Chapter 15

Makrill

From then on, I came to the castel every day to instruct the Justiciar’s children. Sometimes there were lessons in the hall, other times I played their games around the yard, answering their questions as best I could. The Lady Monmouth was never quite so free with me as she had been on that first day, though she had clothes sent to the cathedral for me. De Lacy fancied to employ me as a cup-bearer at some of his feasts and always contrived to show me off to his guests. At a certain time in the meal, he would draw their attention to me as a curiosity of the strange country they had come to, and through trial and error, we formed an instinctive routine of question and answer which never failed to elicit laughter and merriment.

Still other days, the children would be engaged with horsemanship or swordplay or would be out hunting in the vale south of the civitas with their father. On these days, I passed much time with Hamund in the town when I could keep out of the reach of Saer—de Lacy’s steward. This was not difficult, as the chaos of the colony in those days permeated the streets, the disorder also touching the Justiciar’s household as merchants arrived on the quays with their families to lay claim to a portion of the King’s largesse. Adventurers and younger sons of knights continued to come also with their armour and their ambitions to pursue land in the dismemberment of the once great territory and civitas of Duiblinn, known for its wealth from Thule to Aquitaine. This great tide of people coming to the castel gates, seeking audience, clashed with the hordes of petitioners who came daily—Ostmen in the main, whose houses had been taken and given over to some newcomer or other, or whose wives or daughters had been taken by force as concubines.

Through this throng and upheaval, we made our way swiftly and secretly, understanding the weft of the streets and the shortcuts between and through plots. More importantly, between us, we understood the forces at play and navigated the changing face of the civitas better than most. Hamund was wise in a way I had not seen before. He had a multitude of greetings that served him as we walked through the narrow streets, and names spilled from his lips as he hailed a maid spinning wool in the sun before her house, asking after her sick mother; a query after the work to a family repairing the walls of an outhouse in their back plot; a wry warning to the traders on the shambles to beware Bristol silver; a query on the price of barley to a widow selling ale from her front door.

Everywhere he passed, he drew smiles and winking words and small favours. None of the shaded looks that met the Engleis on their rounds. He brought me at times into the houses of artisans, and we spent hours sitting cross-legged on the pounded clay floor watching skilled men work the soft black stone and golden amber into rings and bracelets and beads, or we watched the bone-workers polish beautiful combs or women weave on their looms, passing the time with soft talk. Sometimes we helped with the labours of the townspeople, carrying bundles of firewood into a shed or bringing up boxes of fish to the shambles or helping to gather up the old rushes and bedding straw from the floor of a house to dump out into the steaming cesspits to keep down the smell which grew bad in the summer heat. We were paid in morsels or small kindnesses and sometimes won the secret kisses of sly-eyed daughters in shaded places.

Most of our time was spent, however, on the quay front, where a fleet of shallow-drafted boats belonging to the fishermen of the civitas plied in and out with their dun-coloured sails, raking the bay and venturing out farther in search of herring and bringing in rich bounties of oysters from the beds on the sandbanks and sloblands. And always a large cog or hulc lying against the wooden piers or hauled up on the mudflats outside of the walls, where the fishermen laid out their long yards of netting for repair. These merchant vessels came incessantly from Bristol and Chester with wine and salt and iron and refined cloths from far-off Flemish mills, weapons, soldiers and women and children following their men into uncertain lands. And often I had occasion to ask a merchant’s boy or a friendly sailor about Frodsham and the de Crécy family, though little did I learn.

The sea unnerved me. Quickened me. Its largeness and its fleetness. If you took your eye from it, an expanse of dark water with crowds of raucous gulls settling on its swell could transform into acres of dirty sand and weed, carved through with veins of brackish water, full of scuttling crabs and wading birds. The blue line of the open water calling to me beyond the distant mouth of the bay.

Hamund was most at home here, and I learned that his father had owned two boats. He had a special place among the fishermen, and even the foreign sailors seemed to know him, eagerly skipping over the boats tied flank to flank to help out with a fouled line or broken spar. Though people recognised my birthmark and remembered the day we had been beaten in the street, they warmed to me quickly as I followed Hamund’s cue, hailing and waving and helping where I could and gathering witticisms to share with the older men. Some even began to tease me that they had given me a good stroke that day as I cowered in chains, cuffing my head lightly and laughing as they spoke. I did not mind it.

