The Monk She Bought

The last market before winter smelled of tar and wet wool and the blood of the season's slaughter, and Jorunn Steinarsdottir walked into it with her dead husband's silver at her belt and every eye on the trade-beach counting it for her.

Three ships lay hauled up on the shingle at Hvitarvellir landing, their strakes dark with sea-grease, their crews spreading trade-goods on hides pegged flat against the wind. Sacks of grain from the southlands. Bars of iron. Soapstone bowls stacked like the shells of grey eggs. A rope of amber beads that caught the low autumn sun and held it. The river ran broad and pale behind the booths, and beyond the river the fells already wore snow halfway down their shoulders. A month, maybe less, and the passes would close, the ships would go, and whatever she had failed to buy today she would do without until spring.

Whatever she had failed to learn, likewise.

"Arnor Hrutsson is by the grain-sacks," Oddny said at her shoulder, quiet as a knife going back into its sheath. "Smiling."

"He can smile. It cost him nothing."

It had cost Jorunn forty ells of wadmal and the better part of a shipload of wool, and it had cost her at the autumn folk-moot in front of thirty men who had drunk at Hallgrim's benches. Arnor had come with a tally stick, half of a split hazel rod, the notches cut clean across grain and edge, and he had held it up and said, here is what your husband owed me, lady, cut by his own hand and mine together, and may his drowning be forgiven him for leaving a woman to settle it. She had held the matching half from Hallgrim's chest and looked at the notches — and the notches had looked back at her like bird-tracks in mud, saying nothing, admitting anything. Every man in the circle had waited. Some of them could read a stick no better than she could, but they were men, and no one was going to make them prove it that day.

She had paid. Not because she believed him. Because she could not show him wrong, and a widow who calls a bonder a liar without proof hands her neighbours a feud along with her weakness, and she had a hall and a hundred sheep and thirty souls to bring through the first winter of her widowhood without one.

The wool had gone downriver on Arnor's horses. The lesson she had kept.

"There," Oddny said.

The slave-dealer had set up at the south end of the beach, downwind, where the smell of his trade would trouble the fewest buyers. He was a Hordalander called Skeggi, broad as a door, with rings on his arm that said business had been kind, and his goods sat in a line on a ship's bench with their ankles hobbled: nine souls off the Hebrides run. Jorunn walked the line the way she walked a line of horses at the spring fairs — slowly, letting her eyes do the work, keeping her face closed while men who had known her husband drifted casually nearer to watch the widow of Eyrar go shopping for what she could not manage alone.

Two big island men with rowers' shoulders, worth plenty, worth too much. A woman with clever quick hands and hate in her face. A boy. And at the line's end, apart from the rest as if even hobbled men kept their own ranks, a gaunt one sitting with his back straight and his wrists on his knees, watching the beach with a stillness that was not meekness.

His hair had grown out ragged, but the crown of his head still showed it: shaved once, from ear to ear across the front, in the manner of the island priests. His face was all bone. Salt had split his lips and someone's fist had at some time reshaped his nose, and he watched the market like a man reckoning it.

"That one is free with the porridge and mean with the work," Skeggi said, following her eye and already talking the price down before she asked it, which told her he had been carrying the man unsold from landing to landing. "A Christ-priest off Ljodhus. Can't row, can't scythe, fainted under a peat-load in Orkney. I'd sell him for the price of his winter feed and call the loss a lesson. Now the two lads there—"

"What does he do," Jorunn said, "besides faint?"

"Sings to his god at dawn like a gull. Marks on skins." Skeggi shrugged the shrug of a man who has weighed a thing and found the scales useless. "Bookish. There's no work in him, lady, and I'd not have a widow throw silver away — I say it out of respect for your husband, who bought a sail off me at this very landing two years gone and paid like a chieftain."

Every third man on this beach had a story of Hallgrim's open hand. Every telling of it weighed her belt-pouch in front of the crowd.

She was spared answering by trade. A farmer from up the valley, Thorleif or Thorolf, red-faced, had settled on the clever-handed woman, and the haggling being done, the paying began. Skeggi kept a balance in a wooden case lined with lambswool, and he set the little scale-pans swinging on their chains and dealt the weights out on the hide like a man dealing luck. The farmer unwrapped his silver from a cloth: coils of cut arm-ring, a broken brooch-pin, three stamped foreign coins clipped to fragments. Hack-silver, weighed and not counted, the only reckoning that crossed every border.

"Four ounces the price," Skeggi said. "There's one." The pans dipped and settled level. He tipped the silver into a heap, set fresh pieces on. "Two." Tip, heap. "Three." The third weighing settled slow, the pan trembling on its chains, and he flicked it with a fingernail and called it fair before it stopped moving. "And the last. Four ounces, and a good bargain."

"Three and a half."

The words came from the end of the bench, in Norse worn smooth in odd places, the way a foreign coin is worn — good metal, strange stamp. The whole beach turned.

The gaunt man had not moved. His wrists still lay on his knees. "Your third weighing was light by half an ounce and you called it before the pan settled," he said, to no one and to everyone, in the tone a man uses for saying the tide is out. "Half an eyrir, if this is an honest weight you measure by. The full price is four. There is silver for three and a half on the hide. The rest is still in his cloth."

