I smiled, too, and laughed. “This is far enough,” I said. I looked down into the grotto. “I would stay here forever if I could. It’s so beautiful.”
He drew up beside me.
“Good,” he said. “Flotta straumi.” He relaxed with the words, his voice deep and respectful. Splendid stream. We watched it go by.
Then he straightened himself again, like I’d seen him do before—a gesture of deliberately waking from a dream. “In winter, we skate it.”
“Skate it!” I was thrilled. This wonderland would be made even finer with a dusting of snow. Images of cold laughter came to mind, of frosty breath and fur coats and freedom.
“Já, have you not skated?”
“No, never.” I said it for sure, knowing I hadn’t, and he watched me with calm interest.
“You will, then,” he told me, and he seemed to accept how sure I was. That even with my complete amnesia, I had no doubt I’d never strapped skates onto my shoes. His horse stepped in place, shaking his hooves out, and the chief looked into the grotto. A moment more, standing in a quiet covered over by the sound of endless, speeding water. Oh, I wanted to skate in this enchanted place! This swift rushing could be stilled after all. Frozen. And we could fly over its surface.
Would I still be here? Or would I be grasped by the tank, taken through time?
I took a deep breath, readying myself to leave the ravine, to return to the house and work. “Next time, I’ll find a way down there.”
The chief turned to me with his brows drawn. “What do you mean?” He asked me as if I was dense. “Come down.” He gave the slightest pull on Vakr’s reins, almost imperceptible, and the horse walked right off the edge of the earth.
“Follow,” the chief called, but he didn’t have to, because Gerdi had understood and was already walking exactly where Vakr did. She took a step off the cliff, and my heart fell free.
Of course, it wasn’t a direct plunge, but it was so steep, it hollowed my stomach and dried my throat. We descended the uneven rock face, the horses stepping down without a care. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, to hold onto Gerdi and let her find her way down those jagged rocks. I held my breath, until I knew I would pass out and fall off her back. Gerdi knew what to do. That I had never done anything like this was irrelevant—and electrifying.
We reached the bottom, my head alight and dizzy. I got off the horse clumsily and turned around, my skirt a bundle of confusion. The chief was composed, not struggling with anything.
He sat on the rocks, already using a stick to trace something in the sludge at the water’s edge. The fearsome Viking, reduced to a curious boy poking at a stream with a piece of birch wood.
I sat down several feet away from him, drawing my skirts away from the water. I touched my fingertips to it. It was frigid and clear, its blue borrowed from the sky, its rushing sound so much louder than I expected. It moved fast, flowing off in the direction of home. This water would become the wider river that ran below the house.
The chief didn’t speak much, and I didn’t either.
I looked at him closer and longer now. His legs weren’t bound, and his fine wool pants hung loose around his ankles, only his short boots underneath. He wore no bracers either, and his wrists showed under long loose sleeves. His black hair was free. So undone. I imagined him waking early as I rummaged and clanked around outside his room, imagined him walking outside to find me stealing his horse. The chief had left in a hurry to come after me.
I untied my boots and set them aside, rolled my woolen pants up and stepped into the water. The cold felt knife-like, and all sensation began to slip from my toes. The water reached above my ankles, rushing hard against me and tugging more than I thought it would. It felt wonderful, and I waded out farther into the current, my skirts lifted in my two fists to stay dry.
I looked back at the chief and he seemed open and relaxed in his silence. He’d brought me down here, and in return I would coax him into the stream. “Follow,” I said with a thrust of my chin, playfully echoing his earlier command.
He didn’t play.
When we had walked along the house, my eyes on the back of his neck, he seemed life sized. But as he rose to stand now, I was overwhelmed. The intensity I’d heard about was directed at me, his gold eyes on me, and I was emptied. The blood rushed out of my hands, fingers tingling, everything gone. I backed away and stumbled on the rocks of the stream bed, the freezing water closing like fingers around my ankles.
