Free B0046ZREEU EBOK by Margaret Elphinstone Page A

But when I dream of the summons from the grave, the ghosts of my foster parents, whom I loved, rise up and tower over me, always accusing. No battle, no feasting-hall, for them. In the dream the sea water streams away from their bodies, which are gaunt and livid after being dead for so many years. They tell me they have never rested all this time, for they have had no grave; they are outcast, lost in the waters that surround the world. And no one is to blame but I, who let them follow me, just because of my need for them.
    So now you know what I must tell. We left under blue skies, with a favourable wind; the land already smelt of spring. The cattle were out in the newly uncovered pastures. We even had a couple of young lambs among the flock we took aboard with us. The ship was crammed: cattle, sheep and poultry amidships, the slaves and their families sheltering among them, or forward in front of the sail. We were aft, with an awning rigged to shelter us, for there was no need at first to have the deck clear. We had water and fodder for ten days, besides food for ourselves. It seemed plenty. In good weather, we would have been there within the week. When we came out of Breidavik there wasn’t a cloud over the glacier, and the ice shone in the bright sun.
    You’ve maybe heard about that spring, although it was before you were born. It’s legend now. We weren’t the only ones to be caught out. You know what they say? The story is that it was the first year any Christian folk set out for the lands beyond the world, and the old gods were angry. They had been banished from Norway, then from Iceland. So they took ship with Eirik, or maybe flew before him, and found a place beyond the boundaries of that world which used to be theirs, but was now called Christian. There in the empty lands they found a place to rest. For all I know they haunt those mountains still.
    But when they saw ships with Christians aboard following them to their new sanctuary they were angry. Thor flung his hammer from the glaciers above Gunnbjorn’s skerries, and it landed in the sea between Greenland and Iceland, and stirred up a whirlpool. Ice that had lain quiet for hundreds of years broke into huge splinters and began to drift, monsters roused themselves from the deep, and waves the height of Snaefel flung themselves the length of the western sea, until they crashed to their death against the cliffs of Europe.
    So they say. I tell you this and I tell you that. What I’m not telling you is what it was like aboard that ship. Poor boy. You’re so young; but you too will be judged, as we’re all judged. Are you ever afraid? Is there anything that you’ve done that rises up to haunt you? No, you needn’t answer. I’ve made many terrible voyages. I know what the sea is. Not an enemy, precisely, but stronger than any of us and wholly unreliable. Sometimes its face is like a mirror, and sometimes it is a tormented hell. My first voyage was the worst of all.
    There is only cold and the terrifying water, everything turns to water. Feeling requires something hard, a fact, an edge, but here there is nothing, no difference, only numbness of the spirit and the hands that cannot feel. The dead are thrown into the sea; the living are as cold as the dead. The water hides who is there, who has gone. If there were a tomorrow there would be grieving, but time and feeling are swallowed up; we are crushed in the belly of the sea. We are cast away into the deep, in the midst of the seas. The waters engulf us, even to the soul .
    The sky turns black where there should be evening, and out of the west a wave comes tall and white-capped as Snaefel, like melted land. The ship rises on the wave, her ropes taut as bowstrings, sounding the note that breaks the vessel. The wave crashes into chaos and roaring water, sheep are swept away like froth, the sail is torn to strips of rag. The wind screams on .
    The days and the nights are water. Nothing changes. The cattle are lost,