The Last Bowl
Thjalfi, who was twelve and the fastest goatherd in the valley, could tell what was in the pot from the far end of the byre. Tonight it was barley again. There was less of it than last night, and last night there had been less than the night before.
He shut the last goat in and counted them by feel in the dark, a hand on each warm back. Eleven. The old nanny butted his knee to say she knew he was hungry too.
"I know," he told her. "You've got hay. Stop complaining."
Inside the longhouse the smoke hung low under the roof, and the fish-oil lamp made more smell than light. His mother, Bera, stood at the hearth with the ladle. His father, Geir, sat on the bench mending a net he had mended twice already that week, because the sea had given him nothing to put in it.
Roskva, who was eleven and remembered everything anyone said, sat on the edge of the sleeping platform with her drop spindle turning. She looked at Thjalfi's feet, then at the mud they had brought across the floor, then back at her wool. She said nothing. Roskva could say nothing louder than anyone in the valley.
The bowls stood in a row on the hearthstone. In this house the first bowl went to a guest, if there was one, the second to Geir, then Bera, then Roskva. The last bowl was Thjalfi's. It always had been, and he had spent most of his life finding ways around it.
Tonight he was working on the spoon. If he stood close enough to the pot, his mother sometimes let him lick it. He was edging toward it when the noise began outside.
It came down the valley from above, where nobody lived: a long hollow rumble, like cart wheels running over a wooden bridge. There was no bridge at Steinsdal head. There was no cart either, and no road for one, only the goat track and the scree.
Thjalfi was out of the door before his father had put down the net.
Dusk was nearly gone. The first frost had whitened the turf on the byre roof, and his breath went up in clouds. Down the goat track, out of the dark, came a chariot pulled by two goats.
They were the biggest goats he had ever seen, grey-brown and shaggy, with curved horns and beards to their knees. One had a split ear. They came at a trot, steaming, and stopped in the yard exactly where a goat would stop if it meant to be fed there.
In the chariot stood two men. One was slim and quick and had already jumped down. The other got down more slowly, and the chariot rose a hand's width on its wheels when his weight left it.
He was the largest man Thjalfi had ever seen. His beard was thick and red-brown, his brows were heavy, and his hands looked made for lifting boulders out of a field. A pair of iron gloves hung from his belt. Beside them hung a hammer with a head like a small anvil and a handle so short it looked broken off.
"This the last farm?" the big man said.
"Yes," said Geir, behind Thjalfi. "Nobody lives above us."
"Good. We want a roof for the night."
Geir looked at the big man, and then at the door of his house, which was low, and then at his own empty hands. "We have a roof," he said. "There's not much under it. The barley came in poor."
"I've brought supper," said the big man.
Thjalfi had already gone to the goats. Goats were where his hands always went. The split-eared one put its nose into his palm and breathed on it, and the other leaned its whole warm side against his legs. They were the best goats he had ever touched, broad in the chest and sound in every leg, and they smelled of cold air and somewhere far off.
"They like you," said the slim man. He had an easy smile and clever, restless hands. "Enjoy it."
Then the big man unhitched the goats, led them round by the byre wall, and killed them both, quickly, one and then the other.
Thjalfi stood with his hands still out. A farmer might kill a sheep in a bad winter, or a cow if he had to, but he kept whatever pulled his cart. Geir had sold a cow last spring sooner than lose the ox. This man had killed both his goats in a strange yard as easily as pulling a turnip, and he and the slim one had the skins off them before Geir had shut his mouth.
"How will you get home?" Thjalfi asked. It was out before he could stop it.
"Same way I came," said the big man, and carried the meat indoors.
Bera tipped the barley into a smaller pot. The big pot, the one for slaughter time, came down from its hook, and soon the whole house filled with a smell Thjalfi had not smelled since summer. His stomach made a noise like a dog scratching at a door. Roskva heard it. Her spindle kept turning, but the corner of her mouth tucked in.
While the meat boiled, the big man took the two goatskins and spread them on the earth floor, side by side, hair down, well away from the fire. He smoothed them flat with his great hands, the way Bera smoothed wool for the loom.
