Chapter Four - The Kettle Girl

Erno Hamson sat with his feet dangling over the barnacled stones of the old seawall, staring blindly out to sea, trying hard to control his frustration and hoping some ship -- any ship -- might come by. Pale sunlight struck down through the water in the inner harbour to where half a dozen wrecked boats lay drowned on the seabed, evidence of the raiders' destruction. This exact spot had used to be his favourite place in all of Elda, and he had sat here on a hundred previous occasions, but never in circumstances like those in which he now found himself. For a start, this time there was no Katla Aransen at his side, her crabline disappearing into the lazy green waters below them as they bunked off some chore up at the steading. Indeed, he had very little idea of where Katla might be, except that she was not here at Rockfall, where he had so fervently hoped to find her. Above and behind him, the black smoke which had engulfed the steading on the hillside had disappeared, blown away on a stiff north wind which drove high clouds fast across a chill blue sky. The bodies which had lain scattered about the homefield in various states of despoliation and abuse had been buried, and anything useful which could be salvaged from the remains of the hall had been purloined by the rest of the mercenary troop of which he had until the night before deemed himself, if somewhat reluctantly, a member.

There had appeared to be only three survivors of the raiders' attack on the steading. Two were foreign women who turned out to be whores the Istrians had brought with them from Forent, then discarded. The third was Ferra Bransen. They had found her shut in a fish shed down near the harbour, but for the first two days she had been incoherent with terror, and appeared convinced that Persoa, into whose care she had been given, was one of the raiders, for she cowered away from even his gentlest touch, and wailed if he looked at her. This reaction in itself seemed to confirm that the men who had come to Rockfall were Istrians. Traumatized as Ferra was, she still could remember nothing useful of the events which occurred, nor any detail of the raiders or their vessel; but it had not taken much speculation to leap to the conclusion that since the shipmaker, Morten Danson, was no longer to be found on the island, he had been abducted for a second time, and was now bound for the Southern Empire.

Erno had wanted to follow them immediately, of course, and rescue Katla. The stones of the steading were still hot from the fire when they had arrived, and the corpses strewn around the homefield had not yet begun to stink, so the raiders' ship could not have sailed far. He felt sure that with a good wind, and their superior sailing skills, they could overtake them and save the prisoners they had taken. But Mam would hear nothing of his entreaties. "They are vicious marauders, and we do not know how many of them there are. Besides," she had added, showing him the gleaming points of her sharpened teeth in a disturbingly feral grin, "if they're reduced to stealing Rockfall women, they must be stony broke, and my troop doesn't get itself into dangerous situations without we get well paid for it."

When he had started to shout at her, and call her an iron-whore and a coward, she had simply punched him very hard indeed on the side of the head, thrown him over her shoulder, and deposited him in a pile of hay in the western barn to cool down.

He had been left with a lump on his temple the size and shape of a hen's egg. It was still too painful to touch, and it throbbed dully even when he didn't move. It was difficult to believe that a woman (even one who looked like Mam) could deal him such a wound with her bare fist, but he suspected he could probably count himself lucky that she liked him sufficiently not to simply run him through with the sword he had accused her of being too gutless to wield and left him to die in his own blood. He doubted there were many men alive in the world who had insulted the mercenary leader; certainly, none alive and still in possession of all their parts.

Joz Bearhand had been the one to come and find him and revive him with a cupful of cold water, half a chicken and a flask of stallion's blood. The water Joz had dashed in his face, and when Erno had sat up spluttering and disorientated, the big man had poured a good measure of the bitter liquor down his throat and waited until he choked it down before gifting him with the chicken and a piece of advice. "If you want to see Katla Aransen again, it would be best you do so in this life, and not in some freezing corner of Hel," he had opined sagely. "We're mercenaries, boy. We follow our leader and go wherever the money send us."

