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- Herausgeber: Francis Rosenfeld
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
An American anthropologist and her creative sister spend a year in the Orkney Islands trying to locate the burial site of a Viking princess from the 10th century. Much to their surprise, they find themselves embarking on an adventure much more meaningful than an archeological quest: they uncover an entire world of ancient Norse poetry, history, music, stories, our connection with nature and the world of the dead.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Francis Rosenfeld
My Dear Fiona
Table of contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Other Books by Francis Rosenfeld
©2023 Francis Rosenfeld
Cover Design©JohnBellArtatSelfPubBookCovers
Dedication
To those still alive in our memories, with undying love.
Chapter 1
My Dear Fiona
There are things we don’t talk about, and they weigh heavily on our souls. Who decided they don’t matter? Life is like virgin land. It only surrenders its bounty after we drench it in our sweat, tears, and blood.
People squander their lives, energy, and purpose as if they don’t value themselves enough to live for real, instead choosing to take a backseat and yield the spotlight to some higher power which, based on the results, doesn’t care about them too much.
While I’m writing to you, Fiona, I’m gazing at the same moon you watched from afar in your distress centuries ago, hoping for the miracle that never came, the one that would have freed you from your fear and pain. This moon is like a symbol of unanswered prayers. Some wishes are granted too late, aren’t they? I wonder if God works this way, if all the questions that are left unanswered are in fact processed in a much slower and more permanent frame of reference, in God’s time.
For some, this is a metaphorical musing. They don’t know how lucky they are, the innocents, to live their lives in real time, and not in retrospect.
I’ve had visions of my future, it’s so far away it’s almost like it’s in a another world, and my life is trying to catch up with it, as if it hadn’t happened yet, as if all the choices weren’t made ages ago, in a different reality where time doesn’t exist.
My gift, the gift we share, leaves no room for doubt, not in this simple world we inhabit, hiding like unwanted time travelers, and I can’t help wonder if you knew, back then, waiting for that fateful morning, that I existed, or would exist one day, that I was like you and we were destined to meet.
So many things differ from your time, and yet none at all: despite advances in technology, the human spirit never changes. We’re still the same lost souls with slightly better toys.
I didn’t see you there, in my already written life, and yet, here you are, defying the certainty of a predetermined future.
Who were you, my friend? Who was the girl with soft blond hair who left this world too soon? The one whose blood called out to mine, Fiona Corrigall of Cuween Hill.
We’re only passing through this world, us travelers, we pass through it, but never belong.
We’re children born of the wind.
I hear your voice in the night air sometimes singing a melancholy song, with a simple melody that haunts me, my sister from the past.
In every rain I feel your tears, your soft breath in the fog, your anger in the storms, while life passes me by, pretending to surprise me, just like it does everyone else.
Your fate decided that you’d never age, but I already know I will. Mine is a very long life, I gathered, or will be, or was. I’m getting lost in all my times on occasion. If there is such a thing as time, I will be a daughter, a sister, a mother, a grandmother to you, who died centuries before I was born, but whose spirit is as bright and alive as anyone I ever met.
Be friendly unto me, Fiona Corrigall; to you I pledge my truth
Chapter 2
Alone in Kirkwall
I used to see this sea wall in my dreams. You can’t imagine how weird it feels to look at it in real life! I’m not really sure I’m awake right now, Fiona. There is an elusive threshold of weirdness and serendipity past which we stop believing anything is real, a madness of sorts, a sweet, addictive madness.
Ever since I was awarded this research grant to explore your life and times, I'm in disbelief, constantly questioning what I'm seeing in this taffy-like reality that shifts and changes its colors with the slightest tug.
My parents thought me irresponsible for picking anthropology as a field of study, not easy to make a living at studying dead strangers from a thousand years ago, and this last research project really set them off, because, as they said, just like a soft cow pile, the last thing I needed was another bucket of water.
I’m sharing this with you undiluted, if you’ll pardon my pun, my whimsical sister, because I know you’ll find it as hilarious as I did.
Long story short, my mom cried for hours, pulling all the guilt trips in the arsenal (they still work, I have to confess, but I don’t feel bad; if you can’t be soft and vulnerable with your own mother, how can you even pretend to care for anyone else). My dad, after strenuously forbidding me to go, despite the fact I’m a grown woman, damn it, well, at least as far as the official documents are concerned, insisted to take a leave of absence and accompany me here. Or chaperone. Hey, you should be able to find a better term for this enhanced degree of parental supervision, given you lived in times and places more suited for its use.
