Celtika (3 page)

‘I hope the Mistress approves of her,’ I volunteered.

Several of the men laughed, including Lutapio, who said, ‘Knowing Niiv, Louhi will be eating out of her hand.’

‘How far is it to the lake?’ I asked later.

‘Five rests, perhaps six if you’re slow. Jouhkan and Niiv will take you. The lake shore is crowded with strangers, many of them enchanters. The place stinks of potions, spells and shit. You’d be wise to keep your wits about you. Though somehow, I believe you will.’

I thanked Lutapio and assured him that I was prepared for the circus that I would find. Six rests he had said, and I supposed he meant periods of sleep, approximating to a night. When night lasts nearly half a year, days cease to be meaningful, but I had a fair idea of how far I had to go, now, and the journey was to be shorter than I’d expected.

An icy wind began to blow from the mouth of the mountain sanctuary of Northland’s Mistress. Our warming fires guttered, sparks flying on to the taut hides of the tents, but quickly dying on the layer of stinking grease that covered the skins. A little while later the three women emerged, running, bent almost double; I heard laughter from below the brightly coloured mufflers that encased their faces, all but their eyes, which flashed brightly in the light of the fires. They scampered to their own tent and ducked through the low flap, pulling it shut. The laughter became louder, and then they sang again, but this time with true, pure joy, three voices that bubbled, shrieked and chattered tunefully.

Whoever she was, Niiv now had a little magic, her father’s magic, and she was delighted.

Lutapio and the others crawled into the tent to sleep. I crouched by the fire for a while, wondering whether to probe a little into the Lady of the North; I had heard of Louhi, of course; her effect and influence were everywhere. But I had never encountered her. My idle thoughts were interrupted when one of the women came out of her tent, glanced at me, then came over to me, kneeling down in the snow so that her voluminous skirts spread around her. She wore a red woollen cap pulled down to her eyes, and a scarf that covered her face. Pale blue eyes searched me from that slit in her winter mask. I was disturbed by the intensity of that gaze, almost charmed by it, caught by it as a fish is caught on a bone hook. I couldn’t help thinking:
this woman knows me.

We sat in this way for what seemed an age. I fiddled with burning sticks and she mimed the slow slapping of her hands together as she watched me unflinchingly.

She suddenly spoke. ‘You’re one of those who walks the Path around the world. Aren’t you?’

Taken by surprise at this sudden insight, I answered, ‘Yes. I am. How did you know?’

‘Frost-haired Louhi showed me how to look. She seems disturbed by you. I can’t see your face for all that beard. I wonder who you are? I’ll find out. You’re going to the lake.’

It was a statement, but I still answered. ‘Yes. Looking for a ship.’

‘I’ll find out who you are,’ she repeated almost menacingly, then clambered to her feet, brushed the snow from her skirts and swirled back to her tent.

‘I’d have told you if you’d asked,’ I muttered to her rump as it vanished into the skins.

After the sleep, a fresh reindeer was harnessed for me and I was helped up by Jouhkan. I found the saddling awkward, my thighs spread too wide for total comfort, and the reins, slung between the antlers, clumsy and hard to control.

The three sisters laughed behind their woollen masks, then called to me in a slightly mocking way—I was being teased rather than insulted—before turning their own reindeer away from the sanctuary and trotting off along a holloway through the snow. My own mount bucked and was off in pursuit. Since I was holding the tethers of my pack animals I was almost hauled from the saddle blanket, but kept my grip and bounced uncomfortably behind the amused young women.

Jouhkan tickled my horses with his spear and helped them forward. And in this way we made our first progress southwards, turning away from the northern lights into bleak forest again and following proven tracks and trails. The travel was tiring, but I could have happily kept going. I could almost
smell
the coming dawn. My guides liked to stop regularly, however, crouching in a huddle and exchanging small talk and scraps of food, delays that I found irritating.

‘You won’t get there any faster by wishing it,’ Niiv teased me.

She was eating the last of the salted fish. She was forbidden to eat the meat, she had told me, since she was the daughter of a shaman who had died during her coming of age. She was not properly ‘born’ yet, but whispered to me that she was already pregnant. It was none of my business. She would soon make an offering at the tomb of the Lady of Pohjola, who could make the appropriate adjustments, if she saw fit. Everything was working out well, she believed. Jouhkan was her older brother, and guardian, but he was well aware that Niiv was a rule unto herself.

