Beautiful Wreck (66 page)

“Já, I know.” He spoke into my dress. Resigned, but hopeful too, in the admitting of it.

I told Brosa, “You can’t replace him, either.” And it was good to hear it out loud between us. “It’s okay. You’re beautiful for trying.”

He smiled, comfortable against me, his eyes still closed.

“What has my brother done, then?” He asked me, with a wicked smile. “Enchanted you?”

I laughed out loud, a scattering of sound. The thought of Heirik bewitching me was somehow funny.

Then I thought of the ravine and what had happened there the first time Heirik and I were ever alone together. He’d walked toward me with such intensity, and I’d backed away in fear, yet by the time we climbed the hill back home, I was lost in love. Even without my knowing it. I thought of how he’d taken me to the woods and I’d been thoroughly seduced. Not far from here, he had first called me Litla. I suddenly felt my love for Heirik as if it were a live thing. An animal, not far away, watching me and what I’d just done with Brosa.

I breathed deeply of the green and brown smells of night, and I had no answer. I leaned back into the stout wall, and Brosa snuggled into my lap, and we did fall asleep, for a while.

Little bits of sticks and grass stuck everywhere in our clothes and hair. We stood outside the door of the house and I dusted off Brosa’s shoulders. I ran my fingers through his beard and the hair that fell around his face. He inhaled deeply and held his breath for a moment.

“Careful, Woman.” He stopped my hand and held it to his cheek. “You’ll find yourself up against a wall again.” He grinned and picked a twig from my hair.

He confused my heart, messed it all up. Admitting he didn’t love me, knowing I would never replace his wife, but still insisting on marrying me. And playfully offering to take me like animals against this grassy house.

“You and I are over,” I told him with a smile, a kind but insistent hand against his chest, pushing him away.

“Turn around,” he told me. “Put your hands on the house.”

The sod was cool and yielding under my hands. He brushed me down, starting at the nape of my neck. He stopped along the way to pick out debris. The scratchy wool dress attracted every kind of grass, twig or bit of dirt. When he reached the curve of my buttocks, he brushed a little slower, easier, cupping me in one hand, and I swore I wouldn’t let anything start again.

Then he smacked me good and declared me fit to go inside. I turned, put my hands against his chest to laughingly push him away, and he grabbed the back of my head. He kissed my forehead. Sweet and familiar, like an old married couple, I thought, and then shivered.

“It’s a little cold, já?” A word for
triflingly chilly
, nothing at all to speak of. I felt it come from deep in his chest, where my palm rested. “We can go in.”

“Just a second.” I wanted to count every star, say goodnight to every one, before going back inside to smoke and body odor and my sad little bed where I dreamt of other, different futures.

The air moved, clear and delicious around us. I looked back at the sweep of the spring night sky, and there came three girls out of the dark, as though they’d sprung like land spirits from the cool valley. Dalla, Thora, Svana having a walk before bedtime. I wasn’t sure how much they’d seen of our affectionate grooming, but they surely found Brosa and me in an embrace. I felt caught, guilty for enjoying him. It wasn’t right to enjoy him.

He let me go so he could hold the door with exaggerated gallantry, winking at Dalla. Hár’s daughters smiled sweetly as they went by. When Svana passed into the house, though, her eyes burned inside a cold and lovely face.

Lotta turned four years old.

On her day, she sat cross-legged in the grass, and we did her hair in spirals and a flower crown. She bent over obediently, staring into the heart of a plucked flower the color of an egg yoke. Lotta offered her ash blond hair to Betta to comb, and it fell all around, slippery straight, so silky, it kept escaping from Betta’s fingers. And Betta, whose bony hands were always competent and sure, kept dropping and losing the strands. She swore under her breath. A bitter, perfect compound phrase somewhat like
shaggy-headed skirt chaser
. She sounded a lot like Hár, and I smiled but hid it from her.

Her hands started to tremble as she picked up Lotta’s hair again and spoke to me, her words focused at the house, beyond the little girl’s head.

“He is sorry now that he asked for me. He made a mistake.”

Betta dropped Lotta’s hair, defeated, and thrust her chin into the breeze, looking far down the valley, a tear on one cheek. Lotta lifted her head, but didn’t get up and run away. She waited and listened in that way of little children, invisible, absorbing everything. She twirled the wildflower.

“He takes me with his eyes, fiercer than ever,” Betta pulled on a clump of grass. “But he has not walked with me, ridden out with me. He wants me,” she ripped the chunk of grass out savagely. “But not as wife.”

Hár had been staying as far from Betta as the house would allow. I’d seen it clearly myself and wondered about the endless tours of the walls with Magnus that kept them away for whole days, until hunger drew them home.

“Do you think he’ll take the offer back?” She looked directly at me, wanting a straight answer, but also desperately craving assurance. “Pay it off?”

My brows drew together in confusion.

Oh.
She thought Hár would pay her father, to dissolve the contract that had just been struck. She really thought so. Tears waited, ready in the half moons of her lower lids.

“Have you lost your mind, Woman?” I asked.

