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One market day, when Reynir was thirteen, a travelling salesman came up to their village in the carriage from Reykjavik. Wrapped deep in furs to keep out the autumn chill, the man set up a small stall in a corner of the village square and sat back on a folding chair, hugging his arms to his chest to stay warm.
Unlike those who owned other market stalls scattered around the square, he didn’t shout out the names and prices of his wares. He didn’t bellow about one-time-only offers, or how he was almost driving himself out of business to bring his customers the best deals. He just sat, and waited, and let people’s natural curiosity bring them to him.
Reynir’s parents had shot the man disapproving looks and told their son not to go anywhere near the man – “no good will come of it,” his mother had muttered cryptically – but Reynir was nothing if not an inquisitive child and when his parents were busy haggling over the price of fish with another merchant he snuck off and sidled up to the travelling salesman’s stall.
He pushed past the one or two other customers picking idly over the man’s wares and looked in curiosity and confusion at the strange things laid out on the small table in front of him. From the way his parents had talked, he had expected to see strange and exciting and maybe even foreign things for sale. His eldest brother, now three years into a career in the navy, had taken to filling Reynir’s head with tall tales of the world outside their tiny village whenever he came home on leave. Reynir had listened to stories of the clockwork soldiers of Sweden and the Finns who tamed beasts and trolls with their magic with wide eyes and a mouth hanging open in astonishment. Quite why his other siblings had always sniggered so much when his brother told these amazing tales he had yet to work out.
But his excitement was short-lived. The salesman’s table was cluttered from end to end with nothing but what looked like cheap trinkets – small bundles of twigs that looked like they had been salvaged from the bottom of someone’s garden, candles with odd designs printed on the wax, broken rocks and pebbles that still had lichen clinging to them. Useless stuff.
The disappointment he felt must have showed on his face because when he looked up the salesman was looking back at him with patient amusement.
“This is all a load of junk!” Reynir spluttered as a small smile tugged at the man’s lips.
“Is it?” the man asked.
“Yeah! I mean, what is that?” Reynir asked, jabbing his finger at one of the knick-knacks closest to him, a twisted lump of what looked like bone mounted on a small brass clasp. Someone had carved and inked a weird set of intersecting circles and lines across its surface that to Reynir looked rather like the mess left behind when you swatted a fly. “Who’d want to buy a rotten old bit of bone?” he huffed.
The salesman had been slumped back in his rickety chair but once Reynir had said that he unfolded his arms and leaned forward, his grey eyes boring into Reynir’s green ones. The mild amusement on his face vanished like it had never been there and he looked at the young boy with something like disappointment, as if he had been somehow expecting more of him.
“A rotten old bit of bone?” he asked softly. Reynir dimly became aware that the other customers had wandered off and it was just him and the merchant in this small corner of the market square. He didn’t feel afraid, just oddly cut off, as if there was no-one but him and this man in the whole world.
For the first time he noticed a small fabric badge on the man’s coat that bore a symbol that meant nothing to him. The badge was tattered and torn, as if it had been ripped off and carefully sewn back on. At just thirteen Reynir did not recognise the insignia of the Icelandic Mage Corps. Nor did he know of the ceremonial removal of the rank of disgraced mages. If he had, he might have understood his parent’s misgivings much better.
“This isn’t some sheep’s jaw I found lying by the road, boy,” the man said. “That’s whalebone. Leviathan bone.”
Reynir blinked. His brother had told him about them. And for once, he hadn’t embellished his stories. When it came to leviathans, he didn’t need to. He looked again at the warped chunk of bone, a little nervously.
The man snorted in almost-laughter. “Don’t worry,” he smirked. “It’s not infectious.” He picked it up between thumb and forefinger, holding it gently as if he was worried he might break it, and looked at it as if he was considering buying it himself.
“Why would anyone want to buy it?” Reynir asked quietly, looking at some of the other shards of bone laid out in front of him, at their twisted and pitted shapes that looked less and less natural the longer he looked at them.
“Oh, it’s not the bones people buy,” the man said, setting the shard he had picked up back down on the table. “It’s what’s attached to them.”
“What?”
“The spirit of the leviathan,” the man continued, pushing the bone in its brass clasp across the table towards Reynir, “is bound to its bone.”
