Authors: Jude Fisher
Katla frowned. It was hard to know quite what he meant by the gesture: was he indicating she was mad – ‘touched’, as Gramma Rolfsen would say, with the same indication – or that he was? ‘What?’ she asked, rudely.
‘Everything I need to know about the crafting of any part of a ship lies in my head,’ Danson said, smirking with insufferable complacency.
‘Well, that’s not how I work,’ Katla said furiously. ‘Unless it’s in
my
head, how can I gauge the amount of iron I must smelt, or the shape and thickness I must hammer out?’
The shipmaker shrugged. ‘I will tell you.’
Taking orders from anyone was not Katla’s way. She bristled. ‘I don’t think that will work.’
‘Then what do you suggest?’ Danson asked sharply.
‘I need to see how the brace will fit the wood, how it will be fixed, the strain it will be subjected to by the movement of the ship.’
The shipmaker looked at her in surprise. This was not at all what he had been expecting: he was used to most of the men he employed doing exactly what he told them as if they had no greater brains than sheep, and as for a woman thinking to take such an active hand in the making . . . Well! He would show her the working in its current state and let her make the fool of herself that seemed inevitable by this show of arrogance.
‘Come with me,’ he said briskly, and turned on his heel.
‘Keep that fire hot, Ulf,’ Katla grinned at the goatboy, and trotted after the shipmaker.
She had not been down to the home ground, close by Whale Strand, to see how the ship was progressing for a week and more. Her other concerns had obscured all else around her. When she had last visited the site, there had been little of any great interest to see. Four of the great logs they had towed and barged from Danson’s shipyard had been hauled up out of the water, and one of the largest oaks – a monster of eighty feet or more, and as straight as a taut rope – had been neatly split to reveal the heartwood, all golden and fragrant and close-grained. Workmen had skimmed the bark from the second great oak, a tree that had also grown perfectly upright and true; the other two logs curved gently through their entire length, which had surprised Katla: these latter pair did not look as if they would produce good strakes, for which the graceful arc of the planking would be achieved through careful steaming. There were a dozen men busy at the site with axes and adzes and the air was full of the lovely smell of fresh-cut wood; but Katla, unable to concentrate on anything for long in her current predicament, had soon found her mind wandering, and had then allowed her feet to follow its inclination away from all the noise and bustle.
Now, though, there was a great deal more to see. Two dozen men or more were hard at work on the flat, grassy lawn above the shore’s seaweed-strewn tideline. A handful had come on the barges from Morten Danson’s shipyard, lured by the promise of good pay for their expert work; but most were Rockfallers through and through: wiry, dark men with deft hands and strong faces. They had worked with boats all their lives, even if they were not master craftsmen; and the chance to work on Aran Aranson’s ambitious ship seemed as fine a way as any to pay tribute to the loss of his well-liked son. Many of them hoped, in their hearts, to be selected for the expedition, too: they had heard stories of the Island of Gold, and of those a good number were young men, youngest sons with little hope of land of their own unless – Sur forbid – disaster carried off a fair number of their siblings. And so all worked with care and pride to make the Master of Rockfall’s great ship. They hewed fine planks out of vast tree trunks with sure and steady axe-strokes; those proficient with hatchet and chisel cut cleats and oarholes; while the less skilled soaked withies in seawater and oil to make them flexible enough to use as lashings, while others were engaged in heating new-cut pine, so that now the pungent smell of the resin thus rendered mixed headily with the clean scent of hewn wood. Katla recognised most of the men there: men she had grown up with and seen every day of her life: there was Bran Mattson and Stein and Kotil Garson; Lars Hoplison; Finn Erlingson and his brother Rolf; the handsome Stensons from the north of the island, Felin Grey Ship and his sons Gar and Bran; even Kar Treefoot and her Uncle Margan were there, although they had their own land to work and should hardly be labouring on Aran’s mad project. She grinned: her aunt – Bera’s sister, Gwenna – was a formidable woman; he’d be in trouble when he returned to the shieling, if return he dared.