‘I’m here to protect her from bears and wolves,’ he said with a smile. ‘She’d rather dance with them … and probably would.’

Denied the fish, Jouhkan and I chewed our way through strips of reindeer meat so putrid I almost asked my host whether in fact I was eating a drowned man’s dried bowels. But there was nothing else to eat, so I kept quiet. To take away the taste I watched the beautiful young woman. Crystals of snow and salt lined her mouth as she chewed noisily and greedily. She was watching me with such curiosity that I felt my brow furrow, a sign of nervousness that she clearly noticed instantly. There was always a knowing smile on her face.

‘Where you’re going is the most dangerous of all the lakes in Pohjola; in any land. Except for Tuonela, the black lake. Did you know that?’

I agreed that it was dangerous, but I hadn’t heard more about it than that it was a lake where a screaming ship lay in its depths. Feeling so strongly that it was my old galley that had sunk itself and my good friend there, I had stayed at a distance. I knew of the old man of the lake, but something in Niiv’s tone gave me pause for thought. I’d have to be prepared to unloose a little of my talent, I suspected.

She went on, ‘The song-chanters spend a week on the shore during the long summer, singing to the waters, persuading Enaaki, the old man of the water, to let them swim down. Sometimes he snatches them from the bank and dismembers them. But usually he’ll agree to a visit when winter comes. He eats entrails and you’ll need to supply him with at least one full reindeer’s worth—a horse’s might do—if you’re going to persuade him to let you swim down to his lair. Did you know that?’

I hadn’t. If I found that this offering was essential—I doubted that it would be—I’d have to find some way to trade for a reindeer. My horses were not available.

Niiv was relishing her task of enlightenment.

‘There are more than a hundred
voytazi,
pike-toothed spirits, guarding the sunken ships. Enaaki’s palace is like a labyrinth, walls of wood tied together with weed, and a roof of human bones. It stretches down for miles into the gloom. The lake has no true bottom, only the roof of Enaaki’s palace, full of spy holes and traps. If he comes up to take you, you’ll be dragged down so fast, and so deep, that your ghost will still be in the water above, swimming on, unaware.’

‘I’ll make sure I give him a good meal of entrails.’

‘You
must.
’ She watched me for a moment, then frowned. ‘Enaaki will have eaten your friend a long time ago. It’s only his ghost that screams.’

‘If that’s true, then I’ve wasted my time.’

Then her words came home to me. She had guessed so easily that I had come here not to honour the dead, but in the hope that my friend was still alive, and that I believed it was
his
tormented presence in the depths that uttered the terrible scream for which the lake was named.

‘But I don’t believe it is true,’ I went on, cautious now.

‘Why not?’

‘Because of the ship that protects him. Not even Enaaki can eat this particular ship.’

‘If it
is
the ship,’ she taunted.

‘Yes.’

‘If it
is
your friend.’

‘Yes.’

‘How old are you, Merlin? Tell me that.’

She had leaned forward, almost hungrily. Her breath was astonishingly sweet, despite her meal of fish. Before I could stop myself, I had leaned towards her as well, almost nose to nose, drawn to her without thinking, as lover is to lover.

I came close to telling her the truth. All that stopped me, as she radiated almost irresistible charm and beauty, was that I couldn’t summon the right words to explain the thousands of years I had been walking the circular path that surrounded both the world of reality and the underworlds that opened into it.

‘Older than I look,’ I muttered lamely.

‘Well, yes. I know that. Every so often a skull appears on your face. You should be long dead. A thousand times dead. Tell me how you’ve managed to keep the youth in you alive!’

‘You’d do better to ask the youth. And he’s long, long gone.’

She thought about that, then tapped my nose, not with an elegant finger but with the last morsel of salted perch. ‘I don’t think he is,’ she whispered.

She cocked her head, smiled through the snow and salt as she popped the fish into her mouth, then pulled up her muffler, ready to return to her tent, to sleep, though she stayed for a while by the fire. Jouhkan stared at me, his jaw working slowly as he softened dried meat in his bark-stained teeth. He had not understood much of the conversation.

