Where the Dark Comes First
Kjalkur. Early autumn, the year the war ended.
The first evening
She started inside the walls, because she was standing in them when she decided to start.
The house was finishing its day around her. Ragna was clattering in the kitchen. Eirik was leading the grey mare over the footbridge towards the stables, talking to her the whole way in a low, reasonable voice he never used on people. Smoke from the kitchen chimney climbed straight up for a while and then leaned east.
Geyser went through the gardens first, between the cabbages and the bean rows, and on over the stream into the yard. The straw targets stood in their line by the east wall with arrows still in two of them. There was more room here than she had thought. She paced it out, forge to stream, north tower to stables, and could see the thing standing in it: a long hall, a court in the middle, something tall at the heart of the court. It would fit, if Eirik gave up his targets and the horses went elsewhere and nobody minded the forge coming down.
She stood in the middle of the yard and waited for the evening to arrive.
The sun went behind the west wall while the sky above was still bright, and the wall's shadow came across the yard in one straight edge, a hand's width at a time, until the whole yard lay in it at once. Overhead the light went on for a long while yet. Down here it had been cut off like a door shut on a room, and the yard went from day to not-day without anything in between.
She stood in it a little longer, then went back inside and lit the lamps in the hall.
The second evening
Outside the south gate the road ran on past the house towards the village, and the next evening she followed it, with the lantern on its staff over her shoulder, unlit.
From the gate the village was soft shapes on the rising ground to the northeast, roofs and smoke and a few early lights, nothing with an edge. By the time the shapes had turned into houses she had collected three children. They didn't speak to her. They walked behind her at a distance they had evidently agreed on among themselves, and stopped when she stopped.
At the well in the middle of the village she turned round.
"Are you coming the whole way?"
The tallest, a girl with her hair in two thick ropes, considered it. "Where are you going?"
"I don't know yet."
That settled it for them. They came the whole way, which was out the far side of the village and along a cart track between two fields of pale stubble and back by another track. Somewhere on the second one the smallest of them came up level with her. He had a running nose and a stick he had been using on the stubble as a sword, and he asked the question they had all been carrying since the gate.
"Did you make the sky go black?"
"Yes," said Geyser.
He looked up at it. It was still light, bright and even from one side to the other.
"Can you do it now?"
"No."
"Why not?"
She gave it some thought. "It took a great deal of asking," she said. "And I'd want a better reason than you."
He accepted that as fair and went back to beating the stubble.
The light was nearly gone by the time they reached the well again. Her hand had wanted the lantern for some while, and she let it have it now. The children drew one breath together, because the light did not simply come on in the glass. It came out of it in small bright flecks that lifted and turned in the air round the lantern, like moths around a lamp, and settled on her sleeves and the girl's hair without burning anything. Geyser had stopped noticing them years ago. She stood at the well and let the children look until a woman's voice called two of them in by name, and the third, the boy with the stick, ran off without being called at all.
The third evening
Sigrun brewed for the village and sold it from a bench outside her door. At that hour the bench was usually full. That evening it held only Sigrun, who shifted along so Geyser could sit.
"You were out round the fields last night," Sigrun said. "With half my sister's brood."
"They found me."
"They find everybody." She poured without asking and set the cup on the bench between them. It was dark and smelled of bread. "What are you looking for out there?"
Geyser drank some. It was good, and she said so, and Sigrun waited, because she had asked a question and knew the difference between an answer and a compliment.
"A place for a temple," Geyser said.
Sigrun's eyebrows went up and stayed up a moment. "Whose?"
"Fenxyla's."
"Here?"
"Somewhere near here."
"Huh." Sigrun drank from her own cup. Down the lane someone was calling a dog, the same name over and over without much hope. "There was one of hers on the far coast. Little thing. My mother went once, when I was a girl. A week each way to put down a candle." She looked sideways. "That's the one that came down, isn't it."
"Yes."
Sigrun didn't ask how. She seemed to have a version already and to be content with it.
They talked about land after that. Geyser asked who worked what, and Sigrun knew all of it. The barley east of the village belonged to Torleif and his brothers. The strips along the road were shared out between families every spring and argued over every summer. The wood on the hill was nobody's and everybody cut it. The grazing by the stream, north of the big house, was mostly Arne's.
"Everything by the stream floods," Sigrun said. "Ask old Bjarte. He's stood in it every evening since before I was born."
Geyser walked home by the road. In the morning Ragna set down her porridge and asked, with no lead-up of any kind, whether a temple would be wanting a cook.
The fourth evening
The stream came down from the north past the village, under the road by a stone culvert, through the estate between the gardens and the yard, and out the other side. She had crossed it twice a day for two weeks by the footbridges without once following it anywhere.
That evening she went out by the little gate in the north wall and followed it upstream.
A short way above the house it ran into a shallow fold in the ground, with a long gentle slope on the west side and a shorter, steeper one on the east. The fold widened as it went, into a bowl of grass perhaps two hundred paces across. Hurdles stood stacked by a gap in the hedge. The grass was short and even, cropped close, and she had stepped in the reason twice before she reached the middle.
