The screams of the sea birds were the only things that Smoke could point to as disquieting, a break to the peace of the day.  Smoke and Gospels sat high on the island above the place, Gospels had explained, where the boat from the abbey would put in. 

Smoke was excited to be off the little pinnacle of rock, a hungry prison in all but company.  He sat with his new friend Gospels and hid his excitement in deference to his friend’s discomfort at facing his brethren.  It would be awkward in a way that he knew something about, other people’s expectations.

And yet, as much as he would like to be appropriately somber for his friend, he was delighted with the day, freshening wind, wind whipped cloud torn to reveal bright sunshine, a day to sail, a day to delight a man like he had always been.  Smoke inhaled the salt freshness of it, “Oh Gospels, this is a day to be on the water.”

Gospels sighed, “God is good.”

Smoke chuckled at his friend’s inscrutability.  Was the sigh impatience, discouragement, awe, sarcasm, praise?  Smoke didn’t know, but he was happy and couldn’t keep it to himself. “You know the worst part of my youth was existing in a stinking port city knowing all the while that I was born for the sea.”

“hmm, I too was raised in a city by the sea.  I rather liked the scent of it though.”

“Oh yes, a Northern port city no doubt.  I did not mean to insult.  And too, it may have been the parts of the city I frequented that stank, not the city itself.”

Gospels laughed, “I’m sorry.  I was just. . .    . . .my mind was elsewhere.”

Smoke let things lay.  His new friend was used to solitude, not just as a hermit, but in his life before he took to his coracle.  Smoke was brimming with questions and conversation, yet he knew that he would get no pearls from the oyster.  Well, that might not be a good analogy. 

It was exciting to think that these monks were literate.  His pattern had often been to seek knowledge when he gave up on a life, cut ties to business and family, and lost himself.  Perhaps this time, more than others, he felt the need to know.  He had been so near to knowing nothing ever again.  Nothing like a good death to bring back the zest for life.  So he would build a new life, and for this one as for all his others, he would seek knowledge, he would plan, and then he would live.

He inhaled the salt freshness,  “I’ve been to your city, I didn’t know there was an abbey.  I might have visited your library if I’d known.”

“The abbey had been half a century before the Navigators even came.  Six monks in a coracle ran aground in the bay and that full two hundreds of years agone.”

“I thought you said you were a Navigator.”

“I was of that people.  But I’m not quite that old.” Gospels laughed again.  He seemed a bit more merry, as if his mind had come to some resolve or comfort as they sat there in the sun. “The abbey came before the Navigators, but I, a Navigator, came to the abbey in a boat.”

Folk that don’t know our homes, our treasure houses, and our work places think we live in dank caves.   Many think us a species apart.   Certainly we tend to be thick of waist and broad of shoulder, and too, while Gaellic and Umircen tend to be light complected and haired we, who descend from Loki the son of Dana and his miners, are short, dark haired, and perhaps even darker of skin.

It may be that our homes have shaped us, but not so much in the living as the making.  We are deep delvers, miners of the mountain’s wealth, we are masters of metal and stone.  Perhaps more than any other folk we recall the knowledge of the star farers.

We grow fruit and vegetables in crystal galleries high in the mountains.  We forge mechanical wonders, both tools and weapons and all manner of conveniences and mine apparatus.  We bring light to the deep darkness. We are fire masters.  We are water masters. We are stone masters.

These things we have mastered, but we strive for still more, to recapture what was our heritage of the stars. Our knowledge is great but our numbers are small.  Perhaps because we are not very social, preferring solitude, perhaps because our people are jealous of knowledge hard won, perhaps because most care more for the knowledge we have mastered, for stone and metal and mechanical things, so that they have given up on ever regaining the high knowledge.

Loki is a Norse god.  I have intended to find an equivalent Celtic deity, but I haven’t yet found the right combination of god of the forge and trickster.  Perhaps it is okay to pull the Norse into it all as I believe that there has been cultural cross-pollenation, certainly in Scotland and Ireland, but also back in their origins, their asthetics, their manner of life, and perhaps in their geneology.