Raven Speak (9781442402492) (9 page)

As she waited outside with Rune she also noticed a trail of white bird feces splattering the cliff wall. She followed it upward to an enormous raven's nest, the largest she'd ever seen. It was built directly above the cave's entrance, protected by its own rocky overhang. Thousands upon thousands of broken twigs and small
branches had been intricately woven together over what must have been many summers. The two ravens already perched on its jagged rim, hurling their cries at Rune and Asa, and for the first time it occurred to her that the birds were a mated pair.

Apparently satisfied with the state of the drying fish, though her frozen scowl suggested otherwise, the woman beckoned. Asa hesitated—she'd been promised a whale, and there was certainly no whale here—until an unexpected gust of cold rain chased both her and Rune into the woman's home. The ravens yelled their distress.

Smoke filmed the cave. Its odor blended with the musky-sweet fragrance of rotting food and the faded stench of blood. The high-ceilinged room was quite dry, though, and surprisingly welcoming considering the mess: In a word, the woman's home was
havoc
—complete, day-after-the-storm havoc.

How many winters had passed, Asa wondered, since the floor had met with the cleansing bite of a broom—if it ever had? Animal bones of all sizes littered it, tangling with clumps of cobwebby feathers and shreds of hide and fur. Piled baskets teetered haphazardly among ancient wooden barrels, many lying on their sides. Some spilled moldy fishing nets; others dribbled grain or the twisted roots of vegetables. Bundles of dead pine branches sagged in one corner, their thinning brown needles silently cascading downward. And poking from the gloom at the rear of the cave were several splendid sets of antlers. But Asa also saw art amid the disorder. Large stones of various and unusual
colors had been placed about the room in careful arrangements: two mottled ones here, three strangely smooth red ones on a ledge over there. Odd.

Posts and beams had been erected to support makeshift rafters, and from these rafters hung a year's bounty of both smoked and dried meats: the entire haunch of an elk, strips of smaller animals, netted chunks of green-tinged mutton. Her newly expanded stomach rumbled. So much food. Would the woman share it? Could she take some back to her clan? But where was the whale?

She noticed Rune nosing through the pine branches. His inquisitive snorts were scattering the fallen needles, and she moved closer to make sure he didn't get into something he shouldn't.

“Now,” the woman said, “I'll boil some water for tea—give chase to the chill.”

Asa nodded. She wiped her dripping nose and watched as the woman, with some effort, lowered herself beside the ringed hearth. It took a very brief time for her to coax a fire from the ashes. After lacing branches across the flames and swinging the iron pot into place, she rose and began pawing through some bowls on a nearby shelf, making turbulent rustling sounds.

“Do you prefer nettle or mint? I'm not accustomed to visitors so I don't have a royal selection.” Glancing over her shoulder with the one-eyed scowl that was beginning to grate on Asa, she answered her own question. “No, you're but a child. A child wants something sweet. I've a bit of dried apple around here somewhere …” Her voice eroded into that strange, soft cackling
and cooing as she rummaged through other bowls, peering close with her one good eye.

Asa's teeth clenched. She was a guest here, but this was the second time today she'd been called a child and she was having no more of it. She was fourteen, a chieftain's daughter—certainly no child. Only good manners—and prodding hunger—held her to her place. The moment she learned the whereabouts of the stranded whale, however, she and Rune were abandoning the old woman to her bird-rabid ramblings.

The water reached a boil and a handful of dried apple slices were dropped into the pot along with some apple leaves crumbling on their twigs. Soon they were seated next to the fire's warmth, cupping steaming bowls in their hands. The woman had failed to offer her the guest's traditional seat of honor, yet another affront, so Asa sat cross-legged at her right, chin lifted in smoldering indignation. Rune sidled over to stand behind her. His nose rested lightly on her shoulder, the weight growing noticeably heavier as his eyelids drooped.

