The Islands of the Blessed - Nancy

The stone. Jack felt it with his fingers. It wasn’t merely a chunk of rock; it was richly carved with symbols. He recognized a mirror and a comb—odd things to carve, he thought. There was also—the light was growing faint and he had to bend down to see it—a strange beast with a long mouth and legs curled beneath it. And another beast that reminded him of the carnyx the Bard had described. At the far end was an ornately decorated crescent moon intersected by a broken arrow.

Jack turned even colder than the chill that surrounded him. He’d seen that symbol before on Brother Aiden’s chest. Father Severus had said the crescent stood for the Man in the Moon and the broken arrow for the Forest Lord. The two together meant Brother Aiden, then only a lost child in a forest, had been chosen for human sacrifice.

Jack tried to get up, but the haar was pressing in on all sides. He struggled to breathe. Cold tendrils of fog reached into his mouth and filled his throat. He lay facedown on the stone. The rough granite pushed up against his chest and a weight pressed down on his back.

A small creature crept over the stone. Jack could just make it out from the corner of his eye. It was the honeybee. It was no longer than a fingernail, yet with a bee’s yearning for sunlight it strove to escape the deadening cold. It moved slowly, laboriously, and when it reached Jack’s face, he smelled honey. It climbed upward until he couldn’t see it anymore. It reached his temple and stabbed down.

Pain roared through his senses. He sprang up, all sleepiness gone, and saw that the mist directly above him had opened up. The sky was full of stars. Jack sucked in air until he thought his lungs would burst. He heard heavy footsteps pounding up the valley. In the next instant Schlaup grabbed him and sped away with the boy tucked under his arm.

Jack saw only a blur of houses and streets before they were back at the wharves. Schlaup jumped aboard, making the ship tilt so violently that the sailors had to grab boxes to keep them from sliding off the deck. “I got him! I got him!” the giant cried, putting Jack down.

Skakki shouted to cast off, and the Northmen pushed away with their oars. The Bard crouched beside Jack, feeling his head. “Thank Freya he found you before the tide turned,” the old man said. “We couldn’t possibly hide Schlaup for another day. Too many people kept looking at the ship and asking what we were carrying.”

Jack found that his throat was sore, as though he’d been shouting for a long time. “How did you hide him?”

“We threw a tarp over him,” said Thorgil. “Skakki told everyone he was a heap of grain bags.”

“I’m cargo,” Schlaup said, pointing at his chest.

“You’re much more than that,” said the Bard. “What possessed you, Jack, to go off without telling anyone?”

Jack saw that the first streaks of dawn were appearing in the eastern sky. He realized he’d been gone most of the previous day and all of the night. “I went for a walk…. I’m not sure what happened next.”

The Bard felt his head again. “That’s better. Warmth is coming back. Did you fall asleep in a field, or what?”

Jack described the stone and the sudden appearance of haar. The sea and sky had by now lightened to that predawn color that makes it impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. It was like sailing through dark blue air. “I thought only an hour had passed,” he said.

“When you didn’t appear, we began to worry,” the Bard said. “We searched everywhere, and at midnight I gave Schlaup a whiff of your old boots. He came back straightaway, saying he’d lost the scent near Din Eidyn. I sent him out again. It was an unusually clear night with no fog at all. Are you sure about the haar?”

“Very sure.” Jack felt something small lodged in the neck of his tunic and felt with his fingers. He drew out a tiny, furry body. “The honeybee,” he remembered. “It stung me and I woke up.”

The Bard cupped the insect between his hands and whispered to it in the Blessed Speech. “Now fly you safely home with the gods’ protection,” he said aloud. He opened his hands and the bee flew away, or perhaps it was only blown away by the wind. Jack wasn’t sure. It was such a little creature. 

Chapter Twenty-four

BJORN SKULL-SPLITTER

“The year grows late,” Skakki said, watching the distant shore that afternoon. The air was warm and the sky cloudless. Most people would have said the weather was ideal, but the Northmen were too experienced to be taken in by it. Ran, the goddess of the sea, and her nine daughters lay in wait for the careless. Her net was ever ready to take advantage of sudden storms. “There aren’t many weeks of good sailing left.”

“All I ask for is seven days’ grace,” the Bard said. “If we return in that time, you can take us to the nearest port. We’ll make our own way south. If we don’t return, you and Egil must turn east and leave us to our fate.”

“I’d never do that,” said the young sea captain.

“But he will,” the Bard said privately to Jack later. “He’s no fool. People are lost at sea all the time, and the survivors have to abandon them.”

There’s a thought to cheer oneself with on a dangerous journey, thought Jack. He’d inspected the little coracle they would take to Notland. As small as the ship felt on a vast, gray ocean, the coracle would be like a flyspeck compared to it. They might as well be floating in a bucket.

