“And so would I.” He smiled down at me, kissing the tip of my nose. His lightness was infectious. Together we pulled the remnants of the wool dress from my shoulders and the fur parka from his. For a moment, sitting in only my makeshift trousers with my breasts bare, I was shy again.
I picked up his discarded parka, resisting the urge to cover myself with it. “We’ll ask Puja to make you a better one.”
“I would wear none but one made by your hands.”
“You may call me wife, but I never plan to sew again!”
“So you are my wife, then!”
“Can I be a wife if I’m not a woman?” I asked, suddenly serious. “Or,” I conceded, “not only a woman?”
His solemn gaze matched my own. “I told you once I didn’t want to settle down with a wife. Now I know I never wanted only a wife. I wanted a wife and a partner and a friend. Spirit upon spirit curled one within the other like the spirals of a shell. Isn’t that what you told me once?”
He brushed the hair from my forehead and took my lips once more in his. I dropped the parka. His hand moved to cradle my naked breast. I felt all my spirals uncurl beneath his touch. I moaned, deep in my throat, and his lips grew more urgent; he bent to take my nipple in his mouth.
“Aii!”
Then, as he settled into his task, I moaned a soft “Alianait” of pleasure and buried my fingers in his orange hair.
He turned bright eyes toward me. “Are you so happy you’ve forgotten how to speak Norse?”
“Norse doesn’t have quite the right words.”
He traced one finger over the curve of my breast. “Alianait…” He drew out the exclamation like a caress. My nipple hardened beneath his touch. “Yes… that is the right word.”
Perhaps it was hearing my people’s words on his lips. Perhaps it was simply the drive of my own desire. Perhaps it was the light in his eyes. I was ready. Together we pushed the trousers from our hips and clambered onto the sleeping platform. He pulled me on top of him, and I moved instinctively, seeking release, my hands digging into his shoulders, my feet pressed against his legs.
“My—my thigh.”
“Sorry! I forgot—”
“No, no, come back. Don’t move! Well, I mean move, just how you were, just put your hands—”
“Here?”
“Ow!”
“Here?”
“Yes. There, there, perfect.”
“And how about here?”
“There’s good, too.”
“Here?” I guided him inside me, slowly, achingly slowly.
“Alianait…”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
I always knew he would leave. That didn’t make our parting any easier.
In our last moons together, we hunted side by side, filling my family’s scanty meat caches. We slept side by side as well. No longer alone most nights, for that is not our way, but that didn’t stop us from enjoying each other beneath the sleeping furs. I was still a man to my people, but a woman now as well. Finally I lived in both spheres, enjoyed both lives. A woman in Brandr’s arms, a man upon the open ice.
Puja made me a new parka, and despite Brandr’s protests, she made one for him as well, although he insisted on keeping the dog-fur hood from his old one.
“For luck.”
“Sew a ruff for it,” I said to Puja. “He can’t complain about that, and he’ll need it on the open sea.”
That was one of the few times I spoke of his leaving. But the signs of it were everywhere. The Vinland logs from the Norsemen’s knarrs washed upon our shores, but no corpses followed suit. All trace of gods and giants had disappeared. Brandr and Snorri wasted no time constructing a small boat. They were no shipwrights, but Brandr had been a sailor once, and seemed more at ease in the boat than he ever had on our hunting trips.
Side by side they worked, and slowly their hatred softened and melted like the ice around them. Snorri was grateful for Brandr’s help, and I think perhaps Brandr saw something in the younger man that reminded him of Galinn.
Saartok and Millik helped sew a patched sail of scraped seal hides, and Ququk crafted strong walrus-skin ropes. The old man didn’t fully trust this strange wooden boat, continually insisting that only a crazy fool would build so heavy a ship, but Brandr merely laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, and continued hammering together the long slats of wood.
Niquvana and Ujaguk, the oldest women in our camp, sewed a parka and trousers for Snorri as well. Puja fashioned containers from bladders and hides to hold food and water for the journey.
