, and the chamber would not have a door that opened to anyone.
Sigvör in her chamber at the eastern end of the hall wrote, that night, one more sentence in the bark before sleeping. The sentence, the saga reports, was, the hunger has him. The hunger will keep him. The hunger will be the form of his last fifteen years. I will be the skald of all fifteen. She underlined the word all.
The hall slept. The chief slept with his hand on the club. The skald slept beside the cliff-folk girl in the small chamber at the eastern end. The hall of Aern-Vík was, for the first night in many months, in the form it would take for the rest of the chief’s chieftainship, with the club in the high seat and the chief beside it and the line gathered around in the small slow forward unfolding of what was, in the small careful reckoning of the saga, a hall that had begun its slow decline by the very fact of having received what it had been waiting for.
The Sky’s Hammer was made. The chief had it. The forging was done. The matter, in the chief’s reckoning, was complete.
The matter, in the larger reckoning of the saga and of the song the skald was writing and of the work the cliff-folk girl was carrying and of the chain of telling the salamander in the deep chamber was receiving, was once again only just beginning.
Segment 18: “Hrolv-Kan Speaks the Bone’s Name”
She had been keeping records of her brother for thirty years. This was not a thing he knew, and not a thing she had ever told him, and not a thing she would tell him now. The records were the small private bark she kept beside the larger barks of her professional work, and the small private bark had its own small leather case, and the case lived inside her sleeping-fur where no member of the hall would have any reason to look for it. The records were not malicious. The records were not even, in any strict sense, secret in the way the wandering trader had once described the secret notes of southern courts to her. The records were the small careful observations a sister kept of a brother she loved, against the day when the observations might be needed, either by her own memory in old age when the small details would have faded, or by the songs of the line whenever the songs would, in their own time, come to need to know what kind of man her brother had actually been. The records had begun on the day of her brother’s oath at twenty-three, when he had inherited the high seat from their father, and the records had continued through his first wife and the wasting and the second wife and the long working-out of the chieftainship and the embarkation and the hunt and the wintering and the spring crossing and the forging. The records had filled, by the third week of the second Helmus after the spring crossing back to Aern-Vík, perhaps four small barks, each as long as her forearm and as wide as her hand.
She wrote in the records in the small private script she had developed at twenty for this purpose alone, which used the northern letters but in patterns only she could read, with vowels shifted and consonants doubled in ways her mother had taught her were the old ways of the kitchen wind-women of their mother’s line. The script could be read in time, by someone who studied it, but the someone would need to know the system, and the only person who had ever known the system was her mother, and her mother had been dead these thirty-two years. The script was therefore, for the rest of her life, hers alone. She wrote in it freely. She wrote, in the third week of the second Helmus after the spring crossing, several entries about her brother that she had been carrying in her observation for some weeks and had not, until that week, set down. The setting-down had been delayed by her own reluctance. The reluctance had been the reluctance of a sister to acknowledge that her observations had begun, in the months since the forging, to amount to something more than the small ordinary observations a sister keeps. The observations had become a pattern. The pattern had, in the third week of Helmus, finally crossed a small line in her own mind that her professional self had been resisting for some weeks. The line was the line between observing a person who is going through a change and observing a person who has been replaced by someone else. The line was a difficult line. She had crossed it once before in her career, with their father in his last winter, when their father had become a man Brand Iron-Hand would not have recognized as himself, and she had set down the records of the crossing in the same small private script in a bark she still kept. She was crossing it again with her brother. She did not want to cross it. She crossed it anyway, because the crossing was, in her professional accounting, the most honest thing she could do.
She wrote, in the third week of the second Helmus, the following entries. The saga has them from the surviving bark, which she would carry with her to the end of her life and which would be found, after her death, in her sleeping-fur, and which would be brought by Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand, who would by then be very old himself, to the library at the Watching-Stones for safekeeping, where Brother Eskil’s predecessors would find it and would, with great effort, decipher the script. The entries read, in the saga’s translation from the small private script:
He keeps the club within arm’s reach at every meal. He has begun to set it across his lap at the high seat in the way he set it on the night of the speaking, but now at every meal, not only at celebrations. The other men have begun to notice. The men do not speak of it among themselves where I can hear, but their eyes pass to the club and back to their food in the small dry way men’s eyes pass when a chief has begun a habit they find unusual. The chief does not register the eyes. The chief eats with his left hand only, the right hand on the club.
He has begun to walk with the club. Not at all times, but at most. When he goes from the hall to the smithy, where he still visits Halvar No-Voice in the small daily way although the forging has been over for two months, he carries the club. When he goes from the hall to the wharf, he carries the club. When he walks the small distance from the hall to the small shrine of our father at the eastern slope, he carries the club. He has fashioned a small leather sling for the club so that he can carry it across his back when he needs both hands, but the sling is rarely used, because the chief is rarely without his right hand on the grip. The grip is now worn at the place where his thumb sits. The wear was not visible at the forging. The wear is visible now. The leather has darkened where the thumb has been.
He has stopped sleeping in the bed in the small chamber behind the curtain of black wool. His second wife, who is patient and who has been patient for many years, has reported this to me in a small private confidence in the kitchen at the eastern end of the hall. The chief has been sleeping on a fur in the great hall itself, at the high seat, with the club beside him. He has been sleeping with his right hand on the club. The second wife has come into the great hall on three separate mornings to find him so, and has not, in the small careful way of a second wife who has been treated kindly for the most part across many years, said anything to him about it. She has spoken only to me. She has spoken in the small dry voice that I recognize from our mother’s kitchen, the voice of a woman who has decided that the matter is no longer hers to alter and is now only hers to report to the one person who might, in some way, alter it.
I have not yet decided whether to attempt to alter it. I do not know that I can. The proverb at the wharf did not land. The exchange after the storm did not turn him. The look across the cliff-grass did not turn him. The not-singing of the song at his hall has not turned him. I do not know what would turn him at this point. I do not know that anything would. I write this in case the record, sometime later, will be useful to whoever needs it.
She set down the pencil at the end of these entries and sat for some long time with the bark across her knee and the small fire in her chamber at the eastern end of the hall making the small dry crackle a small fire makes when it is at its evening hour. The cliff-folk girl Kaela was asleep on the other side of the small chamber, on the fur the skald had given her at the spring crossing, with the bracelet of four knots on her right wrist and the small bone falcon at her throat under her tunic and the sash of fourteen white shells folded neatly at her side, because the girl had taken to folding the sash at night and laying it where her hand could find it without looking. The girl had been at Aern-Vík for six months by this point. The girl was approaching her sixteenth winter. The girl had grown some across the wintering and the spring and the early summer, in the small careful way cliff-folk girls grow, with her shoulders broadening slightly and her face losing the last of its child’s roundness. The girl had become, in the small inheritance of the hall’s daily life, a young woman who did the small domestic tasks the hall required of her, in a way that the hall had begun to appreciate, and who was treated with kindness within limits by all of the men of the line, in the same kindness within limits Ulf had first performed on the inland walk.
The girl did not speak of the chief at all. The girl had not, since the morning of the cutting, spoken of him to anyone, the skald reckoned, including in their private conversations at night when the girl might have spoken of him if she had wished to. The girl was, in her small careful witness’s posture, treating the chief as a thing she had been chosen not to look at directly. The skald had observed this and had honored it. The skald did not ask the girl what she thought of the chief. The skald did not ask the girl what the girl had observed of the chief’s small changes. The skald knew, in the small back-of-the-head place where she knew most things, that the girl had observed everything. The girl was a wind-woman in training. The girl observed. The girl had observed the chief’s not-sleeping in the small chamber behind the curtain of black wool, because the girl had heard, in the small careful listening of a wind-woman, the chief’s second wife rise alone in the mornings and go through her small alone-morning sounds rather than the small two-person morning sounds. The girl had observed the chief’s carrying of the club. The girl had observed the chief’s not speaking to anyone for long hours at a time and the chief’s sudden small bursts of speech when the speech came, which the skald had also observed and was recording. The girl was, the skald suspected, keeping her own small record in the small private place behind her own eyes, in the way the cliff-folk’s wind-women had been keeping such records since before the cliff-folk had developed any written form. The girl’s record would not, in the long forward unfolding, ever be written. The girl’s record was for the girl alone. The skald respected the privacy. The skald did not ask.
The skald sat with the bark on her knee. The fire crackled. The girl slept. The third week of the second Helmus was the week the saga of the chief’s line would later record as the week the chief made the small private decisions about the wielding of the club that would, in the coming years, change the form of the line’s hunts. The chief would, the saga reports, announce in the fourth week of that Helmus that the line would undertake a hunt against the mountain trolls of the upper fjord in the first weeks of the following Selnus, and that the chief himself would wield the club at the hunt, and that the wielding would be the first formal use of the Sky’s Hammer against the enemies of the line. The hunt would be a great success. The trolls would be killed. The club would, in its first formal use, perform exactly as Halvar No-Voice had built it to perform, with the shockwave at the critical strike causing avalanche-effects in the upper passes and the trolls falling. The line would celebrate. The line would compose new songs of the chief’s prowess. The chief would, in the small bright shining that had become his ordinary expression, accept the celebration with the same content satisfaction he had taken on at the cliff-top. The hunt of the trolls was for the segment after this one. The skald is mentioning it here only to give the reader the small frame around the third week of Helmus, in which the chief was, in his own small private inward way, preparing for the troll-hunt by spending more time alone with the club than he had spent with any human being in his life including his wife and his sister and his men.
The skald wrote one further entry that night before closing the bark. The entry was the entry the bark would later be most often quoted from by the predecessors of Brother Eskil who would translate the script. The entry read:
He has begun to talk to the club.
I have not yet heard the talking. I have heard, several times, the small low sounds of his voice at the high seat when no one else is in the hall and the chief believes himself alone. The sounds are speech-like but not in any tongue I know. The sounds are too low for me to make out from my chamber. I will, in the next few days, find a way to be closer when the talking happens, so that I can hear what is being said. I do not yet know how I will do this. The chamber I share with the girl is at the eastern end of the hall. The high seat is at the western end. The distance is not great in any hall, but it is great enough that the small private sounds at the high seat do not reach me clearly through the curtain of grey wool. I will need to find an excuse to be in the great hall during one of the chief’s small private times. I will do this carefully. I do not wish to be observed listening.
She closed the bark. She wrapped it in its small waxed cloth. She placed it in the small leather case. She put the case inside her sleeping-fur. She lay down. She did not sleep at once. She lay for a long time with her eyes open looking at the small dark above her sleeping-fur, and she thought about the matter of finding a way to be closer when the talking happened, and she thought about her brother at the high seat with the club across his lap, and she thought about her mother in the kitchen at twenty years before, when her mother had taught her the small private script, and she thought, eventually, about her father in his last winter when the line between the man going through a change and the man who had been replaced had first been clear to her, and she fell asleep, finally, with her hand at the bracelet of small bone rings her own braid was held with.
The opportunity came three nights later.
The hall had been at a small evening meal with no guests, in the small ordinary way of weeks when no traders or honored visitors were at Aern-Vík, and the meal had ended in the small ordinary way, with the men retiring to their benches or to their own chambers and the women clearing the boards and the small dogs of the hall taking their usual rounds for the small fallen bits the women allowed them. The chief had eaten at the high seat with the club across his lap, in the now-customary way. The chief had spoken little at the meal, in the now-customary way also. The second wife, who had been present at the meal and had sat at her usual bench to the chief’s left, had eaten in the small dry quiet of a woman who had become accustomed to a husband who was no longer interested in her. The skald had observed the second wife at the meal and had decided, in the small private way, that the second wife’s patience was nearly at its end. The second wife had not yet spoken any words that would mark the end. The end was, the skald judged, perhaps weeks away. The skald set the observation aside in the small private bark to be written later.
The meal ended. The benches cleared. The chief remained at the high seat. The chief did not, the skald observed from her own bench, rise to go to the small chamber behind the curtain of black wool with the second wife. The second wife rose alone and went to the chamber alone in the small dry way she had been going alone for the past two months. The chief stayed at the high seat. The chief turned the club slowly across his lap in the small careful way he had been turning it across his lap for some weeks. The men of the line left the hall by ones and twos for their own benches and chambers. The hall, by the second hour after the meal, was empty of all but the chief and the small dogs and the skald, who had remained at her bench because the skald had been waiting for an opportunity to be in the great hall after the meal, and the cliff-folk girl Kaela, who had been at her usual bench near the skald and who had not yet risen to go to their small chamber at the eastern end.
The skald gave the girl a small careful look. The look meant, in the small private language the skald and the girl had developed across the long months of their cohabitation, that the skald wished the girl to leave. The girl returned the look with the small careful return that meant, in the same small private language, understanding. The girl rose. The girl walked, in her small careful cliff-folk way, across the floor of the great hall toward the curtain of grey wool at the eastern end. The chief at the high seat did not look up. The chief was turning the club. The chief was, the skald observed with the small back-of-the-head click, in the small private inward state that he had been entering more and more frequently across the past weeks, in which he was alone with the club regardless of who else was in the room. The chief did not notice the girl rising. The chief did not notice the girl leaving. The chief did not, the skald suspected, notice that the skald herself was still at her bench at the southern wall of the hall, in the small dark beyond the longfire’s light, in the place she had been sitting all evening.
The skald sat very still. She had positioned herself, at the beginning of the meal, in a place where the small dark of the southern wall would conceal her if she remained still, and where the small acoustic of the hall would carry sounds from the high seat to her bench more clearly than to any other bench in the hall, because the small acoustic of the longhouse her grandfather had built had been built with this kind of carrying in mind, for the use of skalds in attendance who needed to hear the small private conversations of the high seat without being seen to be listening. The skald had used the acoustic many times in her career. The using had been the small professional duty of the skald to her chief. The using tonight was the small professional duty of the skald to a matter the chief did not know she was attending to.
The girl reached the curtain of grey wool. The girl drew the curtain aside. The girl passed through. The girl, the skald observed with the small back-of-the-head approval, drew the curtain back across the opening behind her in the small careful way the skald had taught her in their first months of cohabitation. The curtain was drawn. The skald was alone in the great hall with the chief.
The chief sat at the high seat. The chief turned the club. The chief did not speak. The skald sat at the southern bench and did not move. The fire in the longfire burned at the small low rate of a fire that had been allowed to fall to embers, and the small light from the embers reached the high seat in the dim red way of all such fires at this hour, and the chief’s face above the club was the small red-and-shadow face of any man at any high seat in any hall at any winter evening across the line’s history. The chief was, in the small visual way, indistinguishable from any chief of his line. The chief was the chief. The skald watched.
The chief did not speak for perhaps the length of half an hour.
The skald did not move for perhaps the length of the same half-hour. The skald had trained herself across thirty-four years of attendance on her brother and on their father before him in the small physical art of stillness, in which the body of the watching skald became, in the small slow practice, a thing that took on the heat of the bench it sat upon and the small movement of the air around it, and the body did not move on its own account. The body simply waited. The waiting was the work. The work was the work the skald had been trained for. The skald did the work.
The chief, after the half-hour, leaned forward over the club in his lap.
The leaning was the small forward motion of a man bending toward a thing he was about to speak to. The skald, watching, took in a small careful breath. The skald did not let the breath out. The skald held the breath in the small careful diaphragm-hold her mother had taught her was the right way to hold a breath for the listening to a thing one did not wish to be overheard listening to. The hold preserved the small acoustic around the listening body and prevented the small inadvertent sound of breathing from masking the small sound being listened to. The skald held the breath. The skald listened.
The chief, leaning over the club, spoke.
The skald has set down in her bark, in the small private script, what she heard the chief say. The setting-down is, the saga must note, an approximation. The skald was not a speaker of the tongue the chief was speaking in, and the skald could not, in the small careful way of a person hearing an unknown tongue for the first time, reproduce the sounds exactly. The skald reproduced them as nearly as her own ear and her own training permitted, in the small private script that she had adapted for the recording of foreign sounds in her younger years when she had been trying to learn the cliff-folk speech from the wandering trader. The skald has set down, the saga reports, the following sounds, which she rendered phonetically.
The chief said, leaning over the club, in a small low voice that was almost a whisper but had on it a small thrumming quality that carried in the southern wall’s acoustic: “Tholaen, dhraen, kal-thaen. Vor thaen, sai. Vor thaen, sai. Mai ulaen, dhraen kai. Sai. Sai.”
The skald, hearing the sounds, did the small back-of-the-head work of placing them in some tongue she might recognize. The skald had heard, in her career, the speech of many traders and many delegations and many wintering hosts and one ambassador from a southern court who had been at Aern-Vík for a fortnight in her thirtieth year. The skald had built, in her small back-of-the-head place, a kind of catalog of the sounds of many tongues. The skald ran the catalog against the small sounds her brother was speaking. The catalog did not match. The sounds were not in any tongue the skald had ever heard. The sounds were not, the skald would later become more certain, in any tongue of the northern reaches or of the southern coasts or of the eastern reaches or of any reach the line’s traders had ever had contact with. The sounds were, the skald would write in her bark that night, of a tongue she had never heard, and that she did not believe was a tongue any living person of the northern reaches knew.
The chief was speaking in a tongue he had not learned anywhere.
The skald sat at the southern bench in the small held breath of her listening, and she felt, with the slow steady arrival of a piece of news that was too large to be received in a single moment, the small dawning of a horror that she had been holding off for months. The horror was the horror that one feels when a person one loves is doing a thing one cannot account for, and one realizes, in the moment of trying to account for it, that the person is no longer fully the person they have been, and that the no-longer-fully-being-them is not a small change but a large change, and that the large change has been happening for a long time and one has not been admitting it.
The chief, the saga must say in this segment, was no longer speaking in his own voice.
The skald has set this down in the bark also. The voice was her brother’s voice in its small physical qualities, the same pitch and the same timbre and the same small dry edge her brother’s voice had always had. But the voice was not her brother’s voice in the small thrumming quality the skald had noted, and the voice was not her brother’s voice in the small confident cadence with which the sounds were being spoken, and the voice was not her brother’s voice in the small intimate way the sounds were being addressed to the club. The voice was her brother’s voice carrying a different speaker. The different speaker was speaking through her brother, in the small slow way speakers do speak through other speakers in the long careful tradition of the line’s wind-women whom the skald had read about in the small private histories her mother had given her, although the line’s wind-women had not been practiced in the northern reaches for many generations and the skald had been raised to consider the histories as histories. The histories were not, perhaps, only histories. The histories were perhaps still alive. The histories were alive in her brother at the high seat at this moment, in the small private way the histories had probably been alive in him for some weeks now, perhaps months, perhaps since the morning at the cliff-top when the bone had first hummed back. The histories were alive in him. The histories were the reason for the small changes she had been recording for months. The histories were the answer. The answer was that her brother had been, in some small slow careful way, taken by the bone.
The skald sat at the southern bench and did not move.
The chief continued to speak the small low sounds. The chief spoke for perhaps the length of three breaths’ worth of sounds, in the same small thrumming intimate cadence. The chief paused. The chief leaned closer to the club, until his face was perhaps a handsbreadth from the bone. The chief, in the small intimate position, spoke a single word in the same tongue, which the skald rendered in her bark as “kal-thaen,” with great care, in the small soft voice the chief had been using the whole time.
The club, the saga must report from the skald’s careful witness, hummed in answer.
The humming was the same low rumble the bone had given on the night of the setting of the final scale, the thunder-tongues of the line’s tradition. The humming came up from the club into the chief’s right hand and into the chief’s chest and into the small bones of his face. The chief, the skald saw in the small dim light, smiled. The smile was not the small almost-smile the chief had been wearing in the months since the cutting. The smile was a different smile. The smile was a smile the skald had not seen on her brother’s face in his entire life. The smile was the smile of a man who has had a long conversation answered by a long-loved correspondent, in the small private intimate way of two correspondents who have been writing to each other for many years and who recognize each other’s hands. The smile was the smile of recognition. The smile was the smile of belonging. The smile was, the skald understood with the small heavy click of the moment, the smile of a man who had found the place he belonged, and the place was not at the longhouse he had inherited from his father, and the place was not in the chamber behind the curtain of black wool with his patient second wife, and the place was not in the sister-and-brother form he had occupied with the skald for half a century, but the place was the small intimate position with his face a handsbreadth from a piece of bone-and-scale wrapped around a quartz crystal and three thunderstone fragments and bound with the leather wraps Halvar No-Voice had made.
The skald sat and watched.
The chief continued the small low conversation for perhaps a quarter of an hour. The chief spoke and the club answered and the chief spoke again and the club answered again. The pattern was the pattern of a long-practiced conversation, the kind of conversation two correspondents fall into when they have been writing to each other for many years and the structure of the exchanges has become familiar. The skald, in the small back-of-the-head professional place where she registered such patterns, registered that this was not, perhaps, the first time the chief and the club had had this conversation. The conversation had a rhythm. The rhythm had been practiced. The chief had been practicing this conversation for some time. The skald did not know how long.
She thought, with the small slow arrival of further pieces of horror, of the night visits to the smithy during the forging. She thought of the small private times Halvar No-Voice had reported, in which the chief had come down to the smithy at night and laid his hands on the developing bone and stood for sometimes an hour at a time. She thought of the wintering at Vetr Bear-Friend’s hall, and of the small private experiments the chief had conducted at night with the bundle. She thought of the inland walk back to the cove and of the small twitching of the chief’s hands that had been the humming continuing in him. She thought of the night following the cutting at the small flat above the stream, when the chief had sat at the fire with his right hand on the bundle and his small almost-smile. She thought, finally, of the morning at the cliff-top, when the chief had held the tail-bone aloft and the bone had first hummed back against his hands, and the chief had laughed.
She thought, with the small heavy click that came at the end of a long piece of detective work in her own mind, that the conversation between her brother and the bone had been happening, in some form, since the morning of the cutting. The conversation had begun at the cliff-top. The conversation had been the humming. The humming had been, the skald understood now, not the small confirming gift of the gods, as her brother had taken it to be, but the small slow opening of a relationship between her brother and the part of the beast that had not, in the contracting and the cooling of the body at the cliff-edge, gone wherever the rest of the beast had gone. The part of the beast that had remained in the tail had remained in the tail because the tail had been cut from the body before the body had finished its small slow letting-go, and the part of the beast that had been in the tail at the moment of the cut had been locked in the bone by the cut. The locking had been the chief’s doing. The chief had cut the tail from the body and had thereby locked, in the bone, whatever part of the beast had been in the tail at that moment. The locked part had then, across the months of the forging and the wintering and the spring crossing and the early summer at the hall, slowly come to know the man who carried it. The man who carried it had been the chief. The man who carried it had been, in his small carrying way, addressed by it. The chief had been hearing the addresses in the form of the humming for many months. The chief had, in the small private way of his deciding chamber, begun to answer the addresses. The answering had become, by the third week of the second Helmus, a long-practiced intimate conversation in a tongue the chief had not learned anywhere because the tongue was the tongue of the beast, the small private tongue the part of the beast in the bone had been speaking to the chief in the only tongue it had.
