Against a Darkening Sky Read online

  AGAINST A DARKENING SKY

  LAUREN B. DAVIS

  Dedication

  As always, this is to Ron. You’re my candle in the window.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part II

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Part III

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Lauren B. Davis

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  The girl held the freckled hand for hours, long past the moment it first began to grow cold. She sat on a stool next to the bed with a sheepskin wrapped around her shoulders, yet still she shivered, for nothing but embers remained of the fire in the clay pit. The bodies of her aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbours lay scattered about the hamlet, some still in their beds, some on the floor of their houses, some waiting on the burial ground. Those who died early, her father and brothers and sister among them, rested in peace beneath the earth. A terrible silence squatted, troll-like, over the village. The dogs harried the corpses until the girl threw stones at them, and then they disappeared to the hills. The two shepherd boys had either run off or died, and the sheep had wandered away. Even the few remaining chickens refrained from squawking. When she had gone down to the river to get water yesterday, the cries of a pair of early-nesting ravens startled her, but now they, too, were silent. Her swollen eyes felt sand-filled. With her free hand, she touched her neck, her armpit, her groin. Nothing.

  Her mother’s mouth had fallen open, the skin sagging and mottled, the eyes half closed. Her hair, once the colour of autumn barley in the sunlight, lay flat and tangled, and a small brown spider tiptoed through the lank strands. Soon her flame-bright mother would not look like her mother at all. The girl had tried to lure death to her by sitting very still, but death would not come. She could not change the web of wyrd.

  The girl closed her eyes and tried to let go of her mother’s hand, but the fingers had stiffened. The rigid claw would not budge, and with her heart pounding in her ears, she used force. The stool tipped and the girl thumped on the floorboards. There were more tears then.

  She crawled to her bed and imagined her sister’s soft scent in the straw-stuffed linen mattress. She rolled over, covered herself with a fur, and stared at the whitewashed wall. The restless dead swirled through the air, hopping from rafter to rafter, their fingers at the shutters, their wails on the wind, their chill breath on her cheek. She thought how easy, how comforting, it would be to go mad. She wondered if she could open herself to it and willed her muscles to relax, her mind to slacken. Like a great ragged owl, despair swooped down, spreading tattered wings. She shrieked, shielded her head with her arms, and curled into a weeping ball until she fell into a sort of sleep. Or, she assumed she slept, for there stood her mother, at the end of the bed, wearing a yellow tunic held at the shoulders with garnet brooches. The girl tried to rise and rush into her mother’s arms, but she could not move. Arms, legs, hands, fingers, head—all pinned by a cruel enchantment. She wanted to call out, but her voice was tight in her mouth. Her mother held out her hands—pale, freckled, and callused. Her hair lay unbraided on her shoulders, shining like sunlight. Surely she’d come to take her daughter to the hall of the gods. And yet it appeared her mother could come no closer than the end of the bed, though her grey eyes pleaded. It took everything the girl had to move even a finger. Not enough. Trapped as an ant in amber. Her mother’s lips moved, silently, and still the girl heard her.

  The dead cannot stay with the living. The living cannot come with the dead. Child, you must walk …

  The bed tilted, the earth slipped, and the girl slid into darkness.

  Under the boy’s grip the oar was slippery with sea-water and his hands were cramped claws in the icy wind. Frequently he wiped his hands on his thighs to keep his grip sure. His skin had cracked and flecks of blood spotted his spray-soaked tunic. The salt stung like a thousand wasps, not only in the blisters on his hands but in the still-seeping lash welts on his back. His legs quivered and ached from bracing against the roll and pitch.

  The coracle’s hazel ribs creaked and muttered, protesting the weight of water, but the little boat was strong and flexible. The boy sat on the transom bar, steering with his oar. Above him the sail strained and bulged against the wind. When he set out yesterday at dawn the sea had been calm, but now the waves were steeper and came faster … he knew he might well drown here. If so, then it would be God’s plan. His father had tried to beat his obsession out of him to no avail and now the grey wall of water rose before him, terrifying as his father’s rage. He closed his eyes. The boat teetered, hesitated, trembled at the crest of a wave, and then his stomach was in his mouth as he rushed down toward the unknown depths.

