The Beachcomber

by Ines Thorn

  Inga frowned, and her face looked pinched and angry. “No!” she said. “I want to keep it.” Then she stood up. “I have to go now. I just wanted to bring you my gift. But you still have to tell me which young man on Sylt makes your heart beat faster,” she said with a smile.

  “Inga, why don’t you stay a little longer? We could make hot chocolate,” Etta suggested.

  Inga hesitated for a moment. Etta knew that Inga had a weakness for hot chocolate, and her father never had it in the parsonage.

  “We can whip some fresh cream, and we have smoked sausage and ham,” Etta continued.

  Inga swallowed and then shook her head. “Father is waiting. I have to make his supper.”

  Jordis, who had turned pale, bit her lower lip. Which young man on Sylt makes my heart beat faster? Perhaps if she tried to answer Inga’s question, she could get her to stay longer, and they could talk her into giving back the rune somehow. “You asked which boy I like . . . Well, it’s not very important, because he’s never even looked at me. That’s probably the only reason he interests me.”

  “But . . . who is it?” Inga asked insistently.

  Jordis sighed. “Well, I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to tell anyone. Do you promise?”

  “Of course I promise.” Inga solemnly raised two fingers.

  “It’s . . .” Jordis bent close to whisper to Inga, and Etta could see how hard it was for her to reveal her secret. “It’s Arjen, the blacksmith.”

  Inga’s forehead furrowed. “Arjen? I never would have guessed that. It would be Arjen!” she said with a shrill burst of laughter.

  “And you?” Jordis asked. “Which boy do you like best?”

  Inga regarded Jordis with a sharp glare. “It doesn’t matter. Because any boy you wanted would throw himself at your feet. With me, it’s the opposite. Boys run away from me.”

  Inga stood, nodded, and left the house.

  Etta and Jordis stood silently until they were sure Inga was out of earshot. “Did you see which rune she took?” Jordis asked incredulously.

  “Yes,” Etta replied. “The Berkanan rune.”

  “The rune of my future!” Jordis could tell that her voice was shaking. “She stole my future! She just put it in her pocket and left!”

  Etta nodded. “That’s bad, I know. But it’s not the worst part.”

  “What’s the worst part?” Jordis asked. Suddenly she felt cold.

  “The runic alphabet, the futhark, is no longer complete. We must get that rune back, otherwise we’ll have to make an entirely new set. An incomplete futhark only gives incomplete answers.”

  “Is that really so bad?”

  “Inga now holds your future in her hands. Everything she does will have repercussions for you. Only once we create a new futhark and a rune master blesses it can we consult the oracle again. Only then can we take your future out of Inga’s hands and give you a new one.”

  Jordis put on a confident look. “Inga is my friend. She’ll take good care of my future,” she said with more conviction than she felt.

  “Well, perhaps we should pray to her God about that.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Did you do what I told you to?”

  Pastor Mommsen stood a full head taller than his daughter and scowled down at her with his lips pursed in disapproval. He was angular and gaunt, with close-set eyes and a disorderly patch of gray hair on his head that was bald in the middle. His shirt was stained and the cuffs were somewhat threadbare. But he had a booming voice that easily filled the entire church and made the occasional member of his flock tremble. Here in the sparsely furnished kitchen of the parsonage, it made the windows rattle.

  “Yes, I gave her the cross.”

  “And did you stay until they hung it up?” His oppressive voice sounded slightly threatening.

  “There wasn’t enough light, but Etta promised to hang it up first thing tomorrow morning.”

  The pastor stamped his foot and snorted. Inga hunched her shoulders.

  “You’d better make sure of it!” he thundered.

  “I’ll go again tomorrow. First thing in the morning.” Inga tried in vain to placate her father. She knew that he hated Etta and Jordis, even though he always claimed he did everything out of kindness. He referred to them as the Ice Women. He’d called Nanna that too. Inga didn’t know why he resented them so much. But he’d even insisted she make friends with Jordis to keep an eye on them. “So I know what’s going on in their household. The Ice Women are dangerous. I want to know everything about them. Everything! Do you understand?”