The skald wrote this in her bark that night, in the small private script. She wrote it in many sentences, with the small back-of-the-head detective work laid out clearly. She wrote it because the writing was the only thing she could do with the horror. The writing did not make the horror smaller. The writing made the horror, perhaps, more bearable, because the writing was a thing the skald could do with her hands while the horror was a thing that was happening in her chest, and the having-something-to-do-with-her-hands was the small mercy her craft had given her across thirty-four years of attendance on great matters.
She did not, at any point in the long quarter of an hour of her brother’s conversation with the bone, move from the southern bench. She did not, at any point, attempt to interrupt. She had decided, in the small careful way she had decided on the cliff-top about the song’s loyalty, that the interrupting would not be useful. The chief was not going to be turned by an interruption. The chief had not been turned by anything in fifteen months, and the chief was now, in the small private intimate position with the bone, more deeply not-turnable than he had ever been. The skald would not interrupt. The skald would only witness.
The conversation ended after the quarter-hour. The chief leaned back from the club. The chief sat upright at the high seat. The chief’s pale eyes looked across the dim hall in the small ordinary way of any chief at any high seat at any winter evening. The chief, the skald observed with the small careful neutrality of a skald at her work, did not appear to register that he had been speaking aloud in a tongue he did not consciously know. The chief, the skald suspected, had no conscious memory of the small low sounds he had just been making. The chief had been, in the small private way, in a state his consciousness did not retain. The chief would, in the morning, remember only that he had sat at the high seat after the meal and had turned the club across his lap in his ordinary way and had gone to his fur beside the high seat to sleep. The chief would not remember the speaking. The speaking was, in the small careful way of such speakings, below the consciousness. The chief had been used. The using had been gentle. The using had been so gentle that the chief did not know he had been used. The using was, in the skald’s reckoning, the worst kind of using, because the using that the user does not know they are being subjected to is the using that does the most thorough work, in the longest possible time, with the most thorough result.
The chief rose from the high seat. The chief stretched his arms above his head in the small ordinary way of a man preparing for sleep. The chief carried the club to his fur beside the high seat and laid down on the fur and laid the club beside him on the fur, with his right hand on the leather-wrapped grip. The chief closed his pale eyes. The chief, the skald observed, was asleep within the time it would take a man to count to twenty. The chief slept well. The chief slept with the small almost-smile.
The skald waited at the southern bench for another half-hour, until the chief’s breathing had reached the long even pattern of deep sleep, and until the embers of the longfire had burned down further to the small low coals they would be at by morning. The skald rose, very quietly, in the small careful way the small acoustic of the hall required of anyone moving at this hour. The skald walked, very quietly, across the floor of the great hall toward the curtain of grey wool at the eastern end. The skald did not look at her brother as she walked past the high seat. The skald did not, the saga reports from her own bark, trust herself to look at him in the small moment without doing something with her face that someone watching might have read. There was no one watching. But the skald’s training was the skald’s training. She did not look.
She passed through the curtain of grey wool. She came into the small chamber she shared with the cliff-folk girl Kaela. The girl was awake. The girl was sitting on her fur in the small dark of the chamber with her right hand at the bracelet of four knots on her left wrist, in the small idle position that meant the girl had been waiting. The girl looked up when the skald came in. The girl said, in the cliff-folk tongue, in the small low voice the two of them had used between them at night for the past long months, “Did you hear it?”
The skald said, in the cliff-folk tongue, in the same low voice, “Yes.”
The girl said, “I heard it from here. Not the words. The sound. The sound under the words. I have heard it before.”
The skald sat down on her own fur, slowly, in the small careful way of a woman who had been sitting still on a hard bench for too many hours. The skald said, “You have heard it before?”
The girl said, “Yes.”
The skald waited. The girl was, the skald had long ago understood, a person who would explain in her own time and not before. The skald did not press. The skald sat on her fur and let the girl find her own way to the explanation.
The girl said, after a long breath, in the cliff-folk tongue, “I have heard a sound like it. At the cliff-top. The third sound the beast made. The hum that came into my chest at the collarbone. The hum had a tone under it. The tone was the tone I have just heard. The tone is the tone of the speaking.”
The skald said, “The speaking of what?”
The girl said, “I do not have a word for it in my own tongue or in yours. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers had a word for it but the word does not translate. The word means, more or less, the speaking of the very long-lived. The speaking is the tongue creatures like the beast use among themselves when they are speaking of matters too long for the tongues of shorter-lived creatures to carry. The tongue is not learned. The tongue is given. The tongue is given to creatures who have been chosen to receive it. The beast gave me a small piece of the tongue when it hummed at my collarbone. I have carried the small piece since. I have not used it. I do not know how to use it. I only carry it.”
The skald said, “And the chief has been given a piece also?”
The girl said, “Yes. I believe so. The chief was given the piece at the morning of the cutting, when the chief held the bone aloft and the bone first hummed back. The piece given to the chief was not the same piece given to me. The chief’s piece was a different piece. My piece is for carrying. The chief’s piece is for using. The chief’s piece is the piece the beast did not wish to give but had to give, because the chief had cut the bone from the body and the giving was, in some way, locked in the giving of the bone. The chief is now learning to use the piece. The chief is using it tonight. The chief has been using it for some weeks. The chief does not know he is using it. The piece is using him.”
The skald sat for some long time with this.
The skald said, finally, “The cliff-folk’s grandmothers’ word for the speaking. Will you tell it to me?”
The girl said, “I will. The word is for you alone. The word is not for the song. Do you understand.”
The skald said, “I understand.”
The girl said the word. The skald has set down the word in her bark, the saga reports, in the small private script, but the bark fragment with the word has not, the saga is sorry to report, survived. The Brother Eskil’s predecessors at the library at the Watching-Stones found the bark intact but the corner where the word had been written had been worn through, perhaps by the skald’s own thumb across many years of consultation, and the word is, in the surviving fragments, only a small set of damaged marks that no scholar has been able to reconstruct. The word is lost. The skald gave the word to the girl that night in the chamber, and the girl gave the word back to her, and the two of them held the word between them, and the word is theirs and the saga does not have it.
The skald sat with the word and with the girl for some long time. The fire in the small chamber’s hearth was low. The girl, after the giving of the word, lay down on her fur and curled in her small careful sleeping position. The girl said, in the cliff-folk tongue, before sleeping, “Skald. He will not stop. He will only get worse.”
The skald said, “I know.”
The girl said, “There is nothing you can do.”
The skald said, “I know.”
The girl said, “The work will be on you, then. The work of carrying him in the song while he is becoming what he is becoming. The work will be the work the beast gave me but in a different form. I will carry the beast. You will carry the brother. The carrying is different but the carrying is the same.”
The skald sat with this. The skald said, finally, “Yes.”
The girl said, “I will help you when I can.”
The skald said, “Thank you.”
The girl slept.
The skald did not sleep for some hours. The skald sat on her own fur with the small dry tightness behind her breastbone, the same small companion she had been carrying since the wharf at Aern-Vík fifteen months before, and the tightness had now grown into the largest version of itself the skald had yet known, and the skald sat with it and let it be large. The skald wrote one more entry in the bark before finally lying down. The entry was the entry the predecessors of Brother Eskil would later most often quote from the bark. The entry read:
He is being spoken through. The speaking is in the tongue of the very long-lived. He does not know he is being spoken through. The speaking has been happening since the cutting. The speaking is the conversation he has been holding with the bone in his sleep and at his quiet hours and at meals and at all the small private times when he believes himself alone. He believes the speaking is his own thinking. The speaking is not his own thinking. The speaking is the bone’s, and the bone’s is the beast’s, and the beast’s is a tongue I do not know and a person I do not know and a relationship I have not had any inheritance for.
The brother I knew is somewhere underneath the speaking. I do not know if the brother I knew can still be reached. I do not know if I am willing to test whether he can still be reached, because the testing would require me to interrupt the speaking, and I have decided not to interrupt the speaking, because the interrupting would be the small useless act of a sister who has stopped accepting what has happened. I have accepted what has happened. I have accepted it tonight. The acceptance is the worst piece of work I have done in my career.
The work that remains for me is the work of carrying him in the song. I will carry him. I will carry the brother. The girl will carry the beast. We will be the two carriers. The two carriers will, in the small careful way of two carriers, walk together the rest of the matter, until the matter is done. I do not yet know when the matter will be done. I suspect the matter will not be done until my brother is no longer in the world, and that the not-being-in-the-world will come about by his own hand or by the hand of the bone he carries, although the bone does not have a hand and the bone will do it, if it does it, by the small slow work of using him up.
I will write the song. I will not show the song to my brother. I will write the song for the very long time. The song will be sung after my brother is no longer in the world. The song will be sung at halls where I will not be present, because the song is too large for any one skald to carry across a single life, and the song will be passed to other skalds and to other halls and to scholars at libraries that have not yet been built, and the song will travel.
The song will travel a long way.
I will be the first to send it.
She set down the pencil. She put the bark in its small leather case. She put the case inside her sleeping-fur. She lay down. She did not sleep at once. She listened, for a long while, to the small even breathing of the cliff-folk girl beside her, and the small dry crackle of the small fire in the chamber’s hearth, and the small ordinary sounds of the longhouse at the deep hour after midnight. The chief on his fur beside the high seat was sleeping, somewhere through the curtain, with the club beside him and his right hand on the grip and his small almost-smile.
The brother she had known since he had been small enough to carry on her hip was, somewhere underneath the speaking she had heard tonight, still alive. The brother she had taught to whittle a small wooden bird at six years old was still there. The brother who had woken her in the night at nine to ask whether the gods knew his name was still there. The brother who had said to her at twenty-three, on the night before his oath at the longfire, that he was afraid he would not be a good chief, was still there. The brother who had looked at her at the wharf at Aern-Vík fifteen months before and had asked her to stay a moment longer was still there. The brother who had given her the small private piece of his uncertainty at the longfire on the night of the oath after the dry-voiced stranger had spoken was still there.
They were all still there. They were all somewhere underneath the speaking. The speaking was on top of them. The speaking would, the skald understood with the small slow heavy click of the moment, only thicken in the months and years to come, and the brothers underneath would become harder and harder to reach, and the skald would, in the long forward unfolding of her life, attempt to reach them in the small private ways she could, by speaking to him as her brother at the small private moments when she could catch him alone and the bone was not in his hand, by referring to small memories from their childhood that the bone could not have known about and the brother might still recognize, by, in the smallest possible ways, refusing to let the speaking become the whole of him. The refusals would, in the small careful sister’s way, be her only resistance. The refusals would not turn him. The refusals would not even be visible as refusals to anyone who did not know what they were watching for. But the refusals would be there. The refusals would be the small ongoing acknowledgments by a sister that her brother had once been a brother and was, somewhere, still a brother, and that the sister would not, in the small careful way of her loyalty to the brother who had been, agree to the speaking’s complete replacement of him.
She would, the saga reports from her own bark, keep up the refusals for the rest of her brother’s life. She would attend her brother in the years of the wielding and the hunts and the celebrations and the small slow accumulated cost of the bone. She would watch the bone use him. She would attempt, at small careful moments, to reach the brother underneath. She would, in most of the attempts, not succeed. She would, in perhaps a dozen attempts across the fifteen years of her brother’s remaining life, briefly catch the brother in the small moment of a remembered childhood matter or a small private joke between them or a small line from their mother’s kitchen, and the brother’s pale eyes would, for a single breath, do the small thing they had used to do, the small recognition of the sister he had known, and the recognition would last a single breath, and then the brother would be gone again, replaced by the chief who carried the bone, and the skald would not have time to say what she had wanted to say. The dozen attempts would be the dozen small mercies of her brother’s last fifteen years, and the dozen would be all the brother she had left, and she would, in her own private accounting, keep the dozen carefully and would not, in the long forward unfolding, ever quite stop hoping for the thirteenth, which would not come.
She lay on her fur. She did not sleep.
She thought of the small dawn at the cove fifteen months before, when she had first seen the cliff-folk girl Kaela on the outcrop above the beach in the failing blue dusk, and the girl had been small and the girl had looked up at the cliff-tops in the small careful way a cliff-folk young one had been taught, and the skald had inclined her head to the girl without saying so because the girl’s looking up had been the first kindness shown to the skald that day. She thought of how the small kindness had been returned to her, in the long unfolding, in every small way the girl had given her since, in the four-knot bracelet noticed and not commented on at the cove, in the small careful translation of cliff-folk words for the skald’s understanding across the inland walk, in the question on the second evening of the inland walk about whether the skald was writing the song, in the small note about the trader at the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps, in the small careful witness’s posture at the morning of the cutting, in the not-looking at the club across the long months of the forging, and now in the giving of the cliff-folk’s grandmothers’ word for the speaking. The girl had been the skald’s small companion in the matter from the very first kindness onward. The girl had been chosen. The skald had not been chosen. But the chosen had carried the unchosen along, in the small careful way the chosen sometimes carries those who walk beside the chosen, and the skald would, the small heavy click told her, owe the girl across the rest of her life for the carrying.
She would repay, as much as she could. She would help the girl in the small ways she could over the coming years. She would, when it was possible, find a way to return the girl to her own coast. The returning would, the skald sensed, take perhaps another five or six years, until the chief’s grip on the matter loosened enough that the small piece of his attention that he had once given to the cliff-folk girl had faded entirely. The chief had not, since the meeting of the eyes at the celebration on the night of the speaking, paid any attention to the cliff-folk girl. The chief had, the skald believed, accepted the girl’s not-looking-at-the-club as the form the girl would take in his hall, and the chief had stopped registering the girl in his small private accounting. The girl was, in the chief’s accounting, absent. The skald could, in time, take advantage of the absence to send the girl home. The sending would be a long careful work. The work would happen when the work could happen. The skald would do it. The girl would carry the beast back to her own coast and would, in her own long life there, complete the small slow work of carrying that the beast had given her, and the cliff-folk would receive their daughter back and the daughter would, in the small slow way the cliff-folk received such things, take up the inheritance and add it to the cliff-folk’s wind-women’s long lineage and would, eventually, in her old age, tell her own granddaughter, in a kitchen, the small line about being seen.
But that is for very much later.
For tonight the skald lay on her fur in the small chamber at the eastern end of the hall at Aern-Vík, in the third week of the second Helmus after the spring crossing, with the bark put away and the small leather case inside her sleeping-fur and the small companion of the tightness very large under her breastbone, and her brother on the other side of the curtain of grey wool sleeping with his right hand on the bone, and the small private tongue she did not know spoken once aloud tonight in her hearing, and the slow dawning horror of the long evening fully arrived in her now.
She did not weep. The skald did not, by the small inheritance of her line, weep at such moments. The skald only carried. The carrying was the work. The work was the song. The song would be carried for the rest of her life, and beyond.
She closed her eyes. She did not sleep for some hours. When she finally slept, the cliff-folk girl beside her was already deeply asleep, in the small even breathing of a young person who had given the older person what she could and was now at rest. The longhouse held in the small quiet of the deep hour. The fire in the hearth of the small chamber burned to the smallest of small coals. Outside the longhouse the wind off the fjord was the small steady wind of the third week of the second Helmus, the wind the line’s reckoning called the patient wind, because it was the wind that did not vary and could be counted on to blow steadily for many weeks. The patient wind blew. The hall slept. The brother she had loved for fifty-some years slept somewhere underneath the speaking she had heard tonight, and the speaking slept on top of him, and the bone slept beside him, and the skald slept at last beside the cliff-folk girl, and the matter, in the long forward unfolding, went on toward whatever it would do next.
The Sky’s Hammer had been spoken to in the bone’s own tongue.
The bone had answered.
The chief was no longer fully the chief.
The skald had heard.
The girl had heard.
The matter, in the chief’s reckoning, had begun the great years of the wielding. The matter, in the larger reckoning of the song and the carrying and the chain of telling, had begun the long slow unraveling that would end, in fifteen years, in the splitting of the earth at the chief’s last battle, and the chief crawling through the underworld roots toward a chamber where an old salamander still lay on a slab waiting for him.
The night was long. The skald slept. The matter went on.
Segment 19: “First Strike Against Mountain-Trolls”
Now the saga must speak of the hunt of the mountain-trolls of the upper fjord, which was the first formal wielding of the Sky’s Hammer against the enemies of the line. The hunt was a hunt of consequence and the saga will give it with the care such a hunt deserves. The songs of the chief’s line have preserved the hunt in detail because the hunt was, in the line’s reckoning, the proof of the matter at the cliffs, and the proof was a thing the line needed to set down for its descendants. The saga of the line gives it. Snæ Two-Tongues sang the hunt for thirty winters in his own hall and the predecessors of Brother Eskil at the Watching-Stones set it down from Snæ’s song and from the parallel song of Vagn Three-Fingers and from the small careful entries the skald Sigvör Ash-Daughter made in her bark, although the skald’s entries differ from Snæ’s in their tone and the saga will indicate where the difference matters. The saga will give Snæ’s account in the main, because Snæ was present at the hunt and was the line’s authorized singer of it, and the saga will give Sigvör’s small entries in the small private script at the moments where the saga’s reader will need them.
The hunt began in the first week of Selnus, in the cold first month of the year, in the third year of the chief’s wielding of the Sky’s Hammer. The trolls of the upper fjord had become a problem of long standing. The trolls had been a problem for the line for many generations, in the small intermittent way trolls were always a problem for the northern halls, with the trolls coming down out of the upper passes in the late autumn to take the line’s stragglers and the line’s pack animals, and the line’s hunters going up to drive the trolls back in the small annual countermeasures the line had developed. The annual countermeasures had been sufficient across the long generations. The countermeasures had not, in any one autumn, eliminated the trolls. The chief, in the year of the wielding of the Sky’s Hammer, had decided that the elimination was the matter the line should now attempt. The chief had announced this at the longfire at the third week of the second Helmus following the spring crossing, in the way Sigvör’s bark has set down. The chief had said, in the carrying hall-voice the chief now used at all formal occasions, that the line had carried the trolls for too many generations and that the trolls would now be carried no longer. The chief had said that the Sky’s Hammer would be the instrument of the carrying-no-longer. The chief had said that the line’s hunters would go up to the upper passes in the first week of Selnus, with the chief at their head, and would find the trolls at their winter dens and would, with the Sky’s Hammer at the chief’s hand, end the matter.
The men of the line had received the announcement with the small old striking of the boards. The men had been pleased. The men had wanted, in the small accumulated way the men had wanted across the long generations, to be done with the trolls. The men had also wanted, in the small new way the men had wanted across the months since the forging, to see the Sky’s Hammer used. The men had heard the speaking of the bone on the night of the setting of the final scale. The men had been at the longhouse celebration. The men had not, in the months since, seen the chief use the club for any purpose beyond the carrying. The men had begun, in the small private way of men who serve a chief whose great weapon has been made but not yet used, to wonder. The wondering had been the small steady undertone of the hall through the third year. The wondering was about to be satisfied.
The hunting party that went up to the upper passes in the first week of Selnus was twelve men, in the same number as the cliff-coast hunt three years before. The chief had thought, in his small private way, about the number. The chief had decided that twelve was the right number for the line’s great hunts and that the line would, from this hunt forward, undertake all of its great hunts with twelve. The chief had named the men in the same patronymic way he had named them at the longfire on the night of the oath three years before, although the men named were not all the same men. Audun son of Brand Two-Knives and Halvard son of Olaf Salt-Hand and Hauk son of Hauk One-Eye were not present, because they had been lost at the cliffs. Snorri Hard-Hand was present, although Snorri’s cough had not fully left him since the swim and Snorri was, the saga must say, a smaller version of himself in the third year than he had been on the embarkation. Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand was present. Vigleik son of Thorbjorn Iron-Calf was present, although Vigleik walked with a small stiffness in the right hip from the bad landing at the cliffs. Eystein son of Olvir Sharp-Tooth was present. Asbjorn son of Hauk Far-Sight was present, with the bow as always. The chief’s young cousin Thorir son of Ragnar Crow-Eye was present, with his left arm now mostly recovered from the break but with the small slowness of the body Thorir had carried since the cliffs. The chief’s cousin Snæ Two-Tongues was present, in the small role of attending singer, in which Snæ had been formally appointed by the chief on the night of the announcement, since Sigvör had been the skald of the cliff-coast hunt and the chief had decided that Sigvör would not attend the troll-hunt. The not-attending of Sigvör was, the saga must mention here, a small piece of the matter the saga will not yet explain in full. Sigvör had written in her bark, in the small private script, that the chief had not asked her to attend and that she had not, when the absence of the invitation had become clear, asked to be added. Sigvör had decided, in the small careful sister’s way, that the troll-hunt was a hunt she did not wish to witness in person. The girl Kaela of the Cliffs had remained at the hall with Sigvör. The saga will return to Sigvör and the girl in the next segment. For now the troll-hunt.
The other men of the twelve were four men of the line who had not been at the cliffs but who had been raised on the songs of it, and who had earned their places at the line’s great hunts by the small steady years of work in the line’s small hunts since. They were named Olvir son of Sigurd Black-Tooth, Geir son of Ari Long-Stride, Ivar son of Hauk Far-Sight (who was Asbjorn’s younger brother), and Brand son of Halvard Salt-Hand, who was the son of the Halvard who had been lost at the cliffs and who had, by the small careful tradition of the line, inherited his father’s place in the line’s hunts at the age the line reckoned a son could take such a place, which was sixteen winters. Brand son of Halvard Salt-Hand was the youngest man on the hunt and was, the saga reports, eager in the small dry way young men are eager who have grown up on the songs of their fathers.
The twelve set out on the morning of the first day of Selnus from the longhouse at Aern-Vík. The morning was the cold clear morning of late autumn turning to winter in the northern reaches, with the small white frost across the fjord and the sky pale and the wind from the inland direction at a small steady rate. The chief walked at the head of the column. The chief carried the Sky’s Hammer in his right hand, with the small leather sling across his back for when he needed both hands. Gjafr-Bíta the chief had left at the hall, in the small careful way the chief had begun to leave Gjafr-Bíta when he carried the club, because the chief had not, in the small private accounting since the forging, found the spear necessary when he had the club. The men of the line followed in the small loose order of a long climbing march. Snæ Two-Tongues walked at the middle of the column, with his small bone harp slung across his back, because Snæ had been raised at the line’s halls and was a singer of the line and carried his instrument at all the line’s great matters. Snæ did not have the driftwood harp of Sigvör’s line, because the driftwood harp was Sigvör’s alone, and Snæ had inherited his own grandfather’s harp, which was a small bone harp made of the rib-bones of a small whale.