When the meat was ready and the bowls were filled, Bera held out the first bowl to the guest, because that was the custom. The big man looked at it. He looked at the four people of the house, and at the row of bowls behind her.
"Everyone eats," he said. "All of you. Now. Then the bones go there, on the skins, all of them, and nobody touches them after."
Geir gave a short, unsure laugh. "You'll want the hides for something?"
"I'll want the goats." The big man was already eating, and he talked through it. "Every bone on the skins, they get up in the morning and pull. That's all there is to it. Eat."
The slim man smiled into his bowl. Geir looked at Bera, and Bera looked at the meat, and then everyone ate, because it was meat.
Thjalfi ate fastest. He burned his tongue on the first piece and did not care. When his mother turned to fill the big man's bowl again, he reached into the pot with his fingers and took the piece he had been watching all along, the one with the most fat on it.
Roskva watched him do it. She watched him the whole way from the pot to his mouth.
"Your boy eats like me," the slim man said to Bera. "As if somebody might take it off him."
"Somebody will," said Bera, and Thjalfi stopped reaching.
The big man ate more than the whole family put together, steadily and without hurry. He threw each bone over his shoulder onto the skins without looking, and every one landed. The children threw theirs too. Thjalfi sucked each bone clean before it went, and then sucked it again.
Afterwards the house was warm and quiet and full. Geir fell asleep sitting up. The slim man told Bera a long story about a wager he had once won, which she did not seem to believe, and then he lay down at the guest end of the platform and was asleep at once. The big man sat a while longer with his hammer across his knees, looking at the skins. Then he lay down too, and the bench creaked under him from end to end.
Thjalfi lay on his own side of the hearth with his belly full for the first time since summer. He was still hungry.
Across the fire, on the far platform beside their mother, Roskva was saying the day's words over under her breath, as she did every night. He could hear them going past like beads on a string. "This the last farm. We want a roof for the night. Every bone on the skins."
"Go to sleep," he whispered.
She went on to the end, and then she did.
The fire burned down to red. Thjalfi lay and looked at the skins. He had thrown four of those bones there himself. Near the edge of the nearer skin, a little apart from the rest where it had rolled, lay a thigh bone, long and thick.
At the autumn slaughter, when Geir killed a sheep, he split the thigh bones on the hearthstone with the back of the axe and gave out the marrow on the point of his knife. It was the best food there was, soft and rich, and it kept you warm all night. It went to Geir first, because he was the father, and then to Bera, and there was never any left by the time it got to the last bowl.
The big man had said every bone on the skins. He had said nothing about the bones being whole.
If Thjalfi took that one, and split it, and put both halves back exactly where it lay, every bone would still be on the skins. All of them. He worked it through twice, and it came out the same both times.
He sat up.
Geir snored. The slim man slept with one arm over his face. The big man lay on his back with his beard pointing at the roof, and his chest rose and fell slow as the sea.
Thjalfi slid off the platform. He knew every loose stone in that floor, because he had been crossing it in the dark to get at things for as long as he could remember. He crossed it now without a sound and knelt by the skins.
The thigh bone was still warm. He took it in both hands.
His knife was small, the one he trimmed goats' hooves with. He set the bone against the edge of the hearthstone, put the blade into the end of it, and leaned his weight on the handle. The bone split with a crack that sounded, in that quiet house, like a tree going over.
He froze. Geir's snore stopped, and started again.
The marrow was there, pale and soft. He scraped it out and ate it off the blade, crouched by the embers with his heart going hard. It was better than anything he had ever eaten. He licked the blade clean, and then his fingers.
Then he fitted the two halves together and laid the bone back on the skin, just where it had been, a little apart from the others. In the firelight the split hardly showed.
All the bones were on the skins. He had kept to the rule.
He crept back and lifted the edge of his blanket. As he did, he glanced across the hearth, and stopped.
Roskva lay on her side with her face to the fire. Her eyes were open. The embers showed in them, two small red points, and they did not blink, and they were looking at him.
He lay down fast and pulled the blanket over his head. For a long while there was only the snoring and the small ticking of the fire.
Then, from across the hearth, so quietly it could have been the embers settling, his sister spoke.
"I saw."