Although she didn't begin a conversation—as a polite host should have done—the woman apparently had words rolling around in her mind. Again and again she shifted positions, heaving a nasally sigh each time, but a foot would wiggle restlessly and she'd have to re-contort herself, and then a knee bounced or her other foot burst into movement. Asa tried to ignore her but, as if guided by their own will, her eyes kept stealing toward the unnatural hollow beneath the woman's bony brow. She'd never
considered the space an eyeball possessed, but the indentation there was substantial, easily the size of a baby's fist. The smooth lid had been pulled shut and sewn in place with stitches only slightly more yellow than its own stubby white lashes.

Growing restless herself, she finally voiced the question that had been on her lips all day. “Is the whale somewhere near here?”

“What whale?”

That knocked a hole in Asa's belly. She set down her tea, inadvertently awakening Rune. “You said if I wanted a whale I should follow you.”

The woman's shoulders jerked convulsively. Was she laughing—actually
laughing
? “I did say that,” she admitted in a muffled attempt to choke back her amusement. “But I didn't say I
had
a whale. Where would I keep a whale here?” She indicated the darkened space around them and folded herself tighter, as if trying to smother her ill-timed humor.

Maddened, Asa climbed to her feet. “Then Rune and I will have to keep looking. Now.”

“You'd never find your way.”

The certainty of the words brought her up short. All of a sudden she felt trapped, moments away from being torn to bits like the other animals whose remains lay scattered about. She wanted to reach over and slap the leathery old face. And, breathing faster, she realized she wanted to slap herself, too, for being so stupid as to follow a stranger right into her lair. What would her father have said?

She eyed the distance to the cave's mouth, wondering if both she and Rune could get out alive. A sharp flapping announced the two ravens' approach. They came strutting into the cave, shaking the rain from their glistening blue-black feathers and turning their heads from side to side with imperious self-assurance. Rune pinned his ears.

She had to act. “
Is
there a whale?” she demanded.

“Of course. The sea is full of whales.”

“Yes, but is there a stranded whale near here?” Such desperation in her voice.

“Not yet.” The woman gazed up at her, sitting very erect and quite still now. “Though there will be.”

Asa's frustrations boiled over. “You said if I wanted a whale I should follow you. You lied to me! Why did you lie?”

The two ravens shrieked and lifted up to flap about the room. A vase of milk-colored glass crashed to the floor, shattering. Something else plummeted from the rafters, landing with a double slap. Fur and feathers and bits of dried leaves swirled in a frenzy. One of the birds dived toward Rune's head and he had to duck to avoid being pecked.

“Quiet!” The woman's harsh cry brought the room to silence. With arthritic effort she rose first to her knees and then to her feet, and kept unfolding and rising until she appeared a full head taller than she previously had. In the firelight her one eye stormed a lightning blue. Obediently the ravens landed side by side on an overhead beam. They touched bills, then huddled together and
watched with keen interest. “I don't need to explain myself to you,” the woman said in hoarse but measured tones. “
I
am not a child.”

Asa stamped her foot. “I am not a child either!”

The judgmental eye marked the gesture. “Then why are you running away? Why did you leave your clan under the thrall of that besotted skald Jorgen the Younger? What sort of chieftain's son—or daughter—abandons such responsibility?”

Had she mentioned the skald's name? How did the woman know it? Brushing aside the niggling questions, Asa answered emphatically, “I left to search for food.”

“You ran away.”

She hadn't. “I was protecting the horses. That was my father's wish, and my mother's.”

“You stole what you wouldn't sacrifice.”

Rodentlike scurryings of guilt poked Asa's insides. But they were accompanied by an ice-cold wariness of her host's intentions. “No one's going to kill Rune.”

“Even if such a sacrifice would please the gods and hurry summer? Even if such a sacrifice would protect your clan?”

“What sort of a god wants a horse killed?” She burned. The tea seemed to have set her ablaze. She felt its liquid warmth pumping through her chest, caressing her ribs and strengthening her arms. The tips of her fingers stung with unseen bees.

“What sort indeed?” The woman kicked aside a basket to clear a path to a large, intricately carved wooden trunk. “Those that fancy
themselves gods, I imagine.” She lifted off a branch dangling dried berries, carefully set it on the floor, and opened the lid. Pawing deeper and deeper through its contents, she said, “Your clan, what's left of it anyway, is in danger—imminent danger. You know that.”

