“Sounds like a clam.”
“Ha! No, they’re sweet. Delicious.”
“Clams are delicious.”
He laughed as if he’d never heard a better joke, then reached out a long hand to ruffle my hair.
I ducked my head before he could see my blush.
Before long we sat beside a fire, enjoying our boiled goose as the Sun burned the fog off the waves.
“You know what?” Brandr sighed, licking the grease from his fingers. “Better than grapes.”
I ladled the last of the yellow broth from the birchbark container I’d made in the painted men’s fashion. “Maybe you should call this ‘Gooseland’ instead.”
“Mmmm.”
“Why is your home called Greenland?” It’s not very green, I almost added, remembering a scrap of dream: Brandr as a boy, trudging through drifts of snow even deeper than those in my own homeland.
“People often ask that. It’s only green for a few short months in the summer, when it’s so bright it hurts your eyes. The fields are dotted with sheep and cattle.”
Such animals, he explained, lived with men, like dogs. The cattle were for eating and milking; the sheep allowed themselves to be shorn of their fur to make wool, the close-woven cloth I’d found so strange. While he spoke, I busied myself with preparing the final goose. I cut off its long, proud neck and made a slit partway along its feathered underbelly.
“They say Erik the Red named it Greenland to lure colonists to its shores,” he went on, stretching his long legs toward the fire. “But I met Erik once when I was a boy, and I don’t think so. He was violent, arrogant—but no liar. I think it was green to him, for he always saw the possibilities in a place. Just like his daughter Freydis.” I watched the angle of his jaw twitch as he spoke the name. It was a long moment before he spoke again. “I only returned to Greenland briefly before I left to come here. After so many years of traveling across the world, I thought perhaps I’d finally settle down. Find a pretty wife, work my own homestead, raise sheep like my brother. But I should have known I’d be traveling again before long.”
“If working a homestead means sucking milk from an animal’s breast, I don’t blame you for leaving again. It sounds unnatural.” While we talked, I kept one eye on him and one on the goose. I pulled back the skin; it came off inside out, like a feathery parka. As Brandr spoke, I scraped the blood and tissue from the skin with my ulu. I’d often performed such women’s tasks in Brandr’s presence—he never seemed shocked. Either he understood that I had no choice, or his people didn’t make such distinctions.
“The world is full of things stranger than sheep’s milk,” he said with a laugh. “Arabia was all sand beneath my feet, soft and yielding like new snow and impossible to walk through. The air is so hot it burns your lungs, like sitting too close to a fire, and there’s no water to quench your thirst. In Rome the buildings are so tall they block the sky from view. And in Iceland the earth’s not earth at all—it bursts into flame and melts around your feet.”
My head spun with all these names and places, each so different from the next. Brandr had traveled like this all his life. Yet if he felt lonely, he didn’t say so. If he missed his brother, he never spoke of it.
“I’d like to hear about this ‘Iceland,’ but we’ve been too slow already this morning. We need to keep moving.” I turned the goose skin right side out. It hung limp from my hands, a deflated mockery of its former bird glory.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“Make a waterskin for winter. The feathers will keep the water from freezing.”
“The Romans would pluck the soft feathers and stuff a pillow with them,” he said wistfully.
“I’d rather have water to drink than a soft pillow for my head. Come on, lazy man. You didn’t catch a single goose. You don’t get to rest.”
We packed up our tent and sleeping skins, scuffed out the ashes of our fire, and continued on our journey. As we walked, I tried to keep Kiasik’s face before me. Certain things I could call to mind: the way his hair waved in the wind, the movement of his muscles when he threw a harpoon, the reckless look in his eye. But when I tried to imagine his cheeks, his mouth, his hands, visions of the man walking beside me would intercede.