He stopped, and turned his head away, rested his palm on the rock wall beside him. And I waited for him to do any of a dozen things, to banish me from his home, to draw a knife from his belt and bury it neatly in my heart, to simply leave me here in the water, rebuffed.
Instead he placed one foot up on a rock and untied and removed his boot. Then the other. He set them aside and walked into the water.
He stepped onto a little island, no more than three feet across, and crouched on the moss. He drew black stones up from the bottom of the stream and piled them. A fort, or tiny cairn. While he built, I let my heart settle. I swirled my foot around, feeling the freezing drift and pull, and watched my hiked-up skirt hover just above the surface.
His voice came, overly easy and light. Sorry he’d scared me? “You love the water,” he said.
I always knew I would. I stopped just a breath away from saying so—just short of admitting that I remembered a time and place where I lived without streams or horses or chieftains.
Here in this lovely place, I felt like I could tell him. I wanted him to know about how I remembered my apartment, the lab, the sounds and unearthly light of screens. Flat pictures of farms. I wanted him to know me. I felt almost like I could say everything, and that he would accept my truth.
“Já,” I said instead. “It feels calm to me. So good and easy.”
This moment felt easy, too, and I was no longer scared of him. No longer scared of birds or steep rocks or anything. Giddy with the rush of relief, I swept my foot in a bigger arc, and I kicked, splashing water on his island.
He pretended not to react, but I could see him hide a smile.
“I am that way with the woods,” he said, and without looking up he sliced his hand into the water and expertly splashed me back. He soaked my pants and the hems of my skirts and my laugh echoed through the rocks and all around us. He told me, “I have the men cut from the far side.”
The far side. Oh. Of the white woods, yes. The gorgeous, glowing woods that were being devoured every day to become boats and beds. To become the fires that gagged and sustained me. But the chief was an early settler, and there was still so much forest left, trees twisting and leaves tossing farther than I could see. It made me happy that there was a place like that for him, where he felt easy.
He still worked on his fort. Approached me indirectly with his few words. “You go places alone.”
I laughed. “Maybe I shouldn’t. I might get eaten by birds.”
The chief laughed, too. “It was the elf hollow,” he told me, sitting up on his heels.
The elf hollow? I recalled the glen that held the tiny house as if in a great palm. Oh. Yes, it made sense. I’d read about this! The little home I’d seen was not a dollhouse for playing, it was there for the hidden folk.
“You keep the small house ready for them?”
He pressed his lips together, literally holding words back. In a moment he answered. “If not, they will come and tramp on Hildur in her sleep.” He tried to say it without disdain, but a hint of stress on her name came through, and I had to hold back a smile.
“They bring dread dreams,” he finished.
“Did the birds protect the hollow,” I asked, trying for one moment to believe what he might. “Because they thought I’d see the elves?”
“Já, well,” He took a deep breath. “I suspect you would have seen many nests, too.”
Nests, I thought, and a second later I got what he meant. Oh. The birds were protecting their eggs! A nesti
ng ground turned legend.
I smiled broadly at that, feeling closer to Heirik knowing that he questioned such things. Besides both of us being isolated, we were odd in this way too. Words tumbled out without my thinking. “It’s less lonely,” I said. “To go out by myself.”
My eyes stung suddenly, and I turned to regard the waterfalls. “I know it doesn’t make sense.”
Level and sure, he answered. “It does.”
I waded back to the shore and he did too. We sat apart from one another, but both of us kept our feet in the stream. I couldn’t feel mine any more, but I didn’t want to break the stillness and pull them out. I knew if I did then we’d leave here. We both watched the water, moving and yet unchangeable. I tried to follow a single bit of it with my eyes, and for a moment the falls seemed suspended.
If I came to this place in the 22nd century, it would look wrong. It might have carved a different path by then. This was now, this small moment sitting with our toes in the water.
I lost track of my little piece of the current and it was consumed. My voice trailed off to a whisper that went with it. “It’s what I came for.” Over the stream’s hard rushing, the words disappeared.
