Chapter 6
I slept at Ivar’s that night. His mother and father hadn’t come home, which wasn’t worrying. Many people would have set up wherever they were when the storm came in, unable or unwilling to brave the elements. That was the way of our village. Our homes were always open to our neighbours. We’d planned during the night to head out at first light, and as if my sleeping mind knew the importance of this adventure, it awoke me just as dawn was breaking.
“Ivar.” I made sure my voice was loud in the stillness. He started a bit, his eyes opening wide.
“Yes. Right.” He shook his head, too-long hair falling around his eyes, and sat upright, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Off we go.”
I helped myself to a small portion of dried rabbit he’d showed me last night. After nearly nothing but fish in recent weeks, the intense flavour made me hold it in my mouth longer than usual. Being the daughter of a fisherman meant little variation in diet – not that I could complain, for at the very least it meant a consistent flow of food, which was more than some people could say.
“This walk will be hard work,” Ivar said, sighing slightly. He tugged on his boots. “It will take us hours to get there and hours to get back. We’ll stop in to see your family on the way out. I’m sure they’ll want to know you survived last night.”
I donned my mittens and cloak. I couldn’t imagine that they’d been worried sick. “You said the cave was inland. Which way?”
“West,” he answered. “Near…” He cleared his throat. “Near the lake.”
I’d not been in that direction in ages, and after the bonfire, an invisible fist clenched around my stomach at the thought. It was far from the nearest village, and not the sort of place one frequented without company. In addition, if you went that way and then veered north, you’d be headed to the foothills of the Kall Mountains, and that alone was reason to stay away. We were a fearful group, us Löskan descendants. We stuck to the sea and huddled in our villages. We hunted in the nearby woods and we used only local resources. Journeys of more than a kilometre or two, without the express destination of another village, simply weren’t done.
Cling to the coast, everyone said. Then all you have to do is watch your back. It made sense. With the water on one side, it left only one direction from which danger could approach.
“There’s a pack just there,” Ivar said, pointing. Supple leather. Ivar had probably made it himself. “We’ll need food after our hike.”
I filled it with a few chunks of bread and some more dried rabbit, along with a leather pouch filled with water. The other unspoken reason for packing food was for the chance that we got stranded, either in the cave or far enough from home that we wouldn’t be able to return. Never leave the village without being prepared for the worst. It was one of the very first lessons all our mothers and fathers had taught us. There were too many stories that could be told of those poor souls who’d left with nothing, and were later found when the snow melted enough to find them, their bodies blue and stiff.
Anneka and Father were unsurprised, albeit mildly irritated, at my overnight absence. When I stopped by our house, my sister had drily suggested that it looked like I hadn’t had much sleep, something I knew she didn’t truly believe – or desperately hoped wasn’t true – and that word would no doubt start to spread. I, in turn, suggested I had other ways to keep myself warm during the night, and slipped back to rejoin Ivar.
Outside the village, the snow was deep and we made slow progress. Manoeuvring between trees and over fallen logs with the wooden snowshoes strapped to our feet made my legs ache, but this wasn’t a time for complaining. Whenever I began to grumble inwardly, I’d picture the red sky or the sail out at sea and it would ignite within me a new fire that would offer enough energy to push on even a little bit further. I trailed a few steps behind Ivar, sometimes using his footprints to avoid having to forge my own way through the snow. Now and then we stopped to catch our breath, but mostly we pressed on silently. Any moment, the plague could be bearing down on us. It was enough to make me look over my shoulder more than once, as though it were a physical being that haunted my shadow.
What a nightmare it was, I thought as we walked. Death lurked just hours or days away, but where the plague would start, whose body it would first see fit to consume, we couldn’t know. I was angry, but also sad and tired. I wanted to stop it, but couldn’t. I wanted to instil hope in those around me, but there was only unease, or a strange kind of calm that spoke of either ignorance or acceptance.