Ostmen, de Lacy called these people, whom we had called ‘Gall’—foreigner—yet they were many generations removed from the raiders the monks once wrote of so fearfully. And though they clung to their traditional names, I was surprised to find that most of them spoke a type of Gaelic with a particular rounded-out sound to it and many strange words that I reasoned must have come from over the sea with them.

Despite the camaraderie in the closeness of the workshops and boats, a pall of fear hung thick over the place, mingling with the salt air from the bay and the heavy smell of fish. The town had been cleansed of the Ostmen nobility. All the big houses in the town had been claimed by the Engleis. All Ostman of rank had been gathered together in the market square, humiliated and put to the sword. Any others found speaking of revolt or gathering in secret were similarly treated. Hamund’s father was one such, and his head still inhabited a spike on the town walls, a yellowed skull with teeth bared and scraps of hair clinging to the bone, weightless in the breeze. Beside him, the bodies of the other two Ua Ruairc men who had arrived in chains with us from Tlachta.

Conn, for his part, obtained a pardon through the intercession of the bishop Ua Tuathail. He was not permitted to leave the civitas, however, and his life was not a happy one. I saw him betimes, labouring at the quayside, where the Justiciar, at the behest of the merchants, was building a new quay front. Conn spent his days in the slobland of the foreshore, sliding and struggling to bear buckets of soil and stone down to the wooden revetment, behind which they were filling in ground. I knew he would not last long. His broken body favouring one side. When we passed, I kept my eyes clear of him—not wanting to see the scorn or the pleading or the accusation writ there in his curd-soft face.

In the late summer, before the long, airy days of sun and sea breeze began to cede to a thinner and sharper air, Hamund took me to the quayside. I believed us to be going to assist with some task or translation. When we approached the wharf, however, he turned to me, stretching his arm out and signalling towards a long, low boat pulled up against a wooden post not far from the pier. Two men I recognised as Gunnar and Thorkil busied themselves on their knees with netting, and a third man I did not know stood thigh deep in the water shipping an armful of the stone balls they use to weigh their nets.

‘Makrill’, Hamund said with a broad smile, his grey eyes all lustre beneath a fringe of dirty blond hair. For a moment he looked as gleeful and unguarded as a child, the severity of concentration falling from his face. And, with the realisation that he was proposing to go aboard the boat, I felt an answering bloom of uncomplicated joy within my chest, making its way instantly to my own face.

We slipped into the cool waters and forged towards the boat, pushing little bow waves ahead of us, and Gunnar dragged us on-board, and the boat, which sat light in the water, rocked severely with the effort.

‘Kneel here in the middle’, he said. ‘Don’t move unless I tell you to’.

The man standing in the shallows, with a word from Thorkil, loosed the rope from the post and threw it into the ship. He gave the boat a shove as Thorkil began working the steering oar, and we surged forward, my body jerking with the unfamiliar sensation, before the resistance of the water settled us to an even advance.

Thorkil propelled us lazily it seemed, though soon we had progressed down the river, past the headland of an Rinn where the great estuary began. Past the figures working along the strand bending for cockles and digging out oysters. Though they were far off, their voices and calls to each other carried clear across the water, disorientating in their closeness as sounds like the screeching of gulls contesting a morsel or the wash of gentle surf away on the shingle combined in a dislocating whole, something new and unknown. The shore receded and lowered in height until even the roof of the cathedral was barely a step in the line of the civitas’ profile, all swallowed by the purple of the mountains beyond, themselves soon settling lower on the horizon, leaving the majority of the view a vast confusion of light cloud and brittle blue that hurt the eye. A lightness of feeling engulfed me, a kind of giddiness to be so far from the shore. The unseen depths below us teeming with unknown things.

‘Are there serpents beneath us?’ I asked, and they all laughed at my fear.

‘Yea’, growled Gunnar, ‘though not so many as in the castel’.

