Saga, page 7
‘I think I’m going to unravel the mystery of this book. Find out if it’s genuine.’
‘Of course it’s genuine!’ Mum said indignantly.
‘Well, it might not be, Mum. Seriously. If something is too good to be true it usually is. Isn’t that what you tell me like all the time?’
‘I don’t see why it wouldn’t be real. It’s right here. Names and dates. Look how old it is.’
‘Yeah but just like fake news, there are fake relics and art and books out there too. The saint’s name in there is a bit suss.’
Mum shrugged. ‘So how are you going to find that out?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.
‘But it could be a marvellous distraction for you.’
‘Stop saying that! Like I could ever forget about Paisley for even a moment. You can’t just point at something else to try to distract me from my grief, Mum. It’s not that simple, okay?’
‘Okay, sorry. But it would be something to occupy yourself with. I don’t know how you’d get it authenticated though.’
‘I guess I’ll do some research online, maybe find out how you get old stuff dated by experts, and look up all these women, see what I can find out about them. Cait’s doing a unit on history or archaeology this coming semester. I’ll see what she thinks.’
To be honest I was getting excited about the prospect of finding out more about the names in the book. My enthusiasm was literally expanding like a fast-motion flower blooming on a nature documentary. All these women potentially related to me! I rang Cait and told her to get her arse to my place asap. She lived right near town so it was just a quick stroll over the train tracks and all the way to the end of the street, which backed onto the Megalong Valley.
Cait stared at me, her deeply Goth-blackened eyes widening like saucers as she stared at the closed book. ‘If this is real, it’s like you are related to Joan of bloody Arc.’
‘I know, right.’ I laughed.
‘Show me again.’ Cait reached for the book.
‘Be careful,’ I warned. ‘It’s getting a bit shabby around the edges where it’s been bound there, see? I don’t want to damage it. It might be worth a fortune.’
‘True,’ she said and took the book gently, turning the pages with great reverence. ‘Old books are valuable collectibles and I think they can go for heaps. I read something about a Shakespeare thing going for millions.’
Millions? That was food for thought.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, peering close and narrowing her eyes, running a light finger over the inside of the front cover. ‘Feel.’
She took my forefinger and rubbed it gently over the leathery surface.
‘Scratches?’
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling. ‘You can see the scratches if you look close. They feel like reverse Braille. Instead of raised lines, they are cut into the fabric or material or whatever this weird stuff is.’
‘Wear and tear?’ I wondered aloud.
‘No,’ she replied thoughtfully, looking really closely at different angles. ‘They seem kind of uniform and just in this little area. They seem like lines, like a method of counting. Some are crossed. It’s hard to make out. Give me your phone so we can magnify it.’
We tried that but could see the lines only a little more clearly. It looked slightly darker in the faint cracks as if it had once been inked.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ I said and went to my desk drawer. I still had some thin white tissue paper recycled from Christmas pressies. I grabbed a lead pencil. ‘Here. Learned this trick in kindergarten.’
‘Careful,’ she whispered, watching as I began.
‘Might work,’ I murmured as I stretched the paper over the surface. ‘Hold it tight, Cait.’
And then very gently I put the pencil on its side and began shading. ‘Worked on raised things like twenty cent pieces but it might, yeah, look. See.’
A glimmer of triumph.
I kept working over the scratched surface until I felt my heart begin to speed up a bit and a warm flush came over my skin. The scratches did seem to be deliberate and were in a very clear pattern.
‘Are they runes or something?’ Cait asked, mesmerised.
‘Don’t know.’
I kept going until I was certain I’d captured them all.
‘Wow.’
‘Double wow.’
We stared at the rows of lines that looked very much like stylised pine trees.
‘Could be some old way of counting, like an abacus or something.’
I put the book aside and we spread the paper on my desk. I opened my laptop and began searching ‘runes’.
I looked at what came up.
‘Hmmm, similar.’
