Wicked Day

To Geordie Haddington

with deep affection

It was no more than a whisper, and the man who breathed it was barely at arm's length from the woman, his wife, but the walls of the cottage's single room seemed to catch and throw the sentence on like a whispering gallery. And on the woman the effect was as startling as if he had shouted. Her hand, which had been rocking the big cradle beside the turf fire, jerked sharply, so that the child curled under the blankets woke, and whimpered.

For once she ignored him. Her blue eyes, incongruously pale and bright in a face as brown and withered as dried seaweed, showed a shifting mixture of hope, doubt and fear. There was no need to ask her man where he had got the news. Earlier that day she had seen the sail of the trading ship standing in towards the bay where, above the cluster of dwellings that formed the only township on the island, the queen's new house stood, commanding the main harbour. The fishermen at their nets beyond the headland were wont to pull close in to an incomer's course and shout for news.

Her mouth opened as if a hundred questions trembled there, but she asked only one. "Can it really be true?"

"Aye, this time it's true. They swore it."

One of the woman's hands went to her breast, making the sign against enchantment. But she still looked doubtful. "Well, but they said the same last autumn, when—" she hesitated, then gave the pronoun a weight that seemed to make a title of it, "—when She was still down in Dunpeldyr with the little prince, and expecting the twin babies. I mind it well. You'd gone down to the harbour when the trader put in from Lothian, and when you brought the pay home you told me what the captain said. There'd been a feast made at the palace there, even before the news came in of Merlin's death. She must have 'seen' it with her magic, he said. But in the end it wasn't true. It was only a vanishing, like he'd done before, many a time."

"Aye, that's true. He did vanish away, all through the winter, no one knows where. And a bad winter it was, too, the same as here, but his magic kept him alive, because they found him in the end, in the Wild Forest, as crazy as a hare, and they took him up to Galava to nurse him. Now they say he took sick and died there, before ever the High King got back from the wars. It's true enough this time, wife, and we've got it first, direct. The ship picked it up when they put in for water at Glannaventa, with Merlin lying dead in his bed not forty miles off. There was a lot else, news about some more fighting down south of the Forest, and another victory for the High King, but the wind was too strong to catch all they said, and I couldn't get the boat in any nearer. I'll go up to the town now and get the rest." He dropped his voice still further, a thread of hoarse sound. "It isn't everyone in the kingdom will go into mourning for this news, not even those that were tied in blood. You mark my words, Sula, there'll be another feast at the palace tonight." As he spoke he gave a half-glance over his shoulder towards the cottage door, as if afraid that someone might be listening there.

He was a small, stocky man, with the blue eyes and weather-beaten face of a sailor. He was a fisherman, who all his life had plied his trade from this lonely bay on the biggest island of the Orkney group, the one they called Mainland. Though rough-seeming and slow-witted, he was an honest man, and good at his trade. His name was Brude, and he was thirty-seven years old. His wife, Sula, was four years younger, but so stiff with rheumatism and so bent by heavy toil that she already looked an old woman. It seemed impossible that the child in the cradle could have been borne by her. And indeed, there was no resemblance. The child, a boy some two years old, was dark-eyed and dark-haired, with none of the Nordic colouring that appeared so often among the folk of the Orkney Islands. The hand that clutched the blankets of the cradle was fine-boned and narrow, the dark hair thick and silky, and there was a slant to the brows and the long-lashed eyes that might even indicate some strain of foreign blood.

Nor was the child the only incongruous thing about the place. The cottage itself was very small, little more than a hovel. It was set on a flat patch of salty turf a little way back from the shore, protected to either side by the rise of the land towards the dins that enclosed the bay, and from the tides by the rocky ridge that bordered the shore and held back the piled boulders of the storm beach. Inland lay the moors, from which a tiny stream came trickling, to splash in a miniature waterfall down past the cottage to the beach. Some way in from the tide-line it had been dammed to form a makeshift reservoir.

