Hawkfall

by George Mackay Brown

Genres: General Fiction; Sea Adventures; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

This collection of sharply-etched fables, dealing with death, legend, love and violence create an Orcadian world that spanning myth and reality - a world set firmly between the sea and the sky - a collection of islands which are life-sustaining and soul refreshing.

Release date: March 13, 2014

Publisher: John Murray

Print pages: 224

Sample

He was dead. The spirit of The Beloved One had gone on alone into the hall of death. His body was left to them for seven days yet so that they might give it a fitting farewell. Now it was time for it too to be sent after. The priests washed his old frail bluish body with water that had been drawn at sunrise. They arrayed him in his ceremonial vestments: the dyed woollen kirtle, the great gray cloak of wolfskin, the sealskin slippers. Across his breast they laid his whalebone bow, and seven arrows of larch. In his right hand they put the long oaken spear. The old mouth began to smile in its scant silken beard, perhaps because everything was being done well and according to the first writings.

Now it was time. All was ready.

A young man blew a horn on the hillside. The six bearers of the dead lifted the body and set out with it from the Temple of the Sun. They crossed between the two lochs, over a stone causeway. They walked solemnly, keeping step, towards the House of the Dead a mile away. Women walked alongside, wailing and lamenting, but in a ritual fashion, not as they would weep over the cruelty of a lover or the loss of a bronze ring. There were six women: a very old woman, a woman with the blark mark of widowhood on her brow, a woman with the ripe belly and breasts of pregnancy, a woman with a red bride-mark on her cheek, a tall girl with new untapped breasts, and a small child of five or six years. They flung their arms about in anguish, they beat their heads and covered their faces with their hands, their shoulders convulsed in loud wails as they stumbled blindly behind the corpse. (But from time to time one looked shrewdly to see where she was putting her feet; and sometimes one wailed till she had to stop for breath, and then she would turn her head and smile to one or other of the chorus, before falling once more to her prescribed lamentation. The little girl uttered cries like a bird, looking round from time to time at the other women and imitating their gestures.)

The procession arrived at the House of the Dead. Boys were waiting at the lee of the wall with unlit lamps at their feet. The priests laid down their awesome burden. The women wailed louder than ever. The old one knelt on the ground and shrieked; she held her skinny arms out as if all the world’s joy and love had been reft from her.

A priest turned and rebuked these distracted ones. Foolish women, he said sternly, to weep so, when you should know that a great chief is going now into his nuptial joys, so that the light may be reborn, with primrose and tern, seal and cornstalk, and that you yourselves may be possessed with all abundance.

Meantime the boys kneeling at the lee of the House of the Dead had been putting flint sparks to their lamps, and guarding the small flames anxiously from the wind. And sometimes, so bright the spring sun shone, it seemed their precious flames were lost. But no: as they stooped in under the low lintel of the House of the Dead, all five of them, one after the other, the lamps glowed like opal in the gloom of the long corridor. So they passed in to the central chamber, uttering an elegy in their high or newly-broken voices.

He is gone from us, The Brave Hunter

He is gone from us, The Opener of Wells

He is gone from us, Fosterer of the

Children of the Sun (the kindly

kindled fires, the lamp flames in winter)

He is gone from us, our Shield

He is gone from us, The Wise Counsellor

He is gone from us, The Corn Man …

After them came the dead chief with one bearer in front and one behind, for it was impossible for more than one person to enter at a time. Very low they had to stoop, these grown men, at the entrance to the House of the Dead. Almost on their knees they had to proceed along the stone corridor; for death should make men lowly and humble, and so they groped their way forward like moles into the flaming heart of the howe.

The central chamber filled silently up with the priests of the sun. The boys stood against the dripping walls, holding their lamps high. The bearers of the dead reassembled. They lifted their king-priest in his litter. A huge square stone block had been levered out of the wall and lay on the floor. Inside the tomb they could see, shadowy and flickering, the bones of former rulers, a knuckle bone, ribs, a skull. Now they prepared this latest traveller for his journey. They laid on him brooches of silver and horn, agates, polished cairngorms, a bronze sword; beside his head a silver cup to refresh him if perhaps he should falter in the arms of his dark bride.

The loaded body passed into the aperture. The stone was lifted and set in the wall once more. One by one the priests of the sun knelt and kissed the stone, and passed out, stooping low for a score of paces, into the spring wind and the sun.

The boys followed with their lamps. Outside they extinguished them; but the sun was so bright that the flames were only small invisible quivers. The boys puffed their cheeks over them. A little smoke rose.

