Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  He nodded to himself and looked deep into the steel edge as he spoke. With his whetstone, he brushed away some imperfection I couldn’t see. “I wanted to care for it today.”

  Betta’s words played out in my mind. You don’t know what he’s capable of. My throat dried and constricted, and I sounded hoarse when I asked, “May I?” I reached a hand toward the ax.

  A cold breeze dried my palm while I waited for Heirik to decide if he’d hand it to me. Did anyone else touch it? Maybe Hár.

  He flipped it over easily so that the handle pointed toward me.

  It was very heavy. So much weightier than I expected, the weapon dragged me down for a moment before I hefted it up in my two hands. I was amazed at how he swung such a thing so effortlessly by his calf when he walked, the pounds held as though they were nothing. The handle was worn and silky in the places he always gripped, and I matched my palm to a spot where his had been just seconds ago.

  The wood felt hot from his hands, but the ax also burned with its own fire. It felt alive and inquisitive, as if searching for who I was. A memory came, of one of my early lessons, placing my fingers on a classmate’s throat and feeling the vibrations of speech.

  “It feels like it a has a voice.”

  “You feel that?” His inflection gave away surprise. He recovered himself and then stood to show me, careful not to touch my hands. He stood so close, I smelled his scent of sweat and metal, felt his height and size. If he were to lean in to me, just now, he could press his lips to my forehead. We would fit like that.

  “It is called the throat of an ax. Here.” He ran his fingers down the long, curved handle with such tenderness. I imagined he was trailing them down the inside of my forearm. I shivered, from his fingers and the life in the ax. “The shoulder,” he said, and rubbed his thumb over the thickest part of the iron. Gods, could he possibly know what he was doing to me?

  Nei, Heirik did not flirt. He had no idea how. And if he felt anything right now it wasn’t detectable—no rapid breathing, no blush of skin to match mine. He was just talking about his ax.

  I let the handle slide through my fingers until the iron head rested on the ground by my feet. It was comfortable, its throat under my thumb.

  A horse whinnied down in the valley and I came awake and remembered why I was here. I promised myself I’d be brave. I wouldn’t cry. I choked the ax in my fist.

  “I have to tell you something awful.” There wasn’t a good way. “Fjoðr is dead.”

  There was a great sigh from the land all around us, and all the grass lay down as one—a flattening that stretched from our feet across the yard, to the house, the highlands and the valleys that led to the sea.

  Heirik sat slowly, elbows on his knees, and hung his head. I sank down onto the ground in front of him, in a rude clanking of needle case, shears and beads. I pulled Slitasongr into my lap as though the ax was a child and looked at it until Heirik was ready to speak.

  “When he was nine, my brother followed me always.” He talked without seeing me. “He wanted to do what I did, eat what I ate, say what I said.”

  I had no picture of Brosa in my head, and none of Heirik as a boy either. They were part of a vague scene—a dark haired boy and a smaller, golden one here in this yard. I imagined Vakr turning back to bite with irritation at Fjoðr, as if to say leave me alone.

  “I was exhausted from it,” Heirik continued. “I told him that to be like me, he was too pretty. He would need to be ugly.” He shook his head and half smiled. “He took a knife to his own face.”

  I blanched, felt my mouth open. “You couldn’t have known,” I murmured. “That he would do such a thing.”

  Heirik looked at me as though I was daft. “Of course I did,” he said. “My brother would do anything I asked.” He spoke with rueful pride, and with sadness, just beginning to believe that his brother had died. Had passed him, and was gone like a morning mist.

  I tried to adjust to the idea of a boy who would do such a thing, cause himself such pain and risk so he could be like Heirik.

  “Brosa will come back,” I said gently. “Fjoðr was a good horse. But he was not your brother.”

  “Já?” Heirik looked to me, desperately hopeful. “Well …” He seemed too bewildered to finish.

  His hair was a mess. I realized I’d never seen anyone cut it shorter. The women cut the mens’ hair, most of them keeping it around chin length. Heirik’s was long now, pulled back on top with a leather tie, the rest trailing everywhere down his shoulders, down his back.