  So Inga had befriended Jordis. At first reluctantly, but then she’d gotten to know the girl with the bright platinum hair and ice-blue eyes. And something happened that she hadn’t expected: she liked Jordis. But she hated her too. Jordis the beautiful. Jordis with the silver hair. Once she had heard Arjen describing Jordis’s hair as the satiny silver edge of the sun when it was veiled behind thin clouds. The others had laughed at him, but Inga had liked the comparison. In fact, she’d liked it almost as much as she liked Arjen himself.

  He was five years older than Jordis and Inga, and had decided not to become a whaling captain like his father. He had bought the smithy from old Mr. Tjart, who had no children to inherit it. Arjen was tall and had broad shoulders. He wore his dark hair a little long, and when he stood by the anvil in the smithy and hammered a red-hot harpoon tip, he tied it back. His face was slender, and his eyes were darker than those of most people on Sylt. Almost everything about Arjen was unusual, including his name. Arjen was a name that his father had brought from Amsterdam. He was a whaler, and once during a storm, a Dutchman had rescued him. Arjen’s father had sworn to name his oldest son after the Dutchman, and he’d kept his promise. Inga knew everything about Arjen. She knew that the first thing he did in the morning was to open the window, look at the sky, and scratch his chin. She had seen him in summer, while he was washing up behind the smithy after a long day of work. He had taken off his shirt and splashed water on his face and then on his chest. Inga had watched the play of his muscles as he had emptied the washtub. She knew when he was in the smithy and when he went home. She had seen him when he came home from the tavern. No one in the village of Rantum locked their doors, so one night she had even snuck into Arjen’s house, quietly opened the door to his box bed, and watched him sleeping. He had looked so beautiful. Beautiful like none before him and, Inga was very sure, no one after him. Arjen. Her Arjen. She knew the blue veins that appeared on his forehead when he was angry. She knew the dimple in his left cheek when he smiled, and she knew his habit of shouting with glee every time he successfully finished a harpoon tip. No one knew Arjen better than she. No one understood him better than Inga. And now Jordis had told her that she liked Arjen too! And Inga was certain that anyone whom Jordis even looked at once fell in love with her. If Jordis wanted Arjen, Inga knew she wouldn’t have the slightest chance of winning his affections.

  “Did you also ask the other question?” Her father grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her past the table, and pushed her onto the bench by the stove. Inga sobbed. Not so much because her father had hurt her, but because of Arjen, and also because here in the parsonage, everything was so different from at Jordis’s house.

  Instead of having blue-and-white delft tiles on the wall, as her friend’s Frisian house did, the walls here were simply whitewashed and had taken on a yellowish-brown tinge from the fireplace and the smoke of the pastor’s pipe. There were no beautifully carved cupboards with porcelain like at Jordis’s house, no polished copper pots and pans, no embroidered pillows, and certainly no clock on the wall that chimed every hour. The parsonage was small. The floor had no rugs, just roughly hewn boards which the housekeeper had intended to cover with straw but had forgotten to again. Both cooking pots and the one frying pan they owned stood next to the fireplace, crusted with dirt. Every draft sent ashes flying over the kitchen floor. Their dishes were a few clay bowls and plates, and there was no silverware, ju
st a few roughly carved wooden spoons. The kitchen bench was hard, the table had been scoured sloppily with sand, and the whale-oil lanterns were greasy.

  “Did you ask the other question?” the pastor repeated.

  Inga shook her head. “You mean, if she has a sweetheart? I didn’t have the chance,” she lied. “I don’t think Jordis is thinking about boys yet.” She didn’t know why, exactly, that she didn’t tell her father what she knew. She knew only that she wasn’t doing it for Jordis, but for Arjen.

  The pastor grunted again. “It’s hard enough to maintain discipline and order in this terrible village! Some don’t even motivate themselves to go to Sunday services. And the young men aren’t exactly standing in line to marry the pastor’s daughter, although she’s of the right age.” He gave his daughter an accusatory glance.

  Inga lowered her head so her father wouldn’t see how she blushed with shame. But the pastor didn’t pay any attention to her and continued. “I heard one of those ridiculous women went to Etta again to see if her husband would come home safely this year. If I could catch her just once at her prophesizing, I’d teach her a lesson she’d never forget!” He ran a hand through his messy hair. “And you? You really haven’t seen anything to do with the old beliefs? No secret altar in the kitchen, where animals are sacrificed?”