The walk up to the upper passes took three days. The walk went up the line of the fjord on the small frozen path that the line’s hunters had used for many generations, with the small camps at the small flats the line’s hunters had built up over the years. The walk was uneventful. The men walked. The chief walked at the head. The Sky’s Hammer rode in the chief’s right hand and the chief’s right hand was, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, content. The chief’s small almost-smile, which had been the chief’s ordinary expression for some years, was on the chief’s face for most of the walk. The chief, in the small private way of his certainty, knew that the matter was going to go as he had planned it. The chief had been planning the troll-hunt for many months. The chief had been planning it across the months since the forging, in the small private times when the chief had been holding the club and the bone had been humming and the chief had been, in the small private inward way the saga has come to understand, in conversation with the part of the beast that had remained locked in the bone. The conversation had told the chief many things across the months. The conversation had told the chief, in some way the chief did not consciously experience as being told, that the trolls of the upper fjord would be the right first use of the club. The conversation had told the chief that the upper passes would be the right place. The conversation had told the chief that the small steady rhythm of the chief’s strikes would be the right pattern. The chief had received these tellings as his own thinking. The chief had been planning his own thinking for months. The thinking would now be enacted. The chief was looking forward to the enacting. The enacting would be, the chief expected, the small public confirmation of everything the chief had been hearing in private.
The walk reached the upper passes on the evening of the third day. The upper passes were the small narrow defiles in the high country at the head of the fjord, where the mountain-trolls had their winter dens. The dens were a series of small caves along the western wall of the largest of the passes, which the line’s hunters called the Long Throat for its shape, and which ran for perhaps two miles between two ridges of the mountain. The line’s hunters had, across the generations, mapped the den-caves carefully, although the line’s hunters had not, across those generations, attempted to enter the caves themselves. The countermeasures had been done at the mouth of the Long Throat, where the trolls came down to raid, and the dens themselves had been left alone, in the small careful way the line’s hunters had reckoned that an attack on the dens would have been a costly attack. The chief, in the year of the wielding, had decided that the dens would be entered.
The twelve made camp at the mouth of the Long Throat on the evening of the third day. The chief gave the small evening speech the chief now gave at all his hunts. The speech was the small carrying hall-voice speech the chief had been giving since the cliff-coast hunt, although the speech had developed across the years into a longer and more confident speech, and the speech that evening at the mouth of the Long Throat was perhaps the longest and most confident the chief had yet given. The speech, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, was the following.
The chief said, “Hear me, kin and bench-fellows. We have come to the Long Throat in the small old way of our line, in the way our fathers came and our fathers’ fathers came, and we have come this time for the matter our fathers did not have the means to complete. We will enter the dens. We will take the trolls at their winter sleep. We will not return until the matter is finished. The gods have given us the means. The gods have given us the means in the form of the Sky’s Hammer, which I carry, and which has spoken to us in the bone’s own tongue at the longhouse on the night of the setting of the final scale, and which has been waiting for this hunt since the forging. The matter will be done tomorrow. We will rest tonight. We will rise at dawn. Tomorrow the trolls of the upper fjord will be remembered as the last trolls the line ever had to bear. Tomorrow we end them.”
The men struck the small frozen ground with the flats of their boots in the small frozen-ground answer the line had developed for cold-weather hunts. The men were warm in the small confident way the men had been warm in the chief’s certainty for months. The men ate the small evening meal of dry bread and salt fish. The men set the watch. The men slept.
The chief, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, did not sleep that night. The chief sat at the small fire of the camp with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap, in the same small careful way the chief sat with it at the high seat at the longhouse, and the chief turned the club slowly across his lap in the same small careful way. Snæ Two-Tongues, who was on the second watch, was present at the small fire for the watch, and Snæ has set down in his song what he saw. Snæ saw the chief sitting at the small fire with the club across his lap and the chief’s pale eyes on the embers and the chief’s right thumb at the fourth iron ring in his beard, in the small careful way the chief had been turning the fourth ring for three years. Snæ saw, also, the chief lean forward over the club, in the small forward motion Snæ had observed before but had not, in his own small understanding, registered the meaning of. Snæ saw the chief, leaning over the club, speak in a small low voice that Snæ could not hear the words of from his watch-position perhaps ten paces from the small fire. Snæ saw the chief’s lips move in a small steady speech-like pattern for perhaps the length of a quarter of an hour. Snæ saw the chief lean back from the club. Snæ saw the chief, after the leaning-back, smile a small smile that Snæ described in his song as the smile of a man who has been given the small confirmation he was waiting for. Snæ did not, the saga must say, recognize the smile as the speaking-through-smile that Sigvör had recognized at the longhouse two years before. Snæ had not been at the small private conversations Sigvör had witnessed. Snæ had only the surface observation. Snæ recorded the surface. The surface was a chief at peace with his weapon on the night before a great hunt. Snæ’s song would later be sung in the line’s halls as the song of the chief’s small private piety on the night before the troll-hunt, in which the chief had communed with the gods through the medium of the weapon they had given him. Snæ’s song was wrong about the communing, but the song was right about the smile, and the saga records the smile.
The dawn came cold and clear. The twelve rose. The twelve ate the small morning meal. The twelve checked their weapons. The chief carried the Sky’s Hammer in his right hand. The men carried their spears and shields and the small short axes the line used for close work in caves. Asbjorn carried the bow with a quiver of the small barbed arrows the line had developed across the generations for trolls. Snæ Two-Tongues did not carry a weapon at this hunt, because Snæ’s role was the role of attending singer and the line had decided long ago that attending singers at hunts did not carry weapons, on the small old reasoning that a singer who had taken part in the killing could not, in good conscience, sing of it. Snæ carried only his small bone harp and the small bag of dried provisions he had brought for himself.
The twelve entered the Long Throat at the first hour of full daylight.
The Long Throat was, the saga must give for those who have not been there, a narrow pass perhaps thirty paces wide at the entrance and narrowing to perhaps fifteen paces at its mid-point, with the walls of stone on either side rising to perhaps four times the height of a man. The floor of the pass was the small frozen rock and ice the upper fjord country was made of. The dens of the trolls were small caves along the western wall, at irregular heights and spacings, with perhaps a dozen den-mouths visible from the floor of the pass at the various spots the line’s hunters had mapped. The trolls within, in the line’s reckoning, were perhaps thirty in number at the winter sleep, with the largest of them, the troll the line’s hunters called Gnar-of-the-Pass, in the largest cave at the middle of the western wall, and the smaller trolls in the smaller caves arrayed around Gnar’s.
The twelve walked into the pass in the small loose order the chief had drilled them in. The chief walked at the head, with the Sky’s Hammer in his right hand. The Sky’s Hammer, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, had begun, perhaps at the third step into the pass, to hum in a way the chief had not heard from it before. The humming was the small steady humming the bone had been giving in the chief’s hands for three years, but the humming in the pass was larger. The humming was concentrated. The humming was, the chief understood with the small bright shining that had become his ordinary expression, the small confirmation that the matter was the right matter at the right place. The bone knew that trolls were near. The bone was preparing. The chief, the saga reports, did not register that the bone was preparing him. The chief registered only that he himself was prepared.
The trolls came out of the first cave at perhaps the seventh step into the pass.
The first cave was a small low den-mouth at the western wall perhaps thirty paces in from the entrance of the pass. The trolls who came out were three. The trolls were the small trolls of the upper fjord, perhaps the height and weight of two men each, with the small grey-blue hide that gave them their resemblance to stone and the small heavy clubs of their own kind they carried, made from the broken-off branches of the dead trees of the upper passes. The trolls came out, the saga reports, at the small woken stagger of trolls who had been sleeping and had heard the approach of men. The trolls were not yet fully alert. The trolls were preparing to become alert. The trolls would, in the line’s reckoning of trolls, have been fully alert within perhaps the count of ten breaths.
The chief did not wait for ten breaths.
The chief raised the Sky’s Hammer in his right hand. The chief took two steps forward toward the trolls, in the small steady steps of a chief who had been waiting for this moment for three years, and the chief brought the Sky’s Hammer down on the lead troll, the largest of the three, in a single overhand strike. The strike was the strike Halvar No-Voice had built the club for. The strike landed on the lead troll at the small place between the troll’s eyes where the troll’s skull was, in the small careful anatomy of trolls of the upper fjord, thinnest. The strike landed with the small dry sound of bone striking bone, which sound was instantly drowned by the larger sound that came after.
The larger sound was the shockwave.
The saga must give this carefully because the shockwave was the matter at this hunt and the saga has been preparing the reader for it across many segments. The shockwave came out of the Sky’s Hammer at the moment of the strike, in the small bright concentrated way Halvar No-Voice had built the club to produce it. The shockwave was a wave of pressure that traveled outward from the place of the strike at a speed faster than the eye could track, in a small dome-shaped pulse that the saga reports from Snæ’s song was visible in the cold morning air as a small wavering of the air itself, like the wavering of air above a hot fire seen from a distance. The dome of the shockwave reached the lead troll first and the lead troll, who was already dead from the strike itself, was thrown back into the cave-mouth perhaps four paces with the small dry sound of a body striking stone. The dome reached the second troll next and the second troll was thrown sideways against the western wall of the pass and the second troll fell with the small dry sound of a body striking ice. The dome reached the third troll next and the third troll, who was the smallest, was thrown perhaps six paces back into the pass behind the dome and the third troll fell with the small dry sound of a body striking the pass floor, which was the same small dry sound as a body striking ice, because the pass floor was ice at this point.
The three trolls were all, the saga reports, dead within the three breaths that followed the strike. The killing was the killing of the club. The chief’s overhand strike had killed the lead troll directly. The shockwave had killed the second and the third by the force of their being thrown against stone or against ice, in the small simple way force does its work.
But the shockwave had not stopped at the trolls.
The shockwave had continued past the trolls and had traveled up the western wall of the pass, in the small upward way shockwaves travel when the lower paths are blocked, and the shockwave had reached the upper portion of the western wall, where the cliffs of the Long Throat overhung with the small thick accumulations of snow that had built up across the first weeks of Selnus on the small ledges and shelves of the upper wall. The snow, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, was perhaps three weeks of accumulation, in the small thick way the upper passes accumulated snow in the first weeks of Selnus. The snow had been held to the upper wall by the small balance of its own weight and the small grip of the stone beneath it. The shockwave from the club’s first strike was, the saga must report, more than enough to disturb that balance.
The snow on the upper western wall began to move.
The men of the twelve, who had been watching the chief’s first strike in the small bright wonder of men seeing the matter they had heard about in the songs come true in front of them, looked up. The chief, who was facing the cave-mouth of the first den, did not look up. The chief was looking at the lead troll in the cave-mouth and at the small bright shining of his own first strike. The chief was, in the small private inward way of his certainty, completing the small confirmation he had been seeking for three years. The chief did not need to look up. The chief had heard the small dry rumble that had begun on the upper western wall and he had known, in the small private way of his certainty, what the rumble was, and the chief had registered it as the further confirmation. The chief turned to the men. The chief said, in the carrying hall-voice that was the chief’s ordinary voice now, in a voice the saga reports from Snæ’s song carried easily over the rumble that was growing on the upper wall, “Back. To the eastern wall. Now.”
The men obeyed. The men ran to the eastern wall of the pass, which had no overhanging snow and which was, at this point in the Long Throat, recessed in a small shallow alcove that could shelter all twelve of them if they pressed close. The men pressed close. The men, the saga must say, did not pause to question the chief’s command. The men had been trained, across three years of the chief’s certainty, to obey the chief without questioning, and the obeying had become the small habitual way the men responded to any order the chief gave. The men ran to the eastern wall. The men pressed into the shallow alcove. The chief came to the alcove last, with the Sky’s Hammer in his right hand, and the chief pressed in with the men.
The avalanche came.
The saga has not yet given an avalanche in any segment of the chief’s hunts, because the chief’s previous hunts had not, in their small careful planning, ever involved the kind of force that would trigger an avalanche. The avalanche at the troll-hunt was the first avalanche of the chief’s career, and the avalanche was, the saga reports from Snæ’s song and from Vagn’s parallel song and from the small entries Sigvör later set down from the reports of the survivors, the largest avalanche the upper passes had seen in many generations. The snow of perhaps three weeks of accumulation on the western wall of the Long Throat came down all at once, in a single great mass that traveled the perhaps four times a man’s height down the wall in what was, by Snæ’s reckoning, less than the count of three breaths. The mass struck the floor of the pass. The mass spread along the floor in a great wave that filled the pass from western wall to eastern wall, except at the small shallow alcoves of the eastern wall where the twelve had taken shelter, and the wave continued down the pass in the direction of the chief’s first strike. The wave was perhaps the height of a man at its peak. The wave traveled along the pass perhaps two hundred paces in the small steady way avalanche-waves traveled, and the wave, in its traveling, passed over the small low den-mouths of the western wall that contained the rest of the trolls.
The trolls in the dens, the saga must say, were buried in the small steady way trolls of the upper fjord were buried by avalanches. The trolls had been at their winter sleep. The trolls had not yet woken to the matter of the chief’s first strike on the three trolls of the first cave. The trolls in the other dens were, by the saga’s reckoning from the line’s later inspection of the matter, perhaps twenty-five in number, in the various sizes of the various dens, with Gnar-of-the-Pass in the central cave. The avalanche covered the den-mouths in the small thick way of avalanches. The trolls in the dens were sealed in. The trolls in the dens, the saga reports, did not all die at once. The trolls in the dens died across the next perhaps two days, as the air in the dens ran out and the small intrusions of the avalanche-snow that had penetrated the dens chilled the trolls past their cold-tolerance and the small accumulating pressures of the snow above did their slow work on the cave-roofs, which collapsed at various intervals over those two days. The trolls, the saga must say, died slowly. The trolls had been at their winter sleep and woke into a death they had not been able to fight. The saga sets this down because the saga has come to think, in the long forward reckoning, that the slowness of the trolls’ dying matters. The chief had not, in his small private planning of the matter, intended the slowness. The chief had intended the quickness of the club’s strike at the first three trolls. The shockwave and the avalanche had been the chief’s intended quickness multiplied by the small unintended consequence of the upper wall’s snow. The slowness of the dying in the dens was an unintended consequence of the unintended consequence. The chief had not thought about it. The chief, in the small private way of his certainty, would not think about it for many years. The trolls’ slow dying would not be a thing the chief carried in his accounting. The trolls’ slow dying would be a thing only the bone and the chief’s hands and, in the deep chamber far below, an old salamander would carry.
But this is for later.
In the immediate matter, the twelve in the shallow alcove of the eastern wall came through the avalanche unharmed. The avalanche-wave passed them at the eastern wall and continued down the pass, and the wave eventually slowed and stopped at perhaps the two-hundredth pace from the place of the first strike, and the wave settled into the small thick blanket the upper passes were familiar with. The men of the twelve, the saga reports, stood in the small shallow alcove for some long breath after the avalanche had passed, in the small stunned silence of men who had just witnessed a thing they had heard about in the line’s older songs but had not, in their own small experience, ever seen.
The chief was the first to step out of the alcove. The chief walked out into the changed pass, in the small careful steps of a man walking on fresh avalanche-snow. The chief carried the Sky’s Hammer in his right hand. The chief, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, was smiling. The smile was not the small almost-smile the chief had been wearing for three years. The smile was a larger smile. The smile was the smile of a man who had not just been confirmed but had been confirmed in a way larger than the man had expected. The smile was, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, almost a laugh. The chief did not, however, laugh. The laughing had been at the storm at sea and at the cliff-top. The laughing had been the laugh of finding and the laugh of wearing. The smile at the troll-hunt was the smile of a man who had been wearing the thing for three years and had now, for the first time, used it in the way it had been built to be used, and the using had been beyond the man’s expectation. The smile was the smile of a glory. The glory was the glory of unanswerable power.
The chief said to the men, in the carrying hall-voice, in a voice the saga reports as larger than the chief had used before, “Hear me, kin and bench-fellows. The matter is done. The trolls of the Long Throat will trouble us no more. The Sky’s Hammer has spoken, and the upper fjord has answered. Let it be known in every hall of the line that this is the day the trolls of the upper passes ended. Let it be known. Let it be known.”
The men struck the alcove wall with the flats of their hands in the small old answer. The men, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, were in the small bright wonder of men who had served at the line’s great moments and had survived them. The men were also, the saga must say, in a small private way that they did not all of them yet recognize, beginning to be afraid of their chief. The fear was not the fear of being killed by their chief. The fear was the smaller and more difficult fear of being served by a chief whose power had become large enough that the men’s own roles in the line’s matters had become, in the small unspoken way, smaller. The men had not, at this strike, done anything. The men had carried the chief’s weapons and the chief’s supplies. The men had run to the eastern wall on the chief’s order. The men had pressed into the alcove. The men had survived. The matter of the trolls had been ended by the chief alone, with the club, and the avalanche the club had caused. The men were, in the line’s reckoning of the matter, present at the ending but not part of the ending. The men, the saga reports from Snæ’s later private confession in his hall in his old age, had begun to wonder whether the line still needed them in the way the line had needed their fathers. The wondering was the small new undertone in the line. The wondering would grow.
The chief, the saga must say, did not register the wondering. The chief was looking at the changed pass. The chief was looking at the avalanche-snow that filled the floor of the Long Throat from western wall to eastern wall. The chief was looking at the place where the first three trolls had been killed, which was now buried under perhaps three times a man’s height of snow. The chief was, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, content. The content was the content of a man who had completed his great work for the second time, after the cliff-coast hunt, with a result larger than the first.
The twelve walked back down the Long Throat to the camp. The walk back took perhaps an hour, in the small careful way of men walking out of a pass that had just had an avalanche. The men were quiet. The chief was not quiet. The chief talked, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, for the whole of the walk back. The chief talked about the strike. The chief talked about the shockwave. The chief talked about the avalanche. The chief talked about the trolls in the dens. The chief talked about what the line would do next. The chief, the saga must say, was talking in the small steady way of a man who had been keeping a long internal monologue for some years and was now able to share parts of it with his men because the matter had finally been done. The men listened. The men did not, the saga reports from Snæ’s song, contribute much. Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand, the saga reports, walked beside the chief for the whole of the walk back and listened with the small careful attentiveness Ulf had developed across the years, but Ulf did not, in the whole hour, say a single word in response to the chief’s talking. Ulf had become, the saga reports from Snæ’s later private confession, the small careful witness Sigvör had been at the cliff-coast hunt, although Ulf was the witness from the men’s side and not from the line’s. Ulf was watching. Ulf would, in the long forward unfolding, carry his own small private account of what he had observed, although Ulf did not write in any bark and the account would survive only in Ulf’s old age in the report he gave to Vagn Three-Fingers in the hall near the Strait of Bones perhaps thirty years later.
The twelve returned to the camp. The men set about the small camp-work of an evening. The chief sat at the small fire with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap. The chief turned the club slowly across his lap in the small careful way the chief had developed over the years. Snæ Two-Tongues, who had taken his small bone harp from his back, was tuning the harp by the small fire, in the small careful way Snæ had been trained to tune a harp on the evening of a great matter, because Snæ had been told by Sigvör Ash-Daughter in the small private exchange at Aern-Vík before the embarkation that the singer of a great matter began the singing on the evening of the matter and not later. Snæ tuned the harp. The chief watched. The chief said, in the carrying hall-voice, “Sing, cousin. Sing what you saw.”
Snæ began to sing.
Snæ sang the first verse of what would later be set down as the Saga of Hrolv-Kan and the Sky’s Hammer at the Long Throat. The first verse was the verse Snæ had been preparing in his head across the walk back from the pass. The verse was the small old line-style verse Snæ had been raised on, with the kennings of his line and the small old patternings of meter and the small dry hammered words his line used for the matters of trolls. The verse, the saga reports, was good. Snæ was a competent singer of his line. The verse landed in the small old way of his line, with the line’s kennings finding their places and the line’s meter holding. The verse named the chief and the strike and the shockwave and the avalanche and the trolls and the line and the upper fjord and the Long Throat. The verse, when it had been completed, was the kind of verse the line’s halls would later sing at the line’s celebrations and the line’s children would learn at the line’s small evening fires. The verse was the small first version of the song that would, in the years to come, become the standard line-song of the matter.
The chief, the saga reports from Snæ’s later record, was pleased by the verse. The chief turned the club across his lap in his small careful way. The chief said, “Good, cousin. Good. Continue.”
Snæ continued. Snæ sang the second verse, which named the men of the twelve and gave their patronymics in the small old way. Snæ sang the third verse, which described the first strike in greater detail. Snæ sang the fourth verse, which described the shockwave. Snæ sang the fifth verse, which described the avalanche. Snæ sang the sixth verse, which described the trolls in the dens. Snæ sang for perhaps the length of an hour, in the small old steady way of his line’s singers, with the small bone harp accompanying him in the small old patterns. The chief listened. The chief, the saga reports, was, by the end of the sixth verse, in a small bright state Snæ had not seen the chief in before. The chief’s pale eyes were wide and bright. The chief’s mouth was open slightly. The chief’s right thumb at the fourth iron ring had stopped its turning, in the small way the thumb stopped at moments of complete attention. The chief was receiving the singing in the small bright way a man receives a thing he has been hungering for. The chief, the saga must say, was not, in this moment, in the chamber of his deciding. The chief was, perhaps for the first time in three years, fully present in the small ordinary way at his own life. The singing of his cousin had brought him out. The bringing-out was the small ordinary work of his line’s singers across the long generations, in which a singer’s song brought a chief out of the small internal places chiefs went and back into the small shared place of the line. Snæ had done his work. The chief was out.
The chief, the saga reports, leaned forward at the end of the sixth verse and said, in a voice that was not the carrying hall-voice but was a smaller and more private voice, “Cousin. Sing it again from the beginning. I would hear it once more.”
Snæ sang it again. The second singing was the small careful gift Snæ gave the chief, in the small old way of his line’s singers, in which a song that had been sung once and received well was sung a second time at the chief’s request and the singer added the small refinements his ear had told him would improve the song in the singing. Snæ added refinements. The second singing was better than the first. The chief listened. The chief, the saga reports, did not look at the club during the second singing. The chief looked at Snæ. The chief, the saga reports from Snæ’s later private confession, had pale eyes that were wet by the end of the second singing, in the small careful way the chief’s pale eyes had occasionally been wet at the small evening fires of the line in his younger years before the cliff-coast hunt, in the small dry weeping the chief had been raised to permit himself only at moments of great matter received. The chief was, for the small moment of the second singing, the chief Sigvör had been recording the disappearance of for three years. The chief was back. The chief was present. The chief was listening to his cousin sing his deeds in the small old way of his line, and the chief was receiving the singing in the small old way of his line, and the singing was the kind of singing the chief had been raised on and the chief was, for the moment, the man the line had raised.
