Magnus

by George Mackay Brown

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

First published in 1973 by the Hogarth Press, Magnus is George Mackay Brown’s tour de force – his most poetic and innovative book. He links the twelfth-century story of the saintly Earl Magnus of Orkney’s brutal murder at the hands of his cousin Hakon Paulson, to that of the philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazis during World War II. This is a unique exploration of the eternal questions of guilt, goodness and personal sacrifice.

Release date: August 27, 2019

Publisher: Polygon

Print pages: 208

Sample

One spring morning all the peasants of Birsay were out on the bishop’s land, ploughing behind their oxen.

The land went in a gradual fertile sweep from the hill Revay to the shore of Birsay. Just off the shore was a steep green island, with a church on it, and a little monastery, and a Hall. A sleeve of sea shone between the ploughlands and The Brough of Birsay (as this island was called). Occasionally the peasants could hear the murmur of plainsong from the red cloister.

The wild geese flew over.

The peasants put their slow patient scars on the fields.

A young man and woman crossed the heather to a new strip of tilth on the lower slope of Revay Hill. The woman was solid and squat and redfaced; she carried a wooden plough over her shoulder. The man yawned as he went. One or two of the peasants called out to him that he was sleeping late in the morning nowadays. He laughed back at them – a flash of teeth, a gust of lewd confident laughter. One peasant shouted, ‘It’s as bad as that, is it, Mans? You even have to take Hild to the field with you.’ The young man laughed again, but Hild his wife hung her head and blushed. ‘No,’ said Mans, ‘the ox is lame. Damn you, Sven, I’m not as randy as that. Hild will have to pull the plough this morning, that’s all that’s for it.’

They reached the end of their rig. This small field had been broken open with mattocks two years before and it was good fruitful earth, but the undersoil kept thrusting up primeval stones and roots to the sun, and it was still difficult to plough. Mans fitted the yoke on the thick shoulders of his wife. ‘I’m sorry, woman,’ he said. ‘With luck we’ll be finished before sunset. The ox will maybe be better tomorrow.’

‘We’ll manage,’ said Hild. ‘I’m as strong as any ox.’

‘Plough out that new strip on the side of Revay, he says to me,’ said Mans, mocking the officiousness of Arn the factor. ‘Plough it out tomorrow morning. My intention is that barley should be sown in it this year. Says I, The ox is lame, he stumbled on a stone. Says he, You’ve got a new strong wife, haven’t you? Yoke her. What’s a stone or two, neither here nor there, says he. The bastard.’

Now the plough was set, between Hild and Mans, like a great key to open the winter field to the sun and full bounty of harvest. Mans prodded his wife with a stick. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Go slow and straight. Don’t lurch.’ Hild moved forward, dragging the plough. Once or twice she jerked to a halt. Then Mans dropped the shafts and picked up a stone from in front of the share and threw it aside. ‘Get up,’ he shouted. The sun rose higher. They finished the first of the seven furrows. Hild drew her forearm across her shining brow. ‘Turn round,’ said Mans. ‘We’re not stopping. We must get the whole rig ploughed before the sun goes down.’

The plough went, waveringly, making a second scratch across the flank of the hill, borne by the woman, driven by the man. They were bowed under the immensity of their labour. They seemed to bear the sun on their shoulders. At the end of the second furrow – a lucky one, because there were no stones, only the sigh and suck of steadily broken clay – they saw that the other peasants had stopped working. They were sitting here and there about the hill eating their bread and cheese. ‘We’re not stopping yet,’ said Mans. ‘We lay in bed too long this morning. We’ll stop and eat when we’ve finished the next furrow.’

They turned again. They had hardly taken three ponderous steps when Hild cried out and clapped her hands to her shoulder. ‘What’s wrong now?’ said Mans, shaking the stilts of the plough.

‘Another stone, I think,’ said Hild.

Mans came round and dragged a huge stone from the side of the share. He lifted it and went reeling to the edge of the rig and dropped it. ‘There’s enough stones in this field to build a barn,’ he said when he came back. ‘Only if I did that, the bishop would put up the rent for sure. Another stone of butter, I think, Arn the factor would say. Yes, another stone of butter, and a stone of cheese, and I think perhaps an extra day’s labour in his lordship’s field at harvest, my man … Bloody parasites.’

At the end of the third furrow Mans unyoked Hild. They sat down in the heather. Hild took two wedges of white cheese and a bannock out of her basket. She broke the bannock in two and gave the larger piece, and a wedge of cheese, to Mans. Hild made a sign of the cross over the food. ‘Bless all Thy gifts to us from Thy bounty. Amen.’ Mans was already eating. ‘Say Amen,’ said Hild. Mans mumbled something through a mouthful of cheese and bread; a runnel of grey juice ran into his beard.