Without turning to look at Brandr, I could see the thin, dry lips that moved so quickly from tense line to broad grin, his wind-burnt cheeks shining red above the golden hairs of his beard. Even at night, when only a few embers from the fire served to illuminate the outline of his sleeping form, I could still see him. And I no longer found him ugly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The night after the goose hunt, we made our camp on a narrow ledge of rock overlooking a calm, black sea. Long before dawn, I woke suddenly from a dream of vast deserts and strange humped beasts the color of driftwood. I could tell without looking that Brandr was gone.
For a moment, I thought he’d finally left for good, returned to one of the many other lands he’d visited. I was surprised by the jolt of fear that gripped me. Would I miss him so much if he left?
When I sat up, I shivered in the frigid air. Winter was on its way. I pulled a sleeping fur around my shoulders and crawled outside. Brandr sat a few paces away, shivering in his blue cloak, looking out into the sky with his hands clenched on his knees. For the first time in many moons, the lights of the aqsarniit glowed overhead. The curtain of green light danced above the horizon, folding and unfurling like thick strands of bright kelp amid tide-tossed shallows.
“It’s like old friends returning,” he said softly at my approach. “I’ve missed this.”
“The spirits want to play. They won’t wait for winter.”
He didn’t turn to look at me as I sat down beside him, but I could see his eyes, and they were brighter than they should have been.
“Few men besides the Norse have ever seen these lights.” His tone, so light the previous afternoon as he rambled from tale to tale of fantastical lands, had grown somber. “They think we’re just telling tales.”
He craned his neck, gazing up as a thick stripe of green flared across the dome of the sky. A raft of small, dark clouds floated past, breaking the green light into rounded patches—like pebbles humped on a stream bed, I thought. But Brandr traced the long green arc with his finger, murmuring, “A snake’s scales. Jormungand the World Serpent, circling the earth with his tail in his mouth. If he squeezes just a little tighter”—he sucked in a breath, as if some great force pressed against his ribs. Then, as the arc faded from view, and he turned back to the curtain of green at the horizon, he managed a faint smile. “Or maybe my brother was right, and it’s not Jormungand at all, but the fires of the Frost Giants in Jotunheim.”
“You’ve never told me anything about Galinn,” I said carefully.
I watched the knob of his throat rise and fall. “He was small, but stronger than he looked.” His words came slow and soft, like a memory too fragile to touch. “Like you. But he told tales like a wise old man. He was no skald, no trained poet or bard, but he knew all the legends. And he was always dreaming. He saw the Aesir—the gods—in everything. He worshiped the three greatest ones, of course: Odin the All-Father, one-eyed far-seer with his raven companions; Thor, the red-bearded Thunderer; and Frey, the gentle god of growing things.”
A one-eyed man with a raven on each shoulder. The image called to me, faint as a last dying echo bouncing in the bowl of my skull. Another man cloaked in lightning bolts. A third with a hidden face—and rainbow eyes. I’d dreamed of them on my first spirit journey. I hadn’t thought of them again, yet now they drifted back into my life in Brandr’s wake. I shivered. The spirits of my own world had turned against me; I didn’t have the strength to battle the spirits of his as well.
Heedless of my discomfort, Brandr went on. “But most of all, Galinn worshipped Freya.” He kept his eyes on the sky. “The goddess of love.”
We sat in silence for a few moments more. A cold breath of ocean air sneaked beneath his cloak,
pulling it away from him. Shaking, he clasped the cloth closer around his shoulders.
The motion seemed to break him from his memories. He turned to me for the first time. “You said the flames in the sky were spirits?”
“Yes. Can’t you see them running toward us?” Flashes of orange and purple now sprinted back and forth across the sky, streaks of green stretching behind like shadows in a long summer twilight. “The dead play games through the long darkness.” The thought of Ataata and Nua and Kidla playing tag between the stars lessened the hurt of their loss.
He took a deep breath, uneven on the way in, but steadying on the way out, and tilted his face up once more. “Then, Galinn, I’m glad you found more joy in death than you did in life.”
I wanted to touch his shoulder and stop his shivering. “My father and grandfather are up there with your brother,” I said instead. “And in here.” I pressed my palm against my chest.
