The Islands of the Blessed Read online

  THE ISLANDS OF THE BLESSED

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  The Land of the Silver Apples

  The Sea of Trolls

  The House of the Scorpion

  A Girl Named Disaster

  The Warm Place

  The Ear, the Eye and the Arm

  Do You Know Me

  THE ISLANDS OF THE BLESSED

  NANCY FARMER

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Nancy Farmer

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Book design by Russell Gordon

  The text for this book is set in Edlund.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Farmer, Nancy, 1941–

  The Islands of the Blessed / Nancy Farmer. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Richard Jackson book.”

  Sequel to: The Land of the Silver Apples.

  Summary: Two years after their adventures in the Land of the Silver Apples, the apprentice bard Jack and his Viking companion Thorgil confront the malevolent spirit of a vengeful mermaid and begin a quest that casts them among the fin folk of Notland (present-day Orkney Islands).

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  ISBN: 978-1-4169-0737-4

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-6047-3 (eBook)

  [1. Bards and bardism—Fiction. 2. Druids and druidism—Fiction. 3. Saxons—Fiction. 4. Vikings—Fiction. 5. Mythology, Norse—Fiction. 6. Folklore—Scotland—Orkney— Fiction. 7. Mermaids—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F23814Is 2009

  [Fic]—dc22 2008045415

  To Harold

  May we find the Islands of the Blessed together

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Heartfelt thanks to the editors who picked me out of the slush pile and nurtured my career: Richard Jackson, Susan Hirschman, and Sharon November.

  Especial thanks to Emma Dryden and Carol Chou for cheering me on while I was writing this book.

  Warmest appreciations to my son, Daniel, and nephew, Nathan Stout, for their joint inspiration for the character Olaf One-Brow.

  CONTENTS

  Cast of Characters

  1. The Gathering Storm

  2. The Wild Hunt

  3. The Hazel Wood

  4. Seafarer

  5. A Scream in the Dark

  6. Fair Lamenting

  7. The Mermaid

  8. The Draugr

  9. A Plea for Justice

  10. The Hobgoblins Arrive

  11. Hazel Comes Home

  12. The Tanner Brats

  13. The Paths Open

  14. Schlaup

  15. All Aboard

  16. A Love Story

  17. The Pink Palace

  18. Pangur Ban

  19. Find Tanners

  20. The Quest

  21. Ethne’s Cell

  22. Schlaup’s Betrothal

  23. The Sacrificial Stone

  24. Bjorn Skull-Splitter

  25. Princess Thorgil

  26. The Hogboon

  27. Escape Plans

  28. Full Moon

  29. The Dead Wall

  30. The Water of Life

  31. Voyage to Notland

  32. The Fin Folk

  33. The City Under the Sea

  34. The Shoney’s Feast

  35. The Draugr’s Tomb

  36. A Life for a Life

  37. Grim’s Island

  38. St. Columba’s Cave

  39. Odin

  40. A Joyful Reunion

  41. Rescue

  42. Flying Venom

  43. Sister Wulfhilda

  44. The Rune of Protection

  45. Departure

  46. Thorgil Silver-Hand

  47. The Islands of the Blessed

  Appendix

  The Carnyx

  Father Severus

  The Fin Folk

  Flying Venom

  Lorica

  Mermaids

  St. Columba

  Seafarer

  Sources

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  HUMANS (SAXONS)

  Jack: Age fourteen; an apprentice bard

  Hazel: Jack’s sister; age eight; stolen by hobgoblins

  Lucy: Jack’s foster sister; lost to Elfland

  Mother: Alditha; Jack’s mother; a wise woman

  Father: Giles Crookleg; Jack’s father

  The Bard: A druid from Ireland; also known as Dragon Tongue

  Ethne: Daughter of the Elf Queen and the Bard

  Pega: An ex–slave girl; age fifteen

  Mrs. Tanner: The tanner’s widow; mother of Ymma and Ythla

  Ymma and Ythla: The Tanner girls; ages ten and eight

  Brother Aiden: A monk from the Holy Isle

  Gog and Magog: Slaves of the village blacksmith

  King Brutus: Ruler of Bebba’s Town

  Father Severus: Abbot of St. Filian’s Monastery

  Sister Wulfhilda: A nun

  Allyson: Thorgil’s mother; deceased

  HUMANS (NORTHMEN)

  Thorgil: Olaf One-Brow’s adopted daughter; age fourteen

  Olaf One-Brow: A famous warrior and Thorgil’s foster father; deceased

  Skakki: Olaf’s son; age eighteen; a sea captain

  Rune, Sven the Vengeful, Eric the Rash, Eric Pretty-Face: Members of Skakki’s crew

  Egil Long-Spear: Sea captain and trader

  Bjorn Skull-Splitter: Olaf One-Brow’s best friend

  Einar Adder-Tooth: A pirate

  Big Half and Little Half: Brothers working for Adder-Tooth

  THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  The Bugaboo: King of the hobgoblins