When the ice finally melted from the sea, everything was ready.
Brandr and Snorri, with Tapsi and me helping, pushed the boat over the rocky shore and out into the open water. Ququk harrumphed, but had to admit that yes, it did float.
Oblivious to the frigid water, Brandr waded out and hauled himself over the side. He stood proudly, hands on hips, his smile gleaming in the summer sun.
Onshore, I turned away.
Puja walked beside me, back to our camp. “You could go with him.”
I stopped in my tracks. I looked at the woman who had been the only mother I’d ever known. I didn’t need to say anything more. She understood. I’d never leave my people. Not even for my mate.
The Norsemen left later that day.
With all our camp gathered onshore to see them off, Brandr came to embrace me one last time. I kept him at arm’s length.
“It’s easier if you just go.” If I broke down and cried, if I clung to him, if I begged him to stay, there was the slimmest chance that he might not leave. And he had to leave. For Snorri. For my way of life. I knew that if I succeeded in protecting my heart, I’d fail to protect my people.
“It is not easier,” he insisted, reaching out a hand to me. “This will never be easy.”
“Please, Brandr.”
I let him take my hand in his. That’s all I could allow. But before I could stop him, he pressed his lips against my palm. My fingertips brushed his orange beard for the last time.
“Tapvauvutit,” he whispered. Here you are. An Inuk’s words of parting.
“Farthu vel,” I said in response, knowing he was wrong. I would never be with him again.
When he drew away, a chill wind reminded me of summer’s fleeting beauty.
I did not watch their boat disappear over the horizon. Ququk did, I think, marveling at the way the sail moved the craft so smoothly across the water. But I left. I grabbed my bow and arrows and walked inland, toward the caribou herds. No wolfdogs ran down my prey for me. No brother teased when my arrow missed the caribou. No friend told me tales to fill the silence at night. No spirit guided my steps or calmed the weather.
I was alone once more.
By the time I returned to camp several days later, I brought two pieces of news. One, the caribou herd had moved northward and we should follow it. Two, I was with child.
My woman’s blood had always been as unpredictable as everything else in my life. On my long sojourn, it had sometimes come with every moon, sometimes not for two or three in a row. But when I woke every morning on my solo caribou hunt and vomited outside my tent, even I, with my limited knowledge of a woman’s world, knew the signs.
On our summer migration, I found myself looking at the world with different eyes. I searched the ground for the tracks and scat of the caribou, yes, but I also watched for black lichen and field moss and willow scrub. Puja didn’t need to be asked, she simply took to walking beside me, pointing out which plants could make a warming tea or form a lamp wick that would burn smokeless and strong—or wipe up an infant’s mess.
Once I might have chafed at walking next to her—now I relished it. She had much to teach. Much I’d never taken the time before to learn. If we hadn’t been scanning the ground together, I never would’ve noticed the qiviut—great furry clumps of brown musk ox fur—hanging off the branches of the low-lying bushes. The massive beasts must have passed this way during the spring, shedding their thick unde
rcoats. Most qiviut was quickly snatched by birds to line their nests. But somehow these clumps had waited here for many moons.
A rustling drew my attention to a nearby hillock. A raven, tall and proud, strode across the moss, her black beak twitching toward us, then away, one bright eye meeting mine. She took to the sky in a scraping of feathers and disappeared in lazy circles into the sunlight, loosing a single croaking call as she went.
Puja sneaked her hand into mine. She knew I watched the bird’s flight with envy.
I squeezed her hand in return, and whispered my gratitude to the raven. She’d been guarding the qiviut for me all summer.
Together Puja and I gathered the ragged sheets of fur from the branches, marveling at the thick softness.
Later I sat in our tent with the pile of wool on my lap. Snorri’s hair had once reminded me of the curling undercoat of a musk ox. Now that I had the qiviut in front of me, though, I thought only of Freydis. A woman whose life was ruled by wool. I’d always seen her constant spinning and weaving as a burden. But now, as I pictured her standing before her loom with her ivory sword, I thought about the women’s magic I’d discovered so many moons ago on the whale hunt. I’d killed a man through the mere tying and untying of cord. How much more power lay in weaving string together than in breaking it apart?