Through inscrutable signs and signals, they steered their craft. They watched, they dropped sail and it bellied out, flapping then emptying in the uncertain breeze. I knelt obediently in the waist of the boat as Thorkil sat at the helm and Gunnar perched in the bows, looking, Hamund whispered, for the shape of the tide on the shallows, the movements of the gulls and for any ripple on the surface. We were not the only boat abroad, and at times, we coasted close to other vessels similarly manned, sometimes exchanging words and signals, other times in silence. The bay stretched in immensity from its low southern edge blanketed in trees rising upwards to cover the lower slopes of the mountains beyond. The northern shore was equally distant, a low strip of land beyond acres and acres of sandy foreshore crisscrossed with runnels of sucking water rising up into a squat headland at the mouth of the bay.

‘Hǫfuð’, said Gunnar from the bows, pointing in that direction now, and we followed his arm to see five or six boats converging beneath the sea cliffs. He scuttled back, his legs astride, bare feet sliding along either side of the boat’s ribs, producing barely a roll, and he fixed the sail, pulling it tight and leaning back with a length of rope in his hand, and the boat kicked forward with Thorkil working steadily now on the steering oar as the boat slid with purpose towards the cliffs. These, at first miniscule in the distance, barely visible beyond the sparkle of sun on sea, rose steadily into large walls towering ever higher above us as we drew into the shade and heard the shouts of the other boats echoing and shattering off the rock face.

Thorkil threw the net now, casting the mouth out wide to lay on the water and then tipping the bag-end over the side containing its stone weights. The momentum of the boat soon outpaced the net, and when the slack in the rope was taken up, the net was drawn behind us for the space of twenty heartbeats. Gunnar and Thorkil then grabbed up the rope and began to draw the net in, hand over hand with a deliberate, coordinated rhythm.

We watched over the side, our weight bringing the gunnel close to the waterline, and soon we saw the net rise from the depths dragging a writhing bulk, visible at first as faint shimmers in the deep blue. Gunnar and Thorkil hauled and hauled, and soon the shimmers became fuller—a seething packed mass of silver and blue fish all darting and surging in different directions, balled tight by the netting. The men struggled with the weight, and I moved to lay hold of the rope. The boat lurched suddenly, and Gunnar roared, ‘Sit down!’

The net breached the surface with the next heave, and the fish, wrenched from one world to another, came over the side. Gunnar loosed the bag, and two score or more fish spilled in around our feet—mackerel. The men laughed and set about casting the net again, bringing up a similar load until we were almost up to our knees in fish, thumping the sides of the boat with thrashing bodies.

Gunnar and Thorkil produced four scarred boards from the bow, handed them around and, laying theirs on their knees, began to clean the fish. Hamund sat beside me and showed me how, his quick knife running down the fish’s belly, his blunt thumb pushing through the slit, ejecting a string of shiny offal. They began throwing the delicate organs high over their shoulders, where a clamour of waiting gulls hovered, tearing the morsels out of the air.

‘Look’, cried Gunnar, his stubby finger pushing a small, beating heart around on his blood-soaked board. He picked it up and swallowed it whole.

‘That’s for your manhood—eat’, he said.

Hamund looked shyly at the others, squeezed out a heart from a writing fish and pushed it into his mouth, maroon drips dappling his chin. I picked one out from a mess of entrails on the board and swallowed it whole. Gunnar slapped the hull with a hanging hand and growled comically.

‘The women will be running scared’, shouted Thorkil from the bows, and we all laughed, Hamund’s blood-dark teeth frightful in his fair face.

For an hour or more, our knives dipped and ripped and sliced in smooth motions, and I warmed to the work, sorting the cleaned flesh from the offal and casting up handfuls of guts to a sky full of screaming gulls. Our work ceased when I flung a handful skywards and followed the red trailing pennants with my eye, arcing upwards and, on reaching the apex of their flight, beginning to fall, and between the hovering and diving gulls, I spied a different pennant, gusting uncertainly in the offshore breeze—a large cog wending its way in through the sandbars, oars out and sail struck. A streaming blue pennant at the mast head. Hamund looked meaningfully to the others.

‘Pembroke’, he said darkly. They nodded silently, the fish forgotten, and Gunnar pulled on the steering oar, turning long, slow rounds with his fist that brought the boat head-on for the river while the others made play with the sail, hitching it so as to catch the light breeze. We easily outpaced the heavy cog, despite our load, and were soon under way for the civitas.

‘Pembroke?’ I said to Hamund quietly. His eyes, when he turned to me, were fierce.

‘Yes, Pembroke’, he spat viciously into the bottom boards of the boat. ‘The Earl returns’.