Beautiful Wreck (12 page)

It was not the ax he normally carried. It was gorgeous.

“Slítasongr,” he said, the long ee up front, the r dissolving into nothing but a brief shape in the mouth.

His voice was fluid and changeable, turning sweet and then to hard stone and back. A voice to study.

It meant rending song. It was the ax’s name. This was not just an everyday tool, but a beloved, named weapon. Delicately balanced and sharply honed not to cut turf or trees, but bones of animals, of people. My mind shied away from what it was capable of. I could see by how he held it that it
would
sing in his hands.

He looked up from it and seemed to shake something off, retrain his features.

“Go in.” He gestured toward the house with his chin and I nodded.

I was dismissed. Before I ducked into the door, I saw him heading toward the stables. “Vakr!” he called to his horse sharply. I stepped inside.

“The iron pot brings out pink,” Betta told me as she and Thora tipped a cauldron of hot water and birch leaves. The scented water poured over a screen I was holding and then, strained of leaves, it flowed into another pot.

Steam rolled like great flowers bursting open all around us. I stirred the leaves with a long wooden spoon, and a gorgeous sent rose up, like cooked apples and black tea.

“The leaves by themselves make yellow,” Thora said.

They were showing me how to dye thread. We worked around a small fire, close to the river. Little Lotta, about three years old, watched with a finger in her slack mouth. Darling and blond, her name was Ginnlaug—“just like you, Ginn!” She was entranced by our work, watching what bigger girls do.

“The pink brings more trade,” Betta said, then smiled and added, “and it’s pretty.”

Her big teeth made her seem just ten years old, until her face fully resolved from the steam and became that of a young woman. She held her braids back and leaned over to breathe deeply of the birch water.

“I’m seventeen today,” she said out of nowhere. With her own long spoon, she joined me in stirring and spreading the soggy greens.

I grinned and smacked playfully at her spoon with mine. “You didn’t tell me it was your …” I trailed off and couldn’t find a word for
birthday
in the old language. “… your day,” I ended dumbly.

“You’ll have flowers for a crown tonight,” Thora said. “Ranka will want to make it.”

“
I
want to make it!” Lotta broke in.

“You can let your hair down.” I tugged on the end of Betta’s braid.

“Nei!” Betta reccoiled. She pulled away from me and flipped her braids over her shoulders, outside my reach. Suddenly, I’d been too familiar.

She never took her hair down outside of the sleeping alcove, she told me. She’d started braiding it as a little girl, when her Ma died and she and Bjarn moved to this big house. Now, nine years later she had a habit of keeping it bound in the same way every day, and no one but the girls she slept with down the hill had ever seen it.

I thought of little Betta, alone without her mommy in a big, strange place, thrust into the company of giant men and stuck up girls. “You were just eight?”

“Já. The oldest of the children down the hill, though. I took care of them.” Betta smiled, and for no reason added, “The chief was thirteen.” She cast a glance toward the stables.

Heirik stood with a couple of boys—Magnus and Haukur—and a bunch of horses. His head was bent in concentration, listening without looking at gangly Magnus, Har’s son, just about fourteen himself. The chief was clearly teaching him something, waiting for the lesson to be absorbed and proof sent back. And not getting the response he needed. The chief’s natural grace was gone, and right now his body was cramped. He was impatient. After just a couple weeks, I knew the subtle physical expression of his moods.

“Your brother will take over the job of chief, then?” I asked Thora.

“Já, the baulufotr.”
Cow foot.
A hundred times dumb, with not enough words for her to express it. He would probably inherit the position, she told me, and keep it if he could. Her idiot brother, with the chief’s holdings, tenants, burdens. From our perch, we could see that his work featured prominent elbows and a lack of physical ease that was stark next to the chief.

“Soon after I came here,” said Betta, “when the chief was old enough to marry, it was decided he never would.”

As though drawn by the illicit subject, Svana and Grettis walked up, spinning. They joined in telling me the whole story.

The chief could not marry. It would endanger all of Hvítmörk if he were to father a child. He could bring heartbreak and ruin. Heirik was not just dangerous himself. He could be a harbinger of something, or someone, far worse.

Thora summed it up in the crudest possible way. “He’s vowed to keep his bloody atgeirr to himself.”
Thrusting spear.
It would have been an apt and witty metaphor if it weren’t so cruel. She looked toward the stables as if the chief might have heard her and cursed her in some new, extra way.

A sudden voice came from behind us. “He is the breaker of rings,” Hildur declared. A phrase for
chieftain
. She’d been observing us, listening, while we didn’t hear her approach. Her cheeks flamed crimson. “I will not have this kind of talk.”

My heart fluttered. Bits of leaves and twigs clung to my spoon.

For a moment all was suspended, then Hildur spoke to Betta. “You, Girl, will stay with our guest and sleep at the house now.” Then she walked away to go oversee someone else.

In the tense aftermath, Betta pressed on the leaves and curbed a small smile. I smiled a little, too. Everyone else watched Hildur’s back, their mouths open.

Was this one of those times when the chief gave orders and she let him? Hildur seemed bunched and angry over this new arrangement. I couldn’t imagine the housekeeper feeling all that charitable toward me. But somehow, I’d been given Betta.

My new friend deftly turned the conversation back to something that would draw attention. “It is possible that a child might be normal,” she said, utterly reasonably. She looked at me evenly while she spoke. “A woman might be unaffected by his touch.” Unharmed, I thought, but not unaffected.