This was, the saga must say, the last evening of the chief’s life on which the chief was, even briefly, the man the line had raised. The matter at the Long Throat had been completed in the small bright way of the chief’s certainty, and the singing of the cousin had brought the chief out of the chamber for the small length of two verse-sequences, but the bringing-out was the bringing-out of a man whose chamber had become his home. The chief would, after the evening of the singing, return to the chamber. The chief would carry the small bright glory of the troll-hunt back to Aern-Vík and the chief would, in the small bright way of his certainty, accept the line’s celebrations and the line’s praises and the new songs the line’s singers would compose in the months and years to come. The chief would carry the club. The chief would speak to the club in the small private times. The chief would wield the club at the next great hunt, which would be against the river-giants of the eastern reaches in the second year of the wielding, and at the third great hunt, which would be against the wraith-king of the southern bay in the third year, and at every great hunt of the chief’s remaining life. The chief would, in the small carrying way of the bone, become more and more the man the bone had made of him and less and less the man the line had raised. The chief had been brought out for one evening at the Long Throat. The bringing-out would be remembered, by Snæ Two-Tongues, as the small private gift of the singer to the chief on the evening of the chief’s first great wielding. The bringing-out would not be repeated. The chamber would close again in the morning, and the chamber would, in the years to come, only deepen.
But for the evening at the Long Throat, the chief was present. The chief listened to his cousin sing the song. The chief turned the Sky’s Hammer slowly across his lap. The chief’s pale eyes were wet. The men of the twelve sat at the small fire at their various positions and listened to the singing and ate the small evening meal of dry bread and salt fish that they had prepared. The men were quiet. The men were, the saga reports from Snæ’s later private confession, in a small mixed state at the singing. The men were in the small bright wonder of having survived the matter and being celebrated in the song. The men were also in the small new unease of having begun, in the morning at the pass, to be afraid of their chief. The two states sat together in the men in the small uncomfortable way two large feelings sit together when they have not been reconciled. The men did not, the saga reports, speak among themselves about the unease that evening. The speaking would happen, in some small private ways, across the small camp-walks of the next three days as the column came down from the upper passes. The speaking would not, the saga is bound to report, ever reach the chief. The men would not, in the chief’s lifetime, tell the chief that they were beginning to be afraid of him. The men would carry the small unease forward in the small private way of men who serve a chief whose great power has begun to make them small.
Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand, who had walked beside the chief on the walk back from the pass, did not speak that evening. Ulf sat at his usual place in the small loose order of the camp, on the chief’s left side at the small fire, and Ulf ate his small meal in the small careful quiet Ulf had developed across the years. Ulf, the saga reports from Snæ’s later private confession, looked at the chief during the second singing of Snæ’s song. Ulf had watched the chief’s pale eyes go wet. Ulf had watched the chief lean forward to receive Snæ’s verses. Ulf, the saga reports, had recognized, in the small careful way Ulf recognized such things, that the chief was for the small moment of the singing back from the chamber. Ulf had not, in the moment, allowed himself to feel any small private hope. Ulf had been the second-in-command of the line for three years and had watched the chief carefully across those years. Ulf had observed enough of the chamber to know, in his own small private accounting, that the small moments of bringing-out were not the small reversals they appeared to be in the moment of the bringing-out. The small moments were small interruptions. The chamber would resume in the morning. Ulf knew this. Ulf, the saga reports, did not, in this evening, allow himself the small hope. Ulf only watched the chief, and watched Snæ, and watched the small fire, and ate his small meal, and turned in for sleep at the small ordinary hour of the line’s hunt-evenings.
The chief, after the second singing, asked Snæ for the song a third time. The third singing was the third gift of the singer to the chief. Snæ sang it. The third singing was, in Snæ’s later private confession, the best of the three, because the singer had by then had three passes at the song and had found the small final refinements. The song was the song. The chief listened with the small bright wet pale eyes. The men listened. The fire burned low. The night went on.
The chief did not, the saga reports, ask for a fourth singing. Snæ stopped after the third. The chief, the saga reports from Snæ’s confession, was content. The contentment was the contentment of a man who had heard his great matter sung in the small old way of his line. The contentment was a small honest contentment. The chief sat at the small fire with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap and the small bright wet pale eyes and the small almost-smile, and the chief, in the saga’s reckoning, was for that small moment a chief his line could have recognized.
He went to his fur at the small ordinary hour. He laid the club beside him on the fur. He laid his right hand on the leather-wrapped grip. He slept. The chief slept with the small almost-smile.
Snæ Two-Tongues, the saga reports from his later confession, did not sleep at once. Snæ sat at the small fire after the chief had gone to his fur, and Snæ wrote on a small piece of bark he had brought for the purpose, in the small public script the line’s singers used, the form of the song he had now sung three times so that the form would be preserved. Snæ wrote for perhaps half an hour. The form he wrote down would, in the years to come, become the standard form sung at the line’s halls. Snæ wrote it. Snæ rolled the bark and put it in his small bag. Snæ went to his fur and slept.
The saga reports that the twelve walked back down to Aern-Vík over the next three days, in the small careful way of a hunt returning from a completed matter, with the chief at the head and the club in the chief’s right hand and the men in the small loose order behind. The walk back was uneventful. The hall received the twelve at the wharf on the morning of the fourth day after the matter, and the hall celebrated, and Snæ sang the song of the matter at the longhouse that evening, and the line’s halls along the coast received the news in the small carrying way of the line’s news, and the chief was celebrated.
Sigvör Ash-Daughter, the saga reports from her own bark, attended the celebration at the longhouse on the night of the return. The skald sat at her usual bench at the southern wall in the small dark. The skald did not sing the Choosing of the Sky’s Hammer at the celebration. The skald did not, the saga reports, sing at all. The skald listened to her cousin Snæ sing the song of the Long Throat in its now standard form. The skald, in her bark that night, wrote in the small private script the sentence, the song my cousin has made is a good song. The song is the song the line wishes to have. The song is not the song that is true. My song is the song that is true. My song will not be sung at the longhouse. My song will be sung elsewhere, in halls I have not yet entered, and after. She underlined the word after.
The cliff-folk girl Kaela of the Cliffs, the saga reports, did not attend the celebration. The girl had remained, by the small careful arrangement Sigvör had set up across the months since the chief had stopped registering her, in the small chamber at the eastern end of the hall during the celebration, and had not come into the great hall. The girl had heard, the saga reports from Sigvör’s bark, the small steady sound of Snæ’s singing through the curtain of grey wool, and the girl had not, the bark reports, listened closely to the words. The girl had been at her own work, which was the small careful weaving of a small cliff-folk-style braid into Sigvör’s hair, in the small ongoing exchange the two of them had developed across the months in which the cliff-folk girl had begun to teach the skald the small cliff-folk women’s crafts and the skald had begun to teach the cliff-folk girl the small careful keeping of bark. The exchange was the small private inheritance the two of them had begun to share. The girl wove. The skald listened to her cousin sing about a matter the skald would never herself sing about, and the skald let the cousin’s singing be the line’s version of the matter, and the skald held her own version in the small private bark for the long afterward.
The chief, the saga reports, was the center of the celebration that night, with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap at the high seat and the small bright wet pale eyes and the small almost-smile and the small carrying hall-voice giving the small old toasts of his line. The hall struck the boards with the flats of their hands. The line celebrated. The trolls of the upper fjord were ended. The Sky’s Hammer had been wielded for the first time. The first wielding had been a great success. The chief was the chief.
The chamber, behind the small bright wet pale eyes and the small almost-smile, had closed again at some point during the walk back. The chief was, by the night of the celebration at the longhouse, fully back in the chamber. The bone hummed in his hands. The bone whispered to him in its small private tongue when the chief was alone. The chief did not, in his own private accounting, know that the bone was whispering. The chief knew only that he was content, and that the matter at the Long Throat had been the first of many such matters that the line would now undertake in the years to come, and that the line would, with the Sky’s Hammer at the chief’s hand, become the greatest line of the northern reaches across the chief’s remaining years.
The chief, the saga must say in this segment because the segment will not be returned to, was wrong about the line becoming the greatest. The line was, in the small careful accounting of the larger matter, beginning its decline at the moment of its greatest celebration. The line’s men had begun to be afraid of the line’s chief. The line’s chief had begun to be unable to be brought out of the chamber by even the small careful gifts of his cousin’s singing. The line’s women had begun to notice. The line’s second wife had not, by the night of the celebration of the troll-hunt, slept in the same chamber with her husband for three months, and the not-sleeping would, in the year following the troll-hunt, become the small open separation that the second wife would, in the small dry way of a patient woman whose patience has been exceeded, finally undertake. The line was, in the small slow careful way of all lines whose chiefs have been taken, beginning to come apart.
The Sky’s Hammer was unanswerable. The chief had wielded it. The line had begun to decline.
The saga goes on. The next segments will follow Sigvör and the cliff-folk girl in the small careful arrangements they were making at the hall, and will eventually follow the chief through the next great hunts of his remaining life, and will, in the segments after those, come to the small slow letting-go of the line and the splitting of the earth and the long crawl through the underworld roots. The matter, in the small careful reckoning of the larger reckoning, will go on.
For tonight, at the longhouse celebration of the trolls of the upper fjord, the chief was the chief, and the hall struck the boards, and the small bright glory of unanswerable power was on the chief’s face, and the chamber was closed, and the bone hummed in his right hand, and the matter, in his own reckoning, was going as he had planned it.
The matter went on.
Segment 20: “Three Soapstone Tablets and a Missing Year”
It is, I have come to think, the duty of every chronicler to take seriously the gaps in the records he has been given. The temptation is to skim past them. The records show a thing, and then they show another thing, and the chronicler, in his small understandable haste to set down a coherent narrative for whoever will read him, fills the space between with the small inferences his training has given him for the filling-in. The filling-in is generally a small unobjectionable inference. The chief was at his hall. The chief was attending to the small ordinary business of his line. The chief was doing what chiefs do at halls in the periods between great matters. The records do not show it because the records do not show small ordinary business at halls. The records show great matters. The space between great matters is, in the chronicler’s small standard assumption, the space of small ordinary business at halls, and the assumption is generally correct, and the chronicler is generally not wrong to skim past the gap.
This is when the gap is the kind of gap one ordinarily encounters. There is, however, another kind of gap. There is the gap that is the wrong shape. The gap that lasts too long. The gap that begins right after a celebrated matter and ends just before another celebrated matter and contains, in the middle, nothing the records have set down at all, and that, when one calculates the duration, turns out to be longer than the small ordinary intervals between great matters that one finds elsewhere in the same line’s records. This is the gap that is doing work. This is the gap that means something. This is the gap the chronicler skims past at his peril, because the gap is, in its absence of records, the place where the records have either failed to capture what happened or, more troublingly, have been brought to a small careful silence about what happened by some force the chronicler cannot, at his desk in a cave-mouth study many years later, identify.
The gap I am speaking of is the gap in the recorded deeds of Hrolv-Kan, son of Brand Iron-Hand, in what the line’s reckoning called the second year of his wielding of the Sky’s Hammer. The first year of the wielding contained the troll-hunt at the Long Throat, which I have given in the previous segment as the saga of his line preserved it. The third year of the wielding contained the celebrated hunt against the river-giants of the eastern reaches, which my predecessors at the Watching-Stones set down from the songs of three separate singers and which I have, in my own work, attempted to reconcile, although the reconciling has not been the matter of the present segment. The second year, between the troll-hunt and the river-giants, is, in the records the chief’s line provides, almost entirely empty. There is a small entry at the third week of Lathandus marking the chief’s attendance at the springtime feast of his hall, which is the small ordinary entry one would expect for such an occasion. There is a small entry at the fifth week of Helmus noting the chief’s reception of a small delegation from the line’s sister-hall at the Strait of Bones, which is again the small ordinary entry. There is a small entry at the seventh week of Sharus, in late winter, noting that the chief had departed the hall for a small undertaking of unspecified character, accompanied by Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand and four other men, and an entry at the third week of the following Selnus noting his return. The undertaking is not named. The location is not given. The deeds, if any, are not described. The line’s records, which in every other year of the chief’s wielding have catalogued the chief’s hunts and small skirmishes and visits to allied halls with the small careful patronymics of the line’s tradition, are, for the missing fourteen weeks of this undertaking, silent.
The silence is the gap.
I have, I confess, sat with this gap for longer than is professionally seemly. I have, in the small cave-mouth study where my desk is set against the south wall and the morning light falls across the parchment in the first hour, sat with the matter for parts of perhaps the last six weeks, and I have not been able to bring myself to write past it. The other gaps in the records of the chief’s wielding I have set aside in the small standard chronicler’s way. The gap of the missing fourteen weeks I have not been able to set aside. The gap is the wrong shape. The gap is doing work.
I have, in the long sitting, consulted three small documents that survive from the period of the gap. The three documents are, as it happens, not at the Watching-Stones library proper. The three documents are in the small adjunct collection at the back of the library where the apocrypha live, which is the collection my predecessors set up in the time of the third Brother Eskil before me for documents whose provenance was uncertain or whose contents had been judged, by some predecessor or other, to be untrustworthy or potentially deceptive. The apocrypha collection is not large. The apocrypha collection contains perhaps three hundred documents at the present count, in various states of preservation, and the three I have been consulting are the only three from the period of the gap. I have spent the last three weeks of my long sitting examining them in the small careful way I examine such matters. The examining has not produced a conclusion. The examining has produced, instead, the small intellectual vertigo that is the subject of the present segment.
I will describe the three documents and what each of them says, and the reader will then be in a position to share, perhaps, my vertigo.
The first document is what I have come to call the Soapstone Tablets. The Soapstone Tablets are three small flat carved stones, each perhaps the size of my palm, of the soft grey soapstone the cliff-folk’s grandmothers used for their small ceremonial inscriptions in the southern reaches, and the three are inscribed on one side each with a small set of cliff-folk runes that my predecessors have, with great effort across two generations, translated into what they believe is the original cliff-folk meaning. The tablets came to the library at the Watching-Stones perhaps fifty years ago, in the small collection of a cliff-folk wind-woman who had died at a very advanced age in a village called Hraevn-an-Ol on the southern coast, and whose family had, in the small careful way of the cliff-folk’s wind-women’s families, sent her small private collection of objects to the library at the Watching-Stones because the wind-woman had instructed them to do so in her last year. The wind-woman’s name in the records of the cliff-folk village is Kaela of the Cliffs, and she would, by my reckoning of the dates, have been ninety-one winters old at her death, and she would have been, in the year of the missing gap, perhaps twenty-six winters old. The tablets are not, the cliff-folk’s village records indicate, the work of Kaela of the Cliffs herself. The tablets are inscribed in the older cliff-folk script, which Kaela was not taught, and which had not been widely taught among the cliff-folk for perhaps three generations before her birth. The tablets, my predecessors believe, are older than Kaela’s life. The tablets came into her possession, the cliff-folk’s village records suggest, in her late twenties or early thirties, in some manner not recorded. The tablets were kept by her for the rest of her life, in the small private chest she kept beside her sleeping-cot, along with a small bone falcon on a leather thong and a sash of fourteen white shells that she wore until the end of her life and that her granddaughter inherited and that has now passed into the third generation of cliff-folk women on the southern coast.
The translation of the three tablets, which my predecessor the second Brother Eskil completed in the small careful manner of his work some forty years ago, gives the following three readings. I will give each in the form my predecessor set down, with my own small notes in the margin where they seem useful.
The first tablet reads: At the gathering at the high stone in the third year, the chief of the line of Iron-Hand made the binding of the Sky’s Hammer to the small dead of the line of Salt-Hand, in the small careful way of the older bindings, and the binding held for the period that followed.
The second tablet reads: At the gathering at the high stone in the third year, the chief of the line of Iron-Hand attempted the binding of the Sky’s Hammer to the small dead of the line of Salt-Hand, and the binding did not hold, and the small dead of the line of Salt-Hand were taken into the bone of the Hammer, and the bone became, in the period that followed, heavier than it had been.
The third tablet reads: At the gathering at the high stone in the third year, the chief of the line of Iron-Hand met with the wind-women of the four cliff-folk villages of the southern coast, and the wind-women refused the binding of the Sky’s Hammer to anything, and the chief departed the high stone with the Sky’s Hammer still unbound, and the period that followed was the period of the chief’s heaviest carrying.
The three readings, I should note, are not from three different tablets in the small sense that the three tablets are physically separate stones inscribed at different times by different hands. The three tablets are, in my predecessor’s careful examination, inscribed by the same hand and in the same script and using the same soapstone from the same quarry. The three tablets are, the predecessor concluded, the work of a single inscriber on a single occasion. The three tablets are three readings of the same matter, set down side by side, with no indication of which the inscriber thought was the true one. The inscriber, my predecessor speculated, was either a wind-woman of the cliff-folk’s older tradition who had, in the small careful cliff-folk way, set down three possible readings to be considered together, or was an instructor of cliff-folk wind-women who had set down three readings for her students to examine, or was, less probably, someone who had inscribed the tablets in a small private joke whose meaning has not survived. My predecessor was unable to determine which. My predecessor left the question open. My predecessor’s notes, which I have read carefully in the small careful way I read all my predecessors’ notes, indicate that he had begun, in his last year, to lean toward the speculation that the inscriber was a single wind-woman setting down three possible readings, and that the three readings represented the three things the wind-woman could not, from her own evidence, reconcile, and that the tablets had been kept by Kaela of the Cliffs as a small private record of an event in which Kaela herself had been a participant. My predecessor did not, however, finalize this conclusion before his own death in the second week of Tyrus some thirty-eight years ago, and the conclusion has been left in his marginalia as a small private speculation only.
The second document I have been consulting is what I have come to call, in my own private cataloguing, the Smith’s Letter. The Smith’s Letter is a small bound parchment of perhaps four pages, in the small dry hand of a smith of the chief’s line whose name appears in the line’s records as Halvar son of Geir No-Voice, who was the chief’s smith at the time of the forging of the Sky’s Hammer and who continued in the chief’s smithy for the rest of his life. Halvar No-Voice could not, the line’s records indicate, speak aloud, by reason of having been born without the use of his vocal cords, but he could write, in the small dry hand of a smith of his generation. The letter is addressed, in the small careful way of the line’s correspondence, to one Vetr Bear-Friend, who was the chief of the friendly hall at the Strait of Bones where the company had wintered after the cliff-coast hunt three years before, and the letter is dated, in the line’s reckoning of dates, to the fourth week of the second Sharus of the missing year, which is to say to the very late winter, perhaps eight weeks before the chief’s return to the hall in the line’s small records. The letter would have been written, by this dating, somewhere in the middle of the missing fourteen weeks. The letter is signed by Halvar No-Voice with the small smith’s mark his line used, and the letter is, I should note, the longest piece of writing in Halvar No-Voice’s hand that has survived in any collection. The smith was not a man given to letters. The smith’s having written this letter at all is, my predecessor noted in his margin, evidence that the matter the letter concerned was a matter the smith considered urgent.
I will give the letter’s contents in my own paraphrase, because the original is in the line’s older form of the script and the paraphrase is more useful to the present account. The letter reads, more or less, as follows.
Vetr Bear-Friend, old companion of the chief’s father, the smith Halvar son of Geir No-Voice writes you in the small careful way our halls have always written to one another. The chief is not at the hall at Aern-Vík at this writing. The chief is away on a small undertaking that has not been named at the hall. The chief departed in the seventh week of Sharus with Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand and four other men, of whom three were of the chief’s line and one was the cliff-folk girl who has been at the hall since the spring crossing three years ago. The chief took the Sky’s Hammer with him. The chief did not name the destination at his departure. The chief said only that he had been called by a matter that required his attention and that he would return in the spring.
I write to you because I have observed certain things at the chief’s hall in the year since the troll-hunt that I have judged you should know. The chief has not been the chief at the hall in the way the chief was the chief in the years before the cliff-coast hunt. The chief has spent the days at the high seat with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap, in the small steady way the chief has done since the forging. The chief has spent the nights also at the high seat, having ceased to share the chamber with his second wife perhaps two years ago. The second wife has, in the autumn of this year, departed the hall to live at her own father’s hall in the next fjord, in the small dry way a patient wife departs when the patience is exceeded. The chief permitted the departure without speaking against it. The chief has not, in the months since, spoken of the second wife.
The chief’s sister Sigvör Ash-Daughter, who is the skald of the hall, has remained at the hall. The cliff-folk girl Kaela of the Cliffs, who is now seventeen winters, has remained also, in the small chamber the sister shares with her. The two of them have made, in the small careful way of two women in a hall whose chief no longer registers them, a small arrangement that the hall has accepted. The sister continues her writing in her bark. The girl, who has by now learned the northern tongue well, has begun to write in her own small set of marks that she has invented for the cliff-folk tongue, since the cliff-folk’s older script is not known to her and her own tongue has not had a written form. The two of them write together at the small chamber at the eastern end. I have observed this in the small visits I have paid to the eastern chamber when the chief has been out of the hall. The sister and the girl have, I would say, become the only persons at the hall whose presence the chief still occasionally acknowledges, although the acknowledgment is small and intermittent.
The chief has, across the year since the troll-hunt, begun to speak aloud at the high seat. The speaking is not in the line’s tongue. The speaking is in a tongue I do not recognize. I have heard it from the smithy, which is close enough to the longhouse that the small sounds carry on calm nights. The sister has heard it also. The sister and I have spoken about it in the small careful way of two people who have come to the same conclusion about a chief and who are now, in the small private way, attempting to consider what might be done. The sister has the view that nothing can be done. The sister has been observing the matter longer than I have, and the sister has, in the small careful way of her observation, concluded that the chief has been taken by the bone of the Sky’s Hammer in a way that does not admit of any small reversal. I have not, in my own small accounting, fully accepted this conclusion. I am the smith. I made the Sky’s Hammer. I have wondered, in the small private way of a smith who has made a great work and has watched the work make trouble for its wielder, whether some small undoing of the work might be possible.
This is the matter I write you about. The chief departed the hall in the seventh week of Sharus, as I have said, with Ulf and four others. The chief did not name the destination. I have, however, observed in the smithy in the weeks before the departure that the chief made several small inquiries at me concerning the location of a place called, in the cliff-folk tongue, the High Stone, which is, the cliff-folk girl has told the chief’s sister and the sister has told me, a place of the older cliff-folk wind-women’s tradition somewhere in the southern reaches, perhaps in the country east of Hraevn-an-Ol where the cliff-folk had been before they were on the cliffs. The High Stone is, the girl has said, a place where wind-women of the cliff-folk’s older tradition have, across the long generations, met to perform certain bindings and certain unbindings of matters that have escaped the small ordinary control of their lines. The girl has not been to the High Stone herself. The girl knows of it from her grandmother, who knew of it from her grandmother. The chief made these small inquiries at me, in the small unspoken way of a man asking about a place he does not wish to admit he is asking about, and I gave the chief the small answers I could give, which were not many, because I am a smith and not a wind-woman.
