Outside, a branch broke in the wind, skittered across the dooryard of his shed, and slammed against the wall. Claire could picture the fisherman arriving home in weather just like this to find a squalling infant and a wife turned blue and lost.
“It was Alys kept him from flinging me into the fire. Others came and held him down. He roared into the night, they say, cursing all flesh and the wind and the gods, even cursing the sea that be his livelihood.
“He was a hard man to start, they say. My mum, she softened him a bit, but when she was gone he turned to stone. And the stone had an edge to it, sharpened against me, for I had killed her.”
“But it wasn’t—” Claire began, then stopped. He hadn’t heard her.
“Others raised me. Village women. Then, when I was old enough, he tooken me back. Said it was time for me to pay for what I done.”
“What did that mean, ‘old enough’? How old were you?”
He thought. “Six years, mayhap? My front teeth had fallen out.”
She shuddered at the thought of a little boy expected to atone for his mother’s death.
“I didn’t know him. It was as if a stranger took me. I went to his cottage, for they said I must, and that night he gave me food and drink, and a blanket to wrap around me as I slept on a pile of straw. In the morning he kicked me awake before it was light and told me he would make a fisherman of me, for I owed him.
“After that, every day, until I was growed, I went with him to the boat and on the boat out onto the sea. He never spoke a soft word. Never told me about the kinds of leaves, or creatures, or pointed to the stars in the sky. Never sang a song to me, or held my hand. Just kicked me across the deck if I be clumsy, laughed when I be twisted in the ropes and sliding pure froze in the water that washed aboard. Slapped me in the head when the sea was rough and I puked over the side. He hoped I would wash overboard and drown. He told me that.
“He made me climb the mast to untangle the lines and he laughed when my hands slid from the salty wood and I fell onto the deck. When I broke my arm he kept me on the sea all day, hauling nets, then sent me to Alys that night and told her to have it fixed by morning or he’d break the other.”
“You should have killed him,” Claire said in a low voice.
He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “I had already killed my mother.”
He stood suddenly, leaning on his stick. He went to the door, cracked it open, and breathed the wind. She was afraid he was going to go out into the bitter cold, that telling her his past had now forced him to punish himself in some way. But after a moment he pulled the door tightly closed and came back. He sat down again, leaning his stick against the wall, and took several deep breaths.
“I growed very strong,” he said.
“I know.”
“I growed taller than my father and so strong, I could have picked him up and flung him into the sea. But I never thought to do that. I stayed silent. I obeyed him. I cooked for him like a wife and washed his clothes and was a wife in other ways too terrible to mention. I made myself into stone. I willed myself deaf when he cursed me and blind to the look of hatred in his eyes. I waited.”
“Waited for what?”
“To be old enough, strong enough, brave enough, to leave. To climb out.”
“What went wrong?” she asked him.
“Naught in the climbing out. I trained for it. I was ready. I knew I could do it and I did. It went wrong after.” Einar moved one damaged foot slightly, staring at it. His tone was bitter. Then it changed and became more gentle, and curious. “Why do you be asking about this?”
“I must try,” Claire told him. “I must try to climb out.”
He stared at her. “No woman ever done so,” he said.
“I must. I have a child out there. A son. I must find him.”
She had known he wouldn’t be scornful, for that was not his nature. She had thought, though, that he might laugh at the impossibility of her plan. But he did not. And she realized that he already knew of the child, that he had heard the talk of it.
He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Push against this.” He extended his arm toward her, his hand held out upright at if to shove something away.
“Like this?” Claire held her hand up against his.
He nodded. “Push.”
She did, summoning her strength to try to move his hand, to bend his arm. It was firm. Rigid. Immobile. Her own arm trembled with her effort. Finally she gave up. Her hand dropped back into her lap. It ached.
Einar nodded. “You’re strong, at least in the arms. Can you climb?”
Claire pictured the vertical rock cliff that hung over the village and hid the sun for half the day. She shook her head. “I climb the path up to the meadow where you keep the sheep. You’ve seen me do it often enough. And sometimes, gathering herbs, I go up into the woods near the waterfall. I never get tired. And it’s steep there. But I know that’s not what you mean.”
“You must start to harden yourself. I’ll show you. It won’t be easy. You must want it.”
“I do want it,” Claire said. Her voice broke. “I want him.”
Einar paused, and thought, then said, “It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating what you’re leaving.
“It will be a long time,” he told her, “to make you ready.”
“I know.”
“Not days or weeks,” he said.
“I know.”
“Mayhap it will take years,” he told her. “For me, it was years.”
“Years?”
He nodded.
“How do I start?” Claire asked.
Ten
Einar says I must do this every single day. It strengthens my belly, where the scar is. Watch.”
Alys glanced over from the fire, where she was stirring a pot of onion soup. She watched for a moment as Claire, lying on the floor of the hut, wedged her feet under a slab of rock that jutted from the base of the wall, and then lifted the upper half of her body and held herself at a slant, taut, for a moment before she lowered herself slowly back down and took a breath.
“Surely you didn’t show that lad your scar?”
“Of course not. But I told him of it.” Claire bit her lip, held her breath, and raised herself once again. Then down, slowly. And again.
“There,” she said, gasping, after a few moments. “That’s ten. He told me to do it ten times every day.”
“Here. Have some soup and bread now,” Alys told her. “I’ll start bottling some strengthening brews for you, as well.” She glanced up at the dried herbs hanging from the beams that supported the hut’s roof. Claire could hear her murmuring the names—white willow, nettle, meadowsweet, goldenseal—and knew she was pondering what combinations to create.
She had told Alys of her plan. No one else knew.
Claire thought of Alys as the calmest person she knew, the person who had seen the worst of things over her long life and was not surprised or distressed by any of it anymore. Claire had watched her stitch the flesh and wrap an astringent poultice around the leg of a small child gashed by a fall on the slippery rocks, soothing both the terrified mother and the screaming toddler at the same time with her reassuring voice. She had seen her, quiet and commanding, attend the most difficult births, with the babies upside down or sideways and the mum begging for death and the dad puking in the dooryard. Claire had been there at deaths—Andras’s mother from fever and cough; a fisherman with his skull crushed by a broken mast; a young boy racked by fits from the day of his birth, finally at five dead with foam on his lips and his eyes rolled back to white. Alys had tended them, tended their families, weighted the eyelids and folded the arms, then returned to the hut to wash her tools, cook supper, and wait for the next frantic villager who would come to the door begging for help.