Lamp Oil
Kjalkur. Early autumn, the year the war ended.
The first day
The cart came up the road from Sörfur an hour before evening, and he knew from the way it took the last bend that it was not one of the King's.
He had been told the ships had sailed. A rider had brought the news two days before, along with a cask of the King's ale for the household and a letter that said very little. The war was won. The owners had left Kjalkur. The estate was to go on as before. He had read it twice in the doorway of the hall, then given the ale to Ragna for the cellar and gone back out to the beans.
As before was not difficult. He had kept the house as before since it was given away. Thirty winters in Magnus's hall in Sörfur, back when Magnus was still only a Jarl, the last of them as the man who answered for its stores, and when his wife died and the hall started to feel too loud, Magnus had found him this: a walled house half a day inland, with fields around it and a stream through the east yard, and owners who were always somewhere else. They had come through a handful of times. They ate like a war band, slept in every bed, left wet boots by the hearth and were gone again in three days, and afterwards the house went back to being his.
The cart stopped at the south gate. A carter from the city, two chests, a sack, and a woman on the bench beside him who climbed down before the wheels had properly stopped.
He knew her. He remembered her from those visits as the quiet one. The village called her the blue one, which was neither kind nor unkind, only accurate: skin the grey-blue of deep water under cloud, and hair that ran from almost black at the crown to the colour of shallows at the ends. On those visits she had sat near the far end of the long table with her hands in her lap. She had thanked whoever set a plate in front of her, every time, and he could not remember her saying anything else.
She came through the gate now as though she had drawn the plans for it.
"Good evening," she said, and used his name, which he had not expected her to know.
"My lady."
"Geyser," she said. "Please."
He looked past her at the cart, at the road behind it, which was empty.
"Just me," she said. "Could the chests go inside somewhere until I know where I want them?"
He had Eirik and the carter take them to the big bedroom at the end of the east wing, because that was where the most important guest always slept. Then he waited to be told what was wanted. A bath, probably. A meal brought up. A message to someone.
"Would you show me the house?" she said. "Properly. How it runs."
So he showed her.
The hall first, because one came into it from the gate path and it was the heart of the place: long and high and dim at that hour, with the great table down the middle under its red runner and the high seat at the far end. She walked the length of it slowly, one hand trailing along the backs of the chairs.
"How many?"
"Twenty-four, lady."
"Who sits in them?"
"Nobody, mostly. The King's people, when they come. Your party, when you were here."
She nodded as if that was useful to know and kept walking.
The kitchen, where Ragna dropped a spoon. The pantry and the cellar steps. The long room off the kitchen with the beds where the house people slept when the weather made even the short walk home to the village a misery. The gardens, cabbages and roots and the beans he had been tying up when the cart came, and the bed by the little roofed bench in the southwest corner, which was his own and grew onions. Then back through the hall into the east wing, the corridor, the rooms nobody slept in, the bath, the study with its empty shelves, the room with the big map table that the last steward had put in and nobody had ever used. Over the stream by the footbridge to the yard with its straw targets and the cold forge and the workshop where Eirik mended harness. The stables. The towers at the corners. The wall walk.
She asked about everything. Who mended the wall when it needed mending. Where the firewood came from. Whether the village sold to the house or the house to the village. What Ragna was paid, and Eirik, and the two girls who came up for the washing. She did not write any of it down, and he assumed it would go out of her head by morning, as it would have gone out of anyone's.
She ate in the kitchen. He had not planned for that. Ragna had been laying the end of the long table in the hall, a single place under the high seat, and the priestess had come in, looked at the one plate on that enormous table, and carried it back to the kitchen herself. She sat on the bench by the fire with her bowl in her lap and asked Ragna what was in the stew, and when Ragna told her, asked where she bought her fish, and had a second bowl.
Later, washing up, Ragna said to him quietly, "She asked my name."
"She asked mine."
"She asked my husband's name."
He did his rounds after the house went quiet, as he always had.
The lamps in the hall were lit. All of them, down both sides of the table. So was the one in the east corridor, and the one in the map room, and in each of the empty bedrooms, a lamp burning on the sill or the table in a room with nobody in it.
He went round and put them out, one after another, because oil was oil and a lamp left burning in an empty room was how houses burned down. The big bedroom at the end he left alone. There was light under that door as well.
In the morning, passing the map room, he saw that its lamp had burned down to nothing. He had put it out himself. He stood looking at it for a moment, then went and got the oil jar and refilled it, and said nothing to anyone.
The third day
Sailors coming back through Sörfur had told the story all summer, and it had come out to the village with the carters. The sky had gone black over the open sea, they said, in the middle of the day, from one fleet to the other. A face had come out of it, larger than a mountain, and a voice had said something that carried for miles across the water, and half the Sea King's ships had turned round and gone home.
He had believed perhaps a third of it. Sailors were sailors.
On the third morning the woman from the story was in the yard asking Eirik what he fed the horses in winter and whether the hay from the north fields was better than the hay from the south. Eirik answered with his eyes on his boots. She listened to all of it.
In the afternoon she walked the wall with him again, the whole way round, and he showed her the place on the north side where the frost got into the mortar every year. At the south gate she stopped and looked up at the banners hanging on the outside of the wall, facing the road. They were Magnus's banners from when he was still Jarl, and had hung there since before the house was given away. Nobody had thought to change them.
"What colour are they?" she asked.
"Red, lady. The King's red."
"Thank you."