And when Erno had countered that he was not a mercenary, nor would he ever be one, Joz had simply grinned his fearsome grin and thrown a small, well-stuffed pouch up into the darkness. When, on its way down, he had snatched it out of the air beside Erno's ear, it had made a most tantalising chinking sound, as of several sturdy coins coming to rest.

Erno, caught between a sudden desperate hunger -- for the aroma of the cooked bird was teasing his nostrils mercilessly -- and sharp curiosity, found himself a moment later asking rather indistinctly, through a vast and juicy mouthful, "What's that for, then?"

But Joz had disappeared into the night, money and all.

Erno frowned: then the food and wine claimed his attention before these questions took firm hold, and by the time he had wolfed down the rest of the chicken, finished off the flask of stallion's blood, and drowsed off into a restless sleep as a result, night had fallen on Rockfall.

The next morning, when he went to look for the rest of the mercenary troop he found they had gone, leaving him boatless and alone. Now, here he sat, drumming his heels on the seawall, waiting to see if it was by some odd practical joke that they had disappeared, and whether they would come back for him. Failing that, he reasoned, he was going to have to trek the length of the island -- on foot, unless he could find and catch one of the Rockfall ponies which had been let loose to run across the wide moorland -- and plead for the loan of a fishing smack from one of the northern shore families; if anyone there were left alive.

"Thinking of becoming a fishy, are you? Going to swim your way to her?" This was delivered in a bellow, followed by an unnerving cackle.

Erno almost fell in the harbour from shock. He had heard no one approach: had thought himself the only living soul left in the area. He pushed himself to his feet, his hand already drawing his belt-knife.

It was an incongruous sight which greeted him: a skinny, bent figure adorned in a half dozen mismatched, ill-fitting skirts, with a fraying blanket for a cloak and wild grey hair reaching almost to the ground. The top of its head was bound with a number of knotted, coloured cloths, making it entirely disproportionate to the tiny body above which it bobbed. The oddness did not end there, either, for behind the figure trotted a small white goat led along by a long piece of string.

Bemused, he waited for this bizarre entourage to approach.

"Fish or fowl? Foul or fair? What can be done with a handsome little drake left out in the sun? Take it home and stroke its pretty feathers, make its tail into a soup," the figure wheezed as it drew near.

Erno frowned, not sure what to say to any of this. No one knew what to say to Old Ma Hallasen: she was, and had always been, as mad as a bat. As a child he had crept up on her little bothy by the stream, usually with the other boys, and once, when feeling particularly brave, on his own. She was a witch, they said, and she ate stillborn lambs and pigs' eyes and put spells on animals and women who crossed her. She didn't like children, and would chase them with a stick. From the perspective of a ten-year-old boy, she had seemed a figure straight out of a tale: a troll-woman, maybe, or a roving spirit hungry for the flesh of the living and he had been terrified of her. But in retrospect, from the wisdom of his twenty-six years, Erno could understand why an elderly woman living on her own with only her goats and cats for company might not wish to be pestered by local boys throwing pebbles and worse at her when she sat out in her tiny enclosure, bothering no one. He forced his face into a hesitant smile.

Old Ma Hallasen peered at him from under her strange turban and returned a massive, gap-toothed grin. "Ah, my little pigeon, flown home have you, to find the coop all broken down and charry? Never mind, my pretty bird. Come back with Asta and me and we'll make you comfy." She laid a clawlike hand on his arm and gave him a grotesque wink. "Ah, little Erni, little Erno."

Erno took an involuntary step backwards and found nothing beneath his heel but air. For a second he rocked precariously on the edge of the seawall, then the crone grabbed him with shocking strength and wrestled him to the ground. The goat nosed at him uncertainly, then started to chew his hair.

"Water is for fishies," she reprimanded him severely, shaking a bony finger at him. "What use are you to me or the Kettle-girl if you drowns like a ratty-beast?"

The Kettle-girl. In one of the island dialects, the word for ‘kettle' was ‘katla'. He stared at the old woman kneeling over him, and felt a new kind of fear. Perhaps she wasn't as mad as she made out; and perhaps, as was reputed, she had the Sight. How else could she possibly know his attachment to Katla Aransen?

