The Beachcomber

by Ines Thorn

  “I was looking for you,” he called from a distance, “and now I’ve found you.”

  “Why were you looking for me?” Jordis asked.

  Arjen laughed. His dark hair shone in the sun, and his eyes flashed. “Yesterday was your birthday. And today, I’m bringing you a gift.”

  Jordis was surprised. Why was Arjen bringing her a gift? He’d always acted as though he didn’t even notice her. At the last Biikebrennen, the early spring festival when boys danced with the girls they liked, Arjen had danced with everyone except her.

  “Why are you bringing me a gift?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. But at the same time, she straightened her skirts, smoothed her hair, and slipped back into her clogs. She wished that she’d tied a ribbon in her hair that morning and washed out the little stain on the hem of her dress. She wished she had a comb, a new dress, new shoes, and a charming smile, because she felt that she must look like a shepherd.

  He took a few steps past her and reached the top of the dike, and sat down in the grass there. “Come, see what I have for you!” he said, without answering her question.

  Jordis followed and sat down, but far enough away that two people could have fit between them. Then she stroked the dog’s soft coat. The animal was wagging its tail excitedly and pricked up its ears.

  “Why?” Jordis asked again, avoiding looking directly at Arjen.

  “Because you’re sixteen,” he said with a smile. “Come see.”

  Jordis bent toward him. Arjen carefully folded back the blanket, and there was a tiny puppy.

  “Oh!” Jordis cried with delight. She took the puppy from him, put it in her lap, and stroked its head. The little dog immediately nestled into her hand and made soft noises of contentment. “Where did you get him?” she asked, her eyes never leaving the animal.

  “My dog whelped eight weeks ago. And I’ve seen you walking alone on the dunes so often I thought you could use a companion.”

  Jordis lowered her face into the puppy’s soft fur and whispered endearments to it.

  Arjen laughed. “And here I thought you’d be saying things like that to me.”

  Jordis looked up and pretended not to understand. “Thank you so much! Can I really keep him?”

  Arjen nodded. “I just want one thing in return.”

  Jordis’s brow creased. “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  Arjen smiled. “A kiss.”

  “A kiss?” Jordis’s eyes went wide with surprise. “Why?”

  Arjen slid a little closer and put his hand on Jordis’s cheek. “Because I like you, that’s why. And now you’re sixteen, so I’m allowed to tell you that I like you. I’ve liked you for a long time. And I think you like me too.”

  Jordis swallowed and blushed, but Arjen closed his eyes and tapped his lips. “The kiss!” he reminded her.

  Jordis peered around in all directions. Once she was sure no one was watching, she brushed Arjen’s lips lightly with hers. A delightful shiver ran down her back, and she was amazed by how soft and warm his lips were. Then she felt his hand on the back of her head, gently holding her so her mouth remained on his. He parted her lips with his tongue and kissed Jordis the way a man kissed his sweetheart. When he finally let her go, she felt her cheeks burning. She had no idea what to do next. Her heart raced, and a strange, unfamiliar heat spread through her body. So she jumped up, holding the puppy tightly against herself, and ran away from Arjen. She didn’t turn around and didn’t stop, but she knew anyway that he was laughing softly, watching her go.

  The puppy was black, and had white paws and a tail with a white tip. Jordis named him Blitz, which meant “lightning,” because he leapt around as quickly as a little lightning bolt.

  “Where did you get him?” Etta asked, and put out a bowl of water for the little creature. Then she got an old blanket and put it on the floor by the stove. “That’s his place,” she said. “And now tell me where you got the puppy.”

  Jordis swallowed. For some reason, she was embarrassed to tell her grandmother, but finally, she overcame the feeling. “Arjen gave him to me. For my birthday. So I’ll have a companion.”

  Etta smiled. “So it was Arjen,” she said with a nod. “Do you like him?”

  Etta had been there the day before when she’d told Inga which of the boys she liked, so she nodded.

