White foaming waves wash against the jagged coast. The landing will not be an easy one for the supply ship, the food aboard which we are reliant on. Stígrøy's isolated situation in rough waters while out fishing for our own, especially through the long-enduring dark of winter.

     The mainlanders crewing the delivery vessel think us islanders insane. They cannot comprehend why we remain here on the twelve-acre island where so little grows, merely enough grass and weeds to sustain a few goats. Nonetheless, the men aboard the Truva are happy to accept the pelts, cheese and cash - which they have repeatedly queried the unending source of - to warm their skins, stomachs and pockets, respectively.

     The Truva comes in unsteadily, brushing its dark pine hull against our modest peer. The captain is routinely drunk by the time he arrives at Stígrøy, having traded for beer and juniper mead in Tønsvik on his route to us.

     I walked down the peer, squinting my eyes to avoid the stinging sea spray. To my surprise, out from the wheelhouse walks a sober man, who wobbled with the boats rock upon the water and walked steadily once stepping foot upon the dock - the opposite routine occurred when he was inebriated and flush-faced.

     We exchanged goods at the usual rate, but the cash price of their goods had gone up.

     "Money is not worth what it used to be, Bjorn." the captain said, smirking.

     This was all routine, and we chirp up the extra coins to pay. What else would we do? We can hardly send a letter to the mainland to ask what the money is worth nowadays. The crew of the Truva would skim through our letters, running their fingers beneath each word to avoid losing their place.

     The play ends with the same closing lines

     "We can take you all and your goats back to the mainland," the captain offers. "We'd only ask for a single goat in return. We have plenty of their pelts but I'm yet to taste the flesh of a Stígrøy goat."

     "We are quite happy here, thanks." I reply with a downward nod of my head.

     "The Nordlys must be very beautiful here. No cities or towns, the sky must get so dark here," the captain says, although I believe these words were only intended to himself.

     "This rock is a halfway house between Tromsø and the gods." He mutters

     If only he knew how right he was.

     It was then that the Captain gave a smile and raised his hand to wave, without actually shaking his hand side to side, to my sister-in-law Elsa, who stood at the start to the dock, wrapped in a heavy shawl we bought some three years ago, and she had patched a hole in with a square of sack.

     Elsa was an attractive woman, tall with pale blonde hair. My brother had travelled to the mainland twelve years ago on the promise of easy work and good booze that another ship's crew - that of the Solstrøm - had planted in his mind. He arrived back with Elsa aboard the wooden Truva, which has now returned to us regularly since.

     Behind Elsa, however, was what caught the captain's attention; my niece. Helena, now seven, was meant to remain at home when we had deliveries. It is for her sake that we remain on the island. She follows in her mother's blondness and tallness, but unlike her mother, whose eyes are a blue-grey like a thin-clouded sky in Oslo's summer, and unlike her father, whose eyes were brown - courtesy of my Spaniard father -, her eyes were a crimson red.

     There is a reason my father came here, all but dragging my mother - then only seventeen - along, some thirty-six years ago. Stígrøy, like the other territories at its latitude, experiences almost endless daylight for its summer and near-perpetual night for its winter. Spring and autumn are blended between, marked only by the blooming and dying of the flora. Every twenty-eight laps around the sun, however, another period occurs.

     Godstiden - the gods’ time - lasts for six days, always following a winter. The Nordlys - the northern lights - are constant above the island, moving slower than their usual dance, breathing back and forth. In these six days, the goats get fatter, and the grass grows four inches taller, shifting from dying yellow to lusciously green. Any aches, pains or wounds of men and women on the island heal in the first two days and, like the goats, become more plump and vital. All of this, my father was told, before the elder reciting this - a former sailor who had been to the island decades beforehand - then claimed:

     "...and if a child is born on the island during the godstiden, they will become a vessel for the gods. They will become the mouthpiece through which the universe whispers its secrets."

     That was when my father hurried to find a bride, worked long hours to feed her well on fish and meat and rice, so that she was strong enough to bear a child, and got a boat captain to take them to Stígrøy. All of this for me to be born here, thirty-six years ago. My father had been a year early. The elder, in his senility, had misremembered the year of the last godstiden.

     My father rushed to get his young bride pregnant again, but she birthed my brother prematurely, so much so that the tiny child grappled with death for four days until he was fattened up like a goat by the arrival of the breathing lights.

     My mother was overjoyed. Her child survived. The gods had saved him.

     My father cursed. He was born four days too soon.