The cottage walls were built of stones gathered from the storm beach. These were flat slabs of sandstone, broken from the cliffs by wind and sea, and weathered naturally, making a simple kind of dry-stone walling, easy to do, and reasonably close against the weather. No mortar was used, but the cracks were caulked with mud. Each storm that came washed some of the mud away, and then more had to be added, so that from a distance the cottage looked like nothing more than a crude box of smoothed mud, with a thatch of rough heather-stems capping it. The thatch was held down by old, patched fishing nets, the ends of which were weighted with stones. There were no windows. The doorway was low and squat, so that a man had to bend double to enter. It was covered only with a curtain of deersksin, roughly tanned and as stiff as wood. The smoke from the fire within came seeping in sullen wisps round the edges of the skin.

But inside, this poorest of poor dwellings showed some glimpses of simple comfort. Though the child's cradle was of old, warped wood, the blankets were soft and brightly dyed, and the pillow was stuffed with feathers. On the stone shelf that served the couple for a bed was a thick, almost luxurious coverlet of sealskin, spotted and deep-piled, a quality of skin which would normally go by right to the house of one of the warriors, or even the queen herself. And on the table — a worm-ridden slab of sea-wrack propped on stones, for wood was scarce in the Orkneys — stood the remains of a good meal: not red meat, indeed, but a couple of gnawed wings of chicken and a pot of goose-grease to go with the black bread.

The cottagers themselves were poorly enough dressed. Brude had on a short, much-mended tunic, with over it the sleeveless coat of sheepskin which, in summer and winter, protected him from the weather at sea. His legs and feet were thickly wrapped in rags. Sula's gown was a shapeless affair of moss-dyed homespun, girdled with a length of rope such as she wove for her husband's nets. Her feet, too, were bound up in rags. But outside the cottage, beached above the tidemark of black weed and smashed shells, lay a good boat, as good as any in the islands, and the nets spread to dry over the boulders were far better than Brude could have made. They were a foreign import, made of materials unobtainable in the northern isles, and would normally be beyond the means of such a household. Brude's own lines, hand-twisted from reeds and dried wrack, stretched from the cottage's thatch to heavy anchor-stones on the turf. On the lines hung the split carcasses of drying fish, and a couple of big seabirds, gannets, Sula's namesake. These, dried and stored, and eked out with shellfish and seaweeds, would be winter food.

The promise of better fare, however, was there with the half-dozen hens foraging along the tide-mark, and the heavy-uddered she-goat tethered on the salt grass.

It was a bright day of early summer. May, in the islands, can be as cruel as any other month, but this was a day of sunshine and mild breezes. The stones of the beach looked grey and turquoise and rosy-red, the sea creamed against them peacefully, and the turf of the ridge behind was thick with sea-pink and primrose and red campion. Every ledge of the cliffs that bounded the bay was crowded with seabirds claiming and disputing their nesting territory, and nearer, on shingle or turf, the pied oystercatchers brooded their eggs or flew, screaming, to and fro along the tide. The air was loud with their cries. Even had there been a listener outside the cottage doorway, he could have heard nothing for the noise of the sea and the birds, but inside the room the furtive hush persisted. The woman said nothing, but apprehension still showed in her face, and she put up a sleeve to dab at her eyes.

Her husband spoke impatiently.

"What is it, woman? You're never grieving for the old enchanter? Whatever Merlin was to King Arthur and to the mainland folks with his magic, he's been nought to us here. He was old, besides, and even though men said he'd never die, it seems he was mortal after all. What's there to weep for in that?"

"I'm not weeping for him, why should I? But I'm afeared, Brude, I'm afeared."

"For what?"

"Not for us. For him." She gave a half-glance towards the cradle where the boy, awake but still drowsy from his afternoon's sleep, lay quietly, curled small under the blankets.