She set the foot of the staff in the turf and stood.
The sun was going behind the long slope. She knew where it was by brightness alone, a white smear low over the ridge, the ridge itself too far off to keep its edge. Closer in, the stream had gone the shade of slate. The grass was pale points on darker ground, every blade separate, more grass than she had ever looked at before she lost the colour of it. Over the hurdles the brightness was thinning. It had been orange here, the evenings she had stood in Kjalkur before. She was fairly sure of that.
The lantern hung dark on its hook. Her hand kept wanting to do something about it. She made it wait.
The dark came up out of the stream first. It rose from the low places, from under the bank and behind the hurdles and along the foot of the steep slope, and filled the bowl from the bottom like water poured into a basin. She felt it reach her ankles, then her knees. The air stopped moving. Up towards the village a door shut, and the sheep in the next field stopped complaining, and everything around her went quiet in the order things go quiet at the end of a day.
Under the quiet there was something else. A faint pull in the ground, like the draw of a current round her legs, and like a current it was going somewhere: down the fold, the same way as the water. She had felt it before in old places, in forests and caves, once at the bottom of the sea. Here it was slight. She stood in it until the bowl was full of dark and the sky above was only a little less dark than the ground, and then she said the evening words, the short ones, under her breath.
Then she lit the lantern, because she had held out long enough, and stood a while longer in the small circle it made on the grass, which was warm on her hands and looked to her like any other light.
The fifth evening
The caretaker had taken the cart to Sörfur that morning. She went back to the bowl.
Someone was already there. An old man stood in the stream up to his knees, bent over the water, working at something under the surface with both hands. He straightened when he heard her on the slope, looked at her, looked at the staff on her shoulder, and went back to work.
She came down to the bank. He was setting a trap, a long tapering basket of woven willow, weighting its mouth with a stone so it lay along the bottom facing downstream. There were two more already in the water further up, marked by sticks pushed into the bank.
"Eels," he said, before she could ask. "They run at dusk. Don't know why. Never asked them."
"You're Bjarte."
"Sigrun's been talking." He waded to the next stick and felt along the bottom with his foot. "You're the one wants to build something."
"Yes."
"Here?"
"Perhaps."
He found the trap with his foot, reached down and lifted it streaming out of the water, looked inside, and put it back. Empty. "Then you'll want to see this," he said, and climbed out on to the bank with the water running off his trousers, and pointed with a wet hand at the west slope.
Halfway up it, in a long uneven line, the grass changed. Below the line it was finer and lay flatter. Above it, it stood up coarse and tufted. Along the line itself there were stones, small ones, and old dead stems, and here and there a pale stick of driftwood, all of it lying in a band as neat as if someone had raked it there.
"Every spring," Bjarte said. "When the snow comes off the hills. Up to there. Some years higher. Year my wife died it came up over the road." He looked at her. "Whatever you build, you build it above that."
Geyser looked at the line for a long time. Then she looked above it, at the top of the west slope, where the ground flattened out before it fell away again towards the road.
"Thank you," she said.
He grunted and went back into the water.
She stayed. He didn't seem to mind or to expect anything of her, and she didn't talk, and he worked his way slowly from trap to trap while the sun went down behind the slope and the dark began to come up out of the stream around his legs. Once he said, without looking up, "Best time of day, this," and she agreed with him, and that was all either of them said.
When the dark had reached his knees he waded out and took a little horn lantern from the bank and lit it with a flint, crouched over it, his back to her. The flame came up behind the scraped horn, dull and steady. Her hand, which had been wanting all evening, let go of something it had been holding.
She left him there with his light and climbed the west slope, past the flood line, up to the top.
The ground was flat up here, and firm, and it went on further than she had thought from below. She paced it, end to end and then across, and then once more to be sure. Below her the bowl was filling with dark, and the stream was a thin pale line through the bottom of it, and Bjarte's lantern was a small dull spot moving from trap to trap. To the northeast the village was a scatter of soft lights, to the south the house was a long dark shape with its own lights beginning in the windows. Somebody, Ragna probably, had started on the hall without her.
She stood at the edge of the flat ground with the bowl below her and watched it fill until there was nothing left in it but Bjarte's lamp.
The sixth evening
Torleif came to the house before she could go out.
He came in his good coat, with his hat in his hands, and stood at the south gate until Eirik went to fetch her. She found him there looking past her into the hall at the long table and the high seat, with the face of a man who had prepared something to say at that table and was steeling himself to say it.
She took him to the kitchen instead. Ragna gave him a stool by the fire and a cup and went to the far end of the room to be very busy with onions where she could hear everything.
Torleif spoke for the village, he explained, to the house, and had done since before the house was given away. Which was to say that when the King's steward used to come for the house's share, it was Torleif who met him. He said all of this carefully and looked at his cup while he said it.
"They say you're building a temple," he said.
"I am."
"On Arne's grazing."
