Diarmait is remembered and reminded

Diarmait’s young wife had been waiting for him. He had felt the chill of her stare in the cold iron of the door handle. He felt it on his face as he entered. He felt it on his shoulder as he passed.

“Good evening, dear,” he said dully.

He felt her slow blink on his back, like a warm cloud passing before a cold sun.

He bent to toss another log onto the fire. His private code of honor demanded that he sit with her until it had burned hollow and collapsed into scaly coals, but he was artful enough to choose the narrowest in the pile.

He did not know why she sat with him in the evenings, unless it was to torment him with the sense that he was a torment to her. She avoided him scrupulously enough during the day, except when meals brought them together. Then he was thankful their table was long.

At night their bed was narrow, but in her sleep Sadb knew how to fold herself into angles and force him into a line. When he tried to touch her, she went so limp that oftentimes he did too. Nevertheless he was not certain she forgave him that any more than when he did not – nor even than when he did not try.

She hated him. He tried his hardest not to hate her and was gradually failing. And in this wilderness they had nothing but each other.

Diarmait watched the shaggy bark sear and flare and crumble as the fire took hold of the log. The wilderness pressed its lips to the lip of the chimney and blew like a mournful piper, making the flames bow down.

“Windy out there tonight,” Diarmait ventured softly.

“Windy out there tonight,” Sadb echoed. “What else would it be in this place? Do you suppose we used to announce ‘Wet out there tonight’ at home?”

Sadb had grown up so near the edge of a sea-​​cliff that she could have dropped an unwanted kitten out her bedroom window to drown it. Her removal to this bowl-​​shaped, sealess valley was one of the thousand indignities she would never forgive him, though he had not wanted this house any more than she.

“Perhaps if the sea were wetter some night than others,” Diarmait muttered.

“I beg your pardon? I did not hear you over the wind.”

“I said–”

The door handle clanked and clattered on the far side of the door, and Diarmait turned gratefully. Any interruption – any servant – anything. The log was already burning away.

To his speechless astonishment it was Eirik Brass-​​Dog who ducked through the door, walking in just as unannounced and just as unexpectedly as he had two years before. Diarmait felt a tingling of absurd hope: Eirik was coming to rescue him from this new prison.

Eirik only glanced at him before smiling past him at Sadb. Perhaps Eirik could read everything he needed to know about a man in a glance, Diarmait thought. Or perhaps he was simply coming to rescue Sadb.

“So, young lady,” Eirik began, but a gust of wind from the chimney slammed the door behind him, making him jump and wince at the same time.

“God damn!” he howled in Norse. “So,” he said to Sadb in his clumsy Gaelic, “I beg my pardon, but I think your house he have the wrong name. I prepare me for Three Winds but so, I count six just coming down tonight. And now that is seven!”

“Isn’t it a dreadful place?” she asked, inexplicably smiling.

Eirik straightened his belt and began again. “So, young lady, I guess you don’t remember me…”

“Young lady,” she scoffed. “What are you? An old man?”

Eirik gasped. “I think I must be! Don’t you remember how I used to bounce you on my knee when you were this high?” He stooped to hold a hand at the level of said knee.

Sadb laughed and shook a scolding finger at him. “No, sir, for it was on my wedding day I met you, and nor would I be forgetting such a bouncing!”

Like dry tinder touched by a spark, she had suddenly flared again into the bright, vivacious girl Diarmait had only looked upon for a few hopeful minutes, before someone had pointed out to her the swarthy, insignificant little man who was shortly to be her husband. After two months at Three Winds he had almost forgotten the sound of her merry laughter.

“So, this high?” Eirik proposed, patting the very hair on her head.

“No, never!” she giggled.

“When you grow up?” he pleaded.

“No, sir! Never shall I be getting any bigger!”

Eirik’s clownish expression softened, and he passed an arm behind her back to guide her gently towards the door.

“So, I come back in four, five months, and we see about that.”

Diarmait could not see her face from where he stood, and he would never know what cloud might have passed before it, or what sun might have shone.

By the time Eirik had seen her off, both the clownishness and softness had gone, leaving a grimly blank expression that Diarmait was free to overwrite with terrible news. It was a face that foretold death.

But Eirik merely clapped his hands down on Diarmait’s shoulders and shook him slightly, as the Norsemen greeted one another, and he generously bent his long arms to allow Diarmait to reach as high as his own.

“Diarmait!” he said softly.