He pulled himself out from under the old woman and heaved himself upright, noticing as he did so the state of her attire. Some hems were stained, with mud, and blood and other unidentifiable fluids; two of the odd pieces of fabric were charred and holed. Understanding came to him, alongside a bitter fury. "You stole these clothes!" he shouted at her suddenly. "You took them from the dead women at the steading."

Old Ma Hallasen leapt to her feet with disturbing vigour for one so old. A great waft of smells accompanied this action, among them a strong smell of smoke. "So what if I did? They wasn't no use to them up there!" Her beady black eyes flashed angrily. "They was long past caring."

Not really mad at all, Erno decided. He took her by the arm and was alarmed to find that sticklike appendage as tough and corded as a treeroot. "What do you know about what happened here?" he demanded, shaking her a little harder than he'd meant to "Where was the Master of Rockfall? Where were all the men? Why was no one here to defend the women?"

The old woman screwed her face up and wrenched herself away from him. For a moment he thought she was going to burst into tears, then she pursed her mouth and with tremendous venom expelled a great wad of saliva and mucous onto the stones of the mole where it spattered with a thick, wet slap. "Under the sea with Sur himself; or bound by ice in the roots of Hel, that's where."

Erno rubbed his face in frustration. "Please tell me," he pleaded. "Tell me what has happened here."

The crone gave him a lopsided stare and jerked her chin at him in a gesture which might have as easily have been dismissive as summoning. Then she gathered her goat up under her arm and without another word turned back the way she had come.

Erno followed her, feeling like a fool. What must they look like? he thought suddenly: Old Ma Hallasen bent almost double by age and the weight of the beast she carried; him tagging along behind as if led by the very string on which she had led her pet.

He knew his way to the old woman's dwelling-place, of course: the pathways of Rockfall were as familiar to him as the veins which tracked across the tops of his hands. It was a rundown little place, a turf-covered hummock shrouded by hawthorns and a gnarled old oak, by the side of Sheepsfoot Stream which came bubbling down out of the heathland at the foot of the cliffs to make a swampy mire out of what might otherwise have been a pretty upland meadow. No one else wanted it, or her, either; for she had been a bit mad even before she had lost her man in the wars; and everyone said that he must have been as crazy as a coot for marrying such a mad old biddy in the first place. No one knew how old she was: it seemed she had always been on Rockfall; and so the ancient hovel at Sheepsfoot Bog seemed the perfect place for her. Like her, it had been around for as long as anyone could remember; no one could remember to whom it had once belonged. From the outside the place looked as dismal a home as any he could imagine, even with its little pen of multicoloured goats and the pair of thin striped cats stretched out on the roof, eyeing him inimically. It rose like a burial mound out of the scabby earth, and its door looked to be a flayed sealskin stretched across a frame of willowwood. Leather ties held it closed against the weather. There were no windows. A chair fashioned from the stern-end of an old rowing boat had been propped in the sun on the south side of the mound, and a large stuffed sack lack atop it with a deep indentation in its centre, where the old woman habitually sat. Behind the house, a pair of beehives buzzed with activity.

Why had she brought him here? Erno's heart thumped uncomfortably as abruptly he lost sixteen of his hard-acquired years and became again a curious, frightened boy, peering from the cover of the hawthorn hedge at the witch's hall, hoping and at the same time terrified that she would appear.

As if reading his thoughts, Ma Hallasen dropped the goat, which immediately kicked up its heels, skipped over the makeshift fence and ran to join its fellows, and turned to face him, her seamed old face alive with glee. She was enjoying his discomfort, Erno realised: she played up to her role.

Then she grabbed by the hand with those cold, knobbly fingers, undid the mangy leather door-thongs and led him into the mound.