  Right. No woman would cut his hair. Probably Betta’s Da would. But what man would want to ask Bjarni to groom him when everyone else was tended by pretty maids and wives?

  “They told you that you’re ugly.” I said it before I’d even thought the words.

  His eyes flashed anger at me, a warning, but he didn’t get up or leave or say a word.

  And I told him, “Nei.” It sounded so tender, the word almost lost in my breath.

  I shook my head slightly, and I smiled and let him see that he was beautiful to my eye. I hadn’t told him how I felt in so many words, but now I’d said something out loud, and it hung between us for a moment. I looked up at him like he was the most divine thing—everything good and lovely in this world. I was confident and sure.

  I watched, but he was unreadable. He’d closed down—something he’d practiced his whole life. A sudden realization broke through his wall, though, and he stood in a burst of intensity, towering above me. He snapped, “You saw Fjoðr.”

  “Já,” I said, standing too, Slitasongr’s blade narrowly missing my ankle and then settling on the ground there. My thumb found its throat again, and it was solid and warm, and in my hand, not his. “Betta and I found him. In the grass on the way back from the woods.”

  Heirik was focused, grave. “How was he done?”

  Courage, I told myself. Just say the truth. “His throat was cut.”

  The ground looked foreign and hard, and I concentrated on it, unsure if I should walk away, if I was dismissed, or if it was the opposite, that I was needed. Needed fiercely. I wavered, choked the ax.

  “You came to me,” he said, incredulous, and then his voice melted into warmest evening. “Brave thing,” he said. I didn’t know if he meant it was a brave thing I’d done, to come and tell him, or if it was a sort of name for me—you brave little thing. Gods, I wanted him to call me something sweet like that.

  He crossed his arms, and ducked his head to look under my hair, to find me in here. If he were willing to touch me, he would’ve lifted my chin. “You are alright?”

  “Já,” I said. My dress caught on my calluses where I smoothed it, down my knee. My other hand gripped the ax. “I’m alright,” I said again. And then I started to cry.

  His hand clenched nothing, and I thought he wanted to reach out to me, to wipe my cheek, hold me and rock me in his arms. Instead he moved with swift and terrifying grace. He took the ax from my hand and flipped it so that he choked it just below the head. In an unguarded second, I’d given him Slitasongr after all. I’d lost it.

  I watched him closely and didn’t flinch. I thought, or maybe dreamed, that underneath the quiet fury I saw something good, some protectiveness and concern.

  “Look,” he said smoothly, his voice dark like black sand. “Look at the blade, here. Put the sun behind you.”

  He came around to stand beside me and hold the ax up, so we were looking into its cutting edge. “A sharp blade reflects no light.”

  In the quiet, I felt the brush of his breath on my temple. It stirred my hair, and I wished he would press his lips there, smooth my hair back with his fingers, tell me to hush, that it would be alright. But instead of these impossible gestures, he showed me his ax. The blade was dark, not sparked with light. It was perfectly honed.

  “Ageirr thinks he goads me,” Heirik said evenly. “He only feeds my power.”

  A sense of impending violence curled like a cat in the corners of the house. It seemed to
stretch itself, then settle down again and fail to stir for hours. On the day Heirik went with Hár to bury Fjoðr, the tension rose, unspoken, around all of us. I was relieved we didn’t eat the horse.

  AN ACRE

  Harvest

  Something shifted, and the air turned to fall without saying so. It was simply here one day, a cold undercurrent, a shortening of the horizon. Our lazy afternoons picked up a hint of urgency. The dry, warm days would end soon, and when they did, we needed to have as much thread as possible ready for weaving, the most possible fish and roots and berries dried and stored. The pantry full of butter and cheese and skyr.

  Fjoðr’s death was curiously set aside.

  But at times I saw a wild anger in Heirik, barely contained. A hidden desire to kill something.

  We worked at putting things away. And as we worked, Betta told me things that weren’t entirely useful. She said that Hildur had some beliefs about the chief, and the idea that his brother would be more of a man. Betta also said that vengeance was more satisfying the longer it was drawn out. She looked around, nervous and furtive, when she talked about the chief. At the same time she told me not to pay attention to anyone’s fears.

