Beautiful Wreck (59 page)

Long parallel ridges widened over the massive hump of its middle and tapered at its tail. They called a beached whale a wreck, and I saw the reflection of a destroyed boat in its body. The proportions and graceful lines exactly like a Viking ship, its proud hull lying vanquished and upturned. Its ribs hauled up dumbly on shore.

But wreck was not a word of devastation or loss. It was a poetic and tender word in the old language. Something carried by the waves, given to the sand. A gift.

A gust of wind lifted Drifa’s hair and mine and the stench came, overwhelming and rotten. Acid leapt to the back of my throat, and the smell of an astounding hunk of dead meat. I choked and doubled over from the physical blow, and Drifa had to shuffle and dance to catch us. When no bile came up, I sat tall and let Drifa make her way to the beach.

Despite the smell, I needed to get close. I needed to see this thing that had come to lie on the sand, to be found and consumed by this family.

True to her name, Drifa floated down the slope, moving with the laze of loose snow on a breeze. She didn’t stop until her nose almost touched the giant animal. She sniffed at the whale, had almost no reaction but a quick shake of her mane, then began to slowly walk down its length as if to give me a personal tour.

So close, the whale obliterated all other thought or impression. Half the size of the house in all dimensions, blotting out the sky as my horse and I ambled its length. It was higher than me, even as I sat on Drifa’s back. I touched a finger to it and slowly drew a line in the slime on its belly. The whale’s skin felt both rough and slick at once, with short bristly hairs poking out here and there. I stood fascinated, in the shadow of its once-majestic body, feeling it begin its long slide into dust. An incredible creature. I thanked the waves for sending it.

A hand clasped my leg, not roughly, but it startled me.

“A little help?”

Sitting on Drifa, I was well above Brosa’s head. I looked down at him questioningly, but he had turned his back to me and was lifting and gathering his hair. He’d pressed a leather tie into my palm. I swallowed with surprise. I had become so used to avoiding touch, this intimate request made me uneasy and a little breathless. It seemed casual enough, even offhand, but it left a fluttering in my belly.

I gathered his long hair in my hand and wrapped it with leather. It was rough and wavy and smelled pleasantly like juniper and smoke. Not the choking fumes of the heartstone, but an outdoor fire. A wild and spicy scent that could just manage to distract me from the nearby whale if I leaned in close enough to his curls. I naturally touched his shoulder to let him know I was through. It felt softer, not as lean as Heirik’s.

“Takk,” he turned to me and smiled.

Before this, I had always looked up to his sea green eyes. From above they were different. I could detect the gold flecks in them, the kin of his brother’s.

“You might want to get away now.” He planted a long stick in the ground, and a giant blade gleamed perilously close to his face. He grinned. It was a big scythe handle—made for the tallest man—fitted with a mean, long cutting edge.

I still looked at him, realizing that I’d been completely mute this whole time.

“We’re about to cut the level.”

I didn’t know what it meant, but I didn’t want to be near.

“Já, okay,” I said, brilliantly. I turned Drifa and we tripped lightly away.

Down the beach, women gathered like shore birds, and I half expected them to scatter when I rode into their midst. Instead they just turned to look past me, from where I’d come. I turned around too, pulling Drifa up short. Brosa had stabbed the blade deep into the whale’s skin near the tail. He and another man were putting their considerable strength into the scythe handle, very slowly and steadily cutting a line parallel to the sand. Two men followed behind and put all their weight into pulling the slippery wound together, keeping tension on the skin. They were splitting the whale horizontally.

The animal was already dead, but there was something cruel about cutting into it so deliberately and dispassionately. It would have been more humane, somehow, to attack it with spear and ax. At least it would have met a glorious end, not this cold surgery.

About a third of the way along the underside, a mass of gigantic pink intestines emerged. They billowed out gracefully at first, then sagged to the ground. The pink tubes looked to be as big around as Hár’s thighs, and the whole pile was taller than Brosa, who deftly ducked out of the way. Steam filled the air around the rent in the body. The whale had died so recently, and was so well insulated with blubber, it still held pockets of heat.

The smell traveled far down the beach, even more revolting.

I dropped lightly to the ground and opened my pack. The organized and grassy nests of the egg cartons seemed a world apart. Their orderly lines and hay-like scent were a haven, daylight amidst a nightmare of dead innards. I breathed deeply of their dusty sweetness.

“I need to take a walk,” I told no one in particular, and I absently handed Drifa’s reins to one of the girls and walked away.

Just a short way down the beach, I came to a maze of eerie, gigantic rocks. The sight struck up a soft pounding in my chest. So familiar.