‘If you find your friend intact, and not in pieces in Enaaki’s kitchen, how
will
you get him back to dry land? As Lutapio told you, the ice is a man’s height thick. It can close over you in seconds.’

Again, that careful curiosity. The question seemed so innocent, but even Jouhkan was probing for the secrets I might hold.

All I said was, ‘Ask me in a few rests’ time. I have to get there first. I have to learn some rules.’ I was still ravenous. ‘May I have some more reindeer meat?’

Jouhkan looked puzzled at that. ‘Reindeer meat?’

I pointed to the brown sinew that he held in his gloved hand. He laughed, shaking his head. ‘This isn’t reindeer … Did you think it was reindeer? I wish it were!’ He snarled at his meal. ‘It makes my stomach churn to think where this came from…’

‘My mistake!’ I said hurriedly. ‘Please don’t elaborate.’

He passed me a strip of the disgusting flesh. I noticed that Niiv was laughing silently behind her muffler.

CHAPTER TWO

Urtha of Alba

‘Will you answer a question for me?’ I called to Niiv during the third period of our journey to the lake. She had been in a sullen mood for two ‘days’, and sick twice. Her sisters were riding apart from her, though there had been no arguments between the three of them. We hadn’t talked very much, there had been very little opportunity. A biting wind had been cutting through the forest. It cut to the bone. It cut all thoughts except those to do with keeping warm and getting home. It was quieter now, just the sound of hooves on fresh snow and the grunting of the animals. Niiv was riding ahead of me.

‘Yes. If you will answer one of mine.’

My curiosity about the woman was deepening, though I was anxious to hide the fact. She was familiar in a way that disturbed me, not because I could feel the kindling of powers of enchantment in her muffled head, but oddly because of the way she laughed. ‘Who’s the father of the child you carry?’

She glanced at me over her shoulder, then rode on in silence for a while before saying, ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know the father? Were you asleep at the time?’

‘It hasn’t been decided!’ she amended angrily, adding, ‘Yet!’

I felt a thrill of comprehension. And a chill at the same time. Familiar words echoed across the generations. I watched her body swaying on the back of her steed. She was vibrancy incarnate. She was staring slightly to the left, aware of my gaze on her. She waited. She remained silent. She knew I was more than curious.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘There’s no child as such, just a hope in your head. Just a dream. Nothing inside you yet.’

‘There
is
a child,’ she said sharply, and after a moment added: ‘It’s simply that the child, as yet, has not got its father. The child so far is Niiv, and Niiv alone. It’s waiting for its father. I keep telling it to be patient, but children are such demanding things.’ She glanced back at me again as she said this, and I saw that she was amused, teasing me. ‘This one wants to be born. But without a father, how can it grow properly?’

‘How indeed?’

We rode on in silence for a long, long time. I spent a lot of that time trying to decide whether Niiv frightened me or fascinated me. As she had spoken I had felt my flesh crawl. My bones were almost singing! All my life I had believed that my skills in charm—some call it enchantment—were carved on my bones, and though I wasn’t using charm at this time (it’s costly), the bones themselves were very effective amulets, always signalling to me to be careful.

Indeed, warning signals were everywhere, most particularly in the flash and swirl of fire in the night sky behind us, silent and sinister. That northern horizon was alive with cascading light, a shimmering fall of burning colour that was constantly reflected in the polished bead and bone of Niiv’s elaborate headdress.

My concerns were twofold. It was clear to me that Niiv was
playing
with the skills in charm she had been given by the Lady of the North. She was dabbling in sorcery in the most obvious way. She had started a child in her womb, sensing that this earthly vessel would be useful in absorbing other life and other skills. I had known of this trick from the moment I had started on the Path, and knew how to take avoiding action. It was a dangerous strategy, and Niiv was still too young to control it; and so she, too, was dangerous. She had certainly learned some small magic from her father, though I doubted that he had intended to teach her. Everything suggested to me that she had stolen her small skills from him. And now her father was dead, horribly drowned. And she had used that death to claim his right in enchantment. Her brother seemed to exist in an airy world of his own, riding well behind us. Niiv had no one advising her, no one counselling her, no one ready to control her excesses. And I was aware that not even Niiv knew how dangerous she was.