“Eirik! Did you come alone?”

“Aye.” Eirik gave his shoulder a last whack and grinned absurdly at him. “So, I try to be inconspicuous.”

Diarmait smiled weakly and looked him up and down. “You? In this country?”

“Sigi she say I stand out less when I stand alone.”

Diarmait’s smile relaxed slightly and spread. “How are they, then, Sigi and the boys?”

Eirik strode past him to the fire, and Diarmait saw no higher than his shoulder as he went by.

“All well, please it God!” he said to the woodpile.

He bent, and Diarmait watched him scuffle with the wood until he had found the heaviest, thickest log. Eirik’s hand was so mighty and so long he was able to grasp it by one end and swing it onto the fire without using the other.

“And have you news of my brother?” Diarmait prompted.

“So, I saw that Murchad just nine days ago,” Eirik replied without pausing to count. “In Ireland. All well.” Then he paused to cough.

Diarmait smelled the acrid smoke of burning bark a few seconds later and coughed companionably with him, but after a moment he began to sense that Eirik’s cough came not from the outside air but within. Each clattering cough came more quickly than the last, leaving him scarcely the time to take a breath for the next.

By the time they slowed into a panting wheeze, the towering man was swaying from lack of air. Diarmait was moved to put his hands out to steady him. Eirik’s back was so stooped their shoulders were at the same height.

“Eirik…”

“What kind of wood is that?” Eirik croaked.

Diarmait let his arms fall. If Eirik wanted to blame the smoke, Diarmait would blame the smoke.

“Sorry, Eirik. It’s bad wood. Nothing grows in this valley but the thorns.”

Eirik grunted and whipped out a handkerchief to wipe his nose. Diarmait watched his back slowly straightening, his head rising up into a higher air. Another flickering worry passed through his mind at the mention of the valley: Why had Eirik come into it at all? All this way if he was ill?

Eirik turned his head slightly and stared at him out of the corner of a pink eye. “So, you put a baby in that young lady yet?”

Diarmait choked and flushed a hot red from mingled humiliation and outrage. “Not three months have I been married!” he spluttered.

“Time enough,” Eirik said gravely.

“Now, she hasn’t said anything to me yet – but that doesn’t mean – ”

Eirik snorted and turned his face away to concentrate on folding his handkerchief. It fluttered in his hand like a white and wounded bird until he pressed it flat.

“So,” he said. “We don’t waste time talking tonight. You keep trying until it is sure. A man never lived unless he have a son to avenge his death.”

“I try,” Diarmait said angrily, “don’t you be thinking I don’t!”

Eirik only inclined his head.

“You don’t know what you’re asking of me!” Diarmait wailed.

“I have three sons. I think I do know how they were made.”

“I know that,” Diarmait groaned. “I mean, she hates me!”

Eirik smiled fondly. “So, for a long time Sigi she hate me too.” 

Abruptly he took out his handkerchief again, for no apparent reason other than a desire to unfold it and scrupulously refold it against his hip.

For a moment Diarmait only watched him. His bottom lip quivered like a thwarted child’s until he could bear it no more.

“But at least Sigi was liking you at the first,” he whined.

Eirik grunted, but he lifted a kindly eye briefly away from his folding.

Diarmait flopped down upon the chair to stare mournfully at the logs. Eirik’s was crushing his own to an early end between its burning belly and the embers Sadb had left him.

“One look was all she was needing,” Diarmait pouted. “She cannot stand the sight of me.”

Eirik put his handkerchief away and flexed his fingers in the heat of the fire.

“So, I think she look at you a lot for a young lady who don’t like the sight of you.”

“Only to glare.”

“Tss! Every time she smile at me, she look at you to see what you do.”

Diarmait hesitated, suddenly wary. “I wasn’t noticing that.”

“Ah! If you don’t notice!” Eirik sighed. He sat heavily in the other chair. “No man can help you then.”

Diarmait picked nervously at the chapped skin of his lower lip and watched the fire. He did not like being made to feel like a young fool by a younger man, and nevertheless he knew that when Eirik spoke he ought to take heed.

Finally he realized he could at least change the subject.

“I hope you weren’t riding all this way to tell me to look at my wife,” he muttered.

“Maybe I ride all this way to look at her myself!” Eirik grinned.

Diarmait’s muscles scarcely had the time to tense before his good breeding corrected them, but Eirik would not have lived as long as he had if he had not learned to spy the sparest signs of aggression in other men.

