Beside the Ocean of Time

by George Mackay Brown, George Mackay-Brown

Genres: Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Thorfinn Ragnarson is the daydreaming son of a tenant farmer, avoiding both work and school despite the best efforts of family, friends and neighbours. Instead, the boy dreams up elaborate historical fantasies of himself as a Viking traveller, a freedom-fighter for Bonnie Prince Charlie and the colleague of a Falstaffian knight who participates in the Battle of Bannockburn. He is then hurled into the future as Thor, who returns to the Orkneys as an adult and recalls his internment in a German POW camp, where he discovered his writing skills. Thor also reflects on the history of Orkney, the links between dreaming and writing and the whims of fate. In this beautiful and haunting novel, Brown's lyrical descriptions and gift for local colour capture, as ever, the myth-drenched magic of his native islands.

Release date: March 27, 2014

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 208

Sample

OF ALL THE lazy useless boys who ever went to Norday school, the laziest and most useless was Thorfinn Ragnarson.

‘I don’t know what to do with you, you’re useless,’ said Mr Simon the teacher. ‘I’ll speak to your father.’

So Mr Simon met Thorfinn’s father, Matthew Ragnarson, in the shop one Saturday morning. He said he was sorry he couldn’t do much with Thorfinn. Try as he would, he didn’t seem to succeed in teaching the boy anything.

On Friday morning, for example, he had been telling the class about the Norsemen in Constantinople 800 years ago – Thorfinn had sat there taking nothing in – he was watching a thrush on the wall outside, inattention personified – ‘a dreamer,’ said Mr Simon.

‘He’s no good at farm work either,’ said Matthew the farmer. ‘You’d think he’d be good at something – everybody has a gift of some kind, don’t they? – but Thorfinn drifts about as idle as a butterfly.’

Isa Estquoy who kept the shop and post-office was listening like a little inquisitive mouse. That way, Isa got to know more about the island of Norday and its inhabitants than the minister or the doctor, even. She just listened to the customers, and gave an occasional squeak.

‘An ounce of bogey roll and a box of matches,’ said Matthew Ragnarson to Isa. ‘And four bars of milk chocolate.’

‘Maybe Thorfinn could join the army,’ said Mr Simon.

‘Not a hope,’ said the farmer. ‘He would be shot at dawn for falling asleep on guard. He would wander away behind enemy lines and be shot there as a spy. Everything Thorfinn does is a mistake, somehow.’

‘He’s a nice boy, Thorfinn,’ said Isa Estquoy in a little tiny voice like a mouse. ‘He’s not like some of the other boys, stealing sweeties off the counter. Some of them threw a squib into the shop last Halloween! Rainbow my cat nearly died of fright. I know the names of the young scoundrels. Thorfinn isn’t in the list. Thorfinn’s a good boy.’

‘A tin of oxtail soup and a book of three-ha’penny stamps,’ said Mr Simon in his schoolroom voice. Mr Simon was a solitary man and looked after himself.

‘No,’ squeaked Isa Estquoy. ‘Oh no, Mr Simon. You owe five pounds three shillings and fivepence, it’s all marked here against you in the book. I’m sorry, I can’t serve you till the account is settled.’

‘You’ll be paid when I get my salary at the end of the month!’ thundered Mr Simon, and his face flushed a little, because some other women customers had come into the village shop.

‘I hope so indeed,’ chirped Isa, handing over the tin of soup and the book of stamps. ‘In this island people always pay for what they buy, on the nail.’

Mr Simon went out, red in the face.

‘The trouble is,’ said Isa to her customers, ‘he has to keep a divorced wife and three bairns in Glasgow. Well, that’s his lookout. He should have thought twice before he married her. But I’m sure the fault is all his. A bully. Did you hear the way he shouted just now? But he won’t frighten me. If he doesn’t settle his bill at the end of the month I’ll write to the school authorities in Edinburgh.’

The island women discussed Mr Simon for a time. One, Bella Simpson, thought he was stern, maybe, but a good teacher. One, Tina Lyde, thought he was very good-looking and needed somebody to look after him in the schoolhouse. One thought he was visiting the village inn too often, but then Mabel was the weekend barmaid there, and Mabel had a way of attracting customers. Mr Simon often had hangovers, that’s why he was often in a bad mood.

