Beautiful Wreck (58 page)

“Betta,” I said. “Do you feel it?”

There was no answer.

I called her, loud enough that she should be able to hear, and again I got no response.

I sat up and looked around, and I was off the slimy, muddy path. I’d paid attention to the stars and wilderness and I’d wandered. The joy of being unfindable quickly turned to worry. I grasped the snow and looked for Betta all around. I didn’t see her anywhere, didn’t see anything but snow. I tried to scramble to my feet, and I sank up to my knees. I struggled, too many skirts and furs, too much snow. My heart started beating fast. I needed to return to people and fire, to the sturdy house. I looked up to go to it.

It wasn’t there.

A fine, gray mist obscured the world. I hadn’t seen it massing around me, didn’t know how long I’d lain unfocused, wondering at such freedom. Now I was inside a smothering pillow. It was getting thicker and grayer fast, and soon the stars and moon were gone.

I turned in every direction and twisted my skirts. Lurched toward nothing. I called Betta, three times, four, five, my heart pounding harder and harder. Flailing in a darkening sea, any direction could be wrong. Tears froze on my face, mixing with gray mist. I called her one more time. My voice sounded weak.

Water was seeping into the place where my boots met my wool pants, making miserable trails, circling my calves. My feet were two dumb blocks. The cold seemed lethal, all of a sudden. I was a vulnerable body that needed to be warm. I blinked desperately, a help code, and then laughed at myself like a bark in the wilderness. My eyes hadn’t worked that way in months.

Trying to use my long-lost contacts brought me back to my senses, and to where I really was.

Specific questions calmed me. How long had I been gone, and how long might it reasonably be until I was missed and someone came to find me? Was I near that limit? Would they be looking yet? How could I help them find me? I stretched my toes and fingers to move blood around in them. The questions helped, but I didn’t seem to know any answers, and a blank sleepiness came like a great and gorgeous weight.

Walking would keep me awake, but if I ventured from my spot, it could be the wrong way. I could move farther and farther from the house, swimming through thigh deep snow into oblivion.

I let my brain turn off, then, and tried to sense the answers instinctively. I quieted myself and tried to let my animal brain remember which way I’d been going before the swirling gray, the subtle clues that I knew in my muscles and the delicate bones of my inner ear. Where the house was the last time I saw it, the angle of my approach and how fast I’d been walking.

Completely opaque now, the mist stung my cheeks. It was moving, picking up speed. The mist changed from smothering cotton to a living thing, a biting wind. Soon snow crystals whipped my face, a swarm of needle-like beaks on a million tiny birds. I turned around again and fell hard in a heap of wet skirts and furs. And I just sat, unable to try again.

Each individual eyelash was stiff and heavy. I started to count them in my mind.

I would die here. I pulled my cloak up over my head, though I felt sorry I had to melt my icicle lashes. They were probably pretty.

I breathed out slowly, filling up the cave of my cloak with warmth, then took my own air back in, enjoying breathing deeply. I was in a state of grace. Going soon, but still alive.

Would I even know it, when I was gone? So tired. A deep, dark kind of sleepiness came like a heavy blanket. I thought of Betta being lost, too. Was she feeling the same thing?

Betta! I struggled up again. She must be in danger, too. I had to find the house and get help for her.

For Betta, I stood and considered everything again. I couldn’t see. Solid white now surrounded me, and I groped at it aimlessly. It seemed so solid, when my hands went through it I was shocked. I only knew it was moving because of my hair whipping and hitting my face, and the moaning of the wind, an unearthly, divine sound. So loud, hearing human voices would be impossible.

The wind paused, and I was left deaf in the stillness. Then it gathered itself, organized itself and came at me all from one direction, strong and fierce. I pushed into it, as if pushing a boulder. And on the wind came the faintest, most familiar scent of smoke.

My chest spasmed with desire for that fire. I pushed toward it, right into the wind, and yelled over and over for help.

I shrieked when a hand grabbed me by the arm.

Someone strong lifted me off the ground and pulled me in tight. I started to shake. “I’m sorry,” I apologized for no reason, and the words were eaten by the wind.

A gentle hand cradled my head. A scratchy beard brushed my cheek. “Heirik,” I said roughly, eyes closed.

“It is Brosa,” he said. “You are safe.”

I opened my eyes and frantically called for Betta.

“Shhhh, Woman, she is safe, too. My uncle found her.”

I pictured her in Hár’s arms for just a moment, his breath close against her cheek before he backed away in secrecy, cursing the wind and his own stubbornness. How he must have wanted to hover by her side, speak to her in lover’s tones, of comfort and the future.

The next day the snow was gone.

