“Rakknason!”
Heirik and I drew apart in a flash.
Behind us, Ageirr descended the hill with long, loping steps. Heirik stood with swift grace and dignity. Not much taller, somehow he towered over the man.
Now I was sure Ageirr’s half-sneer was permanent. A moment of pain and anger had seared itself into his features.
He drew his knife from his belt, considered his left hand and started trimming a fingernail. He nodded to me. “Ginn Sjódottir.” Sea’s Daughter. Everyone knew I was odd, come from nowhere, with no name. The insult sounded greasy on his lips. Incongruously, my sex throbbed from the promise of Heirik’s kiss, unfulfilled. I rolled my hips ever so slightly and pressed against the grass to quiet my body.
“Ageirr, my honor-feeder.” Heirik used a lyrical kind of Viking metaphor, a word poem. It sounded appreciative, but it was a deft reminder of their places—that Heirik was the one who protected and commanded Ageírr. It was a slick little jab, above reproach, and I liked Heirik for it.
I stood and wiped bits of dry grass from my skirt, and I nodded to Ageírr, as if I hadn’t barked at him last time we met. I listened to them talk about fields, hay, cattle, the same subjects Heirik and I had just spoken of, but this time I was not part of them. I became awkward and unnecessary. Then Ageírr mentioned a lost horse, and the mood turned ominous.
A breeze punctuated the quick change. Heirik shifted his body to form a wall between me and Ageírr.
“You’ve drawn now,” Heirik told him with finality.
Ageírr expelled a disdainful “ffft” through closed teeth. “The blood of an animal.” He cast a glance at Heirik’s reddened feet, then looked in his eyes. “A beloved woman lost. It’s not the same.” His eyes rested briefly on me. “Is it, Chief?”
A cold calm stole over Heirik’s body.
“To the house, Ginn.” He commanded, in a way he’d never spoken to me.
I glanced at the knife in Ageírr’s hand, noticed with cold clarity that Heirik now held his knife, too. In my muddled head, I was still the chieftain’s wife, and I knew with certainty that the way I reacted now would reflect on Heirik. Was I supposed to stand by, ready to fight too? I thought of my own little knives that hung from my belt. A Viking wife might or might not. But I would be ridiculous, and Heirik would be savagely angry at me.
I wouldn’t fight, then. I wouldn’t run, either. I would remain collected. But I consumed the hill in big strides.
Looking back was weak. I tried to resist it. I watched my boots instead, one after the other kicking out from under my skirts as I climbed. I couldn’t hear anything behind me, no shouts or cries. But my love was back there, and knives were drawn, and I’d so recently seen that very knife slit cleanly through a sheep’s throat. Tears started to come and I had to turn. I had to know.
Far down the hill, Heirik and Ageirr were talking. They’d put their knives away, and Heirik stood with his arms crossed over his chest, in his way. He wasn’t exactly at ease, nor was Ageirr, but they were not lunging at each other and struggling and snarling like dogs.
It took a second to sink in. They weren’t fighting.
A gust of wind lifted my skirts and made them billow around my knees, and I wanted to just let my legs fall out from underneath me. I wanted to sink into the grass right there and be grateful. There was no danger. And at that moment, Ageirr looked up and saw me. He smiled, without warmth or joy.
I crested the hill, and there sat the house.
All around it played an idyllic scene, out of an old painting. Pink-faced children chased chickens. Men laughed and sheared sheep, while those who’d already proven their prowess drew women away behind the house. Ale sloshed in metal and wooden cups, and the kids dribbled milk from rolled up cones of birch bark. The grass on the house was long and brilliant green and gold. A single naked sheep stood on the roof eating it.
The house was a massive, living thing. Solid in the landscape. And it was mine.
It was a bit later before I got around to thinking of Betta again.
Despite my assumption that she and Hár would run off to the trees, they were both still in the yard, separately talking and drinking with people in the late sun.
