Aric
Eighteen years earlier
The sky was red and swollen, as if it might burst. Every sailor on the ship noticed, but no one mentioned it. It was bad luck to count blessings before they were in hand, and sailors, especially Norse sailors, were always superstitious. Aric stood at the mast, wind blowing through his dark hair. Not all Norseman were blond, especially the ancient ones, who developed seafaring boat technology and visited other lands. Aric’s father’s people were as dark as the southerners who sailed their ships from the Iberian coasts. Aric had never met an Iberian, but his father had on his sailing adventures to the southern isles. In fact, Aric, his father, and their men were going to settle the northern tip of the green isles called Eireland as his father knew there were already Iberians in the southwest there and that they would be friendly and useful for trade.
As if conjuring him through thought, Aric suddenly felt the presence of his father behind his shoulder. He turned away from the sea and looked up into the large, lined face, dark as leather from years on the open seas and creased with concern. That was the only way he could think of him—plus those formidable scars and a tan that matched his cowhide breastplate. Tonight there was a frown on his father’s large mouth. Aric thought he looked like a shunned dog given no supper, and he smiled. His father was called Aric too.
“What are you daydreaming about up here, Aric?” His voice vibrated in a deep baritone; the timbre was so low it hummed, beautifully, in his throat, which didn’t have room for the acoustics of such a sound. You could feel his voice before you heard it.
“I was just wishing that we were exploring a new land and discovering something no one had ever laid eyes on before. I want to meet the greatest warriors from other lands and their priests, too.”
His father interrupted him with a deep, rolling laugh, like thunder. “I’m not sure places exist like that anymore, Son. I’m not convinced there is a land that hasn’t been discovered.” They turned, both looking out at the horizon now.
“But there are places we haven’t seen!” young Aric chimed in.
The older Aric nodded and lifted his hands in animation of vision. “That’s true. I’ve heard that Eireland is the greenest, most lush land you can imagine and that the hills roll on and on for days. The cliffs fall straight into the ocean, and in summer the sun shines and the rain falls and the crops grow insatiably.”
“Will you farm once we are settled, Father?”
Aric had never known his father to farm. In all his twelve years of life, his father had been moving and exploring, leading his people to new, more prosperous land. Aric had stayed at home with his mother and sisters, amid a generally safe and happy childhood, but no happiness touched the feeling of the moments when his family was all together, snuggled up for long dinners, stories, and music at the long table of their longhouse.
“Maybe so,” Aric’s father answered. “But you will farm and build a nice home for yourself with a beautiful woman to wed. And bed.” He smiled. His voice sounded less certain and a little wistful, his son thought.
“It’s important not only to discover new places and gain landholdings but to sew ourselves into the land through marriage and children. That way we leave a piece of ourselves everywhere, and we all become kings through the generations.”
Young Aric furrowed his brow, creating a deep crease in his forehead to match his father’s. “What am I, a woman? I’m to be married off and traded like chattel to make a good relationship with the local warlords? I don’t ever want to be married, Father; I just want to stay with you forever.” His father laughed again, this time with less ardor, and tousled his boy’s hair playfully.
Young Aric looked up at him through thick, dark lashes and navy-blue eyes, the only echo of his mother. He was hurt, and that looked like anger on the boy who would soon be a man. “You’re trying to get rid of me?” It wasn’t worth the fight. The older Aric was too tired from weeks on the water and the prepubescent rage heaped on him by his only living child. As he turned to walk back to one of the rower’s seats, his son continued to gaze out into the ocean, with no acknowledging farewell. Then he heard the boy’s voice barely raised against the wind.
“Mother wanted me to be a warrior king.” It was spoken with such pitiful earnestness that Aric’s father realized only a twelve-year-old boy could possibly believe such a ridiculous claim.
“Hear me and remember this, boy,” his father said, sharply.