  Etta lowered the wooden spoon and turned from the large copper kettle to sit down at the kitchen table. “Come here,” she said, and Jordis obeyed, sitting down with the little dog in her lap and scratching him behind the ears.

  “Now you are sixteen; you’ve reached a marriageable age. Many girls in Rantum marry as soon as possible. You may do that too, if you want, but I certainly won’t force you to marry.”

  Yesterday, Jordis would have just listened to Etta and nodded, but today, Arjen had kissed her. And he had awakened a whirlwind of feeling inside her. The kiss—his kiss—had tasted of sea and salt, but also of honey and smoke. And she had breathed Arjen’s scent, a mix of beech-wood smoke, iron, sweat, and beach grass. She had liked the kiss, and she wanted more. Even thinking about it made her lap warm, and she felt as though butterflies were fluttering in her stomach. Only now did she realize that something special happened between men and women, which until now had been a mystery to her. Other people called it love, or desire. How was she supposed to know the difference?

  She nodded. “I like him,” she admitted quietly. “Very much, even.”

  Etta smiled. “He may come and ask for your hand in marriage. What will you say to him then?”

  Jordis shook her head. She was still confused and hardly knew what to feel. “I don’t know.” She looked so unhappy that Etta stroked her hand.

  “That’s all right, Jordis. You need time. Take it.”

  Jordis looked up. “The rune said that I already know the man I will marry. So it could be Arjen.”

  “Yes,” Etta confirmed. “It could be Arjen, but it could also be many other men on the island. Take your time. Consider carefully what you really want. Because once you’re married, the love will have to last until the end of your life.”

  Etta looked out the window, and Jordis followed her gaze. Without asking, she knew that Etta was thinking about Nanna, her daughter who had died of a broken heart. But Jordis also knew that the deep love between her parents was the exception, not the rule. In Rantum, there were several husbands who regularly beat their wives. There was noise, cursing, and screaming. There was malice, injury, and slander among married couples. Jordis had once heard the neighbor say to her grandmother, “I don’t know what it was like in Iceland, but here, where there are no elves or fairies to help, you have to help yourself. My husband won’t leave me alone. I bore seven children for him, and he still wants to come to my bed. I’m past my fortieth year, but my husband wouldn’t mind if I had another child. Tell me, Etta, is there an herb I can put in his grog to calm him?”

  Etta had shaken her head. “It’s good that he still wants you,” she had said. “There’s no herb against love, as far as I know.”

  The neighbor had looked disappointed. The next day when Etta and Jordis had walked past, she had emptied her washtub right in front of them, barely missing their feet.

  There was a knock on the door, and before Jordis could get there, Inga burst into the house. She was smiling happily, but Jordis could see that her face was pale and she had dark circles under her eyes.

  “I’ve come to hang up the cross for you,” she announced, and looked around the kitchen as though she expected to see a hammer and nail ready. But the kitchen table was bare except for a whale-oil lamp.

  “The cross . . . ,” Etta said, and started to search the kitchen. “I can’t remember where I put it,” she murmured.

  Jordis, too, gave the impression she didn’t know what her friend was talking about. “Look what I have here,” she said instead, and showed Inga the little dog that was lying peacefully in her arms.

  “Oh, he’s adorable!” Inga cried, but then her fac
e darkened. “Where did you get him?”

  Jordis smiled brightly. “Arjen gave him to me.”

  The words wiped the smile off Inga’s face. “Arjen?” she asked, instantly forgetting the cross and the purpose of her visit.

  “Yes, Arjen.”

  “Why did he give you a puppy?”

  Jordis smiled and couldn’t stop herself from blushing. She buried her face in the animal’s fur. “For my sixteenth birthday.”

  Inga’s eyes darkened. Her face looked as though a bleak shadow had fallen across it. She’d had a sixteenth birthday too, two months before Jordis. And what had she received from Arjen? Nothing. He hadn’t even wished her a happy birthday, even though the pastor had announced it in church the Sunday before. Inga knew exactly why her father had done so: he wanted to attract the unmarried men. But so far, no one had come. On one hand, Inga knew that Jordis hadn’t had anything to do with that, no matter what her father said about witchcraft. But on the other hand, she wanted to believe him. It would mean it wasn’t her fault that no one had come for her hand.

