Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  “I’m right?” I asked.

  Betta blushed with that modesty that she seemed to turn on and off at the drop of a needle. She nodded. And then asked my opinion. “What do you think?”

  I took her wrist in my hand. What did I think? I couldn’t think at all.

  Her pulse jumped under my fingers while she waited for my approval. It warmed me, how she cared what I might think. I was that important to her. I’d never been that important to anyone before.

  “What do I think?” I repeated, and I blinked my watery eyes. I was stunned. Disoriented, I sought Hár out to try to see what she saw.

  And I did.

  He stood next to Heirik, like father and son. And in a flash, I saw Hár as a totally different creature—someone to want, to play with, to watch privately in the firelight.

  He’d raised Heirik, and so I thought of him as old, a kind and rough uncle. He characterized himself that way, and I’d bought it, like any five-year-old listening to stories at his feet. Leave it to Betta to find a lover in there. Somehow, she’d seen past that shield, and now I could too.

  He was an adventure to look at, his size alone dazzling. He was loud all the time, whether laughing or joking or stamping his boots in the mudroom. He was brave and responsible and honorable and wild. Off-putting, and casually high-handed, but prone to bust into laughter and smiles full of mirth and sin. It was the sin I noticed now, as he glanced back at us, and I heard Betta swallow hard beside me.

  His hair, which I’d thought of as messy and gray, was more like ash blond shot through with pewter. It caught the sun now and turned to silver, to match the pair of metal cuffs on his forearms. They looked heavy, hefty, and I thought I might fit both my wrists inside one.

  I couldn’t name why, but I thought he was just right for Betta. Já, good.

  “I think it is wondrous,” I said, turning to her, and I was struck by how much she wanted him. It was plain on her face today, almost recklessly so. It made me wonder how much of him she’d had already.

  I remembered my intentions for the day. Find out Betta’s secret. Make Heirik know how I feel.

  One down, I thought in wonder. Now I just had to get the chief alone.

  The shepherd had all the sheep gathered in the circular yard, and Heirik walked among them. He always took my breath away, even on a regular day, even for a tenth of a second. But today he was something new.

  He walked barefoot through the clean grass outside the pen. I’d seen him once or twice without tightly laced boots, but never outside like this, in front of people. There were a thousand common things I didn’t understand every day. His pants hung loose without being tucked and bound; his sleeves were the same, no gauntlets holding them fast. His hair was pulled back on top but otherwise hung long and free. The loop of a pair of shears hung from two fingers, balanced casually as he looked into the animals’ eyes.

  The shears didn’t seem fine enough. I couldn’t imagine such a feat of delicate trimming—a fleece in one piece with no cuts on the sheep—being achieved by anyone, regardless of his masculinity. The blades were well-formed, but looked too rough to slip through wool like that. The animals looked too lively. They would never stand still.

  “The chief does this first?” I asked Betta, already worried for him. The cloth we made from these animals would let us thrive and prosper through trade, the meat from a few of them would keep us alive this winter, and it was Heirik’s place to go first, to bless us, to promise.

  “Don’t fret,” she told me. “There is no man here like the chief with a blade.”

  I stared at her for a second. With her sitting so close, her body warm and angular and real, the whole thing hit home again.

  “Not one?” I raised an eyebrow.

  She actually turned away from me, just a little, with a shy dip of her head. When she turned back to me, she was blushing dark crimson.

  “We’ll talk alone,” I ordered her. “Right after this.”

  “Já,” she said, “okay,” and she smiled, not with her typical wry or knowing smirk, but with genuine pleasure and embarrassment. It was beautiful.

  “You’re right, in any case,” I said. “There is no man like him.”

  Not in any way, I thought. But with a blade especially. I’d never seen anyone so attuned to scythe, ax, knife, as if they were extensions of his will itself. Heirik was gifted, I thought, my head already pleasantly vague with ale and reeling with truths. He was powerful, intelligent, exquisite in movement and form. Rakknason Longhair. The waves fell down his back now, free from braids. Unmarked, he would’ve been like a god, women on their knees around him wishing for a single blessing of lips and tongue. Marked, he was revolting. They couldn’t see what I saw.

