Raven Speak (9781442402492) (15 page)

But she was so close to home and the wind was growing ever stronger. The weather was changing. Closing her eyes, hoping not to hear it, she waited. Rune pawed the crunching sand. Surf splashed the rocks and receded, gurgling. Teasing gusts hummed and faded.

Nothing.

Relieved, she bumped Rune's sides, urging him on, when the wail sounded again. Her eye swung toward a tumble of boulders and brush fringing a high stand of pines. It came from a calf, she was certain, and her mind raced to make sense of that. Had their heavily pregnant cow gotten out of the byre? And if so, what was she doing this far from the settlement? The call repeated, too pitiful to ignore, and she nudged Rune away from the shore, allowing him to pick an upward passage between and around the rocks, decaying logs, and dense stands of brush. It was difficult going, especially with the fading light and their weaving approach. When it seemed they must be steps from discovering the poor creature, two ravens scrambled past, flapping and squawking. She grimaced. Wenda's ravens, no doubt. Were they following her? And what mischief were they up to now?

Rune plowed blindly through another thicket of tangled brush and emerged in a concealed clearing and nearly on top of the clan's lone cow. Listlessly nosing through a brown mat of pine needles, she barely flicked an ear at their arrival. Her newborn calf, all angular bones and rumpled hair, fretted at her side. He butted the slack udder with his wet nose, let out a mournful bawl as he danced sideways, and tried again, all the while swishing his tail in anxious jerks.

The calf was alive and well! Their herd had doubled! A fiery determination to protect the pair hurried Asa from Rune's back. She dragged the ropy kelp from his shoulders and piled it beneath the hungry cow. As she straightened, an unnaturally bright fleck of white on the other side of the clearing caught her eye. Another calf? The cow must have been carrying twins. Their herd had tripled! Mindful of the slippery mountainside, she hurried over to examine the speckled newborn sleeping in an awkward heap.

Shock trampled her excitement. Not only was the calf already dead, it had no eyes. Its bloody sockets gaped blindly at the world. That could be the work of ravens. They'd been known to kill young animals by the most horrible practice of pecking out their eyes. Still … stark images flashed through her mind: the sightless fish suspended outside Wenda's cave, the woman's own hollow eye cavity. Wenda's pointed questions echoed:
What would you do to rescue your clan? Would you give up an eye
? An uncomfortable ripple along her spine suggested a connection. She'd not escaped Wenda yet.

A loud
kra!
made her flinch, and one of the ravens swooped
past to land on the calf's carcass, triumphant. Immediately it began pecking at the empty socket, teasing away a stringy piece of flesh and gobbling it down. That emboldened the second raven to join in.

How dare they? This defenseless calf had been her clan's future. She screamed and lunged, sending them into hasty flight, then stood over the calf protectively. At the very least there'd be some meat in the cooking pot tonight.

But first she needed to get the cow and her surviving calf into the safety of the byre. How could someone have been so careless as to leave the door open? That was Jorgen's doing, no doubt, and as disquieting recollections invaded her, she detected a noise in the forest and froze. Rune's ears pricked. Silently she moved to his side, ready to jump on his back and return to the open shore where they could gallop. A twig broke, some dried leaves crackled, and Rune gave a loud whinny. Answering whinnies ricocheted through the trees. Her father's horses! More good news.

And hard on that joy: fear. Jorgen wanted to kill them, especially Rune. She had to face him, she knew, but Rune didn't. For now he'd be safer in the forest. As fast as she could, she unknotted the rope and let the bags fall. Amongst the trees, unseen hooves pawed anxiously at the earth. Rune whinnied again and the echoing calls returned.

Gently she laid her hand on his wounds; their slight stickiness left only a faint webbing of red on her palm. “Be careful,” she whispered, and slapped his rump, sending him off. He bounded a
few strides upward, then came to a halt to look over his shoulder. From beneath his shaggy black forelock his eyes questioned. “It's all right.” She flung her arms in the air. “Go.” Bunching his haunches, he clambered eagerly up the rocky incline, nickering between grunts. When he disappeared into the forest, such an overwhelming sense of loss swept her that she had to close her eyes and turn away.