  The Nemesis: The Bugaboo’s second-in-command

  Mr. Blewit: Hobgoblin foster father of Hazel

  The draugr: Avenging spirit

  The hogboon: Soulless being that feeds on life

  OTHERS

  The Shoney: Ruler of the fin folk

  Shair Shair: The Shoney’s wife

  Shellia: Their daughter; also known as the drauger

  Whush: A fin man

  Man in the Moon: An old god; exiled to the moon

  Yarthkins: Also known as landvœttir; spirits of the land

  Pangur Ban: Large white cat from Ireland

  Odin: Northman war god; lord of Valhalla and the Wild Hunt

  JOTUNS (TROLLS)

  The Mountain Queen: Glamdis; ruler of Jotunheim

  Fonn and Forath: The Mountain Queen’s daughters

  Schlaup Half-Troll: The Mountain Queen’s son

  Pangur Ban

  I and Pangur B
an, my cat—

  ’Tis a like task we are at:

  Hunting mice is his delight;

  Hunting words, I sit all night.

  Better far than praise of men

  ’Tis to sit with book and pen.

  Pangur bears me no ill will;

  He too plies his simple skill.

  ’Tis a merry thing to see

  At our tasks how glad are we,

  When at home we sit and find

  Entertainment to our mind.

  Oftentimes a mouse will stray

  In the hero Pangur’s way;

  Oftentimes my keen thought set

  Takes a meaning in its net.

  ’Gainst the wall he sets his eye

  Full and fierce and sharp and sly;

  ’Gainst the wall of knowledge I

  All my little wisdom try.

  When a mouse darts from its den,

  O how glad is Pangur then!

  O what gladness do I prove

  When I solve the doubts I love!

  So in peace our tasks we ply,

  Pangur Ban, my cat, and I.

  In our arts we find our bliss;

  I have mine and he has his.

  Practice every day has made

  Pangur perfect in his trade;

  I get wisdom day and night

  Turning darkness into light.

  Written by an unknown eighth-century Irish monk in the margins of a manuscript, when he was supposed to be copying the Bible. Translated by Robin Flower in The Irish Tradition, Oxford University Press, London, 1947.

  Chapter One

  THE GATHERING STORM

  Jack’s fingers ached and blisters had formed on the palms of his hands. Once he could have done this work without harm. Once his skin had been covered with comfortable calluses, protecting him from the slippery handle of the sickle, but no longer. For three years he’d been freed of farmwork. He’d spent his time memorizing poetry and plucking away at a harp—not that he’d ever equaled the Bard. Or ever would.

  Sweat ran down his forehead. Jack wiped his face and only succeeded in getting dirt into his eyes. “Curse this job!” he cried, hurling the sickle to the earth.

  “At least you have two hands,” said Thorgil, sweating and laboring nearby. She had to hold the bracken ferns in the crook of her arm and slice through them with her knife. Her right hand was frozen, useless, yet she didn’t give up. It both impressed and annoyed Jack.

  “Why can’t someone else do this?” he complained, sitting down in the springy bracken.

  “Even Thor does inglorious chores when he’s on a quest,” said Thorgil, stolidly dumping an armload of bracken into a growing pile. She turned to gather more.

  “This is no quest! This is thrall work.”

  “You’d know,” retorted the shield maiden.

  Jack’s face turned even hotter as he remembered how he’d been a slave in the Northland. But he swallowed the obvious response that Thorgil herself had been a thrall as a child. She was prey to dark moods that rippled out to blight everyone around her. That was the word for her, Jack thought grimly. She was a blight, a kind of disease that turned everything yellow.

  Nothing had worked out since she’d arrived in the village. It took the utmost threats from the Bard to keep her from revealing that she was a Northman, one of the murdering pirates who’d descended on the Holy Isle. Even as it was, the villagers were suspicious of her. She refused to wear women’s clothes. She took offense readily. She was crude. She was sullen. In short, she was a perfect example of a Northman.

  And yet, Jack had to remind himself, she had their virtues too—if you could call anything about Northmen virtuous. Thorgil was brave, loyal, and utterly trustworthy. If only she were more flexible!

  “If you’d shift your backside, I could harvest that bracken. Or were you planning on using it as a bed?” Thorgil said.

  “Oh, shut up!” Jack snatched up his sickle and winced as a blister broke on his hand.

  They worked silently for a long time. The sun sent shafts of heat into the airless woodland. The sky—what they could see of it—was a cloudless blue. It pressed down on them like an inverted lake—hot, humid, and completely still. Jack found it hard to believe that a storm was on its way, but that’s what the Bard had said. No one questioned the Bard. He listened to birds and observed the motions of the sea from his lonely perch near the old Roman house where he lived.

