Beautiful Wreck (10 page)

I could see people far off down the hill, heading toward the edge of the silver forest a mile away. They were tiny, and the forest was a living mass of twisting, swaying green. I closed my eyes and thought of salad tossing in a giant bowl. I would hold it in my lap and eat it with my hands—all of it—like an animal.

Something wet and cold touched my temple, and I yelped and whipped my head up. The dog beside me yelped too, and sprang up facing me. My heart raced, and I looked around wildly for help. I’d never been this close to a dog. He stretched his paws out toward me and pushed his tail up high, wagging it, ready to wrestle.

“Nei,” I laughed. His tongue hung out and his ears were two triangles standing in the air. He looked at me a moment longer, as if I might change my mind about wrestling. “I am not a puppy,” I told him, offering him some grass to eat. He looked at it, and then at me as though I were dim. He seemed to adjust his expectations, and turned himself around to sit beside me, facing the sea. He smelled like sun and bare feet, and waves of stink came rapidly as he panted, but I liked his presence. My loneliness wasn’t the dire, choking stone it had been a moment ago.

I picked little yellow flowers from around my feet and tucked them into the braid that went across the top of my forehead, making myself a crown. The dog yawned thoroughly, forming an amazing curl with his tongue, and then lay down with his paws pointing straight forward. I touched his back, and it seemed his whole body vibrated with his breath. Soon I was petting him, telling him nonsense words and how he was a good dog.

The chief and his uncle Har came from the house and stood down the hill to talk, about what I couldn’t hear.

The chief was not easy with people. Most often demanding, matter of fact and seldom warm. But something subtle hid in his voice, so dark brown and lush, the way his tongue curled around the old words. I might wake each morning thinking I would be home, that this was just a bad dream, and when I found I was still here I would panic. Then I’d hear him say something. It didn’t matter what. It was like waking from a childhood nap, someone big and safe nearby.

From where I sat he and Har were silhouetted against the late summer sky, and I was stunned once again by Har’s size. He was the man who’d held me all the way here from the coast, his arms bigger around than I could grasp. His body had shielded me like a blanket. He’d kept me alive.

I’d been watching him with interest all week, and he was the only person who was not at all scared of the chief. He had led the family before Heirik was old enough, and he raised the boy like a son when Heirik’s parents died. If possible, he was even more of a revered and mythic creature than the chief himself.

Most often grim, when his face and voice broke into joy it was overwhelming. His laughter rolled like thunder. The little children—almost all of them his own grandkids—were in turns awed by his imposing silence and charmed by his messy eyebrows and funny faces.

The two men turned my way, and I could see the chief’s flaxen eyes. The family’s unspoken dread seemed reflected there. But why?

He seemed hard and ungraceful today, and I felt like it was because of me. I wondered what he was deciding about me, what he might do.

The flowers were childish, and I untangled them from my hair.

Only ten days I’d been here, certainly no more than two weeks. I needed to give myself a lot more time than that, months or maybe even years, I thought. I needed to give everyone here a lot more time.

Betta came tripping down the hill to land beside me, breathless. “Ginn, you are still here.”

“Já,” I said, surprised at how often she seemed to read my thoughts. “I’m still here. Look!” I patted the dog, depositing crumpled yellow flowers on his back. “I think he likes me.”

Betta shielded her eyes from the low sun, looking away toward the men and the farm. “Já,” she said absently. “Já, I know he does.”

Since I had no memory, Hildur took a good deal of the spinning time to lecture me.

Now, she talked about winter. She explained that while everything that happened inside the threshold of the house was her domain, in winter the line was blurred. Men brought work—from bits of char cloth to entire animals—inside. It was a messy, wet and cold time, and I could see that she was uneasy with the thought of it coming. As she talked about last year’s waist-high snow, I pictured the threshold of the house, the actual line in the dirt, as a neat little handhold in a swirling wilderness. A charm against the uncontrollable frontier.

In reality, she told me, a woman could shear a sheep if she had to. A man could mend a shirt or cook a meal. I would rake windrows in the fields just two months from now. “We keep each other alive, já?” Of course. I found I could very easily imagine Kit’s husband Arn, or even the chief himself cooking. I was sure there were limits, though. There had to be. For one, I could not picture a single one of the males of this family learning to use a drop spindle. I envied them with a great sigh.

Watching the wool endlessly become thread, I absorbed Hildur’s conclusion. One overriding law. Always, inside or outside any house on the farm, the chief was as the gods. I was to do whatever he told me to do. He didn’t often step into Hildur’s way, but when he did, she let him. His orders were above question.

All the women had become quiet. Even while their spindles twirled, each was looking into the distance, or inside themselves, seeing their chieftain. There was that unease that came with any talk of him, an apprehension so vague I couldn’t name it even enough to ask. I pictured the contemplative young man, his resolute mouth, honey eyes. What was it that they feared?

I closed my own eyes and saw a dark cloud and white lightning, an afterimage of the line of thread I was making. I must have looked scared. “He isn’t always terrible, Child,” said Kit. “Nei.”

“He’s not, nei,” Dalla agreed, her sisters nodding. Svana assured me he would never hurt anyone, that he wouldn’t even touch any woman. That it was okay, I’d be safe.

They were all completely unconvincing.

At least Betta didn’t try to dissemble. She sat silent and intent. Hildur made tisking sounds, her face severe.

Thoughts and impressions jumbled together. He seemed off-putting, já, cold and a little frightening. But something in his voice made me respond with a still and open heart. “He doesn’t seem terrible at all to me,” I said finally.

