Raven Speak (9781442402492) (2 page)

Odd. She'd never heard anyone in her clan speak of another settlement in the area. The next village was far to the south. Curious, she urged Rune forward a few steps, craned her neck, and squinted, but the pair had definitely vanished. Odd.

The ocean rumbled as a large set of waves rushed the shore. A freshening wind whipped peaks of white from the choppy waters, in turn cold gray and bronzy green, and she looked to the sky with new worry. The pale light was rapidly withdrawing, fleeing from low-hanging clouds that glowered with menace. Images of hurled stones sinking beneath the waves mingled with the last sight of her father's ship; no bigger than a stone it had seemed then, and she welled up with anger for those that had pushed him to such a foolhardy venture. It was the whispering that had done it, whispering that stirred doubts and suspicions, and the clan had listened with their bellies instead of their minds. Now, she feared, they'd suffer all the more. Gathering the reins, she looked again at the empty bird's nest, just a fringe of dried grass shivering in the breeze. If only summer would hurry.

Frost still rimed the wood planks of the byre door as Asa looped her fingers into the knothole. She threw her weight back in a succession of short jerks and it gradually came open, its cold hinges shrieking complaint.

A sour odor wrinkled her nose as she led Rune down the earthen ramp and into the dark, windowless shelter. None of the animals there greeted them; the cow merely flicked an ear, while her father's two horses swung their heads round for just a moment's dull gaze. Such a difference in a matter of months.

At summer's end, as was the custom, all of the clan's livestock had been divided into the weak and the strong. The small or sickly animals were slaughtered before winter could take its toll, and the healthy—three cows, five pigs, and twelve sheep, along with the horses—had been locked inside the byre. There'd been at least some hay waiting for them then, along with carefully doled out rations of oats and barley. But the food hadn't lasted, while the winter had.

One by one the remaining animals were slaughtered to feed the clan. It was a blessing almost, since they'd gone bony and shivering and in their final days their black eyes begged for relief.
These starving animals could only dream of such a fate.

She pulled a length of brown rockweed from Rune's shoulders and dropped it in front of the cow. The animal blinked and nosed the slimy strand with disinterest. She'd been spared all this time because she was pregnant, a seed of hope for the future. But the distended belly lolling over her folded legs seemed an absurdity, a bloated fungal growth sucking the life from its skeletal host.

The pigs were gone, along with their tasty chops and trotters, and the sheep, too, so there would be fewer woolen clothes for the clan this year. Already Asa's underskirt stopped well short of her ankles, and the tears across each knee had been clumsily sewn shut. Her overskirt hid these imperfections, though, and her cloak was well made. Sitting around the hearth fire at night, she could ball herself up inside it and nearly keep warm.

At the sight of the rockweed, the other two horses pricked their ears and nickered. Asa pulled another glistening strand off Rune and dragged it over in front of them. They dropped their heads in unison to examine the offering.

As always, she ran her fingers along the side of each horse, feeling for herself their deteriorating condition. Their thin, shaggy coats were so dry and bristly, so starved for nourishment. Beneath her fingers the horses' ribs pushed outward like barrel hoops. Her father had promised to bring grain if he found another clan with enough to share; otherwise the three animals, and Rune, would have to continue making do with the seaweeds she managed to scrounge from the shore or the inner bark she stripped from the
pine trees. Her nails were shredded to the quick with that effort, and reddish resin mottled both hands. She didn't mind this as much as the very act of yanking the skin off trees and eating it. That made her feel desperate, no more than an animal. Indeed, every person in her clan was now sunk to being an animal, to scraping out a meager existence while waiting—hoping—to emerge from hibernation.

Although Rune was the smallest, he did the most work carrying her out and back through the icy weather, and so she removed his bridle and fed him the last whole length of rockweed. After a final pat on the neck, she checked the water level in the barrel braced in the corner. Unable to see anything in the gloom, she reached in. An icy skim sucked her fingertips to its surface, and she had to yank them free before using a nearby stick to stab the ice into floating chunks. Grabbing a pail, she slipped out the door and climbed the steep path to the stream that tumbled from the mountains. As always, she looked for signs of anything new, anything green and uncurling,
anything
to show that summer was on the way and that the land would once again nourish them. But the rocks were mostly bare, and as she climbed she felt she was the only living thing in all that bleak world: A silent forest cloaked the mountains rising above her; an endless, empty ocean stretched behind her; and an ominous gray sky, heavy with clouds, clamped down on the fjord like a shield of ice. What could raise its pale head here and sing of summer?

