Havnedatter

Embla

Winter came without concern, as winter always does and it covers, without regard, all within the landscape. The mountains that surrounded them were blanketed in a layer of grey-green, going from verdant forests that covered the sharp spires to looking like old, ruddy quartz, rippled with layers of white in their patterns. Green only shown here due to the pine trees, too thick, too stubborn, to be snuffed out by winter, when everything else withered to stalks. It was truly when the land around Kjempegra seemed to be as large as it actually was. Much of the year the greenery that swallowed the mountains hid its length, so that only when one stood above on the crags of the cliffs, looking down, could they see truly, how many houses were there. The village of Kjemprega was set into the mountain itself and the backs of houses met the steep, cutting walls where the grey stone shone in contrast against the tones of the roofs, boat-like in their shape but sloping, letting snow fall off more easily. These they crafted of wooden planks with daub or waddle, lined with clay to try to keep them from leaking. In summer and spring, the houses reminded one of great rows of topiary, many of them green on top with brittles of turf and sea grass that grew stubborn, watered with mountain rain, but in winter, they looked like rows and rows of clumsy, boulderous cows with humped backs, sticking up from the snow and ice where the heat of fireplaces melted the freeze. They were turned, this way and that, as many houses were nudged in and expanded on where possible as families grew throughout the centuries.

You would not have been poor of sight to miss the size of it, as the cliffs rolled up and down and only the shore-bound homes were plain to the eye when one rolled in from the sea. From out on the water, in the dark of night, the cliffs were alive with countless eyes of fires peering through windows and openings, and the upper part of the cliffs were shrouded in smoke from the many smoke holes where it escaped. There were tall beams and planks that supported the heavy roofs with strings of nets and tools hung up between them. There was no mistaking the village for fishing and whaling being some of its larger food sources, for things grey poorly in such a place, as evidenced by the abundance of boats and the absence of gardens. Over the roar of the water, one could hear goats being herded further up the cliffs.

At the clifftops, looming over the village like a sentry, was the home of the leader of the village, which some would call a king. To call it a kingdom was to drum up very different images than the one presented in the lands here. Kjemprega was both the mountain and region in name, but this area, the mountain and shoreline for many miles, till the scattered, brutal rocks of the Grey Giant’s Sea broke it up into regions too scattered and barren to serve of use save for men marching, two abreast, through, till it reached on to new territory. Kjemprega was not a kingdom the likes of which one finds in the South, with sprawling walls and ramparts lined with men in armor. It was a harsh, stony place whose singular, large castle rose up into the air like a spectral finger, pointing accusingly at the sky.

Its shadow, as the sun moved behind it, stretched well out into the water. It was a shadowed place, always murky and unsettled where the freshwater that came from the mountains and streams met the salt water of the sea. Just deep enough was it for longboats, but not deep enough, nor fertile enough, for the kind of fish and wild life that would have made for kinder living, were they to creep in far enough. It lay in the dark of an unpleasant winter, dry and hard, with flows of stubborn ice still bobbing along its surface. Only the churning of the water from the inlet prevented it from ever fully freezing over, but that would never stop, save for warm weather, to keep the ice flows, big enough to pin a man, from drifting in.

It was usually the only thing that the sea washed up on the pebbled surface that run up, 200ft, from the houses that sat on stilted supports and stones. There, the men would bring in boats and work on preparing the fish brought in from greater hauls. They were proud of their word, if the decorum and gate-work made of old whale bones weren’t indication enough, marking the turning of pathways as one went up the mountains like a morbid hallway.

Thus, it was most unfortunate that the sea insisted to spit up these days, in lieu of fish and ice.

No one wanted to speak about the horrible tragedy that was the attempted burial by way of the sea for Hrafnsonn, of the son of the King of Kjemprega. They did not manage to catch up with the boat in their attempts to make it burn. It charged into the Grey Giant’s Sea with its sails drawn over a bitter, winter horizon as the sea turned to blood in the sunset. Boats paddled by men who were shield brother and fighters alongside of Hrafnsonn weren’t able to go fast enough to catch up with it. It was as though an unnatural wind, blown in from the mountains and bourne out to sea, had been hatched of a sudden. It never relented, pulling snow heavy clouds towards the grey village on the sea’s edge, bringing an eventual storm that swallowed them for days. It was sorrowful enough that the whole event had gone so badly, but that it only ended as the ship, a thing of great value to the village and passed down within the family of the King, going back to the earliest men who bore the name of Hrafnsonn, had ridden it first out of the inlet, barreled into what they called The Scabs. These were clusters of tiny, meanly jagged islands that dotted great swaths of the sea, going out hundreds of miles  at seemingly random intervals. Boats had to take a very direct turn to avoid eventually boring West, towards them, where some sunk below the water’s surface and would tear a hole big enough to lose a man in, should it have scraped the bottom. They varied in size from boulders covered in filth and seaweed, marked by the occasional sea bird, to islands big enough to put a small settlement on, if the rocks had been level enough. Old stories told tales that these were the vanities of sea maidens who sung to lure men, bereft of touch, into their seas to die crashing upon the rocks. They were the daughters of Gymir, so the tales went, but anything is attractive enough, if roughly shaped like a woman, for the men who spent their time at sea and only returned when the raids were done.