I drew her away, and we tripped down the hill to sit by the river, far down the front yard. We bared our feet and dipped our toes in the freezing water, and she laid a hand flat on the ground beside me while she looked out into the distance.
Betta didn’t realize how lovely she was, with her beautiful ideas and quick, mischievous smile. The seriousness of her gift. Her long dexterous fingers, good at spinning and dyeing. True, Betta wasn’t adorable like Svana, but no one was. Svana was a singular little cloud, a puff of sugar. Betta was a woman.
Open to the unexpected, surely. Brave.
Unwise.
He’s too important for me, she’d said of her secret lover. And he was. I spread my toes and wondered if she really understood what her relationship could—and couldn’t possibly—lead to.
I didn’t say anything, and Betta waited a while, in that way she had of allowing the air to become still before dropping a pebble, a rock, a boulder of a question or statement into it.
“Do you remember …?” She started. Drew up some conviction, and then started again. “Have you ever felt a man?”
I stopped swirling the water with my feet and spent a long moment trying to decipher her question. Surely, she wasn’t asking about a man in general. She’d seen me touch men incidentally. Then I figured it out and my mouth curled into a compassionate and amused smile. She was asking if I’d touched a penis. I couldn’t possibly tell her yes, not only because I had amnesia, but also because it was such an undefinable experience, the first time.
Then my smile faded, as the impact of her question hit me.
“Did you?” I asked delicately at first, but then I just had to know. “Did you touch Hár?”
She smiled and then ducked her head shyly. “Nei, nei,” she said. “Not with my hands.”
What did that mean? I didn’t know whether to be relieved or infuriated at the old man. I made her tell me more.
The first time Hár took her riding was like a romantic brand seared into her mind, dark and moonlit and luscious. She’d saved every detail forever, and had been waiting to tell me for so long.
He’d helped her onto Byr and got on the horse behind her, and she first felt his arms—any man’s arms—around her. They rode so fast, she would have been scared, but the feel of his body fascinated her, so warm and sturdy. Something rose in her own body that she’d never known.
He took her to a high hill where they could look out into the moon-stricken valley, and they stayed there for a long quiet time. She was amazed at his solidity, after imagining his embrace and failing to really grasp how it would be. How big he was up close, his breath on her neck and the beat of his heart against her shoulder blades.
He undid her braids, and she let him, her breath suspended. Hár said he wanted to see her that way, to feel her hair in his hands, smooth his palms down the length of it.
He gathered all of it in one hand, placed it over her shoulder, and exposed the nape of her neck. Bent and kissed her there. Her first kiss. His beard was wiry, and then his lips were so unexpectedly soft. He slipped his hands under her cloak, took her by the waist and pulled her closer to him. She told me that he was breathing heavy in her ear, and that’s when she felt him, hard against her.
“It was shocking,” she said. “But then, not really.”
I had a sudden recollection of Betta coming in from the cold weeks ago. Her hair had been loosened and her eyes sparkled with secrets. I was preoccupied at the time—I’d just that minute fallen in love—and so I’d taken her word for it that she had been “out riding.” Wind-swept and alive and surprised. It was still hard for me to picture her riding with Hár.
I imagined being introduced to all those sensations in one night, having never before felt a man’s embrace, lips on her skin, hands in her h
air, and then to feel him against her like that. Betta was such an inquisitive, innocent girl sometimes. Worry gnawed again.
“What have you done with him,” I asked. “Besides riding, and … feeling him that way?”
She laughed lightly, and it was like a splash in the sunset river.
“As bold as I am, and the man such a savage, you would think we’d done every act Thora goes on about. But, nei. He will not.” Her voice was a wistful mew. “He says one day I will want to marry a man my own age. As if there are any men of seventeen.” She looked disgusted, probably imagining the candidates. Then she became dreamy and smiled again.
“He kisses me. He has rolled me around in the grass. He weighs more than a horse.” She laughed and showed her big teeth. “And I can feel him, já?” She grew serious, and I suddenly wanted to burrow into the earth and stop thinking about Hár’s mouth on hers.