And there on the inside slope of the great fosse that circled the House of the Dead sat the six women, laughing at some lewd story that the old crone was telling. The big-bellied woman seemed to shake the earth with her thunderous mirth. Even the widow smiled. The child was on the far side of the fosse, stooping and rising, daisies spilling out through her fingers.

A priest rebuked them. ‘Foolish women,’ he said, ‘do you still not know that your king and your high priest is dead?’ … The women turned away and drew their shawls over their faces, but the shoulders of the child-bearer continued to shake for a long time.

A thin cry shivered across the still waters of the loch. Many voices responded with a shout. In the Temple of the Sun a new priest-king had been chosen. At the very moment of entombment the power had fallen upon a chosen one.

The priests, the women, the boys walked slowly and silently, in procession as they had come, to the Temple beyond the two lochs. Soon they would know who the new father of the people was to be.

He stood in the heather, his upper body naked, alone in the still centre of the circle of huge monoliths: a young man, scarcely more than a boy, a virgin: on him the choice had fallen, his name the voice of the gods had uttered. ‘This is the man,’ proclaimed the caucus of ancient priests who alone could interpret the unutterable will of the gods. And, the choice having now been made, these old ones fussed around here and there, issuing orders to priests and acolytes and people, anxious that everything should be done in accordance with the ancient writings.

The young man with his bright body stands in the centre of the Temple.

He will never again kiss a country girl in the dark of the moon. He must bear now all his days the burden of perpetual virginity so that all else might be fruitful in field, in loch, in the great sea, in the marriage beds. In him the sorrows and triumphs of the tribe will be enacted ritually, and through his mouth the ancient wisdom interpreted; until at last, after very many years, the sun becomes a burden to him and he fares gladly to the House of the Dead and to the dark bride.

A priest kneels before him, puts into his hand a flint knife.

The ceremonies of initiation and consecration will last for a whole week. These rites are solemn, ancient, intricate, and of an almost impossible delicacy (for let a word be spoken wrong, or a gesture obscure the sun, or a foot step withershin, and much misfortune may stem from the flaw).

A young boar is dragged squealing across the heather to the Father of the People. Four priests manhandle the gnashing squealing slithering outraged beast. They up-end it in front of the Father of the People. Gravely, nervously, compassionately he bends over and pushes the flint knife into the boar’s gullet. Blood spurts over his arms and shoulders. The boar twists about, staggers to its feet, looks about it very bewildered, runs a few steps this way and that way, stops, stumbles, slowly keels over on its side, hind legs faintly kicking. The priest-king holds cupped hands under the terrible throat wound. The people crowd about as he stands and scatters the sacrificial blood among them.

Now an ox is sacrificed. It is a quiet patient beast. It thrashes and goes limp under the knife. Blood is showered to the four quarters of the sun, and falls among the people. Happy the man who has a single red spot on his coat.

The arms and shoulders and breast of the Beloved of the Sun are smeared and daubed as if a tattered scarlet shirt had been thrown over him.

A hooded falcon is carried through the heather on a priest’s fist; and is unhooded; and glares once, fiercely, at the celebrant; and flares out and flutters under the knife and is still. And again a small scattering of the life-giving essence.

For the animals bless us with their blood: whom the sun and moon and stars love, and who love those brightnesses in return, but who cannot articulate blessing, the innocent ones; they bless the wintry hearts of men with passionless perpetual streams of sacrifice.

That same day, near a village on the west coast of the island, the men prepared for the first fishing of the year. Two by two the fishermen stood beside their boats among the sheltering rocks. Then with a cry and a heave they swung the inverted boat up over their heads, and turned, an immense purposeful four-footed insect, across the broad sand to the edge of the water; and with a cry and a heave were again two fishermen and a floating curragh.

Next they brought down to the sea their stack of crab-pots. With concentration, a dark intentness, they stowed them on board. The stone brine-prisons in the Skara Brae houses were almost empty of limpets and dulse and whelks and mussels, but today they were after more succulent fish, the crab and the haddock. Creel by creel was handed from shore to boat.

In one of the Skara Brae houses an old mouth, so very dry and whiskered and shrunken that the young ones forgot sometimes whether it belonged to a man or a woman, began to mutter over the ashes, ‘The Beautiful One is dead.’ It soughed out the same words, over and over again. Once it said, ‘His mouth was a delight to my mouth.’ Then, over and over again, like the creaking of ash when a fire is dying, ‘The Beautiful One, the Beautiful One, he is dead.’

A young woman came to the sea-bank and called to the busy fishermen, ‘The chief has died between the two lochs. Old Mara, she has seen it.’

The fishermen paid no attention to her. It was a good day for fishing: a pewter sea and a gray sky. The crabs had put on their new hard coats. They would have issued from their crannies and ledges to see what polyps and algae they could prey upon. And they would certainly not despise the bait that men offered them.