  “Why did he give you that little mutt for your birthday?” Inga couldn’t stop her voice from sounding bitter.

  Jordis shrugged. She was still gazing at the dog, lost in her own feelings, and hadn’t noticed her friend’s tone. “Grandmother thinks he might have . . . intentions,” she said quietly and happily.

  “Oh. And what do you think?”

  Jordis finally looked up. “He kissed me!” she exclaimed. “Can you believe it? He kissed me, like a man kisses his sweetheart.”

  Her eyes glowed and the glow remained, even when Inga spun on her heel with a sob and stormed out of the house, with no further mention of hanging the cross.

  Confused, Jordis watched her go. “What happened?” she asked her grandmother.

  Etta sighed. “I think she’s in love with Arjen too, and wants to marry him.” But there was another worry that she didn’t say aloud: Inga had Jordis’s future rune. She could do a lot of mischief with it. Nothing in the world was more dangerous than a jealous woman, even if she was only sixteen years old.

  CHAPTER 5

  Arjen’s father was a whaling captain, and when Arjen was so little he could barely see over the tabletop, his father taught seamanship in the winter. Young men in Rantum who’d already been to sea, and some who hadn’t been but wanted to, met around his kitchen table and listened to Captain Kris Hansen.

  Arjen remembered it well. The plainly clothed young men sat around the table, shuffling their feet and chewing on the ends of their goose-quill pens. They had sheets of rough grayish paper made during the summer by a woman from Tinnum on which they took note of everything Captain Hansen told them. The captain himself sat in an armchair by the fire, smoking his meerschaum pipe and holding various items aloft every now and then.

  “This is a plumb line. It consists of a cord about twenty yards long, with a ten-pound weight at the end, usually made of lead. The plumb line is used to measure the depth of the water. The measurements are recorded on nautical charts.”

  Arjen sat under the table, holding his knees to his chest out of the way of the students’ feet. Once he’d tied a heavy old nail he’d found on the beach to a calving rope and measured the depth of his mother’s washtub, the depth of a bucket, and even the depth of a sheep’s water trough. When his mother told his father about the experiments, his father had patted him proudly on the back. “You’ll be a wonderful captain someday.”

  Arjen asked his father to explain the constellations to him. So they sat on the dunes during cold winter nights, wrapped in warm sheepskins, and his father told him about the stars. Arjen soon knew the fifty-eight navigational stars and wanted next to learn everything to do with navigation.

  He was barely twelve years old when Captain Hansen took him as a ship’s boy on a long whaling voyage. His mother cried when he said farewell, hugging and kissing the boy who’d grown so much in the past year. Arjen, embarrassed, twisted out of his mother’s arms. “I’ll be back, I promise,” he’d said.

  As a ship’s boy, he climbed to the crow’s nest and was proud when he finally got to cry “Thar she blows!” for the first time. He wasn’t allowed to get in the whaleboats with the harpooners, but when the whale was roped to the side of the ship and the blubber cutters were working, he could hardly stand to wait anymore. He handed men their knives, dragged away pieces of blubber, scrubbed the deck, and scoured gigantic pots and pans in the galley, and when he returned to Sylt in the autumn, his pockets were full of coins. He spotted his mother from the Dutch smak and ran to her as soon as the ship had docked, holding out his hands full of coins.

  “Here, this is for you!” he cried.

  His mother took him in her arms and wept, stroking his hair, and said, “Oh, you shouldn’t give this to me!”

  But Arjen insisted his mother keep the money, so she put it in an old stocking and kept it under her mattress for him. That winter, Arjen no longer sat under the table but with the other students on the kitchen bench. His father told them about different kinds of ships, when to use which sail, how a ship’s wheel was made, and which kind of clouds brought which kind of weather.