“I know he wants more of me,” she said. “He won’t take it.”
I was relieved at that, and it made me like him. But I was full of sadness over all the lost lust in this house.
ARROWS & SPEARS
I splashed my face with frigid water and swished with a lot of mouthwash in the pre-dawn dark.
We’d eaten quickly and were leaving for the coast in a thick and dusky mist—a kind of dark that was entirely new to me. A lowering of the light, still, not quite completely dark, but enough for the low clouds to obscure my sight. In the city, this kind of gray dusk couldn’t exist together with the blaring electric light. Here, it began to linger longer every day.
The idea of full dark scared me, and when I imagined it I panicked a little. At the same time, I desired it, a dream about to be fulfilled. I would see so many more stars. I’d longed to see them, when I read about them at home and saw images in the arcs. Time lapse shots that streaked the sky with their movement.
I’d stood on the glacier, as far as I could get from the steady artificial lights that stretched to the sea, and searched for them, but only the same five were always visible. I’d seen more in the gray dusk of haying. But I had no way of imagining how many would be revealed in this place, when the winter came.
Heirik took a small group of us to make the last trip to the sea before the frigid months. We would pick up eels and shark from the fishing camp. Women would gather late berries and small pieces of wood, shells and bone for spoons and combs and pins. The boys would catch auks and plovers and puffins, and we’d come home loaded down with everything the horses could bear.
In the back mudroom, by the light of two wall lamps, I found a wool hat and pulled it down over my head. It was a work of art, this everyday item that someone—one of the women I knew?—had made. A wide band of dramatic dark brown fur sat like a wreath across my forehead.
I wondered how it looked on me. I hadn’t seen my own image in months, and I knew I’d been changing here, with this food and work and the elements. I ran my tongue over the backs of my teeth, feeling the space there in the center, a reminder that I was still me. I could see the ends of my white-blond hair, my familiar long ponytails coming out from under the hat and down over my shoulders. My hair was the same as always. But my hands were new. I turned them over in the quivering light and they were stark and strong.
I pulled on my wool cloak, and started looking for a good blanket to go over it.
Heirik came out of his room, throwing massive, moving shadows across the light of the oil lamps. Flames guttered in the breeze he stirred up. Colors were indistinct in the mudroom, in this light, but I could see he was dressed in his dark blue wool. His most formal clothes. A lush, silvery fur rested across his shoulders, seeming to glow with its own light.
I thought of him tenderly in these clothes, knowing they were a symbol of the rare times, the events where everyone was compelled to love him.
I also thought he looked flat-out gorgeous. I let my eyes drift shamelessly from his hair, down along his jawline, where his beard was trimmed neatly, wandering past his throat where Thor’s hammer hung, and on down his body. Past his black leather belt, littered this time with everyday tools and knives as well as the seax across his waist and ax at his side. I devoured the blue fabric brushing his knees. His boots were tied so tight, I could see the curved lines of his calves. He was handsome beyond reckoning.
His voice was hoarse. “You are cold,” he told me.
It was obvious. I shivered, mute.
“Turn,” he commanded, with a thrust of his chin. He took the fur from his own shoulders and placed it on mine and it was warm with his heat. His arms very nearly around me. So close, I felt the pressure of knives and tools against my back.
Luxurious, velvety soft fur brushed my chin, and I pulled the skin close around me. It was pale silver, maybe an arctic fox. While it had been a slight shoulder covering for him, it fell halfway down my back and arms. The warmth from his body was in it, and it made my blood rise to meet it.
The animals were ready to leave, tossing their manes, their breath making great puffs that were lit by thralls’ torches. Freezing air crept up my legs, and I stopped to tuck my wool bloomers into the tops of my rock-solid socks before I climbed onto Drifa.