When I’d first woken on this black sand, I’d seen rocks of all sizes stretching in the distance. I knew—though I couldn’t really remember—that these were some of them. I’d been right here, I thought, dipping the toe of my boot into the moist ground and making a little impression that immediately filled halfway with water. I’d lain near these very rocks, but without the strength or sense to even see their bizarre attraction.

The smallest was twice my height, and it joined to another, larger rock to make a slick, gray arch for me to duck under. I went through and explored a gallery of several more.

Rounded and massive rocks, they looked like benignly big, lumpy monsters. The shaggy seaweed that grew all over them completed the image of beasts, slumping toward the sea. Seaweed looked like hair, shimmering in coppers and slimy greens. Here and there what might have been one house-high rock had split into two who almost touched, seemed to bump noses. I had the impression that though they seemed stationary, the beasts actually moved in a slower timeframe, so slow I couldn’t apprehend it.

The ocean’s sound rushed and echoed around inside the rock maze. Birds like dots swooped far overhead, their cries just audible above the water’s din.

Some rocks were undercut with elf-high tunnels, obviously carved by a brutal force of water, still oozing mud from the last high tide.

It was coming in again. The darkest midnight water, iced with a pure white reflection of sunlight on its surface. It crept closer, and when I turned to look back, the entrance to the rock world looked far away. The tide came faster now with each surge. I skirted the foam and tried to stay up high and away. I gripped my dress in my two fists and started immediately back.

I heard a shout and looked up to see Betta, far up on a plateau above the beach, what seemed like a hundred feet above me. She waved, speck-like against the sky. I saw a couple other women there, too, not faces, but the shapes of skirts in motion, silhouetted against white clouds. I looked around for the way up and saw a gentle climb across some boulders, that wound around to the top. I climbed until I met them up there, and breathless with the effort, I came close enough to the edge to look down on the scene below.

The thralls had set up a half dozen A-frame tents, the ones we’d used at Jul, and they looked like little play-houses. The red threads running through their fabric lit up against the beige and gray of the landscape. I could see children running around and women carrying things, moving things, indistinct from up so high. I could see the men, teeming around the whale. They seemed so small.

When the shouts came, our heads all whipped up like a startled flock, and we moved toward the edge of our high plateau. I crawled on hands and knees to the very edge to see what was happening.

The otherworldly rocks I’d wandered among, the ones that glistened at low tide, had enticed a child to climb. The tide was coming in fast now, and he was stuck.

My chest spasmed with fear. I remembered how those elf-high caves looked, carved into pure rock by the force of this sea. At high tide, they would be boiling with seawater, waves seeking their way in and then exploding high into the sky.

More memories came, darker ones, from many months ago. The water dragging at my boots, my skirts, the bone-crushing cold.

Brosa had said what? That a grown man could survive two minutes before losing his will, less than ten before death. But never a little boy. He would be dashed. The foaming and crashing would eat him alive, too small to swim against the surf, too thin to withstand the cold.

From where I crouched I could just see that it was Áki, no more than three or four years old. He scrabbled on his hands and knees on top of the slimy rock, and I imagined his panicked tears. Over the surf, I could barely make out words, bleak and small. People yelled, “Don’t move!” I heard Heirik calling, “No time for a boat.” I found him in the mess of people, and saw that he was shouting to Brosa, waving to him. He caught his brother’s eye, nodded to him, and then the chief waded into the deadly ocean.

Heirik was in the water too long, trying to reach Áki.

I looked down and watched him swim to the slick rock, saw him talking to the boy, probably gentling him, trying to climb up to him, but with each attempt Heirik slid back into the sea. I stretched out on my stomach so I could see over the edge of the cliff. I saw his dark hair fanned out in the water, his heavy clothes dragging down. My lungs filled tight against the ground, my head dizzy from breathing along with Heirik, willing him to reach the boy, wishing them back to shore.

He’d stopped trying and began to just float alongside the big rock, and I wished I’d been counting the minutes. Was it two now? More? Then I saw what Heirik was thinking, I hoped. He was waiting as the waves came higher and nearer, waiting for the water itself to take him to the boy. He was so close.

Time moved too fast, seconds bleeding away, and yet the waves grew too slowly. I swore I could feel Heirik’s focus shift and dissipate. He held his body differently, giving it up to the cold, slipping away though I willed him to stay. I imagined his thoughts slowing, suspended, not focused on what his loss would mean to anyone, just on that little boy. On keeping his own eyes open one more second, then one more.

Into the eerie scene, a wind came whistling hard and pressed me down into the dirt and grass. My own viewpoint seemed to draw back and away, and from my high perch, I watched Heirik begin to die.

Then a wave raised him close enough, and in a heartbeat he grabbed Áki, pulled him close, and swam for shore. I stood and watched them reach the beach. And like an arrow released from a bow, I ran.