Men from the village would mention it, amused, as signs that they were soon to return to home, but the great ship, that carried the promise and future of the line of Kjemprega’s Kings, would meet them as the stones of its grave.

It was hard to consider it a blessing that the king, mad and violent in his grief, did not come to see its windfall. Men aboard the pursuing boats watched as its sail billowed in the gale-like winds, snapping and rocking with violence that would have shaken and tossed men loose into the water. It skimmed one of the Scabs, low enough to be difficult to see in the churning waters as the sun disappeared behind the edge of the word, before it met another. This, they recalled, tore out the entire left flank in a spray of aged wood that made the boat tilt. There was no stopping the icy water from flooding it now, and it was a race between sea and wind. This, understandably, was when they knew the boat was lost. Its end came not long after this, perhaps less than a minute, as it went, before the furious vessel rammed itself into an island of almost complete verticality. It hit with the full force of the wind behind it, and rolled, almost to its end, crumbling into the sharp stones where it teetered, then collapsed under its own weight.

They watched as its contents, once meant for the fire that would take it to the afterlife, went sliding into the dark waters of the sea. A last boom was heard as the beams which held up the sails, broke almost in half under their weight, and plunged into the waters, after the bounty that once covered the deck. Men, who wore the same gold rings given to them by the King, as the once great warrior Hrafnsonn, could do nothing except watch it crumble

There was nothing to recover, as the sea would spit what it didn’t want back out.

The tides would come in the days that followed, and the King’s grief was doubled, over and over, as the contents he meant to send off with his son made their way back to him. It came in pieces, horrible pieces.  It brought to mind, that most terrifying question of all of just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain sanity. It was, at first, the horses that came back. They came back bloated and white, half eaten where the things that live in the sea had taken bites of them. No need was there to describe their ghastly appearance, for people of Kjemprega knew what happened to bodies that spent days in the water. These, they disposed of without delay and without bringing it forward to the King.

After the horses, he started to watch from the edge of the cliff, waiting to see, and demanded that anything that the sea brought back be brought to him. It began a tradition that winter, that anything that came from the wreckage was to be brought to the home of the King for examination. All knew what it was that it meant that this was demanded of them. It was not important that the king saw every  shard of pottery that washed up, nor that he had to look at every gold piece, grimy with sea water and grit, that people found with their weather worn hands on the beaches, for these did, indeed, wash up, but that he wanted what he’d had to give in the first place.

Maybe it would make him happy?

Or so it was that the girl thought as she spent the winter days, slowly combing the beaches for as far as her small feet would take her. The woolen coat that covered her helped to block out the sting of the cold as her thick boots padded over piles of ice and uneven shapes of the rocks. It was dark fabric, as that was warmest, and only the brilliant red of her hair, hanging about her head in thick, messy curls, made her stand out there. As she often did, she played there, alone, and unattended, as the other children her age kept to their groups or did the work expected of them. Their house had slaves, as many of the more well to do houses, and there were quite large houses, did. So she was not expected to assist, as others were, to make food and to keep the fires going, nor did she have chores needed to be done, like cleaning and weaving. She was not good at any of these, nor did her mother maintain the patience to correct her needlework. It would not occur to her for a long while that this may have been an issue, as no one in the house gave her much mind in the wake of things. They had enough slaves to tend to all these matters, and the children of such slaves, too, were put to work. So it was, that she was not missed, and the girl was perfectly fine with this.

It was better out here anyway. Her father had became a looming, ghostly visage of himself and her mother, typical mother, was difficult and terse. The only benefit of it all was that her mother was far too focused on the misery of her father to be bothered with following her around, or correcting her. It was a mother’s job to do that, people said, and the usual process of correction was one that the girl was plainly fine to avoid. She’d spend her time out here for a long as possible, avoiding adults and the crude, sniffing faces of the hunting hounds that lounged around the stony castle that was their home. Even for all of its fireplaces, it was no warmer there than out here on the shore. The cry of seabirds and far off seals, nesting in the the Scabs, mixed with the roar of water and served as a rough guide of sorts of just how close she was to home.