I write you because I believe the chief has gone to the High Stone with the Sky’s Hammer. I believe the chief has gone there, in the small possibly even half-conscious way the chief now does most things, to attempt some matter with the Hammer that he does not wish the line to know about. I do not know what the matter is. I have wondered whether it might be the matter of an unbinding, in which the chief would attempt to release the small piece of the beast that has been locked in the bone of the Hammer since the forging, and which has been speaking to the chief in the tongue I have heard at the longhouse. I have wondered, alternatively, whether the matter might be the opposite, in which the chief would attempt to bind the Hammer more firmly to himself or to some other thing or person, in the small way the older traditions describe such bindings. I do not know.
I write you because Ulf is with the chief, and Ulf is the second-in-command of the line, and Ulf has been the small careful witness of the chief’s changes for the entire period since the cliff-coast hunt, and Ulf will, perhaps, in his own small careful way, find a way to report to me or to you about what occurred at the High Stone. If you receive any small report from Ulf in the months to come, by any means, I would ask that you send word to me at the smithy at Aern-Vík. I will, in my own small way, do the same for you.
The matter is, I think, important. I do not yet know how important. I am writing this in the small care of a smith who has made a great work and is watching the work make trouble.
May the small steady cold of the late winter keep you well. May the small dry weeping of your hall be only for old matters. May the small return of the spring find you in good health.
Halvar son of Geir No-Voice, smith of the chief’s line at Aern-Vík.
This is the letter. The letter exists in the apocrypha because, my predecessor recorded in the margin, the letter is the only surviving piece of correspondence from Halvar No-Voice to any party at all, and the letter’s authenticity has not been confirmed by any cross-reference, and the letter’s reception, if any, by Vetr Bear-Friend has not been recorded, since Vetr Bear-Friend died of the small wasting of his old age in the autumn of the year following the letter and his hall’s records were largely destroyed in a fire perhaps ten years after, and there is no way to determine whether the matter the letter describes was, in fact, the matter the chief was on. My predecessor’s marginal note says only that the letter, if authentic, indicates that the chief’s undertaking in the missing fourteen weeks was at a place called the High Stone in the southern reaches, in some matter related to the Sky’s Hammer, but that the matter’s nature cannot be determined from the letter alone.
The third document I have been consulting is what I have come to call the Cliff-Folk Letter. The Cliff-Folk Letter is, despite its name, not a letter in the formal sense. The Cliff-Folk Letter is a small set of marks on a piece of birch-bark, in a script that my predecessor identified, in his careful examination, as a small invented script of the cliff-folk tongue developed in the early third century of our library’s reckoning by a single person, almost certainly Kaela of the Cliffs in her young adulthood, in the small early years of her literacy after she had been taught by the skald Sigvör Ash-Daughter to read and write the northern script. The Cliff-Folk Letter is, my predecessor concluded, a small private note Kaela of the Cliffs wrote to herself in her own invented cliff-folk script, in the small private way one writes for oneself rather than for a recipient. The note is dated, by my predecessor’s careful examination of the small marginal year-mark Kaela had developed for her dates, to the fourth week of Sharus of the missing year, which is to say to almost exactly the date of the Smith’s Letter, which would have been in the same week or perhaps one week earlier. The two documents are therefore from the same window of time, perhaps eight weeks before the chief’s return to Aern-Vík.
The note is brief. The note reads, in my predecessor’s careful translation, the following.
He has taken me with him. He said he needed me as a guide. I have agreed because I have decided that if he is going where I think he is going, I should be there. The skald did not wish me to go. The skald asked Ulf to watch me. Ulf will watch me. I am not afraid. I am the chosen of the beast. The beast did not give me the work of carrying so that I would refuse to go where the work needed to be done. The work is the work. The chief has begun, in the past months, to speak to me at the small private moments when he believes the bone is not whispering to him. The chief asked me, in the small ordinary voice he sometimes has when he is not in the chamber, whether the cliff-folk had a place where a thing might be set down. I said yes. I named the place. I named the High Stone, although I have not been there. I named it because I have decided that if the chief is going to be brought out of the chamber by anyone, it will not be by the skald or by Ulf or by the smith or by his second wife who has departed. It will be by the work the beast gave me. The work the beast gave me has been the carrying, but the carrying may also be a small steering. I do not yet know. I will see.
We will leave in two days. The skald is angry with me. The skald is also, in the small careful way of the skald, relieved that someone is finally going to try. I am the only one who can try. The chief will not allow the skald near the Sky’s Hammer at any private moment, because the chief understands, in the small private way of the chamber, that the skald is the only person at the hall who fully sees what has happened to him. The chief does not understand that I see also. The chief does not register me at all, except in the small ordinary moments. The not-registering is, in the small careful way, the thing that has allowed me to be the one to ask the question. The question was whether the chief would let me come.
He has let me come.
I write this in case I do not return. The skald will find this if I do not return. The skald will know what to do with it. I have told the skald the small things I think the skald should know. The skald has told me the small things she thinks I should know. The two of us have agreed that I will go and that the skald will stay and that we will, between us, see whether anything can be done. The skald gave me her small bronze pin from her cloak this morning. I am wearing it inside my own tunic, against my ribs, in the small way the skald wears her own marks inside.
I am not afraid.
The beast saw me. The beast gave me the work. The work is now the going.
I will go.
This is the note. The note is, my predecessor concluded, authentic, in the sense that the script and the bark and the small marginal year-mark all match other authenticated documents of Kaela of the Cliffs from her later life, and the note’s contents are consistent with the broader account that emerges from the skald Sigvör Ash-Daughter’s surviving bark fragments from the same period. The note exists in the apocrypha because, despite this authentication, the note describes an undertaking whose nature is not corroborated by any other document, and because the note’s account of the matter at the High Stone, if there was a matter at the High Stone, breaks off at this point and does not resume in any document I have been able to find.
There is no document from Kaela of the Cliffs that reports what happened at the High Stone. There is no document from Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand that reports it either. The chief’s return to Aern-Vík in the third week of the following Selnus is the line’s small entry in the records, and the line’s records do not give an account of what occurred during the absence. The line resumes its small recording of the chief at the high seat with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap and the small daily business of the hall, and then, three weeks later, the river-giants of the eastern reaches are announced as the next great hunt, and the records pick up the line’s small steady documentation of the wielding.
Whatever happened at the High Stone, if anything happened there at all, is not in the line’s records.
This is the gap.
I have been sitting with the three documents for these six weeks at my cave-mouth desk, with the morning light falling across the parchment in the first hour and the small dry wind from the cliffs coming in through the cave-mouth at the second hour and the small steady drip of water at the back of the cave behind me at all hours, and I have been considering, in the small painful way of a chronicler at a gap that is doing work, what to do.
The three documents are, the reader will have noticed, not in agreement. The Soapstone Tablets give three possible readings of a single event, with no indication of which the inscriber thought was true. The Smith’s Letter gives a small speculation about an undertaking the smith did not witness and could not verify, with the smith’s own admission that he did not know what the matter was. The Cliff-Folk Letter gives the personal account of a participant who set out with the chief but whose account breaks off before the event itself. The three documents, taken together, point to the existence of a matter at the High Stone in the late winter of the missing year, but the three documents do not agree on what the matter was, and the three documents do not, in any combination, allow me to reconstruct what actually happened.
I have, in the long sitting, considered the three possibilities the documents jointly suggest, which are not the same as the three readings the Soapstone Tablets give. The three possibilities suggested by the three documents together are:
The first possibility is that the chief succeeded in some binding or unbinding at the High Stone, and the matter was either (a) the binding of the Sky’s Hammer to the small dead of the line of Salt-Hand, by which I take the first Soapstone Tablet to mean either the line of Halvard son of Olaf Salt-Hand, who was lost at the cliffs, or the line of his son Brand son of Halvard Salt-Hand, who was at the troll-hunt, or both, in some manner I do not understand; or (b) the binding of the Sky’s Hammer to himself more firmly, in some way that the second Soapstone Tablet describes from the bone’s side; or (c) some other binding or unbinding not described in the surviving documents. Under this first possibility, the chief returned to the hall changed by the matter, and the river-giants hunt of the third year was undertaken with a chief whose relationship to the Hammer had been altered at the High Stone in some way the line’s records do not register.
The second possibility is that the chief attempted the matter and the matter failed, in the way the second Soapstone Tablet describes, with the bone of the Hammer taking what the chief had attempted to bind into itself rather than into the intended target, and the chief returning to the hall with a Hammer that was now heavier in some way. The third Soapstone Tablet also describes a failure, although in a different mode, in which the cliff-folk wind-women at the High Stone refused the binding altogether and the chief returned with the Hammer still unbound and the chief’s carrying afterward was heavier as a consequence. Under this second possibility, the chief came back changed by the failure rather than by the success, and the line’s small steady recording of the river-giants hunt represents a chief who had attempted a thing and not been able to do it.
The third possibility is that nothing of consequence happened at the High Stone, and the chief’s undertaking was the small unsuccessful errand of a chief who had gone looking for a thing and had not found it, and the chief returned to the hall with the matter unresolved, and the river-giants hunt was the chief’s next attempt to resolve the matter by other means. Under this third possibility, the three documents are records of an attempt that came to nothing, and the line’s records do not describe the absence because the absence was the small nothing of a failed errand.
I have been unable to determine which of these three possibilities is correct. I have read the documents at perhaps thirty different sittings across the six weeks, in the small careful way of a chronicler attempting to find the small detail that will decide a matter, and the documents have not yielded the small detail. The documents are consistent with all three possibilities. The documents are consistent with each of the three possibilities being correct. The documents are consistent with one of them being correct and the other two being false. The documents are consistent with two of them being correct in different aspects of the matter and the third being incorrect.
This is the place where my predecessor at the Watching-Stones, the second Brother Eskil, would have set the matter aside and recorded in his margin that the gap could not be resolved with the available documents, and that the gap would be left as a gap for future scholars to investigate when, perhaps, new documents came to light. My predecessor did, in fact, do this. My predecessor’s marginal note on the gap, in the small dry hand of his late years, reads, the matter at the High Stone cannot be reconstructed from the available evidence. The matter is left for the future. May the future, in time, find what we have not. My predecessor died three years after writing this note, and the future has not, in the perhaps thirty-eight years since, brought any new documents to light.
I have considered following my predecessor’s example. I have considered writing a similar marginal note and proceeding to the river-giants hunt in the next segment, in the way the line’s records proceed, and skimming past the gap with the small acknowledgment that the gap exists. I have considered this for the small ordinary practical reason that the chronicler’s job is to set down what can be set down, and not to indulge in the speculation about what cannot be set down, and the gap is the kind of matter the small chronicler’s professional discipline tells one to leave alone.
I have decided not to follow my predecessor’s example.
I have decided not to because I have come to think, in the long sitting, that the gap is not a small ordinary gap of unrecoverable information. The gap is doing work. The gap is the shape of the story.
I will explain what I mean by this. The chief’s wielding of the Sky’s Hammer is a story that the line’s records and the line’s songs have given us in the small line-narrative form, with the great hunts catalogued and the small interstitial periods skimmed past, and the line-narrative form’s natural shape is the shape of an ascending career, with the great hunts as the small steady upward steps and the chief’s mastery of the Hammer increasing across the years until the small dramatic conclusion at his last battle. This is the shape the line’s singers have given the story. This is the shape the songs of Snæ Two-Tongues set down in the form preserved in our library’s main collection. This is the shape the line wishes the story to have.
The gap is the wrong shape for this shape. The gap is a fourteen-week period in which the chief was absent from the hall and the line’s records do not say where he was or what he did, and the gap occurs in the middle of the wielding, after the troll-hunt and before the river-giants. If the chief’s career was the small steady upward ascent the line’s singers have given us, the gap should not exist. The chief should have been at the hall in the small ordinary way between great matters, attending to the small business of the line. The line’s records should have small entries for the period, in the small steady way the line’s records have small entries for the small ordinary periods between great matters in every other year of the chief’s wielding.
The gap exists because something happened in the missing fourteen weeks that the line did not wish to record. The line did not wish to record it either because the matter was a failure that the line did not wish to admit to, or because the matter was a success of a kind that the line did not wish to celebrate, or because the matter was the small private business of the chief that the line was not in a position to know about and could not, therefore, record. Each of these explanations is consistent with the three documents I have been consulting.
But the deeper observation, which has been growing in me across the six weeks, is this. The story the line’s singers have given us is the wrong shape entirely. The story is not the small steady ascending career of a chief mastering his great weapon. The story is the small slow account of a chief being mastered by his great weapon, and the mastering is the matter, and the great hunts are the small visible signs of the mastering’s progress. The troll-hunt is the chief’s first small significant use of the bone’s power. The river-giants are the second. The wraith-king of the southern bay is the third. And so on, until the last battle. The great hunts are the line’s small public face of the wielding. The wielding is, behind the public face, the small slow taking-over of the chief by the bone. The taking-over is the story the line’s singers could not see, or could see but could not say, because the line’s singers were of the line and the line had to be celebrated.
The gap is, in this reading, the place where the taking-over happened most dramatically. The gap is the missing fourteen weeks in which the chief, in some small private inward way, attempted to resist the bone, or attempted to use the bone for some purpose other than the line’s celebrated hunts, or was, in some way the documents only hint at, finally and irreversibly taken. The gap is, in this reading, the central event of the entire wielding. The gap is the hinge.
If this reading is correct, then the line’s records have been organized in a way that obscures the hinge. The line’s records have catalogued the small celebrated hunts and have skimmed past the gap, and the skipping past has had the small effect of making the gap invisible to any chronicler who proceeds in the small ordinary line-narrative way. The line’s records have, in this reading, been doing a small slow work of concealment for the duration of the wielding, and the gap is the visible mark of the concealment, in the small absence-shape that an alert chronicler will eventually notice.
I am, perhaps, that alert chronicler. I do not say this in any small congratulatory way. I say it because the alertness is the small accidental product of the fact that I have, in my old age, spent more time at the apocrypha collection than my younger predecessors did, and the apocrypha collection contains the three documents that the line’s records do not. The apocrypha collection has, by being the place where uncertain documents are kept, become the place where the small evidence of the concealment can be assembled. My predecessors were not, in their small careful work, lazy. My predecessors simply did not spend the time at the apocrypha collection to see what I have seen. The seeing is the seeing. I have seen.
What I have seen is that the matter at the High Stone, whatever it was, was the small central event of the wielding, and the wielding is the story, and the story is the small slow taking-over of Hrolv-Kan by the bone of the Sky’s Hammer. The great hunts, in this reading, are not the matter. The great hunts are the small steady public signs of the taking-over. The gap is the matter. The gap is where the chief either resisted and failed, or resisted and succeeded only partially, or was finally taken, or was, in some other way, brought to the small private inward state from which the rest of the wielding proceeded.
I cannot determine which of these the gap actually was. The three documents do not allow me to determine. The three documents allow me only to say that the gap was, and that the gap was doing work, and that the gap is the shape of the story.
This is the intellectual vertigo I promised the reader at the beginning of this segment. The vertigo is the vertigo of a chronicler who has, in his long sitting, come to suspect that the small story he was setting down is not the story he should be setting down, and that the small story he should be setting down is the story whose central event he cannot reconstruct. The vertigo is the vertigo of a man who has been writing a book and has discovered that the book’s true subject is the absence at the book’s center, and the man cannot write the absence, because absences cannot be written, and the man can only write around the absence, and the writing around the absence is the small honest acknowledgment that the absence is there. The vertigo is the vertigo of the small slow recognition that the absence is doing more work than any of the small presences.
I have, after this long sitting, decided to write the segment about the gap in the form the reader is now reading. The segment is the small honest acknowledgment. The segment is the small careful description of the three documents and what they say and what they do not say and what their combined existence suggests. The segment does not reconstruct the matter at the High Stone, because the matter at the High Stone cannot be reconstructed. The segment names the gap and names the three documents and names the three possibilities and names the small recognition that the gap is the shape of the story.
This is the most I can do.
The reader will, perhaps, be dissatisfied. The reader will, perhaps, wish that I had been able to determine what happened at the High Stone, and that the segment had given the small definite account that the reader was expecting. The reader will, in this dissatisfaction, share the small ordinary expectation of all readers of line-narratives, which is that the line-narrative will resolve, and that the small definite account will be given, and that the gap will be filled. The line-narrative form has trained the reader to expect this. The line-narrative form has trained me, also, across my long career, to provide this. I am breaking the small expectation in this segment. I am breaking it because I have come to think, in the long sitting, that the small expectation is itself the small mechanism by which the line’s concealment has been preserved for many generations. The line’s records skimmed past the gap because the line’s singers expected the line-narrative to have a small definite shape. The chroniclers who came after, including my predecessors, skimmed past the gap because the chronicler’s discipline expects the small definite shape. The shape itself has been doing the concealing. The shape itself has been the small ongoing way by which the line has prevented its chiefs from being seen as anything but the small ascending heroes the line wishes to celebrate.
I will not skim past the gap. I will name it. I will name the three documents. I will name the three possibilities. I will name the vertigo.
The reader will then carry the vertigo forward into the next segment, in which the river-giants of the eastern reaches will be hunted in the third year of the wielding, and the reader will carry, with the reading of that segment, the small private knowledge that the chief who hunted the river-giants was a chief who had been to the High Stone in the previous winter and had undertaken there some matter that no surviving document can fully describe, and that the chief who was wielding the Sky’s Hammer at the river-giants was a chief whose relationship to the Hammer had been altered in some way at the High Stone, and that the alteration is the small invisible context within which the river-giants hunt should be read.
The reader, carrying the vertigo, will not be able to read the river-giants hunt in the small simple way the line’s singers wished it to be read. The reader will read it as the second great hunt in a wielding whose center is a gap. The reader will read the third great hunt and the fourth and the fifth in the same way. The reader will read the last battle and the splitting of the earth in the same way. The reader will, in the small ongoing way of the carrying, read the entire remainder of the saga as a story about a man whose central event the reader cannot see.
This is, I have come to think, the right way to read the rest of the saga. The rest of the saga is the small visible part of a story whose central event is invisible. The invisibility is not a flaw in the story. The invisibility is the story. The line’s chief was a man taken by his weapon, and the taking happened, in its most dramatic form, in a place no surviving document fully describes, and the taking is the story, and the story is the taking.
I will end this segment here.
I will, in the next segment, return to the line’s narrative as the line’s records preserve it, with the river-giants of the eastern reaches and the small steady documentation of the wielding’s continuing. I will give the next segment in the small dry chronicler’s way it has been given to me. I will not, in the next segment, return to the matter at the High Stone, because I have no more to say about it. I will leave the gap as the gap.
I will leave one final note for the reader before closing this segment. The cliff-folk girl Kaela of the Cliffs, who was at the High Stone with the chief in the missing fourteen weeks, lived for a further sixty-four years after the chief’s death at his last battle. Kaela of the Cliffs returned to her own coast at some point in the years after the chief’s death, by means our records do not detail, although the cliff-folk village records indicate she returned alone, on foot, in the autumn of her thirty-fourth year, with the small bone falcon on its thong and the bracelet of four knots on her right wrist and the sash of fourteen white shells across her shoulders and the three Soapstone Tablets in a small leather pouch at her belt. Kaela of the Cliffs married no one. Kaela of the Cliffs had children by some father not named in the records, and one of those children was the mother of the cliff-folk girl Kaela’s granddaughter to whom Kaela told, in her last afternoon at ninety-one, the small line about being seen. Kaela of the Cliffs did not, in her sixty-four years on her own coast, tell anyone what had happened at the High Stone. Kaela of the Cliffs took the matter with her to her death. The Soapstone Tablets were the small public marker she kept of the matter, but the Tablets are themselves three possible readings and not a single account. Kaela of the Cliffs, in her old age, was asked many times by her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren what the Tablets meant. She would, in the small dry kitchen voice she had learned in her years at Aern-Vík, smile and say, in the cliff-folk tongue, that the Tablets meant what they meant, and that the meaning was not for her to give but for the Tablets to give in their own time.
The Tablets have, in their time at the Watching-Stones library, given the three readings. The three readings have not, after fifty years in our collection, resolved.
This is, perhaps, the way the Tablets are meant to be read. This is, perhaps, the way Kaela of the Cliffs herself read them. The three readings are the three readings. The matter at the High Stone was the matter at the High Stone. The matter is not for the future to resolve. The matter is for the future to carry, in the small unresolved form, into the rest of the story.
I close this segment with that.
The river-giants of the eastern reaches will be in the next segment. The line’s records will resume. The chief will continue his wielding. The skald will continue her writing. The cliff-folk girl Kaela of the Cliffs, who has returned from the missing fourteen weeks unharmed but changed in some small way the documents do not describe, will continue her own small parallel writing at the small chamber at the eastern end of the hall. The matter will go on.
The gap will remain.
The gap will carry the story.
Brother Eskil of the Watching-Stones sets down his small careful pen at this point. The small dry wind from the cliffs has shifted to the inland direction. The morning light has moved from the south wall of the cave-mouth study to the north wall. The water at the back of the cave continues its small steady drip. The matter, in the chronicler’s own small private accounting, is for now set down.
The future will, perhaps, resolve it. Or not. The chronicler does not, at his age, hope for the resolution. The chronicler has come to think the resolution is not the point. The carrying is the point. The chronicler carries.
The reader, by reading, carries also.
That is enough for this segment.
Segment 21: “Captive No Longer”
Many years later, when she was a woman of perhaps middle age and her hair had begun to take on the small grey threads her grandmother’s hair had carried in its braid, Kaela of the Cliffs would say to her own daughter, in the kitchen of the house above the cove, that the leaving had not been the brave thing it became in the small later tellings. The leaving had been the small ordinary thing she did one autumn night when the longhouse at Aern-Vík was full of strangers and the chief was at the high seat in the small private inward way he had been at the high seat for years and the skald was watching her with the small careful look that meant the skald had finally agreed it was time. The leaving had been small. The leaving had taken perhaps the count of forty breaths from the moment she rose from her bench to the moment she was out of the longhouse gate. The walking afterward had been long. The brave thing, she would tell her daughter, had not been the leaving. The brave thing had been the walking. The brave thing had been all the things her grandmother had taught her on the cliff path above the cove twenty years before, brought into use across the small steady days of going south by a road she had never seen.
Her daughter, who at eight understood almost none of this, would ask her, in the cliff-folk tongue, whether the small grey threads in her hair had come from the walking. Kaela would say that perhaps some of them had. Perhaps most of them. The grey came from many places. The walking was one. The leaving was another. The years before the walking were others. The grey came from being a person who had carried things. The grey was, Kaela would say to her daughter in the small careful way her own grandmother had once spoken to her, the small visible mark of the carrying. She would say this and then change the subject to whether the daughter had finished her small chores for the evening, and the daughter would let the subject change, because the daughter had begun, even at eight, to recognize the small careful way her mother gave information about the years she had been gone.
But this is for very much later. The walking itself, on the long road south through the country no cliff-folk had ever walked, was the matter the daughter was asking about, and the walking is the matter I must give now, because the walking is what happened, and what happened is what should be told.