  The prayer was constant on his lips. Lord Jesus, the power of the storm is thine, the power of the sea is thine. If it be thy will, see me to the harbour of thy love.

  All his dreams had been of the wide sky and open sea. All his dreams ended with the angel of the one true God appearing before him—white and gold, with fire round her head and birds hovering above her, beckoning him, a smile on her rosy lips. Her wings were like sails of finest linen, held in a gentle wind. The placid waves lapped at her fine-boned feet. No matter how his father bullied, no matter how his mother cried, despairing of his sanity, he could not refuse the angel’s call. Over many months, in secret moments stolen from his time minding sheep, he built the boat, and set sail without saying goodbye.

  The boy opened his eyes. On the far horizon, under a glowering steelish sky, was a glimmer of gold, and in the glimmer a dark spot. Land then. Ioua. The holy island. It must be. His heart leaped, even as another wave rose before him and blotted out the vision. The boat skewed at the wrong angle. In horror, the boy watched as a wave the size of the chieftain’s hall loomed overhead, frothing at the lip, and then crashed down. Something cracked, tore, split … There was no chance to scream, no chance to howl a prayer. All was black and icy. Rough forces pulled at him. His hands reached for nothing. The world was gone and below was above and above below. So this was how it would end: the angel calling him to his death. His chest burned, but this wet world was cold and dark and silent. He could drift here, slide into her arms and sleep. As though he would open his mouth and breathe …

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  A.D. 626, First Travelling Month, Ad Gefrin, Northumbria

  Earth and sky press up against one another here, as though battling for dominion. On this particular day, all afternoon the clouds have weighed down, draping across the hills like a
wet cloak, the grasses on the plateau dancing to the tune of the wind’s lyre with wild abandon. Now it’s late in the evening and the villagers are asleep, for the nights are short this time of year and there’s much work in the fields. The weather shifts. The sky roils greenish black, shot with blinding gold. Several men stand around the lord’s living quarters. Lord Caelin paces back and forth on the muddy ground, drinking wine from a goatskin, glancing angrily at the door of a hut from behind which come the cries of a woman in childbirth.

  Inside the hut the air is thick with sweat, mugwort, and juniper smoke. The lamps randomly sputter tallow. Wilona, a girl of some sixteen winters, crouches in the shadows, with her back against a tapestry, waiting for instructions. Her long fingers worry the wool of her brown tunic. Freckles spatter her skin; her eyes are the shade of the palest river stones, and her braided hair the colour of a ginger cat. She stops picking at her tunic, chews her thumbnail, and watches her guardian, Touilt.

  Firelight skitters across Touilt’s face as she stands by the labouring woman’s bed. She smiles, the teeth in her mouth sharp. She doesn’t smile often, preferring to cultivate a severe demeanour, and the expression is not now entirely convincing. Her face is craggy, her thin brown hair grey-streaked, her dark brows a forbidding line over her deep-set eyes, which are the colour of wet bark. A fierce intelligence lies behind those eyes, and under their scrutiny more than one strong man has been reduced to admitting a lie. From her belt hang tweezers, a comb, and a loom weight marked with a spiral, sign of a seithkona—a spell woman. Touilt has been the village seithkona for many years, since the night a band of raiding Picts killed her husband and three sons. The power of the gods struck her that night and she wandered for a long moon up in the high hills, letting the visions ride her. In return for taking her husband and sons, the gods granted her the gift of prophecy. When she returned to Ad Gefrin, she knew the language of the runes.

  “Be brave, little mother, be brave,” Touilt whispers to the moaning woman.