The interior of the witch-house, as he could not help but think of it, made Erno's jaw drop. From the outside, it appeared less than the size of a small fishing boat; but the inside was huge, stretching back into shadows beyond the unsteady light cast by candles ranged around the walls. Someone (surely not the old crone herself?) appeared to have hollowed a great cavern into the hill. Huge timbers, smoothed by age and use, supported the roof, and the maker of the place had dug the floor deep into the ground to lend the room sufficient height for a tall man like Erno to stand upright without danger of thumping his head. Elaborately-worked hangings flared out of the candle-light, colours more rich and varied than Erno had ever seen, for the dyes of the Northern Isles tended toward the simpler shades of nature -- browns and greens and soft heathery purples and blues; such rare essences which gave these vibrant hues could be afforded only by the wealthiest lords. There was a large wooden settle spread with furs and heaped high with cushions embroidered sumptuously in reds and golds, a massive carved table with dragonclaws curled in fabulous detail around balled feet, thick sheepskins on the floor; a fire roaring away in decorated iron grate, with an ingenious flue which led who knew where? There was no smoke to be seen outside the mound at all.

When he turned to ask the old woman a dozen questions, he found them snatched away. She had removed the turban and frayed blanket and was now in the process of taking off her many skirts. Now Erno felt real anxiety. Had she brought him here to couple with him? The very idea was ludicrous, horrifying. He felt his flesh creep at the thought of being pressed against that ancient, withered skin. He was about to push past her and duck out through the door, treasures or no treasures, when she blocked his way. She had stepped out of the last of the stolen rags, and now stood before him in a simple plain black shift. It made her look no less old, but considerably less bizarre, and he was about to say something to this effect when she caught him by the arm and hauled him with her deeper into the dwelling-place.

Beyond the front room lay another part of the dwelling, and if the first had made his jaw drop, this second chamber stole his breath away.

Along one wall shelves were piled high with scrolls of vellum sealed with wax and tied with ribbon. Flasks made from some translucent substance lined another shelf. Erno could not help but reach out and pick one up. It was hard and cool, entirely smooth, and of a wonderful crimson hue. He held it up to the nearest candle, marvelling at how the light played through the object, sending flickering rays of red dancing across the room. Awed, he replaced it. The old woman laughed. "Haven't you ever seen a bottle before, Erno?" Her voice had dropped a note and mellowed, as if she were indulging with her treasures. "A young rover like you: en't you ever seen glass?"

He shook his head wordlessly and continued into the chamber. Another shelf revealed a great pile of long yellow bones, and a skull with a single oval hole in the forehead, but where the eye-sockets should have been in any ordinary skull, there was nothing but smooth, polished ivory. Erno shivered and made the sign of Sur's anchor. The hair prickled up and down his spine. This was a place no living man should enter of his own free will. The Old Ones might now claim his soul...

"Don't be afraid, Erno Hamson," said the mad old woman, sounding very much less mad now. "Come with me."

She took him by the hand and he followed her bonelessly.

At the farthest end of the chamber, a mighty sword hung on the wall. Its pommel was of a sheeny, lambent yellow metal which looked as if it might be warm to the touch and ended in the perfectly-formed head of a fox. The guard was intricately inlaid with horn and ivory and bone. The blade was long -- Erno knew instinctively that if he were to lift it from the wall and stand it before him, its pommel would stand level with the centre of his breastbone -- half as long again as his own weapon. It was broad at the hilt and tapered to a fine cutting point; and its entire length was pattern-welded to such a degree that the colours of the iron twisted and curled around and about like fabulous serpents chasing one another through a fog: if he narrowed his eyes, they came almost into focus, then were lost again, as if their forms were a trick of the light, or a rippling out of time. The tang was so elegantly crafted that it brought tears to his eyes: Katla Aransen would have striven all her life to make a sword like this. It had been forged by a master swordmaker and wielded by a hero from some lost age. His hands itched to hold it.

