Vastervik: Chapter 2

The sheep shit squelched under Toby’s Berluti oxfords—custom-made, £3,000, now comprehensively ruined.

“Christ,” he muttered, lifting his foot and staring at the brown smear across the burnished leather.

“Ah,” Guðmundur said. He didn’t stop walking. “Rub it on the grass.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your pretty shoes.” Guðmundur gestured at the hillside with one enormous hand, as though the entirety of Skalavik’s green and wind-flattened landscape existed solely as a shoe-cleaning facility. “Rub them against the grass. No one is too precious about trailing shit into the castle here.”

Toby looked at the castle. Svartborg sat on a granite outcrop above the harbour, black-walled, built from the same dark stone as the cliffs it perched on. It wasn’t a castle in the way Toby understood castles. There were no turrets, no manicured gardens, no gift shop. It looked like something the landscape had produced by accident, a result of a geological event that just happened to have pushed piles of massive stone together. Smoke rose from three of its chimneys. A gull sat on the parapet and stared at him with the fixedly hostile expression of an airport security agent at the end of his shift.

He rubbed his shoe against the grass. The grass was wet. The shit left a long smear against it.

Guðmundur was already ten paces ahead, climbing the slope in an unhurried stride. He wore the same wool coat as yesterday, the same boots, the same braided beard. Toby was starting to suspect the man owned just this one outfit.

“Svartborg has been the Ri’s summer seat since the fourteenth century,” Guðmundur said, not turning around. “Before that, it was a monastery. Before that, a fort. The walls are three metres thick in places. You could shell it from the sea and the people inside wouldn’t spill their coffee.”

“Do you get much shelling?”

“Not since 1648.” Guðmundur stopped at the top of the rise and waited for Toby to catch up. The wind was coming off the North Sea in flat, bitter sheets, and Toby’s Loro Piana was doing approximately fuck all about it. His ears ached. His eyes watered. Guðmundur stood in it like a man standing in a light breeze. “From here you can see the oil platforms.”

Toby looked. Grey sea, grey sky, and yes, far out on the horizon, the angular silhouettes of three platforms, tiny at this distance.

“Vasterviksk oil,” Guðmundur said, “is the second-largest North Sea reserve after Norway’s. Larger than Denmark’s. We have been pulling crude since 1971, and the sovereign fund now sits at-” He named a figure. Toby blinked. “Per capita, we are one of the wealthiest nations in Europe. You did not know this.”

Toby hadn’t known. His eyes must have glossed over this fact when he skimmed the executive summary on the Vastervik project during the flight over. Four hundred thousand people on a bunch of rocks in the North Sea with sheep shit on the footpaths and no phone signal, and they were sitting on that.

“No. I knew.”

“Good.” Guðmundur turned and continued along the ridge path. Below them, the harbour unspooled in its dark crescent. Fishing boats rocked at their moorings. A woman was hanging laundry on a line strung between two stone posts, the sheets snapping horizontal in the wind. “The oil pays for everything. The main islands, Nordhavn, Strandvik, Ketilsfjord, they are modern, with proper infrastructure. Hospitals. Fibre broadband. Schools that would make your Eton weep. They’re basically Greenland with better plumbing.”

“And out here?”

“Out here is different.” Guðmundur scratched his beard. The copper braids swung. “The outer islands keep the old ways. Skalavik, especially. The Ri, he is very attached to it. The fishing, the traditions, the ceremonies. He believes they are what hold us together. And perhaps he’s right. But the harbours are crumbling. The boats need diesel engines, not prayers. The roads—” He gestured at the single-track path they were walking, which was less a road than a suggestion of a well trodden path. “We need to channel the oil money outward. To the edges. That is why you are here, Mr Everett.”

“Toby.”

Guðmundur gave him an assessing look. The same look Toby had been getting from every Vasterviksk official for the past three months. “Toby, then. But you will understand, the Ri’s attachment to the old ways is not sentiment. It is policy. And Skalavik is the heart of those old ways. So when we talk about infrastructure, about modernisation, we are talking about something delicate.”

Toby walked beside him, his ruined shoes squelching on the wet grass, and they came around the east side of the castle where a walled garden dropped down toward a cluster of outbuildings. A grouping of stone sheds sprouted up from the earth, there was a smokehouse with fish racks outside it, and what looked like a forge with its door open.

Toby saw the omega before he placed the scent that a stray breeze carried over to him.

Casper was standing near the garden wall, wearing a tunic of undyed linen that stopped at mid-thigh and a pair of loose trousers that the wind pressed flat against his legs. No coat. No layer of wool or oilskin against the weather that was making Toby’s bones hurt. His hair was dry today, white-blond, and it whipped across his face in the gusts. He stood with his arms at his sides and his chin lifted slightly, and in front of him, a man was kneeling.

The man was old, broad, built on Guðmundur’s scale. He had the shoulders of someone who’d hauled nets for fifty years. He was bent low, his wind-cracked hands cupped around the omega’s bare left foot, his forehead nearly touching Casper’s toes. At the omega’s feet sat a small wooden box. Toby could see straw poking from the gaps in the lid, cushioning the fresh eggs that lay within.

Toby stopped walking.

Guðmundur didn’t. He walked straight to Casper, dropped to one knee on the wet grass without hesitation, and cupped the omega’s right foot in his palm. He murmured something in Vasterviksk. A low, rhythmic phrase that had the cadence of something he’d said a thousand times, and pressed his thumb to the arch of Casper’s foot. Then he stood, brushed the mud from his knee, and turned back to Toby as though he’d done nothing more unusual than check his watch.