  A rumbling sound made both Jack and Thorgil look up. The blacksmith’s two slaves had arrived with an oxcart. A moment later the large, silent men crashed through the underbrush to gather up the bracken. They tramped to and fro, never speaking, never making eye contact. They had been sold by their father in Bebba’s Town because they were of limited intelligence, and Jack wondered what kind of thoughts they had. They never seemed to communicate with each other or anyone else.

  Even animals thought. As the Bard had instructed Jack, animals had much lore to impart to those who paid attention to them. What kind of lore did Gog and Magog, as the slaves were called, have to impart? Nothing good, Jack decided, looking at their brooding, averted faces.

  When the oxcart had been loaded, Jack and Thorgil set off for home. Most of the time they lived at the Bard’s house, but now, during the crisis of the impending storm, they had returned to the farm Jack’s parents owned. It had grown a great deal in the last three years.

  Beside the fields, farmhouse, barn, and winter storage shed was a new dairy Jack’s father had built. This contained three sturdy black cows tended by Pega, whom Jack had freed from slavery. She also cared for the chickens, new lambs, and a donkey. But she was not allowed to touch the horses. The horses were Thorgil’s domain and jealously guarded, particularly from the tanner’s daughters.

  At the edge of the property, where the land was too stony for crops, was a hovel constructed of peat. This was where the tanner’s widow and her two daughters crowded together with hardly more room than three peas in a pod. They had arrived to help Jack’s mother the year before and had never gone home.

  “I wish this storm would arrive,” cried Thorgil, throwing a stone at a crow. The crow eluded it. “The air’s so heavy! It’s like breathing under mud.”

  Jack looked up at the cloudless, blue sky. Except for the ominous stillness, it could have been any early summer day. “The Bard spoke to a swallow from the south. It told him that the currents in the air were disordered and all the migrating birds were confused. Why don’t you ever talk to birds, Thorgil?” The shield maiden had gained this ability when she’d accidentally tasted dragon blood.

  “They never tell me anything,” she said.

  “Maybe if you didn’t throw rocks at them …”

  “Birds are stupid,” Thorgil said with finality.

  Jack shrugged. It was like her to ignore the gifts she had and to demand what she could never achieve, a glorious career as a warrior. Her paralyzed hand had put an end to that. She also wanted to be a poet. Jack had to admit that she wasn’t bad. Her voice was harsh and she had a fondness for bloody death scenes, but her stories held your attention.

  During long winter evenings the villagers gathered at the chief’s hearth for song and hot cider. The Bard played his harp, and when he wearied, Jack and Thorgil recited sagas. Brother Aiden, the little monk from the Holy Isle, joined in with tales of the god Jesus, of how He fed a thousand people with five fishes and performed many other diverting miracles. But the real draw at these gatherings was Pega. Her voice was so compelling that the very storm blasts hushed to listen to her.

  “By Thor, those Tanner brats are meddling with my horses!” Thorgil broke into a run, and Jack hurried after to break up the inevitable fight. The tanner’s daughters were fascinated by the horses, a gift from King Brutus the year before. Actually, it was unclear whose horses they were, since they’d been handed to the entire group of pilgrims returning from Bebba’s Town. Jack thought they ought to be the Bard’s, but Thorgil insisted that they were hers by right, since she wa
s the only true warrior among them.

  “Get off, you mangy curs! You’ll ruin their training!” Thorgil whistled and the horses wheeled, throwing their small riders into the dirt. The animals came to a halt before the shield maiden, prancing nervously like the spirited creatures they were. Jack ran to pick up the howling girls. “Tell them to shut up or I’ll really give them something to blubber about,” snarled Thorgil, stroking the manes of the horses.

  Jack checked the girls and found they had no real injuries. They were eight and ten, stunted from years of bad food and the noxious air of the old tannery where they had lived until their father died. “They’re only children,” Jack reproved, wiping the girls’ dirty, tear-streaked faces with the tail of his tunic. “You probably did the same thing at that age.”

  “I was a shield maiden. I was the daughter of—”

  “Careful!” Jack said sharply. The girls stopped crying and eyed Thorgil curiously.

  “Who was your da, then?” the older one demanded.

  “Probably a troll,” the younger said, giggling. Thorgil reached down, but they sped off before she could wallop them with a rock.

  “Filthy bog rats,” Thorgil said.

  “All it will take is one slip,” Jack warned. “One hint that you are not a Saxon to someone who has reason to hate you, and the whole village will turn against you. And it will turn against my parents and me for sheltering you.”

  “That debt is the only thing that keeps me from flinging my true heritage into their faces.” Thorgil embraced the neck of one of the horses, and it blew a long, horsey kiss at her. Jack was impressed, as always, by how much the animals loved her. Too bad she couldn’t inspire the same sentiment in people.

  “Let’s go to the house,” Jack said. “I’m starving, and we have to cut bracken all afternoon.”

  “Curse the bracken,” swore Thorgil. “Curse the pointless, boring existence in this village. For one rotten turnip I’d throw myself off a cliff into the sea!”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Jack, leading the way.

  Chapter Two