Wild Magic (57 page)

Pragmatically, they took the bread, fish and meat back with them to the
Long Serpent
, but no one wanted to touch it, let alone eat any of it. It was as if the supplies were as damned as the crew of the unnamed vessel had been, as if the food might contain the curse which had carried them away to Sur’s Howe.

Later that night, another of their number vanished.

Urse One-Ear was on last watch, but he neither saw nor heard anything, did not even notice the man was missing until Pol Garson took him by the arm the next morning. ‘I cannot see Erl anywhere,’ he said quietly. ‘And I do not think it is my eyesight which is at fault.’

Urse checked the ship from stem to stern, then woke his captain with the grim news. Aran cursed roundly. ‘I should have taken the whole watch,’ he said, though his lids were red-rimmed from lack of sleep.

The big man bridled. ‘I was alert the whole time.’

‘Then you are suggesting he disappeared on my watch?’ The Master of Rockfall’s eyes flashed dangerously.

Urse shrugged. ‘All things are possible until we know the truth of it.’

Aran Aranson’s temper was legendary in the Westman Isles, though it was said he never struck an unfair blow. Even so, there were many who would have paid to watch a bout between the Master of Rockfall and Tam Fox’s giant, Urse One-Ear; between the temper of the one and the size of the other the betting would have proved close. But as it was, the captain merely shook his head.

‘There is something horribly awry here, Urse,’ was all he said. ‘I do not hold with stories of the undead or demons in spirit form; but men cannot simply vanish into thin air.’

‘I have heard of expeditions on which men simply lost their wits and the will to live and have cast themselves silently overboard when the attention of others was distracted,’ Urse ventured.

‘There is madness here,’ Aran replied, ‘but I do not believe it was in the lost men.’ He paused. ‘Although all things are indeed possible until we know the truth of it.’

Twenty-seven

Katla

Life at Rockfall continued in much the same manner as it always had when its menfolk were away. The women carried on the chores of the fields and farm, salted fish, baked bread, spun wool and wove cloth and dug and dried peat for the long fire. They mended the drystone walls to keep the sheep in, and the chicken coops to keep the foxes out. They patched the barn wattle and added new turf to the hall’s roof where the extended summer sun had burned brown patches into the green. They milked the cows and the goats, separated whey and curds, bound wheels of cheese in muslin and scraped barnacles off the hulls of the boats they hauled up out of the harbour before the worst of the winds came.

But rather than revelling in her new responsibilities, Katla hated every minute of this enforced domesticity. With hardly any men present except for the shipmaker and occasionally a couple of elderly fishermen who’d seen enough of the sea, the balance seemed wrong: she felt the atmosphere to be stifling, contained, small-scale. The talk was all of women’s matters: who was pregnant, who was not; which soapwort worked best for the skin, whether camomile made the hair lighter; how eating fish livers made eyes shine and nails grow long; why it was best to add salt to scones and honeyed butter to carrots; why a bone spindle-whorl worked better than a wooden one. None of these details held the least interest for Katla, whose brush with conception had left her chary of anything to do with sexual matters, whose skin was as brown as the husk of a nut and whose hair had grown out into a shaggy mass as ragged and unkempt as a head of red kelp. Her eyes were bloodshot from the smoke and the wind and her nails, if not bitten down to the quick, were broken and scraped by her escapades on the rockfaces of the island: other women’s secrets about how to enhance one’s beauty and attract a husband were as dull and as alien to her as the precise knot required to slip a fishnet tight shut or make fast a halyard were to her female companions.

Worst of all, there seemed to be no way of avoiding conflict with her mother. Whatever she did was wrong: when she carded wool it was in a rather more haphazard fashion than the meticulous Mistress of Rockfall demanded; when she peeled vegetables for the nightly stew, Bera told her off for cutting the skins too thickly and losing the best of the flavour. She could not sweep a floor properly, it seemed, nor even mend a torn tunic, let alone weave or sew or spin with the rest of the women, all of whom seemed to have learned these mysterious skills at birth and without a cross word from their mentors. In pique, she took to running the length and breadth of the island again, ostensibly gathering mushrooms and mussels and gulls’ eggs, netting coneys and speckled trout, picking reeds for the floor or for new baskets, bulrushes for tapers and torches, but more often simply running for running’s sake, not even knowing what it was she ran from.