  “They’re little girls,” she stated simply, “Svana especially.” Then she added with disdain, “And Hársdottirs.”

  They were, by my 22nd century standards. Svana and Thora were around fifteen years old. At seventeen, Betta was more mature, by far, even than Dalla Hársdottir who was already a mother four times over. Betta could be more mature than me at times, even though I had so many years on her I would never tell. Not only the thousand and two hundred, but my own twenty-four that I’d actually lived.

  “They talk stupid to soothe themselves,” she said, “when none of the adults are around.”

  I laughed brightly at that. Heirik was just over twenty years old himself, and Betta seventeen, but they were truly adults, and Svana was a toddler in comparison.

  “What is Svana afraid of?” I asked.

  “Her own fascination, maybe,” Betta said. “I’ve seen her wonder about him.”

  I didn’t like that, and I said so.

  “Don’t worry, Woman. She fears him completely. She’s just vain enough to worry that he might break his vow and take her as wife.”

  She placed a hand over her heart, dramatically, and one between her legs, looking around as though the chief were coming for her. I cracked up—actually rolled on the ground. But something nagged me every time she spoke of Svana. I pictured the girl’s tiny teeth at every mention of her name. In a tidy row, pure and dangerous.

  The ancestral ax, and the sense of doom, were put away when haying began.

  Men gathered in the misty glow of pre-dawn, standing or sitting on logs and rocks, honing blades and breathing the cold breath of morning. A cheerful shink-shinking song of a half dozen whetstones on steel surrounded the back door.

  Every man on the farm, from the lowest thrall to Heirik and Hár, had been working every morning from just before sunrise, dropping from exhaustion, getting up and doing it again. They stank. They ate. More than I imagined human beings could eat. They couldn’t keep their eyes open any longer than it took to devour what food and ale we gave them.

  The women worked too, and any children who were big enough to rake. Dalla and Kit took the tiniest babies tied on their backs. They followed behind the men to sweep the grass into windrows, back and forth each day, turning it until it dried in the sun and could be piled onto horses’ backs.

  Or so I was told. Betta and I had been left behind, with the little children. For days, she and I didn’t work in the fields, and our lives became a continual process of exchanging clothes and turning fish and butter into men. Thralls did laundry, and Betta and I kept the house. We sat outside and made socks in the chilly sun.

  Today was the ninth day, and possibly the last.

  The stone foundation of the house pressed hard against my back, but the sun was gorgeous and I wasn’t going to move. Some part of me felt the light changing, the angle and approach of it, felt the narrowing window of daytime, and instinctively I wanted to keep it. To soak it up and store it like an animal before winter.

  Today, the shush of grass moving overhead, and the clack of dry fish like wind chimes made me drowsy. The needle binding in my hands seemed far away. My hands themselves a hundred miles from my mind. Everyone was far down in the valley, the men cutting down fields of grass, the women and bigger children cutting barley or raking, always raking, making hay.

  A single wooden pitchfork stood against the wall beside me, a silent companion, left behind while everyone else worked. Perhaps just as grateful for this sleepy moment. I smiled with the irony of traveling to a hard-working farm in order to really take this deep, sun-soaked rest. Outside, amidst the varied sounds of yard and house, not the hum of a refrigerator or bleep of some small technology that spoke up when I was just on the cusp of sleep. I thought of the chill of climate controlled naps. Remembered the sounds of small engines. My mind drifted to a memory, a fight in the tank. The thick, dark ocean in 1900s Atlantic City. Ladies’ long dresses whipping the wind. A sharp jolt shot through me, followed by endless falling. I cried out, scrabbled at walls, something to hold. But there was nothing. Only a rending and tearing of something fragile. Sharp steel slicing in my head.

  I was returning.

  I heard the sizzle of the tank’s effort to take me, felt it prying in my brain. Felt the opening of a single moment like an unfathomable flower. I heard someone calling me. Morgan? I heard in my mind, “I’m going home,” and the whole idea of home stretched over a thousand years, brilliant and meaningless. I longed for Betta, for Heirik, but they were beyond my reach. I saw the lab, the blinding white of artificial lights in my eyes.