  Inga shook her head. “You were there yourself, and you didn’t see any altar or anything else strange.”

  “But the smell!” The pastor shuddered. “The smell. Fire and brimstone. As though it came straight from hell!”

  “Etta was probably making soap again. She doesn’t use wood ashes like everyone else; she makes it from bird bones.”

  The pastor still wasn’t satisfied. He sat down at the table next to Inga and poked her roughly in the arm. “I’m hungry. And I’ll wager that you didn’t make anything for me.”

  “But the housekeeper . . .”

  “She spent the entire day cleaning the church. That’s what she’s responsible for, not this household. That’s your job. What else is a daughter for? Now get off your lazy bottom and serve your father dinner.”

  Inga got up, opened the door to the larder, and gazed with resignation at the rickety wooden shelf. The butter pot was empty, and so was the bowl for the eggs. She found a heel of bread, a piece of sheep’s cheese, and two herring that smelled so bad that she was certain they were no longer edible. She carried the bread and cheese to the table, put an onion next to them, and filled a dented cup with water.

  “Is that all?” her father asked.

  Inga nodded. “We haven’t been to the market in Westerland for a long time,” she said. “We need oil, barley, and oats.”

  He regarded her with an angry stare. “You’re only concerned with worldly matters.”

  The pastor took a bite of bread. He chewed with his mouth open and shoved a piece of cheese in afterward. Inga watched. She was hungry too, but she didn’t dare tell her father. The answer came anyway. “You must have eaten something at their house. You probably stuffed yourself with treats like a Christmas goose, didn’t you?”

  After the pastor had gobbled his meal, he picked up a Bible and pressed it into Inga’s hand. “You’ll read from the Revelation to John tonight,” he ordered.

  Inga sighed and read what her father demanded. She read loudly so he wouldn’t be disturbed by the rumblings of her stomach. When she was finally finished, he put her on trial again.

  “Did you tell them they should come to church on Sunday?”

  “They know that themselves,” Inga replied.

  “It’s important. You must tell them. I want the townsfolk to finally see what they are. See to it that they come.”

  Inga shrugged. “How could I do that? I can’t force them to come.”

  The pastor bared his yellowed teeth and slapped the tabletop. “She’s your friend. As far as I’m concerned, you can threaten her. Tell her she’ll go to hell if she keeps avoiding church.”

  Inga made a face. She wasn’t even sure if Jordis believed in God the Father and his son, Jesus Christ. In any case, her friend went to church very rarely. At Christmas, and sometimes at Easter or Allhallows.

  “I don’t care how you do it, but make sure they come next Sunday. Both of them.”

  Inga narrowed her eyes. “What are you planning?”

  “That’s none of your concern. Unless, of course, you want to help me,” he chided her. He stood up and blew out the lanterns so as not to waste any oil on Inga. Then he crawled into his box bed and left his daughter sitting alone in the darkness.

  Inga sat there, staring out the window at the pale moon and doing what she always did when she wanted to escape the reality of the parsonage: she dreamed. She dreamed of Arjen coming to take her away and bringing her to a home that looked like Jordis and Etta’s house. A house where she could feel comfortable. A house with embroidered pillows and soft sheepskin rugs and chests of clothes. A house in which people spoke and ate together, and maybe even laughed every now and then. Inga didn’t care how Arjen got her out of there. The important thing was that she got out soon.

  But Arjen would never marry the pastor’s daughter, even if Jordis didn’t exist. He would never marry someone like Inga. She was short and buxom, with hair that curled up like wood shavings in the rain and eyes the color of earth. There was nothing special about her, and she didn’t have anything that anyone wanted.

  If Inga was honest with herself, she was envious of Jordis. Not just of her home and her loving grandmother, but also of her looks. Jordis wasn’t exactly what was considered “pretty” on the island, though. She was very slender, almost skinny, with barely any feminine curves. Her eyes were the blue-gray color of the sea in winter. But her hair was magnificent. It fell in silvery, almost white waves to her hips and stayed smooth and shiny, no matter what the weather. Inga had often been tempted to bury her face in Jordis’s smooth, soft hair, which always smelled of roses and lavender.