Young Aric turned around from the bow, unable to ignore the urgency of his father’s voice. The wind whipped at his hair, which fell just over his ears and nearly covered his eyes. He wore his best linen shirt, a leather vest, and his grandfather’s obsidian knife around his hip, slung low in a leather belt. The sunset behind him was radiant and full of colors that had no name. The clouds were large and fluffy and looked like giant ships themselves, headed for the horizon. It was devastatingly beautiful, and his father knew it was the way he would always remember his son, so he paused for a moment to take in the exquisite scene. Purple, blue, orange, red, and everything in between.
Aric was large for twelve, like his father had been and his father before him, but his face was a boy’s, innocent. His eyebrows touched each other in the center of his perfectly symmetrical face, and his bottom lip quivered. This, paired with the dreamlike scenery, made his father feel like he might cry for the first time since his young, radiant, clever, and kind wife had died five years before.
“Listen, Son,” he said more gently, “all she wanted you to do was to live. Live through these turbulent times and live life every day with a wife you love as much I love her. That’s what she told me when she knew she was dying.” A single tear fell from the boy’s eye. “And Aric, my son,” he continued, “we will see her again if we remain strong and good.”
He laid his hands on the boy’s shoulders, and they sailed off under the giant clouds, dotted with evening stars and a silver moon. They didn’t say a word; they just stood there in this warrior man’s embrace that was close enough to the maternal hug that the twelve-year-old desperately needed. The sky eventually faded to deeper purples and indigo. Aric’s eyes felt heavy, and he leaned his head against his father’s chest, feeling the steady rise and fall and the husky intake of breath and low hum of his voice reaching for some tune. What was it? A lullaby his mother used to sing to him, he thought. He couldn’t ever remember his father singing it, but just for a moment, he felt wrapped up in Gunnhild’s arms once again.
Then, he was transported to her lap. Her warm, scratchy, wool dress itching his face and the impossibly smooth skin of her neck and face smelling of breast milk and honey, her breath sweet with beer, and her soft, springy, goldenrod hair falling around him like curtains. He leaned into his large father for just a moment more and took a long, deep breath, feeling his strength and smelling the smoke of fires and fish on his clothes, the rough feel of leather and sun-aged skin, the black wiry hairs on his huge forearms, and the soft reverberation of the lullaby in his chest. This is how he would remember him.
Aric lay on the rock, feeling the lap of the water beneath him. The heat of the sun-warmed stone permeated his torn, seawater-soaked clothes, and he focused on the tiny ball of fire he could still feel burning within him, stoked by the warm stone and the feeling of the sun on his back. He wondered how he had managed to pull himself out of the water. He could tell from the roar of crashing waves around him that he had reached shallows near the beach, but he had no strength to move from his rock or even roll over on his side to take in his surroundings. He just stared down at the gray pattern of the rock and noticed how it was silver in the sunlight in places, almost like liquid, it was so smooth and shiny. Odd, he thought as he forced himself to swallow, his dry throat working as hard as it could to lubricate itself. Consciousness was fading, and he was afraid, but not for long.
A calmness came over him as he closed his eyes, and he saw his mother’s face, young, thin, and pale, too beautiful for this world. Her jaw had been strong and her chin square, but the masculinity of the shape had been softened by the most delicate pair of pink lips, which widened into a broad smile that created deep creases in either side of her face and opened as wide as a songbird’s beak to belt out even more beautiful songs. She sounded celestial. She was singing the song his father had been singing to him before the storm came.
His mind rejected that thought, and he quickly focused on his mother again—her long nose, which he used to run his pointer finger down, gently, soothing himself, as she rocked and fed him. Her blue-green eyes were large across her face but narrow and slightly turned down at the ends, like his own. And they were thickly lined with auburn lashes that lightened to blond at the tips and matched her fine and fair brow. Aric started to slip from his thoughts into a numbing peace.
To stake a hold on some sort of conscious thought, he pictured her curly hair, soft as feathers and springy to the touch. He could never quite describe the color. What was it? Not golden, nor yet red. It was something rosy in between that he had never seen since. It was like the sunset, he realized. That’s why she had come to him on the ship’s bow as he watched the sun go down the night before. It was the color of the golden hour. The vermillion bleeding into the gold of the sun and azure of the sky created colors that had no name.