     After my father’s drowning ten years ago, my mother moved back to the mainland. My brother, his wife and I, then in our twenties, stayed on the island with the other family that lives here, the Kristiansens.

     Helena was the promise that had been made to my father, but that he had not lived to see. She was a child of the Godstiden. That is why her eyes carry their red. She has not yet whispered any of the world’s secrets. She has yet to say a word at all.

     She can read and write rather well, for which her mother's teaching is to thank. Elsa was training to become a teacher before meeting my brother. She has not written anything out of the ordinary, she has transcribed no messages from beyond the stars yet.

     “I’ll be right back to help you unload” I say to the captain and walk briskly down the dock to the girls.

     “She wanted to see the men who bring us food” Elsa told me, beating me to the question.

     “Did she write that?” I asked

     “No, but she heard you and Jan talking about the delivery last night. She looked at me and I could tell she wanted to see what you were doing.”

     “Where is Jan?” I questioned. “He should be here helping us unload this stuff, and you two should be back in the hut.”

     “The older doe is unwell,” she told me. “He is concerned it will give birth early. He wants to be there in case it does so.”

     Helena moved from behind her mother and began walking forth. I thought about grabbing to stop her as she passed on my left, but I figured she would stop. The men were strangers. We, on an island of seven people, have raised her not to talk to strangers.

     I turned to watch as she walked past me. She broke into a fast skip now. We had also taught her not to run where it is wet. She was five metres ahead of me before I began walking after her, not quite meeting her pace.

     She came to a stop on the wooden dock just where a crew hand was unloading a barrel from the boat. He moved around the barrel to one end to lift it upright. He clocked Helena as he lifted the barrel, not her eyes but just the shape of her. It was once he had the barrel upright that he looked at her properly.

     She stood there and raised her right hand, shaking her whole arm side to side erratically as children do when they wave. He smiled and raised his hand back, shaking it at the wrist, the way adults do when they wave.

     Helena turned to her left now, her attention shifting to the boar. She stood on her toes now, craning her neck to see into the boat, her small hand still raised. Another crewman inside the boat chuckled softly upon noticing her.

     “Well, hello there!” he said in a faux-surprised tone. However, when he locked eyes with her, he froze.

     "What do we have here?" he wondered aloud, his voice louder now, drawing the attention of another man on the boat and gestured vaguely with his head in Helena’s direction. The second crewman joined him, and they exchanged a glance. One muttered something I couldn’t hear, and the other nodded, his gaze darting back to Helena. Their voices were low, their words lost to the wind, but the tone was unmistakable. They had noticed her eyes.

     I finally caught up to Helena, swiftly took her hand, and marched her back down the dock to her mother. The men in the boat came up to the nearside gunwale to talk to the barrel handler; I didn’t hear what they said but felt their eyes in the back of my head and Helena’s.

     “Here. She’s met the men who bring our food, now please take her home.” I said as I handed the child off to her mother.

     “Sorry. I’ll see you later for dinner,” Elsa said, turning and heading up the steps carved into the rock by my father and the elder Kristiansen.

     I hadn’t noticed the captain get back off the boat. I know heard his boots trotting on the dock behind me, one squelching step at a time.

     “Thats something special you have there” he said casually, as if he was complimenting one of the pelts or cheese wheels.

     “She’s not my wife,” I said, turning to face him. “She married my brother, remember?”

     The captain shook his head disappointedly, blinking slowly “not the woman, Bjorn. The child.”

     “She’s not mine, either” I replied lightly, letting out a breathy chuckle. I knew very well what he was getting at but tried to diffuse it.

     “I’ve heard the tales of this isle” he continued in a tone as though he wanted neither the girls nor the deckhands to overhear. “Your father spoke of them, too. He spoke about them plenty after a few bottles. Said there were seasons here unlike anything else in this realm. Magic seasons.”

     I didn’t answer.

     “She looks about the age to have been born in the last of those... seasons. What do you call it? The Godstimen?” his stare interrogating me.

     “Godstiden.” I stated. “It’s just a story. My dad liked it.”

     “Just a story,” he echoed, looking past me to the girls now halfway up the steps. “Her eyes say otherwise. They’re the colour of the Nordlys when they get red and angry.”

     “She’s just a kid.” I said, practically pleading at this point.

     “Maybe. Or maybe she’s something else.” He stepped back now, his boots scratching the dock. “See you next time, Bjorn” he called over his shoulder, his tone light again, almost cheerful.

     I stayed on the dock to watch the Truva pull away. The crew’s laughter rang faintly over the waves. The ship became a dark smear on the horizon, then vanished.

     I will be seeing them again too soon.