It took me nearly until the end of the Moon When Birds Fly South to carve a workable spindle. By the Moon When Winter Begins, I’d spun only half of the qiviut into thread. As I twisted the fibers together, I felt a strange power building within me. Not that of an angakkuq, not quite. Perhaps it was only the strength of my child. Had every mother felt the stirrings of such power?
Puja and Ujaguk and Niquvana stared at my new thread, at first skeptical, then fascinated. They begged for spindles of their own. Ququk and Tapsi agreed to carve them from the antlers of the caribou we’d killed. Soon the women walked with their spindle whorls swaying before them, like spiders birthing their silk. None of us had Muirenn or Freydis’s skill, but together we collected a thick spool of qiviut thread by the Moon of Great Darkness. Rougher, thicker, less fine than the Norsewomen’s—but stronger, lighter, and warmer.
I both hated and loved the child growing inside me. I hated how protective Puja had become, treating me like some fragile girl. I hated that I could hardly lower myself into a kayak, much less paddle long enough to hunt down a seal along the ever-widening ice edge. But when the baby moved inside me, when I felt the contours of its feet pressing against my palm, I couldn’t help but smile.
Unable to hunt any longer, I began to fashion a loom. It took me three frustrating moons to complete. I never did figure out how to make a working shuttle; I resorted to passing the qiviut threads under and over each other by hand. To tighten the weave, I used a blunted snow knife in place of an ivory sword—a tool for building, not bloodshed.
I’d woven a scant finger’s length of cloth when the first pangs began.
My family built a birthing iglu for me on the outskirts of our camp. Puja stayed by my side as she had stayed by my mother’s. Taqqiq had told me that every passage was one of blood. Birth and death, we are torn apart and re-created.
I was ripped open once more, but this time my tears were those of joy, not rage.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
With my baby swaddled in seal furs by my side, I sat before my loom. For a day and a night, I did nothing but nurse my child and stare at the small stretch of cloth.
With my eyes open, I dreamed. But they were not my dreams. They were Galinn’s, and the old painted woman’s, and even the All-Father’s. I dreamed of one people destroyed by another, leaving nothing but ruins and shards of clear quartz. I dreamed of a land where all the spirits would live in peace. I dreamed of an ending, where Odin’s ravens flew with my own and Inuit wolfdogs lived in a Norse god’s prophecy.
Then I dreamed of a beginning.
I took up the thread again. My cloth, if it could even be called cloth, was ragged and patchy, all loose threads and snarled edges. Still I wove, my task lit by sunlight and seal oil. My fingers flying over my loom, I began to sing my story to my child.
I started with my own tale—the melting of girl into boy, of man into woman and back. And back again. Of a journey to a land of towering trees and back once more to flat stone. Of a man with eyes the color of ice and hair the color of flame and a smile to warm the coldest night. Of brothers lost and found and lost again. And always, always, the spirits watching from above and below, from my own land and from across the sea, until finally the gods themselves melt away, never to return again.
My child’s eyes wandered unfocused across my face, across my fingers—not yet able to see, to understand. But able to hear. And, one day, to remember.
As I sang, I wove together the strands of my story. I wove together my own past with that of my father and my grandfather and my mother. I wove Issuk’s family into the warp and my own into the weft. I twined the strength of Freydis with the innocence of Snorri, the laughter of Brandr with the courage of Kiasik. Singarti’s grace. Uqsuralik’s power. Loki’s cunning. Frey’s gentleness.
I wove together the gods I’d led to destruction, those who couldn’t see that my land was big enough for them all. The Aesir saw my land as theirs to conquer. Loki saw it as his to defend. I, too, had wanted the Norsemen gone. Yet did my child not share the spirit of the Viking I loved? Odin walked with a raven on each shoulder—he could have found a home here with the animal spirits. Instead he had come to fight. To the Norse, battle was a way of life. They couldn’t live in a land without subduing it. And, as much as I hated to admit it, my own people were little different. I had not forgotten the old painted woman and her memories of slavering dogs. My ancestors had driven the first iglu builders from this land. One people replacing another in an unending cycle. A cycle I wanted to finally break.