Isa Estquoy squeaked with mirth.

Matthew Ragnarson put his tobacco in his pocket and left the shop.

‘Poor Matthew,’ said Tina Lyde who had a soft spot for every unmarried man in the universe, ‘he could do with some well-handed woman up at Ingle, to bring up his four bairns, the three lasses and Thorfinn …’

Matthew the farmer walked along the two-mile road to Ingle.

His three daughters, Inga, Sigrid, and Ragna came running to meet him. He gave them each a bar of chocolate.

‘Where’s your brother?’ said Matthew. ‘He’s usually first in the queue when the chocolate’s being handed out.’

Inga and Sigrid and Ragna waved vaguely here and there. Thorfinn their brother could be anywhere – on the far side of the hill, down on the shore with the cormorants and Jimmo Greenay the beachcomber, in some hovel listening to old folk telling moth-eaten stories.

 

As a matter of fact, Thorfinn at that very moment was on a Swedish ship, the Solan Goose, anchored off a port in the Baltic. The skipper, Rolf Rolfson, was making plans to meet the prince of Rus, with a view to trading with his people and establishing good relations.

It should be said that Thorfinn was actually in the barn of Ingle, lying curled in the bow of his father’s fishing yole, with the collie Stalwart sleeping in the stern. But in his imagination he was walking up a beach in the eastern Baltic, along with six other Swedish vikings, to meet a troop of envoys from the court of Rus.

Each Swede had a hand hovering not too far from the axe in his belt.

‘We greet you, friends!’ cried Thorfinn, a bit of a quaver in his voice.

‘Shut up!’ said Rolf Rolfson. ‘I’ll do the talking. Leave it to me.’ The Russians stood now on the bank above the beach. They held up hands of peace, palm outward, to the Swedes.

Rolf ordered three heavy cases of iron ore to be set down on the stones, a gift to the prince of Rus from the Swedish merchants.

‘One of you stay beside the small boat,’ said Rolf Rolfson. ‘Be ready to make a quick dash for it in case they try any funny stuff.’

The seven Russians clapped their hands with delight over the open boxes of Swedish iron ore. A huge man lifted a lump of ore and balanced it in his hand. He nodded. ‘He must be a blacksmith, that one,’ said Rolf.

The young Prince Boris seemed to be delighted with his guests.

The prince and his court lived in a little palace not far from the sea. There was a village of wooden huts and gardens beside the palace. It seemed to be a splendid palace, all ivory and marble and oak, but when Thorfinn got inside it was filthy and smoky and grease-smelling, and the rain came in.

At night the Swedes were given bearskins to cover themselves.

‘Now,’ said Boris the prince, ‘you will stay here forever, my friends, and eat the fat of the land.’

They ate pieces of roasted wolf and bear, and the ale was so strong that Thorfinn nodded off where he sat, after two mouthfuls; and he had to jerk himself into wakefulness.

Though cobwebs draped the rafters, there was now a magnificent silver salver on the table with a boar’s head on it.

‘We will be careful in our dealings with this Boris,’ said Rolf Rolfson to his men. ‘Drink no more than one horn of his beer. Generosity can go too far.’

Later Rolf Rolfson said to Thorfinn, ‘You, Orkney boy, stand guard at the door of our room. Rouse us if you hear anything suspicious.’

Thorfinn stood for four nights at the door of the chamber.

At midnight on the fourth night he heard the young prince in talk with his chief bodyguard, an immense man with a beard as brown as a bear, called Illyich. Lantern light splashed them as they talked in the yard.

‘Listen well, Illyich,’ Prince Boris was saying. ‘Tomorrow night, we are to make a feast for the Swedes. Set a big barrel of the strongest ale beside the fire. The Swedes will get drunk one after the other and fall asleep at their benches. Then you and your men, Illyich, will send them on the longest journey they can ever take … Phew! – the servant women will mop up the blood in the morning. Then their ship, the Solan Goose, will be mine. It is a fine ship. I can sail in her to China or Greenland.’