  Lady Elfhild, loosely wrapped in a linen gown, squats on the straw strewn over the feather-filled mattress. She clenches fists, jaw, neck. The gods hold Elfhild like a flame in a fragile lamp, in a thin place between worlds. Somewhere, the gods are riddling and tossing the dice of fate. If Wilona listens, she can hear them clatter in the gaming cup. The straw is damp with sweat and carries an acrid tang. A sudden gust of wind rattles the door and riffles the wall hangings.

  Touilt gestures with an outstretched arm that Wilona should bring her blue cloak and the wolf hide lying on a nearby table. When Touilt dons the garments, Wilona shakes her head to displace the glamour—the illusion—that Touilt, with the pelt’s snout over her forehead and its paws on her shoulders, is more wolf than woman. Wilona retreats to her place in the corner. Touilt spits into her palms, rolls a stone rune back and forth between them, lifts the feather mattress, and places the blessed rune beneath the writhing woman.

  It is Elfhild’s second child. The first lived less than a morning, and the birth was hard. Wilona prays. Lady Elfhild’s thighs cramp and Wilona watches the pain run in an icy silver slice up to her abdomen, her spine. Like a slithering blade it twists between her legs. Wilona winces.

  “The child will kill me! Sif, wife of Thunor, I invoke thee, let this child come. Let me live.” Elfhild twists and turns and her eyes focus on something in the corner. “What is that? Some beast!”

  “I see nothing. What do you see?” Touilt makes signs in the air with her fingers—the hammer of Thunor, the protective rune algiz. “Tell me,” she says to Elfhild.

  Wilona looks into the dark corner. Something hunkers there, more a dark space in the shape of a beast than a beast itself. Can’t Touilt smell its dank, marshy scent? Wilona pushes back into the wall. The spirit shudders, takes more solid form—large, long-necked, great-winged.

  Elfhild moans. “I see it. Not Sif. Not her. Sif’s swan. She’s saying something … she calls for a sacrifice!”

  “Then pledge it, and trust the goddess.”

  Elfhild groans as another contraction overtakes her, and Touilt whispers in her ear to seize the bird’s neck and grip him, ride the beast of pain. Touilt runs her hands over Elfhild’s heaving belly. The mother-to-be collapses on the mattress and pants like a dog.

  “Come, Wilona. Make yourself useful. Clean this, and fetch fresh straw. Now.”

  The straw is wilted and soiled with sweat, shit, and blood. Wilona makes sure not to wrinkle her nose as she gathers the worst of it and packs it, warm and sticky, into a large bucket.

  “Go on, fresh straw, fresh straw.” Touilt pushes her with urgency, but not violence, toward the door.

  Outside, the fresh air carries the metallic scent of the oncoming storm. A large raindrop splatters in the mud at Wilona’s feet and then two more on her face. Caelin and his companions huddle under the eaves near the side of the birthing-house. Their eyes follow her. Lord Caelin’s face is dark as the roiling sky, and he is just as dangerously unpredictable.

  Wilona empties the bucket into the midden pile, wipes her hands on the rag tucked into her belt, and scampers to a nearby byre. Inside, a cow near her own birthing time shows the whites of her eyes. The shed flashes blue and an instant later thunder cracks. Wilona jumps. The rain is as loud as a waterfall. Something scurries near the grain bin. Rats, she thinks and, looping the bucket over her arm, grabs an armful of straw. A figure steps out from the shadows. “Dunstan! You gave me a start!”

  He’s that sort of boy, always popping up where and when one doesn’t expect him. His wide mouth and large ears dominate his thin face; his dun hair is tied back with a leather thong. His mother, upon the death of his father, and perhaps perceiving her oldest son ill-suited to battle, apprenticed him to Alwyn the woodworker, who despairs of him, and more than once has punished his lack of attention by sending him to the fields for a fortnight. “What are you doing here? Have you been demoted to cowherd again?”