We shouldn’t have to accept this.
I surveyed the blanketed land during one of our pauses, and my thoughts found their way to my mouth. “There’s always a beauty in the after-storm stillness.”
Ivar watched me for a moment, then nodded and looked away. I wasn’t one for small talk. Conversations to no end were often better left unsaid. It was a trait of mine that had irritated him as far back as my memory could go, but one that was bred into me.
The woods were quiet, padded with thick, soft snow, the sun teasing us from behind the scurrying clouds. Off towards the northwest, the sky was still dark where the storm was passing through. If it made it as far as the Kall Mountains before breaking apart, they’d be buried beneath even more snow than we were. “I think Skane is catching its breath,” he said, breathing in deeply as if to make his point.
The bare trees shook with distant thunder, a low rumble rolling over the hills towards us. I felt the vibration in my stomach. That happened sometimes, during the bigger storms. The sky would shake and groan, angry. We moved on, the sun arcing its way towards midday before the glistening waters of Lake Hornstrăsk appeared in the valley below us. It stretched away for nearly a mile, most of the edge frozen. Its centre was still thawed, but as the season crept closer to winter, it would continue to freeze until the entire surface was one block of ice several metres deep.
Today, the lake looked different. My mind was knitted with worry and darkness, laced together so tightly they created a sensation of dread that weighed me down like an anchor. Ymir had told me a story once. A story of how, generations ago, a star had fallen from the sky and into the ground, destroying everything in its path. In the years that followed, the lake had formed, and for decades no one went near it. I couldn’t see it the same away again after that. As if Ymir’s words had come to life, I could see a falling star, a raging ball of fire careening to the ground, destroying a village and the surrounding area and leaving a mark so deep a lake would form. What lay beneath those frozen waters? Bones and broken homes and the remnants of extinguished lives. Hopes and dreams and thoughts of a future, all snatched away and crushed in the flash of a bright light. It wasn’t just a lake: it was a burial ground.
“The animals haven’t yet stirred, it would seem,” Ivar said presently, forcing my gaze away from the water. I eyed the fresh snow along the banks below us. The only tracks in the vicinity were our own.
“I don’t blame them,” I replied. We weren’t making directly for the lake, rather towards a series of cliffs set away from the right bank.
We moved slowly, steadily, the knowledge of how far we were from home encouraging us to use caution. As we walked, I recalled other stories, superstitions, passed around through the villages. Our people, particularly the elderly ones, took pride in the yarns they spun to the younger generations, some of which were true, and some of which were not – deciding which was which was half the fun.
“Those stories,” I said, watching as the cliffs rose taller before us. “The ones grandfathers like to tell, about the caves.” I knew he understood what I meant. “Do you think they hold truth?”
A moment passed before Ivar answered. “I don’t know.” A few more steps. “I’ve never seen it to be true myself, but that means little. My father always said rune singing is too valuable a skill to let it disappear in fear of fairy tales.”
People held that some of the caves where writings had been found, and even the ones that hadn’t yet been discovered, had been cursed long ago by old gods or rune writers, or goodness knows what else. They said the runes held a darkness that was better left alone. “We should spend our time looking to the future instead of trying to see into the past,” one storyteller had said.
That would be easier if the past didn’t hold information that could mean the difference between having a future and not.
And besides that, they’d been written to be read. People hadn’t spent so much time and energy carving them into stone walls for nothing but the darkness to see, so that they could pass down through the aeons and disappear unread when this world at last turned to dust. Perhaps it was an art form that we should once again assume. After all, what if many of us lost our lives by the plague looming ever nearer on our horizon since the appearance of the red lós? What if, in the future, someone else discovered Skane, and the cave wall runes were their only way of knowing what had become of us? What if, one day, my life was nothing more than a few markings on a cave wall?
Dark thoughts led to dark feelings and dark deeds. I took in a breath of the crisp air and cleared my head.