The damp winds surging up the slope carried the smell of wood smoke and a promise of warmth. Night was near, and it was time to get the cow and her calf to safety. Time to get under a roof herself.

Freeing the rope from the bags, she looped it around the cow's thin neck, careful not to let it cut into the dangling flap at her throat. She gave a gentle tug, which the cow blatantly ignored. She tugged harder, but the cow continued nosing the kelp. Her calf, meanwhile, having found a teat with milk, was suckling hungrily, pausing on occasion to butt his mother's flank for more.

She sighed in frustration. Horses were so much more agreeable than cows. How was she going to goad these two toward the byre? To add to her distress, a dank gloom was creeping across the clearing and the not-too-distant hiss of rain sounded high above. There was no time to waste. She choked up on the rope with both hands, leaned into her heels, and pulled hard. The cow twisted her head obstinately, not budging. Rain suddenly engulfed the mountain with a deafening roar. Muddy rivulets began churning down the slope, soaking her boots. She gave one more hard tug,
lost her balance, and fell. Gravel bit her hand as soppy earth soaked her skirt.

That was it. Exasperated, she yanked the rope from the cow, hoisted the dead calf onto her shoulders, managed to grab the bags, and, stumbling under the soggy burden of her increasingly clingy clothes, made her way down from the forest and homeward. The cow and her calf would have to fend for themselves until morning. She was cold and tired, and now drenched as well, and she wanted to sleep under a roof. And she wanted to see her mother.

That guilty desire pushed her even faster through the deluge: She'd been away too long; she'd tarried with the animals too long. The fevered pronouncement Wenda had made upon their meeting—that her mother was already dead—tormented her mind. She tried drowning it in mumbled prayers to Freyja, her mother's favorite goddess, and hurried on.

Out of breath, her legs spongy, she reached the settlement. The rain eased, and a few glittery stars poked through a twilight sky mottled with drifting gray clouds. Everywhere water roared across the earth to rejoin the sea. She was more than ready to rejoin her clan. Readjusting her load and kicking at the sopping hem of her cloak, she trudged down the last rise.

In the distance the longhouse door opened. A greeting rose in her throat until she recognized Jorgen and she froze in place, praying to meld with the darkened hillside at her back. She hadn't planned on encountering him out here.

Her blood thudded along her neck, her tongue thickened, and
her eyeballs grew chill because she didn't dare even to blink. She watched him jerk his head in a funny way, sniffing at something, looking for something. Finally, after an unbearable while, he retreated inside the longhouse and pulled the door closed after him. Waters still rushed across the earth, noisily returning home, but she couldn't move.

Hating herself, she stood undecided. Her mother was mere steps away. But so was Jorgen.

A few latent raindrops, fat and hard, pelted her head. Yet she stood. A flash of lightning stripped the land naked, startling her to momentary blindness, and when the land fell black again she bolted clumsily toward the nearest shelter: the abandoned byre holding the clan's dead. It would have to do for now.

She half expected an unhappy
draugr
to knock her flat when she entered, but only a rotten odor slapped her face. Not daring to proceed further, she sank to the earthen floor just inside the door and waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom.

The cloudburst pounded the sod then, as before, abruptly passed on. The steady
drip-drip-drip
of water punctuated the ensuing silence.

As the gloom receded the dead slowly appeared. A mute audience, they stretched away in a neat row, side by side, heads abutting the opposite wall, shapes differing only in the dim color and weave of their blankets. The farther bundles seemed flattened somehow, as if the unhoused souls, tired of waiting for burial, were tugging their decaying bodies into the ground unnoticed.
They had been Einarr, Systa, and her own brother, Harald, there in the oat-colored blanket her mother had woven. The first three to die, though with so many passing it was hard to keep the order straight. Surrounded by so much death, she became acutely aware of her heavy breath warming her cold lips.

Nearer were the bundled forms of Kolla and her shy daughter Ragna, and still nearer, the slender remains of her other brother, Magnus. A bright vision of his freckled face offering a gap-toothed smile sprang to mind. Always laughing, he'd been her father's favorite from the day he was born, and when he'd died, her father had retreated to the bed-closet and not come out for two entire days. Magnus's loss, she believed, had made it easier for her father to step onto the
Sea Dragon
and steer it into the storm.

