Chapter 6 #3
Hello, she murmurs, without knowing why. Hello, fish.
The fish turns, almost as if it has heard her, its tail and head forming a near-circle, turns again, then rises up through the water, its scaled length flexing around the ripples, its colour brightening and brightening as it comes towards the light.
Brith, filled with a sudden dread, stands very still, watching it, and the dog, sensing something, emits a low growl.
The fin on the fish’s back breaks the water first, then the delicate splay of its tail. It swirls round twice before its mouth edges itself out of the pool: a wetted, lipless opening with a greyish tongue.
Give me the ring, a voice says, or seems to say.
Brith staggers, half falling into the water, soaking herself up to her waist. She flails, making a grab for the smooth rock but is sure to keep hold of the ring.
Who said that? she hisses, shivering. The voice was faint and rasping, like the sound of pebbles raked by a wave. She must have imagined it. She cannot really have heard it. People always say to her that she spends too much time dreaming, that she never keeps to a task.
The dog is crouching low, its belly in the water, and it gives a volley of warning barks, and the voice comes again, unmistakably, and she knows she is not dreaming it, or imagining it, that it is not the sound of a breeze through the branches, or the gluggle of the stream.
Give me the ring. It’s mine.
She snatches her hand close to her chest and glares at the fish, whose gleaming beads of eyes hover just below the surface, its lips moving.
It’s my father’s ring, she says, her words shaking with rage and something like fear.
Give it. I need it.
The fish, whose silvery length is speckled with peculiar spots, each ringed with a paler circle, giving it the appearance of having numerous eyes all over itself, is of a type she hasn’t seen before.
She has watched her father put brown trout into a trance with his hand, then snatch them dripping from rivers, seen her mother net pink-bellied salmon in the shallows of loughs, then roast them on sharp sticks over hot flames, and how delicious is the skin when its edges are blackened by fire?
But this fish looks nothing like them. It executes a circle of the pool, its tail giving angry flicks, its downturned mouth still above water, trailing a V of ripples after it.
You shan’t have it, Brith whispers. You shan’t.
Give it to me, quick, the fish orders, and Brith finds its voice so terrible and somehow so familiar that, without thinking, she puts not her thumb but the ring into her mouth—again that cold, clear taste—and holds it on her tongue.
The spotted fish thrashes angrily, disturbing the waters so that the pool’s edge laps against the rock.
Brith tells herself she isn’t afraid, she is the daughter of a warrior who came from over the hills, accompanied by two huge dogs, a man who wore a yellow-bright ornament about his neck and a ring on his finger, and loved her mother, and her, and the baby.
He loved her so much that he gave her a precious pup from one of his dogs, to protect her.
He would never have left them, never, unless—
I will not, Brith starts to say, I—
And with the second “I,” her throat contracts and she gulps, without meaning to, and suddenly the ring is gone from her tongue and she feels it sinking down inside her.
Down, down it goes, down her throat, which aches and protests, down her middle, into her stomach. Brith has swallowed her father’s ring.
She turns, sealskin shoes slipping on the wet stones, and runs, the dog crashing through the stream beside her, away from the pool, from the hateful fish, from its depthless watery spell-working, from the copse of drooping willows and the floating oak leaf, and when she finds her mother, she clings to her back like a sodden mer-child, sobbing about a fish that talked and a pool with no bottom and how she never wants to walk here again, and can they please, please, go home?
Her mother embraces her tightly, with the spare arm that isn’t holding the baby.
She rocks her to and fro, she croons to her, she sings her a song, and she fears a little, too, for this daughter of hers, who is so passionate and so singular, and who takes life not at all easily, but seizes it with both hands, and how this child does remind her, how like him she is, and what pain it gives her to see this.
Pain and joy, an equal balancing, a vying bright anguish of the two.
The dog paces to and fro, hackles bristling, snapping at the empty air, its head turning one way, then the other, as if aware of invisible foes in the valley around them.
As it turns out, Brith’s mother is right to fear for her.
In the years that come, her father never does return.
The mother, being so fair and so good, has many offers but she accepts none because she will keep herself for her man, the father of her children, who may come back, he may, and these refusals, of course, make a few enemies.
What does come to the fort is a bloating sickness that takes many of their young people, Brith’s brother included.
They bury him at dusk, in a mound, with his little axe and his horn cup, so that he will never go thirsty or hungry in the next world.
Then the crops fail, first one year and then a second, and the bloating sickness comes again, and many of the huts inside the fort lie empty, and the elders decide that there must be a sacrifice to appease the gods, and it should be a young maiden, and at a meeting of the men it is decided that the best would be the girl Brith, for she is beautiful, like her mother, and the gods may be pleased by her.
What is not said, but thought by all, is that Brith is an odd girl, unlikely to be chosen by any man, the progeny of the meandering stranger who came by that time, with wild hair and gleaming weapons and a pair of hunting hounds, who took a liking to one of their own, and then disappeared, who knows where?
There are rumours that, soon after he settled among them, the man had a cache of golden treasure and buried it beneath the ground; many have tried to find it, digging deep in likely places, and even more have tried to get the girl and the mother to tell them where, but they claim not to know anything about it, and this refusal to yield up the location of the treasure angers the elders, angers the warriors, and infuriates the other women.
The girl has a tendency to stare into space instead of putting a hand to her work, and tells stories of talking animals and spirits of the forests.
And she is always accompanied by the enormous grey dog, given to her by her father, and trained by him to protect the girl, almost as if the man knew he wouldn’t be around to do it himself.
The only one who will speak against sacrificing Brith is the teller.
She has the gift, he points out to the elders, and she has already memorised several important tales.
She should be his apprentice, and should take over from him when he passes into the next world.
But because Brith has no father or brother to argue for her, to offer her protection, because she is yet to be sought by a man, and because her mother has refused all advances, both honourable and otherwise, the teller’s pleadings are ignored and she is chosen.
The elders are not fools: they take the precaution of snaring the dog with meat and tethering it to a rock—its teeth would be enough to tear off the limb of a man—but they had not reckoned on the will of the mother.
When the men come for the girl, in the middle of the night, her mother realises at once what is happening.
She implores and screams; she shuts Brith and herself into their hut, barring the door with a staff of blackthorn that had once belonged to Brith’s father—he had soaked it in brine and strengthened it with the blood of magpies.
But it is not enough to keep out the men: they batter down the door, splintering the blackthorn staff in two.
A sudden wildcat, Brith’s mother seizes up the broken pieces and lunges at the men, injuring one of the elders on the arm, so that they are obliged to ask the young warriors to come and lash her hands together.
She pleads, then, she falls to the ground and her hair covers the feet of the men.
I beg you, she says, please, not her, she is all I have.
She says she can help them find treasure, she thinks she knows where her man might have buried the gold.
Let me show you, she says, but they say it is too late for that.
She offers herself in Brith’s stead: Take me, she says, I will go, I won’t fight you.
And when the elders shake their heads, she kicks at them with her strong feet and whispers to Brith: Run, my girl, run.