The Island House (35 page)

The owl was hunting again. As Freya trudged back across the meadow, she watched it quarter the ground beneath its wings.

She didn’t know if she liked the owl—there was something alien in those great unblinking eyes, that golden, vacant stare.

She stopped. The bird was behaving strangely—it seemed to be flying backward and forward in a regular pattern.

Squinting in the half-light, Freya watched as the owl fluttered down and landed on the apex of the field tent. Wings neatly folded, it turned its head all the way around to stare at her.

Freya called out. “Impressive—very
Exorcist.
”

The owl ignored her. It launched into the air, heading toward the rookery.
That’s right. Go rob a nest. Knock yourself out.

Freya sighed and walked on. She was weary, and the ring stones were farther away than they looked—everything always was on Findnar. She wasn’t enjoying the thought of rigging a large tarpaulin single-handed in a rising wind either, but once she arrived beside the pit, training took over. With a fair bit of swearing, she finally outmaneuvered the flapping plastic and pinned it to the earth.

Arms in the air, Freya shouted, “Thank you!” Then, on impulse, she bowed to the stones before she marched off toward Compline. “See you all soon. Be good.”
Each step, and I’m closer to hot, hot water . . .

As she reached the site of the girl’s grave, Freya stopped to collect the bagged skeleton and strike the tent. The sun was sinking
into a furnace of scarlet and gold on the western horizon, and she paused to admire the dying of the day, turning for one last look at the ring stones.

Something moved in the inner circle. Fluttered. A figure.

This time there was no mist and no ambiguity. This time, someone really
was
standing there—a woman—and it wasn’t Katherine. This person wore a dress of some kind—a dull red color. No. Not a dress, a tunic. That’s what fluttered.

“Hello.” Freya started forward. “Hi.” The stranger was too far away to hear. Freya waved.

The girl—if it really was a girl—was standing close to the center of the inner ring.

She was standing right beside the excavation.

Freya began to run toward the stones.

CHAPTER 23

B
EAR WATCHED
from a distance. He always watched from a distance now.

Being a lay servant, he stood at the back of the church, but he could see Signy lying facedown before the altar with the other girls.

He had not been able to change her mind. Now, in the blustering spring weather, as drafts rushed through the cold church, it would be accomplished. Today Signy would take vows. She would become a postulant and then, in time, she would be made a nun.

As the moon had waned last night, there had been one final, pointless conversation.

“You know why I am doing this, Bear.” She had been patient with him, as if he were a stubborn child. “I did not resist temptation. The life of our baby was taken to show me the sin of what happened between us—and that the Gods in the stones are false. It is for me to make amends now and serve my brothers and sisters, and the Lord, as faithfully as I can.”

At first he had tried to reason with her. “But what will you serve, Signy? A tortured man dying slowly so that you can drink his blood, eat his flesh?” His voice had risen. “We are not savages.” He’d grabbed her wrist when she tried to turn away. “Look at this scar. We two are joined by blood—our own and that of our child. Please.
Please.
This place just wants slaves, willing fools who cannot see the truth.”

Signy had shaken her head. Dark circles under her eyes told of deep suffering. “I will pray for you at the vigil tonight, Bear, and
I shall pray, also, that you may be healed and find peace—as I pray for the soul of our daughter.” Her voice had cracked. That was something, some indication that she still felt emotion. His Signy.

But the girl in the black kirtle who lay before the altar today was no longer his Signy.

Last night, though, his Signy had faltered when she said, “I must give back your gifts, Bear. I can take nothing that is not sacred into the convent.” And she had handed him the little ship, then the knife.

Neither could speak. At last he’d said, “But this they cannot take from you.” He’d marked the little lead box with a cross.

So many weeks of winter work with only a rushlight to see by, but he’d made the box and the crucifix that lay inside. Jet from the cliff formed the body of the cross, smoothed and burnished with sand and pinned with a tiny nail of copper, and the crucifix was small enough to hang between Signy’s breasts. Something of him would go with her, if she would allow it.

Hesitant, she’d taken his present in her hands.

Bear groaned, and some of the monks turned. They frowned at him, but he did not care.
That girl, the one on the end, she’s mine, not yours.
That was what he wanted to say. But it was not true. Not now, for last night he’d destroyed their last moment together.

As he tied the crucifix around Signy’s neck, he’d taken her face between his hands. “I brought you back from the dark kingdom, once. I gave you life. Do not take mine away.”

“No!”

Signy had pushed him, and he’d fallen hard against the wall of the church. A heap of rags on the cold earth, he’d watched her run.

Perhaps she had heard him. Perhaps, as she lay there before the altar, his words were in her head still. “You are not a nun, Signy. You’ll never be a real nun. Don’t lie to yourself.”

