The Island of the Women and Other Stories

by George Mackay Brown, G Mackay Brown, George Mackay Brown

Genres: Short Stories

Synopsis

In these six stories George Mackay Brown leads us back along the sweep of Orkney's past and beyond even that to the remoteness of fable. He reveals the timelessness of the lived moment and the constants of island life in the harvest of sea and land and the compulsions of voyage and homecoming.

Release date: March 27, 2014

Publisher: John Murray

Print pages: 320

Sample

The horizon, as far as the eyes of the girl could span, quivered. Between the horizon and the furthest spur of rock, the sea was a gray herd moving towards the shore. On the spur of rock wave after wave was wounded, gash and arch and scatter of silver spray: they dragged shorewards, one after the other, and died there, among the sand and pebbles, with long sighings and susurrations. All day, until the wind-driven trek of ocean from the west stilled towards sundown, the waves would perish on the shore with monotonous regularity. Yet it seemed to the girl that the sea, after the gale, had a happy sound along the coast. It was not so much death as consummation, the end of a long journey, the handing-over of a multitude of sweet secret messages.

What was that? – a flagon bobbing among the rocks, a sudden gleam and wallow? (The skippers did send messages of half-hopeless human urgency that way sometimes, a fragment of writing pushed into an empty wine flagon, and sealed, and flung overboard. That there was a sick man – so-and-so – on board; that there was a fine school of whales just under the horizon, ripe and drowsy for the harpooning; that there seemed to be a new island to the north, among drifts of sea-haar – let word of that be brought soon to the king; or simply, ‘I love thee well, my sweetheart, Brenda, I will be home soon and in thy arms’ …)

The dark gleam rose, between two surges, and was a bull-seal, a magnificent animal with immense eyes and silver-gray pelt. Then, off the skerry, the water was thronged with seals. They drifted slowly here and there, their faces set towards the sudden sun-glittering heave of ocean. The bull remained apart, in his ring of water. He looked up at her. The girl pursed her lips, whistled. The wind took the brief shrill music out of her mouth and blew it inland, scattered, towards the mountains. She laughed; she loved the unknowable seals almost as much as her horse and her hawk.

Then, as she walked on along the goat path, the sun dazzled directly on the sea where the seals swam; it cancelled them in gold intolerable rinsings of light. The herd was still there; the girl’s ear could detect the selkie-noise among the many sounds of the sea.

She whistled again, long and thin, into the sea wind and the net of light.

It was time for her to turn, to be getting home. The first of the suitors was expected today, from Brittany, about noon. There might be more than one; so many were coming.

The waves died, monotonous and seemingly fulfilled, among sand and pebbles and rockpool; the broken water was drawn back again into the blue immensity: ocean acknowledges no death.

The girl sat down on a stone at the side of the goat path. She would rest for a hundred wave-falls; then she must turn and go back to her father’s Hall, and the new life. This was the last day of her freedom.

She would of course obey her father’s wishes to the last detail. That was her duty and her fate and her desire. Yet she resented the unknown trappings and ceremonies of the estate that she was about to enter. She sometimes thought she could never endure it; her heart would break, she would go out of her mind, if she had to live far from this corner of Norway, with a man perhaps that she would not like, for the long remainder of her life. But that was what it was to be a woman, the only daughter and heir of a rich merchant. It was always possible that the chosen husband would be a good kind man, and that she would grow to love him in time. But the resentment still moved in her, a little vinegar in the veins; it curdled, but dissolved soon in the warm expectant blood of late girlhood.

She whistled into a lull of wind. The sun-dissolved seals stirred and eddied. She laughed. The rage against fate, against what society ordained, never lasted long. Marriage would be a perilous venture, fraught with miracles, or loss, or mere boredom.

She yawned. She had been up since before sunrise, sewing the small pearls into the bodice of the white wedding-gown, candle-splashed among old Maria and the girls.

Another long wave gathered, curled, hung, died in dazzling joyous ruin: and out of the ruin, flung high, a dark-green flagon lay streaming on the sand! A message out of the sea! The girl rose. She scaled the shallow cliff, going quickly down with skilled feet and hands, until she stood among crackles of dry seaweed. She turned. A young bright-fleshed stranger was standing between her and the sounding sighing verge! – a castaway or a pirate.

Before she could gather her wits, the stranger said, ‘I know you, girl. I have known you for a long time. We’ve been watching you since you were a child. We’ve come to love you. You should not do this thing that’s being forced on you. You’ll be unhappy for ever. We love you. There’s nothing we won’t do for you. Come now, quickly, I am a king in the west’ …

What the man said was strange and astounding, and the mode of its delivery was marvellous too; his mouth when he spoke was like a struck sea-harp.

