Hedda Stein-Sun's UnRemembered Islands

By Anthony Nordvik-Nash

A great, fast paced adventure with Vikings in the 1980s - for readers 11 plus and adults too. Join Hedda on her amazing adventures with longboats, deep secrets, daggers, cakes and pastries. Hedda is a young 12 year old Viking from a disgraced Clan. She might have one chance to restore family honour. Awe and danger follow her journey. Join these exciting and fun travels, discover the truth behind the secrets. Like Harry Potter? Like Voldemort? Like goblet of fire? Like #Harrypotter? Like Williams? Like book of dust? Like hermione? Like snape? Like Ron Weasley? Like hunger games? Like maze runner?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Nordvik-Nash
• Release date: Jun 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781999991715

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Forest

‘Three hundred and six,’ Hedda sighed, kicking the ground. Since her tenth birthday, she had kept a painful count of the sharp stones thrown at her. Even then, leaning over to cut the first slice of cardamom cake, she had ached with the rows of bruises across her body.

Flint and granite hurled, nearly every other day. She added today’s to her list: two hundred and seventeen leaving deep bruises, eighteen sets of stitches.

But now, as dusk arrived and she headed for the trees, the forest would provide some protection. Amid the cool ferns, she could hear her second voice. She neared the firs, clasping her arm tight, trying to stem the blood from her newest cut.

‘Marit, just once, just once, couldn’t I pick up a stone, cast it back at them?’ Hedda thought-spoke, asking the second self that shared the worries in her still-growing skull.

Think of your clan! You, a daughter of old leaders … That’s not the way! came the tinny internal voice behind Hedda’s temples.

‘But it all went, the joy! It went so quickly!’ Hedda’s thoughts carried a lilting sound, ebbing and flowing like her speech, ending with the hard edge of the islands close to Norway’s coast.

Hedda’s mind-eye still watched the fading ripples of early, gleeful days. Up to knee-height, her childhood had been daisy chains, laughter and sword games. But the cowled shadow of family shame welcomed itself into her life so early. She was just five, maybe six, when the vague tales of the clan, of the pit prison, circled and trapped her. She asked to know more, to know what had happened, but some dark reasons seemed bolted and hidden away.

Hedda could still picture herself in those pretend wedding processions - the flowing cotton dress, little Vegard waiting at a fish crate altar, wild spring-flower bouquets replaced with sneers and taunting, pushing and thrown stones.

It was also then that Marit came first to join her.

‘I tried, Marit! Tried to have friends outside of my small family. I begged, but my hand was bitten. The shame on its own … why couldn’t that be enough punishment?’ Hedda pleaded.

Quiet! Marit half commanded. You need to treat that wound. Look for the broad leaf bushes in the forest. Don’t think I am going to help you with healing every time! How would it aid you in the long run?

At the forest edge, the curled ferns bowed like house-hounds before Hedda’s touch, as if greeting an old lord. Hedda looked quickly behind her, before taking the path. She knew the risk of being followed, the risk of someone seeing her hidden skill at work. A few steps more and she would be lost under the shade of the trees - tall, slender birches standing guard in their silver uniforms. These sentries gave way to dark-bark fir trees, some three or four times taller than the stave church in the valley behind.

Hedda knew that most of the village would still be down by the longboat. The boat would be filled with a jostling crowd, tightly packing parcels under the decks, barrels of pickled beets and cucumbers, and dried hocks of meat wrapped in greased paper. Hedda had promised to be there for the farewell the next day - always the hardest leaving day of the raiding season, as everyone knew that a second boat, the Dolphin Boat, would come perhaps just a week later, splitting families still further apart. The Dolphin Boat would take the selected young and those judged five years from death to Razorbill Island. Hedda knew that the chance to be there for the challenges, the Holmgang, was an honour that went back a thousand years.

A chance to learn from the wise.

For her and her family, it offered a rare gleam of hope. They were still allowed to attend, having not been banned by that spiteful McKennor decree.

She had done all she could with her studies, trained hard. But to be chosen brought risk, though she knew that now at least, not all challenges involved the sword and fight. She knew, at least to start, there would be other ways to test. Even if her family could not be leaders, perhaps they could gain some relief - to be treated no longer as if slaves, lowly thralls. There was, though, still no doubt that at the Holmgang the risk of death remained for all.

Many never returned.

But now, she needed the broad leaves. And for that she had to go to the clearing.

Move, move quickly, now deeper in, came Marit’s tin voice from between Hedda’s ears.

‘Hush! Can’t you just leave me now? Leave me with my own thoughts for once!’ Hedda whispered.