Was it a question? Asa began stumbling over a response but was interrupted as the woman straightened, her arms full of fabric.

“Tell me, what would you do to rescue them?”

“Anything, of course, anything at all.”

“Would you give up an eye?”

Horrific images flooded her mind. She became acutely aware of the warm liquid bathing her eyes, heard the lids blink, squishing, felt the balls swivel toward the cave's mouth again. Her own breathing roared in her ears. Taking a step closer to Rune, she said, “If my clan is in danger, I have to go back now.”

The old woman looked at her ravens, who both bobbed excitedly, and then at Asa. “You will go back, but not today, and not until it's time. And when you do, you'll wear this.” She shook out a beautiful woolen cloak dyed the deepest of blues. The firelight danced across the sparkling hem, embroidered with blue glass beads and clear crystal ones.

Asa's mind tumbled. She'd never seen the cloak before, and yet it was eerily familiar.

“It won't cost
you
an eye,” the woman said, fastening the heavy garment around Asa's shoulders, “but rescuing your clan may demand something equally dear.”

Stepping back, she thrust out both arms and a raven immediately alit on each one. She whispered to one bird and then the other, turned toward the cave's mouth, and gave a mewling cry that rose to a fierce screech. In unison the birds flapped off into the misty gloom.

Asa couldn't move.

Horses were fools, Jorgen thought. Given their freedom, they came sniffing back to the site of their winter imprisonment at day's end, creatures of dull habit, unable to think for themselves. Unable to imagine a life beyond their suffering.

He slipped away from the byre's wide-open door. He couldn't see them yet; they lingered somewhere up the hillside, hidden from him. But he could hear their hooves squishing through the mud and snapping the occasional twig. They moved restlessly; they wanted to come back. And when they did, he'd welcome them.

The advancing cold was making him impatient, though. What was the noise she made, the one that made them lift their heads, whinny happily, and come galloping? He curled his tongue between his lips and tried sucking air. The shaky whistle was met with a long silence and then a distant—and distrusting—snort. He tried blowing air, fitting his tongue against his teeth in different ways to get the right sound. Still the horses didn't show. He folded his arms across his chest and felt the air rush past his nostrils. He knew they would eventually, whether he called or not.

Twilight now, that curious interval that was neither day nor
night, when the world seemed to hold its breath. A slippery time, he'd always thought, when shadows played tricks on men's eyes and not everything was as it seemed. He looked down the darkening path that edged the fjord all the way to the ocean. A spattering of crescent-shaped impressions marked the mud, their edges curling up and spilling outward. All that was left of her.

A hard spasm fired his belly. It snaked earthward, molten. He succumbed to the sensation, lost himself in the throbbing ache for a few shallow breaths, then abruptly smothered it. Better that she was gone. She had proven herself ungrateful, and worse, unworthy of his attention. Hadn't he offered her everything: gifts carved by his own artful hands; stories chosen especially with her in mind, ones brimming with the wisdom of his father and his father before him? He shifted his weight remembering how she'd brazenly argued his stories' wisdom. Such insolence! And last night—last night he'd proffered the remaining, tastiest cheese from his personal cache of food (his tongue watered as another hunger took hold), and how had she repaid him? He lifted one hand to trace the crusted ridges on his cheek, the work of her bony fingers gouging his skin. The latent heat flared again, sweetly torturous, and subsided. He exhaled with force.

He'd had to invent a story of a bear. (Which showed how gullible the people were, for when was the last time a bear had been seen in these lands?) But these were strange times, he'd reminded them, and went on to describe how he'd awakened to find Asa sneaking away with her horse. How he'd followed her
into the night, calling for her to return—“Think of your mother!” he'd cried—until he saw something large, something shadowy—it had to be a bear, the biggest bear he'd ever seen—swat her to the ground. He told how he'd scrambled through the forest after them both, slipping again and again in the mud—that accounted for the bruises—and pushing past the unyielding branches that raked his face so mercilessly. But she was gone. Just like that, he related in a voice full of pitched woe, she was gone, and her horse had run off too, or been killed, and the other horses with it. Such a tragedy.