Every voice faded, and they all gaped at me. Ranka listened with big eyes, and it reminded me of how she reacted when I suggested the chief was her father. She had dropped the comb into the bath and gone still.

“Ranka,” I asked. “Why are you afraid of him?”

The little girl stared like she was trapped, and I was sorry I’d asked.

“You see what he is, já?,” Hildur answered in something close to a low hiss. She was transformed by the subject, no longer kind.

I shook my head slowly, still ignorant.

“Child, clear your eyes,” she continued. “The gods spilled blood on him. A terrible omen.”

I was lost. Blood was spilled on him?

It came to me slowly and dreadfully. “His mark.” I breathed the words.

“Já, his mark.” Hildur’s fingers grazed a glass bead, a charm that hung from her belt, as if warding off the danger of even speaking about him. She was truly scared, brimming with it.

“We don’t speak of it,” she explained with irritation, as though I was a willful child who had pestered her for answers. She continued anyway. “The chief was clutched from death by his father’s hands so that he could learn from him and take his place.”

“Ulf,” I said, reviewing my lessons. “His father.”

Ulf was there when Signé brought forth their firstborn, Hildur told me. The baby who was now the chief. The moment he came into the world, a blast of wind passed through the house, flattening the heartflame. The servant woman who had helped Signé tried to wipe the blood off the baby, but it would not come. When Signé realized the blood was part of him, she clutched the baby tight to her breast, frightened for his life.

I imagined her, a new mother, her baby just minutes old and in danger. I saw her tears, her wild eyes and determination. Her kisses on his warm head.

Ulf drew his seax, Hildur said, and ordered everyone away, the doors shut and bolted. And then with the gentlest love for Signé and for his new son, he set his knife down and placed the baby on his lap. He sprinkled him with water and named him for his own grandfather.

Something tugged at my awareness, something odd about his father, Ulf, naming him, but the feeling was gone in a second.

With a name, Heirik had been accepted and could not be exposed and left to die, no matter the family’s superstitions. Still, Signé wouldn’t let anyone touch him. She took baby Heirik in her arms again, and did not let him go for seven weeks. She charmed and glared the family into submission. She bound them in fear, not with a curse, but with a blessing. She blessed anyone who would follow and serve Heirik.

Signé’s blessings were powerful and not to be spurned.

“And so we follow and serve him,” Hildur finished. “And he is his mother’s son. Untouchable.”

Untouchable. They kept using that word.

In their flutter of assurances, Svana had mentioned I shouldn’t worry, that he would never touch a woman. Could she possibly mean it literally? The times I’d seen him interact with people, he hadn’t reached out. He hadn’t touched me when he knelt and looked in my eyes at the beach. He folded his arms and turned away when we talked at the forge. Ranka’s little voice came to mind.
The chief has his own room.
My god, what did they think might happen if he touched them?

“And the eyes of a wolf,” Hildur was still talking. “And that hair. A blue swan.”

It was a poetic phrase for raven. I thought it was kind of pretty, until she finished the thought. “The bird of corpses.”

In the uncomfortable lull that followed, I bent my head to my work and really tried to spin. My thoughts kept following paths that branched and narrowed and became mired. It was a birthmark, huge and ugly, yes, but in my world practically inconsequential. It wouldn’t be fraught with fearful meaning. It would probably just be removed.

This was not my world. Looking out over the vast land, I tried to imagine the depth of belief that could allow such cruelty. For a little boy to grow up without the comfort and joy of touching other people. I kept coming back to his eyes. The troubled thing I’d seen in them when he stood with his uncle, silhouetted against the sky. Maybe he’d seen my loneliness. And now he knew what it looked like from the outside.

“But you thrive,” I said. “The farm thrives under him.”

Hildur’s eyes were like sparks on steel, but I held her gaze.

“Intelligence,” she said, punctuating the word with a smack of the spindle to keep it moving. “Leadership, fierceness, strength. And a face and body disfigured by an ugly curse.”

She contemplated this, her fingers expertly pinching fiber, her lips pursed to match. “It is a complex thing, what the gods have given him.”

I supposed so. No matter how much I might believe or disbelieve about the Norse gods, some force of nature had made the chief into what he was.

“And you,” she raised her chin at me. “Now the disir have given him you to figure out.”

There were glances, as though the ancestral spirits who’d invited me were now sitting like ghosts among us on the wall. I dropped the spindle and reeled it up carefully. When I got it back, I placed it in my lap. My hands shook and I couldn’t spin. What could I say in answer to that? I was another complication in his difficult life. And he was a feature of what was to become my lonely existence, too, forever stranded far from home, in a place where no one knew me. Tears stung the corners of my eyes, and I let my gaze blur until the hills and valley were a sad, green wash. A big cloud came and turned it all dark blue.

“Hildur?”

Ranka was speaking. I kept looking blearily into the distance.

“Já, Child.”

“What does a blue swan look like?”

“Oh …” Hildur hesitated for just a second. “It’s a terrible beast, little one. A bird as big as a horse. With great black wings that sweep the ground, wider than a man’s outstretched arms. Bloody eyes and claws, and a carrion reek.”

It was a horrible joke to play on the child, but I imagined Hildur winking to let Ranka know it was just a story to scare and thrill her. Then Hildur finished, in a hiss. “Its beak is gory with the flesh of men. Its shriek rips souls from their dying bodies.”