When I finished my tale, I cut the cloth from the loom with Brandr’s sharp knife. I ran my fingers over the rough brown weave, each stitch and snarl loosing a flood of memories. My story made tangible. Never to be forgotten. The threads knotted and gaped—weft and warp joining as uneasily as Inuk and Norseman. But the cloth held together. With this I had woven my shattered world back together. With this I would wrap my child.
I swaddled my baby in the ragged qiviut blanket and crawled from the qarmaq. Together we stared up at the Moon. I no longer feared Taqqiq—he turned his face away from us and stared over his shoulder at the sister who chased him instead. My future lay only in the world at my feet and the new life in my arms.
Or so I thought.
Seal Birthing Moon found us back in our igluit on the landfast ice. Every morning, Tapsi and Ququk left by dogsled to hunt on the frozen sea, while I stayed behind to nurse my child. But come summer, when the ocean rippled beneath the never-setting Sun, I would be a man again, teaching my people how to hunt the whale as Issuk had done.
I made my own aglirutiit now.
I stared off across the frozen sea. In the moonlight, loose snow blew across the ice in long, undulating ripples like watery waves, as if summer had come a few moons early. I let myself dream that the sea ice had melted—that somehow Brandr had made it all the way to Greenland, seen Snorri safely home, and returned to me. A foolish hope, I knew.
Still, when I heard the heavy footsteps behind me, I nearly jumped. When I heard the Norse-accented voice call my name, I nearly cried.
When I turned around, a tall, red-bearded man stood before me.
“Thor…”
“Omat.”
“I thought…”
The god smiled, his teeth very white in the moonlight. “You thought we were dead?” He laughed, a low, thunderous rumbling. From the dim light behind him, other figures emerged. Odin and Frigg, Frey and Freya, and a host of others… All the great gods of the Norse assembled before my iglu. Their clothes no longer sparkled with gold and silver, their weapons no longer glinted with iron and steel—only driftwood and slate and bone.
I pulled t
he qiviut blanket tight to shield my child.
“Don’t hide her,” Freya urged. When she spoke, the wreath of yellow poppies and pink saxifrage in her hair bobbed and waved. “She’s why we’re here.”
Gentle Frey stepped away from his beautiful sister to peer at the baby in my arms. I could barely meet his gaze, yet this god whom Brandr had struck down seemed to bear me no malice. “We thought the Fate of the Gods would be our end,” he murmured. “Eternal death without rebirth. Darkness without light.”
“Among my people, the heralding stars always return,” I explained hesitantly. “Dawn follows darkness. The Sun rises again. Each end, even the Ragnarok, is also a beginning.”
I could hardly believe it, but my women’s magic had worked. When the spirits had died in battle, I’d lost my powers as an angakkuq. But I’d tapped into something far older and deeper. That which I had destroyed I now restored.
“We do not live as we did before,” Frigg said, her voice grim but resigned. “We are Norse gods no longer.”
“Inuit. Norse. Both are people of dwarfs and giants and ravens and wolves,” I replied. “We will give you sanctuary here among the ice.”
“We may have been reborn in Jotunheim,” Odin said, “but we will move south. It would be nice to live among the trees once more.”
The wind picked up, as if Sila wished to hasten them on their way.
The snow rose from the ice in a swirling curtain. One by one, towering figures emerged from the whiteness. Striding. Prancing. Soaring.
Wolf, Raven, Bear, Caribou.
I fell to my knees before Singarti. “You haven’t abandoned me,” I managed, choking back tears. I held up my child for my guardian spirit to sniff.
You cannot kill a spirit so easily. Singarti’s voice spoke into my mind. We move. We change. We do not die.
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