Expectations
What if you can't live up to what your life demands of you?
A vignette set in the world of my novels.
“ONE YEAR? YOU CAN SPARE me for one year. Roghan is old enough now to do a man’s work.” I tried to keep my voice reasonable, calm, the voice I used when negotiating the price of fleeces. My father, watching his new wife move between the hearth and table, didn’t turn his head.
“That fucking scáeli. I give him a bed and food, and he puts ideas in your head. You’re the oldest son, Sorley. Your place is here.” No heat in his voice; he was too cheerful after these first nights with his new bride to get angry—which was why I’d picked this morning to ask again.
The scáeli, Amlodd, hadn’t put the idea in my head; he’d only confirmed it was possible. Not only possible, but with a recommendation from him, almost a certainty. “Your voice is just passable,” he’d said, in his room where I’d gone for a lesson on technique, “but your skill with the ladhar and your poetry are superb, given you’ve had no training. Dagney could refine both, and consider it a privilege to be given the chance.”
The Lady Dagney, head of the scáeli’en council, and teacher of music at the Ti’ach na Perras, far to the south. A surge of excitement had made my breath catch. Then Amlodd had reached out to run one finger down my bare arm. “Teaching you is a privilege,” he’d said, smiling, and I’d forgotten about the southern school and string technique and anything else for the next half hour.
Even now, months later, that memory could make me shiver. But sometimes—only sometimes—I let my imagination substitute another man’s touch for Amlodd’s. A man who called the Ti’ach na Perras home.
He was another reason I wanted to go to the Ti’ach, although there was no guarantee he’d be there. His work as both a travelling teacher and a toscaire meant he was often on the road, bringing news to the remote torps, listening to opinions and problems, and reporting back to the Teannasach. He’d visited my father for a few days, a year or more past. I’d fallen in love with a quick smile and dark eyes, with a gentle voice and lithe grace. One night of his brief stay he’d knelt to speak to me about the music I was playing, and the feeling of his fingers on my knee, as if for balance, still lingered.
I’d been convinced of his interest that night, in me, not my music. He’d no need for steadying, and there’d been a suggestion in his eyes. Hadn’t there? The truth was I couldn’t be sure. How could I be? What Amlodd, a few months later, had begun to teach me in the privacy of his room, the door bolted, was shameful, forbidden. If my father knew….
If my father knew he would disown me, and I would be free to go south to the Ti’ach, to become a musician of skill and learning, and perhaps one day a scáeli myself. But even as a scáeli I would be banned from Gundarstorp, from its hills and coves, the sound of sheep and the smell of the sea, and the long, low hall sheltering against a hill.
If you really wanted to find him again, you’d do it, my mind told me. If you really wanted to be a scáeli, you’d do it.
Both of those are only dreams, I countered. Gundarstorp is real, and my home, and my responsibility.
My father turned to face me now, a grin on his face. “You’re eighteen soon. Time you married. I’ve Betis of Hardarstorp picked out for you, you know.”
I did know. Just as my sister was already promised; it was how things were done in Sorham. Which landowner’s daughter he had in mind for Roghan, just fifteen, he hadn’t said. Younger sons were more difficult, with no land to inherit. I should have been a younger son; I had been, until my older brother Gundi died of fever when I was small. All the expectations passed to me then. Expectations and obligations, and no place for my dreams.
“She’d wait a year too,” I said. Foolishly.
“Enough!” my father roared. A fist hit the table, hard enough for the weak beer in my cup to splash onto the wood. Maj, my new stepmother, looked up, startled. “Get that food inside you, and then get out to the hill. Send Roghan back for his breakfast.” My brother had been out with the shepherd since midnight, as always in lambing season. My turn to assist, his turn for food and warmth and rest.
