Chapter 61: First Birth and Weddings II

There was a silence in which absolutely nobody in that street knew what to do.

And then the boy who had killed more men than he could count said something short and cracked that nobody afterward could agree on the words of, and turned round, and walked away up the hill quite fast, and did not come down again until the evening.

Twenty-seven more were coming.

Nobody said that out loud either. Everybody had done the counting.

The weddings were apparently Haaland's problem, and he had never in his life been so certain that a thing was not his problem.

It began with a fisherman and a girl off the sweeping crew coming to find him at the training ground, both scrubbed, both in their best, and asking him something he had to have repeated three times before he understood it.

They wanted to be married.

Congratulations.

"Fine," said Haaland. "Good. Excellent. Get married."

Then they explained, patiently, that this was precisely the difficulty.

Because nobody on that island was married.

Almost none of them had come off the ship married, and everything formed since had formed in a cave in the dark with a shifted sleeping mat and no ceremony at all, and that had been perfectly acceptable when they were all going to be dead by spring.

It was not acceptable now.

And inside a fortnight there were six couples asking.

The trouble was not the asking. The trouble was who they were asking.

Me.

Everybody thought it was lovely. Everybody said so.

And every single one of them, one after another, walked straight into the same small idiotic wall, which was that there was nobody on that island with the standing to say the words.

Not a priest. Not a chief. Not an elder with any authority beyond what people happened to give him on the day.

Nobody suggested Hiccup. It did not occur to one single person in that plaza, and it would have been awkward for everybody if it had.

"Oddr," somebody finally offered.

"No."

"You know the words-"

"I know a great many words," said Oddr. "None of them are holy. You want a man to stand up and speak for the gods, and I have not been on speaking terms with any of them since before your mother was born."

"Haaland, then."

Gods rot the lot of you.

Haaland, who had killed men for money for more years than he cared to count, went pale.

"No."

"You are the-"

"No."

So somebody proposed that the couples simply say the words to each other.

It satisfied nobody.

They did it anyway. Every single one of them, on one long gold evening in high summer, in the lower plaza with everyone on the island round the edge of it.

It was a special occasion. Not only for the six pairs of their own, but for a great many other things.

For being alive, which was the first of them. For the roofs. For the fields coming up in their lines on the south face. For the fact that not one of them had been beaten, sold, or counted since the day they came ashore.

And for the child.

He was there, in the arms of one of the sweeping women at the side of the crowd, awake and furious about the noise until somebody's drum started, at which point he began to giggle and could not be made to stop.

Ylva was propped on a bench beside him with a blanket round her shoulders in the warmest evening of the year, still the colour of a woman who has lost a great deal of blood and not got it back yet.

She was not watching the weddings. She had one of his hands between her finger and thumb and was moving it about, gently, to see what he would do with it.

Then the six of them said the words at each other, and were cheered until the birds came off the walls.

And it was good.

Haaland would not have it said otherwise. It was one of the best nights any of them ever had.

It was late, on the plaza steps with the fires burning low, that Oddr remarked, "None of that was official."

Haaland looked at him.

"Nothing about it."

The old man turned his cup slowly on the step, entirely without amusement.

"Think about what a wedding actually is, anywhere in the world. Two people say a thing in front of somebody who can hold it. A priest, so the gods have heard it. A chief, so the tribe has heard it. A king, so the law has heard it. Somebody who stands between them and everybody else, and who will still be standing there in ten years when one of them wants out of it, or dies, or has to be told whose child that is."

He stirred the fire.

"Take that away and what is left? Two people telling each other something they already knew."

He shrugged.

"There is nobody here who can make anything official. Not a marriage. Not a debt. Not a judgement. Everything we did tonight, we did because everyone in that square happened to agree. That is all any of it is. Agreement."

Haaland thought about that a while.

He had spent most of his life in armies. He knew exactly what a place looks like on the day the agreement runs out.

Down at the far end the men had got onto the drink, which was its own argument.

Haaland was well into it himself by then and had every intention of going further. He drank the way he did everything else, steadily and without apology, and there was not a man on that island who had ever seen it change him, and not one who had ever seen him refuse a cup.

"When does the wine come in?" somebody asked, hopefully.

They all knew what he meant. The cuttings had come north wrapped in wet sacking on the seed run and gone into the ground on the third terrace in the spring, a hand and a half of dead-looking stick apiece, and had been watched by half the settlement ever since like a pot that would not boil.

"Three years," said the old farmer, who had been dreading the question. "Four, if the first winter takes them."

There was a silence of genuine mourning.

Down at that end of the tables Rum was laughing along with the rest of them. Cup in hand, red in the face, entirely at his ease among men who had known exactly what he was one winter ago.

And one of them, well into his own cup, said the thing Haaland took to bed with him.

"Ah, we'll manage. It's all right so long as we all agree, isn't it."

Everyone laughed.

Haaland did not.

Because Torvald had disagreed.

They had found him at the edge of the camp with his guts out and his eyes still open, and not one person on that island had possessed the standing to do a single thing about it.

He watched six newly wed couples dance badly on the stones.

He finished his cup in one go, and left.