The old fisherman was getting to his feet. He collected his box of eggs from the ground and placed it in Casper’s hands with a nod. No words. He walked away toward the harbour path without looking back.

Casper held the eggs against his chest. His eyes found Toby’s and then moved to a point just past his left shoulder, and stayed there.

“Hello,” Toby said.

“Hello.” Casper’s voice was quiet and clear. The accent sat somewhere between Scandinavian and Scottish, the vowels long, the consonants soft. It was the kind of voice that made Toby want to lean in towards its owner.

“Cold morning,” Toby said, because apparently this was all he had.

“It’s June.”

“Right. Yes.”

Casper looked at the box of eggs in his arms. His fingers were pale around the wood. Up close, without the harbour and the ritual and the chalice of seal fat, he looked younger. The linen tunic left his collarbones visible, the notch of his throat, the line of his neck. He had the body of someone who had never lifted anything heavier than a book. The wind pushed his hair across his eyes and he didn’t free a hand to move it.

“Are those from his chickens?” Toby tried.

“His wife’s.” A pause. “The brown ones are best.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Casper glanced at him. A flicker, gone before Toby could read it. Then back to the middle distance.

Toby’s chest felt tight in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. The omega’s scent was reaching him in waves, carried on the wind. That intoxicating mix of salt and herbaceous green. He wanted to keep talking so that Casper would have reason to stay within scenting distance. He wanted to say something that would make the boy look at him properly, hold his gaze. But Casper was already drawing back.

Guðmundur stepped between them, shifting his body so that it blocked Toby’s sightline and turned Casper toward the garden wall.

“Go on,” he said, and ruffled Casper’s hair. His massive hand covered most of the boy’s skull. Casper ducked his head, and Guðmundur gave him a light smack on the backside to send him off. Casper went, barefoot on the cold stone, the box of eggs held carefully against his ribs, and didn’t look back.

Guðmundur watched him go with the expression of a man watching a favourite nephew.

“I was there, you know,” Guðmundur said. “When we put him in the sea. Six months old. His mother was—” He made a gesture that could have meant crying or screaming or both. “But it is tradition. The Sea God must test his own. So I carried him to the end of the north jetty. Very small, he was. Fit in my two hands. And I put him in.”

Toby stared at him.

“He floated.” Guðmundur said it simply, the way someone might say the sun came up. “Bobbed right to the surface. Didn’t cry. Just lay there on his back, looking at the sky. His selkie blood. The sea knew him.”

“You threw a baby into the North Sea.”

“It was summer.” Guðmundur’s chin came up half an inch. “The water was at least fourteen degrees.”

Toby opened his mouth. Closed it. Fourteen degrees. He thought of the heated infinity pool on the roof of the Everett building in Canary Wharf, maintained at a steady twenty-eight. He thought of his niece, Edmund’s daughter, who screamed if her bath was half a degree below thirty-seven.

“Come,” Guðmundur said. He clapped Toby on the shoulder with a force that sent him stumbling forward a couple of steps. “I want to show you the north pastures. It is tupping season.”

“Tupping.”

“Mating. The rams.” Guðmundur’s face split into a grin inside the copper beard. “You must be careful on your morning walks. The rams are very territorial in tupping season. Very aggressive. They will charge you if you come between them and the ewes.”

They walked. Below them, the pastures dropped away toward the sea cliffs, and Toby could see the sheep — thick-woolled, heavy, nothing like the decorative animals he’d seen on country estates in the Cotswolds. Two rams were circling each other in a pen near the cliff path, heads lowered, and as Toby watched, one lunged forward and cracked its skull against the other’s with a sound that carried up the hillside.

“There,” Guðmundur said, pointing. “You see? Very passionate.”

“Wonderful.”

“And you are likely to see the Vasterviksk at it too, this time of year. In the fields, behind the sheds, on the beach if the tide is right.” He said this with the same tone he’d used for the oil reserve figures. Matter of fact. “The rut hits everyone differently. Some go home. Some do not bother.”

Toby looked at the sheep. The rams were backing up for another go, the impact hard enough that he could feel it through the ground. The ewes stood at the far end of the pen, eating, spectacularly unbothered by the stupidity of the males.

“Right,” Toby said.

He turned back toward the castle. The wind had shifted, and the smoke from the chimneys streamed sideways across the grey sky. Somewhere below, in the walled garden or the outbuildings or the stone corridors of Svartborg, Casper Halvorsen was carrying a box of eggs in his small hands.

Toby thought about the deal. The infrastructure proposal, the harbour modernisation, the roads and the diesel engines and the fibre optic cables that Guðmundur wanted run to the outer islands. He thought about the Ri’s attachment to the old ways, and the crumbling jetties, and the sovereign fund figure that Guðmundur had named on the hillside. He thought about the contracts his legal team had drawn up in London, the clauses drafted in English and translated into Vasterviksk by a firm in Edinburgh that charged four hundred pounds an hour.

These people threw babies in the north sea, and had rams fucking in the fields, and a teenage male omega mystic. They had a sovereign fund worth billions and a castle with three-metre thick walls and a trade minister with an Oxford doctorate who knelt in the mud to touch a boy’s foot.

They were savages, Toby thought. Charming, wealthy, fascinating savages, but savages all the same. And savages, in his experience, didn’t read the fine print.

He followed Guðmundur through the castle gate, his shoes leaving brown smears on the flagstones, and began to calculate the profits Everett could expect to roll in from the Vastervik project.