I didn’t ask again. I spent my time with the sheep, my hands slick with blood and birth fluid and wool-fat, or on other work in barn and byre and field, and sometimes at the harbour among the fishing boats. The lengthening light and a workday that went from dawn to dusk left little time for music, except for the songs we sang as we sowed grain or unloaded fish from the holds, the screams of gulls a discordant accompaniment. The longer songs, the danta, accompanied by my ladhar, were for celebrations of weddings or harvest, and for the dark winter nights.
The first of the barley had fallen to the scythe when, serving us breakfast, Maj suddenly paled, clamped a hand over her mouth, and barely made it to the slop bucket before vomiting. I looked away, but my father laughed, a triumphant sound. “Took long enough,” he said. “When?”
“After midwinter,” she said, wiping her lips.
“A screaming babe in the house,” he said, but he was smiling. “Better be a boy, if I have to put up with that again.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t marry Betis yet,” I said, “or there could be two of them before long.” He laughed again. He’d suggested a harvest wedding, the two celebrations combined into one. We’d all live in the long farmhouse; Maj, as my father’s wife, would direct Betis’s work, for all she was no more than a few years older.
The idea of marrying Betis terrified me. So did the expectation of fathering the next heir. Could I? My early explorations with the girls of the torp—trying to convince myself that what I felt when I watched their brothers in the fields was just something passing—hadn’t been entirely unsatisfying, even if it hadn’t been their hands and lips I’d been thinking about in the dark. I supposed I could do that with Betis, too.
And if I couldn’t? How long before my secret was revealed – and the inevitable dissolution of the marriage, and my banishment? Wouldn’t it be better if I just spoke the truth now, if the result would be the same? The choices bore down on me like the weight of a bundle of fleeces. My stomach clenched.
“I’ll be here to help,” my sister said. She’d taken over serving the porridge. Maj leant against a doorframe, an uncertain look on her face.
“Good learning for you,” my father said. “It’ll be your turn, in a few years.”
“Will his name be Gundi again?” my sister asked him. “He’ll be your firstborn with Maj.”
My father shook his head. “Not how it’s done. He’d be thought the heir, if we named him that.”
He—if it were a son—would grow up here, learn the work and the land and sea; play in the crumbling, ancient tower, birth sheep, plant seeds, love the hills and streams, the calling curlew and the barking seals – and then he’d have to leave. As Roghan would, soon. But younger sons, like daughters, grew up knowing this. And I, who could keep it all, wanted to leave. For my music, and for a man I’d known for three days.
Or because I could not live up to what was expected of me?
I was riding south tomorrow to discuss fleece prices with a neighbouring Harr. Maybe I should just keep riding, let my horse loose somewhere, disappear into the land. Maybe it would be best. I could make my way south…
“Fill our cups again,” my father directed. “A drink to the babe.” My sister did as he asked, and I raised the cup, feigning a smile.
“It’s still a first-born,” my sister said. “Aren’t you supposed to grant a wish?”
Three times, the custom was: once at the first signs of pregnancy, once at the quickening, once at the birth. Only with a firstborn.
“You’re right,” he said, his eyes, indulgent, on Maj. “So. Sorley. When the harvest’s in, you can have the winter at your school. There’s the first wish granted. You’ll get yours, girl, and yours too, Roghan, if this babe holds to life.”
I tried to speak, through a dry mouth. Did he mean this? But he must; the wishes granted on a firstborn’s life were sacred, and his words had been heard by us all. Hot tears pricked behind my eyes. I took a drink. “Thank you,” I managed.
“I want you back for the lambing, though, and you’re marrying Betis in the spring,” my father warned.
I nodded. A winter. Six months, less. A compromise…but long enough, perhaps, to learn if I could have been a scáeli—and if I had read the look in a man’s eyes correctly. It would have to be enough. At least I would know, and not just wonder, and perhaps I would have memories to sustain me. If I did, I decided, I could shoulder the expectations of Gundarstorp’s heir.
And maybe the dark-eyed toscaire would visit again.
One day, I thought, I’ll tell this baby what he gave me.
If he can just do his duty and provide an heir, perhaps they will overlook the rest.