To save time, Skakki no longer followed the coast, for it was riven by a huge gulf. Instead, they went northwest out of sight of land, navigating by the star the Northmen called the Nail. By day Rune kept their direction with his memory of the sun’s position at that time of year. The Bard helped by calling on the wind. Thus, they were blown along steadily for two days with the great sail always filled and the waves neither too high nor too low.

“I’ve been thinking about what happened in Edwin’s Town,” the Bard said as he and Jack rested in Schlaup’s shade. “To someone like Severus the world is idiotically simple. There’s only one way to do things, and it’s always his. My stars! You have no idea how much he and the other Christians squabble about when to celebrate Easter. The ninnies don’t realize Easter is one of the old goddesses, and she couldn’t care a fig about when anyone celebrates her.”

Seafarer returned from one of his forays and settled on the deck next to the old man. The bird reported that he’d seen no islands or ships ahead. Jack gave him a dried herring as a reward.

“Gods, if they’re neglected, tend to fall asleep, but they never really go away,” the Bard continued. “It is the Christians themselves who keep Easter’s memory green and who, unwittingly, disturb her slumbers. A long time ago the Forest Lord and the Man in the Moon ruled these lands. Then people arrived with new deities: Odin, Thor, Freya, Jupiter, Mars, Jesus. Each new layer covered the old, but the old is still there. When you lay on that sacrificial stone, lad, something woke up. I’d be willing to bet that if the bee hadn’t stung you, you’d be six feet under by now.”

“Why would something want to kill me?” Jack asked.

“Why does fire burn and water drown? It’s what happens when one falls into their power.”

“And the bee?”

“Ah! There’s the interesting part,” said the Bard. He stroked the head of the albatross, and the great bird purred deep in his throat. “That small creature sacrificed itself to save you. It was no more random than Pega happening to have a candle in the dungeons of Elfland, or Severus happening to be in the forest when Aiden needed rescuing. Think of the momentous events of the past three years. The Holy Isle was destroyed and the Northmen learned that easy plunder was to be found in monasteries. You’d think this would prove the end of Christianity, but it hasn’t.”

“Northmen have been raiding more monasteries?” Jack said. He hadn’t heard about it.

“Oh, yes. But at the same time, odd things have been occurring in the realms of the old gods. Elfland was laid bare to the light of truth, hobgoblins returned to Middle Earth, Unlife was driven from Din Guardi. It looks to me as though a profound shift has taken place in the life force. I’d guess that you have some purpose to fulfill and that is why you were saved. But don’t get a swelled head over it. A cabbage has a purpose when someone needs to make soup.”

The next day Seafarer returned with news of islands. The albatross was only interested in certain things and so they learned a great deal about fish. Much food, Seafarer exulted. Many birds. They fear me. Feels good.

Are there houses? Thorgil asked in Bird.

Don’t know, Seafarer said. But when they came to the first island, they did find houses of a sort. Domes of turf bulged on the rocks, and the folk within hissed in a strange language and refused to come out.

“I think they’re Picts,” said Skakki. “Olaf arrived at some sort of trading agreement with them, but he said it was more trouble than it was worth. Farther on is Horse Island, ruled by Bjorn Skull-Splitter. He’s one of my father’s best friends. It’s an excellent place to camp while we’re waiting for you to return from Notland.”

Of course he’s called Skull-Splitter, Jack thought moodily as he watched the greenish depths of the sea. No friend of Olaf’s could possibly be called Bjorn the Beloved. And he wondered what mayhem the man had committed to earn his name. The water was amazingly rich with life, from long, trailing forests of seaweed to teeming shoals of fish. Dolphins swam alongside the ship, diving in unison. Otters floated on their backs, munching crabs in their paws. They looked like humans eating chunks of bread.

The ship passed many small islands, some no more than rocks jutting out of the sea. All of them seemed deserted, although Jack saw standing stones in odd patterns and, once, a windowless tower. Horse Island was large and treeless with a few rugged cliffs topped by wiry grass. Jack thought it dreary compared to the sea.

Rune steered the ship to a bay with a beach and a village beyond the coarse sand. A crowd began to gather at their approach, and Skakki blew his father’s horn in welcome. The crowd didn’t react.

“They’re too quiet,” said Thorgil.

“They don’t recognize the ship,” Skakki said.

“That shouldn’t make a difference. We sent them a traditional greeting and they didn’t answer it,” said the Bard. “Let’s stay out of arrow range for a while.” Skakki ordered the oarsmen to halt their forward movement.

Jack observed houses made of turf that blended so well with the ground, at first he thought he was looking at tiny hills. The Northmen inhabitants wore turf-colored clothes and turf-colored boots. With their hair the color of dry grass, they could have been fragments of island that had awakened and decided to walk around. Even the smaller, darker Picts among them faded into the background like noonday shadows.