THE WATER’S EDGE

Spring

It was just a few days later when we heard about the whale.

A messenger from the fishing camp rode up to the house to tell us there was a beached animal—a wreck—of such size he had never seen. Soon there was a flurry of readying. Horses and supplies and baskets and children, tents and bedrolls and wraps and furs. Cunning egg cartons made of sweet-smelling, dry grass, each big enough to hold dozens of eggs.

Nearly everyone would go. A beached whale on our family’s sand was a sublime omen and great gift, and claiming it would be a festival.

So I sat atop Drifa, traveling again to the sea.

The land opened up before us in different shades this time. Newborn grass shoots fuzzed everything with the most delicate, sunny green. Wild, and promising to become unruly, they grew in the crevices of jumbly rocks of all sizes. The rocks were strewn everywhere to the horizon and beyond, and they stood out darker now, in the light of spring. Birches were sparked with buds, kissed with a fragile life. Snow gone, everything was newly open to the sky. It spread above us, simply blue, touched with white clouds from a storybook. The air felt clean, and breathing it was delicious.

What seemed like this wild, unruly mix of grass and crumbly rocks and hills, was actually the byway, our defined course to the sea. The route had been controlled by Heirik’s family for three generations. Once I knew this, I could see it—a suggestion of a path worn into this stony ground, where for forty years men and women had chosen safe and efficient routes.

Along the ridge, the stone sisters stood guard. It was our gloriously flowered, grassy, rocky passage, and no one else’s. I wondered what would befall someone who contested the rights to this land, and I remembered Eiðr’s hand falling clear of his body in payment for the life a horse. What would the price be, for a stab at this beauty?

The horses were sure-footed on the steep decline, and this time I wasn’t as scared. Not entirely able to sit loose and easy, still I trusted Drifa and knew what to expect. I looked out more this time, at the vista. I could see the place where the ocean would be, the idea of it introduced by an absence of hills, a somehow greener sky.

It would be my second time there, not counting the day I arrived. Already, I looked back to my previous trip and thought of myself as naive. Back when I thought I could have everything, when I thought it would be simple, and yet I feared so many easy things—birds and horses and steep rocks that we traversed to get to the water. Now I sat taller on my horse. I’d been to the edge of my heart’s fear, and I hung there still, every day wondering what I would gain or lose. A steep decline felt like nothing.

When we hit the flat ground, the horses took off as they had last time. I watched the men and boys ride off in a glorious explosion of hooves and light. Drifa and I came right behind. The thrill of wind in my hair shocked me out of my reverie. Thoughts turned to hanging on, breathing, a glorious dizziness from adrenalin and love for this horse, this terrifying land. Past my tears, I could just make out the chief, and this time his brother by his side, flying together along the great curving river that would bring us to the sea.

We neared the last rise, and I heard everything first before I saw the scene. I heard the waves’ rhythmic crash and suck, the reeling birds’ thready calls, the shouts of men who had gotten here first and were welcoming us with something like a song. The hvalsaga. News of a whale.

When we topped the rise, I looked down on the great black-sand basin and it stole my breath.

It was familiar now, this vast and savage place, spreading for miles below. This stretch of coast was contained on one side by the cliffs to my left. Hundreds of feet high, their bases curved like a great enfolding arm around the sand. Tucked into the curve nestled dozens of tiny caves, where Heirik and I had sat together so long ago, where Ageirr had found and taken me.

Those caves looked inconsequential from up here at the top of the great rise. The sight brought ragged emotions up, bile in my throat, tears whisked from my eyes by the wind. I looked to my right instead, and I saw the fishing camp far down the beach, the hut and several boats pulled up on the sand beside it. In the water, beyond the camp, I saw the delicate curves of a Viking longship. The dragon’s head just visible from here.

And straight ahead of me, the wreck.

We were separated—the whale and I—by several tiers of brush and stone and wood and sand. From where Drifa and I stood, a steep and long slope led down to brushy flats that extended to the caves and off into the distance toward the camp. Another level down would bring us to a rocky section, made of a million stones so big I could just lift one with two hands. They came in every shade of gray, steel and black, and were scattered over with skeletal driftwood from kindling-sized sticks to massive trunks, twisted, cracked, rent in terrible, reaching shapes.

Another step down, and we would wade through knee-high, electric lime colored brush. Snowblooms! They were just babies now, this year’s new plants massing everywhere. Then one more step down, and the sand would level out, become moist and then wet and then meet the sea. And there it lay.

The whale, now dead, lolled on its side and offered its striped, white underbelly to our view. It was gently and softly tremendous, limp and yet proud in death. From my vantage point a hundred or more feet away, I could see right down its length.