Beautiful Wreck (35 page)

“I know.” He looked off down the cascade of yellowing hills and laughed quietly at himself. “I make no sense. In front of them, you must.”

We were still, and then he spoke again.

“You said my name, the first day you came outside.”

The first day, when I came outside to meet him. Memories of blinding daylight and fire welled up, his shoulders working over iron and stone. In my gut, I felt an echo of the distress of those first hours in this alien time and place. But also contentment. Back in that quiet moment, squinting into the sun on my first day outside the longhouse, I’d been at home. I’d known him already, before I even heard what he was called.

“Heirik.” I gave his name to him now.

“Já,” he whispered. The day’s fiercest breeze came up, rippling the grass and filling my ears. I could barely hear him. “Again, please,” he said. It broke my heart.

“Heirik,” I called to him softly, willing him to look, and he turned to me finally. It wasn’t just the remaining fire of ritual that lit his eyes. They gleamed with moisture at the corners.

“Don’t call me otherwise, when we are alone.”

I nodded a solemn vow. I would call him by his name, privately, in all the small moments I could. And I would not say herra in his presence again. If it hurt him, then I would find a thousand ways to avoid it.

We shared the view of the valley in silence, and I longed for him to call me something secret too. “In the woods,” I blushed. Pushed myself. “You called me small.”

His lip curled up, amused. “You liked that.”

Two handfuls of dry grass occupied my hands. I watched my fingers close into fists, heard the ripping sound. Admitted it. “Já.”

It was a lover’s way of seeing me.

“Já, then, Small One.” It was the sweetest sound, in a lifetime of listening to the beauty and nuances of thousands of voices. This one, now, was it.

He didn’t say anything more, but I was familiar with his silences. I looked to the horizon and luxuriated in the tension between us. After a while, he talked to me again.

“We’ll do three more for winter,” he said. “I can keep fourteen.”

He was talking about the sheep. He’d considered the hay, the animals, the people. Children, four girls not yet married off, Kit would have another baby in winter. Each animal ate so much hay, yet fed so many people with dairy if we could keep it alive through the polar nights. There were cows, too, so many of them. Some of those would be slaughtered. Heirik knew our food stores, knew our needs. Some was calculable—a cow ate twenty tons in the winter, he told me—and some was not. Variables like weather hovered just outside his reach.

And then, fourteen. That was the answer. A clean, simple answer for such a complex equation, and some diminishing part of the future me would have found it cold. The newer me sat beside him like a chieftain’s wife, considering his logic, thinking of the best way to deploy the women in reducing and preserving the dead. Looking at the farm the way he did, somehow we’d come to sit closer. Side by side, very close. My elbows rested on my bent knees, just like his. I felt like two sheepdogs, surveying what we were born to protect.

“Salmon is done for the year. We have enough,” he said. “We’ll bank more small fish. And shark, before the rain and wind.” He turned to face me, and I could feel his breath on my cheek.

“More important,” I murmured. “We have enough grain for ale.”

I turned to him with laughter on my lips, and suddenly we were a hand’s breadth apart, no more. His breath was sweet with honeyed drink and a hint of blood. Loose wisps of his hair brushed my cheeks. We both stayed seated just as we were, then he leaned in so slightly and I tilted my head up to him. So close I could feel the shape of his lips in the air between us. I could move to kiss him. I could open my mouth. I would. I was.

“Rakknason!”

Heirik and I drew apart in a flash.

Behind us, Ageirr descended the hill with long, loping steps. Heirik stood with swift grace and dignity. Not much taller, somehow he towered over the man.

Now I was sure Ageirr’s half-sneer was permanent. A moment of pain and anger had seared itself into his features.

He drew his knife from his belt, considered his left hand and started trimming a fingernail. He nodded to me. “Ginn Sjódottir.” Sea’s Daughter. Everyone knew I was odd, come from nowhere, with no name. The insult sounded greasy on his lips. Incongruously, my sex throbbed from the promise of Heirik’s kiss, unfulfilled. I rolled my hips ever so slightly and pressed against the grass to quiet my body.