The fishermen worked on.

Three women came and stood on the low sea-bank that protected the village. A fierce elderly woman cried to the fishermen, ‘Does a man work the day his father dies? The Father of the People is dead. He who feeds us is dead, the Provider. Do you want a darkness to fall on us?’

Two of the curraghs were afloat. The men in them hesitated and were half turning back to the sand. A young man with a curiously flattened nose spoke across the water. ‘Pay no attention to the women. What if some old man or other is dead? We have been making creels all winter for this day.’ He handed the oars to his companion in the boat and leapt aboard. Half-a-dozen groups were still stowing creels aboard. The first three curraghs drifted slowly into the west.

A boat scraped on the stones of the steep green island. Two young men leapt from the bow and dragged the boat clear of the water. A man with a hawk on his fist stepped from the slippery stones to the sand. He was a tall dark ugly man, with a hook nose and a sharp gray eye. The falconer followed him on to the island. The dark man flung the hawk from him. It would not go; it fluttered and flared and swung on his hand, rooted there, a fierce flaring of wings. The falconer stooped to it, whispered, offered it his hand, sang. The bird hopped gently from one fist to the other. Then the dark man walked up the beach, leapt over the low sea-bank, and ran across a field to a carved stone doorway. He entered the Hall boisterously.

In the church a stone-throw away the clergy and the boys were trying out their voices at a new setting of a penitential psalm:

Miserere mei, Deus, secundum

magnam misericordiam tuam

Et secundum multitudinem

miserationum tuarum dele iniquitatem meam

A cantor was trying to make a proper contrast of voices, a better interweaving of treble with bass and tenor. ‘Try once again,’ said the offended clerical voice. ‘Once more now.’

Miserere mei, Deus, …

The dark man’s feet thudded over the wooden floor of the Hall. The fire in the central hearth was almost out, charred logs with one yellow flame gulping among them. The man stopped and clapped his hands. A boy came running from the women’s quarters beyond. ‘Blow up the fire,’ said the man. ‘It’s February, not June. Bring in more logs. Start a flame with some broken peats.’

‘Yes, lord,’ said the boy, and lifted a large straw basket from the hearth.

He was a rather ugly boy; he seemed to have no proper nose-bridge, so that his nostrils flared out over his cheeks; also his face was a constellation of freckles; but in spite of these defects everyone in the Hall found him attractive, and the women especially were inclined to spoil him.

‘Lord,’ he said now, pleadingly, ‘please give me leave to go to the burn after dinner. There is an otter in the burn. I have sharpened a long stick.’

‘Tomorrow,’ said the man. ‘Today there are more important things to do.’

The boy pouted a little. He turned and carried the basket in front of him to the fuel-hoard outside.

At the far end of the long Hall a woman sat at a loom. She was still beautiful though her hair was streaked with gray and there were wrinkles about her eyes and mouth. Around her sat three girls. One was on a low stool. The two on the floor had their feet tucked demurely under their skirts. The three girls were sewing. They drew coloured woollen threads through one long undulation of linen. Truncated pictures appeared on the linen – the wing of a raven, the leg of a soldier, the stern of a ship.

The men who had hauled the boat ashore entered, carrying dead birds and hares, and passed through into the kitchen, a hound flowing and lolloping among their legs.

The dark man approached the women round the loom. He strode across the tapestry. One of the girls cried ‘O’ and put her hands to her mouth as the deerskin shoes, soiled with sand and mud and seaweed, brushed against the linen. The man bent over the woman at the loom. She tilted her face towards him. ‘Ingibiorg,’ he said. He kissed her once on the mouth (still red and beautiful, though with wrinkles and unwanted hairs about the corners now). He touched her coiled bronze braided hair gently. Then he passed out of the chamber into the dark corridor beyond.

The boy came staggering back into the Hall with logs and peat in the basket. He dumped it down beside the hearth. The girls called out to him to take care.

The dark man took off his hunting jacket in his room. He took off his hat with the swan’s feather in it. He took off his red woollen shirt. He kicked off his shoes. He went to the door and clapped his hands. He loosed the thong at his waist and slid his skin trousers off and threw them on the heap of clothes on the bed. He turned. A silent figure stood in the door with a garment over his arm. The naked man went down on his knees and stretched out his arms for the penitential sackcloth to be put on him.

‘Mis-er-er-e,’ said the ill-natured voice from the choir of the church. ‘You are not exactly at a feast when you sing that. You are not in a dance-hall or a tavern. Not exactly. You are souls in torment. You are standing in holy fire. Pray that it may be the cleansing fire of Purgatory and not that other unquenchable brimstone. Now once again – and remember your sins and be sorry for them while you sing it – Mis-er-er-e.’