Today, her job was peeling carrots. An entire barrelful of them. Bera had set the keg down in front of her with a thud and a grim look which brooked no objection. ‘By noon, Katla,’ she said sharply, ‘or I’ll give you the turnips too. And if I find the peelings are any thicker than my thumbnail, you’ll be peeling mangelwurzels for the rest of the week until you’ve got the knack of it and won’t waste any more of our precious stores.’

Quite why anyone should need to boil a barrel-load of carrots and three dozen turnips, let alone a sack of inedible mangelwurzels, Katla could not imagine: except as a punishment for some unspoken transgression. She stared at the heap of hateful vegetables then, vengefully, at her mother’s retreating form and set her jaw.

Gramma Rolfsen cackled. ‘That’ll keep you out of mischief for a few hours!’

Instead of rising to the bait, Katla reached into her tunic pouch, took something from it and held it out to her grandmother. On her palm lay a neat-looking metal object somewhere between a stick and a knife. Hesta Rolfsen frowned and picked it up. She held it in front of her face, then selected a turnip and ran the item away from her across its rough surface. The stick/knife skittered and jumped. ‘Useless thing,’ she said in disgust.

Katla laughed. She took both turnip and implement back from her grandmother and drew the blade across the vegetable towards her instead. As if by magic, a sliver of purple skin spiralled to the ground.

The old woman exclaimed in amazement.

After a moment, ‘It peels,’ she said, unnecessarily.

Katla gave her a gleeful grin and lowered her voice so that none of the other women present would hear. ‘I knew she was going to make me do the carrots today – I saw her collecting them from the barn last night,’ she said. ‘So I sneaked into the smithy to devise something which might make the job easier than using my poor old belt-knife. I could shave a pig with this, the blade’s so keen!’

She had been forbidden access to the smithy by the Mistress of Rockfall as a form of punishment, and when Katla had objected on the grounds that with the men away it was surely the best use of her time to forge as many weapons as she possibly could in case they needed to defend themselves, Bera had simply laughed. ‘Can you imagine Marin Edelsen wielding a sword against a raider?’ she had asked, quite sensibly. But this made Katla all the more mulish. ‘I could teach them the basics,’ she’d said; but her mother was having none of it. ‘One hoyden is quite enough in my house: I was hoping the presence of the other girls might civilise you; but I can see that given your head the rest of them will be turned into ruffians in no time at all. Household duties only for you, my girl, till I decide otherwise.’

And thus it had been this past week and more.

For the next hour, even with the miraculous new tool, Katla peeled carrot after carrot, and took the top layer of skin off several of her fingers into the bargain. She watched a drop of her blood run the length of one of the vegetables and seep down into the pile. By rights, she should sluice them off with well-water, but just now she could not be bothered.
Since they’re sucking my soul out of me, they may as well taste it
, she thought bitterly, and reapplied herself to the job with renewed vigour. For a while she drifted into a sort of pleasant haze and the pile of unpeeled carrots dwindled rapidly.

A particularly loud noise roused her from her reverie. It was Magla Felinsen, talking as only she knew how. It was impossible to attune your senses elsewhere, for the woman had one of those voices which cut through all others, a voice which would be audible even through a howling wind or the heart of a wildfire.

‘And so I said to Suna, “Suna Bransen,” I said, “if you want to look like the Troll of Blackisle, you’re going the right way about it. With hair like that you need to add a little wool-oil into your rinse-water, which will sleek it down a bit.” And do you know what she said to me?’ Magla put her hands on her hips so that the ladle she’d been using to stir the pot dripped slowly down her apron and onto the floor. Katla watched one of the slyer cats detach itself from the shadow of the benches and slip under Magla’s guard to lap at the spilled broth. Having consumed this, it looked up speculatively at the dripping ladle and a tremor of intent ran through the muscles of its haunches as if it would launch itself at the implement; then Magla started gesticulating extravagantly with the spoon and the cat ran for safety. Little globules of fatty gravy flickered into the air and fell sizzling into the fire. ‘“Magla Felinsen,” she said, “you may wish to smell like a rancid old ewe, but I most certainly do not; and when you’ve finally managed to get Arni Hamson to offer for you perhaps I’ll ask for your advice”!’

‘How ill-mannered,’ said Simi Fallsen. ‘Anyone can tell her people came from the east.’