  There was another thing that bothered Inga about Jordis: she knew her friend was keeping secrets from her. Secrets that would make the pastor happy, if only Inga could figure them out. Her father thought Jordis and Etta were witches of the old religion. There were still a few on Sylt who secretly followed the old faith and for whom Etta’s word had more weight than that of the church. After all, the village was named after the Norse goddess Rán, the goddess of the sea. But that meant only that in the past, everyone here had believed in the Norse gods. Inga would have liked to know more about the old religion, but Jordis never revealed anything. When Inga asked, she pretended that she’d never even heard of an old religion, or of the gods Odin, Thor, Loki, or Rán. But Inga was sure these gods accompanied Jordis always.

  There was only one thing that Inga wasn’t envious of: her friend’s dead mother. Inga didn’t have a mother anymore either; she had died in childbirth with Inga’s little brother. But she was properly buried in the graveyard, while Jordis’s mother, Nanna, lay outside the graveyard walls on unhallowed ground, where many of the villagers emptied their refuse. Inga believed that Nanna deserved that grave. But she also believed that Jordis had experienced much happiness in her life, in spite of her mother’s absence. In spite of, or maybe because of, the old religion. And she wasn’t at all sure if Jordis deserved that happiness.

  CHAPTER 3

  Happiness was something Jordis didn’t have in abundance. She had, however, been blessed with a cheerful disposition. She sang and laughed often, and wandered through the dunes lightheartedly. She entered the water without fear and gladly collected seagull eggs and black mussels in the salt marshes. Her days were balanced, without significant highs or lows. At least, they had been since she’d recovered from her grief over her parents’ deaths.

  Jordis’s bad luck had begun on her seventh birthday, the twenty-first of September 1702. She had been standing on the dunes with her mother, waiting for the whaling ships to return.

  They were waiting for Jordis’s father, who was a wealthy whaling-ship captain
. He was brave enough to go far into the Arctic ice, making him one of the most successful whalers. He was well respected all along the mainland coast, and on the island, the boys saw him as a role model.

  The crew of one whaling ship had already returned to Sylt—the entire island had echoed with the exuberant joy of wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters. The women who still waited stood on the dunes, gazing southward to see if another smak would appear on the horizon.

  “He’ll be here today,” Jordis’s mother had promised that morning. “Today, your father will be home. I know it.” He was already overdue; he should have been back long ago. But something must have held him up in Hamburg. Perhaps the unloading of his ship, or business with the shipping company.

  Little Jordis had nodded and said, “He promised. He promised he would be back for my birthday.” Now they stood hand in hand on the crest of the dunes, and when a smak finally appeared on the horizon, they ran home. Her mother put on her best dress, brushed her hair until it shone like silver, and combed Jordis’s hair too. They hurried to the harbor while Etta roasted a leg of lamb and aired out the box beds.

  They stood in the harbor for hours, and when the smak finally arrived, Jordis was already hopping from foot to foot, practically shaking with excitement, while her mother kept smoothing her hair and dress.

  Finally, the first men disembarked, and women threw themselves into their men’s arms, weeping tears of joy, embracing and kissing them. But there was one man for whom no one seemed to be waiting. He walked over to Jordis and her mother and handed Nanna a sealed letter, his eyes downcast. “I’m sorry,” he stammered, and then walked away quickly. Her mother stared at the letter for what seemed like an eternity. Then she dropped Jordis’s hand, turned around, and made her way back over the dune path to Rantum, without looking to see if her daughter was following her. When they arrived, she sat down at the kitchen table and put the sealed envelope down. Etta knew at once what had happened. She sat beside her daughter, stroked her hand, and gave her a cup of water. But Nanna could no longer hear, feel, see, or taste anything. She just sat there as though she were dead. And later, when Jordis tried to climb onto her lap, she wouldn’t hold her. Jordis fell from her mother’s lap onto the hard floor. Nanna didn’t react to her daughter’s crying, didn’t hold her or comfort her. She just sat there, white as a shroud. The envelope lay unopened before her.