Beautiful Wreck (80 page)

She smiled.

“From when?” she asked, and her teeth stood out big and white in the lamplight. Before I could answer, she also asked, “And can you stay this time?”

“Já,” I said, sure of it. “I’m home now.” I told her about the day during haying, when I first knew I didn’t want to go. And then I started to tell her everything. I began with the day I arrived. “I woke on black sand,” I said, and she settled in to listen.

Betta took care of things, and I stayed with Heirik all night. I sat beside him and tried to spin. I talked with him in low tones, telling him stories of my glacier, and of the island, the way I knew it before Hvítmörk. All the good parts. Coffee and pillows and fighting you could enjoy without anyone having to die. The oranges he could try when he woke up. I knelt at his bedside and pleaded with him to wake up, my forehead pressed hard into his shoulder, my body shuddering. I crawled in with him and slept, and when I woke I felt him breathing under my cheek, and I had the sensation that we were normal, husband and wife waking to start the day. But I was the only one who got up.

I cared for him, cleaned him. I washed his wounds with linen soaked in honey water, careful not to break the raw, seared skin.

I thought about going with him into death. When it finally came, would I be brave enough to go? He was a chieftain, but not the epic kind who ruled like a king in Norway or Sweden. Just here in the small world of our island. Would they push him away on an elegantly curved, flaming boat nonetheless?

I pictured his belongings surrounding him, his ax and bracelets and glass cups. I looked to the chest in the corner, where he kept precious things, and a thought came to me slowly, just a wisp of smoke at first. I let my mind wander to the worst scenario, his possessions laid out in the boat that I’d seen tied up past the fishing camp. Beloved items, his father’s knives, mother’s furs. And a small wooden box.

It looked exactly like the one in the archives, on the screen, only new. Just made a few dozen years ago, rather than twelve hundred. About two hands across, its doors closed with a dragon’s-head clasp, it waited among the furs in the chest.

The box felt warm inside its nest, and I lifted it out like a perfect egg.

I knew what was inside. In the frigid future, I’d clung to the image of this box and its diary, the proof that at least a few settlers had written about their own lives, far before the sagas. I assumed it was just something lost to the years, obscure but possible.

Now I knew better, having lived here. No woman on a Viking farm could have kept that diary. No woman here could write. Except me.

I looked to Heirik where he slept, raven hair against cool linen. The formidable chieftain with precious metal eyes, sleeping, reckless as a child. His wife wrote the diary. And in it, she told of so many things that hadn’t happened to us yet. Moments still to come. That woman, the writer, had a future with her dark-haired man. He was alive.

My fingers touched lightly over the lock. With sure hands, I dug deeper in the trunk and found the key.

The book looked so clean and new, the birch bark soft the way I always knew it would feel under my fingertips. The first three pages were scratched with dates and trades, the hash marks and awkward notes I knew so well. And then came blank pages. Nine of them.

In the box lay a few slender bones, hollow and finely sharpened, just like Brosa said. I picked up the priceless vial of ink that lay next to them, and it fit into my palm. I laid these things out on the small table.

“Everyone settled,” I started to write.

I thought of how the diary looked in my contacts, and I made the shapes by hand. My words as powerful as the runes on a healing bone. Someday, I would teach him all the letters, and he could write me a love poem.

A knock came at the door, and Brosa filled the doorway.

He looked like a beaming bear, dressed in a work shirt, sleeves pushed back and crusted with mud. He’d wiped his hands on his pants, but they were still brown with dirt. He brought a gust of fresh air in with him, a waft of grass and sun, and I squinted as if he himself were radiant. How long had I been sitting here, with the edge of the bed biting into my thigh, my hand on Heirik’s chest? How long since I’d seen the sky? A night and a day and into the next evening, I thought. I couldn’t remember.

“How is he?” Brosa asked.

“Sleeping,” I reported. “No change.”

Brosa took just one step into the small room and looked from there, seeming to assess his brother and then settling his gaze on me.

“It’s shining outside,” he said. “You should come.”

“I …” I tried to imagine sunshine, tried to picture myself walking in it ever again.

I hardly knew how to speak, how to encompass everything I felt for Brosa. Here he stood, this brave and tender man who had been willing to put behind what he loved, put the sea and wind and the lure of other lands behind him, to stay here at Hvítmörk and marry me, give me a good life.

“I am sorry,” I said, my voice cracking, my hand reaching for him.

With alarm, he came to kneel at my feet and take my hands. “Nei, Woman! Why?” His nails were filled with dirt.

“You would give up everything for me,” I said, barely rasping the words out, but I lifted my head finally. “And I turned from you in a heartbeat.”

He looked up at me with those sparkling, sea-green eyes. “You told me that you would hurt me.” Then he winked and his broad smile came. “You are close to my heart,” he said. “You’ve given me the greatest gift any woman could. You love my brother.”

I ducked my head. He was always so generous and good.