He waited for whatever came next. Nothing did. She stood a while longer looking up at them, then went on along the wall, and after a moment he followed her. He decided it was a southern way of asking about the King, or a priest's way, and that either way it was not his business.
That night every lamp in the house was lit again. He left them.
The fifth day
He kept the stores the way he had kept them in Sörfur: a board in the cellar with a line for each thing, and notches cut for every jar or sack that went up the stairs. On the fifth day he stood in front of the board for some time.
In a usual autumn the house used one jar of lamp oil in a fortnight. Less, when nobody was in residence, which was usually. He had cut five notches in five days.
He did the sum twice. If it went on like this, the oil laid in for the winter would be gone by midwinter, and the dark months not half over. He thought about how to say that to her. He had said things of the kind to Magnus often enough, in the old days, and Magnus had generally laughed and told him to buy more. He did not know what she would do.
He went up to find her at dusk and found her in the hall.
She was walking the length of the table, unhurried, the way she had walked it the first evening. As she came level with each lamp, the wick took. She did not touch them. She did not carry a taper. She did not look at them; she was looking ahead, at the far end of the hall, and on either side of her the small flames came up one after another as she passed, so that the hall filled with light behind her like a wake.
At the high seat she turned and saw him in the doorway.
"I know," she said. "The oil."
He had not said anything.
"I'll see to it," she said.
"Seeing to the oil is my work, lady."
"Then I'll see to the money." She said it pleasantly, as she said everything, and came back down the hall past the lamps she had lit, and went through to the kitchen to see what Ragna had made.
He stood in the hall a while among all that light. A third, he thought. Perhaps a half.
The seventh day
People began coming to the gate.
Word went down to the village in a day and along the roads in a week, and it was not long before there was someone at the south gate most mornings, cap in hand, asking whether the priestess would see them. A farmer wanting his new plough blessed before it went into the ground. A woman from two villages over whose husband had been on one of the ships that turned back, and who wanted to know, she said, what it had been like. Two boys who wanted to see the blue lady, and were sent home by Ragna, and came back the next day anyway.
She saw all of them. She saw them in the hall, at the long table, because that was where there was room, and she sat with them halfway down it and not at the high seat. Some days he went through on some errand and there were four or five people along the benches at once, eating Ragna's bread and waiting their turn, and the priestess listening to a man talk about his plough as if there were nothing else in the world she would rather hear about.
In the evenings, when the last of them had gone, she went up onto the west wall and sat on the walk with her back against a merlon and watched the sun go down behind the hills. He saw her there from the yard most nights. She sat until the light was gone, and then longer, until it was properly dark, and then she came down and went inside, and the windows filled up one by one behind her.
The tenth day
Her chests had been open for several days by then. He knew because the girls who did the washing told Ragna and Ragna told him: clothes in the press in the big bedroom, and books on the shelves in the study, real ones, heavy, written in hands nobody in the house could read. And something big in the bottom of the heavier chest, wrapped in oilcloth, that nobody had dared to unwrap and that rang faintly when the chest was moved.
He had thought she would stay a week. He began to think she might stay the winter.
The twelfth day
She found him in the garden, in his own bed, lifting onions.
She crouched down at the edge of it, careless of the dirt on her hem, and watched him work for a while without saying anything. Then she said, "I'm staying."
He sat back on his heels.
"Here," she said. "In Kjalkur. In this house, for now. I'm going to build a temple to Fenxyla."
He knew the name. Everyone knew the names. There had not been much of her on this side of the peninsula in his lifetime, and less since a little temple on the far coast had come down, which he had heard about the way one heard about things a week's journey away, without paying much attention.
"Here," he said.
"Here, or close. I haven't decided where yet." She looked round the garden, at the wall, at the tops of the towers. "There's room."
He put the onion he was holding into the basket with the others. He found that the first thing he wanted to ask was what happened to the house, and it seemed a small thing to ask a woman who had just told him she meant to build a temple. He asked it anyway.
"Does the temple want the house?"
"The temple will want somewhere to stand," she said. "The house will still want keeping." She looked at him. "I was hoping you would go on keeping it."
"Folk up here don't pray to her much, lady."
"They'll be welcome all the same," she said. "So will everyone else." She stood up, brushed off her knees, which did nothing for the hem. "Ragna says you'll be going into Sörfur in a few days."
"For stores."
She took a purse from her belt and held it out to him. It was heavy. He took it because there was nothing else to do with it.
"For the oil," she said, and went back towards the house.
The fourteenth day
He took the cart into Sörfur at first light and was there by noon. Flour and salt from the merchant on the harbour, nails from the smith, a new bridle for the grey mare. Then the chandler's, last.
The chandler had sold to Magnus's hall for twenty years and knew exactly what a house that size went through in a winter. When he heard the order he put down his pen.
"Twelve jars?"
"Twelve. And the tallow candles. Three boxes."
The chandler looked at him for a moment, then picked his pen up again and wrote it down, and named the price, which had gone up since the spring. He paid it from the priestess's purse, and there was a good deal left in the purse afterwards.
It was dark by the time the cart came round the last bend of the road with the jars packed in straw behind him, clinking softly over the ruts, and the mare tired and wanting her stall. He saw the house from a long way off. Every window along the hall was lit, and the east wing, and the rooms nobody slept in. And further off, north of the walls where there was nothing but grazing, a single small light stood still on the dark slope above the stream, where nobody had any reason to be.