When we were finally in the shadow of the cliffs, in front of the maw of a cave ready to swallow us whole, we stopped. I eyed it, unnerved, while Ivar adjusted his bags and withdrew the knife from its sheath, as if to ensure he hadn’t lost it on the way. I touched mine gently, praying I’d never have need for it.
“You can help with light,” Ivar instructed me. “I’ll do the translating if you can hold the candles. It’s dark in there.”
Darker than a midnight with no stars. I knew that. I’d been into caves like these before.
We each pulled a candle from our bags and lit the wick. Out here in the sunlight, the flames were almost impossible to see, but in the blackness of the caves, they would be blinding. Ensuring our remaining candles and flint were within easy reach – losing our source of light on the inside could be deadly – we entered the cave.
My first instinct was to turn around and seek the daylight again, but this was why we had come. We were here for the secrets that slept in the shadows, that had been stowed away for future eyes like ours to read. Save for Ivar’s first visit, when was the last time a human had walked here? How long since these rocks had seen a human form pass by, searching for answers or satisfying some aching curiosity? Had the last souls to enter been those who’d written on the walls? Had other villagers come exploring since then? Some small part of me wanted to think we were the first people to enter this place in generations. It made the very air we breathed seem hallowed.
Our candles sent flickering light dancing around us as we moved through the narrow passageways. The shadows warped and shifted, sometimes growing, sometimes shrinking as our candles moved. The ground beneath us was slick, where dripping water had frozen. I worked to keep my footing, while my senses remained alert. Watchful. The shadows could hide anything, and the stories of the caves weighed heavily on my mind. Around turns and bends in the rock, I strained my eyes to make out anything out of place. But always, there was just more rock, more ice and more shadow.
I stayed close to Ivar. I could feel his body as our clothes brushed together and see his breath that left white bursts in the air. “It isn’t far,” Ivar whispered. I could understand why. Even the whisper was deafening in the utter stillness. Our footfalls bounced off the walls, echoing back to us, hollow and faint. There was only darkness in every direction. The thought of Ivar having come here alone made my skin crawl.
He turned to glance at me, as though making sure I was still following him. Like I would just separate and strike off on my own. Still, though, I was glad he looked. The way my candle reflected in his eyes was soft, comforting, and my body tingled with a longing to be held.
“Here,” Ivar said at last, and our candlelight fell on a wall covered in markings. Scratches, carvings of numbers and letters I’d never understand on my own. What meanings they did hold for me only came from Ivar’s translation. Some of them, like the runes in caves closer to the village, had become lodged in my brain like a splinter, the kind that festers and doesn’t go away. These etchings were how we’d come to know almost everything about our lost culture and about those who came before us. The warriors, the settlers, the pioneers. But more importantly, it was how we’d come to know anything about the Goddess.
What little scraps of information we’d learned about our Goddess had come from caves like these, where more scratches and shapes told short anecdotes or relayed the beliefs of those who had come before us. Some of our knowledge had been handed down from the generations past, but precious little. Skane was a cold, brutal country, nearly always wrapped in winter. Many of those first peoples so long ago didn’t survive to tell stories. It took countless years, generation upon tiny generation, of trying to survive and stake out an existence here before it finally caught on. Before their homes could finally stand the storms, before their hunting skills were enough for survival.
Before they knew which parts of the island to leave alone.
At first glance it was much like the caves closer to Neska, but the unreadable writings could be vastly different. Just like how, to many, the stars seemed vast and senseless, these pictures and shapes seemed nonsensical. Yet they told us far more than the stars ever would.
Ivar set his bags on the floor of the cave, handing me his candle. Wax dripped on to my mittens and I wished I could feel the burn. Cold was seeping into my bones, in here where sunlight never reached. I exhaled while Ivar withdrew a scroll, sending a burst of white into the frozen air. I imagined the burst was smoke from a fire that burned inside me, and the thought sent a faint warmth to my heart.