Aric cried at the loss of her and the pain of failing to live, her last wish, but he was so dehydrated that no tears came. In his mourning she comforted him, and he felt her arms cradle him as if he were a babe again. She told him she was there to protect him. Aric shook his head, feeling like he was hallucinating his mother’s presence, but it felt increasingly real. He couldn’t tell if it was a part of him speaking from deep within him or if it was really her spirit, come down from Valhalla. She said that love stretched across time and death, and a mother could always pour her love down into her children, no matter what. He nestled into her chest, feeling the ridges of her clavicle and the softness of her pale, supple skin and breast. Being with her again, one last time, felt so good that he decided to let go and go with her, and just then he felt as if he were being lifted by strong, stout arms.
Aric sat by a fire in a huge cave across from a small man. Aric was just twelve but could tell he was much larger even as they sat together, hunched by the fire, both holding their legs, folded into their chests, like distant reflections of one another. The size realization made Aric feel safer because he knew he was stronger if he had to fight. Somehow that didn’t seem likely. The man had given him water and nursed him back to consciousness by the fire. Aric was wrapped in the small man’s cloak.
Though this man couldn’t have been much older than his father, there was a way about him that seemed ancient. He wore nothing but a hide tunic; Aric realized that was probably because he had given him his cloak, a beautiful deep green. He wore furry boots Aric had never seen before and a leather pocket full of what smelled like a variety of healing herbs and tonics. He spoke to Aric in the Norse tongue, and he was clearly learned or well-traveled because he was almost positively not Norse. Aric spoke back to him in the broken language his father had begun to teach him when they were preparing to settle the green isles.
“I am Ray,” the little man said, his lips curling into the most charming smile Aric had ever seen. “I am a Druid, and I will take care of you here in the king’s cave before we find you another boat in the village.” Aric nodded in understanding. “You sing quite beautifully,” Ray said to him. “You were singing softly but with such passion as I carried you into the king’s cave after you came back to life.”
Ray began to gut a fish, and the smell filled Aric’s nostrils. What did this little man mean after I came back to life? he thought.
“My mother,” Aric tried to reply in the Gaelic tongue. “She would sing down in the hall, and it filled the longhouse to the roof tree. They were all in love with her as much as her song. I remember many a night falling asleep to the sound of her voice telling the oldest stories known to men.”
“Ahhh, I’ve actually heard the song you were singing before. In another longhouse, some time ago.” Ray smiled like a toad again, and though Aric felt safe and at ease with him, he knew at once that the little man was hiding something behind that smile.
“You speak the Norse tongue well; I can tell you are well-traveled,” Aric responded.
“Yes.” The little man smiled again.
“Why is it called the king’s cave?” Aric asked, craning his neck to look above and around at the vast caverns and their carvings.
“Good question,” the little man answered as he covered the salmon with gentle, deft hands and placed it on a smooth stone in the center of the fire. From the fire, he grabbed a torch, and Aric marveled at how the heat didn’t seem to burn his hands. “I guess it will be called the king’s cave. Right now it’s just a special, spiritual place where we come to ask for blessings.” He held the torch up, and the light on the wall showed hundreds of carvings from floor to ceiling, some meters high. Aric’s eyes widened, and he noticed the little man casting a massive shadow on the carving wall. Maybe these Druids he had heard of were magical after all, he thought.
The little man gestured upward at the carvings. Some were animals—birds, horses, and fish—while others seemed to be more like symbols or some sort of writing Aric had never seen. The little man talked for a long time about the art and had funny stories for some of the scenes. Aric half listened while fighting distraction from his own fear and exhaustion. What would he do now, he wondered. An orphan, alone in the world.
“What do you think it all means?” Aric asked, eyes wide, scanning the many pictures and looking for something that reminded him of ones he had seen at home.
“You, my boy, are full of good and interesting questions. I see you come not only with a body fit for fighting but also with an inquisitive spirit.”
