Beautiful Wreck (67 page)

Hár looked across the vast yard to Betta. Far down the hill with the children, she twirled, and her green skirt floated open like a trumpet flower. He looked with kind, thoughtful eyes. Then he shook his hand out once and grasped his knees, ready to get up and go back to work. With a deep breath he added, “I will not take his honor.”

I looked up sharply at the echo of Heirik’s words.
Leave me my honor.

“Child,” he said to me, so gently. “You must know that Heirik grieves.”

It was the first time I’d heard Hár use his name. The old man smiled. “He is trying to save you and all of us.” He looked around the yard and down into the valley, as if to measure what was saved, and it was impossible for me to tell whether he believed it himself. Then he added, “And he is a stubborn, stupid ass.”

GATHERING

After two weeks, the air all around the house came alive with an almost audible buzz. The exact kind of tension felt just before a bow-shot.

Brosa now went to the walls with Hár in the daytime, leaving me many hours without his warm protection. I tried to help with cooking, sewing, anything, and every time I touched a tool or bowl or spoon, Hildur would look up as though she could feel my intention, and she would hiss, “Rest, Girl. You’ve done enough.”

Instead, I walked outside for hours, wandering in the twisty birches or sitting at the top of the sheer drop to the ravine. I squatted down to look at flowers and mosses more closely than I ever thought possible. I collected bits of pumice, pretty white florets of lichen, feathers.

In the dying sun one night, Svana and Betta walked with me. Every time Svana’s pale hair and pink complexion came into view, I tensed and thought of her fingers, her hands, on Heirik. It drove me mad.

Now, we stood at our ravine, the one that I felt belonged to me and the chief. We gazed out over the twin waterfalls, Betta, Svana and I quietly standing together and listening to the rush, the two courses of water always meeting just before they hit the roiling surface.

We watched for a long while, each of us with our arms folded across our chests, as the light turned from pale sun to steel to navy blue. A velvet sky, spread out like a wing over our heads. Svana turned to me out of nowhere, her teeth flaring up tiny and white in the dusk, her words a sharp crack. “You cannot have every man in this family.” She walked away in a huff and sweep of skirts, one blond braid swinging out behind.

I turned to Betta, who had a hand clasped hard over her mouth, eyes wide. I ducked my head and laughed silently, too. But ice melted down my spine. She’d gotten past Heirik’s boundaries. I wondered what she was capable of, the little creature. And what she meant to do.

When the stubborn chief returned, he had ten more beastly men with him. More and more were coming along, gathering to go to the assembly, the Thing. He left them camping in the yard and spent his hours in his room, or gone off alone to the woods. He hardly met anyone’s eyes, least of all mine.

Men, women and children had arrived at our house by the dozens. Among them, Eiðr came with his older niece, but not Ageirr. He hadn’t shown himself since the fight on the sand.

By the day we left for the gathering, at least fifty of us set out together under a puff-clouded sky the blue of eggshells. Betta’s dream come true. We would camp three nights out under the stars, and ride four days to the Thing.

Down by the river that ran just below the house, I turned Drifa back to look up once more at its snug greenness, the strong slope of its roof and sturdy doors.

“I will be back,” I told the house, as if telling the dog to stay.

Early summer

The day stretched out long and lazy, and we rode with our cloaks thrown off in the sun.

The chief’s family rode ahead of the crowd, and so I was surrounded by Brosa, Betta, Hár, Magnus, Svana. The sweep of sky seemed to lift and pull us along, leading a great train of people and animals. I could smell and hear the moving feast that slowly ate up the ground behind us. Voices joined and writhed, sparked with shouts and jolts of laughter. Children’s cries and infants’ squalls. The mellow stink of ale carried on the breeze whenever it whipped my hair forward, and the reek of sweat and horses pressed against our backs.

Ahead of us, a vast wilderness opened wide and green. The rocky ground was lush with moss and complexly layered with white and copper lichens and tufts of spring grass, stretching farther than I could see until at last it disappeared in a cloud of ever-present mist. Framed against it all, Heirik rode out far ahead, facing the landscape alone and first. Every so often he would fall back to talk with his uncle or brother. Or Svana.

The few times he came near, she spurred her horse to meet him, a little fox cub at his heels. They would talk until he turned away.

Heading across the island to the meeting place, the route was different than our familiar byway to the sea. The rocks felt wrong under Drifa’s feet, and there were no stone sisters, only smaller cairns with different aspects.

“Bit-meyla.” I spat the words out loud, then looked around to be sure no one had heard me.
Biting little girl.
I felt so stupid, then, I pressed my forehead into my hand.