  The boy’s grin is contagious, even at a moment like this. “No, that’s not it,” he says. “Although she’s a lovely cow, isn’t she?” He gestures with his chin. “How goes it in there? It’s been a long time.”

  “Difficult. I have to get back.”

  A frown settles on Dunstan’s face and looks unnatural on his usually cheerful features. “Wilona, wait … there’s talk.”

  “What kind of talk?” She continues to fill her arms with straw.

  “Caelin’s worried. He’s very fond of his wife.” Dunstan reaches out and touches her arm. “It might go badly if Lady Elfhild or this child dies.”

  “I wish Lord Caelin would go inside the hall and drink like other men.”

  “He’s had enough to drink. More than enough.”

  “He’s drunk?”

  Dunstan nods. “Roaring.”

  Wilona has only seen Caelin drunk on a handful of occasions. The last time, at Yule, he broke a slave’s arm for spilling ale on his tunic. The time before that, he’d broken a hound’s neck for growling at him. “The goddess will protect us. We’re in her care.”

  Wilona says goodbye to Dunstan, ducks past Caelin and his men, and returns to the birth-chamber, where Elfhild is on all fours, her mouth open, her tangled hair stuck to her shoulders. The lady is clammy with sweat and trembling. Her eyes are not closed but rather are fixed on some midpoint in the air, her breathing shallow and ragged. Touilt mutters something beneath her breath, takes a pouch from inside her tunic, and pinches out some seeds. Wilona counts with her—thirteen. A stool next to the birthing bed is covered with objects now: a blade, herbs in leather pouches, carved sticks with various kinds of animal fur attached, bones of different sorts. Touilt chooses a thread and a small square of clean linen and ties the seeds inside.

  Wilona scuttles forward with fresh straw, scatters it, tries to pat it into some sort of comfort, and then retreats to the corner shadows. Thunor claps his hands again and sends a lightning bolt across the sky. The look on Lady Elfhild’s face—agony like a red haze—makes Wil
ona’s stomach sour. She hugs her knees.

  “No,” Touilt says, gesturing. “Come here.” She makes Elfhild lie down and the lady moans and thrashes, her hair dragging and pulling. A breast escapes from the loosely wrapped cloak, the veins blue. Touilt presses the linen patch containing the thirteen coriander seeds into Wilona’s palm and forces her hand high on Elfhild’s left thigh. “Hold that there. Hold it no matter how she flails. Hold it!” The seithkona pours a goblet of red wine and, with her hand behind Elfhild’s head, tilts it to her lips. “Drink.”

  Too weary to disobey, Elfhild drinks. When she is done, Touilt puts the goblet on the stool and picks up a middling-sized twig, the tip charcoal-blackened. She draws runes on her palms. Berkano. Inguz. Laguz. Eihwaz. She chants the names. Her eyes meet Wilona’s. This, too, is part of the teaching. She begins to hum and mutter, calling in the disir, the spirits who guard women during childbirth. Beneath Wilona’s hands, slivers of thread-like silver seem to writhe. Her breath is short and ragged. It’s as though she’s linked to the struggle below her palm, becoming part of it. She pulls away, wanting to remove her hand, but the runes bind her there, near the opening of life. It is as though arms other than hers—vaporous yet unyielding—press down, pinning her palms to Elfhild’s thigh. Heat rises from the woman’s skin. Wilona swallows her cries. They taste like blood.

  A gust of metal-scented wind. At the open door stands Caelin, dripping rainwater from his darkened hair and beard. His bulk fills the doorway. The eyes are probing, used to making quick decisions, and impatience twists his lip. His entire face is skewed with worry masked as fury, and Wilona again notices the two long battle scars on his left cheek. He reeks of ale.

  “It’s too long!” he thunders, shaking the wet hair from his face. “Why does it take so long?”

  “So long?” says Touilt. “What do you know of time, you who are easy in and easy out? Your contribution may have taken only a moment, but you leave us with a longer chore than your swift pleasure merits, I suspect.”