"Take it," the old woman said, but Erno found he could not move. Old Ma Hallasen tsked impatiently. "A blade like that could take a dozen pirates' heads in a single blow," she said gleefully, standing up on her tiptoes and reaching up to where the weapon hung on the wall. The sword was about as big as she was, Erno reckoned, but the crone removed it from its brackets with no apparent effort and seemed to stand as straight and tall as he was once she had it in her hands. When he took it from her grasp, he almost dropped it, taken by surprised by its weight.

"Tee hee, tee hee!" Ma Hallasen cackled, back in character once more.

"I don't understand," he said at last, his fingers moving wonderingly over the amazing pommel. "Where did these things come from? Who are you? Why are you giving me this? It must be worth a fortune."

The crone regarded him with her head on one side, as if she were assessing whether he was worthy of the truth. Then she said, "This sword was forged by Sur's own hand and now belongs to my son. I believe you know him, though he's as old as your great-grandfather would be now."

Erno laughed at the old buzzard's hyperbole. "My great-grandfather has been in the ground these past forty years, but when he breathed his last he had reached the good age of six and eighty!"

Ma Hallasen gave him a delighted open-mouthed grin. It was not a pretty sight. He had till now thought Mam's grin a thing of horror, but somehow the crone's yellowed nubs were worse than those pointed fangs. "Ha! You do not believe me; nor have you guessed, then. Ponder on it, my handsome pigeon. The clue is in the sword." And with that she beckoned him to follow once again.

He went puzzledly, staring at the great sword in his hand, but unless he was being extremely stupid, it did not appear to offer any obvious answer. His armbones buzzed from holding it; but whether this was because of its great weight or for something intrinsic in the weapon itself, he could not tell. He concentrated on the feeling for a few second, but that only made his head buzz, too. At last he laid the great blade against the wall and looked around, his head clearer now than it had been while he had the weapon in his hand. They were back in the front chamber, and Old Ma Hallasen was opening a wooden chest Erno had not noticed before, and removing from it a large object wrapped in a piece of gorgeously colourful silk. For a moment, Erno's heart stopped dead in his chest and hung there like a cold stone. Then it started to beat again, as fast as a trapped bird. Scarlet and orange flames licked the hems of the cloth: it looked identical to the gift he had bought for Katla Aransen at the Allfair, the shawl for which he had paid all his savings over to a nomad woman. But then he saw there were birds woven into the upper part of the fabric, and that although similar, it was not the same weaving at all. A great and inexplicable sadness came over him then. Katla had had the shawl with her the last time he had seen her, on the strand of the Moonfell Plain, before he had done her bidding and left her behind there to face her fate.

Ma Hallasen whisked the silk covering away. Beneath it stood a globe of polished stone. Kneeling on the floor with far greater fluidity than a woman should have at her advanced age, she gestured for Erno to sit on the opposite side of the table from her. She placed one hand on either side of the crystal and peered intently into it. Then she looked up into his eyes. A spectrum of light chased across the sere old skin and hollow planes of her face. She looked entirely otherworldly, one of the Old Ones from time immemorial.

"Think of her, the Kettle-girl," she urged. "I see your heart: it burns as brightly as if it were beating on the outside of your shirt." She lowered her voice conspiratorially, though there was no one but the goats and cats to hear. "And I heard you weep for her up in the homefield as you and the sharp-toothed one walked among the bodies there."

He gasped. "I did not see you there," he said accusingly, as if by some magic she might have been one of the crows he had disturbed, which had fixed him with eyes just as beady, before flapping guilelessly off into the trees.

"People see me only when I wish them to," she said impatiently. "I prefer to draw as little attention to myself, and to my home, as possible. Now think of the Kettle-girl and put your hands on the crystal."

Erno found himself doing as he was told. He thought of Katla in the forge, beating out a sword like the one now propped against the wall, her face fierce with concentration and sheened with sweat, the red lights from the flames shining on her arm muscles and making a nimbus of her hair. And then suddenly, there she was. Her hair was shorter and her face was thin and there was a huge fading bruise on her jaw; but it was unmistakably the Kettle-girl. She was in some dark place, and other women that he recognised were curved into the distorted plane of the crystal's viewpoint were crowded into the same prison. Their hands and feet were clasped by iron shackles.