Not quite believing him, not quite understanding what he meant, Reynir reached out to pick up the chunk the man had handled. His fingers brushed cold bone, felt the folds where it had grown in strange ways, felt the ridges and indents where the strange sigil was carved, and for a brief, fleeting second he felt something else –
(inky blackness, crushing depth, cold water soothing ravaged skin)
(iron hulls in the water above, rising to meet the challengers, pincer and jaw against gun and ram)
(wounds bleeding into the sea, lost, disoriented, sand suddenly beneath and the water falling away)
(sucking for breath, heaving lungs)
(horizon staining red, dawn’s fire scorching and cleansing)
- and he snatched his hand back like he’d been burned.
He glanced at the man with something approaching fear.
The man noticed Reynir’s reaction but pretended not to. Let the boy discover his own talents. He had his reasons for leaving that life behind. Instead he launched into his sales pitch.
“When the leviathans beach themselves, after battles or storms, people come for them before the government’s soldiers and scientists can get to them. Mostly they just chop them up and render them down for their blubber, but they bring mages with them too. Those mages take the spirit of the dying leviathan, and they bind it with runes to its own skeleton.” He pointed at the fragment of bone that Reynir had briefly touched. “And that’s what that is. The merest fragment of a leviathan’s soul, locked away deep in there.”
Reynir looked down at the bone, at its warped surface and inked runes, suddenly felt a great rush of sadness for the thing he had for just one fleeting second glimpsed inside of it.
“And so there’s power in that thing, oh yes. Power enough to keep all other spirits at bay. Anything that wishes to do you ill, be it human or spirit or anything else, is going to turn tail and run the moment it catches a glimpse of the leviathan. The finest protection from harm, I guarantee it – and yours for only two hundred krónur.”
A few weeks’ pocket money. Reynir thought for a second, and then pulled a small purse from his belt and started counting out coins.
That night, as the rest of his family slept, Reynir huddled under his blankets and held the chunk of bone in his hands, turning it this way and that, trying to feel what he had briefly felt in the market as he had touched it for the first time. But nothing came. He tried again the next night, and many nights after that, but to no avail. If asked, he probably would not have admitted to the foolish notion he entertained of somehow releasing the small part of the leviathan’s soul, of letting it free somehow.
Eventually, after days became weeks and months and finally a year, he first thought he must have imagined it, and then forgot all about it. The lump of whalebone gathered dust in the bottom drawer of his bedside cabinet. Occasionally he would bring it out and look at it, smiling ruefully at how silly he’d been as a boy – ready to believe any tall tale, be it a passing merchant’s spiel about whale souls or his own brother’s tall tales about the world outside Iceland.
Sometimes he would put it in his pocket for a few days anyway. Longer, if he forgot it was there.
Almost six years to the day after he had edged up to that merchant’s table, Reynir stood amongst the ruins of vast palaces and tried to believe Sigrun’s reassurances – translated by Mikkel, who no doubt had put his own spin on the captain’s words – that the shapes he had seen at the stained, sagging windows were “probably nothing”.
Unconsciously, his hand went to his pocket. His fingers rubbed smooth bone and cold brass, the touch of the whalebone trinket he had found in an inside pocket of his jacket last night reassuring him, reminding him of home –
(locked in bone, carried by ship, but tasting the ocean anyway, the salt tang, the air, the wet, the waves)
(awake and alive, home at last)
(swimming again, searching, hunting, guarding)
Reynir blinked and uttered a small cry of surprise. He stumbled slightly and the world span around him for a second.
A hand caught him by his shoulder and steadied him. He heard a voice, Tuuri’s voice, but muffled, distant, as if she was on the other side of the great square they were parked in rather than inches away from him. “Reynir? Are you okay?”
He looked around the square as if seeing it for the first time. All around him he had a sudden sensation of things stepping back, from broken windows and shattered doors, retreating from some vast new presence which had blossomed in the centre of the ruins.
“I’m fine,” he said, turning to face Tuuri’s worried stare, a slightly startled grin spreading across his face. His fingers traced the whalebone again. It may have been his imagination, but it felt different somehow. Not just dead bone and dry ink mounted on cold metal, but something… more.
That night Reynir dreamed of endless oceans and enormous shapes looming in the water below, chasing him playfully as he dashed happily across the surface. Unseen by him, alien things watched him with hollow sockets and cold eyes, but they saw what he ran with, and knew to keep their distance.