She pursed her lips, and it seemed she really wasn’t sure. Couldn’t even understand what I meant. I’d noticed it before—her second sight didn’t work at all when it came to her own heart. To Hár.

“Betta.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what he does all day. But the way he looks at you. I have never seen a man’s heart so exposed.”

Lotta turned her little blond head over her shoulder and asked, “Is he Grandda?” She flipped the flower over and back, loosening the petals.

“Já, Child,” I answered her. “Your Grandda is going to marry Betta soon,” I admonished Betta with my eyes, “and be her husband forever.”

Lotta nodded gravely. “Will there be a party?”

I told her já, and I took over braiding her hair. I wove a story about a big party with songs, and honey in her milk. Grandda would have a shiny sword, and there would be a pretty crown for Betta and snowblooms and she would ride in on a horse. She would look like a handmaiden of a beautiful goddess.

I heard Betta sniffling. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pick her own flower and slowly, carefully pluck the petals off. She gathered them in her lap, like drops of sun against her linen skirt. I could feel her relief like a great cloud clearing and letting the warmth in, bathing our skin. I stole a glance at her face, and she was smiling just a little. She might not believe me entirely, but she was okay.

The bandage was just unwieldy enough to drive Har insane, as he tried to change it himself, one-handed. He sat, grumbling, on a big upturned log, one of the few in the yard that would accommodate him. A bowl of soapy water and a pewter cup cowered at his feet.

I watched from the shadows of the door as he tried to untie the bandage, then tried again and growled louder. He stood, picked up his ax from where it gleamed in the grass. He turned to face the big log, and with a controlled rage he hacked it neatly in two.

I stepped from the doorway and shielded my eyes from the sun, walked up to him and with my full five feet and three inches I ordered him. “Sit.” I gestured with my chin at the next biggest log in the yard, and he went to it. I took the sudsy bowl on my hip, the cup, which held clear water, in my hand. There was a small cup of honey, too, and new cloth.

I knelt in front of him and worked slowly on his hand, wondering how I could start to ask. Why was he ignoring Betta? I didn’t know how to begin, and so the silence grew. He dropped a statement into it. An answer to a different unasked question.

“I could not watch the sons of my brother,” he said. “Watch their stupidity, and not act.”

He stopped then and lifted his eyes to me, and they were apologetic. But he didn’t back down from what he needed to say. “I couldn’t watch her go to another man.” He looked far down the hill at Betta, where she played with his granddaughter, tossing a flower at her. He seemed to forget about me. “I love her too much.”

This love was a word I’d never heard before I came here. It didn’t appear in any of the sagas or poems and certainly not the legal documents—the words that were used and kept in public. It was private, unwritten, and I could tell in a heartbeat what it meant. A gorgeous mix of sounds and words,
cherish, want, take
all turned into a single verb. It melted my insides with the thrill of an unknown word and the depth and resonance of his voice as he gave it to her from afar. I love her, he’d said. Too much.

Suddenly I felt very, very angry at Heirik, and it came out like a black wave at Hár. I yanked on the bandage too hard, and spat my words at him. “Then where are you all day?”

He stared at me, completely blank.

“Why don’t you show her? Ever since the coast—”

I stopped myself. After all my help with their clandestine meetings through the long winter, I felt comfortable with Hár. But I was snapping at the one man who had admitted his true feelings and expressed them in a proposal based only on love.

I tried for gentle curiosity. “Why do you ignore her?” I took a palmful of soapy water and bathed his hand.

“Her father.” Hár winced at the burning soap. “He sits like a hawk on a branch.”

I laughed out loud. He glared at me, but I laughed some more. It was too good and too easy. Relief passed through me like a tremendous, delicious wind.

I dropped my eyes so I could hide my giggles, and I watched as the bloody runoff from his wound turned the bowl pink. Staring at the swirling colors, I tried to hide my continuing laughter, but my shoulders shook quietly. I couldn’t stop thinking about this prepossessing man thwarted by Betta’s weak, simpy Da. This patriarch, father of thirteen, reduced to a love-stricken, horny teenager.

“But …” How could I say it kindly? Bjarn wasn’t even a man, fully. He was a thrall, and Hár had a right to marry his daughter without even asking. Yet, Hár feared him? It was impossible. “… Bjarn?” His name was nearly swallowed as I tried to contain a little more mirth.

I dipped my fingers in golden honey, and it was silky, with a promise of tenacious stickiness to come. It smelled like late summer as I applied it to Hár’s wound. He sucked in air and gave me an evil glance.

“Já, well, since I asked for marriage, he has grown a backbone.”

I smiled and tried to be gentler. Tried to imagine how Betta would handle these beloved, damaged hands, with their promise of protection and pleasure. Hár saw Bjarn as a father, who had dreams for his daughter, no matter how far-fetched they had once seemed.

“I’m sure you could persuade Bjarn to let you take a walk with your betrothed.” I tied a final knot in clean linen.

“Nei,” he sighed, contemplating his fresh bandage as if his hand were new to him, and inconsequential. “He is protecting his daughter. For a man such as Bjarn, it is the greatest moment in his life.”