Near his feet, along a rock, lay an empty seal-pelt. The sun, dazzling again suddenly out of a rockpool, confused the girl still more.

The stranger took a step towards her. His naked feet left no prints in the sand. She put out her hand between him and herself. That frail defence was scattered. The stranger entangled her, arms and knee and mouth. Her mouth struggled, fluttered, failed, was a tight flower, opening flower, scattered flower. There was blood on her arm from the quick blue scratch on his face. She kissed him on the wound, then on his mouth. His arms relaxed. She turned, she broke free. Her feet scurried in the sand, crashed among dry seaweed, left the shore. She flew up the cliff as quick as a bird (or so it seemed to her, telling it all to the old woman later, beside the fire). As she hung, breathless, against the goatherd’s stone, she heard the enchanting voice again, ‘It will happen. You can’t escape this. Be miserable in your rich prison for a while. My name is Imravoe, King of Suleskerry. I will come for you in the end’ …

She was sitting quietly on the stone, her eyes blinking against another sunburst. The dream was broken. It was a matter for wonderment, and slow laughter. She had sat too long last night among the candles, over the love-gown. She had in truth never moved from this stone. It was a dream begotten of sun and resentment and sea-dazzle. She kneaded her eyes. The little beach below was empty; there was neither a spread of selkie-skin nor the message-bearing bottle. The seals had moved out of their sun-prison and were splurging and eddying further out, all about the squat powerful head of the bull. Neither he nor any of his tribe seemed to be in the least concerned with her existence.

The girl said, in the small correct voice she used to the chaplain and her tutor and the guests from ship or distant castle, ‘I have fallen asleep. I had a dream. My father is rich and influential. There are a dozen young men coming to make offers for my hand in marriage, from all over Scandinavia and far beyond. My father is good and considerate. He won’t force me to marry any suitor that I don’t like – I know that. So Imravoe, handsome dream-king in the west, I must take another road. I must go in at another door, and be at last a wife and a mother. But I think I won’t forget the beautiful harp of your mouth, Imravoe, though it was only a dream-song, and dream-kisses.’

She got to her feet. She waved farewell to the indifferent seal-dance below. But, before she turned, the bull-seal, alone of the tumultuous congregation, turned his full dark melting eyes on her.

Her mouth was a cold shell. Her cheek was salt-crusted. There were five petals of blood on her wrist.

When the girl came round the corner of the last crag she saw three strange ships anchored in the bay below her father’s Hall. She hoped devoutly that they were merchants from France or England; or envoys from the king in Bergen; or new ships that her father had bought for his timber and walrus trade.

When she arrived in the courtyard her old nurse Maria met her and told her what her heart now most dreaded to hear: the first three suitors had arrived.

She met them at the long table in the Hall during supper. They were all, in their different ways, impressive young men. Tryg was a Swede from Gothenburg, fair-bearded, a soldier, one of the king’s bodyguard in the east. His bravery and chivalry had been spoken of long before she set eyes on him. He threw back his head and laughed often, and then looked eagerly from face to face at the table, as if life was a business of huge enjoyment and he could not have enough of it (because all too soon, especially for soldiers, the well is drained and dry).

A slender dark youth sat beside Tryg. His name was Oswald and he came from Jutland. He was a famous skald among the great houses of that land. It was said that some rich and beautiful ladies in the south were in love with him for his talents. Very occasionally Oswald put his dark melting eyes on the girl and then looked away, half offended, from the cold blue look she gave him in return. After supper Oswald sang two new songs on a harp, one heroic, one about love; and all the people in the Hall applauded his skill. But when the poet looked at her for whom the songs had been especially composed, she had not, in the midst of all the clapping audience, put one hand to another.

The third suitor was a German princeling. He was not as handsome and gay as Tryg the soldier, nor so talented as the skald Oswald, but his wealth put them both to shame. On his arm he had a ring of pure gold, and some master craftsman had carved the intricate dragon design on it. A great silver-smith had made the brooch at his throat, set with pearls and opals. The stuff of the blouse he wore was silk brought by caravans and camels from the furthest east, and his shoes were made of dark subtle Spanish leather. The young prince Wilhelm spoke little. There was no need to speak. His clothes and his jewellery proclaimed to all the world his wealth and status. This girl would live in splendour and ease all her life if she married him. She would drink out of emerald cups.