"For him?" asked her husband, surprised. "Why? Surely all's well for us now, and for him, too. With Merlin gone, that was enemy to our King Lot, and by all accounts to this boy of his as well, who's to harm him now, or us for keeping him? Maybe we can stop watching now in case other folks see him and start asking questions. Maybe he can run out now and play like other children, not hang on your skirts all day, and be babied like you've had him. You'd not keep him in much longer, anyway. He's long since grown beyond that cradle."

"I know, I know. That's what I'm feared of, don't you see? Losing him. When the time comes for Her to take him back from us—"

"Why should it? If she didn't take him away when the news came of King Lot's death, why should she do it now? Look, wife. When the king her husband went, you'd have thought that was when she'd see to it that his bastard went, too, quietly-like. That was when I was afeared, myself. When all's said, it's the little prince, Gawain, that's king of the Orkneys now, by right, but with this boy, bastard or not, nearly —

what? — nearly a year older, there's some might say — "

"Some might say too much." Sula spoke sharply, and with such patent fear that Brude, startled, took a stride to the doorway, jerked the curtain aside, and peered out.

"What ails you? There's no one there. And if there were, they'd hear nothing. The wind's getting up, and the tide's well in. Listen."

She shook her head. She was staring at the child. Her tears had dried. When she spoke, it was barely above a whisper.

"Not outside. There's no folk could get near enough without we heard the sea-pies screaming. It's here in the house we need to watch. Look at him. He's not a baby now. He listens, and sometimes you'd swear he understood every word."

The man trod to the cradle's side and looked down. His face softened. "Well, if he doesn't, he soon will.

The gods know he's forward enough. We've done what we've been paid for — and more, seeing what a sickly wean he was when we took him first. Now look at him. Any man might be proud of a son like him." He turned away, reaching for the staff that stood propped beside the doorway. "Look you, Sula, if any ill had been coming, it would have come before this. If harm was meant to him, the payments would have stopped, wouldn't they? So stop your fretting. You've no call now to be fearful."

She nodded, but without looking at him. "Yes. It was simple of me. You're right, I dare say."

"It's a few years yet before young Gawain will be troubling his head about kingdoms, and king's bastards, and by that time this one might well be forgotten. And if that means they stop the payments, who cares for that? A man needs a son to help him, in my trade."

She looked up at him then, and smiled. "You're a good man, Brude."

"Well," he said gruffly, pushing aside the curtain, "let's have an end to this. I'm going up to the town now, to hear what other news the sailors brought."

Left alone with the child, the woman sat for a while without moving, the fear still in her face. Then the boy's hand reached towards her, and she smiled suddenly, a smile that brought youth back, bright and pretty, to her cheeks and eyes. She leaned to lift him from the cradle, and set him on her knee. She picked up a crust of the black bread from the table, sopped it in a beaker of goat's milk, and held it to his lips. The boy took the bread and began to eat it, his dark head cuddled into her shoulder. She laid her cheek against his hair, and put a hand up to stroke it.

"Men are fools, so they are," she said softly. "They never see what's staring them in the eye. You'll be no fool, though, my bonny, not with the blood that's in you, and the way those eyes look and see right through to the back of things, and you only a baby still.…" She gave a little laugh, her mouth against the child's hair, and the boy smiled at the sound.

"King Lot's bastard, is it? Well, so they say, and better so. But if they saw what I see, and knew what I guessed at, ah, these many months past…"

She rocked the child closer, calming herself, sending her mind back to those summer nights two years ago when Brude, with a gift of gold ensuring his silence, had put out, not to his accustomed fishing ground, but farther west, into deeper water. For four nights he had waited there, grumbling at the loss of his catch, but kept faithful and silent by the gift of gold and the queen's promise. Then on the fifth night, a calm, twilit night of the Orkney summer, the ship from Dunpeldyour had stolen into the sound and dropped anchor, and a boat put out from her side with three men, queen's soldiers, rowing it. Brude answered their soft hail, and presently the thwarts of the two craft rubbed together. A bundle passed.