Beautiful Wreck (50 page)

Heirik carried me the last part of the way, on his back, as if I weighed nothing. The snow was not quite up to his knees, the sky calm and star-struck. He walked easily, maybe suffused as I was with the great strength of possibility. I held on to him and our four skið. He felt like a horse under me, bone and muscle moving steadily, calmly, untiring.

I never would have found the house. It was no more than a gentle roll in the land, a nondescript hill, though once we came close I noticed the pale smoke climbing weakly, mixing with the gray dawn, the same color. The light time was beginning for the day, the five or six hours when the sun almost rose, reaching and not quite making it to the horizon.

I felt born to hold onto Heirik. And yet, gods, I was ready to get down! Relieved when we reached the house, I dropped the skið heavily and slid down off his back. He turned to me, and even as we both shivered, frozen through, we still could not go in.

He seemed emboldened by the night, and he pressed me up against the stiff, cold grass of the house. He planted a hand against the house and leaned over me, and I waited for his kiss. But he hesitated.

“Undra min,” he said, so softly I could have missed it.
My surprise.
Then he looked away into the night, considering something unseen. He looked back at me, paused. And then all his boldness and grace dissolved.

“Ginn,” he started, his voice broken, and then he stopped, closed his eyes and waited until it seemed he could speak again. “Jul is soon,” he said. The holiday feast? He confused me so often, with so few words. “I want you by me.” He closed his eyes. “I want—”

The door closed with a muffled thump, and we both turned.

Someone had been there.

GOD-MAKER

Peaceful morning came. I sat up in my bed and drew the curtains open, then rested with my knees drawn up and simply looked out. The house looked pretty, wintry and cozy, with furs all around. The roof was open and a fire burned today, cheerful and strong, not just smoking embers and hot rocks. The murmur of voices grew and resolved into words.
Hemline
and
fish
and
fool
. I watched Betta counting out bound stitches to Lotta, who sat pressed to her side, nodding seriously. One of her chubby baby fingers poked at the stitches. Ranka sat right next to them binding a sock, such a bigger girl already.

Heirik had been angry when he heard that door close last night. Just a couple hours ago. It ripped us from a dream, destroyed a fragile moment between us.

He left me in an elegantly silent fury, gone into the house, but he didn’t find anyone there.

Then we went to our beds, he to his and I to mine. Not angry, nei. Frustrated. Wanting more. We would figure this out tomorrow. And now the day had broken, and it could start to happen.

Thinking of his words about the Jul festival, my heart felt light and skittery like a beach bird. I want you by me. His voice was tangled with the words, nervous, urgent. Only later, dreaming of him before my eyes closed on the last hours of night, did I figure it out. He didn’t mean he just wanted me near him at the party. He wanted me beside him on the high seat. His wife. He was asking.

The house breathed with me, and it was calm and lovely, flickering fire, braided girls, strong, playful men. Lamps gave more light to the work, and a soft scent of rosemary rose from a few where precious bits of herbs had been added. My house dog panted under the bench across from mine, dirty paws sticking straight out.

For a shining moment, all of it was mine.

“Child!” Hildur called to me, snapping me out of my reverie. “Butter and fish.” She held her iron ring of keys out rudely, arm extended, waiting for me to get up out of my blankets and come to her. Butter and fish. Any one of six people were sitting closer and could have helped.

One more morning. It wouldn’t help to argue now. With a taste of defiance in my throat, I climbed out of bed and went to the pantry.

I turned the biggest key over in my hand before I slid it into the lock. It had an iron shaft, as long as my fingers and palm, that twisted and curved into three big teeth on one end. Tiny dents pounded all over formed a twining design. It was warm. Hildur had sat by the fireside all morning, and it held the heat of her skirts, her body, but soon it would be mine. I rubbed my thumb over the curves of its decorative swirls, and I thought about Heirik so close in the next room. Wondered when he would come to me.

Bringing butter to the hearth, I felt something underfoot. A toy? In a dream, I saw the butter flung out from my hands, the dry strips of fish flying up and ever so slowly floating down, caught in a moment between joy and horror. And I fell—arms outstretched like a lost lover—into the flames.

Hands and skirts thrashing, I felt people pulling at me, up out of the fire, into cool arms. Someone drew me close, drew my head back to look in my eyes. They called for Bjarn. Pain came seconds later, the side of my face, left arm, hand exploding.

I yelled for Heirik. I screamed for him, and when he didn’t come I shrieked, “Where is he?!!” Pain clawed up my throat. Breathing was too hard, and I struggled with it. I heard him, finally, and even his voice couldn’t stop this. I reached for him, desperate.