The Norwegian merchant, the father, smiled and nodded among this brave company, and frequently raised his wine-cup. Powerful and famous men had come in quest of his daughter: his house and lineage were securely established for many more generations, after he himself was dead.

But when, near midnight, he looked for the girl, he saw her sitting alone in a far corner of the main hall. ‘Well, of course,’ he said to himself, ‘it is no easy matter, it is in fact a very serious business, for a young girl to choose the man she must live with for the rest of her life. It must be bewildering for her, so many different accomplishments. She is thinking how painful it will be to leave her home and horse and hawk – all she is familiar with. But I would like to know, all the same, what is in her mind and heart’ …

Dancers shuttled between him and his lonely daughter. When the music stopped and the dance was a still loom at last, he looked again and saw that his daughter was no longer in the great chamber. She had, perhaps, gone to bed.

Tryg was laughing louder than ever beside the fire. Oswald was in the middle of a group of girls, turning his black melting eyes from one to another. The German princeling glittered, magnificently alone.

But she was not in her room.

They found her, near midnight, down at the shore, looking seaward across a dark heave of water.

In her chamber she stayed for seven days afterwards, until the three suitors had gone home. She would not so much as say goodbye to any of them. In vain her father beat with his fists on her door, and sometimes murmured gently through the panels, and sometimes shouted in a loud hectoring voice. She would not take the bar off for him or for anyone.

Only old Maria was allowed in, with water for her hands and face in the morning, and with a tray of fish or fowl at noon, and in the evening to unlace her and comb out her long bright hair.

On the seventh evening she told the old woman about Imravoe.

Oswald’s sail, the third and the last, disappeared among the islands. The girl came out of her chamber then. Her father turned away from her. Her behaviour had deeply wounded him. She went at once down to the rocks. The shore was empty. But on the western horizon stood a strange sail, red as a butterfly. The sail quivered in the summer wind. She wandered for miles along the coast. Not one sleek seal-head broke the sea-surface. She wept for a while among the shells and stones, when she thought of how she had hurt her father. She wept for her own foolishness. Imravoe the seal-prince had surely been a dream. Even if it was not a dream, how could a girl with warm blood ever marry a cold sea-creature! She wept because the dream, though beautiful, had been false.

When she neared the Hall, going back by cliffs that the sea had gnawed here and there into caves, she saw the ship with the scarlet sail anchored out in the bay. There, coming to meet her from the main door of the Hall, were her father and the most handsome man she had ever seen. Her father said to her, half sternly and half kindly, ‘My daughter, here is the lord Odivere from Iceland. He has come to see us on a certain matter of business. I hope that you will give him a fairer hearing than you gave to certain others who were here recently.’

The man was young. His beard was a golden fleece from nostril to throat. He put a grave steady look on her. Then he smiled, tilting back his head and narrowing his eyes a little. He even laughed, as though he was glad to be out of all the sea dangers between Iceland and Norway; but mostly, it seemed, for joy at finding such beauty on the far shore. His laughter was not like the wild extravagant death-defying laughter of Tryg the Swedish soldier. He laughed like a man who has come home after a long voyage. The girl smiled. She took both his hands in hers.

‘I am pleased to see you, Odivere,’ she said.

Her father looked anxiously from one face to the other.

This fourth suitor was wealthy too. He had three good well-carved rings on his fingers, that he wore modestly; not flashing his splendour in the eyes of the world like that arrogant German princeling.

‘I hope you will bide with us for some time,’ she said to Odivere.

Her father smiled from face to face as they passed from the sunlight into the Hall. He called for a cup of wine for the traveller – no, three cups – to celebrate his safe and welcome and much-hoped-for arrival, around the fire.

And then, over the wine, the young man began to describe his voyage to them; how a south-easterly gale had driven his ship half-way to Greenland; how they had sailed among a great school of whales to the north of Faroe; how they had heard strange singing in the waters between Shetland and Orkney, and the helmsman had shouted excitedly that he had seen a mermaid (but it could only have been the glitter of the moon which is so intense that ear is enchanted as well as eye, and imagines ineffable harp-strokes); how, further east, they had been gently besieged by a great herd of seals … The young lord Odivere had a vivid tongue, and she thought his descriptions far superior to the stylised bombast that the poet Oswald chanted above his harp.

‘My friend,’ she said. ‘You have travelled a long distance. You must be tired. I have greatly enjoyed listening to the story of your voyage – especially the herd of seals that came about your ship. Now I think you should go to bed. I will get Suena and Broda, my girls, to make up a bed for you. Have a good sleep. I look forward very much to see you again in the morning.’