Her pulse quickened as she scanned the scene. The excitement was palpable: an adventure was being crafted before her very eyes. This expedition belonged to every man present and would be theirs to cherish: everyone here was a participant in her father’s dream. Something about this romantic notion appealed to her, made her grin from ear to ear. And there, visible in momentary glimpses through the knot of men who laboured around it, was the heart of the enterprise: the most elegant thing she had ever laid eyes on; and that included the most costly jewellery worn by any lady at the Halbo court, the finest bred pony in the isles or the best sword she had ever made. Set upon a frame of hewn pine and supported by crossed spars at top and toe was the spine, head and tail of a great ship. Threading her way through busy men and stacks of timber, stepping over cut angles of scrapwood, propped tools and sacks of wool and horsehair as if in a dream, Katla came to a halt at last beneath the skeletal prow and there craned her neck upwards. Carved out of a single treetrunk, the stempost curved outwards from the base and then back on itself with the graceful sweep of a swan’s neck. She followed its line groundwards. The deep and massive keel must surely have been coaxed from the huge oak she had last seen split upon the strand by a master craftsman, for it had been fashioned as a single piece, despite extending to almost seventy feet in length. Nowhere did such mighty trees grow in the Northern Isles any more: it must have originated in the sacred grove above Ness. Reflexively, she made a warding sign, hoping that all the attendant spirits of that ancient grove had been suitably propitiated when this awesome tree had been felled. She could not help but reach out and touch it. At once, a jolt of energy coursed down her arm. She gasped, finding herself caught up in the ecstatic rush of life she encountered there; yet at the same time was able to retain enough detachment to allow her to appreciate the artistry of the workmanship which had taken a fine tree and made from it this elegant form. Where the prow met the keel, a clean joint had been made, the wooden edges smoothed flush and the rivets bedded so neatly that when Katla knelt and ran her hand over it, there was hardly any change to the sensation beneath her fingertips. The entire frame seemed to vibrate against her skin like a purring cat. It was suddenly a great temptation to sit there for the rest of the day just stroking the thing; with considerable resolve, she took her hand off the prow and stared up at the shipmaker in wonder.
‘It’s extraordinary.’
In response, Danson merely inclined his head.
Katla’s head felt dizzy, displaced. She rose slowly, for fear of losing her balance and sprawling on the ground in front of him. ‘So: show me where it is that the braces will go,’ she said at last, mustering herself.
The shipmaker indicated the hollow inside the ship where keel met stempost and where the first of the overlapping garboards had been nailed in place. ‘Here, and here, running down past the keel scarph to strengthen the bow for the ice-breaker. It should extend from here—’ he indicated a point above the second board ‘—to here—’ a foot past the scarph. ‘It needs crosspieces here and here for strength, and that would best be made of a piece than welded, if you can manage such a thing.’ He knew perfectly well that she could not: it was more than he’d ask of his own smith, but he would enjoy seeing her fail. ‘Then we’ll rivet the exterior piece through the wood to the interior brace. It’ll make the prow rather less flexible than I’d prefer, but your father is adamant on the need for it.’
Katla walked to the other side of the vessel and peered over the top strake, marvelling at the way all the different pieces of handcut wood melded together with an almost supernatural perfection and something in her view of the loathed shipwright began to make a shift towards a rather grudging admiration. Grabbing up an empty wooden pail that gave off a strong reek of fish, she turned it over and stood on it so that she could reach over to the place where the ironwork was to be riveted. Then she closed her eyes and let her hands move up and down the joinery.
Danson watched her, one brow raised in disbelief. The girl was either mad or brilliant, and he most definitely erred towards the former judgement. Let her do her worst: when she had wasted a goodly amount of rare iron and produced some useless monstrosity that clearly would not fit, then he would make sure that her strangely blinkered father would see the truth of it. Shaking his head, he walked off to check his foreman’s progress with the plank-steaming.
Katla made her way back to the smithy as if she were sleepwalking and when Ulf Fostason addressed her she barely even acknowledged his presence. All afternoon the forge rang with the sound of hammer on anvil and smoke and embers billowed from the windows. As the sun dipped behind the Hound’s Tooth and the men trailed in from their labours to eat in the hall, the goatboy stumbled out into the twilight, his limbs shaking with fatigue. Lit by torchlight, her face and arms sheeny with sweat and her hair hanging in rats’ tails, Katla quenched the ironwork in pine tar and linseed oil and regarded her handiwork with satisfaction.