She left in the third week of Sharus, in late winter, in the fifth year after her return from the matter at the High Stone, which she did not, in her own private accounting, count as part of her captivity, although the matter at the High Stone is for the previous segment and is not here. She had been at Aern-Vík for nineteen winters by the third week of Sharus. She was twenty-two winters of age. She had grown the small distance a cliff-folk woman grows in those nineteen winters, into the small steady shape of her line’s women, with the dark cliff-folk eyes and the wild black hair that had finally agreed, in the small careful braiding the skald had taught her, to lie somewhat flatter than it had lain in her childhood. The missing finger on her left hand had healed into the small puckered scar it would carry for the rest of her life. The bracelet of four knots remained on her right wrist, the original one her grandmother had tied on the threshold-floor of the house the evening the smoke had first come up the cliff face nineteen winters before. The small bone falcon her aunt Mira had given her at ten remained at her throat under her tunic. The sash of fourteen white shells she folded carefully each night in the small private way the skald had taught her, and she laid it where her hand could find it without looking, and she had not, since her return from the High Stone, worn the sash openly in the longhouse, because the chief at the high seat in his small inward way had begun, in the months after the High Stone, to look at the sash when she wore it, and the looking had not been the small empty looking of his earlier years but had been the small interested looking of the chamber, and the skald had advised her to keep the sash folded against that interested looking, and she had agreed.
The longhouse had filled, on the third week of Sharus, with a feast that had been called by the chief in honor of the line’s small allies of the eastern reaches who had assisted in the river-giants hunt the previous summer. The chief had called the feast as a small reciprocal hospitality, in the small old way of his line, and the small allies had come, in a delegation of perhaps thirty men, with their own chief at their head and their own singer in attendance, and the longhouse was now, at the small evening hours of the third night of the feast, full of strangers and full of small noise and full of the small smoke of the cooking fires and the small heat of too many bodies in one room.
The strangers were the matter that had decided her, the saga of her later life would later report from her own telling. The strangers were not the small ordinary visitors at Aern-Vík that she had grown accustomed to across the nineteen winters. The strangers were a large body, perhaps thirty in number, and the strangers were occupying the longhouse in a way that made the small everyday paths of her movement at the longhouse become the small paths of strangers’ attention. Strangers had asked her, on the first night of the feast, where she had come from, in the small interested way men from the eastern reaches asked such questions of any unusual person they encountered at a foreign hall. Strangers had asked her, on the second night, whether she could be persuaded to demonstrate the small wind-women’s craft her people were known for in the south, in the small interested way men from the eastern reaches asked about all the small foreign practices they had heard rumor of. Strangers had asked her, on the third night, whether she was the cliff-folk girl who had been at the cliffs of Falling Stars at the matter of the Sky’s Hammer, in the small bright way men of the eastern reaches asked about anything that touched the line’s celebrated matters, and one of the strangers, a young man perhaps her own age with the small dry voice of his line and the small careful manners his line gave its young men, had asked her in the cliff-folk tongue, in a pronunciation she had not expected from a man of the eastern reaches, where her people now lived along the southern coast, and whether the cliff-folk’s wind-women would receive a visitor from the eastern reaches if such a visitor were to come south in the next year.
The young man’s question, the saga of her later life would later record, was the small piece of information that decided her. The young man’s question was the small piece of information that had been waiting for her across the nineteen winters and had not, until the third night of the feast, arrived in the form she could use. The young man’s question had told her three things at once. The young man’s question had told her that the cliff-folk were still on the southern coast, in some number, in some way, in some shape. The young man’s question had told her that the cliff-folk’s wind-women were still recognized in the eastern reaches as a craft worth seeking out, which meant the craft had not died out in the nineteen winters of her absence. The young man’s question had told her that travel between the eastern reaches and the cliff-folk country was possible, in the small careful way the young man had asked about it, which meant the road south existed and had been walked by men of the eastern reaches in the recent years.
The road existed. The cliff-folk existed. The craft existed. Three pieces of information she had been carrying private hope about for nineteen winters, all confirmed in a single conversation with a young stranger who had not known he was confirming anything. She had thanked the young man for his question, in her small careful northern tongue, which by the third week of Sharus was the tongue she most easily spoke, and she had answered him in the small careful way she had practiced, which gave him a small honest answer about her people without giving him any small useful detail that would have allowed him to find her later if he came south looking. She had said only that the cliff-folk were still on the southern coast, and that the wind-women’s craft was still practiced, and that a visitor would, in the small careful way of the cliff-folk’s hospitality, be received if the visitor came with respect. She had not named her own village. She had not described the path from any landing-point on the southern coast to any cliff-folk settlement. She had given the young man, in the small careful captive’s way she had developed across the long years, the answer that was true but that did not betray.
The young man had inclined his head in the small respectful way of his line and had moved on to his next conversation, and Kaela had sat back at her bench at the eastern end of the hall with the small careful empty face she had been wearing for nineteen winters, and she had felt, in the small private place at the back of her head where her grandmother’s gifts had been put across the years, the small dry click that had been her grandmother’s signal of a new piece of knowledge taking its place beside the older pieces. The click had told her, with the small careful certainty her grandmother had taught her was the certainty of the wind-women’s readings, that the time had come.
She had looked, across the longhouse, at the skald.
The skald had been at her usual bench at the southern wall, in the small dark beyond the longfire’s light, in the place the skald had been sitting at every great gathering of the longhouse for nineteen winters. The skald had been watching her. The skald had been watching her through the whole of the conversation with the young man. The skald had been watching her, the saga of her later life would later record, with the small careful look that meant the skald had been waiting, also, for the right moment, and the skald had been hoping the right moment would arrive in some form she could recognize when it came. The skald had recognized the form. The young man’s question had been the small recognizable form. The skald and Kaela had looked at each other across the long noisy hall, in the small private way they had developed across the years for exchanges that had to happen without anyone else noticing them, and the skald had inclined her head, in the small smallest of small inclinations, perhaps no more than the small movement of her chin downward by a hair’s width, and the inclination had said, in the small private language the two of them had developed: yes. Now. Tonight.
Kaela had inclined her head back in the same small smallest of small inclinations, and the inclination had said: yes. I am ready.
The skald had then looked away, in the small careful way that meant the exchange was complete and they were not to look at each other again for the rest of the evening, because any further looking might be noticed by some witness who had been trained to look for such exchanges. Kaela had looked away also. The two of them had not looked at each other again that night.
The leaving itself was the small ordinary thing the saga of her later life would later report it as. She had risen from her bench at the eastern end of the hall at perhaps the third hour after the evening meal, when the longhouse was at its loudest and the strangers were drinking the small honey-mead of the line’s third night, and she had walked, in her small careful daily way, toward the curtain of grey wool that marked the entrance to the small chamber she had shared with the skald for nineteen winters. The walking was the walking she had done a hundred times before at the longhouse, and no one in the longhouse marked it. The chief at the high seat did not look up. The chief had been at the high seat for the whole of the evening, with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap, and the chief had been in the small inward way of the chamber for the entirety of the feast, and the chief had spoken to the small visiting chief of the eastern reaches in the small carrying hall-voice but had not, the saga reports, registered any of the other strangers in any meaningful way, and certainly not Kaela. The chief had not, in fact, registered Kaela at any point in the past two years, since her return from the High Stone, except in the small instrumental way of a man who needed a translator for a small visiting cliff-folk trader perhaps once or twice a year. The not-registering was, the skald and Kaela had agreed in their long private conversations, the small ongoing condition that would, in some autumn, allow Kaela to leave without the chief raising any alarm.
She passed through the curtain of grey wool. She came into the small chamber. The chamber was empty. The skald had remained in the great hall at the southern bench, in the small careful way the two of them had agreed the skald would, so that the skald’s continuing presence at the gathering would mask any small absence of Kaela’s that might be noticed. The small fire in the chamber’s hearth burned at the small low rate of a fire that had been allowed to fall to embers. The small bag Kaela had been preparing for this night across the past several months was at the foot of her sleeping-fur, in the small careful corner she had kept it in, with the small contents the skald and she had together agreed would be needed. The contents were the following: one set of cliff-folk-style winter walking-clothes, which the skald had had made for her in the previous autumn by a woman of the hall in the small careful way of having clothes made that did not draw attention; two pairs of small leather walking-boots cured in the northern way for winter wear; a small leather pouch of dried meat and hard bread that would feed her for perhaps three weeks if she ate sparingly; a small bone-handled knife the skald had given her in the previous spring with the small careful instruction that the knife was a tool and not a weapon and that she should never use it as a weapon if she could avoid it; a small leather waterskin; a small piece of flint and a small steel for the making of fires; a small bag of dried herbs of the line’s smithy that the skald had said would, in small careful pinches, ward off the small worst of the colds; a small folded square of waxed cloth for keeping the bag dry in the rain; and, in a small inner pocket of the bag the skald had stitched herself, a small folded piece of birch-bark that contained, in the skald’s small careful hand in the cliff-folk tongue the skald had been writing for some years now, a small set of instructions for the southward road as best the skald and Kaela had been able to reconstruct it from the small information they had gathered across the nineteen winters from traders’ offhand remarks and from the line’s small map-collection.
Kaela changed her clothes. She changed into the cliff-folk-style winter walking-clothes. She put her old longhouse-clothes into the small wooden chest at the foot of her sleeping-fur, in the small careful way that they would be found when found, in the small ordinary place a person’s clothes were left when the person was wearing other clothes, so that the discovery of the empty clothes would not, in itself, signal that the wearer had gone anywhere unusual. She put on the small leather walking-boots. She folded the sash of fourteen white shells very small and put it into the bag’s inner pocket beside the birch-bark of instructions, in the small careful way the skald and she had agreed she would carry it, so that the sash would not be visible to any stranger she met on the road but would be available to her when she needed it for the small readings of the wind that the road would require.
She lifted the bag onto her back. The bag was heavy but not impossibly heavy. The skald and she had judged, in the small careful way of their planning, that the bag needed to be light enough to carry for many weeks and heavy enough to provide what those weeks would require, and the balance they had struck was the balance the bag now held. She drew the small cliff-folk-style winter cloak the skald had also had made for her around her shoulders. She tied the cloak at the throat with the small bronze pin the skald had given her on the morning of her departure for the High Stone five years before, the same pin Kaela had worn inside her tunic against her ribs on that journey. The pin was the small piece of the skald she would carry forward in the small visible way. The skald had given it to her for keeps on the night of her return from the High Stone, and Kaela had worn it openly at the longhouse since, in the small visible way of a sister-gift the chief had no objection to.
She stood at the small chamber door for a single long breath. She did not, in the small private way of her own deciding, allow herself to look back at the chamber. The chamber had been the small home of the skald and herself for nineteen winters. The chamber had been the place where the skald had taught her to read and to write the northern script. The chamber had been the place where she had taught the skald the small careful braiding of her line’s women and the small private cliff-folk tongue’s grammar. The chamber had been the place where she had returned from the High Stone five years before, in the small dim grey of a third Selnus morning, with the small private grief of what had happened there carried inside her in a way she had not yet, in five years, fully been able to put down. The chamber would, she suspected with the small back-of-the-head click that she had begun to recognize as the cliff-folk’s grandmothers’ small careful warning system, be the place she would think of most often across the long walking, because the chamber was the place she was leaving, and the leaving was the matter of the walking, and the walking would, in its small steady way, be the small constant comparison between the chamber she had left and the cove she was walking toward, neither of which she would be in for the duration of the walk. She did not look back. She had decided not to. The looking would have made the leaving harder than the leaving could be made.
She passed back through the curtain of grey wool into the great hall.
The great hall was, the saga reports, at its loudest hour. The men of the eastern reaches were singing some song of their line that Kaela did not know, with the small visiting singer at the front of their bench area leading the singing, and the men of Aern-Vík were joining in at the small refrain parts, in the small old way of the line’s hospitality at gatherings. The chief at the high seat was watching the singing with the small almost-smile that had become his ordinary expression. The skald at the southern bench was watching the singing also, in the small careful way of the skald at any line gathering. The skald did not look at Kaela as Kaela passed through the curtain. The skald did not need to. The arrangement had been agreed. The arrangement was that Kaela would leave through the small side door at the eastern end of the longhouse, which led into the small kitchen-yard, and from the kitchen-yard out through the small kitchen-gate that the small dogs of the line used to come and go, and the kitchen-gate would, at this hour, be unlatched because the cooking-women had been carrying food in and out across the evening and had left the gate unlatched in the small ordinary way. Kaela would pass through the kitchen-yard and out through the kitchen-gate, and the kitchen-gate would, in the small ordinary way, not be noticed.
She walked through the great hall toward the eastern end with the small ordinary gait of a person going to the small kitchen-yard for the small ordinary errands a person of the hall sometimes went there for. No one looked at her. The strangers were absorbed in their song. The men of Aern-Vík were absorbed in the small refrain. The chief was absorbed in his small almost-smile. The skald, in the small careful way of her planning, did not look at her. Kaela reached the small side door at the eastern end. She pushed the small side door open in the small ordinary way. She passed through. She closed the small side door behind her in the small ordinary way. She stood for a single breath in the small kitchen-yard, in the small cold of the late winter night, with the small breath visible in front of her face in the small white cloud the breath made in the cold. She walked across the small kitchen-yard to the small kitchen-gate. She passed through the small kitchen-gate. She stood in the small alley behind the longhouse, in the small dark beyond the longhouse’s light.
She was out.
The leaving had taken, the saga of her later life would later report, perhaps the count of forty breaths from her rising at the bench to her standing in the small alley. The leaving had not been brave. The leaving had been the small ordinary thing the saga reports. The walking, she knew with the small back-of-the-head click, would be the brave thing, and the walking had not yet begun.
She walked.
She walked south. The road south from Aern-Vík was the small road the line’s traders used for the spring journeys to the markets at the head of the long fjord, and the road was, in the third week of Sharus, partially covered in the small thin snow of late winter, but the road was walkable in the small careful way a cliff-folk-trained walker could walk a partially snowed road. She walked at the small steady pace her grandmother had taught her was the right pace for long roads, in the small even step that conserved the body’s heat across many hours. She walked through the small first night of her leaving and reached, by the small grey morning, the small frozen stream that the line’s traders called the First Crossing, which was perhaps fifteen miles south of Aern-Vík and which marked, in the line’s reckoning, the small boundary beyond which the longhouse’s small daily patrols did not range. She had crossed the small boundary. She was, in the line’s reckoning, outside the small daily reach of the chief.
She sat down on a small flat stone at the First Crossing in the small grey morning and ate a small piece of dried meat from her bag, in the small careful way she had been taught by her grandmother to eat on long walks, with the small steady chewing that drew the most nourishment from the smallest pieces. She drank a small mouthful of water from the small leather waterskin. She rested for perhaps the count of a hundred breaths, in the small careful way one rested on long walks, long enough for the body to recover and short enough that the body did not begin to cool. She rose. She walked.
The first day’s walking after the small grey morning was the small ordinary work of going south through country she did not know, with the small careful folded birch-bark instructions in the inner pocket of her bag and the small careful sense of the southward direction her grandmother’s teachings had given her. The country south of the First Crossing was the small wooded country of the line’s middle fjord, with the small pine-and-oak woods that grew along the small lower slopes and the small open patches of moor between, and the country was, in the small late winter way, mostly empty. She passed no one in the small first day. She passed no one in the small second day. On the small third day, in the small late afternoon, she passed a small group of three traders walking north along the same road, men of some hall she did not recognize but who carried the small marks of the line’s western reaches in their cloaks, and the traders nodded to her in the small ordinary way of strangers passing strangers on the line’s roads, and she nodded back in the small ordinary way, and the traders walked on north and she walked on south, and the small encounter was, in the small careful way it had been planned by her grandmother’s teachings nineteen winters before, exactly the kind of encounter the small ordinary cliff-folk woman walking south through unfamiliar country would not be noted for.
She walked.
The walking took, by her own later reckoning, perhaps fifteen weeks. The walking took her south through the line’s middle fjord and then through the line’s southern fjord and then into the country of the small southern halls of the northern reaches and then through the country of the small western traders’ road into the country of the southern reaches proper and then across the small first of the cliff-folk’s outlying lands and then, at last, along the small cliff-paths she had walked as a child with her grandmother to the small cove above which her village had been. The walking was the matter the saga reports she would, in her later years, decline to give in detail, because the walking had been the small steady ordinary work of going on, and the small steady ordinary work of going on did not, in her grandmother’s teachings, deserve the small detailed telling. What deserved the telling was the small particular things that had happened along the walking. The small particular things were two.
The first was the small body of her walking. She had not walked any great distance in nineteen winters. The longhouse at Aern-Vík had been her small whole world for those years, with the small short walks to the wharf and to the fjord-edge and to the small smithy and back, and her small cliff-folk body had grown soft in the nineteen winters in the small ordinary way bodies grow soft when they are kept indoors. The walking south found her body in this softness and began, in the small steady work of long days, to remake the body into the body of a walker. The remaking was hard. The small first week was the small worst week, in which her feet developed the small painful blisters of unaccustomed boots and her legs developed the small painful aches of unaccustomed distance and her shoulders developed the small painful soreness of the bag’s weight. The skald and she had foreseen this. The skald had packed, in the small bag of dried herbs, a small careful portion of the cliff-folk’s wind-women’s herb for foot-pain, which Kaela’s grandmother had taught her to apply in the small careful way at the end of each walking day. Kaela applied it. The pain subsided across the small second week. By the small third week, her body had begun to remember the walking, and the walking had become, in the small steady way of all long walks, the small daily fact of her life. By the small fifth week, she walked easily, in the small steady pace her grandmother had taught her, and the small body of the walker had returned to her, and she walked the small remaining ten weeks in the small even way of one whose body has remembered what it was for.
The second small particular thing was the dreams.
The dreams began on the small third night of her walking. She had camped, on the small third night, at a small flat above a small stream in the line’s middle fjord, in the small careful way her grandmother had taught her to camp, with the small fire of the smallest size needed for warmth and the small bag of provisions at her head and the small bone-handled knife in its sheath at her hip and the small leather cloak drawn around her in the small careful winter way. She had been sleeping for perhaps the third hour after lying down when the dream came. The dream came in the small dim way her dreams had come for many years, with the small careful unfolding of an event that she did not yet know she was dreaming. The dream was the small high valley with the pale tall grass moving in the almost-speaking wind, the same dream she had been dreaming since she was twelve, the dream her grandmother had assured her was a dream of significance that she should not press for understanding but should only receive. The dream had returned to her many times across the nineteen winters at Aern-Vík, although the dream had, in the long years, become less frequent and more variable, with the egg-stone in the dream sometimes cracking and sometimes not, and the pale tall grass sometimes moving in one direction and sometimes in another, and the wind in the dream sometimes carrying small sounds she could not place and sometimes carrying only the small whisper of the grass itself.
The dream on the small third night of her walking was different.
The dream began as it always began, with the small high valley and the pale tall grass and the egg-stone, but the dream’s sky was the small dark of a storm rather than the small clear of the calm hours, and the wind in the dream was the small high wind of a storm rather than the small almost-speaking wind of the calm. The egg-stone in the dream was not cracking and was not whole, but was, in the small in-between way of dreams, both cracked and whole at the same time. And the wind in the dream had a voice.
The voice was not loud. The voice was the small low voice she had heard at the cliff-top in her thirteenth year, in the third sound the beast had given her, the small acknowledging hum at her collarbone. The voice was the voice of the very long-lived, in the cliff-folk’s grandmothers’ word the skald and she had been keeping between them. The voice was the beast.
The beast spoke in the small wind of the small dark sky. The beast spoke a single phrase she had not heard in nineteen winters. The phrase was the phrase the beast had given her at the cliff-top, in the small careful way the hum had laid itself down in her in the place behind the place where words were made. The phrase had been there all along, in the small inheritance she had been carrying since the cliff-top. The phrase was the phrase. She had not put words to the phrase before. The phrase had not, in the small careful way of the language of the very long-lived, been a phrase made of words. The phrase had been a small concentrated piece of meaning that the human tongues did not have the small steady shape to carry in single words.
The phrase, in the dream on the small third night of her walking, came to her in the small dark wind of the storm sky, in a form she could now, after nineteen winters, almost translate into the cliff-folk tongue if she had to. The closest the cliff-folk tongue could come to the phrase was, perhaps, this: I see you on the road.
She woke in the small grey dawn of the small fourth morning with the phrase in the back of her head where the small inheritance had been put. She lay for a long breath in the small dim of the dawn with the phrase. She understood, with the small back-of-the-head click that had returned to her on the road in a way it had not been in nineteen winters, that the phrase was the small confirmation. The beast had not forgotten her. The beast had been watching her, in the small careful way of the very long-lived, across the nineteen winters of her captivity. The beast had been waiting for her to walk. The walking had been the matter the beast had been waiting for. The beast had given her the work of carrying nineteen winters ago, and the work had been the carrying inside the longhouse, and the work was now, on the road, the carrying of the small inheritance back to her own coast.
She rose. She broke the small camp. She ate the small careful breakfast. She walked.
The dream came again on the small fourth night. The dream was the same dream, with the storm sky and the wind and the egg-stone that was both cracked and whole and the voice in the wind. The phrase was a different phrase. The phrase, in the small closest cliff-folk translation she could make of it, was: the carrying is the walking now. The phrase laid itself down in her in the same place behind words where the first phrase had laid itself down. She woke with the small back-of-the-head click again. She walked.
The dream came every night thereafter, across the small remaining fourteen weeks of the walking. The dream came in the same small form, with the storm sky and the wind and the egg-stone and the voice. The phrases were different each night. The phrases were small concentrated pieces of meaning that the beast had been holding for her across the nineteen winters and was now, in the small steady way of the long-lived, giving to her one phrase per night. The phrases were not, in the small reckoning of meaning, instructions. The phrases were not warnings. The phrases were not, the small back-of-the-head click told her, even, in the strict sense, communications from the beast. The phrases were, she would understand much later in her life, the small slow unpacking of the inheritance the beast had given her at the cliff-top nineteen winters before. The inheritance had been given in a single concentrated hum at her collarbone, but the inheritance had been too large to be held in conscious form all at once, and the inheritance had been folded into her in the way one folds a long cloth into a small space, and the road south was the small steady unfolding of the cloth, one phrase per night across the long weeks.
She received the phrases. She did not, in the small careful way her grandmother had taught her was the way of receiving small gifts of significance, attempt to write them down. The writing would have, she suspected, fixed the phrases into shapes the human tongue could carry, and the phrases were not, in their truest form, things the human tongue could carry. The phrases were to be received and held in the place behind words. She received them. She held them. She walked.