‘And what about that awful hair of hers, flying about all wild and bushy and uncontained – it looks like the tail on a manky old mare!’ giggled Thin Hildi.

‘Poor Suna. Such an uncouth girl,’ said Kitten Soronsen, shaking her pretty head in mock sorrow. ‘So like our beloved Katla!’

Everyone, except the subject, laughed loudly at this: they had got used to regarding Katla as fair game in the matter of appearance and manners, and she usually accepted their ribaldry in good part. Throughout the merriment, Kitten Soronsen smiled in her disturbingly equivocal fashion, with a sly quirk of those cruel, chiselled lips which made a dozen local lads go weak at the knees and stammer in her presence. It was always hard to know, when she made such observations, whether her teasing was affectionate or unsufferably rude, and no one ever dared challenge her for fear of being made to look even more stupid than she had already rendered them. Katla glared at her, taking in her perfect complexion and elegantly braided locks, bound with blue ribbon and the tiny silk flowers some admirer had bought for her at the Allfair, and was shocked to feel a moment’s regret at the contrast between them. That twinge made her temper snap.

‘Why do you think everybody wants to be like you, Kitten Soronsen? You think you’re so fine with your pretty hair and your perfect face and your smooth pink skin. Just because you’ve got men paying you court from half a dozen islands, buying you little gifts and making you pretty rhyme-strings, you think you’re better than anyone else. But eventually you’ll end up the same as any other woman owned by a man – with babies hanging off your tits and your belly as soft and drooping as an old sow’s and your arms elbow-deep in smallclothes and nappies, and it will be exactly what you deserve.’

Even before the words were fully out of her mouth she knew she had overstepped her mark. Kitten was catty, it was true, and vain and mean-spirited; but one jibe about her messy hair was hardly just cause for such a tirade. Despite this, it was with some satisfaction that she saw the girl’s face darken and her blue eyes flash with rage. Then Kitten Soronsen hurled the wooden spoon she had been using hard at Katla’s head. Katla, of course, ducked it neatly. It flew over her shoulder and hit Marin Edelsen square on the bridge of the nose, causing her to squawk with shock and pain. Blood began to spurt out of her nostrils, down onto her best linen apron and well-stuffed tunic, and over Thin Hildi as well, who took one look at the scarlet drops and fell down in a faint.

Morten Danson, who as usual had been snoozing on the bench beside the fire, came awake with a start and stared around him in a disorientated fashion as if he had forgotten yet again where he was.

Seeing her projectile miss its mark, Kitten Soronsen leapt as neatly as her namesake across the long fire, buried her hands knuckle-deep in Katla’s hair and began pulling viciously. A physical onslaught on the two-time wrestling champion of the Westman Isles Games was not the most sensible ploy, but Kitten Soronsen was stronger than she looked, and angrier than a nestful of hornets. Katla had not expected such an assault: taken by surprise she lost her balance and went down cursing with the other girl on top of her. The two of them landed with a thud in a slippery pile of vegetable peelings. The barrel went over too, spilling the rest of the carrots here and there, so that when Kitten tried to get to her feet she could get no purchase and fell back on Katla, knocking the breath out of her.

Gramma Rolfsen began to cackle and wheeze and clap her hands together in delight. ‘A catfight! How I love a good catfight. Go on, Katla, show her what for!’

At this point, Magla Felinsen joined in. ‘Bitch!’ she cried, hitting out at Katla’s hands and arms with her ladle. ‘Mangy fox-haired bitch! Hit her, Kitten: rip her ugly little face off !’ Then she started yelping as Hesta Rolfsen began laying about her with her stick.

Even occupied as she was trying to lever her attacker off her with a forceful knee, Katla was surprised by the intensity of Magla’s dislike. What had she ever done to provoke her, she wondered; but only for a moment, because now Kitten was clawing at her eyes, her fingernails as hard and sharp as talons. Perhaps there was something in all that guff about fish-oil making your nails stronger, Katla thought inconsequentially as Kitten gouged at her. She closed her lids tight, feeling the girl’s thumb press down hard and tried to wrest her head away, to no avail, because someone else was snarling and kicking at her. Dimly, she could hear her grandmother swearing like a fishwife, the rise and fall of her wicked knobkerry, then a howl of outrage as the old woman went down. Fury flooded through her then.