Beautiful Wreck (6 page)

In the dark, we arrived somewhere. Frightened, numb from the horse, I couldn’t walk or speak. The big man carried me. I heard muttered phrases, men’s clipped words, women’s voices like a flock of practical birds. “Found,” I heard in the odd Old Norse, “almost drowned” and “make room.” I felt a wooden bench against my back, a wool blanket dragged up and over my clammy clothes and body. I was asked my name.

“Jen,” I struggled to say. I was so, so tired, and my voice sounded small and hoarse.

A woman was holding my hand. Her face was tough but curious. With her smooth palm she petted me. “Ginn,” she said.

She was surrounded by the glow from a fire, and I looked beyond her to see more than a dozen faces, people crowding on benches that flanked a long room—so long I couldn’t see the end. It was the heartstone setting, but so much bigger than we’d designed it.

The characters were different, too. Swirls of smoke singed my eyes and when I choked, tears blurred their faces, but I could still see detail. Fear and curiosity alighted on each face in a different way as they considered me. And each pair of eyes was illuminated with a rich inner history that brought them to this moment. This was no Jiu Jitsu sim, and they weren’t playing house.

It felt real. Like I was really here, in Viking Iceland. But that wasn’t possible.

None of this was. The vivid stink of fish and horse and smoke, the long stretch of fairytale forest under an epic sky that changed with the hours, a far-reaching landscape that deepened into night. None of this could happen in the tank. And so I wasn’t in it, was I? Even as my mind refused to consider it, some small part of my heart knew it was true.

Iceland, circa 920

I choked into consciousness, my lungs on fire. A wave of smell washed over and into me, the stink of fire and wood and bodies. The berth was dark, and the bench beneath me bit into my hips. I could just about stretch my toes to the opposite wall. Concealed behind a pair of thin curtains, I was alone. But I remembered a bony body tossing next to mine, someone yanking on the wool cloaks, the low sound of female voices. “Shhhh, go to sleep.”

Now, a stack of folded blankets and sheepskins sat tidily against the wooden back wall, everyone gone but me. I pulled myself up to sit and lean into the corner. Strong smells made my eyes well up. I turned my head and pressed my cheek to the wood. These must be the scents of sap and bark, mixed with the familiar tang of metal from Morgan’s studio. Such small sips of air made my head throb.

I sluggishly tapped out and nothing happened.

My sleeve was different. A soft, fluffy underdress that wasn’t mine.

Jeff said smell was the most basic of the senses in terms of primal response, behavior, memory. Basic scents were achievable in the tank, but subtle and complex smells were beyond current programming capabilities. This dress smelled like soap and bright, glacial water. The scent of this wall flushed my body so strongly and specifically, opening up dark and sensual in my gut. The smell of dirt brought back moments from this morning. Memories of anemic park grass between my fingers. The glimpse of sun through angry swirls of skirts already felt like a million years ago.

This smell wasn’t emitted by the cold workings of a molecular generator. It was wood. I was in this world.

I looked around, but didn’t find a place to vomit.

Time still passed, which was impossible. The wrongness persisted—the vivid smells of birch and wool and sweat, the unknown characters and voices. The sound of words I didn’t design.

Some dwindling piece of my heart still believed I could tap out, despite the fact that this world could never exist in the tank. And so I tried again, and then I shook and cried. I cried silently, my forehead pressing tight into my palms, mouth open. I cried for home, for Morgan and Jeff, for safety. For facts inside my eyes, my contacts showing me how I could choose words, define them.

I cleared my eyes of tears and then blinked them on, but they didn’t respond. Nothing glowed or twitched, not one letter or fact. My dread became shapeless. The definition of the word itself and no more.

Then the chief’s voice was there. Outside the curtain.

He sat on the bench right outside and talked about a tool—a word for
earth cutter
. Another man spoke about how many, how sharp. The chief talked about how many walls, how far. Men’s thoughts and calculations. I sensed the heaviness of his body, so close I could feel the bench move when his hips shifted. I could have touched him, if I’d stretched out my arm.

Old Norse words were often round and thick, spoken with the cadence of a lullaby. Voices layered upon one another around the heartstone, phrases rising like questions. Then barks of joy pierced the softness. Clipped tones of irritation. No other language had its range, its ragged roughness and yet its capacity for melody and intimate murmurs.