The chief broke into my reverie, but gently. “My grandfather knew poetry,” he said. “He put the house here.”
The house came to mind, a living thing, its walls grown so thick with grass that it melted into the hills. The chief looked up and back in its direction. We couldn’t see it from here, but the word hús itself seemed to pull at him. His mother’s house. The place he remade every year, shoring it up, making it solid and safe. The place he entered every night, into a world where everyone turned away.
I thought Heirik himself knew poetry. He spoke so sparely and bluntly. Statements so evocative with three or four words.
“Haying is soon,” he said. “We’ll have enough wood stored.” He looked at his own unmarked palm as if the echo of his ax lay there, then turned his hand over to rest on his knee. He raised his eyes, so pale in the morning light.
“We’ll go,” he told me, and he drew his boots on.
I didn’t want to, but I knew it was time. We weren’t truly suspended here. The day would begin and I would cook and sew, and he would tell men what to do. He’d cut wood and sharpen axes blunted by constant chopping. And roundup and haying would come soon, time passing as it should. I liked that idea.
Gerdi fell in exactly behind Vakr, nose to tail, and once again I found myself watching Heirik’s back. His glossy hair stirred with a breeze, and I felt like I’d observed him this way not only once or twice, but always, for twelve hundred years. The farm was beginning to feel that natural to me.
We didn’t talk anymore, and at first it was easy. By the time we reached the house, he was different. Working. Roughly calling to the foster boy to bring another horse up. I was completely forgotten, and the ease of building a fort and splashing were displaced by the demands of the day.
Hildur stood framed in the mudroom door. “There you are, Child!” She sounded relieved, as though she’d been worried about me. She watched Heirik ride off, and once he was gone, her voice turned unkind. “You have work to do.” I nodded and slid off Gerdi’s back.
Bye, I thought after the chief.
Hildur waited, the palm of her hand pressed against her waist, her charm.
Hvítmörk was a low, dense forest.
The trees were maybe twice my height. Just tall enough to get forever lost.
I was alone here, as I was many nights after a late evening meal. The women didn’t wonder or worry about me. Betta did sometimes, but not always. Some nights she was gone, walking with someone else, and I would go alone to the ravine and listen to the rapid water. Or come here, to the edge of the woods.
I ducked in under the trees, a few feet in, just to see how it felt inside. It was cool and creepy and smelled alive, like wet dirt. Gerdi would know where we were. She’d find our way back. Holding her reins, I drew her into the enchanted woods.
At first, everything looked white—the bark of the trees, the tops of the angelica flowers, even the horse by my side. The light itself was blasted out and white. But as my eyes adjusted, I saw a subtle chaos of color. Underneath the peeling white bark were copper and fire and pale apricot. The snowbloom stalks were electric lime, set against a forest floor of black dirt, creeping with low evergreens and their navy blue berries.
The trees did not stand majestic and straight. They were elaborately twisted, each with three or four trunks growing from a single root. Some spindly, some strong and intertwined with others. Each tree seemed a complex mess, but when seen together they all slanted in unison for the same light. An eerie reaching, as though the forest had a million skeletal hands all desiring the same thing.
I ducked under branches and picked my way through the underbrush, looking for something myself, I didn’t know what. It was too dense for Gerdi now, and I let her go, knowing she would be content with so many blossoms at our feet. She would stand eating until I returned.
The woods got thicker and closer, and when I stopped and peered through the branches, the tangle of trunks went on forever. They pressed in from all directions. This time I wasn’t afraid to be alone, though, out here in real nature with no companion but a horse. Twelve hundred years in the future, I would be born. I’d come so far. There was something negligible about the dangers of wandering in the woods.
I ducked low, branches snagging in my hair and creeping juniper grabbing at my hems. The trees peeled white, revealing a coppery red so dense it was hard to look at. Brushing leaves out of my eyes, I stumbled into a little stream bed.