The walking through the small middle fjord and the small southern fjord and the small country of the southern halls was the small ordinary walking of a cliff-folk woman going south in the late winter, and the small encounters with traders on the road were the small ordinary encounters of a traveler, and the small camps at night were the small ordinary camps. The walking through the small country of the western traders’ road and the small first of the cliff-folk’s outlying lands was the small different walking of a woman who had begun to recognize the small features of the southern country from the small descriptions her grandmother had given her in her childhood, with the small pale stones at the small crossings that the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had set at certain spots in the older centuries, and the small particular shape of the small ridges along the small western horizon that her grandmother had once described as the shape of an old woman’s spine. She walked the small remembered country with the small back-of-the-head click coming more and more often, in the small steady way of a person whose old memories were returning to her after a long absence. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers had said, her grandmother had told her in her childhood, that the body remembered the small features of the country it had been born to, and that the remembering came back to one in the small steady way of a hand recognizing the small grip of a tool one had not held in many years. The body was remembering. The hand was finding the small grip.
She reached the small first of the cliff-folk’s outlying villages, which her grandmother had called Threshold-of-the-South, in the small twelfth week of her walking. The village was small. The village was at the small edge of the cliff-folk’s country, on a small plateau perhaps three days’ walk inland of the southern coast, and the village had perhaps twenty households, with the small cliff-folk-style threshold-stones at the small doors of the houses, and the small fishing-poles leaning at the small porches because the village had a small stream that ran past it and the villagers fished the small stream in the manner of the cliff-folk who had been displaced from the coast in some past trouble. Kaela came into the village in the small ordinary way of a traveler arriving at a small cliff-folk village. The villagers received her in the small ordinary way of cliff-folk receiving a stranger who appeared to be of their kind. The villagers offered her a small meal at the threshold-stone of the village’s senior woman’s house, in the small old way of the cliff-folk’s hospitality, and the senior woman, who was perhaps seventy winters of age, looked at Kaela across the small evening meal with the small careful look of a senior woman trying to place the stranger by the small marks she carried.
The senior woman said, at last, in the cliff-folk tongue, in the small careful slow speech of one who has been working a thing out across the meal, that the stranger was wearing a bracelet of four knots on her right wrist, in the small old style of the wind-women’s families of the southern coast villages, and the bracelet was very worn but the small marks of its weaving could still be seen, and the small marks of its weaving were the marks of the village of Hraevn-an-Ol, which had been on the southern coast above a cove. The senior woman said that she had once known a wind-woman of Hraevn-an-Ol, in her own youth, when wind-women of the cliff-folk’s southern coast had still come north to the threshold villages for the small old gatherings. The wind-woman she had known had been called by the small name Stenir, and Stenir had had a granddaughter whose name had been something with the small long final vowel of the southern coast, which the senior woman could not now remember.
Kaela said, in the cliff-folk tongue, in the small careful slow speech she had not used in nineteen winters but which had been returning to her across the small weeks of the walking, that the wind-woman the senior woman had known had been her own grandmother, and that the granddaughter the senior woman could not remember had been herself, and that her own name, in the cliff-folk tongue, was Kaela, with the small long final vowel, which Kaela said carefully, in the way the trader in the Cradle of Where Light Sleeps had said it twenty years before in a wind that had carried it only to her.
The senior woman of Threshold-of-the-South, the saga of Kaela’s later life would later report from Kaela’s own telling at her daughter’s house many decades on, sat for a long breath with this. The senior woman said, eventually, in the cliff-folk tongue, that the wind-woman Stenir had died perhaps six winters before, of the small slow age of her line, and that the senior woman herself had received the news of the death from a trader who had passed through the village on his way back from the southern coast, and that the senior woman had wondered, at the time of receiving the news, what had become of the granddaughter who had been taken north many years before by the men of iron and silver-skin, because the small careful cliff-folk news that had reached the threshold villages across the long years had said only that the granddaughter had been taken and had not, in any subsequent year, said anything else.
Kaela said, in the cliff-folk tongue, that the granddaughter had been at the longhouse at Aern-Vík for nineteen winters and had now, in the small careful way of a captive whose chief had stopped registering her, walked south to come home.
The senior woman said, in the cliff-folk tongue, that the granddaughter would be welcome at her hearth for as long as she wished to stay, and that the small road from Threshold-of-the-South to the cove above which her grandmother had lived was perhaps three weeks’ walk, in the small careful winter way, and that the road was a road the senior woman could draw for her on a small piece of birch-bark in the morning.
Kaela accepted the small hospitality. Kaela stayed at the senior woman’s house for three nights, in the small careful way of a traveler who has been long on the road and who needs the small recovery of a hearth. The senior woman drew her the small road on a small piece of birch-bark on the third evening, and Kaela folded the bark into the inner pocket of her bag beside the skald’s older instructions, and on the small fourth morning Kaela rose and broke the small hospitality and walked on south.
The remaining three weeks of the walking were the small steady walking of a woman who knew the road. The dreams continued each night, in the small steady unfolding of one phrase per night, and the phrases continued to lay themselves down in her in the place behind words. The phrases across the remaining three weeks were the phrases the beast had been holding for the last small portion of the unpacking, and the phrases were, the saga of her later life would later report from her own later understanding, the small phrases that prepared her for the meeting with her own country. The phrases were the small careful gift of the long-lived to one who was returning home after a long absence. The phrases said, in their various small concentrated ways, things that translated approximately as: the country has changed. The country has remembered you. The country will not be the country you left. The country will be the country it has become. You will be the woman you have become. The two will meet at the cove. The meeting will be the matter. The matter will be the rest of your life.
She received the phrases. She walked. She came, in the small thirteenth week of the small remaining walking from Threshold-of-the-South, to the small ridge above the cove where her grandmother’s village had been, in the small grey morning of the third week of the second Lathandus after her leaving from Aern-Vík.
The village was not there.
She had known this, in the small back-of-the-head way, since the third night of her walking, when the beast had said in the small dark wind of the storm sky that the country would be the country it had become. The village had been moved, the cliff-folk had decided, in the small careful way of the cliff-folk’s people-decisions, in the season after the chief of Aern-Vík had taken her, because the chief’s coming had taught the cliff-folk that the cove was a place that could be approached from the north, and the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had judged that the cove was no longer the small safe place it had been across the long generations. The cliff-folk had moved the village to a small inland location perhaps half a day east of the cove, where the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had decided the small approach from the sea would not threaten. The cliff-folk had told the moving to the small wandering traders who had passed through the threshold villages across the long years, and the small wandering traders had carried the news, and the news had eventually reached the senior woman of Threshold-of-the-South, who had drawn for Kaela on the small piece of birch-bark not the small road to the cove but the small road to the small new village half a day east.
Kaela stood at the small ridge above the cove in the small grey morning. She looked down at the cove. The cove was empty. The cove was the cove she had known. The cliffs were the cliffs. The sea below was the sea. The pale tall grass on the cliff-top was the pale tall grass, although the small thin scar in the cliff-top where the beast had struck nineteen winters before was now visible, in the small slightly different color of grass that grew in such places, in the small long thin line that ran from the cliff-edge inland for perhaps fifty paces. She looked at the small thin scar. She did not weep. She had thought, in the small private way of the long walking, that she might weep at the moment of arriving at the cove, in the small dry weeping of the cliff-folk her grandmother had taught her was the appropriate weeping for moments of great matter received. She did not weep. The small back-of-the-head click told her that the weeping was not, in the small careful reckoning of the moment, the right response. The right response was the small steady looking. The looking was the looking. The looking was the small careful confirmation that she had returned to the place she had been taken from. The looking was the small completion of the small piece of the inheritance that had been carrying her south for fifteen weeks.
She looked. She looked for a long time. She turned, eventually, and walked east, in the small careful direction the senior woman of Threshold-of-the-South had drawn for her on the small piece of birch-bark, toward the small new village half a day east where her mother, if her mother was still alive, would be.
The walking east was the small last small piece of the walking. The walking east took perhaps half a day, in the small careful way of a woman who was walking the last small distance and did not wish to arrive too suddenly. She walked. She paused at small intervals to drink water and to chew small pieces of dried meat. She walked. She came, in the small late afternoon, to a small new village on a small inland plateau, with the small new cliff-folk-style houses in the small new arrangement the cliff-folk’s grandmothers had laid out, and the small new threshold-stones at the small new doors, and the small new children playing the small new clattering games with shells on the small new threshold-stones in the same way the children had been playing them at the old village nineteen winters before, because the small game had not changed, in the small careful way the small games of the cliff-folk’s children did not change.
She stood at the small edge of the new village. She did not, immediately, walk in. The cliff-folk’s grandmothers had taught her that one approached a village one had not been to before, even one’s own village in its new location, in the small careful way of a stranger, with the small inclination of the head and the small waiting at the edge of the village until the village’s senior woman had been alerted and had come out to receive the stranger. Kaela waited. A small woman of perhaps her own mother’s age noticed her at the edge of the village and called, in the cliff-folk tongue, to one of the village’s older women, and the older woman came out, in the small careful way of a cliff-folk senior woman, and the older woman walked to where Kaela stood at the small edge of the village.
The older woman was Kaela’s mother.
The older woman had aged nineteen winters, in the small steady way of cliff-folk women, with the small grey threads in her braid and the small careful walking of her later years, but the older woman was the same woman who had stood at the threshold of the old house in the old village above the cove the evening the smoke had come up the cliff face, with the small straight back and the small careful eyes of the cliff-folk’s women’s line. The older woman walked to Kaela. The older woman stopped at perhaps two paces from where Kaela stood. The older woman looked at her. The older woman looked at her for a very long breath, in the small careful way of a cliff-folk woman looking at a thing she had not expected to see.
The older woman said, in the cliff-folk tongue, in the small careful slow speech the older woman had not used to her daughter in nineteen winters but which the daughter recognized in the small dry click at the back of her head, “Cloud-headed one. Are you mine?”
Kaela said, in the cliff-folk tongue, “Yes, mother. I am yours. I have come home.”
The older woman did not, in the small dry cliff-folk way, weep. The older woman did, instead, the small careful cliff-folk thing of stepping forward by one pace and taking her daughter’s hands in her own, and she held the hands for a long breath, in the small careful way the cliff-folk’s women held the hands of those who had been gone long, and she said, in the cliff-folk tongue, “Your grandmother is dead these six winters. I have been the senior woman of our line since. You are home now. The line is yours when I am gone. Come. We have a hearth. We have a small place for you. We have been waiting.”
Kaela said, in the cliff-folk tongue, “Mother. I have been carrying. I have been carrying a thing the beast gave me. The thing is large. The carrying is not finished. The carrying will be the rest of my life. Will you have me carrying?”
The older woman said, in the cliff-folk tongue, “I will have you carrying. The line will have you carrying. The line will carry with you. That is what the line is for.”
Kaela said, in the cliff-folk tongue, “Thank you, mother.”
The older woman led her into the small new village. The villagers received her in the small careful way of the cliff-folk receiving a daughter long gone. The senior woman’s house was a small new house at the small center of the small new village, with the small new threshold-stone of the line, and the small new hearth at the small center of the floor, and the small new sleeping-cot at the small western corner where Kaela’s grandmother’s sleeping-cot had been at the old village. Kaela came in. She set down her bag in the small western corner. She unfolded, from the inner pocket of the bag, the small folded sash of fourteen white shells. She laid the sash on the small new sleeping-cot. She stood for a long breath in the small chamber, in the small careful way of a person arriving at a place that was, somehow, simultaneously the same place she had left and a completely different place.
The skald, far north at Aern-Vík, would, the saga of Kaela’s later life would later report from a small set of cliff-folk traders’ messages that passed across the years between Aern-Vík and the southern coast, receive word of Kaela’s arrival at the new village some four months after Kaela’s leaving. The skald would write, in her small private bark in the small private script, the sentence, the girl has arrived. The carrying has come home. The line will have her. I will not see her again in this life. The work I have done with her was the small finest work of my career. She underlined the word finest.
The skald would die some seven winters after Kaela’s leaving, in the small careful way of the cliff-folk’s grandmothers’ phrase for the deaths of those who have done their work, the small slow death of a singer whose work is done and whose body has decided to set down the carrying. The skald would not see Kaela again in this life. The two of them had agreed, in their small private conversations across the long years, that they would not. The agreement had been the small careful agreement of two women who had become, in the small private way the cliff-folk’s grandmothers’ phrase called sisters-of-the-carrying, the small careful pair that had carried the matter of the cliffs across nineteen winters in the small careful way of two who had not been blood but had been bound by the matter to be sisters anyway. The skald had carried the brother. Kaela had carried the beast. The two carriers had walked together. The two carriers had agreed to part. The parting had been the small careful agreement that the work each had been given was the work each would complete in her own country. The skald had completed her work at Aern-Vík, with the song and the long observation and the small careful witness of her brother’s last fifteen years. Kaela had begun her work at the new village above the cove, with the small careful unpacking of the inheritance and the small slow teaching of the small cliff-folk girls of the line in the wind-women’s craft that would, across the small slow generations, carry the matter forward.
But all of this is for much later.
For the small grey afternoon of her arrival at the new village, Kaela stood in the small senior woman’s house with the small sash on the small sleeping-cot and her mother at the threshold-stone watching her, and the small back-of-the-head click told her that the matter of the walking was complete. The walking had been the small steady ordinary work of fifteen weeks. The walking had been the brave thing, in the small careful way her grandmother had once taught her was the small careful definition of brave thing, which had been the doing of a small steady ordinary work that was hard for many weeks without giving up.
She had not given up. She had walked. She had arrived.
The small fragile feverish joy of the moment, the saga of her later life would later report from Kaela’s own telling at her daughter’s house, was not a clean joy. The joy was a joy that knew it was owed to grief. The joy was owed to the beast, who had given her the work of carrying that had brought her south. The joy was owed to her grandmother, who had been dead these six winters and would not see her granddaughter’s return. The joy was owed to the skald, who had stayed at Aern-Vík to do her own work and had given up the small private hope of seeing Kaela again in this life. The joy was owed to the chief at the high seat at Aern-Vík, who would not, in his small inward way, notice for some weeks that Kaela was gone, and who would, when he eventually noticed, not have any small clear understanding of who had gone or why, because the chief had stopped registering Kaela in any meaningful way two years before. The joy was owed even to the chief, in the small careful way the joys of those who have escaped are owed to the small condition of the escape, which was the chief’s small inward chamber.
The joy was the joy of a freedom that knew the freedom was small and fragile and had been bought at the cost of many other people’s smaller and larger losses, and the joy was, in the small careful way of all such joys, the joy that would, in the long forward unfolding of her life, become the small steady warmth that would keep her going through the small steady work of the carrying. The joy would not be a small bright triumphant joy. The joy would be a small steady joy that knew its sources. The joy would be the small steady joy of a woman who had walked home and had been received by her own line and had laid down a small folded sash on a small new sleeping-cot and had been told, in her own tongue, that the line would carry with her.
She stood in the small chamber. She looked at her mother at the threshold-stone. She inclined her head, in the small old way of her line. Her mother inclined her head back. The small evening began.
That night, the dream came one final time, in the small steady way the dream had come every night across the small fifteen weeks of the walking. The dream was the same dream. The storm sky. The wind. The egg-stone that was both cracked and whole. The voice in the wind.
The phrase, in the small closest cliff-folk translation she could later make of it, was: the carrying is now the line’s. You are not alone. Rest.
She woke, in the small grey morning of her first day in her own line’s village, with the small back-of-the-head click. She lay in the small new sleeping-cot for a long breath, in the small careful way of a woman receiving the small final piece of the inheritance.
The dreams did not come again, in that form, after that night. The dreams of the storm sky and the wind and the egg-stone and the voice ceased on the small grey morning of her first day home. The beast had given her what the beast had been holding for her. The carrying had been unpacked.
The carrying was now the line’s.
She was not alone.
She rose. She walked out into the small new village. The small day began. The small fragile feverish joy held in her chest in the small steady warm way it would hold for the rest of her life, and the small steady warmth held the small careful grief beside it, and the two together held her as she walked the small new paths of the new village and began, in the small steady way of one who had been given the work, the small slow work of carrying the cliffs forward into whatever the cliffs would, in time, become.
She had come home. She would not, in the small steady reckoning of her later years, ever fully understand whether the cove had received her or whether she had received the cove, and the question would, in the small careful way of all such questions, not need an answer. The cove was the cove. She was Kaela of the Cliffs. The carrying had begun its second long phase.
She walked.
Segment 22: “The Bone Grows Heavy”
Now the saga must speak of the years in which the cost of the wielding began to be paid, and the saga will give the matter in the form the chief’s line preserved it, with the small careful entries of the years and the small steady documentation of the changes the chief was undergoing across them. The line’s records of these years are not the records of great hunts. The great hunts had become, by the eighth year of the wielding, less frequent, in the small ordinary way the great hunts of any chief’s career become less frequent as the chief ages and as the great enemies of the line have been mostly addressed. The line’s records of these years are the small daily records of the longhouse at Aern-Vík, with the small entries the line’s scribes set down for the small ordinary doings of the chief at the high seat and the small comings and goings of the line’s men and the small accumulating signs that the chief was beginning to be a man other than the man the line had once known.
The saga will give the matter in three small parts, in the form the line’s records suggest the matter unfolded. The first part is the part of the bruises. The second is the part of the eyes. The third is the part of the men’s murmuring. The chief, in each part, did the same small thing, which was the refusing. The refusing was the matter of the segment, in the chief’s own carrying, and the saga will give the refusing in the small careful way the line’s records have preserved it, although the saga must say at the outset that the refusing was the small visible behavior the chief enacted, and the actual interior of the chief’s refusing was a thing the line’s records cannot describe, because the line’s records are external documents and the interior was the chief’s. The saga will give what the records give. The reader, in the small careful way Brother Eskil’s segment foretold, will hold the giving.
The bruises were the first sign.
The bruises began in the eighth year of the wielding, in the small early spring of the eighth Lathandus after the spring crossing back from the cliff-coast hunt. The chief was, by this reckoning, perhaps fifty-eight or fifty-nine winters of age, and the chief had been at the longhouse at Aern-Vík for nearly two years since the river-giants hunt, with the small intervening matters of two minor skirmishes and the small annual countermeasures and the small reception of the eastern delegation that had been the feast at which the cliff-folk girl Kaela had departed. The skald Sigvör Ash-Daughter, who is the saga’s most careful witness for the period and whose bark survives in the longest fragments at the library at the Watching-Stones, has set down in her small private script the first observation of the bruises in the small careful way she set down all such observations.
The bark reads, in the saga’s translation from the script:
In the second week of Lathandus, the bath-women of the hall reported to me, in the small private way the bath-women have begun to report things to me, that the chief at his small monthly bath had on his left forearm a bruise the bath-women had not seen the previous month. The bruise was the size of a man’s spread hand and was the color of old wine. The bath-women had asked the chief, in the small careful way of the line’s bath-women, how the bruise had come to be there. The chief had said, in the small carrying hall-voice he uses for all answers now, that the bruise was nothing. The chief had said that the bruise was from a small fall against a doorframe at the smithy three nights earlier, when the chief had been visiting Halvar No-Voice in the small evening way the chief still visits the smithy. The bath-women had received the answer in the small careful way of the bath-women and had not pressed. The bath-women told me. I have asked Halvar No-Voice, in the small private way I ask him, whether the chief fell against a doorframe at the smithy three nights ago. Halvar No-Voice has written me a small note. The note says no.
I do not know where the bruise came from. The bruise is the color of old wine. The bruise is the size of a man’s spread hand. The bruise is on the left forearm of a man who carries the Sky’s Hammer in his right hand and has done so for eight years. I have my suspicions.
The skald had her suspicions. The skald did not, in the small careful way of her writing, set them down in the bark at the moment of the first bruise. The skald set down the small observation and held the suspicions in the small back-of-the-head place where her observations gathered, in the small careful way of her craft, until the gathering had reached a size at which the suspicions could be set down with the small careful weight of a pattern rather than the small careful weight of a guess.
The bruise on the left forearm faded across the small subsequent two weeks, in the small ordinary way bruises fade, although the skald noted in her bark that the fading was somewhat slower than the fading of an ordinary bruise on a man of fifty-eight winters, and the bruise left, after the fading, a small faint discoloration on the forearm that did not, in the small careful way of bruise-residues, ever fully disappear.
The second bruise appeared in the fourth week of Lathandus.
The second bruise was on the chief’s right shin, just above the ankle, and was the size of a small loaf of bread, and was the same color of old wine as the first. The bath-women, in the small careful way of the bath-women, reported the second bruise to the skald at the next month’s bath. The chief, asked about the second bruise, said that it was from a small striking against the small wooden bench at the high seat in the longhouse, where the chief sometimes set the Sky’s Hammer at his feet in the small careful way of a man storing a heavy weapon at hand, and the chief had, in the chief’s account, struck his shin against the bench while reaching down for the club one evening. The skald did not ask Halvar No-Voice about the second bruise. The skald knew that no smith’s account would help with the second bruise, because the second bruise was on the chief’s leg and could not be tested against any smithy story. The skald wrote in her bark:
The chief has told me, through the bath-women, that the second bruise was from striking the small wooden bench at the high seat. I have observed the small wooden bench. The small wooden bench has no sharp edges that would produce a bruise of that shape. The bruise is not the bruise of a small striking against a bench. The bruise is the bruise of a small striking against something else. I do not yet know what.
The third bruise appeared in the second week of Tyrus, in the small early summer of the year. The third bruise was on the chief’s left side, just below the ribs, and was the size of two spread hands together, and was the color of old wine deepened with the small dark of late-summer plums. The bath-women, in the small careful way of the bath-women, reported the third bruise. The chief, asked, said that the third bruise was from a fall against a stone in the small bath-house itself, where the chief had slipped on the small wet floor and had struck his side against the small stone at the corner of the bath. The bath-women had been in the bath-house when the chief had bathed, in the small ordinary way of the bath-women’s work, and the bath-women had not seen the chief slip or strike his side. The bath-women had, in the small careful way, agreed that they had perhaps been turned away at the moment of the slipping. The bath-women had agreed this, the skald wrote in her bark, in the small careful way the bath-women had agreed it when the chief had asked them whether they had been turned away. The bath-women had not, in their own small private accounting, been turned away.
The skald wrote in her bark, in the small private script:
The third bruise is the largest of the three. The third bruise is at the place on the body where a man might be struck by a weapon held in his own hand. If a man carrying a heavy club in his right hand were to be struck in his sleep by some pull or twitch of the club against his own body, the bruise would be on the left side just below the ribs, in the size and shape of the third bruise. I am writing this in the small private way. I do not, at this point, believe the chief is striking himself in his sleep with the Sky’s Hammer in any conscious way. I do, however, suspect that the Sky’s Hammer is, in some way the chief is not consciously controlling, drawing the chief’s hand in his sleep, and that the drawing has produced strikings the chief has no conscious memory of. The chief sleeps with his right hand on the leather-wrapped grip of the club. The chief has slept this way since the night of the setting of the final scale. The chief’s right arm, in sleep, would be in a position from which a small strike against the chief’s left side would be possible. The bruise is consistent with this. The chief’s account of the bath-house slipping is not consistent with this. I am writing this in the small private way. I do not have proof. I have a pattern. The pattern has reached the size at which I am willing to set it down.