She pressed her chin onto her knees. She'd not cried for any of them, even her own brothers, and had stoically swallowed the pain their deaths delivered. Death was part of life. And yet … and yet it seemed there'd been far too many deaths of late, and that they'd begun weighing inside her like so many stones. She shifted position and drew a difficult breath.

All the while that her eyes were passing back and forth over the bundles, she knew she was pointedly ignoring the nearest one, the newest one, the only bundle in the row free of dust and leaf litter. The only form wrapped in a beautiful madder-red blanket and pinned with her mother's filigreed, gold-and-silver brooch. Its two gripping beasts, eternally entangled, glinted even in the dark.

Clasping her knees tighter, Asa forced herself to look. Tears
brimmed. Her mother's death wasn't unexpected, she scolded; and yet, childishly, she felt cheated. She'd never again feel her mother's smooth, calloused hand cupping her chin; never trade good-natured teasing with her; never witness her mother's delight in a double fistful of purple foxgloves dangling on their stalks. All of which she might have had if she hadn't galloped away in the middle of the night and left her mother to die alone. The tears rose further and trembled upon her lashes. She bit her lip, blinked rapidly, angrily, and fought them away. Digging her chin harder into her knees, she recalled every last thing that she loved about her mother and mentally pinned those memories to her shroud, that her mother might remember them also and smile in her spirit world.

Later, when she'd gone numb even to the odors in the cold byre, she sat thinking how everything had gone wrong and she arranged much of the blame around her own shoulders. Long ago she should have seen how lost her father was and how sick her mother was; they'd just hidden their needs so well. And what had she done? She'd galloped off to save Rune and, all right, to seek a little food for the clan, but had been talked (by a fool!) into setting her sights on a whale—a whale, of all things! (And who, really, was the fool?) If only she'd kept her eyes fixed on the ground, gathered some roots or some nuts, taken smaller, safer steps, maybe then she would have returned in time to save her mother. Or at least returned in time to give her a farewell kiss, to prevent her from dying alone.

Now she herself was left truly alone. Her mother and brothers were dead; her father was gone and Rune was gone. She had no one to help her and, worse, though separated by dark and distance, she sensed Jorgen's malicious, manipulative presence. Who knew what he was up to?

Hah! She did know what he was up to: He was taking over leadership of the clan. And with her mother dead, he'd probably already assumed her father's seat of honor beside the fire. That twisted her belly. How was she going to live here? She heaved a sigh as Wenda's words came back to her:
Has all of your father's work been so easily tossed to the winds? Yes,
she answered bitterly,
as easily as smoke
.

It seemed ages since she'd slurped down Wenda's mussel stew; the warm broth would certainly have been welcomed now. Her mouth watered involuntarily. What about the meats left in the bags? Without having to stir too much, she managed to fumble through them.

A lone mutton loin, as heavy and as hard as a rock, lay inside the first bag. It would require a lot of boiling. The dried fish might be palatable so she blindly reached into the second bag. Her fingers met not food but something thick and soft and, even without being able to see it, she knew it was the blue cloak she'd worn in Wenda's cave. At least she could be warm; that was something. Hastily she peeled off her wet cloak and wrapped herself inside the blue one. The garment was nothing short of magical in easing her shivering at once.

Reaching into the last bag she discovered the partially dried fishes. She tore one apart and teased the still tender flesh from the bones. The meat flaked on her tongue and quieted her stomach. Her back unknotted and, with warmth oozing through her body, she gave in to sleep.

She had no idea how much time had passed when she was startled awake by the sound of steps approaching the byre. She held her breath, her heart thumping. Jorgen! It had to be him; no one else dared enter here. She was trapped.

Fastening her eyes in the direction of the door, though she could barely make it out in the darkness, she waited. Another step, muffled by mud, and then another. Slow, hesitant. What was he up to? A whiffle, akin to an animal's breath, came just on the other side of the wall at her back; it was followed by a low, questioning nicker. Rune.