Anyway, I managed to dissuade him at the last minute, and, as I took leave of any expectations for a conventional life, which I knew I had to leave behind when I boarded that plane, going I don’t exactly know where, the last glance I got of him was his twitching mustache and the crease between his eyebrows as he saw me off with his arms crossed and a disappointed look on his face.
I swear, sometimes, Fiona, if I didn’t know they loved me…
So here I am, on my own, (Gasp! Cover your eyes, polite society!), talking to a dead woman of the Northern seas whose crystalline giggles I can almost hear in the wind.
Your people probably thought you more mature than mine do me. You must have seemed a grown woman before you even turned twenty, definitely wiser than my parents think I am right now, a decade older.
That matters little, anyway, to people like us. Old, young, these are conventions people make to place themselves in the landscape we call time, but it makes very little difference when its painted veil is laid out on a table in front of you in its entirety, in such a way that you can reach out and touch it with your finger anywhere you wish.
It probably wouldn’t be advisable to tell the research committee that I am pulling most of the strands that unravel your past from visions and dreams, and that, right now, I know without doubt and without proof you weren’t born here, but a lot farther north, on the continent, and this short trip across the channel must have seemed like going to the ends of the earth for you, on that wooden boat, creaking from every joint, small and fragile like an eggshell, braving the frozen mists and the ice floes, uncertain whether you’ll ever see land again.
This rocky cliff must have been a vision of Paradise, after that long voyage, I know that because I can see it through your eyes, and I can feel how cold you were, even wrapped in all those thick blankets and furs your wealthy family was proud to pamper you with.
Love doesn’t change through time, does it, Fiona? I bet your family loved you just as much as mine does me; I bet you were the apple of your father’s eye, and your mother couldn’t stop beaming with joy every time she looked at you, you beautiful Norse princess, that she worried over your slightest sniffle and doted on your every need. Love is timeless.
Don’t worry, Fiona. I’ll find your artifacts. I’ll find your historical records. I’ll find your real footsteps on the surface of time, and you’ll become as real to the others as you are to me now, while I watch this rugged coast through your eyes. I can see it emerge from its shroud of clouds and reveal itself to your enchanted sight for the first time, during the parting of the mists, long before the mighty sea wall was even a dream.
The sea batters it relentlessly now, whipped by haunting winds; this is a rugged land which sulks under its vernal light, and yet you’re made of sunshine and laughter. The ghostly weather never dimmed your cheer, aah…, to be young!
A friendly stranger passed me by, walking his dog on the promenade at the top of the wall, and asked me, in a dialect I could barely make out, whether I was writing a letter to send home. I suppose I am, in ways. We travelers have many homes, and none.
I can’t shake how excited you were at the sight of this island. You must have arrived here in the dead of winter, a strange decision for a seafaring clan like yours.
I suppose you didn’t have a choice, that you were running from a much larger danger, one so imminent it made your winter sea voyage seem safe by comparison.
How old were you? 12? 13? And yet you were no longer a child. That weight on your shoulders is not just the blankets and furs, is it?
I can tell you knew how to read and write. Often when I close my eyes, I can see you writing letters to me as well, scribbled in a sharp and labored runic script, and it makes me sad I don’t understand what they mean.
The fingers holding the quill are calloused and spatulated, accustomed to turning the spindle and adjusting the warp tension in the loom much more than they are to writing. There is no softness in them, because they had been kept busy since they could hold a needle, and their fingertips are pricked raw by its constant use.
Literacy makes you privileged. It was an unusual honor for a woman of your time, an honor reserved only for those meant to rule. That privilege comes wrapped in crushing responsibility; people like you aren’t afforded childhoods. Who taught you joy and laughter, Fiona? Or maybe those aren’t things that need to be taught.
I wish I could read those letters of yours! Here’s to learning dead languages, although I must confess Norse runic script never occurred to me as an option before. You can’t justify learning it because it helps you understand botanical nomenclature.
It’s late spring now, as warm as springs get this far north, and yet a shiver slithers through my bones and I instinctively wrap my cardigan tight around my body as passing clouds obscure the sun. Old wives’ tales say a shiver from the blue means somebody’s walking on your grave.