Who do you think I am anyway? came the voice, adding, Hedda, can’t you hear the footsteps behind you? If you don’t go now …

She didn’t want to argue anymore. Instead, she answered Marit by pulling her silver-handled dagger from its rune-covered scabbard and knocking its hilt hard on her forehead. With each step through the woods, the anxious muscles in her shoulders loosened and released. Her pulse slowed. The tight, tall firs and pines brought early dark to the forest floor. Then, further on, in the centre of the forest was an older oak wood; the air was still shaded, but the clearing here took on a brighter pastel green.

There she sat crossed-legged, leaning on a smoothed ice-age boulder, pressing the crushed leaves on her arm to help seal the open cut. She hoped the earlier footsteps had turned away. Anyhow, now at least, anyone would just see a young girl sat alone in the woods. Soon, though, as dusk took hold, it would bring its grey wash to the sky. Animals would find some bravery in the early evening, draw near. Now, she could feel the dusk seep into her bones. It was starting to build. There was that gentle surge in her blood, that daily rush she was still trying to tame.

As the forest darkened, before true evening, four or five sets of soft-furred, grey ears, half a hand high, bobbed backwards and forwards into sight behind a fallen log. Hedda could hear them move, a few steps forward, a few less back, hopping slowly closer. Then, on the other side of the clearing, brown-red faces, black-nosed, moved behind the trees, nearly as tall as horses but with finer, smaller heads. Hedda caught their gaze and slowly nodded towards them. Four of them were there, lightfooted, a male made grander still by two tall branches of felted bone crowning his head. The stillness of these fine lives was then broken by the rumble and crack of snapped branches. It was something much heavier, something padding, broader than any man in the Great Hall and heavily black-brown furred. He joined the clearing, making one short roar.

StorBjorn sat, his great bulk resting down on a patch of ground before Hedda. The compacted grass traced his bodyline, like a worn stool, a frequent rest in the grey-green light.

A few minutes later and the animals had gathered in a rough ring around Hedda. Here was such a wide range of sizes and fur, some jaws for grain, others for flesh. To Hedda, nothing seemed to be shared amongst this animal group, nothing perhaps other than the importance to them of this time in the day. Hedda sat like the core of a seed-pod, holding the group together without violence or fear. They sat for a few quiet minutes, resting, but then, then a new noise in the forest came, an unwelcome noise.

Hedda lost her thoughts to the sound, someone’s footsteps, leather boots, someone who might see Hedda and her gathering and wonder why, what, what is happening? Her blood-surge shrank away from her. She fell back to being simply a slight twelve-year-old girl. The forest scent changed to sour.

A thin veneer of control cracked, shattering to the ground.

Within seconds, StorBjorn was on his hind legs, over seven feet tall. Growling, ‘Urreaaar-awh Urreah-aaawh!’ - baying, wild. The pads of his front paws raised in the air and broadened, hooked claws, each a finger long, flexed outwards, ready to swipe down hard. Within a moment, there was a rush of wind as his weight struck out. It lashed forward and just missed the neck of a young deer before hurling into a rabbit. There was an ugly thud against rough bark. The rabbit fell with an anguished, low-pitched cry from its soft core, and then … the sound of small bones breaking.

Hedda quickly knelt, urgently checking the struggling life at her ankles. She brought back her focus and surged upwards. Her own small frame stood broad-footed between StorBjorn’s massive, roaring, violent shadow and the other animals. The deer, seeming locked in fear, were trapped against dense holly bushes.

Hedda’s look was frost and stone, an ice avalanche of pressure building behind her eyes. In a flash, she reached out towards her second self: ‘Marit, come, I need your help!’

The edges of Hedda’s eyes started to glow moon-white, the glow building quickly, lighting the edge of her cheekbones. For a moment, as Marit stretched out from inside, a faint white orb hovered above her, shot forward and was gone.

Then the bear halted, its eyelids dropping down, head bent.

Hedda walked slowly over to the rabbit, like a nurse tending a brave wartorn and damaged soldier. She held the little one in her arm, its small mouth grabbing out for breath. ‘We can make it through, together,’ she whispered to it, before adding in her thoughts, ‘I need your help again here!’

Hedda rested her hand on the rabbit. She smarted with a jolt of pain, as if from a jagged broken rib. The delicate animal calmed, and it seemed that its deep unseen injuries, snapped bones and wrenched ligaments, re-fused and started to heal.

Finally, the pain inside her eased and the rabbit struggled back on all fours, resting on Hedda’s forearm, cleaning its face slowly with long strokes of its paws. Then it moved onto its back legs, and Hedda lowered her hand, allowing the rabbit to limp into the ferns and into the forest.