Brandr flinched. “Don’t say that. That’s what they always say. That the dead live on inside of us. But they’re no longer part of this world. Perhaps, as you believe, they still exist up there, out of reach, in the sky. Maybe Galinn was right, and he feasts tonight in the halls of Valhalla with Thor and Odin.” He laughed harshly. “Or maybe, just maybe, although I hope it’s not true, the dead live in heaven with the Christ, never to experience the joys of the flesh. But no matter what, Galinn is gone from here.”
“You don’t understand me. Up there, my father plays in the stars. But his soul has been reborn in me. I have his name, his spirit. We are curled one within the other, like the spirals of a shell.” He looked dubious; I pressed on angrily. “You don’t seem to believe in a world you cannot see. And yet, if I were like you, I wouldn’t believe your stories of deserts and volcanoes and tall buildings of stone. I would say you made them up, since I’ve never seen them. But instead, I trust that there are many things beyond my understanding.”
He didn’t speak again right away. Perhaps he’d taken some comfort from my words. Perhaps he just didn’t want to discuss it further. I tried to read his face, his posture, but I saw only ice. Whatever he felt, he wasn’t yet ready to let me share his pain. Frustrated, I rose to leave.
“Here.” He opened his hand to me. In the center of his calloused palm lay a tiny wooden object. I remembered how he used to hide his carving whenever I approached. I hadn’t seen him work on it recently. In fact, I’d forgotten it entirely.
“It’s for you.”
I reached for it, my fingers brushing his hand. I held the carving up to the wavering green light of the aqsarniit. A tiny walrus figure with two perfect, intact tusks. Across its back, he’d carved a fine network of spirals and knots like those adorning the hilt of the small, sharp knife—like those of his own tattoo. I clutched it in my hand for a moment, then placed it carefully in my amulet pouch next to its one-tusked companion.
“I’m sorry about the other one,” he offered. “I didn’t mean to break it.”
I nodded, eyes downcast.
“You say I don’t believe what I don’t see and don’t understand. That’s not true. I believe in you. I have no reason to, really—I know almost nothing about you. But I trust you.” He turned his gaze back to the shimmering sky.
I breathed easier without his eyes on my face.
The aqsarniit streamed and swayed like silent tongues of green fire, stretching from one end of the sky to the other.
“I threw that little walrus out of your tent that day because I needed you to know how far I’d come, how alone I am. How alone I was,” he corrected himself. In the starlight, his stony face melted—for a heartbeat or two, his mouth quavered into grief. Then, with a deep, hollow breath, his features calmed. “I don’t feel alone anymore.”
Afraid of what he might say next, I merely stammered, “You should come back inside the tent. The cold isn’t good for your leg.”
To my relief, he didn’t press the conversation further.
When I finally fell back to sleep that night, with Brandr lying an arm’s length away, my inherited dreams were more vivid than ever. Every time I rolled over, I rose from sleep like a drowning man sucking air, and in that instant of clarity, I remembered everything: a face not unlike Brandr’s, but younger and beardless, with hair the color of dead grass. Blue eyes and a faraway stare. Galinn. I had last seen him pale and terrified, bleeding in his brother’s arms beside the whale carcass.
Then another vision—a giant wooden boat surrounded by bearded men in iron helmets. A boat far longer and slimmer than the one that had brought Brandr to Issuk’s camp. Ahead, a small village of stone houses with mossy roofs perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Even from far out at sea, the screams of the women carried across the water. They ran into their low houses, scooping up their children as they went. The screams grew faint as the women barricaded themselves indoors. A keening howl of an even higher pitch soon replaced their cries.
Ahead of the ship, three giant black wolves ran across the sea, their feet striking spray from the waves. On their backs rode three naked women, each holding aloft a sword shining with blood. The men on the ship paid no heed to these apparitions, but I saw them clearly, and my ears rang with their piercing screams. Above the village, three enormous ravens croaked out a harsh greeting as their mistresses approached.