See? People already know time is a painting where all the ages of life can be seen at once, but they know it in their bones, in their instincts, they wouldn’t be caught dead believing it in their waking state, for fear of going mad. Maybe someone did just walk on my grave right now, although my guess is they’re more likely to have walked on yours.
I passed the old town church on my way here, and the eerie field of black tombstones in its courtyard. I’ll have to stop there later and see if I can find any records of your family. Not of you, of course, sister. You lived too far back in time for that. The best I can hope for is maybe a great-great-great-great-grandchild or niece, or nephew. Did you have siblings, Fiona?
I have a sister, and we’re very close.
I suspect I am a direct descendant of yours, which means your blood flows in my veins as well. We are thus blessed, we women, to have the thread of ancestry unbroken all the way to the beginning of our line.
I’ve never seen an entire cemetery of black stones before. What do you know about it? It’s very unusual.
***
I stopped by the church yesterday and the mystery of the black tombstones was explained: the graveyard experienced a massive fire, yet the church was unharmed, not even a speck of smoke or soot.
I bet you’d be asking yourself right now, Fiona, how does one set stone on fire, and you’d be right. The priest couldn’t explain it either, hence the miracle designation of the phenomenon. It happened so long ago no written records of it remained, and oral history can be very imaginative in these parts. It’s hard to separate truth from fantasy after all these centuries.
I’ll make a record of my notes and organize them later, I don't want to forget the stories I heard, which, although they may be unbelievable to most, are still too fascinating to ignore.
Legend has it a beautiful young maiden, which strangely matches your description, used to sneak out at night and come to the cemetery to meet her beloved. The affair went on for years, and the maiden’s parents started to worry when she turned away every suitor that knocked on their door. Why, she was turning twenty and she was already an old maid, right, Fiona? Anyway. Her parents thought, maybe she pledged herself to faith and they would have been thrilled for her to join the convent in the next town, but the mere thought of leaving the village of her birth was enough to set their daughter into a wretched panic.
Suspecting foul play, her father followed her to the cemetery one night and saw her wait there by a tombstone, and a beautiful young man appeared, but not of flesh, an eerie creature glowing faintly in the darkness.
He was too terrified to intervene, of course, one takes the Otherworld seriously around here, but he understood his daughter had fallen for a spell, so the next night he gathered the elders in secret and tried to set the fateful tomb on fire.
Of course, stone doesn’t burn, so the pointless pursuit did nothing but start a commotion in the village, drawing everyone’s attention, including the maiden’s.
In anguish, she ran to the graveyard, dashing to the desecrated stone, and the tales say that her light increased in intensity the faster she went, until her form was too bright to look at, like looking at the sun.
Her brightness turned night into day and consumed her in an extraordinary flash of light, and after people’s eyes readjusted to the darkness, they noticed she had disappeared.
She’d never been seen or heard from since.
It is said that she went to be with her beloved and was never spoken of again. If a person has gone with the fairies, the humans are not allowed to interfere, because the fairies will be wrathful when one of theirs is taken.
It seems God miraculously spared the church from the blue-white fire that burned the stones and turned the dirt around them barren. When the vegetation started growing again, it always came in pairs - two trees, two rose bushes, two blades of grass. Some even swear that’s how the four-leaf clover came to be. It couldn’t bear a leaf without a pair.
Sometimes I think that the only reason I joined the field of anthropology was to uncover these wild stories, which tend to be more fascinating than the actual history. The latter is usually dull, random, and motivated by human pettiness and greed. What really happened? I’m probably going to find out, because I have to, a research grant is a research grant, but I really don’t want to, Fiona. If I were to venture a guess, the place was probably struck by lightning.
Chapter 3
The Broch of Brodgar
The car trip to the Brough of Birsay led me through treeless landscapes, shy and soft in the sunshine, and filled with the bright smiles of wildflowers, a poem in white, rose, purple and green, laid down as scenery by a benevolent god.
I stood beside them, with the wind in my face, trying to remember an older time, as if I’d been there before. But maybe those were your memories, Fiona, not mine. Maybe that’s what the stones are for, repositories of memories, remembering the fingers of all who had touched them.
I was looking for an excuse to go to the other side of the island, and it was interesting to learn your family tree had spread some of its roots there.