  Arjen took notes on everything, and in the evenings, when everyone had crawled into their box beds, he would read at the kitchen table until the last candle burned out. The following year, he sailed as apprentice helmsman, and when he was seventeen, he completed his first officer’s degree and sailed on his father’s ship as a navigator. By the time he was twenty, he had completed all the degrees he needed to captain a ship. The only person above him was his father. Arjen alone was responsible for holding the ship’s course. It was he who observed the stars at night and determined the ship’s position in relationship to them. During the day, he stood on deck and kept track of every mile the ship traveled.

  But then misfortune struck. It was August 15, 1710. His father’s brig got caught in the ice near Cape Platen, Nordaustlandet, to the northeast of Spitsbergen. The provisions were almost gone and the water reserves were low, but that wasn’t the worst part: some of the men were sick with high fevers. Arjen and two others lowered a sled onto the ice, intending to make their way to Cross Bay on the west coast of Spitsbergen. It was several days’ travel, but it was their only chance of getting help. They’d been traveling for just one day when they came across an English brig that had barely managed to get free from the ice. The Englishmen welcomed the three men from Sylt aboard, offered them a generous meal, refilled their water supply, and even offered them a place to sleep for the night.

  While his two companions slept, Arjen spoke with the English navigator, who showed him a device that was like the cross-staff Arjen used to measure angles and distances and stay on course. Traditionally, the cross-staff was a stick about a yard long inscribed with measurements and several shorter sighting vanes, or crosspieces, with holes in the middle so they could slide up and down the central piece. The device was turned to face the sun or stars near the horizon, and then the sighting vanes were slid up or down until the bottom edges were even with the horizon. Then a reading could be taken from the measurements. The cross-staff’s usefulness was limited, though. If the ship rocked, for example, it was difficult to get an accurate measurement. And if there was fog or thick cloud cover, the cross-staff was useless.

  The device the English helmsman showed him was a little different. It was one-sixth of a circle and worked with lenses. Arjen listened excitedly to the man’s explanation; he’d never seen anything like it before.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  The helmsman laughed. “Well, it’s nothing yet. This scientist in England—he’s a bit mad—asked me to take a few measurements with it.” He held up the contraption of metal tubes and glass lenses. “But it doesn’t work. You have to look at the sun through the lenses, but who can look into the sun?” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m afraid I might go blind.”

  “May I try it?” Arjen asked. The helmsman handed it to him, and Arjen held it
to his eye. He was right; the low Arctic summer sun blinded him and he couldn’t take a measurement. Still, he could imagine its advantage over the cross-staff immediately. “If only the lenses weren’t so bright, then . . .”

  “If, if, if. My boy, if I had a coin for every time I heard that word. It doesn’t work, believe me. I’ll stick with the cross-staff and the astrolabe for my navigation. And so should you.”

  Arjen nodded but still asked for a piece of paper and a quill so he could sketch the strange device.

  When the three Frisians set out the next morning for Cross Bay, Arjen was lost in thought. He was calculating angles and thinking about lenses and how they worked. He didn’t hear his companions talk, and he didn’t keep an eye on the clouds the way he was supposed to. And when the first snowflakes began to fall, not gently and quietly but blowing horizontally into them, he knew he’d made a mistake. They were in an endless field of pack ice, unable to go either forward or back because they no longer knew which way they were going. The storm began to howl, tearing at their clothing. Everything that wasn’t tied down blew away, even their heavy iron drinking cups. The storm was so strong they couldn’t have moved, even if they’d known which way to go. Soon their eyebrows had accumulated layers of ice, their cheeks burned with cold, and their lips cracked open. It was a blizzard. The sharp snowflakes whipped against them like needles, boring into every bit of exposed skin. The men were so chilled that their bones felt as thin as glass. And then night came. Normally, the low midnight sun lit the late Arctic summer nights, but they could barely see their hands in front of their faces. One of the men, a boy really, who was only at sea for the second time, began to sob. “We’re going to die!” he cried. “We’ll freeze to death!”