Something was happening over on The Brough. That tranquil island was suddenly like a disturbed beehive. A servant woman walked among an outflurry of hens and stooped and went back into the kitchen of the Hall with six twitching corpses. The bell for Terce was late, and was succeeded almost at once by the bell for Sext. Long white coats, bald heads, hurried here and there through the cloister. A man with a knife dragged a pig, thinly squealing, towards the dunghill in the yard. Once the young bishop himself appeared bareheaded, and looked over towards the Hall, and went back into the church. There were important guests at the earl’s Hall that day. They moved about in their stylish clothes in the sunlight, bright as bees and butterflies. One came down to the water’s edge and dipped his fingers in a pool. A young couple, hand in hand, climbed towards the summit of the island, where it was suddenly shorn off into a line of tall red Atlantic-facing cliffs. The kitchen began to reverberate with the noise of pots and pans. The island had a larger skirt now, for the tide had been ebbing all morning and leaving swathes of seaweed and uncovered rocks. Soon it would be an island no more, and the few peasant women who were standing in a knot on the Birsay shore would be able to walk across to The Brough, if they got official permission.

‘What’s going on?’ said Mans, sucking the last of the juice out of his red curly moustache.

‘Surely you haven’t forgotten,’ said Hild. ‘Today’s the wedding. The lord Erlend and the lady Thora. Everybody in Orkney knows that.’

‘If they don’t know now,’ said Mans, ‘they will know it next winter. They’ll know it all right when their taxes go up. To keep the wine in their cups and the silk on their backs. The bloodsuckers.’

‘You mustn’t speak like that,’ said Hild. ‘I saw the lady Thora on her horse yesterday. She’s a bonny girl, right enough. She smiled at me, riding down between the fields. I wish I could see her in her bridal gown. I hope the wedding won’t take place till evening, then I might have a chance of seeing her, like the women down at the shore there.’

‘If I was you,’ said Mans, ‘I would save my breath to pull the plough.’ He got to his feet. Hild followed him. He lifted the yoke. She bowed her shoulders to receive it. He angled the plough at the earth.

The fourth furrow was heavy going. The share struck on gray stones and red stones. Mans threw them aside. Once the plough got wedged between two stones, and when Mans pulled them up he saw a well of darkness underneath – not the rich earth darkness but the uncanny hollow darkness of a troll’s house. He peered inside, and saw an underground chamber of large crude stones. These trolls’ houses were common in this part of Orkney. If you were brave enough to explore deeper you might find a few human skeletons, with cairngorms and pearls and silver brooches. But only a few of the young Vikings had the courage to go after such terrible treasure. Mans did not throw these stones aside. He replaced them carefully over the hole and covered it up with earth. He beat the earth flat with his feet. Hild turned round and crossed herself three times. ‘Get up,’ said Mans. The plough stoddered forward, round the breached cellar.

Down at the shore now, there were a score of women waiting.

Between the fifth and the sixth furrows two young tinkers, a man and a girl, crossed the shoulder of the hill. The man was carrying a dead rabbit. They hesitated at the edge of the rig, then the girl began to walk among the furrows. She stood for a moment in the third furrow, looking uncertainly from the man tinker to the two peasants. The plough shivered to a halt.

‘Get back off the ploughed land,’ shouted Mans. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going? Off with you.’

The tinker girl skipped back to her mate. She was a dark lithe creature. Varying fires – rage, mockery, scorn – burned in her eyes. Her face smouldered at Mans and Hild. She had large flashing eyes; as if they drew their light direct from the clear well of the sun.

Her man said, humbly and gently, ‘I’m sorry, sir. We’re making for the shore, to cook our supper. It’s shorter this way. I sprained my ankle up on the hill.’

‘It’s not as if the seed was in,’ said the girl. ‘I wasn’t doing any harm.’

‘Cross a ploughed field once more this summer,’ said Mans slowly and darkly, ‘just let me hear of you putting one foot in anybody’s corn, and the factor will know about it. The factor hanged three tinkers in Caithness last winter.’

The tinker girl put a black glower on Mans. Her man took her by the elbow, anxiously, in case she said any more. They veered away, going round by the side of the field. Before they turned their faces to the shore, the girl jumped once in and out of a furrow. The girl yelled in derision. She squeezed up her face and stuck out her tongue. Hild looked round, terrified, at the hideous gargoyle (for tinkers, with priests and witches, can put a curse on simple people). Then the girl went leaping down the hill, and her man followed hirpling a long distance behind. Her mockery faded among the rocks and sand dunes.

‘Bloody scum,’ said Mans.

‘No, but you must be careful what you say to the likes of them.’

They paused at the end of the sixth furrow.

Bells, thin and purified with distance, began to peal from the steeple of the church in the island (that was now an island no more, for the last thread of sea had snapped, and the women of Birsay had begun to troop over, picking their way carefully with raised skirts among the seaweed and the rockpools). On the hither shore only the two tinkers were left. They stooped, gathering bits of driftwood from the ebb. Up and down and round the bells swung, they nodded, they brimmed with joyous sound, the bronze tongues struck the bronze palates, and all these mouths trembled, now one, now another, high and low, all different, but making a single splendour of sound, an epithalamion.