"She's alive!" he cried, lifting his face to the gaze of the old woman. Immense relief flooded over him, followed immediately by a terrible despair. How would he find her? How could he rescue her from the slave markets or whatever other horrors awaited her? How could he even leave the island, let alone make his way to Istria?

"Look in the stone again, pretty pigeon."

When he did so, he saw a ship being rowed into Rockfall's harbour. With its sail down in the still air, it took him a few moments to realise what he was looking at. Then a great surge of hope welled up in him. Even with her back to him, he knew Mam's bulk and power. Besides which, it was impossible to mistake the identity of her oar partner, for a great ripple of coloured images swirled across his back. Paired with Mam on the oar was her lover and assassin: Persoa, the tattooed man. It was the mercenary ship: they had come back for him!

Without a second thought, he leapt up from the table and strode toward the door.

"A gift spurned is an enemy gained." The old woman's voice was deep and resonant. It stopped him dead in his tracks. For a moment in the tricksy light of the howe, it looked as though her hair was a great cloud of gold, that her features were larger, younger, more commanding. She looked less like mad Old Ma Hallasen than -- He pushed the thought away: it was ridiculous.

By the time she had pushed herself upright from the table and slowly and painfully retrieved the sword from where he had propped it, he had successfully dispelled the disturbing image which had briefly visited him. He laid hands upon the great weapon ruefully. "I am sorry, old woman," he said. "I did not mean to spurn your gift, if gift it is."

"More loan than gift it is, maybe," she croaked, an ancient crone once more, bowed down by the weight of her years and the aching of her old joints. "And you have enemies enough if you follow the course you are set on without adding me to their number." Still she did not let go of the sword. Erno found himself gripping it awkwardly, not sure whether to wrest it from her or wait for her to relinquish it to him. His arms began to shake with the strain of its great weight; but in that fitful light it seemed that hers remained steady as rock. She stared him in the eye. "This sword must find its way back to its maker," she said cryptically, and then cackled as she his arms dropped suddenly when she let his hands take the full weight of the weapon. "Or else all will fail."

Then she hobbled into the darkness at the back of the chamber and merged into the gloom as if walking into a past time in which he could not follow.

Blinking against the shock of the daylight outside, and bemused by his strange encounter and even stranger surmisings, Erno Hamson shouldered the great weapon and turned his footsteps down the path towards the harbour, feeling as if some distinct but undeserved doom had settled itself upon him. Quite how he would answer the mercenaries when they questioned him about the provenance of the sword, he did not know. By the time he had made his way to the sea wall, where the mercenaries were waiting, his mind was still an unhelpful blank. So he said nothing at all, though they all stared at him, and the sword curiously, and when Joz Bearhand ran his hands appreciatively over the chased hilt and pommel, mumbled something about ‘an heirloom', which was as close to the truth as he could manage without opening himself to far more difficult and unnerving discussions. That night, as they set sail for the Southern Continent, in pursuit of the raiders' ship, he slept with the weapon beside him, wrapped in his cloak, and dreamt about casting it into the ocean before the fate the old woman had spoken of could possibly attach itself to him, but in the morning it was still safely wrapped and he found he could not part with it. Besides, as Mam pointed out with her usual pragmatism, if the money which Margan Rolfson and his wife had pressed upon them for the rescue of their dearly beloved sister Bera and her daughter Katla, and the few silvers they had collected around the island from the other prisoners' relatives, ran out before they could accomplish the task, they could always sell the thing and get a good few cantari for it.

Erno did not respond by saying that selling the sword would be impossible; and Mam did not add that Margan had taken her aside and made her swear to put the women out of their misery by whatever means afforded to her if they had been too cruelly misused by their captors or others by the time the troop reached them.

And so each held to the secret things they knew as the ship sailed south.