The dirt and stones that lined it were almost completely dry, but a waterway still trickled, so tiny I could step across it with ease and not get my boots wet. I knelt and washed my hands, then dipped water into my palms and drank. It tasted cold and honey-kissed, and I knelt and dipped my head low to smell its dirty, vivid scent. I stood too quickly, snared my dress on a branch, and fell into the open palm of a tree.
Five gnarled trunks grew from its base, and I had fallen in a cherry red heap right in its center. I leaned back and saw the sky, peaceful through the leaves. I ran my finger along the glossy side of a leaf and it was tough like old leather, like the chief’s bracers would be, worn slick and strong. I lay my head against a scratchy trunk and drew my body in, curling up inside the tree like a fort. Colors changed and my eyes grew heavy. The sun was sinking and dimness coming on, and the branches were turning from snow and blood and peach to the simple darks and lights of night.
I felt the cage-tree holding me, and yet I wasn’t there at all. I was in my apartment, shocked at the cold, unyielding tile under my toes. The farm on the wall screen lay ridiculously flat, and I laughed at myself, the self who used to know anything. I muttered at the apartment to turn up the heat, and then I had a thought—I asked the apartment to let me go. And with a rush, I was outside, looking back at my building against the night sky. I saw myself. My body was still there. In the windows all around me were people, above my head, right under my feet, laughing, watching screens, feeding each other. A couple making love.
I stood out against a flat pasture, a single hand against the glass.
On the real farm, then, I saw a girl playing bride. An imperfect crown of twigs and flowers sat on top of her tight braids. She laughed and threw her bouquet of grass up in the air and it fell all over a dog who sat panting in the sun. She looked up and almost seemed to see me. She smiled, and her teeth were enormous.
I tried to look around behind little Betta. The chief was there somewhere, in that yard, his thirteen-year-old self. I wanted to see him.
But all I could see was his face the way it looked now, in his twenties. Now that I’m grown, he’d said. That smile, it was devious and charming and too brief. His eyes were dark amber. “Stay,” he said, as if I might ever go. He reached for my face, and I lay my cheek in his hand and thought Gods, he’s touching me. I turned to kiss his fingers, a
nd his palm was warm and dry against my lips, mine to touch, to own, all mine. I woke. My sweaty cheek stuck to my own hand, my whole body curled in the palm of a tree. Newly born and glowing.
I must have been attracted to Heirik all along, but I sat in the cup of that tree and felt the weight of realization. Oh, yes. I saw it now. How I’d assumed my interest in his voice was academic. How I felt defensive of him, but it was no more than I would feel for any outcast. The way my heart was peaceful and open around him, the way I looked for him coming from the fields at night, listened for him first thing in the morning. Those meant nothing.
Except that I’d fallen for him.
He’d given me a stream, after all. He’d given me his woods and animals. He talked to me, like he did with no one else. He told me to put my hand on his house and call it my own, and I wanted to. I wanted to hold him in the heart of that house and have it be ours. I would be the one, the only one, to touch him.
I floated home, a blissful idiot on Gerdi’s back. The world was navy blue, with white lichens glowing like starbursts in the dark. The horse stopped to sniff and chew things, or sometimes just stood and looked around, as if moving had no appeal. I didn’t care. I was reliving every moment I’d been with Heirik, every word he’d said since the day we met. They were few, and it was easy to recall them all. Turn to me, he’d said. I only wanted to see your face.
His eyes frightened me the first time I saw him, at the coast, and again at the ravine. Now I wanted to look into them for long hours, to spend days learning the shades they went through with the changing of the light, sun-bleached wheat in morning to amber at night. I wanted to touch his dark brows, explore his mouth and bearded chin, my fingers small against his jaw. I wanted to see his fleeting smile, and maybe ask him if he’d let it linger a moment more.
Gerdi ate a flower and I thought languidly about his hair, how bits of it stuck to his forehead. I wanted to brush them away.
Beautiful Wreck Page 9