Bracelet of Bones (3 page)

3

W
hen winter closes its fist, when the ice age cracks its bones and the wolf age moans, you cannot follow, you cannot lead, you cannot stray far from your own hearth. All you can do is scratch the half-frozen earth for blighted turnips and carrots, and water your goats and cattle and bleating sheep, and feed them with hay, and drill holes through the ice and let down a baited line for pike or herring or mackerel; all you can do is drink ale, and chew dried meal, and gnaw your chilblains, and wait.

Days became shorter, though sometimes they were so dazzling that they stuck little pins into Solveig’s eyes. Nights became longer.

On some mornings, Kalf worked in the little smithy. He stoked the furnace, then he smelted the block of iron he and Halfdan had brought back from Trondheim and began to hammer out a new cooking cauldron. Not only this. Kalf put new edges on all the knives and axes, even Solveig’s carving knife, and a new edge, too, on the blade of his tongue. He never missed a chance to cut his stepsister with a keen word.

Bright-eyed Blubba worked alongside his brother. Whistling and singing snatches of song, he worked long strips of iron, winding them around their old milk vat where it was coming apart at the seams, and secured them with iron nails. And once, with Solveig, he walked over the hill to the birch copse, and the two of them axed a tree and together dragged it back to the farm. On sunny mornings, Solveig went down to the jetty with a basketful of filthy clothing and washed it all with soap stinking of mutton fat, gritty with wood ash. Then she laid the clothes out to dry from one end of the jetty to the other, weighted with stones, but by the time she went back to collect them, they were all stiff as boards.

“Our old sail,” said Asta. “More holes than fabric. It’s like a colander.”

“It’s all right,” Solveig said.

“It’s not,” retorted Asta.

It wasn’t so much Asta’s words as the way she said them, and what she did not say, that hurt Solveig.

“Hard work, Solveig, I know it’s hard. But you and me and Kalf and Blubba, what are we meant to do? Your father’s not half the man Einar was.”

Solveig glared at the marl floor.

“No one pushed Einar around. He would have stayed loyal to the family.”

Solveig’s eyeballs grew hot.

“What are we meant to do?” Asta repeated. “We must work all the harder.”

Sometimes Asta narrowed her eyes and saw straight into her stepdaughter’s head.

Once, while Solveig was weaving coarse cloth for the new canvas sail: “You wouldn’t get as far as Trondheim. Wolves would eat you.”

And again: “Words! Words! Words make promises. Words break promises.”

And for a third time, while Solveig was cutting wax for new candles: “You’re just a girl, Solveig. Fourteen winters old. You’re soft as beeswax.”

Kalf overheard his mother. “Soft, and stuffed with secrets.”

Solveig’s fingers tightened around the handle of her knife.

“Me and Blubba never know what she’s thinking.”

“I know, all right,” said Asta in a cold voice. “I know exactly what she’s thinking.”

Solveig’s eyes were hot. She glared at the beeswax and jabbed at it.

“But I do know . . .” Kalf said slowly.

Solveig held her breath.

“I do know she’s hiding something . . . and I’ll find out what.”

On some evenings, Asta drowsed beside the hearth, worn out by her day’s work, and Kalf and Blubba fooled around in the dark outside or drank themselves stupid with ale, but Solveig sat upright on her bench and scoured and scraped at a piece of walrus bone. She shaped it into a kind of oval, and then she began to inscribe it with runes.

My father, she thought, his real name is Asser Assersson. His mother was Swedish, but his father was Danish. That’s why everyone calls him Halfdan.

I can’t remember my mother. She died to give me life. Sirith she was called, but my father calls her Siri. When he says her name, his voice is always gentle.

He’s the only one who shortens my name. Solva, he says. Solva. Sun-strength!

He doesn’t care about Asta in the same way he still does about my mother, and it’s the same with Asta. She still loves Einar, her first man, Kalf’s and Blubba’s father. He was drowned.