Aric just stared back at him, a little confused but mostly detached as he was starting to let the magnitude of what had happened rest heavily on his shoulders. He hadn’t been able to think of the loss of the ship: the image of his father drifting off to sea when he was fighting the current and grabbing onto the boards from the hull floating by him. Aric had been solely focused on his own survival because of what his father had told him just before the storm set in. Because that was what his mother wanted. The little man saw the pain in the boy’s eyes from across the fire and came over to sit next to him and offer him all he had: a little bit of kindness and a lot of fish.
“I think what it all means is that people have been coming to this cave because it’s special for a long, long time,” Ray began as he removed the fish from the fire and sliced it open with his flint knife.
Aric noticed the blade was held in place by a whale bone handle carved at the end into a spiral form. It was not the most magnificent one he had seen, but it reminded him of one his father had carried that looked like a wolf carved into the antler of an elk.
The salmon was as large as the little man’s entire forearm, and he took one cheek and one small filet for himself before gingerly setting the rest on the stone in front of Aric. “And I think it also means that people will keep coming to the cave to pray or chant, hide or hope, for a long time after we’re all gone.” Ray motioned to himself and the carved and painted walls around them. Aric devoured his salmon flank, careful of the thin bones as he always was at home when he and his father caught salmon in their icy Nordic rivers. He thought for a bit and sucked the fatty juice off each finger.
“Is that what you meant when you said it will be called the king’s cave?” he asked as he savored the last of the warm, fleshy pink fish. He felt the beady, dark brown frog eyes of the little man piercing down into him. Suddenly, he felt uncomfortable—not afraid but as if he was being sized up or assessed. Then the man spoke in gentle tones, now in the Norse language so Aric understood perfectly.
“Nothing evades you, does it, Aric?” Aric shook his head back and forth, staring up at him. “You’re wise,” Ray continued, holding up his knife. “And your mind is like the fine point of a blade.” The firelight glowed off his flint dagger and sparkled in his eyes. “You have the red aura of a warrior, though, and you are built for fighting. We could use you here, among my people. I am actually their head Druid—it’s, uh, like a priest.”
“My father told me what Druids are,” Aric retorted, with all the wisdom that a twelve year old believes he has. The mention of his father closed his throat back up as if he had swallowed another gallon of salt water from the sea. He rested his head on his arms, which he had wrapped around his knees. Ray took a deep breath.
“There are no other survivors. I think you know that,” Ray said quietly, placing his hand, strong but with very short, stout fingers, on Aric’s arm. He hesitated to go on, seeing that it caused the boy pain, but he also knew, from experience, that the only way to survive was to go on, push forward, and seize a new life rather than bemoan the lost one.
“You would have a great place of honor in the village as one of my household. You would be familiar with the Druid customs, but you would be trained as a warrior and free to travel and explore as your people did, as you were meant to. You wouldn’t be a prisoner, Aric; you would have more freedom than you could imagine and whichever wife you choose.”
Aric lifted his tear-strewn face from his arms. “I don’t want to choose a wife.” He made his request so seriously that Ray couldn’t laugh at the boyish crack in his voice when he said it.
“Well, we have a few years until then.” Ray smiled at the boy and wrapped short arms that couldn’t meet around his shoulders. He stood, silently encouraging the boy to do the same. Aric stood, with Ray barely clearing his shoulder. “I will take good care of you, Aric. Tonight is the summer solstice, and it is good luck that you have been reborn today. I have just attended a joyous birth this morning in one of the oldest households of the village.”
Ray kissed the top of Aric’s hand and led him out of the cave by it. Aric still wondered what he meant by being reborn; he had never heard that term before. And it was midsomer. That was when their ship was supposed to land in Eireland, so they must have been quite close. These thoughts vanished as soon as he and Ray stepped into the blinding light just outside the cave on the rocky beach, because Aric was once again taken aback and confounded by something the little had Druid said: “Yes, I see it. You will live happily from now on and be married, in love, just as Gunnhild wanted.”