I thought I’d immersed myself in this language. But I’d been playing at it. My god, I was hearing the real thing. I closed my eyes and drank in the chief’s voice. Hoarse like gravel sometimes, very grave, but something about it was good.

Feeling the solid weight of his body on that bench, I wanted things. I wanted to see the gestures that went with the words, to see peoples’ faces when they spoke. I wanted to go to the bathroom, wash my hair, eat. And I wanted to look at the chief again. I remembered every line and detail of his face from the sea. The high forehead, black waves of hair and dark angled brows, knifelike cheekbones, wolfish eyes. I raised my hand to lightly brush the curtain that divided us. I wondered what he was named.

The men left the house, and even through the curtain I could feel the sigh of readjustment in the way the women talked.

I sat up and stretched as best I could in the cramped space, and I seized with pain, a thousand needles and aches and pinches. I leaned into the wooden wall and groaned. My fingers tapped on my arm out of habit, but I wasn’t surprised nothing happened, nothing at all.

I lay my head against the wood and felt its scratchy surface snag my hair. I had no more ideas. I was just here.

“She needs to get out.” A woman was speaking. She said “the bath,” and something like “it will ease her.” The voice was soft but slightly hoarse, like the scratchy mane I’d clutched last night. A tiny lisp, no more than a push behind esses, so small that no one but me might notice. A formation of the mouth.

Someone drew the curtain aside and let in the light of a nearby torch and a strangling wave of smoke. Sun reached through a hole in the roof, enough so I could see her clearly. She placed her hand, slim and bony, palm down against the bench near my feet, and she looked at me with pale eyes. Quiet, but not hesitant.

She was younger than me, maybe by several years. It was hard to tell, because of the light, and because of her hair, both childish and severe. It was pulled tight in two French braids that gripped her head like talons. They made her angular features stand out, accentuated in the lamp light. Nose straight and prominent, high cheekbones, chin like a point. But her lips were full and rounded, a soft mouth for such a sharp face.

After a moment, she moved her hand farther into the alcove, as if gentling an animal in a cage. It was easy to let her come all the way in. She folded herself like a wading bird, all arms and legs. It was simple to let her sit with her knees drawn up just a few feet away.

“I am Betta,” she told me. The rich, smoky voice I’d heard outside the curtains now came from those lips, a sensual surprise. She smiled, and her teeth were just a little too big for her mouth. Somehow it softened everything, gawky and charming.

I smiled too, and breathed in a rush of smoke. The air burned going down. I croaked hello. Mutual intelligibility, I thought. If people who speak different versions of a language can equally understand each other.

She focused on my mouth, eyes intent and curious, and I wondered if she’d never seen anyone with a gap in their teeth. Her hand twitched in her lap, as though she wanted to reach out and test me. As if where language failed, her fingers could find out what I was. She wasn’t afraid of openly observing.

“You’re scared,” she said. Everything was stated matter of factly.

She couldn’t know how deep my fear went, spiraling down inside me like a funnel of dark birds. Varieties of fear. I was insane, definitely. And stranded, abducted by realists? Stuck forever in some twilight of the tank? Or not. Afraid to admit it, my gut knew what was true. I was twelve hundred years from where I began.

The shaking started again, and I drew five pounds of wool and fur up around me.

“You have no need to be,” she told me. “The farm is green now. It’s summer, já?” She looked at my blankets, then reached for one and very slowly drew it away. “You need to come outside and breathe.”

Breathing! The idea of fresh air came to me as if from a long ago story. I’d forgotten about it. There would be clear air outside the house. Air and sun and light. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait. I needed it. Tears sprang up, and I nodded, already gulping for it, singeing my lungs.

Betta slid to the edge of the alcove and opened the curtains all the way. “Let’s see if you can walk.” Her strong fingers closed on mine, and she helped me out of bed and into the house.

I stepped into a Viking dollhouse, lit by two dozen lamp fires that twinkled and flared along the walls.

Benches stretched far away to my right, scattered with gray and white furs and sheepskins, their ends disappearing into the dark, limitless longhouse. In the firelight, the benches and walls were colored in butter and copper. Outside the reach of the small flames, they shifted into shades of rust, plum and darkest brown shadows.