The 1,000-year-old Boy. Ross Welford
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One thousand years is a long time to hear stories again and again, but I never get bored of them.
(Sometimes I can almost touch a memory of him. A fuzzy mental picture of a tall blond man; the smell of a ship’s rope dipped in tar; a feeling of fear in a storm; but they are indistinct recollections. They seem thin, as though constantly trying to bring them to mind has somehow worn them out.)
Da’s name was Einar. He was a soldier-turned-trader from the island of Gotland in what is now called the Baltic, but in her stories Mam still called it the uster-shern – the Eastern Sea.
Where did they come from, these ‘life-pearls’? No one knew, not for sure. There was a saga – an ancient poem – that Mam would tell by the light of the fire’s embers, of an alchemist’s manservant escaping from a massive tsunami in the Middle East. He carried a bag of the life-pearls across the desert, to the mountains of Carpathia in Eastern Europe. How much of it was true, though, was anybody’s guess.
Mixing the liquid in a life-pearl with your own blood stopped you from getting older. It did not make you immortal however: you could still be killed in battle, or by disease, or – as Da found out – by accident.
Mam said he had obtained the life-pearls when he had heroically fought some vagabonds who were raiding a tiny village. I loved this story.
‘Like a true and noble warrior,’ said Mam, ‘he spared the life of one of the bandits in exchange for the life-pearls.
‘Straight away he used one of them himself. He made two cuts in his arm and poured in the liquid from one of the glass balls. Four life-pearls remained. The valiant Einar knew, though, that they were so valuable that anyone who owned them was at risk: people would kill to have eternal life. So he told no one until he met …’
‘You!’ I would fill in and Mam always smiled.
‘That’s right. By then, he was already a hundred and forty years old. He was living in the land of the Danes, and speaking their language. We had been married for only six months when I learnt I was pregnant with you, Alve.’
(‘We married for love,’ she never tired of telling me. ‘That was unusual then.’ A thousand years ago, love was very low down on the list of reasons to get married – a long way below things like family alliances, wealth and security.)
Mam was poor, Da was not, and people were jealous of Mam’s good fortune in marrying the rich and handsome Einar of Gotland. And, when people are jealous, they start to talk, and the talk turned to Einar’s age, and how strange it was that the village elders remembered him from their own youth.
Could he be one of the fabled Neverdeads?
And, if he was a Neverdead, might he possess the livperler – the life-pearls?
Already the Neverdeads were so rare that many people thought it was just a tall tale told by those who had travelled and met people from distant lands. For example, there were stories of a vast land to the south where there were four-legged creatures with tremendous long necks that could reach the topmost leaves of trees; where there were fat horses that lived in rivers; where there were tiny, hairy people, with long tails, who swung through the branches of the forest.
No one quite knew how much of this to believe. Perhaps stories of the Neverdeads were just more travellers’ tales?
But, when the rumours about his long life reached my father’s ears, he was taking no chances. With his wife and child, he made plans for a new life in the land of the Britons, where he hoped they would be safe. As it turned out, he was right … in part.
He saved me and Mam. But he did not save himself.
Einar of Gotland was unrecognisable as he stood on the wooden jetty of Ribe on the west coast of Denmark with Hilda, his wife, and a small child – me. That was exactly what he wanted.
He had shaved his beard, cut his hair and dressed in the clothes of a middle-ranking tradesman. Not too rich to attract attention, nor so poor that people would question his ability to pay for a passage on the ship to Bernicia in the land of the Britons.
No one knew him in Ribe, but he was taking no chances. We stayed a little way out of town. Da was on edge, said Mam. He thought he was being followed. Hilda was now a Neverdead as well, the bloody process carried out on the night of their marriage. Together they would live forever in the new land with their son.
If they made it.
Einar had bought passage on a cargo ship that would sail straight across the North Sea, stopping first north of the old Roman Wall to offload cargo and take on another shipment, and then carrying on down the coast to the mouth of the Tyne.
The captain had said four days, maybe five, depending on the wind – and the wind was not cooperating. Cargo ships relied on sail, rather than the oars that the longships used, so if the wind was coming from the west – as it usually did – a journey to the new lands was hard sailing.
After a week, the wind changed and in less than a day the battered old knarr, with its filthy, patched sails, and old, tarry ropes, was gliding out of Ribe harbour.
Da boarded separately from Mam and me. We were to pretend for the whole journey that we were unconnected. Da gave the pearls to Mam, to keep them even safer, in case anyone recognised him. ‘Until we land,’ Mam had said to me, with her most serious face as she put it when retelling the story, ‘you must never speak to your da.’
She said I was clearly puzzled but did as I was told. I was always a good, obedient boy, she said.
We had very little luggage: a bag each, made of hemp, and, for me, a wicker basket containing a young cat that I had called Biffa. It was not a name, nor even a word. I think I just liked the sound of it.
On the boat there was no privacy. If anyone needed to wee, or more, they had to do it in the sea, as the boat shuddered along over the cloud-coloured waves. The crew were not fussy: they just dropped their trousers and put their bottoms over the side of the boat.
And that is how we lost Da, said Mam. No one saw him go. The wind had come up, and the skipper had pulled in the sail, and the long knarr was rising and falling on the swell. As the boat bucked and reared on the white-capped waves, Da got up and clambered to the rear, which was where everyone went. It was a little bit private as there was a stack of barrels secured with rope that would give you some cover and you could hang on to the rope straps.
And that was it, the last anyone saw of him.
Mam was the first to notice. Everyone had been huddled over, trying to stay dry, when she said, ‘Where’s Einar?’
When it became clear what had happened, the skipper turned the boat into the storm and tacked to and fro, going back way further than we had come that day, in case Da had been carried on the current. There was no sign of him. Even if he had yelled when he went over, he probably would not have been heard over the noise of the waves and the wind and the creaking old boat.
What a way to go. It still makes me sad, even though I can hardly remember him, and this was centuries ago, but it still comes back to me, even after all the sad and bad things that I have seen.
‘The hardest thing,’ said Mam, ‘was being unable to grieve. I had to pretend to be as sad as someone who had only just met him – and that you were crying because you were small, and any death upset you, not because your father had gone missing.’
‘But why?’ I used to ask.
‘Because that was the plan, to avoid those who might be after the pearls. And I stuck with it. I did not know – I still do not know – if he was pushed overboard. There was another passenger on the boat: a mean-looking devil with a huge black beard, and he and your da had argued earlier that day. I know Einar did not