The ancient burial customs of this place exercise a strange fascination on me, like a spell cast centuries before I was born.
The bones of my ancestors sleep quietly beneath this land, sorted and distilled through the landscape, moved and rearranged in cairns, reduced to their very essence, the skull, by the people of old, whose lives differed greatly from my own, and their relationship with nature and death, even more. I can feel their call in my own bones, like a slow buzz, a magnet of sorts, drawing me to where I’m supposed to be.
Our ancestors weren’t nice people, were they, Fiona? Or maybe histories are written by the victors. Sinners become saints and wise people wicked, and all there is left of them is a tale told by others, everywhere else but here. Here the bones speak their truth.
It is strange for a girl from Wisconsin to wake up every morning in a place with no trees, where the grass looks like a dense tufted carpet, tightly wrapped around white stones which poke through it like giant dragon eggs.
I arrived in Birsay in the middle of the afternoon, too late for a trip to the broch. The evening comes early so far north in spring, and I watched with fascination as the stone bridge beneath the water’s surface appeared with the tide while the sun set and the moon shone its silver light on the ocean. I couldn't see clearly through the glare of the wet stone and the water, but I could swear I spotted lights moving on the island in the distance, and heard a faint laughter in the air, clear and pure like a child's. Memories of other times, perhaps? Things that the stones remember.
This is how the legends were born. It is this landscape; I don’t doubt it. The lady who ran the bed-and-breakfast I stayed at the night before commented, quite displeased, that the local youths like to play this game where they challenge each other to spend a whole night on the island, cut off from the mainland until the low tide in the morning, and use their lights and noises to spook the superstitious and make them cross themselves to ward off the fair folk.
One becomes so turned around by the surreal setting filled with cairns and stones, one starts doubting one’s own senses. So the laughter was real, then. And the lights. Suddenly, I had this powerful urge to find out who it was, and it was completely illogical. I just felt like it had to be someone who resembled you, or more precisely, the vision of you I have in my mind, young Viking princess who lives in my dreams.
The stone bridge looked a lot less eerie in the bright light of the morning as I started my long walk across it to the broch. A salty mist coated my hair in frost, and the pungent smell of algae sharpened my senses and made me aware of my footing as I carefully treaded on the slick rocks. Every so often, puffins perched on the bridge, like sentinels, looking at me with strange detachment as I made my way from my realm to theirs.
The island belongs to them now that the remains of the old Pictish fortress are barely visible above ground, making it more suitable for birds than for people.
And there is where I saw you again, Fiona, laughing at the puffins with your fur-trimmed hood pulled over your golden locks to protect them from the salt spray.
The innkeeper's story left me wondering whether the girl I spotted was actually there or just an apparition of the haze, but there was no haze, my dear, just the glow of the sun beaming over a meadow of blooms and flocks of colorful puffins.
Maybe it was the girl from last night, exhilarated by having emerged victorious from the challenge.
However, in a population that remained rather isolated for centuries, who can say how many Birsay girls would end up resembling you?
I snapped many photos from the island to send to my parents, including a clear one of the copy of the famous Pictish stone. I bided my time until the evening tide, jotting down notes and taking stock of odd details that didn’t photograph well.
After that I shared my sandwich with the puffins, ignoring the 'Do not feed the birds' warnings, I sent long and elaborate texts to my family, instead of the letter that I had planned to write them, which, for some reason, feels like the most appropriate way to stay connected with family while visiting here.
I shared with them every detail of my life in Orkney, from the practical to the curious, gave them updates on my research, assured my parents that my schedule is on track, and I'm keeping warm and safe, and omitted to mention you, fair maiden of the cairns.
I studied the old handwritten documents in the Church of Saint Magnus in Kirkwall, but found precious little about your relatives. The local legends about their lives are more prolific than the written records.
It’s hard to reconcile the factual history with the vivid portrait I have in my mind. The stories seem incomplete, like an essential connector piece is missing, one I came here to find.
I’m just going to call it research, because obsession sounds so negative.
The information for which I traveled to Birsay didn’t pan out.
It seems the reward of the journey was watching the glowing path to your mysterious island materialize from the sea in the moonlight.
If this research produces nothing useful to the scientific community, I am sure there is a captivating fantasy novel in there somewhere, with a beautiful and nostalgic theme full of youth, love, and conjured magic from days gone by.