“I heard you,” I told him, brushing tears from my face. “When you spoke with Heirik at the Thing. You told him I would become yours now.”

“Ahhh,” he said, something beginning to make sense. “Já, well, you must have missed the rest of that conversation,” he said ruefully.

“The rest?”

“My brother said nei,” he sighed, “and tried to take my arm off.” Brosa looked down at his wrist and shook his hand out. “I reminded him it was not my idea.”

He laughed, but I was quiet, my breath suspended.

“He was sick with love-grief,” Brosa told me, as though it might excuse anything. Then with a big breath he said, “Anyhow, Egil and Rafnson came, and we had to make a good show of it.”

I thought of Svana serving those men, of Heirik’s cramped mood, deftly hidden to all but me.

Brosa continued. “We talked about you later, for a long time. About what he had done to you. What he had to do to make things right.”

“Já?” My laugh was laced with bitterness, and I cast a dark glance at Heirik, sleeping. “He is devious. I can hardly imagine what else he thought he could do.”

“Uh, marry you?” Brosa suggested.

“Oh.”

My heart lurched. In the gray pall of that miserable night, even as I stumbled to the water and washed my hands in the tide, even as I tapped out in bleak emptiness, Heirik had been changing his mind, resolving to ask me if I would live by his side. Like a bird looking down on it all, I saw him stand with resolution inside the tent at the Thing, orange lamps lighting the canvas. I saw me drop to my knees at the ocean, the water like black oil covering my hands.

“It did take him a long time to come to that decision.” Brosa’s words brought me back. “And a great deal of ale to get him to admit he had been gravely wrong. Even more drink before he realized the world did not revolve around him, and that he might be too late.”

“He was,” I said. He was far too late. Only because I fought to come back, did we have one more chance.

Brosa lifted my chin and turned my head so he could examine the whale’s tail around my eye. He cocked his head to see it from another angle. “Where did you go?”

“Where I came from,” I said reasonably, explaining nothing.

“I see.” His thumb traced the ink, and he seemed to decide this answer would be enough for now. He stood, and his hand on my shoulder was strong and sweet. “You will be his wife yet,” he said. “He owes you that much.”

I smiled and wiped my cheeks and chin where tears gathered.

“And he is a stubborn boar,” his brother added.

I laughed the tears away. “Já, that he is.”

I thought Brosa would leave then, but a pause hung in the air until it became awkward.

“Ginn,” he started, and I looked up to him and felt my own eyes wide and lost. Brosa went on, “You need to come outside now. You are in charge of this house, and Hár and Betta marry tomorrow.”

It felt like a kick to my chest. “So soon?”

“Já, it has been planned this way, you know.”

He looked tenderly at Heirik, at the place where my hand now rested defensively on my husband’s chest. “It’s already begun,” he said with a strong hint of apology in his voice. “People are arriving. We’re digging. Laying the stones and starting the fires.” He held up his hands, palm out, to show me dirt and char.

I sniffled. “Já,” I said, slowly waking from a trance. This was what I’d wanted, had been born to do, to be the wife of this house, and yet I sat with clean hands in a small, dark room. “Já, I see.”

I stood and looked around me, picked a shirt off the floor as though I could prepare for a wedding as quickly as straightening our room. I pressed my skirt flat against my legs. Then I rose to my full height. “I will need the thralls to bring up ale and food, get the tables down. The boys can finish helping you, and Ranka can bring out the cups and bowls and be in charge of shining.”

Sleep or no sleep, glorious life went on growing like flowers on a house. And I would tend it.

Brosa looked at me with profound relief. “You have seen this done before, then.”

I nodded and laughed. “Já,” I said. “Hildur had me practice many times.”

I glanced back at Heirik and bent to tuck a blanket around him. I kissed my fingers and touched them to his mouth, promising silently that I would be back, and then I walked out to join the wide, sunny world of the living. I willed him to follow.

Hár walked down the length of the house, away from me. The sun shone on his back, and he held a gleaming short sword in his hand, swinging it unconsciously, like a song. It was the one from above Heirik’s bed. When Heirik and I were married in the open grass, outside this house, he’d given me Slitasongr for our sons. This sword, Heirik’s great-grandfather’s, would be for Betta.

At the end of the house, Hár turned back to nervously pace this way now, toward me. He wore the torc Betta had given him—the one from the assembly market, cats snarling at his throat. The bronze played against the sky of his eyes and the gray at his temples and in his beard. He wore his hair all down around his face, more supple than seemed possible. It whipped around his strong jawline in a quick burst of wind.

He smiled to me as he came closer, his hand brushing the house the way Heirik and I both did sometimes. He was all the colors of a deepening sky, the amber flash before becoming night, the way Betta saw him when they met at the woods for the first time.

“We should wait for my nephew,” he said. He glowed with anticipation and love, and I knew he was saying this because it was right. But he wanted Betta. And I wanted to see them together. Something good and promising on this windy day.

“Nei, Old Man,” I said. “Brosa will do fine. Heirik would want you married.”