Suddenly, the atmosphere returned to calm. StorBjorn remained on the same spot. All seemed as before, save for the dull throb deep inside Hedda. She turned to the massive being and walked up to him, arms open. Her eyes, no longer lit white, were now glistening with gentle understanding. She hugged his massive frame and he hugged back, controlling his power.

‘We need to learn, StorBjorn,’ she whispered.

At the same time, she reached for the handle of her dagger. She paused while the two voices inside her debated. This would need a deep cut, a lasting scar. She pulled the dagger from its ancient scabbard and dug the full length of the blade into the bear’s paw. It delved through fur and skin, then deeper through fat and into the bear’s muscle and flesh. Warm, dark treacle blood pulsed in a small tide onto the weapon’s hilt and gloss coated Hedda’s clenched knuckles.

The bear raged, tears running from his eyes, head raised, the salt water drops running into his open jaw. He did not fight back.

Hedda pulled out the blade, stood back and held it high toward the bear’s eyes. StorBjorn fell down on all fours, yelping as his injured paw hit the hard ground. Then he turned and lumbered into the forest. He was gone. Only a distant whimpering could still be heard from behind the trees.

Hedda loved that bear, had loved him since he was a cub.

The wound would heal over time. His, anyway.

Hedda quickly scanned around her, dagger raised, searching the trees, but the sound of footsteps had gone. She re-joined the track taking her home.

• • •

She headed back to the finely-crafted, broad-logged roundhouse, decorated with master carvings from the myths of serpents and dragons, which once had stood at the proud centre of the village. Now it stood amongst the pigsties and the wet of the north fringe, angrily thrown back together.

On the path, blocking her way to the roundhouse, she saw a small hooded figure. She could tell from the hunched-over bone and skin frame it was Old Anna, her sack clothing pierced in lines of moth holes, the edges of her cloak splattered in mouldering clod and muck.

Hedda, like everyone in the village, always tried to dodge behind bushes or in the alleys, away from Old Anna, but she could see nowhere on this single track to honourably hide.

Two things that repulsed Hedda most about the crone were that horrible stench, like dead dog, and the disturbing versions of the future that she would tell. Hedda tried to take comfort from pretending they were only fables from an aged and lonely mind, but Hedda still lost sleep over Old Anna’s crooked visions.

The old one drew closer. She pulled back the hood of her cape and brushed back her white-grey hair, long and tightly curled. Her face seemed held together by its deep, aged grooves, framing wide, bulbed eyes. Her once-moss-green irises were thickened and glazed with clouds of white. Hedda wanted just to push past, but knew her clan would expect her to open the greeting.

‘Hello, Gamle-Anna, so nice to see you this evening,’ said Hedda, not getting too close.

‘Well, we know that is not true for at least one of us,’ came the age-worn, barbed voice. Now, though, even Anna’s harshest words were softened by a mouth clinging with spit onto its last three yellow-black teeth.

‘How can I help you, Gamle-Anna? Can I carry anything for you?’ Hedda asked dutifully, trying to breath only through her mouth.

‘You can carry a message for me,’ Old Anna replied.

‘Yes, of course. Who to, to my father, or perhaps Far-Far?’ said Hedda.

‘To no-one, just carry it for me,’ Old Anna made clear.

Hedda bowed, but inside just wanted to leave, wanted to get past, get home.

‘Please, please, you are not going to tell me again about my disgraced, hated, clan, how we are valued less than runt pigs?’ asked Hedda, repeating the words of others, with polite but practised angst.

‘No, you can hear that from the first and last house in the village. Don’t need it from me,’ Old Anna said, without the need to care.

‘I know, I know,’ Hedda added, now cross-armed, her tone as if in some saddened game of charades. ‘You are here to say, yet again, that my family will not, cannot, ever come to anything - fallen from our old great height into the dirt. Or, tell me more unclear histories about the Order of the Acorns.

Or, say that clan, yes family, come before me as a person, and I need to keep in line, tied by my past.’

‘Well, young lady, if you heard that from me, at least then, then we know you were not listening.’ Anna drew back a breath and spat a half cup of wet on the ground. When she lifted her head, for a moment, the edges of the aged clouds in her eyes seemed lit a cold blue. ‘Come, come, closer to me,’ the old one asked.

Hedda hesitated, but leaned over towards Old Anna with a small stamp on the ground. As she did, Old Anna grabbed her by the hair with the speed of someone fifty years younger. She pulled with a violent tug and dragged a good hand of long hair with her.

‘Oww!’ Hedda screamed. ‘What are you doing? That really hurt, you mad old kjerring!’