It was on her way back down the path that she finally noticed
something different. The byre door was open, and a somewhat misshapen person was wedged into its gap: Jorgen the skald. He was the clan's storyteller, poet, and occasional prophet—a man she detested. And he was looking at the animals. Mindful of the slippery pebbles, she nonetheless quickened her steps. The splashing water cleared the pail's rim.

He heard her coming and spun. “What are you doing?” As if he couldn't see the pail for himself.

“Fetching water.” She took a bold step forward, but he blocked the doorway with his twisted, turdlike body. Baths had occurred infrequently the last few months, but the skald had a peculiar odor that went beyond not bathing. It turned her stomach.

“You've not been fetching water all this time. Where did you disappear to after the ship's leave-taking? Your mother's been waiting for your report and you've worried her beyond any of my help.”

If that was meant to hurt, it worked: His accusation drenched her with guilt. Her mother had been too ill that morning to walk to the shore to see off her husband and the other men. Yet Asa hadn't returned directly to her. Dwelling on her own worries, she'd gone galloping. “I went for a ride,” she answered, and hastily added, “looking for food.” Squeezing past him, she nodded toward the slimy weeds mouthed by the animals. His stench clung to her like a resinous film. Slowly, hoping he would leave, she rested the pail on the edge of the barrel and took her time pouring out the fresh water. But when the last drop had trickled into the barrel, she turned to find him studying the horses with the toothy greed of a wolf.

Her father, the clan's chieftain, had decreed that the remaining animals were not to be slaughtered. The pregnant cow was their only chance at milk and cheese and a future herd. And while eating horses was not out of the ordinary, these were her father's pride, a luxury he allowed himself. The red stallion was his and the bay had been a gift to her older brother. Rune had been intended for her other brother, but the impish creature had bucked him off with such abandon that for years Rune had worn a harness in the fields rather than a saddle on his back. Less than two years after Asa had been born, however, she'd discovered the horse dozing on the ground and clambered onto his back. They'd been inseparable ever since. She wasn't going to let anyone kill and eat him.

With that resolve in mind, she set her jaw and, giving the skald her iciest glare, moved past him. Claiming an authority that went beyond her fourteen years, she stood outside the byre door and waited for him to remove himself. Again she held her breath as he brushed past. What made him smell that way? Rotten onions? A bleeding tooth? Pee? She recoiled as he turned back and, still grinning, stepped right up beside her to help her shoulder the byre door closed. One behind the other then, heads bent, they hurried toward the longhouse. A stray, bitter wind raced up the fjord to snap at their heels.

Upon the stone door-slab, the skald hesitated and glanced back at the byre.

“The spruce trees are beginning to bud, I think,” Asa said, hoping to prove that summer was coming, that wild cress and
leeks would soon be in their future and in their stomachs. That they'd survive without having to eat the horses. “And I saw a fulmar's nest.” Essentially true.

He looked down at her and grinned, showing wicked yellow teeth. “Did you now?” he said on a rush of noxious air. The odor fogged the entry until he turned and went into the longhouse. He scanned the room to see who was watching, then took his place beside the fire and sat, rocking.

The longhouse was as gloomy as the byre and nearly as cold. What had once been a snug shelter dancing with firelight and vibrating with people's laughter was now a sooty, smoke-filled hall. Peevish words were flung like gravel; lengthy silences hung in the air. The reeds covering the earthen floor had long been ground to dust. The soapstone dishes had run dry of whale blubber, so there was no light except for that coming from the fire glowing in the central hearth. In the early months of winter the iron cauldron suspended over the hearth had held rich brown stews of beef or mutton. Now, day after day, it kept a watery soup simmering beneath a gray foam. The flavor changed from bitter to greasy to burnt depending on what mushy vegetable was scrounged from the storeroom or what bony rodent was trapped, pounded to a paste, and stirred into it.