Cait and I huddled in front of the screen and scrolled and searched through all sorts of things. Different kinds of ancient symbols and writing. The marks weren’t quite runes. Not at all like the Sumerian or Egyptian hieroglyphs. We peered closer, momentum building, frustration simmering, desperate for some lightbulb moment.
And then it came.
We stared at the images in front of us and then at one another and exploded at the same time.
‘Ogham?’
We pronounced it differently from one another, laughed and then sucked in our collective breaths.
‘It is, though,’ I said excitedly. ‘Isn’t it? They look the same. Almost identical.’
She nodded enthusiastically and began reading.
‘Ogham is a really ancient Irish or Gaelic form of writing. It’s appeared on stones and manuscripts from ancient Ireland, Wales, Scotland and as far away as the Orkney Islands and they think it’s possibly related to early runes. A Gaelic version of runes. Maybe Pictish.’
‘Pictish?’
‘Yeah.’ She kept reading. ‘Like, the Picts are some forgotten ancient people of Briton who got wiped out by the Vikings. They think the Ogham writing is connected to them.’
‘Wow.’
‘Hmmm. How can we figure out what it means?’ she asked.
I searched on the computer while Cait went and got a pen and began rewriting and copying the symbols onto a sturdy piece of paper. We both sat on my bed ignoring the rain outside that had begun to hammer down.
‘There’s an Ogham online translator but it looks a bit dodgy.’ I kept looking. ‘Maybe we could track down someone who actually knows what they are doing,’ I muttered. ‘This is just silly. Maybe we need to find a proper linguist or Gaelic academic or something. Send them a copy and ask.’
‘Maybe. But surely there’s some way of finding out how to translate it. There’s plenty of info online,’ Cait said, sitting next to me trying to elbow me aside. ‘Let me see.’
‘I’m looking. I’m looking.’ I pushed her back. ‘Settle down. Look. Listen to this. Ogham is read vertically from bottom to top and it has twenty letters called feda, which means trees.’
‘Well, that’s not surprising cos they look like rows of weird little pine trees.’
I hummed, trying to absorb it all, speed-reading.
‘I reckon we should try to decipher it ourselves,’ Cait said. ‘Seriously. Where’s the fun in getting someone else to do it? You can learn pretty much anything from the internet.’
I took a deep breath and let the butterflies of eagerness settle down.
‘Okay, Cait,’ I said, feeling a bit drained and overwhelmed by our incredible discovery. ‘Let’s take a copy each and separately go away and learn what we can, see what we can come up with. I’ll race you. And then if we end up with similar translations it might mean we are on the right track. If we can’t do it or come up with nonsense, we’ll ask for advice from an expert. There are some. There’s a heap of references here with names.’
‘I’m in. This is soooo full on and exciting.’ Cait bounced on the bed and made some high-pitched noise that sounded like squeee.
I nodded and looked at the mysterious book.
‘I think this is the beginning,’ I grinned at the book and then at Cait, ‘of a beautiful adventure.’
And, I smiled to myself, a major distraction.
The storm had drifted away from the island and a light snow lay over the hills like a shroud, soft, still and silent. The sky above me was an uneven, clouded grey and the sea below was an expanse of choppy dark green. The whispers of the ocean were coming from down by the shore, beneath the carping shriek of gulls. The island had shaken off the howling blizzard and returned to normal. Yet something had changed. The world felt slightly askew as if the storm had thrown us all off course.
After taking some fresh milk and seeded bread for my morning meal, I walked up to the well with Arnórr jarlaskáld. We stopped on the rise of the hill that looked across to the mound of the Brough of Birsay on one side and down towards the Sands of Evie beach on the other, where beyond I could just make out the tiny dot of the holy island Eyin Helga.
‘Teacher,’ I ventured nervously, ‘the king has requested my company today because he wants to tell me of the Battle of Stamford Bridge and how his father fell bravely so that I can begin to craft a great retelling of it.’