For a child, the enormous cliffs went as high as the sky as they loomed upwards with precarious steepness. There were hills that connected to the shores here, scattered with dry clumps of seagrass and dotted with the footprints of the animals that came up and out of the wood, but it was a fair steep and direct descent upwards that only a bird could have managed. She stood at the bottom as she turned the edge of the shore, leaving the open view of the inlet, were someone to have watched her, and hopped carefully along the rocks, and pathway so scattered with snow. For a child, falling and hitting the ice was not the worst fate that could have befallen them. She, as a child of 7, was thin and spry with sharp elbows and a back used to blunt hits.

It was just the threat of falling into the water and getting swept out that was the real concern. The stinging in her fingers made gripping the wall of rock harder than it needed to be. She felt the surface press into her tender skin, threatening to break it if she pushed too hard. Dips in the shore where the rocks broke were filled with frozen pools of water that were dingy with seaweed. Many such spots lined the beach and even dogs were to take care to traverse it. It would hurt to step in there, because most of the water was likely frozen into a crust that would have cut her if she fell in, so with extra patience and determination, she made it across the beach to where the cliffs began to fall further in and the dotting of the Scabs began. Fishing boats would never manage to survive here, as the rocks dipped both low and high, making it a place where only the fishes managed to spawn successfully. It was here, also that the tall, falt topped basalt columns began to extrude from the ground and water, forming rudimentary steps that went up and down. The added benefit, as one as crafty and imaginative as children would know, meant for privacy, which also meant it was good for games. 

The red headed girl managed the last few feet with shaky steps as the icy rocks turned to hard, packed dirt, leading up into the hills that fed the forest. Here, the columns grew so tall that they cut off the view of the sea, and thus the wind, letting her head of messy, dark red curls rest against her shoulders. Little feet made the frozen sea grass crunch as she trotted, determined, up the hill. Snow made the climbing here harder than it was in the warmer months, when she would come. There were rocks she knew to reach out for if she started to slide, but she managed, grabbing a hold of some of the roots of the trees that jutted out on the edge of the hill until she pulled herself up.

Then, as she had countless times before, she called “Audorrrr!”, into the woods.

Her voice echoed along the shore, fading into the sound of the waves before she took in a breath to call again. “Audorr!” The little red head called out again, and the echo that she heard in the woods confirmed no response. Here, it was dull and somewhat dark due to the shadows cast by the great pine trees. There was nothing but those kinds of trees, save for ones whose names she didn’t know that turned to skeletons when winter came.

There were no animal tracks here, confirming that no one had been here since the snowfall of many days ago. Those were days she’d spent in the home, playing here and there was quietly as her mother would grow cross if she grew too loud, and she knew her father would not rise to her rescue. Seldom did he do so. At least here, in the woods where she often played, she didn’t need to be quiet nor be defended.

Her shadow rolled over the ground in front of her as she stepped forward into the line of the trees. Here, the snow remained, undisturbed, and she felt her imagination come to surface. White stretched between the trees that followed the shape of the ground in small, rolling seas of snow. It grew more blue the further one could see in, and seldom were the patched of sunlight, managing through the thick tree branches. Here, the roar of the sea began to grow quieter with each step she took, and began to hold her breath. The little girl pretended she was walking into a beast’s cave and that the trees were the bones of its prey, and she had to sneak about them without breaking any.

The creak of snow under her boots and the rapid beating of her heart began to thunder in her chest with every movement of her feet. She became very aware of the motion of her movement, and the more she thought on the weight of her hands the heavier they seemed to feel and how unnatural the motion of toe to heel, in the roll of her walking pace, felt.

She wanted to shout again, but found her voice lodged in her throat, as though there were a plug of air. Not painful in its tightness, but too round to overcome. Her mouth opened, as if to speak, only to close and open again as she walked further and further on, feeling the ground rise under her feet. There came a snap, twigs breaking, and she paused, squatting down and making herself flatter as she did, driven by some instinct that bad her make herself smaller.

Her head turned left and right, looking for the source of the sound and making her curls slap against her face, the ends of which stung the slightest bit. There was nothing, not even a flutter  or a twitching tree branch.

“A…” The the slightest sound of air passing her lips sounded as she found just enough bravery to try to call again, but the sound stopped itself before it became little more than an audible wince. In the dimmed of the forest, she did not feel or see the shape of the shadow that slowly crept over her, or the way the snow seemed to shudder under the weight of what cast it. The little red head began to rise, hands on the ground to push herself up from the triangular lump she formed in the snow, motioning forward. She leaned up, about to push up with her knees, when it hit her.

“Ayee!!” She screamed as two hands clamped down on her little shoulders with startling force and picked her up, hoisting the child up out of the snow.

“There you are!” A voice from behind her spoke cheerfully, almost right against her ear. “So loud, so loud! They shouldn’t call you Rose, they should call you Roar!”. The screech of fright turned into a screech of laughter as the hands dropped lower and tickled her through her woolen coat, making her squirm.

“Audor!” She cried in protesting laughs.