The bruises continued across the eighth year and into the ninth and the tenth. The bruises accumulated in the small steady way of bruises that are caused by a thing the body is not aware of being struck by. The bath-women reported the bruises at every monthly bath. The chief gave a small account for each bruise, in the small carrying hall-voice, and the small account was usually plausible in the small surface way and was not plausible when examined closely. The skald examined each closely. The skald wrote in her bark across the three years many entries about the bruises. The entries became, by the end of the tenth year of the wielding, the most extensive observational record the skald had kept of any matter in her career.
The bruises did not appear, the skald noted across the years, on the right arm or the right shoulder or the right side. The bruises appeared on the left forearm, the left shin, the left side, the left thigh, the left upper arm, the left jaw once, and on the right shin and right thigh in smaller patterns. The bruises were distributed in the way bruises would be distributed on a man being struck in his sleep by something held in his own right hand, with the small concentration on the left side that the geometry of such striking would produce. The skald set down the geometry carefully, in the small private way, in a small marginal sketch she made on one fragment of bark that has survived, and the sketch shows the small distribution of the bruises across the chief’s body in the small careful way a smith might sketch the small distribution of strikings on a piece of metal that had been worked from a particular angle. The sketch is, my predecessor at the library noted in his marginal commentary, the only sketch in the skald’s private bark, and the sketch is the small piece of evidence that the skald had reached, by the tenth year, the small careful conclusion that the chief was being struck by the club in his sleep.
The chief, the saga must say, did not register the bruises in his own conscious accounting. The chief gave the bruises the small surface accounts at the bath-women’s questioning, and the chief did not, beyond the small accounts, examine the bruises in his own small private way. The chief had stopped, at some point in the years since the river-giants hunt, looking at his own body in the small careful way men of the line had been raised to look at their bodies. The chief no longer washed his own face in the morning, in the small ordinary way of the line’s men, because the second wife who had once done such things for him had departed the hall in the third year of the wielding and the chief had not, since the second wife’s departure, found any small substitute for the small daily work she had done. The chief simply did not look. The chief rose in the morning from his fur beside the high seat, with the Sky’s Hammer beside him and his right hand on the leather-wrapped grip, and the chief took the small dry bread the cooking-women set out at the high seat each morning, and the chief began the small daily work of being at the high seat with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap. The chief did not, in the small careful way of his daily routine, attend to any small change in his body. The bruises, in the chief’s own conscious accounting, were not happening to him.
The saga will give this carefully. The chief was not, in the strict sense, lying when he gave the small surface accounts to the bath-women. The chief was, in the small careful way of the small inner chamber that had taken him since the cliff-top, simply not in any position to know what had caused the bruises. The chief had no memory of striking himself in his sleep. The chief had no memory of waking in the night to find a bruise newly forming. The chief had, perhaps, in some small private way the saga cannot reconstruct, the small steady experience of his body being a body that was bruising, and the chief had the small steady experience of giving the small surface accounts to those who asked, and the two experiences sat in the chief’s daily accounting in the small parallel way two unconnected things sit in a man’s daily accounting, without the man being aware that they should be connected. The bruises were, in the chief’s conscious accounting, small accidents of his ordinary life. The chief’s ordinary life was, in the chief’s conscious accounting, the small daily work of being at the high seat with the Sky’s Hammer. The two accountings did not, in the chief’s small inner chamber, intersect.
The pale eyes were the second sign.
The chief’s eyes had been pale across his entire life, in the small careful way of the chief’s line, with the small flint-color that the line’s records called the line-eyes. The chief’s eyes had been the small bright flint at the morning of the cliff-coast hunt, and had been the small bright flint at the cresting of the ridge above the cliffs, and had been the small bright flint at the cutting of the tail, and had been the small bright flint at the moment of the cry at the cliff-top. The eyes had remained the small bright flint across the first years of the wielding, in the small careful way the saga has been giving them, although the eyes had begun, in the small careful way the skald noted in her bark, to take on a small wet sheen at moments of the chief’s exultation, the small wet sheen the saga has set down at the troll-hunt’s second singing.
The change in the eyes began in the ninth year of the wielding.
The change was small. The change was the small slow clouding the line’s records would later, in the small medical reckoning of the line’s healers, give a name to in the small dry medical phrase the line used for the small clouding of the eyes of old men, but the chief in the ninth year was not, in the strict sense, an old man. The chief was perhaps fifty-nine or sixty winters, which was old in the line’s reckoning but not yet the old of the small medical phrase. The clouding began as the small faint pale film that crossed the chief’s left eye in the small evening hours of the ninth year, when the chief sat at the high seat with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap and the longhouse was at its evening lighting. The skald, sitting at her usual bench at the southern wall, noted the film in her bark. The bark reads:
The chief’s left eye in the small evening hours has begun to show a small faint pale film at the outer edge of the pupil. The film is not present in the small morning hours. The film appears, by my observation across three weeks of evenings, at perhaps the second hour after the evening meal and remains until the chief goes to his fur. The film is not visible in the small bright light of the small fire’s brightest hour. The film is visible in the small low light of the longfire’s evening hour. I am writing this in the small private way. I have not asked the chief about the film. I do not believe the chief is aware of the film.
The film grew. Across the small subsequent weeks of the ninth year, the film extended from the outer edge of the chief’s left eye across the small remainder of the pupil’s outer ring, in the small slow way the small medical phrase would later describe. By the end of the ninth year, the chief’s left eye had, at the evening hours, a small ring of the pale film around the entire outer edge of the pupil, and the inner pupil itself was the small flint-color it had always been, and the eye gave the small overall appearance of a flint-pupil surrounded by a small pale halo. The skald wrote:
The left eye has the halo at the evening hours of every evening now. The chief does not, in his own accounting, register the halo. I have observed the chief looking at himself in the small bronze mirror that hangs at the high seat, in the small ordinary way the chief checks his beard, and the chief has not, at any of the small mirror-checks I have observed, attended to the halo. The chief’s mirror-checks are the small ordinary checks of a man checking his beard. The chief does not look at his own eyes.
The film began to appear in the right eye in the small early months of the tenth year. The film began in the right eye in the same small slow way the film had begun in the left, with the small faint pale ring at the outer edge of the pupil in the evening hours. The film in the right eye grew at the same small slow pace. By the end of the tenth year of the wielding, the chief had a small pale ring around the pupil of each eye at the evening hours, and the rings had begun to extend, in the small slow way, into the daytime hours, with the small faint version of the rings visible at the small low light of the chief’s small chamber at the morning hours, although not yet visible at the small bright light of the noon-hour outdoors.
The chief, the saga must say, did not register the clouding in his own conscious accounting. The chief’s mirror-checks remained the small ordinary checks of a man checking his beard. The chief did not, in the small careful way of his daily routine, attend to his eyes. The chief saw, in the small ordinary way, what he had always seen. The chief did not register that what he saw was, in the small careful way of the small medical phrase, being seen through a small pale film at the outer ring of each eye, which film would, in the small steady way of such clouding, slowly come to cover the small inner pupil also, and the chief would, in the small slow way the small medical phrase would have predicted, lose the small clear seeing of his earlier years and replace it with the small foggy seeing of the small late period.
The skald noted, in her bark, that the chief had begun, in the small middle months of the tenth year, to misjudge small distances at the high seat. The chief reached for his cup in the small morning hours and missed by a small handsbreadth, in the small careful way a man whose eyes are clouding misses, and the chief took the cup at the second reach. The chief reached for the small bread the cooking-women set out at the high seat and missed in the same small way. The chief did not, the skald noted, register the misses. The chief took the cup or the bread at the second reach in the small unthinking way of a man who had not noticed the first miss. The chief simply did not see that he was missing.
The skald wrote:
The chief is misjudging distances now. The chief does not know he is misjudging. The chief takes the cup at the second reach in the small unthinking way and continues with the small morning routine. The chief’s small inner accounting has, perhaps, adjusted itself to the small new pattern of the second reaches without noting the adjustment. The chief is, in the small careful way, becoming a man whose body is performing the small daily routines through a small new pattern of behaviors that the chief’s conscious accounting has not registered.
The third sign was the men’s murmuring.
The men of the line had begun to murmur, in the small careful way the saga reported at the troll-hunt, since the morning at the Long Throat seven years before. The murmuring had been, in the small careful way, the small unease the men had developed at having a chief whose great weapon had made the men’s own roles in the line’s matters smaller. The murmuring had grown across the small subsequent years, in the small steady way murmurings grow when the conditions producing them do not change. The murmuring had not, in any of the small subsequent years, become a thing the men spoke to the chief about. The murmuring had remained, in the small careful way of the line’s men, the small private exchanges among themselves at the small evening fires when the chief had retired to the high seat, and at the small bath-house gatherings when the chief was not present, and at the small smithy visits when the chief was not at the smithy.
The murmuring in the eighth, ninth, and tenth years of the wielding had taken on, in the small careful way, a new content. The new content was about the bruises and the eyes. The men of the line had observed the bruises also, at the small public moments when the chief’s clothing had not fully covered them, and the men of the line had observed the small pale rings in the chief’s eyes at the small evening hours when the longfire’s light had revealed them. The men, in the small careful way of the men, had begun to draw the small connections between the bruises and the eyes and the small almost-smile the chief wore and the small inward way the chief sat at the high seat. The men had drawn the connections in the small private way, in the small evening exchanges when the chief was not present, and the men had reached, in the small careful way the men reached such things, the small private consensus that the chief was, in some manner none of them could name, beginning to come apart.
The small private consensus had not, in the small careful way of the line’s men, been spoken to the chief. The men had been raised in the small careful way of the line, in which the chief was the chief and the line’s men did not speak to the chief about the chief’s small private matters unless the chief asked. The chief had not asked. The chief had not, in the small inward way of the chamber, registered that there was a small private consensus among his men. The chief had continued the small daily work of being at the high seat, and the chief had continued the small monthly bathing and the small mirror-checks and the small daily routines, and the chief had not, in the small careful way, noted that the men around him had stopped looking at him in the small open way of the line’s men’s looking and had begun looking at him in the small careful way men look at a chief about whom they have reached a small private consensus.
The skald wrote, in the eleventh year:
The men have stopped looking at the chief openly. The men’s eyes pass to the chief and away in the small careful way of men who have been talking among themselves. The chief does not register the small change in the looking. Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand has, by my observation, been the small primary keeper of the men’s consensus. Ulf has been having the small evening exchanges with the other men of the line for some years now, and Ulf has been, in the small careful way of a second-in-command, the small careful holder of the consensus among the men. Ulf has not spoken to the chief about it. Ulf has, in the small private exchanges Ulf has had with me at the small bath-house when the chief is not present, indicated that Ulf does not, at this point, see any small useful way to speak to the chief. Ulf has said, in the small dry way Ulf speaks, that the chief is what the chief is, and that the line will, in the small ordinary way, follow the chief until the chief is no longer able to lead, and at that point the line will, in the small ordinary way, do what is needed. Ulf has not said what the doing will be. Ulf has, I suspect, not yet decided.
The chief is alone among his men. The chief has been alone for some years. The chief does not register the alone.
This was the state of the matter in the small middle years of the wielding. The bruises were appearing on the chief’s body and the chief was giving the small surface accounts. The pale film was extending across the chief’s eyes and the chief was misjudging the small distances at his daily reaches. The men were murmuring among themselves in the small private consensus and the chief was alone among them. The chief was, in the small careful way of the small inner chamber, refusing all of this.
The refusing was the matter of the segment, and the saga has been arriving at it across the three small parts. The refusing was not a refusing the chief made in the small conscious way of a man who has examined a thing and decided to refuse it. The refusing was a refusing the chief made in the small unconscious way of a man whose small inner chamber had become, across the years of the bone’s whispering, a chamber that did not admit of any small information that contradicted the chamber’s small ongoing certainty. The chamber’s certainty was the certainty that the chief had been chosen by the gods, that the storm at sea had been the blessing, that the cliff-coast hunt had been the great work, that the forging had been the great making, that the troll-hunt had been the first great wielding, that the river-giants had been the second, that the Sky’s Hammer was the gift of the gods to the chief’s line, and that the chief was the carrier of the gift across the chief’s remaining years. The chamber’s certainty did not admit of any small information that the bruises were caused by the club striking the chief in his sleep, because such information would have meant the gift was, in some small way, harming the carrier. The chamber’s certainty did not admit of any small information that the eyes were clouding because of some small consequence of the wielding, because such information would have meant the gift was, in some small way, taking the carrier’s sight. The chamber’s certainty did not admit of any small information that the men were murmuring because of the chamber’s effect on the chief, because such information would have meant the gift was, in some small way, costing the line its small ordinary confidence in its chief.
The chamber’s certainty was, in the small careful way, the chief’s whole inner life by the tenth and eleventh years of the wielding. The chamber’s certainty had no door. The information could not get in.
The saga will give one small particular moment, in the small careful way the saga has been giving such moments, in which the refusing is visible in the small surface way the line’s records have preserved.
The moment was in the third week of Helmus in the eleventh year of the wielding. The chief was at the high seat in the small evening hours, with the Sky’s Hammer across his lap. The longhouse was in its small ordinary evening, with the small evening fire burning and the small ordinary men at their small ordinary benches and the small ordinary cooking-women clearing the boards. Ulf son of Gisli Bone-Hand, who was now perhaps fifty winters and who had been at the chief’s right hand for the entire wielding, approached the high seat in the small careful way of a second-in-command approaching his chief. Ulf carried, in his left hand, a small cup of warm broth the cooking-women had prepared for the chief, in the small daily way the cooking-women prepared a small evening broth.
Ulf set the small cup down on the small wooden tray at the chief’s left. Ulf inclined his head, in the small respectful way of a second-in-command. Ulf did not, in the small ordinary way, leave the high seat immediately.
Ulf said, in the northern tongue, in a voice that was not quite the small ordinary voice and was not quite the small private voice, but was a small voice in between, “Chief. May I speak.”
The chief looked up at Ulf. The chief’s pale eyes, the saga reports from the skald’s bark, had the small evening rings of the small pale film. The chief’s right thumb at the fourth iron ring in his beard was, in the small ordinary way of those years, slowly turning. The chief said, in the carrying hall-voice that had become his only voice, “Speak, Ulf.”
Ulf said, in the same small in-between voice, “Chief. The men have asked me to speak with you.”
The chief said, “The men.”
Ulf said, “The men of the line, chief. The men have observed certain things in the recent months and the men have, in the small careful way, asked me to bring the observations to you.”
The chief said, “What things, Ulf.”
Ulf said, “The bruises, chief. The eyes.”
There was, the saga reports from the skald’s bark, a small silence at the high seat. The skald at the southern bench was watching in the small careful way. The chief at the high seat was looking at Ulf. The chief’s pale eyes did not, the skald noted, do any small thing the skald could read. The chief’s pale eyes simply looked at Ulf, in the small inward way of the chamber.
The chief said, after the small silence, in the carrying hall-voice, “The men have observed the bruises and the eyes.”
Ulf said, “Yes, chief.”
The chief said, “And the men have asked you to speak with me about them.”
Ulf said, “Yes, chief.”
The chief said, “Ulf.”
Ulf said, “Chief.”
The chief said, in the carrying hall-voice that had become not quite the carrying hall-voice but had taken on, in the small careful way, a small new edge that the skald in her bark would later describe as the edge of a chamber whose door was being pushed against from outside, “Ulf. There are no bruises. There are no eyes. There is the matter of the line. The matter of the line is the matter at hand. The men have, perhaps, in the small idle hours of the recent months, found themselves with little to do, and have, in the small idle way, occupied themselves with the small observations of their chief. The chief has not asked for the small observations. The chief does not need the small observations. The chief is well. The Sky’s Hammer is well. The line is well. The men should attend to their own work and not to the small idle matters of their chief’s body. Do you understand me, Ulf.”
Ulf said, in the small in-between voice, “I understand you, chief.”
The chief said, “Tell the men what I have said.”
Ulf said, “I will, chief.”
The chief said, “And, Ulf.”
Ulf said, “Chief.”
The chief said, in the small carrying hall-voice with the small new edge, “Do not bring this matter to me again.”
Ulf said, “I will not, chief.”
Ulf inclined his head in the small respectful way. Ulf turned. Ulf walked back across the floor of the longhouse to his own bench at the western wall, in the small careful walking of a second-in-command who had been told what the chief had told him. Ulf sat down at his bench. Ulf did not, the skald reports from her bark, look back at the high seat. Ulf had been told. Ulf would, in the small careful way of his role, take what he had been told back to the men, and the men would, in the small careful way, hear what they had been told, and the small private consensus among the men would, in the small careful way, deepen.
The chief, the saga reports from the skald’s bark, sat at the high seat after Ulf had returned to his bench, with the small cup of warm broth at his left and the Sky’s Hammer across his lap and the small pale rings around his pupils in the small evening lighting and the small slowly-turning fourth iron ring in his beard. The chief, the skald noted, did not drink the broth. The chief left the broth at his left untouched, in the small careful way the chief had been leaving small evening broths untouched for some years now, although the broth had been brought to him every evening by the cooking-women in the small daily routine.
The chief sat. The longfire burned. The hall continued in its small ordinary evening, with the small men at their benches and the small cooking-women clearing and the small dogs of the line taking their usual rounds for the small fallen bits. The chief sat. The chief turned the fourth iron ring slowly.
The skald wrote in her bark that night, in the small private script:
He has refused.
I had thought, in the small private way of my attendance on him, that the refusing would take some other form. I had thought he might, in the small careful way of a chief addressed by his second-in-command, take the small information into the chamber and consider it in the small private way and emerge, perhaps, with the small surface acknowledgment that some matter required attention. I had thought he might, at least, attend to the bruises in a small private way after the conversation. I had thought he might, at the very least, look at his own eyes in the small bronze mirror at the high seat and register the small pale rings.
He did none of these. He sat. He turned the ring. He left the broth untouched. The matter the men had brought to him through Ulf has been refused at the small surface level. The matter will not be brought to him again. Ulf will see to that. The men will accept that they have brought it and that the chief has refused it, and the men will, in the small careful way, continue their small private consensus, but the men will not bring it to him again.
The chamber has been pushed against. The chamber has held. The chamber has, in fact, taken on a small new edge that I have not seen before. The edge is, I think, the edge of a chamber whose certainty has been challenged from outside. The chamber’s certainty is brittle. The chamber’s certainty is not the small confident certainty of a man at peace with his power. The chamber’s certainty is the small defiant certainty of a man who has begun to feel, in some small private way he cannot acknowledge, that the floor of his certainty is cracking. The floor is cracking. The chief is defying the cracking by refusing to acknowledge it.
This is the matter now. The chief will refuse for the rest of his life. The chief will not, in my reading, ever again be in a position to take in small contrary information. The chamber will hold against everything. The chamber will hold until the chamber is broken open by some force the chamber cannot refuse, and the small force, when it comes, will not be a force from outside. The small force will be the small final consequence of the bone’s long work on the chief, and the bone will, in its own time, complete the work, and the chamber will, at the moment of the completion, finally crack.
I do not know when. I do not know how. I have been watching for fifteen years and I have not been able to determine when the matter will reach the small completion.
I will continue watching. I will continue writing. I will not, in the small careful way, ever again expect the chief to acknowledge what is happening to him. The expecting was the small last small piece of my professional and sister’s hope. I am setting it down now. I have set it down before, in the small careful way, at the bath-women’s first reports of the bruises and at the first appearance of the small pale rings. I am setting it down again now, in the small final way. I will not pick it up again.
She underlined the word again.
The brittle defiance of the chief in the small middle years of the wielding, the saga must say in closing this segment, was the small visible behavior of a man whose floor had begun to crack and who had decided that the crack would not be acknowledged because the acknowledgment would, in his small inner accounting, be the small first step of the surrender. The chief had been raised by his father Brand Iron-Hand to consider acknowledgment of weakness as the small first step of surrender, and the chief had taken the teaching into the small chamber of his deciding, and the chamber had used the teaching in the small careful way the chamber used everything, in the service of the small ongoing certainty. The chief was not, in the strict sense, lying to himself about the bruises and the eyes. The chief was, in the small careful way of the chamber, simply not in any position to admit them. The admitting would have required the chamber to allow a small piece of contrary information through its small inner walls, and the chamber’s inner walls had been, since the bone’s first hum at the cliff-top, walls that did not admit contrary information. The walls were the small permanent feature of the chamber. The walls held.
The chief refused the bruises. The chief refused the eyes. The chief refused the men’s murmuring when Ulf brought it to him. The chief, in the small careful way of the small brittle defiance, was the chief.
The line’s records, in the small middle years of the wielding, are records of a hall in which the chief is the chief and the small daily routine is the small daily routine and the small great matters of the line are the small great matters. The line’s records do not, in their small ordinary way, report the bruises or the eyes or the murmuring. The line’s records report what a line of singers report, which is the small surface activity of the chief and the line. The records that report the bruises and the eyes and the murmuring are the small private records of the skald Sigvör Ash-Daughter, in the bark she kept in her small leather case inside her sleeping-fur, in the small private script she had developed for her own use. The bark survives, in the fragments my predecessor pieced together, at the library at the Watching-Stones. The bark is the small careful witness of the years.
The bark is also, in the small careful way the saga must give in closing this segment, the only surviving witness of the chief’s small interior in these years. The chief did not write. The chief did not, in the small careful way of his line, keep any small private record. The chief had Snæ Two-Tongues to sing his deeds, and Snæ sang them, in the small public form the line preferred, and the line preserved the songs, and the songs are the small line-record of the chief’s wielding. But the chief’s interior across the middle years, the small chamber of his deciding and its small steady refusing, is preserved only in the skald’s small private bark. The bark is what we have. The bark is the bark.
The chief, the saga reports from the bark, slept that night on the third week of Helmus in the eleventh year of the wielding with his right hand on the leather-wrapped grip of the Sky’s Hammer, in the small ordinary way he had slept for ten years. The chief’s small almost-smile was on his face. The chief, in his own small inner accounting, was content. The chief had refused the matter the men had tried to bring him through Ulf, and the refusing had, in the small careful way of the chamber, been the small confirmation of the chamber’s continuing strength.
In the morning, the cooking-women would find the small cup of warm broth still untouched at the high seat. The cooking-women would, in the small ordinary way, take the cup away. The cooking-women would, in the small private way they had developed across the years, mention the untouched cup to the bath-women, and the bath-women would mention it to the skald, and the skald would, in her small bark, set down the small detail with the other small details of the day, and the small day would continue.
The chief would continue. The bone would continue. The chamber would continue. The brittle defiance would continue. The floor of the chamber would, in the small careful way, continue to crack.
The crack would not, for some years yet, become the small final crack. The crack would, in the small slow way of all such cracks, take its time.
The saga goes on.
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