Arnórr looked at me with his crow-like eyes and his lips curled into a cruel sneer.
‘Is that so, girl of the Goddess?’ he asked slowly. ‘The boy, Olav, who is not yet king I might remind you, was not even present at the battle. He stayed with the ship and went nowhere near the war grounds.’
I felt my face prickle at having my falsehood uncovered so readily and cursed myself for being so bold. Olav had invited me out for the day but to play, not to verse.
‘I meant,’ I lied more boldly, ‘that he wishes to tell me all the tales he has heard from his men so that I might cast a poem that presents his father in a heroic light.’
He regarded me coolly.
‘If that’s what the uncrowned king requests.’ He spoke flatly. ‘But you cannot be distracted, Astrid. Work on the poem. Not the boy.’
My face flushed with heat and my eyes stung with embarrassment.
‘I … I … Sir, I am given to the Goddess and never …’
By offering a jagged excuse, I was making myself sound guilty, which confused me because I really didn’t have anything to be guilty about. I was obeying the king’s request. That was all. Accepting his royal invitation.
‘I am a master poet, dear girl.’ Arnórr raised one eyebrow. ‘My eyes see things other eyes do not. And to be a true poet you must also. Not just things as they were or are, but as they might be. If you know enough stories, Astrid, everything is predictable.’
He touched one long finger to the blue moon on my forehead.
I sat behind Olav on his tall white horse, tightly holding his body as we galloped southwards to the Sacred Fields that swept down to the twin lochs. I wondered if the things I was feeling – the warmth and pull of familiarity for Olav and my desire to be close to him – were just my imagination or dreams using my Goddess sight. Perhaps they were loose threads of tattered childhood memories? I shut my eyes from the glare of the world of white snow and ghostly dim light, rested my forehead on the furs covering Olav’s back and breathed in the scent of him.
A flash of an image.
Olav standing before an enormous crowd, a crown upon his head, beaming, and a woman beside him, small, covered in a wedding veil as he held a crown over her head.
A vision or a wish?
A bird screeched, startling me. The island birds and winter fowl had taken shelter during the blizzard. Birds were resilient and tough. I’d come to know them well during my retreat on the tiny holy island of Eyin Helga. But many had returned from their hiding places to marvel at the snow, confused as their claws sank into the soft fall. Ducks used their webbed feet as snow-paddles and waddled through iced puddles, croaking and squabbling.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I called to Olav, and his blond head nodded in reply.
He shouted back, ‘Incredibly beautiful! You get used to winter snow in Norway but here on the islands snow is somehow more special. Winters are much more fierce and unforgiving back in the homeland.’
The horse beneath us was strong and fast, even in the snow, and smoky bursts of white were thrown up as he disturbed the fall, reminding me of breaking waves on the surface of the sea. After my year of silence I noticed things around me that before I had not been so aware of and I marvelled at how much I had missed of the world. A patch of cloud overhead resembled an owl winking down at me from the pale sky. Olav’s body seemed to melt into mine wherever we touched. I pressed into the hard warmth of the young man in front of me, my heart beating in time with the horse’s hooves.
The Blessed Standing Stones loomed up ahead like giant sentries. We passed the Mother Barrow, a hill containing the most sacred birthplace of the Goddess. It was covered in snow. Beyond it I could see a paddock filled with squat black cows sheltering against a stone cottage. Olav slowed his horse and we clopped by the handful of farms, moving closer to the isthmus that ran between the salted loch and the freshwater one. The stones marked the way of the sacred processional, a ritual that stretched back into the dark and very distant past, all the way to the old place that marked the landing of the Sky-Men at the Hill of Skerrabra on the far west coast.
We came to the two most important tall stones, the oldest ones. The Odin stone and his companion, the Freyja stone, just a little further away. The wind raced over my face and I felt the skin all over my body rise up into startled gooseflesh. These two ancient stones had come to be known by these names after the Norsemen came to the islands, but they had been standing there for an eternity before that. They were the Oldest Folk, Nerthus and Njord, turned to stone by age. Almost as old as time itself.