“Well, it is a closed door,” said Thora. And as chief, it was his door to close.

Magnus would someday become a big man like the rest in his family, like his father Hár and cousin Heirik. And like both of them, he would one day protect and guide a clan of farmers and fishermen and traders more extensive than Betta or I could imagine. At the moment, he seemed completely incapable.

“The chief teaches Magnus everything,” Thora said, “as though this is a good plan.” She touched a charm that hung at her belt, just like Hildur’s. A ward against Heirik’s ugliness and a blessing for his long life in one complex and brief swipe of the fingers.

That night, I made room in my little sleeping alcove for Betta. I curled up beside her and felt an unfamiliar pressure, painless, happy, in my heart.

Each day without fail the women mentioned the chief’s brother. Younger than Heirik, and so wonderful.

He was called Brosa, but he was a character to me, his face unknown, with no real name on my lips. He was beaming and broad, I was told. Strong and kind and generous. Brosa was capable. Sweet. Each woman added words to the litany of his greatness. Expansive. Funny. Bright like the heart of a flame. Tall as the chief and just as fierce.

“And handsome to make the girls go mad,” Kit added wryly. She gave Svana an amused glance.

Svana didn’t mind being exposed as lovesick. She exhaled, “Like the sun.” She let her spindle sink and slow.

The whole family had a love affair with him, an infatuation just as great as their fear of the chief. He’d taken the boat away on a trading voyage. His return would announce celebration, and he would bring abundant, luxurious goods to the farm. A hero.

I imagined a vaguely rugged man at sea, his curved wooden ship slicing the waves, his perfect face to the wind.

The way they offhandedly called it a
boat
confirmed what I already knew. This house was prominent, rich, and the chief more powerful than I could understand. And no woman for him, no one to carry on the family line. Hildur’s comment—that there would be no real wife of this house until Brosa came home—began to make sense.

I asked why this wonderful brother hadn’t married already.

“Já, Child, there was a wife for Brosa,” Hildur told me with that pinched tone she used for half-forbidden, half-delicious subjects. I could hear the fiber slip through the hooks of our spindles. Sometimes I knew nothing about what things meant here. It was an open and honest and bright place, and I kept stumbling into pits of darkness that this lush grass was meant to hide.

“Esa died.” Kit finally said, matter of factly. “Birthing their son.”

“Oh.” A stunned answer. What else could I say to those two statements? To the grinding pain and dashed hope those words conjured?

Betta completed the miserable thought. “The babe died, too.”

Brosa had married the sister of Ageirr, a young farmer with adjoining land. Ageirr’s father once had a great holding, but he grew old and demented, until finally he sat useless and blank eyed as his farm suffered a quick decline. The marriage of Brosa and Esa was meant to save Ageirr’s remaining family. To dig them out of the mess their father’s illness left behind.

Their union merged Ageirr’s farm into Hvítmörk. A stroke of generosity and strategy, the marriage added to Heirik’s collection of followers. It was not far, Betta told me, raising her chin toward the horizon, and I wondered what vast distance she considered to be nearby.

Ageirr missed his sister Esa with an unseemly passion. Hildur told me that at night he sometimes walked in goat’s form and came to our house. He’d lean his head and horns against the grassy wall all night, right outside the pantry where Esa and Brosa had made their bed.

Brosa was sixteen then, the girl fifteen, “so beautiful like a breeze.” They were married only a year when she died. When Brosa returned from trading this fall, he’d be nineteen.

There were great gaps in the story, whole pieces submerged in sorrow. I was getting only the child’s version.

I glanced again at Magnus. If Heirik would have no son, couldn’t Brosa still have one?

As if she read my mind, Betta added. “Brosa wants no other wife.”

“That will change.” Hildur said with finality, and she cast a glance at her daughter. Svana blushed becomingly. “It’s too much of a waste.”

“And a man like that,” tisked Kit.

“Já,” Thora agreed, “light to the chief’s darkness. Da calls them the wolf pups.” Because of their father’s name, Ulf,
wolf
.

Heirik’s eyes came to mind, and they were quite wolfish. But similarity to any of a half dozen prophetic and fearsome animals could be found. A wolf’s eyes, a crow’s hair, the mane and elegance of a god’s steed. His black beard, his birthmark were of no consequence. Heirik was not dark. He was entirely lit by sun. What candle could Brosa hold to such a stunning older brother?

“If you squeeze her so hard, you’ll be at the sea in no time.”

Magnus, amused, watched me cling to the back of an old mare named Geirdis. The horse wanted to go somewhere, and she pulled her head side to side to loosen the reins. Magnus held them in his hand, up near her chin, and in the sonorous, loving voice these men reserved for horses, he called her Gerdi. I gripped her mane and tried not to clench her sides with my feet.

“Grab her with your legs only if you want to fly,” he told me.

“Já,” I told him. “As if I might ever want that.”

Under all my clothes, I was already sweating. Together with my apron, loose pants and ankle boots, I was a generous bundle of linen and leather. I melted from the effort and embarrassment of hoisting myself up onto the saddle—a primitive arrangement of two wooden boards that hung at Gerdi’s sides, hollowed slightly so my thighs fit into them. Iron stirrups swung like two curved raindrops. My toes reached to just barely grip them. The two boards were held together and slung over her back with leather straps, so there was no actual seat underneath me, just moving bone and muscle.