‘I just need nine long strands - you can have the rest back,’ said Old Anna, counting and sorting the hairs in her hand. Once she had chosen her nine, she started to twine them and then form a braid: first three twines of three and then one thicker braid of nine.

‘Here, I have made this for you, to remember, remember the three groups of three,’ Old Anna spoke, tying the strands into a circle like a brooch.

‘Three of three …?’ Hedda replied, rubbing the sore patch on her head, trying to hide her need to know.

‘Yes, yes! Three captives, three powers, three parts of yourself.’ Old Anna paused. ‘I woke today with a glimpse of what will be seen. Here is the first three,’ Old Anna said, pointing at the one twine in the plait. ‘Remember, there lie three groups of captives; you will find them and you have the chance to make one dark decision that will not save them all.’

Hedda looked at the old woman and searched for something meaningful to say back, but could find nothing from her unfinished childhood.

‘Right, fine. Um, it’s getting late … can I help you home?’ Hedda asked.

Anna just stood there, mouth open, shuffling from foot to foot, her dank smell building with each step. ‘The second three,’ she said, ‘are three powers. Some will want to steal, to have all three, but I have never seen one master the darkness they bring together, even for a moment.’ Anna’s tone mirrored a grieving church mass. As she spoke, she tucked the round hair brooch into a pocket of Hedda’s tunic.

Hedda waited for a few seconds, then drew her shoulders back and gave a short formal nod, adding, ‘Good night, farewell!’ and ran for home.

‘And the final three!’ Old Anna shouted out after Hedda. ‘The three parts of all of us, the clan, care for others, care for yourself. Remember, if any of the nine strands are worn, uncared for, the brooch will break.’

Chapter 2

People Leaving

So far today, at least, Marit had been quiet, letting Hedda say her farewells by the harbour edge. All had stood straight-backed. There was a solid slapping of shoulders. Villagers gathered, well-wishing for their departing raiders. The raiders in turn were leaving notes of small chores, wishing the young and old well should the Dolphin Boat come for them, some giving hints on how to best survive the Holmgang.

All was in order, but then Hedda lost her footing, slipped and was close to falling.

‘Look! Hedda skal falle inn - right into the sea sludge!’ came a cold, sharp voice in the crowd.

Hedda and several of her clan had, seconds before, shoved their feet against the rough oak stern, pushing the ancient dragon head longboat to sea. The boat slipped off into cooling waters towards the ever-present mist, but sadly Hedda had pushed way too hard. Only her right leg was on land. The rest of her, in her best white and black spotted, cowhide tunic, was hanging over the stale water, trapped in the harbour corner. She was above the spot where the fish were filleted and the innards were swept in. Even from five feet below, the stench from the bubbling gas made Hedda’s stomach wretch. Then, she fell in, knee-deep.

The sludge drooled into her boots. Slime, like fish gruel, oozed down to her toes. At first, she had kept her balance, but then she caught her foot on something moving. She stumbled and fell forwards, face first.

Hedda pulled herself back up and tried to spit out that sour milk taste.

As she wiped the slime from her eyes, she soaked up more cold sneers from those standing above her. The villagers stood in a rough crowd, leaning over from the harbour side, looking down, laughing at her and shouting, cherry-faced.

‘Let her rot there,’ shouted one voice.

‘Look, the rats are coming for her!’ added another, sounding delighted.

She tasted the daily sourness again, and wished she could lash out, swear at them or even cry, but that would show a fracture, a forbidden weakness.

‘Let me pull one of the crowd down into the sludge by their heels, drag them down!’ Hedda begged Marit in her thoughts.

Not now! Wait! Give it time! the tin mind-voice cautioned.

Hedda instead stretched up to grab the wooden harbour edge. It was nearly in reach - her wire-like muscles shaking - almost there.

Then, from above, a shadow.

A black leather and steel boot, trimmed with white seashells on the toecap, slammed down hard, cracking down on her hand.

Blood coloured Hedda’s fingernails.

That boy with the boots! hissed Marit. He’s kicked and punched you more often than the sunrise!

Hedda looked back up at the boy with his greased-back, black hair and gaunt skull-white face.

‘Nei, Vegard, not again!’ Hedda snapped at him, holding her throbbing hand under her other arm. ‘Can’t you just leave me alone, attack someone else?’

Go on then, urged Marit’s mind-voice, butting in. Why not? Yes, yes! Pull him in! Drag him in, into the sludge!

Vegard cackled and hissed like a scavenging bird in front of the jeering group around him.

‘Thought you were a rat on the ground, something ugly, filthy, just like