  The shears in his palm were an elegant if primitive tool, a single curved loop of iron, held under tension. Triangular blades at each end came together like scissors. He weighed them thoughtfully, flipped them over in his hand.

  He flicked the shears to indicate one of the sheep. A solid old wether, immensely woolly, dispassionately chewing. The shepherd pulled it by its tail, away from the others. It reared up, and he took it by the shoulders from behind, dragging it over to Heirik.

  In the quiet, Heirik knelt and took the sheep to him by the fleece at its jowls. He and the animal had a short, silent communication. Then he stood so that he straddled the sheep, the animal’s face tucked between his thighs, and he began clipping at the forehead.

  The shears snicked, crisper and more precise than I expected. He worked from one ear to the other, now pulling back the sheep’s chin with his hand, so he could turn it from side to side. Heirik worked across the back of the animal’s neck, letting the fleece roll down, until soon it was a ruff around its shoulders. He followed the same pattern until he was shearing down its back. The fleece was a thick blanket, folding back in one piece to let a velvety, vulnerable creature emerge. Its head lay still against Heirik’s thigh. Mesmerized.

  By the end, Heirik was kneeling, straddling the sheep on the ground, to finish the haunches and lower belly. Then the animal was bare. Heirik let the shears drop to the ground, and stood and turned the wiggling sheep around to face forward toward us, then locked it again between his thighs. The chief picked up the fleece by two corners. He unfurled it against the sky, its perfect shape lifted high on a breeze. His linen sleeves moved with the breeze, too, and a ray of sun lit up two thick silver bracelets on his forearms. There were whoops and hollers and clinks and dull thumps of wooden cups.

  Hildur took the fleece from him, and she looked elated and young, almost kind. We would make it through winter, then, and prosper. For this one moment, she didn’t seem to mind that we had a masculine and potent chief. In a little ale-induced trance, I watched his thighs where he still held the sheep. I wanted to climb on Heirik’s lap and feel him rise to me, proof that the test was right.

  Then Heirik held up his hands, palms up, and the hush was immediate. The air trembled with expectation and the repressed need to celebrate, but everyone waited for something important.

  “Freyr,” he began. He kept his hands raised, and as he spoke he looked past us all toward the sea. His voice was clear, as though it could carry all the way there, to reach the god himself as he sailed his wave-steed.

  “You rule over rain and the shining of the sun. Abundance and pleasure. Fruitfulness of seasons, of unions. We are mindful.”

  He grasped the sheep’s ear, drew its head back, and with swift precision slit its throat. A sure cut, blood flowed fast and free around Heirik’s bare feet. He squatted to gather a shallow handful, brought the blood to his lips, then stood and held the cup of his palms up to the sky. A gentle and violent creature.

  “This is our gift.”

  A sudden breeze lifted a red spray from his hands. He dropped them to his sides, and blood ran from his fingertips in thin streams. It pooled around his feet and the body of the fallen sheep. Heirik opened incandescent eyes, and for a moment, he was transformed into the face and soul
of the god Freyr himself. Irises of lit amber, hair like black flame. And then he smiled. It was a mischievous half-smile, seductive, smeared with blood. He called “Hár, up!”, challenging his uncle to do better, and everyone cheered. The party had begun.

  I sat stunned.

  I turned to look at Betta, but she was gone. And when I looked at Svana, her pale cream cheeks were infused with a becoming pinkness. She sighed, eyes fixed on Heirik, and it was dreamy and unsettling. Her gaze was hungry. Gods, it was true. A fertility god had been invoked, and it was real. Could even Svana be moved by its presence enough to see past her disgust? Oh, nei, nei, nei.

  He came toward her, and I had a brief and gut-wrenching vision of them together. Of this world had I never come. Svana would want this all—this house, this family, and eventually in spite of her fear, this man. And once she reached out to Heirik, he would be drawn to her, and they would find their way. My heart raced.

  But he wasn’t coming for Svana. He was coming for me.