While Aran Aranson conferred with Morten Danson and Orm Flatnose over the dinner board as to the best ratio of sail and mast to keel to bear the strong winds of the arctic north, his daughter staggered down to Whale Strand bearing a most bizarre-looking contraption in her arms. The thing she had made bore little relation to the simple iron brace the shipmaker had specified.
It was far lighter than she had expected when she had started to beat it out of the smelted metal, for she had heated it until the iron was blue, beaten and quenched it, and cut away the excess; then beaten it thinner and quenched it again, and then again; but it was strong, far stronger than the sturdy but coarse frame that had originally been envisaged. And although it was beaten so fine, she had smelted out the impurities so thoroughly that she knew the metal would withstand first the indignity of the riveting, and then the strain of the moving wood and the counter-pressure of the ice-breaker that was to be added below the waterline. That was the dangerous part of the design: even the most finely made ship might be thrown entirely out of true by such an addition, especially if the ice-breaker were made by lumpen hands; but then she recalled the fine joinery and the clean lines of the vessel and knew that Danson was too prideful a man to allow poor workmanship to mar his creation.
Isolated on its clumsy pine cradle upon the empty strand, with the moonlight limning every line of its structure, the bones of Aran Aranson’s emerging vessel appeared more austere than ever. Katla breathed deeply and approached it in some trepidation. Something had prompted her to place the armature she had made inside the ship when there were no witnesses to the act: but whether this was out of fear that the thing would not fit and that her efforts would be ridiculed; or out of some more obscure, almost religious urge to commune with wood and iron, both of which had come up out of Elda’s roots, she had no clear idea: both concepts were terrifying.
And so, teetering on the upturned bucket that was still where she had left it, she lifted the armature over the riveted boards – noticing with some small part of her mind that was not entirely frozen with fear, that another two planks had been added since she had left the scene that afternoon – and placed it inside the bow. The shock that travelled up her hands as wood and metal made contact nearly threw her off her perch. It was as if the oak – even in its mutilated, man-worked form – reached out for the iron, embraced it, took it into itself. The brace fitted like a second skin, even to the ridges in the overlap of the strakes. She stood there, on the bucket, with the palms of her hands glowing against the metal, feeling the life in the wood beneath it, and the life of the world below that, where the keel met the pine frame, and the frame met the ground, and the rock veins beneath the beach ran out into the sea and down, far down, into the heart of Elda itself; and then the voice came.
‘Do not take sail in this ship, Katla Aransen, for I have need of you.’
Her head came up with a start, and involuntarily she searched the strand for the speaker, although she knew full well there was no one but herself there in that dark place.
That night she slept fitfully, her dreams haunted by crashing seas, by the sound of breaking wood and the cries of dying men. She awoke in the grey light of dawn with painful cramps in her belly, and when she went outside to piss before the rest of the household were about, found that her monthly bleeding had come upon her with a vengeance.
Seventeen
Seers
Frost had etched feathery patterns on the flagstones of the herb garden and crazed the puddles on the ground made by the melt of last night’s hailstones. The Rose of the World steadied herself against a tall clay planter filled with dead and twiggy herbs and watched her breath blossom in the air. She knew by these signs that it must be very cold but she felt the change in temperature not at all. Part of this might be due to the way in which she was swathed: over an underdress of soft white linen and a tunic of red velvet she wore a heavy cloak lined with the furs of ermines and minks; the black and white of the pelts gaudily chequered. Around her shoulders as she was leaving the castle gate, her husband had then insisted on wrapping a sealskin cape with a wide snood trimmed with snowbear fur which he had drawn up over her pale golden hair. Then he had kissed her on the forehead and walked quickly away before desire overtook him. Ever since the night on which he had stumbled on the mistaken belief that she was carrying the heir to the Northern Isles, Ravn Asharson had been extravagantly solicitous, and rather than reveal the truth and break his heart, the Rosa Eldi had taken to layering her clothing in accordance with his wishes. He had also been exercising the most remarkable self-control. Since that night they had lain together but once, and that in the pitch-dark so he would not see the pristine flatness of her belly. She was beginning to doubt her own powers, such as they were; and the fact that she had been unable to conceive, no matter with what diligence she had tried, had done nothing to improve her peace of mind.