The bass voices made utterance, dark with sorrow.

The man in sackcloth followed the summoner across the field to the church. The walls still had skirtings of snow, under the blue cold sweep of sky. Revay Hill had a white worn cap. Bare feet followed bare feet across the grass and into the gloom of the church. The penitent knelt beside a pillar and, shaking with cold, tried to remember his sins. The killing of his nephew Rognvald in the seaweed in Papa Stronsay. The burning of Rognvald’s men earlier that same night. The holocaust of the King of Norway’s men the next morning, a heap of reeking corpses on the shore of Kirkwall. He tried to imagine these things, the sword in the guts – a lingering bitter death that; the fire climbing from belly to chest to beard, bones crackling and marrow bubbling and the man still not dead, unless he had mercifully choked on a lump of smoke; the axe in the skull between one word and another. He tried to imagine the sins he had committed, and to be sorry for them, but he could think of nothing except the spasms of cold that were going through his body.

Meantime the Mass had begun. ‘Introibo ad altare Dei,’ sang the Bishop in his fine Latin that he had learned to pronounce in the colleges of Paris.

‘Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,’ responded the choristers in the coarser Latin of the north.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Backwards and forward the voices shuttled, weaving the unseen garment of penitence, weaving the sackcloth.

There was silence. The penitent looked up. An acolyte was bringing to the Bishop the bason of ashes. The boy knelt before the altar, delivered the ashes, knelt again, retired. The penitent swung his head round the church slowly. Ingibiorg his wife was kneeling behind him, but in the clothes that she had worn at the loom; only her hair was covered with a gray cloth. Three gray-kerchiefed girls knelt beside her. The falconer and the young men were there in their hunting clothes, their feathered caps on the stone floor beside their knees. Erlend his second son knelt over by the statue of Saint Olaf. The cook was there, carrying his ladle as though it would take a blessing from being in church and pour out better broth and stew. He did not see the boy who looked after the fires in the Hall. The stewart was there. The men from the fishing boat had brought their nets. The ploughmen and the cattlemen and the shepherds and the keeper of the pigsty were there, and their women. All those cheeks were gaunt in the taper light, as if sorrow had indeed hollowed out their faces. He alone wore the sackcloth for them all.

De profundis clamavi, Domine. A bass voice rose up, imploring, out of woeful pits of shame. Domine, exaudi orationem meam, sang the tenors. The phrases were a little brighter, as if hope were a possibility – it was there, somewhere, surely – it was not entirely extinguished. At least sorrow was something – the people of Orkney had this day put off the many-coloured coat of vanity.

But had they? Thorfinn Sigurdson, Earl of Orkney, Shetland, Caithness, Sutherland, Ross, the Hebrides, Man, Lord of the Western Sea, could not concentrate on anything because of the great qualms that shook his body. Springs of coldness rose from his knees where they touched the stone floor and passed up through his loins and his belly and his chest and his face. His clasped hands shook. He tried to concentrate on his sins. Unfaithfulness to the Lady Ingibiorg on three occasions this past winter, with one of the handmaidens (the innocent-looking one) and with Sven the ploughman’s eldest daughter and with the Gaelic girl in Caithness – O God, he could not even think of the girl’s name or her appearance because of the cold gules that were chilling the sinuses of his forehead and obliterating his ears and fingers.

Sacerdores tui induantur iustitiam: et sancti tui exultent, sang the farm boys, their pure high blessed notes rising to the roof.

And I did not go to Mass at Christmas midnight, because I had drunk too much honeyed ale. And I accuse myself of the constant sin of pride. And while many of my people eat limpets and roots I never fail to stuff my belly out with roasts of pork and trout from the grill and Irish wines. And I … But he existed within the heart of an iceberg.

Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion: ut aedificentur muri Jerusalem, sang the redeemed voices, base and treble and tenor part of a single whole, interwoven, reconciled, a fitting Lenten garment to offer to the Lord.

In the following silence the worshippers heard, borne into the church on the uncertain east wind, very faintly, the cry of a transfixed otter.

The Bishop descended from the altar, carrying the bason. He paused before the Earl. The Bishop dipped his thumb in the ashes. He marked a gray cross on the forehead of the Earl. Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris …

All the people bowed their heads, waiting for the ashes of humiliation to be written on their brows.

The principal clerk at the Palace of Birsay, Jonathan Fraser, a Scotsman, sat at a table in the library on the morning of June the tenth and wrote, as every morning, the diary of Patrick Stewart his master as far as he had observed the Earl’s busine. . .