What I believe is my father needed a woman and Asta needed a man. For comfort. To make a household. To bring up their children. They argue half the time and sometimes go to bed bitter.

I think my father must be glad to have escaped Asta’s tongue. And Kalf’s as well. They’re as sharp as each other.

He’s never liked Kalf, and Kalf’s never liked me.

Actually, I don’t think Asta minds my father going all that much. She complains, all right. And it’s true, we all have to work harder without him. But . . . but you promised. You must have known it was our last day together. You must.

“You’re fourteen, Solva. Rising fifteen . . . Fifteen and rising.”

Were you just waiting for me to grow up before you went away?

One day, a young Christian priest from Trondheim, Peter, came to talk with Asta and the other folk living along the fjord about building a church.

“King Olaf and his warriors,” he began, “sailed back from Garthar to reclaim his throne and kingdom—and he fought in the name of the White Christ.”

“Much good that did him,” said Asta.

“At Stiklestad, three thousand men fought alongside the king,” Peter went on. “Norwegians, Swedes, shoulder to shoulder.”

“Not because they were Christians,” Old Sven said. “Because Olaf was our rightful king.”

The young priest sighed and clasped his hands. “But it was one man against ten, the huge heathen rabble loyal to King Cnut. The largest army ever seen in Norway. But although King Olaf died, Christ, the Prince of Peace, will live forever.”

“Don’t you preach to me about that battle,” Asta told him.

“There’s not a family along this fjord who didn’t lose a father, a son, a brother,” added Old Sven.

“What I don’t understand,” Solveig said to the priest, “is how the way of the White Christ can be carpeted with blood. You keep saying he’s the Prince of Peace, but King Olaf and his army whirled their battle-axes. How can you forgive and wreak vengeance at the same time?”

The young priest, Peter, gave Solveig a pitying smile. “We forgive those who are willing to be baptized; those who are not, we must strike down.”

“Most of the families living along our fjord have been baptized,” Asta retorted, “but they still worship Odin and the other gods as well.”

The young priest shook his head. “I will pray for you,” he said, “and visit you again.”

On another day, Blubba asked Solveig why her father had left them and sailed away.

“He’s gone because he promised to,” Solveig told him. “He’s honoring his promise.”

Blubba frowned.

“He promised Harald Sigurdsson that he would follow him. Can you remember him?”

“Not really.”

“He was even taller than my father.”

“I remember that.”

“And he had a loud voice and a loud laugh.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“When he fought with my father at Stiklestad, he was fifteen and you were only four,” Solveig told Blubba, and then she sat him down beside her. “He was born to be a leader, Harald was, and you can be sure he and my father will come back and avenge King Olaf’s death.”

“When?” asked Blubba.

“Do you know,” Solveig went on, “when Harald was just three, he told his half brother—King Olaf, that is—that what he wanted most was warships? Not food, not board games, not weapons. Warships!”

“I wish Halfdan would come back,” announced Blubba.

Solveig swallowed loudly. “What about you?” she asked Blubba. “What would you choose? What do you want most?”

Blubba gazed at his stepsister seriously.

“Well?” she asked.

“You used to be happy,” Blubba said. “And smiling . . . and laughing. I want . . . your days to be all like that again.”

“Oh, Blubba!” cried Solveig. Tears sprang to her eyes, and roughly she drew Blubba to her, and then she sniffed and pummeled his back.

Not a day passed without Solveig thinking about what her father had said, and not said. Without wondering where he was and whether she could follow and find him.

She had never been farther away from her home than the market at Trondheim, and even then not on her own. But home isn’t home, she thought. Not any longer. There’s food and shelter here, I know, but such sadness, such pain.

Even the wolves, she thought, even they would be better than this.

Solveig inscribed the runes, so that the point of her awl bit into the oval of walrus bone: “SOLVEIG THE SUN-STRONG FOLLOWED . . .”