He wagged a finger at Diarmait and chuckled softly. “So, I think it is not too late for you two!”

“What do you want?” Diarmait barked.

Eirik’s laughter stopped abruptly, and that deathly look erased the expression of his face again.

“I want to ask you about your father’s ships,” he asked in a deep voice that Diarmait had forgotten.

“Why are you asking me then?” Diarmait mumbled. “I haven’t even seen the sea in three months.”

“Why not?” Eirik asked. His mystified air only infuriated Diarmait.

“Because I’m still waiting for my father to send me somewhere to do something, but it seems two months is long enough to forget a son!”

“I do not think.”

“Then he’s punishing me I suppose! Were you seeing this valley by light of day? That’s my heritage! Three winds and the thorns!”

“What did you do?” Eirik asked mildly.

“Nothing!”

“Maybe that’s why.”

Diarmait’s small body tensed again, and this time his good breeding did not cool it down. He gripped the arm of the chair and leaned forward, daring Eirik to say it again – and hoping he might say a little more.

Eirik only asked gravely, “How were his ships, then?”

Diarmait swallowed and sighed and sat back deep in his chair.

“You must have seen for yourself,” he muttered. “You must have come up either the Cree or the Fleet, and half his ships are lying at the mouth of the Fleet and half at the mouth of the Cree.”

“I came up the Fleet,” Eirik said softly.

“Then why weren’t you asking Young Aed while you were there? He’s having the care and the keeping of them.”

“Young Aed was not at home,” Eirik said patiently, “for he was out finding him a wife for Christmas. But I wanted to ask my friend Diarmait and not Young Aed.”

Diarmait sighed in childish frustration and flopped his arms in his lap, but he could not hide his flush of pleasure at hearing Eirik Brass-​​Dog call him his friend. An hour earlier he would have been pleasantly surprised to learn Eirik ever thought of him at all.

“You could have been counting them yourself, at least,” he whined. “I’m certain they’re all there.”

“I counted the masts. So, you say the half are there and the other half on the Cree?”

“Aye, give or take.”

Eirik sat up and rubbed his long hands together. “And who’s keeping the ships on the Cree?”

“Young Eochaid of the Colins.”

“And how old is young?”

“I don’t know, fifteen or so. At my wedding he was just trying to grow a beard and looking like an ass for it.”

“So, that one,” Eirik said softly. From the side Diarmait could not tell whether his smile was cunning or merely amused. “And how are the sails?”

“I’m certain they’re fine, Eirik,” Diarmait said wearily. “If you’re wanting to know about my father’s ships, you ought to ask my father, or at least the men holding them.”

“Are they still black?” Eirik asked.

“Of course! Or… perhaps they’ve faded a bit,” he grumbled, “since we may no more put a warship to sea!”

Eirik sat back and smacked his hand down on the arm of his chair. “That’s no excuse to let sails rot! God damn! That’s the best reason not to!”

“I didn’t say they’re rotting! They may have a faded a bit, nothing more. An ocean of dye is it taking to dye sails black, as you ought to be knowing, with your blue one.”

“Faded a bit,” Eirik muttered to himself.

“I’m certain they’re still a dark dark gray, if they aren’t black.”

Eirik rubbed his hand down his long face and sighed wearily. “Go to bed, Diarmait. I’m damned tired.”

“Then you may go to bed. I’ll have it made right now.” He began to rise, and then he settled slowly back into his seat. “Why were you wanting to know about my father’s ships and sails, anyway?”

“I don’t know yet. So, I think about it tonight. And you go see your wife.”

Diarmait glanced back at his log in despair. Seldom had he wished it would burn a little longer – tonight it had not yet even burned. But it was pressed between Eirik’s and Sadb’s, and Sadb’s logs were little more than embers, and Eirik’s log was burning so very fast.

And of course, he thought, he alone reckoned time by wood and ash.

“She won’t thank you for that,” he muttered.

Eirik closed his eyes and sighed through his nose.

“She might someday, Diarmait. You might someday. And I’ll be thanking you tonight if you’re loving your wife, as I cannot be loving mine.”

Diarmait nibbled on the chapped skin of his bottom lip, awkward and ashamed. This younger man made him feel like a child.

Eirik opened his eyes slightly and stared through his lashes at him, with such finality on his grim face that Diarmait knew he was speaking his last words until the morning.

“I loved her even when she hated me, Diarmait. I loved her even when I hated her.”