Nerthus had started as a ball of clay that mixed with saltwater and seaweed to grow into the Mother Earth we know, the Goddess of land and sea. Njord had fallen from the sky, striking down as a bolt of lightning, with his army coming behind him with the rain and hail. They brought iron swords and battles. Njord had demanded co-regency with the Goddess and began to attempt to tame her. The current warring state of the world was the result. Nerthus, of course, could not be tamed and it was foolhardy to even try.
Olav pulled up his horse and turned his face towards me.
‘Shall we alight?’
‘Yes.’ I groaned with relief.
My back and haunches were sore from the unfamiliar ride. I felt the need to stretch my legs and feel the frozen earth beneath my boots. I was used to walking and could walk for all the hours of a summer day without getting tired but I’d never been astride a horse and the initial excitement had given way to discomfort.
The cold snaked up through my feet and I gasped sharply, the dragon breaths of winter coming like smoke from my mouth. I stumbled as I lost my footing in a soft mound of melting snow, but Olav caught me by the arm and steadied me. His hands were strong.
‘Remember the promise we made as children, here at the stones, Astrid?’ Olav asked, looking down into my eyes. ‘We would have been nearly eight.’
I smiled awkwardly. I did remember. He kept his hands on my arm.
‘We were just silly children,’ I stammered and looked down at the packed ice about my frigid feet. ‘Fostered with peasants to give us a normal childhood.’
‘And yet now we are nothing but normal. A king and a priestess,’ he said, reaching a finger under my chin, to lift my head to meet his gaze. ‘These last few weeks, Astrid, I’ve been watching you study with Arnórr and I’ve been thinking about that promise. I think we were seeing things with the clarity and truth that innocence offers. I have never forgotten you. There was something. Something bigger than us.’
I pulled away from him and stomped through the snow towards the Odin Stone, which was dusted white but still showed the moss-rusted, weathered signs of the ancients. The monolith stood much taller than me and I ran my gloved hand over the rough surface. Just above my eye level was a hole that had been worn straight through and I stepped up on the ridge of stone beside it so that I could stare through it, looking up towards the open waters of Loch Harray. The expanse of water was almost black. The surface was flat with small jagged peaks of waves rippling over the surface.
I was trying to push away Olav’s memories because I had been mulling them over in my mind for weeks as well, watching him, feeling drawn to him, wondering if they bore any meaning. We had shared nothing but knowing smiles and shy sideward glances until the day before, when we had spoken in the animal compound, but I had spent the previous days keenly longing for a glimpse of him, holding my breath, waiting for the knowing looks he sent my way.
As I focused on a sweep of eider ducks skating low across the water, I was startled to see them disappear. Through the spy hole, half of Olav’s face appeared and one blue eye stared at me. It had been eight years since we had looked at one another this way. Back then both of us needed to stand on many stones to reach the spy hole.
I felt my face tingle and my belly roll over like a breaching whale. Those promises had been childish fancies, make-believe dreams about what life might be like as an adult. We had little idea how different our destinies would be: me to take the place of the High Priestess in the Temple, keeping the knowledge of the True Things alive here in the ancient land of the blue-painted people; and Olav to be crowned King of Norway, one of the greatest kingdoms in all existence. He was to live in a world of flesh and blood and gems and foreign silks while I would reign in the realm of spirit and sea and dirt.
‘We promised each other that we would grow up and marry one day,’ he said carefully.
I recoiled. With my heart beating and my face red with confusion, I walked away from the tall stone, up towards the isthmus separating the two lochs, along the path that led to the Circle of Stones. I heard the crunch of Olav’s footsteps as he followed me through the melting snow towards the briny shore of the Loch of Stenness. I stopped at the Watchstone and turned to him.