  Heirik walked toward me with intent, and I saw the man I’d seen in the wildflowers, in the woods, times a hundred. He had drunk the power of his god and was lit with it, emboldened and free. With a lithe motion, he made wiping his mouth on his shirts seem like poetry. Then he was standing close to me, his hand against the wall at my side. He leaned into it.

  “Ginn.” The way he looked at me, sweet and speculative, I would have done anything for him.

  “Spin that fleece.”

  It was the last thing I’d expected, and I laughed. I was moved by his demand, that he would want that from me for this first fleece of fall, the blessed one. His. At the same time, I guessed the wool weighed five pounds. I was aroused by his nearness and playfulness. I’d say yes, yes, yes.

  “You don’t want me to do that.”

  “Já, I do.” He smiled again, his lips still stained.

  “I’m very, very bad at it.” I was serious. “You can have the thread for tooth floss.”

  “Then I will clean my teeth a happy man until I’m with the ravens.” He smacked the wall and walked away to see how Hár was measuring up.

  Dozens of thoughts beat like wings in my head. Disbelief. Awakening, physically and in my heart. A wistful sense that this is what it would be like, if he were my husband, coming to see me and flirt with me. Maybe someday stand close against my back and nuzzle my neck like the other couples in this yard. Elated and flushed, I wanted another drink. I thought someone would have to wash the blood from his clothes. I wanted to ask him if I could take care of such things for him, with him. But I knew. I knew that his freedom and intimacy would be gone the very next time we met.

  It wasn’t, actually.

  The effect of the shearing and blessing was lasting and strong. It suffused everyone, all over the farm. More than one couple wandered off together, suspiciously close to one another if not hand in hand. Hár and Betta leaned against the back of the house, talking casually, intimately. I had the urge to run over and cover and hide them with a giant cloak, ask them what the hell they thought they were doing.

  I felt it myself, like a directive in my gut, a desire to take and consume Heirik. To roll in the grass and comb his hair back off his neck with my fingers and bite and kiss his throat.

  Where was he?

  And where was Svana? The thought of her made me uneasy, like I’d lost track of a dangerous little animal. I looked around to see where she’d gone.

  Scanning the gathering and not finding her or Heirik, I told myself a lot of scattered things. Svana was afraid of him. She wouldn’t go off with him, ever. But she was fifteen years old and self-centered, and things were chaotic at her age. Heirik was so young. He didn’t speak to women ever. Only me. I wondered if he even knew how to deflect Svana. And yet. It was Heirik’s place alone to tell Svana if he didn’t want her attention. I had no right to demand anything. He wasn’t mine.

  Still, something possessive clawed its way up into my throat and wouldn’t go down until I’d found her.

  She was with him. About to turn the corner of the house, I heard her voice, tiny and querulous. “Herra?” she asked.

  “Svana,” Heirik answered, surprised, his voice like golden light.

  It was all I heard before I rounded the corner. I simply stared at them, standing several feet away, and they stared back, a dumb moment. I gasped in surprise when Betta slipped an arm around my shoulders from behind, her timing impeccable.

  “There you are!” She drew two other women into the conversation, both of whom wanted to see my beaded necklace.

  The girls seemed afraid of me at first, like cats reaching out curled paws. I tried to seem human and normal, as though I hadn’t come from the sea, as though I hadn’t worn Signé’s clothes. They bent their heads to see my necklace, to touch its cunning needle case and winding beads, and I watched over their heads.

  Heirik broke off standing with Svana and came toward us.

  I thought the two women would fall down and tremble at the sight of him. They used the most formal term of address, calling him their chieftain. Heirik nodded silently to them and to Betta, dismissing them all, then set his eyes on me, and I was very much not dismissed.

  “Walk with me.”

  He smelled like cinnamon and ale and blood.

  “Yes, Chief,” I told him, with a nod that verged on a bow. He walked away, leaving me to smile goodbye to Betta, and to the tiny women, who stood astounded and sorry.

  I went off after Heirik, and he led me past the house and the stables, down to the steep grassy slope where we could sit hidden from the house.