The figures that erupted suddenly about the open door of the Hall were no bigger than bees, from where Mans and Hild stood among their furrows. These were the wedding guests – the gentry and large farmers and important merchants of Orkney and Caithness. A lonely mitred figure appeared at the door of the church. The swarm of wedding guests unfolded to reveal two figures, one in white, one in scarlet. The pair moved slowly towards the church door. The wedding guests seethed after them. All moved in a trance of happy sound. The air was rich. The bishop raised his right hand. Bridegroom and bride bowed. They touched his offered jewelled hand with their mouths. They passed first into the church. The bells trembled and fell silent, one after the other. After that bronze exultation, the fragile choir voices. Homo quidam fecit cenam magnam, sang the monks inside. The bishop followed bridegroom and bride into the web of sacred song. The wedding guests, two by two, stooped under the arch.

‘We have one more furrow to do,’ said Mans.

Breaking the last furrow, they were very tired. Hild stumbled once or twice. When the plough struck a stone she felt as though her shoulder had been wrenched from its socket. She groaned. Mans, stumbling after the plough, began to mutter and curse to himself about this and that. ‘Your wife, says he, she’ll do till the ox gets better. Yoke her …’ And on he went, mumbling occasionally ‘scum’, ‘parasites’, ‘bastards’, ‘bloodsuckers’, though whether he meant the factor or the bridal pair or the tinkers at their fire on the shore or the stony furrow Hild did not know. Once or twice Mans spat in disgust. Hild’s back ached as though she had lain a winter on a bed of boulders. She saw that her feet were plodding through scree and tufts of heather. ‘Woa!’ cried Mans. ‘We’re finished, thank God. Where do you think you’re going?’

They stretched themselves for a while in the heather. All the other peasants had gone home with their ploughs and oxen.

The ocean tilted up, slowly, to meet the sun. In Christ Church the nuptial Mass was being celebrated, though of course nothing of the ceremony could be heard from the sunset flank of Revay; nothing, except one small exquisite tinkle through the stillness of the sea and the seabirds. ‘The Lord Christ is in the church now,’ whispered Hild. She sat up. She saw the Birsay women kneeling round the church door.

Mans muttered among the heather.

‘It’s time we were going home,’ said Hild at last.

The sun was a bleeding wound along the horizon.

Evening brought a great silence, in which there were only small sounds – the lap of a wave, the thud of a rabbit or a hare, the pleep-pleep of a seabird.

Mans put the plough over his shoulder. He was too tired to say yes or no.

Half-way down to their croft, Hild looked back. There was a yellow-and-red flicker outside the cave; that would be the tinkers stewing their rabbit.

‘For Christ’s sake hurry up,’ said Mans. ‘I’m hungry.’

It grew darker. The church was possessed by a still measured murmur. It came, a thread of blessing, over the sea. Hild paused to listen.

Suddenly Mans was furiously angry. He stood on the peat road and raged. ‘The blessing,’ he shouted. ‘What kind of blessing do they need, other than what they’ve got!’ … Hild walked on. She felt sad and a bit frightened when Mans was in this mood. They were poor humble folk – they always would be – God had ordained it so – it was foolish, not to say impious, to complain the way Mans did whenever there was a bit of extra labour to do on the land.

She walked on, alone. There was a different sound from the sea now. The tide had turned. The gray flood was beginning to pour in from the west. Slowly the waters encroached on the wide shore that led from the ploughlands to The Brough. The darkening sea was full of echoes and boomings and sonorities.

When Hild looked round again Mans had disappeared. She knew where he had gone. Prem the weaver’s door further up the hill stood open and she could see a few men sitting round the lamp and the barrel. Prem, who was a bachelor, kept a kind of ale-house in addition to his loom and his hundred sheep. ‘No wife,’ thought Hild, ‘would allow that kind of carry-on in her house.’ … Like most of the women, she disliked drink and the changes it wrought in her man. A few peasants and fishermen gathered in Prem’s cottage in the evening. Hild hated it when Mans went there, for it was hard to say in what shape he would come home. He was one of the kind that wouldn’t stop drinking till the barrel was empty. When he got drunk he was generally violent and satirical.

Hild was too tired to eat anything in her cold cottage. She knelt beside the bed and said Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be. Then, because her whole body ached, she lay down on the straw and sacking. She prayed to God that Mans would come home from the ale-house sober. She prayed that the lord Erlend Thorfinnson and the lady Thora would have many happy years together, and children growing about them, and children’s children to sweeten their age. She prayed that the field they had ploughed would yield enough for them to eat next winter. She prayed that there would be no more war in the islands in their time: she thought with horror of the burning houses, the young men with the savage frightened mouths, the women going among the wounds and corpses at the shore, the ships that sailed into the west and never returned. Give peace in our time, Lord, she whispered in the darkness. She wondered briefly why, when all the other women in Birsay seemed to bear a new infant regularly each winter since their marriage, her own womb was still untroubled. Could it be that she was barren? Fruit of the womb of the blessed Mary, she prayed, give me a child in this house, to sing to in a crib in the corner. She prayed once more that Mans would not get drunk, and in the middle of that prayer she fell asleep.

She awoke to the gnawing in her shoulders, to the gray half-light before dawn, to the bitter taste of unanswered prayer. For Mans w. . .