The coast was less than a half day away, maybe four hours, I thought. In terms of the whole island, we lived virtually on the beach. We walked in the gray mist, our horses mingling and bumping. About a quarter of the way along, a suggestion of sun began to penetrate the gloom, a lightening that I didn’t notice until it was there, faint but steady. Steam lifted and began to vanish, and the sky opened up, brilliant and massive over our upturned faces.
I’d wondered about Heirik himself, in his most beautiful clothes, on a supply run to the beach. It seemed an errand he could entrust to Hár and Hildur.
Now I thought I knew why he’d come. He desired this sky.
The color hovered somewhere between lavender and the edge of an ax. Purple and silver joined and pulled apart and shifted with the serene movement of pewter clouds. The last remnants of mist rose reluctantly to meet them, to be lost in the larger vapor of the enormous atmosphere.
I watched a few of Vakr’s sure steps, and Heirik’s back before me. His clothes were dark, but he wore another pale fur on his shoulders, his hair falling like a midnight tail. It had grown so much since I met him. When I first laid eyes on him, his hair had curled around his shoulders. Months since I’d been lost.
“Ginn,” the chief called. “Ride with me.”
I came up even with him, and could see that black wavy strands had come free around his face. I wanted to reach and tuck one back, care for him in that small way. His short beard would feel rough under my fingertips. Under my lips. I opened them slightly, involuntarily, and he noticed. It wasn’t quite a smile he gave me, but his features were open and calm, his breathing slow and satisfied.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told me, and I wondered why. I thought that there wasn’t a single part of me that feared this. Never.
And then we crested a rise, and the heads of three haunting giants rose up before us.
I sat, struck viscerally by the crude figures, fear pooling in my gut. Made of stone, they stood at least twice the height of the house. Their bases sat far below us, and I peered down to see that someone had built on top of natural rock formations, with tremendous blocks and boulders. On top of each towering pile sat an oval stone that looked like a head.
They stood in a line, leaning toward us, as if they walked toward our home. We passed them on our right, from largest to smallest. Crude but so real, the two-story-tall bodies were hunched and frozen along their eternal path. They seemed far more ancient than possible, as though they’d been bent into the wind for millenia, always making their way to Hvítmörk.
“The stone sisters,” Heirik said. “They show the byway.”
Then Drifa canted forward and the world dropped away from under me. I grabbed frantically for her mane with both hands and clutched hard, and she shook her head to push me off. I looked, and a cry stuck in my throat.
We were riding straight down a cliff. Every part of my insides battled to get out, any way possible. Acid burned my throat and my intestines felt liquid and weak. I closed my eyes, which was much worse. I opened them again and looked out across the vast open space before me.
The rock face went straight down at a heart-stopping angle, the surface jagged and tricky. The cliff was threaded with the barest hints of path here and there, slippery patches of slate, grainy with dirt. The places where for decades horses had chosen the same footholds.
Now, Drifa followed right behind Vakr, picking out places to step with complete ease. I watched her feet. She was impatient with me, twitching to remind me to let go of her mane, but my hands tangled there like claws. I clenched her sides, and she took great big breaths to try to throw my legs off.
A few miniature plateaus, here and there along the path, gave me a chance to breathe and look out, briefly, toward the ocean. It stretched like a blue thread, visible here and there beyond rows of far hills.
It could have been a thousand miles away or closer than I dreamed. The vast distance seized me, like it did any time the land opened up around me and I could see out. See distances that weren’t possible in my original time. Far off, the water waited patiently, dark green and iron under an endless lavender sky. Sun came—a brief, straight ray—and kissed the surface, lighting it up a deep aqua before quickly turning blackish again under a shadow of clouds. For a moment the voices and language I loved so dearly had no meaning. They yielded completely to something big and wordless.
Tiny rocks and gravel spilled away as Drifa skirted an outcropping, and I gasped. I fixed my eyes on Heirik’s back and watched as harsh breezes that verged on wind struck and riffled his fur. I trusted him in my bones, entirely, always, with my life. He would not lead me onto a dangerous path.
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