He’d pulled himself up against the rigid wall, the chilled, cut stone. Fury swamped sorrow as he remembered. This building was the symbol of all that had been taken from him, and yet this
Christ, the ghost they all worshipped here, had been only a man—they all said that. How could he also be a God?

One by one, the postulants to be were commanded to stand before Abbot Cuillin. Gunnhilde stepped forward to attend them, emotional as any bride’s mother. In the sisters’ dormitory, Bear knew their worldly clothing would be stripped away and their hair cut to stubble. Rerobed in postulants’ habits, the four would be dedicated to a God none of them would ever see, and Signy would never, willingly, look at him again.

Waiting for the girls to return, Abbot Cuillin censed the altar. All his brethren knelt, heads bowed, and beat their chests in accusation of sin.

Bear snorted. How much iniquity could be accomplished on a gruel of oats, barley, and seaweed? He would not watch what was to come, he could not.

Emerging from the church like a badger from its hole, Bear blinked in the cool spring light. He knew what he’d left behind. Darkness. The church was lit only by lamps of seal oil and odorous tallow candles, and this was the frightened, haunted world that Signy, the bright, sweet friend of his youth, would now inhabit willingly.

Bear ran toward the meadow where the barley was a green fuzz of urgent life. The rising swell of voices followed him, and then the bell began; the service of consecration was finished.

He leaned on his staff. It was done. Signy was lost to him.

Bear turned and stared at the circle of stones. They had buried their daughter there, and now he would make her soul an offering, the ship he had made for her mother.

CHAPTER 24

I
N THE
two years since her profession as a novice, much had changed for Signy, and that was because she had been singled out by Brother Anselm, the monk who ran the Scriptorium.

One evening in the Abbey kitchen, after she had finished pounding dried fish for tomorrow’s break-fast, she was told to rake the ash and reset the fire for the morning.

But Signy found a piece of good charcoal among the spent coals, and sinfully, she hoarded it. Every day between Vespers and Compline, a little personal time was permitted, and this particular evening Signy decided she would draw just to vary the tedium of prayers, work, and sleep. She liked to draw when no one was watching.

In the nuns’ chamber, her sisters were bent over sewing and handwork at a table. Signy withdrew to the end of the room, farthest from the lamps, and faced the wall. There she prostrated herself as if in private contemplation. From the back, in this dim corner, it would look as if she was telling the rosary, but surreptitiously she had begun to sketch on the flagged floor, her face against the stone.

After a time, she knelt to inspect what she had drawn.

“Now, what are you doing here, Sister?” Brother Anselm had been made the chaplain of the novices recently, and it was his habit to join his charges just before the final service of the day.

“Nothing, Father.” Signy scrambled up and tried to move one foot surreptitiously beneath the skirts of her habit to scuff the images she’d made.

Anselm signed a cross over Signy’s bent head. As was proper, the novice was discomforted at being directly addressed, yet he had known her since she was just a small, lost heathen. His heart had been warmed to see her slowly turn from paganism to the one true God.

“Nothing? But you are always so industrious.” The monk waved the girl aside, expecting to see a work of piety from her busy fingers.

There were faces sketched on the stone flags. A likeness of Sister Gunnhilde, her age and kindness captured in just a few quick lines, the features of the youngest of the novices, Witlaef, tenderly displayed as the shy child she was.

“But . . . these are secular images.” Brother Anselm’s confusion turned to concern. “Rub them out, Sister. Quickly. You are not to speak of this.” Anselm stood in front of the novice as Signy swiped the images away with the hem of her habit. He raised his voice and addressed the others to distract them. “Sisters, it is time to join your brothers in the chapel. The bell will shortly ring for Compline.”

Processing out behind the nuns and the other novices, Signy reflected on her luck at being discovered only by Anselm, and also on her perverse instinct for implicit disobedience.

Much was risked by drawing what she saw, the world of everyday monastery activity. But some small flicker of defiance still burned in her heart, try though she might to smother it. It was hard to be mindlessly, gratefully obedient hour after hour, but on the day she had miscarried her child, she had turned away from her previous life. By this act she had accepted the power of Christ and His mother into her life, and with that came the obligation to atone for her sin with Bear. Yet sometimes it was hard, and sorrow for all she had lost made the old life beguiling. Signy struggled to fight such thoughts, struggled to banish Bear’s image from her mind, and that of the tiny, perfectly formed baby who had never breathed. Her nameless daughter.

Perhaps, one day, God would tell her when she had suffered enough for what had been done.

“In the Scriptorium, you will work behind this screen.” Anselm pointed to several large panels of woven bog willow. In one corner of the copying hall between two unshuttered windows, a tiny room within the greater space had been created.