“Ageirr, my honor-feeder.” Heirik used a lyrical kind of Viking metaphor, a word poem. It sounded appreciative, but it was a deft reminder of their places—that Heirik was the one who protected and commanded Ageírr. It was a slick little jab, above reproach, and I liked Heirik for it.

I stood and wiped bits of dry grass from my skirt, and I nodded to Ageírr, as if I hadn’t barked at him last time we met. I listened to them talk about fields, hay, cattle, the same subjects Heirik and I had just spoken of, but this time I was not part of them. I became awkward and unnecessary. Then Ageírr mentioned a lost horse, and the mood turned ominous.

A breeze punctuated the quick change. Heirik shifted his body to form a wall between me and Ageírr.

“You’ve drawn now,” Heirik told him with finality.

Ageírr expelled a disdainful “ffft” through closed teeth. “The blood of an animal.” He cast a glance at Heirik’s reddened feet, then looked in his eyes. “A beloved woman lost. It’s not the same.” His eyes rested briefly on me. “Is it, Chief?”

A cold calm stole over Heirik’s body.

“To the house, Ginn.” He commanded, in a way he’d never spoken to me.

I glanced at the knife in Ageírr’s hand, noticed with cold clarity that Heirik now held his knife, too. In my muddled head, I was still the chieftain’s wife, and I knew with certainty that the way I reacted now would reflect on Heirik. Was I supposed to stand by, ready to fight too? I thought of my own little knives that hung from my belt. A Viking wife might or might not. But I would be ridiculous, and Heirik would be savagely angry at me.

I wouldn’t fight, then. I wouldn’t run, either. I would remain collected. But I consumed the hill in big strides.

Looking back was weak. I tried to resist it. I watched my boots instead, one after the other kicking out from under my skirts as I climbed. I couldn’t hear anything behind me, no shouts or cries. But my love was back there, and knives were drawn, and I’d so recently seen that very knife slit cleanly through a sheep’s throat. Tears started to come and I had to turn. I had to know.

Far down the hill, Heirik and Ageirr were talking. They’d put their knives away, and Heirik stood with his arms crossed over his chest, in his way. He wasn’t exactly at ease, nor was Ageirr, but they were not lunging at each other and struggling and snarling like dogs.

It took a second to sink in. They weren’t fighting.

A gust of wind lifted my skirts and made them billow around my knees, and I wanted to just let my legs fall out from underneath me. I wanted to sink into the grass right there and be grateful. There was no danger. And at that moment, Ageirr looked up and saw me. He smiled, without warmth or joy.

I crested the hill, and there sat the house.

All around it played an idyllic scene, out of an old painting. Pink-faced children chased chickens. Men laughed and sheared sheep, while those who’d already proven their prowess drew women away behind the house. Ale sloshed in metal and wooden cups, and the kids dribbled milk from rolled up cones of birch bark. The grass on the house was long and brilliant green and gold. A single naked sheep stood on the roof eating it.

The house was a massive, living thing. Solid in the landscape. And it was mine.

It was a bit later before I got around to thinking of Betta again.

Despite my assumption that she and Hár would run off to the trees, they were both still in the yard, separately talking and drinking with people in the late sun.

I drew her away, and we tripped down the hill to sit by the river, far down the front yard. We bared our feet and dipped our toes in the freezing water, and she laid a hand flat on the ground beside me while she looked out into the distance.

Betta didn’t realize how lovely she was, with her beautiful ideas and quick, mischievous smile. The seriousness of her gift. Her long dexterous fingers, good at spinning and dyeing. True, Betta wasn’t adorable like Svana, but no one was. Svana was a singular little cloud, a puff of sugar. Betta was a woman.

Open to the unexpected, surely. Brave.

Unwise.

He’s too important for me
, she’d said of her secret lover. And he was. I spread my toes and wondered if she really understood what her relationship could—and couldn’t possibly—lead to.