‘I will do what you want,’ said Illyich in his deep rich voice. And he laughed.

Thorfinn shook Rolf Rolfson awake and told him the midnight talk he had just heard.

‘Well done, boy,’ said the skipper. ‘I am looking forward to this feast.’

In the morning Rolf told the other Swedes what was afoot. He told them to bring their daggers, hidden under their shirts, to the feast. He warned them not to drink any of the strong ale, merely to froth their beards with it, so that the prince would think they were drinking deeply. Secretly each man must pour the beer into the earthen floor.

That night when they were all seated on the benches, a man went round filling their ale-horns, and there was a high fleece of froth on every horn. The Swedes let on to drink deeply but they only laced their beards with froth, like men on a spume-flung voyage. Thorfinn had no beard – being a boy – but he had a cluster of tiny bubbles round his mouth. Dogs lapped the pools of beer on the floor.

‘Drink deeply,’ cried Prince Boris. ‘It is my best ale. It is ten years old. You will sleep well this night, my friends. Far, far you will venture into realms unknown.’

Secretly, the Swedes poured their ale into the earthen floor. Two drunken hounds rolled their eyes as if the world was a crazy place and went lolloping over to the fire and unrolled long red smoking tongues and went to sleep.

Three men came in and one had a harp of mammoth tusk, and they began to sing. They sang in such powerful deep voices that Rolf was unable to converse with his men.

‘When the boar’s head is brought in,’ said Rolf, ‘that will be the sign. We will turn ourselves into wild boars and we will have the boars’ revenge on those boar-hunters who have killed a thousand boars since their grandfathers first hunted tuskers and grunters in the forest.’

‘Drink deeply, friends,’ cried Boris. ‘The best of the beer is to come.’

The music went on.

Rolf said to Boris, ‘I thought this was a feast you had invited us to. That seems to be death music that the musicians are playing.’

‘It is music of the hunt,’ said Boris. ‘Fill the horns of our guests. Don’t you hear the cries of the wild swine in the forest? That’s what the music is about. Surely you hear the boar’s cry of defiance to the hunters and the dogs. It is all in the music.’

The dark chant went on and on.

‘Enough now!’ cried Prince Boris. ‘Bring in the boar’s head.’

As soon as the boar’s head, reeking, was carried in from the kitchen on the magnificent silver platter, Rolf gave a sign and the Swedes took out their daggers and before the wolf outside had stopped howling not one man of the palace was alive, except Boris the prince and the harpist.

There was a great lamentation of women in the village.

Boris stood there, amid all the carnage, and he said to Rolf, ‘You’re a cleverer man than I thought, Swede. You will go far, Rolf Rolfson. A man can go so far, as far as he has it in him to go, then even the luckiest man must lie down under a stone.’

‘Don’t kill the harpist,’ said Rolf. ‘He is a talented man. That was a good elegy he made, even before the death. A pity if such a good musician were to die too soon.’

So the prince and the musician went out under the stars, and nothing was ever heard of them again.

It was later said that in the Ural mountains in the east there was a travelling musician, who was accompanied everywhere by a young ragged man. And those two gave half of all the money they earned to the beggars and blind folk they met on the way. Before he played in any village square, the musician would kneel before the melancholy young man, his companion, and say, ‘Prince, may this music I am going to play now sound well in your ears …’ Those two wanderers were said to be Prince Boris and his harpist.

Rolf Rolfson took over that country but after two years he became tired of tax-gathering and boar-hunting and staying in one place.

He had a hundred men carry the Solan Goose across a great tract of land to the banks of a river called the Volga.

Rolf said to his helmsman Grettir, ‘Grettir, you are to stay behind and be prince here in Rus now. Make wars and treaties east and west, become the king of a mighty kingdom. May your name resound down the ages, Grettir.’

Grettir said all he wanted to do was to sit at the steering-oar of the Solan Goose, and so at last come home, an old man, and die in Sweden.

‘Your stars are not written that way, Grettir,’ said Rolf, ‘but as I have said.’

So Grettir watched sadly as the Solan Goose set sail down the wide River Volga. Then he went back to his palace at the edge of the forest.