  He bent his knees and rested his wrists on them. Without gauntlets, his sleeves hung loose, tinged with blood. Stupidly jealous and filled with lust, I wanted to slide my fingers inside those sleeves, touch his bracelets, feel his pulse. His eyes were still electric, drawing out the autumn gold in the grass.

  He wasn’t smiling.

  “I didn’t like that, Ginn.”

  I drew my brows together. What had I done?

  “You bowed down to me. You called me Chief.”

  I settled into the grass and drew my knees up, too, and wrapped my arms around them. “I’ve been instructed to call you that and nothing else,” I countered with the gentle looseness of two cups of ale.

  “I know.” He looked off down the cascade of yellowing hills and laughed quietly at himself. “I make no sense. In front of them, you must.”

  We were still, and then he spoke again.

  “You said my name, the first day you came outside.”

  The first day, when I came outside to meet him. Memories of blinding daylight and fire welled up, his shoulders working over iron and stone. In my gut, I felt an echo of the distress of those first hours in this alien time and place. But also contentment. Back in that quiet moment, squinting into the sun on my first day outside the longhouse, I’d been at home. I’d known him already, before I even heard what he was called.

  “Heirik.” I gave his name to him now.

  “Já,” he whispered. The day’s fiercest breeze came up, rippling the grass and filling my ears. I could barely hear him. “Again, please,” he said. It broke my heart.

  “Heirik,” I called to him softly, willing him to look, and he turned to me finally. It wasn’t just the remaining fire of ritual that lit his eyes. They gleamed with moisture at the corners.

  “Don’t call me otherwise, when we are alone.”

  I nodded a solemn vow. I would call him by his name, privately, in all the small moments I could. And I would not say herra in his presence again. If it hurt him, then I would find a thousand ways to avoid it.

  We shared the view of the valley in silence, and I longed for him to call me something secret too. “In the woods,” I blushed. Pushed myself. “You called me small.”

  His lip curled up, amused. “You liked that.”

  Two handfuls of dry grass occupied my hands. I watched my fingers close into fists, heard the ripping sound. Admitted it. “Já.”


  It was a lover’s way of seeing me.

  “Já, then, Small One.” It was the sweetest sound, in a lifetime of listening to the beauty and nuances of thousands of voices. This one, now, was it.

  He didn’t say anything more, but I was familiar with his silences. I looked to the horizon and luxuriated in the tension between us. After a while, he talked to me again.

  “We’ll do three more for winter,” he said. “I can keep fourteen.”

  He was talking about the sheep. He’d considered the hay, the animals, the people. Children, four girls not yet married off, Kit would have another baby in winter. Each animal ate so much hay, yet fed so many people with dairy if we could keep it alive through the polar nights. There were cows, too, so many of them. Some of those would be slaughtered. Heirik knew our food stores, knew our needs. Some was calculable—a cow ate twenty tons in the winter, he told me—and some was not. Variables like weather hovered just outside his reach.

  And then, fourteen. That was the answer. A clean, simple answer for such a complex equation, and some diminishing part of the future me would have found it cold. The newer me sat beside him like a chieftain’s wife, considering his logic, thinking of the best way to deploy the women in reducing and preserving the dead. Looking at the farm the way he did, somehow we’d come to sit closer. Side by side, very close. My elbows rested on my bent knees, just like his. I felt like two sheepdogs, surveying what we were born to protect.

  “Salmon is done for the year. We have enough,” he said. “We’ll bank more small fish. And shark, before the rain and wind.” He turned to face me, and I could feel his breath on my cheek.

  “More important,” I murmured. “We have enough grain for ale.”

  I turned to him with laughter on my lips, and suddenly we were a hand’s breadth apart, no more. His breath was sweet with honeyed drink and a hint of blood. Loose wisps of his hair brushed my cheeks. We both stayed seated just as we were, then he leaned in so slightly and I tilted my head up to him. So close I could feel the shape of his lips in the air between us. I could move to kiss him. I could open my mouth. I would. I was.