Her father set down his cup; he came between them and threw his arms round both their necks, and put their faces together.

Suena and Broda were summoned from the kitchen to make a bed for the lord Odivere.

They went on speaking pleasantly for a short while, until Broda called from the south bed-chamber that the blankets were spread now. The traveller bade his hosts goodnight gravely. He raised the girl’s hand to his mouth. The girl inclined her head.

The father’s face dimpled and flashed with joy.

When Odivere disappeared at last through the door of his bed-chamber, the girl said to her father, ‘I think I love this man. I am sorry for grieving you this past week. This man I will take for my husband, if he asks me.’

‘He has asked me,’ said the merchant. ‘I have given my consent.’

Later, when the cups had been cleared away and the fire banked down, she went to see if their visitor was comfortable. What she heard on the threshold of his chamber made her pause and listen again: scufflings, whispers, the sounds made by dark hot lips, Broda’s silly giggles.

The girl returned on tiptoe, trembling, to her own chamber.

She did not sleep for a long time, because her room was full of sea-glitter and sea noises. (It was getting on for midsummer.)

When she rose next morning her father was making arrangements already for the marriage and the marriage feast; so many sheep and pigs would have to be slaughtered, so many loaves and cakes baked, so many hogsheads of ale brewed. And it wouldn’t be the chaplain in the Hall either, old Father Paul, who would perform the ceremony – a horse-man was already on his way to the bishop at Nidaros.

The Icelander greeted the girl kindly and lovingly next morning. She suffered him to put a kiss on her hand. Her face trembled when she looked at him. It was impossible, surely, what she thought she had heard beyond the curtain last night. It had been another false dream. Broda and Suena passed from kitchen to table with the breakfast plates, looking prim and cold as always. When they were alone she suffered him to put a kiss on her cheek.

Her father took Odivere aside after the meal to discuss the question of dowry.

After the splendid marriage in Norway the lord Odivere took his bride west to Orkney, where a large farm had been prepared for him in one of the islands. This estate he had purchased with the dowry.

There the young couple settled down. Odivere oversaw the work of the farm and opened trading connections with Ireland and Denmark. He had plenty to do, dealing with skippers and farm-workers and foreign merchants.

The lady Odivere organised the household. This she learned to do well after a winter or two. She had brought from Norway her old nurse Maria, and under Maria’s tactful instruction she learned how to deal with servants, and all the work of spinning-wheels and butter-churns and the baking of bread that women servants have to carry out under the supervision of the mistress of the house. The lady Odivere herself saw to it that the Hall where they lived was beautifully furnished, and clean, and full of fragrant smells whenever a stir of wind blew the curtains apart.

In time – after a little initial resentment and suspicion on the part of the islanders, who always turned away from anything new – the lady Odivere came to be liked by everyone on the estate. Even the tinkers who passed through uttered her name with a nod of the head. She was generous and considerate to everyone, as a great lady should be. In the end she was loved from end to end of the Orkneys.

For Odivere it was not quite the same. He was respected, not only for his position, but because he understood well the skills of farming and trading. But the men he had dealings with held aloof from him. There was a coldness about the man. Merchants signed his bonds and put bags of silver in his hand and went away. His farm servants did mindlessly the work that he told them to do, with horse and scythe and flail. Sometimes when the work was ill or carelessly done, they quailed before his sudden violent rages. Fires burned brightly in the great chamber on a winter day, and the ale cups went round, and stories were told; but there was never such fellowship in the men’s quarters. The islanders could not bring themselves to love that cold efficient stranger who was their master.

Some people disliked Odivere very much, and took no pains to hide it; for example, old Maria. She did not curtsy or smile when Odivere came in from hunting with a brace of grouse or a long stiff hare and laid these trophies at his wife’s feet. He would throw back his head and laugh. Then the lord and lady would kiss each other beside the loom where a tapestry was growing. But when they turned again with happy faces, there the old woman was standing by the window, frowning as if two tramps had somehow strayed in and were filthying the place.

‘Maria, why do you dislike Odivere so much?’ said the lady Odivere one day when the old woman was combing out her hair.

‘I try not to think about him at all.’

‘No, but you put on that vinegar look whenever he is here.’

‘I have heard things on the roads.’

But what kind of rumours she had heard about Odivere she would not say; no, not for any bribing or cajolery.

‘There are evil tongues everywhere in the world,’ said the lady Odivere. ‘Why won’t you tell me what these stories are?’