For the space of a wave's fall and drag the beach held quiet. Then the farmer looked down at his cloth, and up at Skeggi, and closed his fist on what remained, and somebody by the grain-sacks laughed the short ugly laugh of a man watching someone else's ox gore someone else's dealer.

"The thrall can't row," the farmer said, "but he can count your fingers for you, Skeggi."

Skeggi's face had gone the colour of raw liver. He made a show of re-weighing, and the pan hung light, half an ounce shy, just as the foreign voice had said, and he cursed the wind, the chains, the damp, and made it good, and the crowd enjoyed all of it enormously. It was the worst thing that could happen to a dealer at the last market of the year, and the man who had done it to him sat hobbled at the end of the bench with his eyes already gone away to the river-mouth, where a knorr was working out on the ebb with her sail filling, south, toward the open sea and whatever lay beyond it that he looked for.

Jorunn watched him watch the ship, and thought: he did not do that to be bought. He did it because the weighing was wrong, and being wrong in front of him was more than he could leave alone.

She had buried a husband who could charm a bargain out of a stone and never once check the weighing behind the charm. She had paid Arnor Hrutsson forty ells and a boatload of wool for the difference between what was said and what was cut. And here sat half an ounce of exactness, insolent as frost, priced at his winter's porridge.

"Lady," Oddny murmured, in the flat voice she used for warnings, "every man on this beach is watching what you do next."

"They were watching me before. Let them watch me get value." She stepped in front of the monk, between him and his ship, and stood there until his eyes came up to her. They were grey, patient, and not in the least meek. "You read tally-sticks?"

A pause, while he took her measure in turn — her keys, her pouch, the men watching sideways. "I read three tongues and cut a fair score-stick," he said. "I was twenty years at letters and numbers. A tally is a child's psalm beside an Easter-reckoning."

"Whatever that is."

"Finding the one right day in the year's thousand wrong ones." Something moved behind the grey, dry as a winter branch. "Numbers cannot lie, lady. They can only be lied with. It wants a watcher, is all."

"And you watch."

"It is what is left of what I am."

Skeggi came sidling back, scenting the turn things had taken, and began to talk — sound of limb after all, a rarity, a scholar, a king's ransom in a lean frame — and Jorunn let the tide of it break on her while she did her own reckoning, the only kind she trusted, the kind done in her head where no man could recut it. A field-thrall's price for a man who could not scythe. Against it: Arnor's smile by the grain-sacks. Every stick in Hallgrim's chest that she could not read, holding debts owed and debts owing, and winter coming down the fells to find out which she believed. Men said a widow could not hold a hall. There was gossip all down the coasts of one who had, in a district north of here, a stubborn creature who they said had held her farm with law-craft and her own two hands and now shared a high seat cut wide for two — and men told it as a marvel, the way they told of two-headed lambs. Jorunn did not intend to be a marvel. She intended to be paid what she was owed.

"Half the field-thrall's price," she said, cutting Skeggi off mid-hymn. "You named him porridge and a lesson. I heard the whole beach hear you."

Skeggi looked at her, and at the crowd that had heard, and hated arithmetic more than any man on that shore had ever hated it. "The lady buys like her husband bargained," he said sourly, which was not true, and they both knew it, and he took her silver — she made him weigh it twice, and the second time the whole beach was silent, savouring, while the pan settled true — and it was done. Witnessed on the beach by named men, the price called aloud, lawful as a land-sale. Property of Eyrar, one Irish monk, sound of limb, mean with the work.

They cut the hobble and he stood, taller than she had judged, and steadier. Up close he smelled of ship's bilge and old wool, and the wind off the river moved his ragged hair, and out at the river-mouth the knorr leaned on the ebb and went away small toward the sea. He watched it go until it rounded the ness.

"Your name," she said.

"Ciaran, son of Fintan. Brother Ciaran, when I had brothers." His eyes came back from the sea and settled on her, level as his own scale-pans. "You will want to know what you have bought, since no one on this beach could tell you. Ask me anything that can be counted."

"I know what I bought." She said it plainly, so that he and Oddny and the sideways-watching men could all take delivery of it together. "A tool to keep what is mine. You will keep my tallies. You will weigh what crosses my threshold, in and out. And you will teach me letters and reckoning, so that no man cuts a stick against me again in the sure faith that I cannot read it back to him."

That reached him. She saw it land, the smallest widening of attention, a scribe handed strange script. Whatever he had braced himself to be set to — dung, peat, the oar he could not pull — it had not been this.

"Teaching was my office once," he said slowly. "I have taught boys who wept over their letters, and one bishop's nephew I would have traded for any of them. I can teach a — " he chose the word with care — "a determined pupil, lady, if the pupil comes determined."

"The pupil comes owning you," Jorunn said. "Determination is my second quality."

"And the first?"

"I pay attention. Late," she said, "but I have begun."

Something that in another face, in another year of his life, might have grown up to be a smile touched the monk's salt-split mouth and died young. He bowed his head, obedient as a psalm, and behind the obedience she could see it plain, because he did not trouble to hide it: he was already gone from here. Already ransomed, already south over the rim of the sea, already home in whatever stone hush he prayed to. His back would bend at Eyrar. The man inside it was a held breath, waiting.

Well. Winter did not care what a tool waited for, so long as it worked.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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