I couldn’t hear what she and Heirik talked about. Couldn’t hear anything but a sound like a savage ocean in my head.

On the second afternoon, we came to a tremendous valley, miles wide. It sprawled under the sun, fuzzed with spring grass and framed on either side by woods of short, ragged trees. I walked off far ahead with Brosa, and at his side Drifa and I dropped down into that endless lawn.

His boots rustled the ankle-deep grass, and the woods’ edge crackled with movement. Underbrush snapped and shivered. A pair of foxes lifted their heads as one and watched us pass. With a sudden harsh breeze, grass laid flat from our feet all the way to the horizon. Birds wheeled, threads of voices far up in the air. Snorts and hoofsteps, hundreds of them, moved behind us, always catching up yet never coming close.

Brosa walked beside Drifa and talked about boats. How long they should be, of what wood, how the planking should be layered. A good snekke had a keel ten men long. He drew the swoops and curves of hulls in the air and told me why each shape worked to slice the water, ride the whale road. The dragon’s eyes and mouth should be wide open, he told me, to eat up the waves and clear the way of spirits.

He told me about the beauty of light glancing off the water, and I thought the color of his own eyes captured the idea perfectly.

“I can see it, when you tell me,” I said, and he ducked his head, somehow shy after all.

Drifa matched his footsteps, keeping a slow and easy time. He told me more. About the nausea of a terrible storm, he and his crew near to death. The seething black water and freezing rain seemed impossible from where we stood now, in this warm, yellow light. He remembered the desolation of too many days afterward, not knowing if they were still on course. He spoke of the burning of frozen cheeks and cracked lips, the anguish of hunger, of not enough water. “The stink of the other fools in the boat, as you might imagine,” he said, glancing back at the army that followed us.

“Then there was a day when the raven flew farther ahead,” he said. “And there was home.”

He looked at me with plain happiness.

“And when I got home,” he said, in his way of turning everything into a bedtime story, “there was you.”

“I was a surprise, já?” I smiled.

“Not by the time I got to the house.” He laughed. “My brother took one minute to be sure I still lived, and then he told me about you. Many things about you. All the way from the sea to our back door.”

My laughter sounded like chimes in the crisp air, so light and happy I hardly recognized it.

“He talked of me?”

“Well, já,” he said, “for quite some time. I knew all about how you came to be found on the sand, how you cut an acre of grass, how bad you are at spinning thread. I knew about your voice, and your lovely blue lips.”

I closed my eyes and smiled, breathed in the whisper of a breeze laced with juniper smoke and ale. I felt Drifa move underneath me, her hips dipping to one side and the next, over and over, a confident and forceful little girl. Heirik’s gift to me, even before either of us understood how we felt.

“We’ll camp here,” Brosa said, and I opened my eyes to find I was at the center of an eddy, horses and people drawing up on every side, nosing around, milling, trying to stop for the night.

We camped in the lee of a rock at least six times my height. It loomed above our heads, encrusted with moss and copper lichens, and topped by a handful of scrawny birches. They looked black now, without a hint of green in the twilight.

Cozy inside my blankets, I lay hip to hip with Betta. No one slept near us, two weird women betrothed to important men. Clouds passed in front of the moon, obscuring its bright arc with swirls of gray and deep lilac. The light filtered through the birches’ stark fingers, and my eyes drifted shut watching it, closing once, then again.

“The chief thinks you will find your family,” Betta stated, waking me. “A husband you are lost from.”

“Nei,” I muttered. “He doesn’t.”

I spoke without thinking, the truth slipping out through sleepy lips. At first, she didn’t say anything in return, and I almost thought she might let it go, let the words dissipate, unquestioned. But not Betta.

“What do you hide from me?”

Her voice sounded flat, dampened by our hard bed. It seemed like a simple question, but I knew her and I felt the complexity in it. She didn’t mean just now. Her question was patient and old, and I wondered how long she’d seen a lie in me.

She was up on one elbow now, surveying me, and under her scrutiny, I hid. Out of habit, a trick developed at her own urging. I shielded my real self even as I turned under the covers to face her, and I dug in my heart and found one true thing I could tell her. Something that had been waiting behind my breastbone, ready to burst out one day. Now it did.

“I have lain with the chief.”

Betta’s face went blank.

She tilted her head like a housedog with a sore ear. She looked harder at me to try to find the joke, but I nodded. She continued to stare at me, with no wit, no chiding, no expression at all. Betta was always so easy-spoken, so funny and cutting. I felt a silly satisfaction at stunning her speechless.

“In his room?”

I laughed out loud like a joyful shout, amused that this was her question.