  The sadness was brutal, and the acceptance, pining for something already gone.

  Nei, I wouldn’t accept it. I struggled against the pull of the tank. I thought only of my gorgeous farm, my streams and elf hollows and hay. I reached for them desperately with my thoughts. I didn’t want home. I wanted here. This house I sat against.

  This house.

  An insistent stone stung my spine.

  I opened my eyes, and a chicken regarded me, black and yellow and curious, its head jerking around worriedly. Another came, as if to confer on my case. Panting and whimpering, I put a palm to my chest. I felt the hard beat of terror.

  Betta rounded the far corner of the house at a run, shouting my name. Her skirts swung out, and dried fish spilled from a basket. Lotta came, falling far behind, little braids swinging. Betta fell to her knees beside me and took my face in her bony hands. Her eyes searched. “Are you alright?”

  I wanted to say it was just a bad dream. Já, that’s what it was. But knowing where I’d come from, and how I’d gotten here, it would always be more. The missed step I felt upon falling into slumber used to taunt me. When I first came, I wished it was the tank. There were days I’d woken and tapped out over and over to nothing. Now, the falling would feel like an alarm. Every nightmare would be, just possibly, the real thing. My greatest fear, to see the faces of my friends and colleagues, triumphant, the tank come to claim me. I threw my arms around Betta and cried.

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Nei, Ginn.” She shushed me and told me, “No one will make you go. Shhhh. Shhhh.” She pulled back to look at me with her water-colored eyes. “The chief would not allow it.”

  “But I’m not even useful.” I sniffled. I was fairly bad at every kind of work except the most basic, carrying or scraping things, picking up leaves. “They don’t even want me to help rake.” The word for rake was a howl, bitter and babyish.

  Betta sat back on her heels and looked at me frankly. “Honestly, Woman.”

  I sniffled some more.

  “You don’t know why we’ve been left here these nine days?”

  Já, I was unfit for real work. Betta must have been assigned here to be with me, to keep me company, take care of toddler
s and prepare food for the family, who returned sweaty and filthy from haying. In other words, the work for weak girls who couldn’t rake. I wasn’t strong and solid like Hár’s daughters, not sinewy and tough like Hildur.

  Betta shook her head at me. “The chief ordered Hildur that you must stay at the house. You’re not to be made to do field work.”

  Oh.

  I looked at her blankly, and so many thoughts reeled and circled. I wanted to live here forever, to live my life with these people, die here someday. And though my heart had known this for a long time, my mind was working to fit this new knowledge in like a boulder through the front door. Heirik had commanded that I not work in the fields. Was he favoring me because he felt close to me, wanted to protect and honor me? The idea of his concern and affection grew warm in my chest. But I could easily be wrong. Maybe he saw me as a guest, living not in our shared home, but in his. Or maybe he just thought I was weak.

  That idea made me feel truly worthless. Heirik didn’t think I could do it. Didn’t he know me? Know that I could be strong? Suddenly I wondered. Could I?

  The buzz of flies at the stable came to me, ominous and angry. I could do the work, no doubt better than delicate Svana or wan Dalla. To keep me from proving it, to keep me here at the house, was unfair. I wasn’t a princess or … something weak … a kitten. I rubbed hard against my eyes and nose, and it stung. My face was sore from crying and must’ve looked raw. Flushed with indignance. I stood and brushed off my clean skirt for no reason.

  All three of us—Betta, Lotta and I—looked up at the sudden sound of hoofbeats. Heirik and Hár came flying so fast on Vakr and Byr, we hadn’t even noticed them coming from the field. They skidded to a halt dangerously close to us, full of the pleasure of wind on their sweat-soaked faces and in their hair. The horses’ breath came in great snorts, and the animals tossed their heads, the ecstasy of running still upon them. The men dismounted, so deflty and beautifully for such large, and in Hár’s case gruff, creatures. They were hot from working with scythes for eight or more hours, clothes sticking to their shoulders, arms, everywhere. They walked toward us, smiling, and I could see a change come over them when they noticed my crying face.