Removing his mittens and rubbing his hands together quickly, Ivar turned to stare at the wall, as if searching for the place he’d left off. I held the candles aloft, illuminating the wall as best as I could.
Markings lit up, some strange, wavy lettering, some crude images that had been scratched on to the surface with a sharp stone or something similar. They were scattered intermittently, the letters and pictures somehow forming a bigger picture once deciphered. To someone like me, it made no sense. But to a mind like Ivar’s, one that had been trained to understand them, they were yet another piece in the overall story of Skane’s beginning.
Well, Skane had been here long before us. But it was different, back then, back before our ancestors came on boats, hope in their eyes and fear in their hearts. It was empty, it seemed, devoid of life, save for the animals. Waiting for someone to find it, to love it, to start an existence.
As I eyed the markings on the wall, I imagined them being written, a fur-clad form, alone, scratching away at the stone, desperate to have their story heard. Imagining a future where someone like Ivar would stumble across it, read it, know it. Make the hours of frozen fingers worth it. Be thought about, even just for a moment. Man or woman, I didn’t know. Young or old, it was a mystery. Whoever they were, these writings were a phantom echo of their soul, and that fact alone was beautiful.
“I got to here.” He touched a rune near the top left of the wall, then retrieved the scroll from the floor. “It’s a villager, relaying stories of their travels. So far, they’re just talking about an attack. Wolves.” He pointed to the faint drawing of what looked like an animal. “They were attracted to a nearby river.”
He fell quiet, looking from the wall to the scroll, occasionally jotting down words. Luckily, we had little trouble with wolves. Packs of them would travel by occasionally, and we’d either hear their howls during the nights or find their tracks the next morning. But we humans were far too much trouble for them, unless they caught us alone. I’d seen one in the woods once, when I was up a tree. Its hulking, white-grey form was so large that I couldn’t look away until it was long out of sight.
I held one candle up to the wall and a second candle near to his scroll. The shadows kept dancing in my periphery, making me jumpy. I could envision them coming to life, reaching out to swallow us.
“That,” Ivar whispered, touching another rune. It had peaks, and even I knew what it meant. “The mountains.”
I stared at the rune while he continued to work. It transformed in my mind from a scratching on a wall to one of the dark, snowy peaks of the Kalls. Never before had I laid eyes on them, but from the stories I’d heard and tales Ivar had told me from the translations, I’d painted my own image of them. Tall. Dark. Deadly.
“I travelled to the mountains,” he read aloud. Then, after another few minutes of working, “It is home to the jōt, amongst other things. Territorial. Night dwellers. Their camp was filled with bones.”
Jōt. The giants. They’d been mentioned in more than one story, passed down to deter anyone from travelling to the mountains. Bones. I glanced around the cave, as if the dark words might bring something sinister to life. The shadows suddenly seemed deeper.
Perhaps it was my mind, perhaps it was the curse of the runes, but I was almost certain there was a faint sound somewhere else in the cave. A light padding, similar to a footfall. I glanced at Ivar. He was listening, I could sense it, but there were no more noises. He breathed in, then out, and carried on with the translation. There were many animals that no doubt came to explore these caves, searching for shelter or food or water. If a predator happened upon us, we were armed.
“If you can reach the highest peak, you may hear the Goddess speak.”
I whipped my head around and stared at Ivar. He was focused on the wall, as if double-checking the translation. Then he nodded. “They don’t elaborate. They just go on to discuss the hunting of a wolf.”
“There has to be more,” I said, turning my own eyes to the wall, like I could make sense of it myself. “What do they mean?”
“There’s nothing else, Ósa,” he said gently, like I was too frail to bear a more direct response.
I gripped the candles so tightly they shook, sending wax spilling to the floor.
We searched the other walls for writings, but found none. When at last we’d finished, and exited the cave into the sunlight, there were footprints in the snow.
They weren’t ours.