"On the rise above it. Above the flood line." She watched him take that in. "I'll talk to Arne."
He nodded slowly. He had more, and she waited for it.
"Will there be a levy?" he said. "For the building. Men, or carts, or…"
"No. I'll pay for the work. Anyone who wants it can have it."
"And after." He turned the cup in his hands. "People will come. From Sörfur, from further. That's what temples are for."
"Some will," she said. "They'll need somewhere to sleep, and something to eat, and something to drink."
Torleif thought about that, and she could see him arrive at Sigrun, and at his brothers' barley, and at the empty loft over his own byre.
"And us," he said at last. "The village. Would we be expected to…"
"No," she said. "You'd be welcome. That's all."
He finished his cup. At the gate he put his hat back on and then took it off again and said, "Thank you, lady," and put it on again and went off up the road, and she stood watching him until he blurred into the dusk and was gone. Ragna, at the far end of the kitchen, had cut enough onions for a week.
The seventh evening
Arne's house stood at the end of the village nearest the fold, with a sheepfold behind it built of the same grey stone as the walls of the house, and a dog on the step that stood up when she came through the gate and did not sit down again.
The boy with the stick opened the door before she could knock, looked at her, and ran back inside shouting.
Arne was a big quiet man with a beard. Hild, his wife, was small and was not quiet at all, and it was clear from the moment Geyser sat down at their table which of them was going to do the talking. They had heard. Of course they had heard. They had heard from Sigrun, and from Bjarte, and from Torleif, who had come straight from the big house to tell them the night before, and from their son, who had been telling them for five days that the blue lady had made the sky go black and would do it again for a good enough reason.
"It's the best grazing we have," Hild said, before Geyser had said anything at all. "End of summer, when everything else is burnt to straw, that bowl stays green. That's the stream. You take that and we're feeding them hay by harvest."
"I don't want the bowl," Geyser said. "I want the flat ground on top of the west slope. Above the flood line."
"The sheep go up there."
"They can still go up there. Around the building. I'd rather have sheep on the grass than a man with a scythe." She turned her cup on the table. "And the meadow on the east side of the stream below the house. The house cuts hay from all of it and needs half. You can have the other half to graze."
Hild looked at Arne. Arne looked at the table.
"That's wetter ground," Hild said.
"It is."
"Lower."
"It is that too."
"Sheep don't like wet feet."
"Then I'll put a ditch in it," said Geyser, "along the bottom, so it drains to the stream. While I've got men digging anyway."
There was a pause. In it, Geyser became aware of the boy, who was sitting on the floor by the hearth with his stick across his knees, following every word with his mouth slightly open.
"And what do you want for it?" Hild said. She said it the way someone tests a step they don't trust. "The meadow and the ditch. Nobody gives a meadow away."
Geyser thought about it honestly.
"Your sheep in the bowl in the evenings," she said. "I like them there. And him," she nodded at the hearth, "to stop following me round the fields with that stick."
Arne laughed, a short surprised sound from somewhere under the beard. Hild did not laugh. But something in her shoulders changed.
"He won't," she said.
"No," Geyser agreed. "I didn't think so."
They shook on it at the gate, Arne's hand very large around hers, and Hild put a wrapped cheese in her arms as though it were part of the bargain and always had been. The dog lay down at last. Geyser walked back along the edge of the fold in the dusk with the cheese under one arm and the staff over her shoulder, and below her, in the bowl, the sheep had come down to the stream, and the dark was coming up around them.
The morning after
The caretaker had been back from Sörfur for two days.
After breakfast she took him out by the north gate and up along the fold. Arne's sheep were in the bowl, and Bjarte's sticks were still in the bank, and the flood line ran along the west slope in the flat morning light just as plainly as it had at dusk. She took him up past it to the flat ground on top and walked him over it the way she had walked it alone: the hall here, its doors facing down into the bowl, the court there in the middle, the small room at the back, the far end where the ground started falling away towards the road.
He listened to all of it. He walked it himself, twice, with his hands behind his back, and stood a while at the edge looking down into the bowl, and then at the house, and then at the village, working something out.
"It's a good spot," he said at last. "Firm. Dry. You'll want to dig for the footings before you trust it, but it's good."
"Where does one find masons in Kjalkur?"
"The King's builder, in Sörfur. Rolf." He made a face. "He's good. He's slow and he's dear."
"Who's quick and cheap?"
"Nobody who's any good." He turned and looked along the top of the slope towards the hill with its wood that belonged to nobody. "There's stone up there, though. There was a quarry on that hill once, before my time. If it's still workable you'd save the carting from Sörfur, and that's half of what Rolf charges you for. You'd want someone to go up and look at it."
"Could you?"
"I could." He was already walking, back the way they had come, down past the flood line towards the stream and the north gate. "I'd take Eirik. And Torleif's eldest, he's cut stone before. And we'd want to know what the King thinks about timber, because there's none on that hill worth anything, and the roof of a hall that size is going to want…"
She followed him down into the bowl, past the sheep, listening.