Asa hurried over to where her mother lay on a straw mattress pulled close to the fire. As wife of the chieftain, she'd be in charge of the clan until the men returned. So she'd left her private bed-closet at the south end of the longhouse and set up command
by the fire's meager warmth. Secretly Asa wondered if it was all a mistake. Her mother, wrapped in a feather quilt overlaid with two sheepskins, could barely lift her head. How was she going to lead a restless clan?

As if sensing her worries, her mother reached out an arm to caress her daughter's cheek. “How is Rune today?”

Nothing about her husband leaving, nothing about every one of the able-bodied men leaving in a desperate venture to provide food. No, her mother would set aside her own worries to be a leader, strong in the face of the disaster that was engulfing them. “I found some rockweed for him and the others,” Asa responded, “though we had to ride a long way. But when I carried water from the stream it looked like some of the spruce trees were beginning to bud. There were purple knobs on the ends of the branches.”

With a weak smile, her mother tucked her arm back under her feather quilt and closed her eyes. “Tell me about your ride. What did you see?”

That was her way of asking for a story. In the monotonous, housebound months of winter, even insignificant events had to be told and retold, with ever more interesting details embroidered onto them, to help pass the time.

Asa recounted her ride around each finger of the mountain range, describing the ocean's changing colors, the ancient picture-stone that sprouted from the whale-nosed bluff, the weighty shapes of clouds in the sky, and ending with the raven and the strange figure. “I saw it land on a man's arm, but I didn't see a
village anywhere. Does Father know about the people living there? Maybe they have food.”

Her mother spoke with her eyes still closed. “I've never heard him speak of another village nearer than a day's sail away. Are you sure of what you saw?”

She thought. The fjord had been very shadowy, but yes, she'd seen the raven alight upon something that had to have been a person. She nodded. “Yes, I'm sure.”

That brought her mother's eyes open. “Did he look evil—a raider or a pirate? Did you see his ship?” She lifted onto one elbow. “With the men gone we're easily taken. I'll have to do something, prepare… . I wonder if they saw your father and the others leave.”

Ill as she was, her mother didn't need more worries. “Maybe it was just my imagination,” Asa soothed. “The fjord was in shadow, and when the raven swooped into the shadows it looked like he landed on the arm of a person, but it was probably just a tree.”

“You're sure?”

Her mother's eyes begged the answer, and so she gave it. “Yes,” she replied, “I'm sure we don't have to worry about raiders.”

And that, in essence, was also true. Why should they worry about raiders when they had nothing to be raided? The brutal weather had already stripped them of everything.

The months of late summer and early winter had been the harshest anyone could remember. Rain had fallen in torrents and the crops had become moldy. Then, almost without pause, the rain turned to hail and flattened the blackened stalks. What hay that
could be salvaged from the mold was put up in the byre, but it was only a third of what was needed. Cabbages were stunted, pea pods mostly empty. The deer and elk climbed into the shelter of the high mountain forests, and even the gulls seemed to have flown to more temperate shores. In hard times the ocean had always provided plenty of food, but when the storms finally ceased, the fish, too, had apparently swum away, because time after time the nets were drawn in empty.

Needles pricked everyone's stomachs unendingly, and still the winter stretched on. Then, in the darkest days, an awful sickness had begun clawing its way through the clan. The room divided into those who turned their feverish faces toward the cold drafts whistling through the cracks and those who huddled beside the fire, unable to melt the frost that gripped their marrows. Hour after hour, day upon day passed when the clan's members sat in the dark, too ill to move, chewing on bark or vomiting it up. Movement ceased, and an entire day could go by before anyone noticed that a hand no longer twitched or that eyes stared unblinkingly at the rafters. No one was strong enough to dig a burial chamber; it was all anyone could manage to just roll the stiff body in a length of cloth, lay it on a plank, and carry it out to the smaller byre, the empty one, to wait in a frozen row with the others. Nine so far. Two of the shrouded bundles held Asa's brothers.