I leapt over the side of the boat and waded to shore, my heart racing and my vision clouded with red haze. The part of me living within Brandr’s memory wished only for blood. But my own mind shrank in horror.
With the other Vikings laughing beside me, I burst through the door of the nearest stone hut. A young black-haired woman with enormous eyes crouched in a corner holding out a crude spear. A Norseman wrenched the weapon from her grasp and broke it over his knee. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her toward me.
“For you, Brandr,” the man crowed. “Young and fresh. Just like you.”
I awoke with a strangled scream. Beside me, Brandr twitched and moaned in his sleep. Did he wander in the same terrible dream?
Not Brandr, I decided. He would never take a woman as Issuk took me. With his brother, with an injured wolfdog, with me—he’d always been kind.
I laid a hand on his shoulder until he slept peacefully once more.
I will not believe it of my friend. I will not.
Still, I didn’t sleep again that night for fear the dream might return. I could not bear to witness its end.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
How much farther to your people’s camp?”
I had asked the same question every morning since I’d learned Brandr’s tongue. But today I shouted it over the howl of the wind. We’d woken to a frigid blast ripping our tent apart. A storm had roared in overnight, dumping snow as deep as my waist. It had taken all our strength to make our way from our camp to the nearby shoreline to check our location.
“I don’t know exactly,” Brandr shouted back through chattering teeth. He pointed through the whirling snow toward a small, rocky island perched in the center of a sheltered bay. “That looks familiar from when we explored up the coast, but we didn’t reach it until at least two days into our journey, with a strong wind behind us. We may still be a week away by foot. Perhaps more.”
I’d lost track of the moons. Brandr said the Norse called this time Slaughter Month—a useful name for the time when they butchered the sheep who wouldn’t survive the winter—and the Romans called it November, “Ninth Month,” which didn’t seem useful at all. He said the days would continue to grow shorter for another moon. But if this was indeed the Moon of the Setting Sun, why were the days still so long? The ice on the lakes still buckled beneath my touch, and the ocean still heaved and crested, completely liquid. Not even gray mush ice formed at the shoreline. From those signs, I’d thought we still had time before winter arrived in force. I’d been wrong.
The storm continued unabated, whipping the snow through the air with such ferocity I was surprised any had settled on the ground at all.
I pulled the hood of my parka tighter against my cheeks as we trudged back through the drifts to the remnants of my tent. It had only ever been meant for summer; I was lucky it had lasted this long. Brandr stood beside me, visibly shaking. His tattered blue cloak was no more substantial than the cloudless sky it resembled. By now the snow—wetter and heavier than usual—must have soaked through his cloth trousers.
Every day I tarried was one more day Kiasik lived alone among strangers. But we couldn’t travel in weather like this. Brandr would freeze and I would lose my way. A wise Inuk would crawl inside his iglu and wait for the storm to pass.
I stabbed the butt of my spear into the snow, confirming what I already knew—it was far too soft to build a proper iglu.
“We build a qarmaq out of sod, or wood, or whatever we have,” I announced. “Otherwise we freeze where we stand.”
“Or drown in snow,” Brandr added, brushing the heavy flakes from his beard.
So, with spear and sword and wolf paws, we dug a circular pit an arm’s length deep through snow and earth. Brandr pulled up saplings to form a frame like those that supported the painted men’s bark dwellings, and we used the remnants of the tent to cover it. On top of the skins, we piled a thick layer of snow. Without a lamp or seal oil, we made a fire pit in the center, as the painted men had done, and a smoke hole above it. A mound of pine boughs covered with pelts served as our sleeping bench. At my insistence, we also built a long entrance tunnel that curved into the earth before rising through the floor of our qarmaq. Used to turf longhouses, Brandr would’ve put the door in the side of the hut where the cold air would rush inside every time we lifted the door flap—but I convinced him of his folly.
As a final touch, I strung the wide brown bear pelt across one side of our new qarmaq, creating a private area where I might sleep and use the night bowl.
“Won’t we need that fur to sleep in?” Brandr asked.
The Wolf in the Whale Page 28