There, that summer, he married a beautiful woman, and they were prince and princess of that region.

The Solan Goose was all summer sailing down the Volga. Thorfinn didn’t think there could be such a long wide river in the world.

Sometimes, out of a black forest fringing the river, a shower of arrows would come swooping into the ship. One oarsman, Valt, was killed. Rolf Rolfson told his crew to set up the shields.

Sometimes the forests thinned out and they saw immense plains, with sheep grazing and a shepherd boy playing a pipe. The boy seemed to be quite unafraid of the strange ship. He sat and played on his pipe … The shepherd dog came down to the river shore and barked against them.

Many weeks’ sailing down the river, the lookout men sighted early in the morning an orchard. Every tree was laden with apples and pears.

‘I have a great longing,’ said Rolf the skipper, ‘to sink my teeth into a ripe red apple. We will go ashore and get some.’

Thorfinn felt the inside of his own mouth running and rilling with desire for the fruit.

So the Solan Goose dropped anchor and half a dozen men rowed ashore in the little coracle.

Thorfinn begged to be taken with them.

There was a little village beside the orchard. When the villagers saw the strange vessel hesitating and halting on the river, they ran away among the trees – men and women, old doddering people, children, dogs and geese and cats.

The Swedes plucked several baskets of fruit from the trees.

Thorfinn sank his teeth into an apple. At once his mouth gushed with freshness and sweetness! He had to draw his breath before the next bite.

Solmund, one of the crew, said they ought to set the orchard on fire. A burning orchard would be a sight to wonder at.

‘You’re a fool, Solmund,’ said Rolf. ‘Even if it could be done, we wouldn’t do it.’

The sailors laughed.

‘Well,’ said Solmund, a little downcast, ‘at least we can burn down the village.’

But Rolf said they wouldn’t put torches to the village either.

Instead, Rolf took a large silver coin from his pouch and laid it on the sill of the largest house there. ‘We will pay those people for their excellent fruit,’ he said.

Then they rowed back to the Solan Goose.

The men gorged themselves on the apples and pears. Solmund ate so much that he had to lean over the side and be sick.

The sailors laughed.

They raised anchor and floated downstream.

Before they turned a bend in the river, Thorfinn looked back and saw the villagers standing in the doors of their houses.

A dog barked at the disappearing ship, but it seemed to Thorfinn to be barks of joy.

An old man was holding up his hand. His fingers flashed like a star …

The baskets of apples lasted them a full week. The fruit made a pleasant change from the great river fish they were always eating, sturgeon.

‘I will never eat a fish again, so long as I live!’ grumbled Solmund.

Sometimes one of the sailors called Bjorn who was a fowler back home at Sollentuna in Sweden brought down a few wild geese that were flying between two clouds. Then the stewpot bubbled over the fire amidships.

‘Oh,’ said Rolf, ‘for a taste of good bread! I think often of the warm crusted loaves my mother bakes in Gothenburg.’

But they did not taste bread for months.

The land on either side of the river broadened into fertile pasture and wheatlands as they sailed south.

Rolf had an eye like an eagle. ‘I see a mill beside a little stream over there,’ he said. ‘I think with luck we may be eating bread for our supper. We will go ashore now and have a word with the miller.’

They got into the coracle and rowed ashore with a few sacks to hold the grain.

The fields of golden corn stretched back to the low hills, mile on mile of fertility. Many inland villages must have lived off that plain.

They saw the miller at the top door of his mill. First the miller let fly a spear at the Swedes. It stuck quivering in the ground at Rolf’s feet. Then the miller put a horn to his mouth, and blew so hard Thorfinn thought the man’s cheeks would burst.

No sooner were the last echoes of the horn dying away than they heard the sound of hooves on the hard earth. Over the ridge rode a score of horsemen, urging on the horses, waving swords. The swords made flashing circles in the sun.

‘Now,’ said Solmund, ‘that miller certainly deserves to have his mill burned about his ears.’

‘Save your breath to get back to the ship,’ said Rolf.

The Swedes ran down to the shore.

The Cossacks’ horses pranced on the river bank above.

Thorfinn stumbled on a stone and fell. . .