“Solveig!” rasped Asta. “Will you stop that? You’re scouring my skull! Stop all this scratching and scraping before you drive me mad.”

Solveig stayed her hand.

“Or else work outside. The days are lengthening, aren’t they?”

Praise be, thought Solveig. Praise Odin and Freyja and Thor and all my gods. Praise the White Christ, even. Yes, the days are getting longer.

My winter’s almost over.

The ice is breaking up.

The morning before she left, Solveig told Asta that spring was on the doorstep.

“There are many false springs,” Asta replied.

“Can’t you feel it?”

“And it’s better not to think about it,” Asta warned her. “Otherwise you won’t be able to think of anything else.”

Then Solveig blithely announced, seeing as spring was in the air, it was high time the little shed beside the jetty was mucked out. “And as my father’s not here,” she went on, “I’ll do it for him.”

“As you please,” said Asta in a dry voice.

So her stepmother suspected nothing when Solveig walked down to the jetty, five hundred paces away, three times that day. But each time she went, Solveig was carrying more of the things she needed to take with her—food, and fresh water in a little keg, clothing, her carving tools and grindstone and a little sackful of bones—and she stowed them all in the upended back half of her father’s old coble where he stored oars and bailers and nets and lines and weights and floats and the like.

The first time she went down to the jetty, Solveig actually did muck out the shed—for a short while, anyhow—to salve her conscience. And on her third trip, she checked the rigging of their boat, perched on the end of the jetty. Then she got down on one knee and poked at the frazil ice with an oar. The crystal needles were as thin as her own fingernails and at once gave way.

Solveig’s heart quickened. Her blood began to sing.

Before she went back to the farmhouse for the last time, she picked her way along the shore to the family’s sloping graveyard. Bitter little wavelets were dashing themselves against the rocks at the bottom end of it.

Solveig wandered between the graves of her mother’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents she had never known, and then she knelt in the sopping grass beside her mother.

“Sss,” hissed the north wind. “Sss-sssss.”

Solveig put her right hand over her heart. “I feel afraid,” she told her mother. “I’ve never felt so afraid. But I’ve never been so sure of what I have to do. Mother, my mother, my journey will either lead me to my father or lay me down like you.”

It was too early in the year for even a pale aconite or a nodding snowdrop, but Solveig scouted around and collected a handful of little white pebbles. Carefully she arranged them at the foot of her mother’s tilting stone: snowflakes, teardrops, a white petal shower. Then she stood up and hurried back to the farm.

That evening, Solveig grew nervous. Very nervous. She didn’t feel hungry, and that night she didn’t sleep much. She kept telling herself she must wait until first light, but then she became afraid she might fall into a deep sleep just before dawn.

She sat up in the dark. Quietly she dug out the gold brooch hidden in her pillow sack. She felt for the holes in her reindeer skin and put her hands and arms through
them. Then she stood up and picked up her sheepskin. But with her first step she kicked the iron poker lying between her bench and the hearth.

Asta was instantly awake. “Who’s that?” And then: “What is it?”

“Me,” said Solveig in a hoarse voice. “Only me.” Her heart was hammering.

“What is it?”

“My stomach,” said Solveig. “Cramps in my stomach. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to.”

Both boys were snoring.

“I can’t wait,” groaned Solveig.

“Close the door,” Asta told her. Then she sighed and lay back again.

The moment Solveig felt the night chill on her cheeks she was alert—alert to the terrible risk of leaving and to all the pain of staying.

I can go back in, she thought. I still can!

But then, all at once, she was striding away from the farm. Now she was running, and the east wind was springing after her. And when it moaned, Solveig was sure it was Asta, calling.

Solveig didn’t look back until she reached the jetty, but as soon as she did, she could see that the sky over the hills was just beginning to turn pale. Not yet green, not primrose.

Quickly, Solveig shoved the boat down the sloping ramp into the water. Then she hurried back to the upended coble and carried out the few things she had to take with her.