“Leave the house,” he said, in the voice of the chief.

Dresses rustled, children cried, doors closed. He was behind me then, his body big and snow-cold against my back, his arms came up around me, holding and rocking, talking low in my ear. “Litla,” he said, “Shhhh.” He pressed my unharmed shoulder tight to his body, trying to gentle and calm me.

My mind lit for a second on each of a string of simple things. Pain, hands, tears on my face. Heirik. Just him, not even the man but him as a spirit, a thing. Lullaby words,
hush, hush
. The implacable flames that still burned in front of me, orange and mean, gray closing on all sides.

I woke in misery. The hearth fire was in my blood, eating my skin. I looked at my arm, expecting to find it swarming with biting insects or angry spirits. It was flung out at my side, expertly wrapped in linen from my elbow down to my stinging fingertips. The sparking pain there was almost a comfort. I still had fingers.

I would not touch my face.

“Ginn,” Betta’s voice came clear and low. She petted my unhurt arm, steady and assuring. She spoke over her shoulder to someone else. “Tell the chief she is awake.”

I closed my eyes again. I felt him there, suddenly, his weight shifting the bench, his scent coming near.

“Hello, Litla,” he said. “You are here.” His fingers were light on the arc of my brow. Now I thought of it as his sweet habit, a favorite way of touching me, hand to bone. It made me smile, and the smile turned to pain.

I tried to laugh through it. “I am not small, you know.”

He laughed too, silently, and continued to brush his fingers across the unhurt part of my forehead.

“Já, well, I am not handsome.”

So there we were.

Bjarn came and broke up the moment. He held something about as long as my hand and wrist, smooth, ivory-colored and hollow.

“The bone of a wreck, Herra,” he said. A beached whale—a gift from the gods. Heirik took the bone shard and examined the markings on it.

“They stand uncurved,” the chief agreed somberly, then took the bone and tucked it in the blankets by my side.

He just sat with me for a while, his hand now resting on my hip, pressing steadily to gentle me. He kept the pain down. His presence, and an odd sense of tingling life that came from the bone resting against my ribs. When the pain in my skin clawed and scraped, the whisper of the whalebone and Heirik’s words, the soft surety of his touch, all mingled and covered me and made the pain bearable.

I would bear it, já. For weeks after that. And every day felt as long as a lifetime, knowing I had lost him.

Midwinter

Heirik would stay by me through all time, he said, but we could not be lovers. “Too many times, you have been hurt after holding me,” Heirik told me. “I can’t risk hurting you again.”

There was no worse pain he could have inflicted than those words. They made my chest tight, made me clutch my stomach alone in the night. But they weren’t surprising words. I’d known they were coming from the moment I woke in bandages, when he looked at me with such sad, caring eyes, regret rising off him as thick as smoke. He’d sat by me, and his fingers had traced the contours of my face. Now I realized he’d been memorizing me. Already saying goodbye.

He didn’t leave the house and go to the cave like I thought he might. He checked on me every day. But he always stood back, looking serenely objective to anyone but me. I saw his hesitance, as if a single touch would complete the job and burn me to a pile of dust.

Other than those gloomy moments with Heirik, I had a perverse need to stay by the fireside. I sat, linen wrapped around my head, ugly as a monster. Unable to sew, just staring for long periods. Betta would come talk to me, wrap a blanket around me like an invalid, and tell me little stories about goddesses and elves and what it would be like to go to the great meeting in the west.

Each day, Bjarn changed the bandages on my hand and face. I knew when he took me outside, he would apologize and then scrape at my wounds. The pain seared away all thought, and words died in the sensation. I felt every swipe of rough cloth, felt the bones of Betta’s hand ready to break in my grip. Bjarn would pour soothing honey and herbs on me, and glance nervously around, searching for someone. Did the chief watch him?

On the fifth day, Heirik did come, and he loomed over us while Bjarn peeled the bandages back and inspected my hand. The chief leaned so gracefully against the house, his everyday ax hanging lightly in his hand, looking just the way he had when I fell in love with him—dark and forbidding and decorated with blades. In the distance, I noticed Ranka peeking around the corner of the house, everyone watching.

Bjarn looked at my palm, my wrist, and he swallowed hard. “It is good,” he stated, then let out a long breath.

Heirik turned away for a moment, looking up the hills. Then he leaned his ax against the house, turned to nod at Bjarn and smile at me with a brilliant, warming smile—the sweetest since my accident.