I didn’t say anything, and Betta waited a while, in that way she had of allowing the air to become still before dropping a pebble, a rock, a boulder of a question or statement into it.

“Do you remember …?” She started. Drew up some conviction, and then started again. “Have you ever felt a man?”

I stopped swirling the water with my feet and spent a long moment trying to decipher her question. Surely, she wasn’t asking about a man in general. She’d seen me touch men incidentally. Then I figured it out and my mouth curled into a compassionate and amused smile. She was asking if I’d touched a penis. I couldn’t possibly tell her yes, not only because I had amnesia, but also because it was such an undefinable experience, the first time.

Then my smile faded, as the impact of her question hit me.

“Did you?” I asked delicately at first, but then I just had to know. “Did you touch Hár?”

She smiled and then ducked her head shyly. “Nei, nei,” she said. “Not with my hands.”

What did that mean? I didn’t know whether to be relieved or infuriated at the old man. I made her tell me more.

The first time Hár took her riding was like a romantic brand seared into her mind, dark and moonlit and luscious. She’d saved every detail forever, and had been waiting to tell me for so long.

He’d helped her onto Byr and got on the horse behind her, and she first felt his arms—any man’s arms—around her. They rode so fast, she would have been scared, but the feel of his body fascinated her, so warm and sturdy. Something rose in her own body that she’d never known.

He took her to a high hill where they could look out into the moon-stricken valley, and they stayed there for a long quiet time. She was amazed at his solidity, after imagining his embrace and failing to really grasp how it would be. How big he was up close, his breath on her neck and the beat of his heart against her shoulder blades.

He undid her braids, and she let him, her breath suspended. Hár said he wanted to see her that way, to feel her hair in his hands, smooth his palms down the length of it.

He gathered all of it in one hand, placed it over her shoulder, and exposed the nape of her neck. Bent and kissed her there. Her first kiss. His beard was wiry, and then his lips were so unexpectedly soft. He slipped his hands under her cloak, took her by the waist and pulled her closer to him. She told me that he was breathing heavy in her ear, and that’s when she felt him, hard against her.

“It was shocking,” she said. “But then, not really.”

I had a sudden recollection of Betta coming in from the cold weeks ago. Her hair had been loosened and her eyes sparkled with secrets. I was preoccupied at the time—I’d just that minute fallen in love—and so I’d taken her word for it that she had been “out riding.” Wind-swept and alive and surprised. It was still hard for me to picture her riding with Hár.

I imagined being introduced to all those sensations in one night, having never before felt a man’s embrace, lips on her skin, hands in her hair, and then to feel him against her like that. Betta was such an inquisitive, innocent girl sometimes. Worry gnawed again.

“What have you done with him,” I asked. “Besides riding, and … feeling him that way?”

She laughed lightly, and it was like a splash in the sunset river.

“As bold as I am, and the man such a savage, you would think we’d done every act Thora goes on about. But, nei. He will not.” Her voice was a wistful mew. “He says one day I will want to marry a man my own age. As if there are any men of seventeen.” She looked disgusted, probably imagining the candidates. Then she became dreamy and smiled again.

“He kisses me. He has rolled me around in the grass. He weighs more than a horse.” She laughed and showed her big teeth. “And I can feel him, já?” She grew serious, and I suddenly wanted to burrow into the earth and stop thinking about Hár’s mouth on hers.

“I know he wants more of me,” she said. “He won’t take it.”

I was relieved at that, and it made me like him. But I was full of sadness over all the lost lust in this house.

ARROWS & SPEARS

I splashed my face with frigid water and swished with a lot of mouthwash in the pre-dawn dark.

We’d eaten quickly and were leaving for the coast in a thick and dusky mist—a kind of dark that was entirely new to me. A lowering of the light, still, not quite completely dark, but enough for the low clouds to obscure my sight. In the city, this kind of gray dusk couldn’t exist together with the blaring electric light. Here, it began to linger longer every day.