‘I do not want you, my sweeting,’ said old Maria, ‘to die of grief.’ And she would not say another word as she drew the comb through the long glittering crackling hair.

One morning the lady Odivere found a servant girl, Sig, the daughter of one of the ploughmen on the estate, weeping as she cleaned a great trout at the side of the burn. ‘What’s wrong, Sig?’ said the lady Odivere kindly.

But Sig would not say what ailed her. Her shoulders shook. Her face throbbed with grief.

‘Has the cook beaten you for neglecting your work?’

No: the cook had not laid a finger on her. She begged the lady for pity’s sake not to ask any more questions.

But the lady Odivere persisted. Sig must tell her. She was ill, perhaps?

‘My lady, I beg you – I am not ill. I am in my usual health.’

The lady Odivere had had enough of the girl’s peasant stubbornness. She became quite severe. ‘Sig, unless you tell me at once why you are crying I will send you back this very day to your father’s hut. You will work no more for me in the Hall.’

The knife and the trout glittered beside each other in the sunlight. The girl turned her smeared glittering face up to her mistress.

‘Please, dear lady, ask me no more. I can’t endure it.’

‘Then you will pack your box and leave the Hall at once. I won’t have such stubborn people working for me.’

At that point Sig broke into uncontrollable sobs. Her small body shook with grief above the stones and the rushing water. The lady Odivere was sorry at once for having added a new hurt to the girl’s sum of anguish. She sat down beside her on the grass and put an arm round her.

And then, while the gulls wrangled on the shore over the entrails of the great fish, the lady Odivere heard all that Sig would ever tell her – a few broken words among sobs and sniffs – but she gathered that some man in the island who had no right to do so had taken Sig in his arms and forced unwelcome kisses on her; and worse.

A coldness came upon the lady Odivere then that would not have troubled her if the brutish wooer had been some ploughboy, or the man who looked after the falcons.

She kissed Sig gently, and told her she was not to worry; and she told her how much she liked her; so much indeed that she was going to take her away from the kitchen – where there was always a certain amount of horseplay and loose talk which was hurtful often to young innocent girls – and she was going to make Sig one of her own personal servants. From that very day Sig would work in the lady Odivere’s chamber, at embroidery most of the time, but also at dress-making and weaving. Nobody would harm her there.

Sig turned on her mistress then a face of such love and gratitude – though it was all messed with her late sorrow – that the lady Odivere had to smile back, even through the gathering lourd of her own heart.

That evening, as old Maria was preparing her for bed, the lady Odivere said, ‘Maria, you do not like my husband. I think I know the reason now. My dear Maria, my husband cannot help his nature. He has been endowed with an over-abundance of sensuality. I do not hold it against him. I understand. I love him in spite of the way he behaves sometimes when he thinks I am not there.’

Maria shook her head. She was just an ignorant old peasant woman, she said. She did not understand such subtle high-flown talk.

‘I mean,’ said the lady Odivere, ‘that he has little wayward outbreaks of love, now and then, for this girl and that.’

‘He kisses women,’ said old Maria. ‘Everybody knows he does that. That’s nothing.’ Then she gave such a violent tug to her mistress’s hair with the comb that the lady cried out.

‘There’ll be kissings in dark places till the end of time,’ said old Maria. ‘That’s nothing. I would laugh if it was only that.’

They heard the sound of a foot on the threshold. Maria put her wise withered mouth to the cheek of her mistress and went out by another door before the lord Odivere should enter …

There came a disquiet on Odivere that winter, a growing restlessness. He took no pains to hide from his young wife what ailed him; he had the wanderlust, he wanted to be abroad for a year or two. This hunger for new lands and seas was no new thing in the countries of the north; it was precisely that that had lured the Norsemen out of their poor mountains and sea-coasts towards Iceland, and Greenland, and Vinland (that men later called America) and France and Sicily and Byzantium. Once at least in every Norseman’s life a rage and a hunger possessed him; he would wither and die if he could not break that gray circle of the horizon. Even Sund the old ploughman, who did nothing but sit at the Hall fire all winter long, had been to Ulster with Guthorm and Arnor the poet; that four-month-long excursion had kept him in stories (which were, it was said, lies mostly) for fifty years. An adventure into the sun once a lifetime, was due to every man who lived on the fringes of the Arctic Circle. Their women expected it. They did not complain; though sea travel in those days was a hazardous matter, and the chances were one in seven that husband or son or father might not return. Not without cause they called the sea ‘the old gray widow-maker’ …

It was a priest from Lindisfarne in England who breathed first on the smoulders.
. . .