Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  More than that. We were born to stand next to each other, protecting each other until our last breaths. I would be patient, and one day we would share the passion and everyday beauty, face together the exigencies of farm life and grave decisions he had to make. I would be beside him for those things. I was no longer scared of the steepness.

  A while later—a very long while, or perhaps a scant handful of minutes—we stepped off rock and onto flat ground. The floor of a gold and lovely valley opened at our feet, flanked by thick birch forests on either side.

  Drifa’s feet hit the valley floor, and in a second, we flew. She picked up speed in an instant and was running free across the flat ground. I almost shrieked, it was so sudden and violent. But in a second I was there with her, riding with a complete and contagious joy, at the edge of terror. I leaned into her muscular body, and the wind took the tears from my eyes.

  The men rode even faster, their horses’ feet a grassy explosion. Heirik took off after his uncle, until they both flew. Magnus and Haukur went by in a hopeful blur, wanting to catch up with them. Soon Drifa’s thirst to run was slaked, and she slowed down and down until we finally walked at an easy pace. The men were small flecks of pepper in the distance, already near the sea. The oppressively vast distance between us, the smallness of their lives against such a big place, made my heart flutter. I looked down frequently at Drifa’s twitching ears and bent to pet her strong neck.

  We traveled at a modest pace now, following a small river that cut a single grand curve in the golden grass. The horses stepped right into it as though it weren’t there. Knee high, it shushed all around us and I lifted my feet to keep them dry. My cherry skirt skimmed the surface. So late in the season, the grass burst with colors of straw and golden ale and rust before it would soon slide into dormancy or death.

  It wasn’t a morbid thought to me. It was a comfort, the steady and normal turning of the seasons.

  In another quarter hour, we emerged at the top of a big, gradual slope, with the sea waiting below. The horses stepped through brittle, brown snowblooms as high as their chests, as sure on the shifting sand of this dune as they had been on the rocky terrain an hour ago.

  Then the plants ended, and we dropped into the immense, curving basin of the black beach and sea.

  We picked our way as if we were the only living creatures among a scattering of the dead, driftwood all around us like bones, in all sizes from tiny sticks to whole trees I wouldn’t be able to put my arms around.

  The russet and cherry of my dress stood out below my fur and blanket, and I felt like a single rufous bird in a world of pewter and steel. A world that was otherwise uninterrupted by the natural creams and browns of common dresses. Even the dark blue of Heirik’s clothes blended with the purple and steel of the sand.

  Then we met the water.

  Curious, fearless Drifa stepped straight into the pounding edge of the sea. She waded in until she was knee-deep in the violent white foam that exploded against us, sending spray up my legs with every darkening wave.

  I wasn’t prepared.

  I knew I would face the water. But as it came time, now, I wasn’t ready—could never have been ready—for its roiling assault. The sound of the sea was deafening. I didn’t remember this crashing, over and over, every wave throwing up an angry spray. I drew back on the reins and Drifa backed up, tripping and confused by the pull of the undertow, the pull of my dread. The water touched my boot and I shouted, incoherent fear. I turned her hard to get out of the ocean, away from its sucking desire to take me back.

  The waves I remembered were even and relentless. Not like this. This was an autumn ocean, tossing and wild. I was afraid if it found me, it wouldn’t let me go.

  With a few wind-sucked shouts and barks, Hár split the party up, some galloping off to the fishing camp, just visible in the distance down the beach. Heart racing, I was vaguely aware of women taking baskets, boys heading off toward the high crags, grabbing clubs of driftwood to hunt the slow and hapless auks that gathered there.

  I still trembled, looking into the sea. When it clutched my ankles, I felt a kind of desire in it, like it wanted me. The gritty smell of salt filled me, choking off my breath. Like a child looking for a big hand to draw me up and comfort me, I turned to Heirik. And I lost my breath at the sight.

  He watched me with those gold eyes. They burned with a slow flame, but it was ready to flare. He wanted me. His eyes said mine. Question, plea and command. My heart dropped away, and I let my own eyes show him, yes. I whispered, but so softly it was eaten by the wind. “Are you mine, too?” He watched my lips form the English words but couldn’t possibly hear them.

  He came toward me, Vakr kicking up foam. Drifa shook her head at him, snorting and complaining.

  “I’m okay,” I told Heirik, though he hadn’t asked. I looked around to find Hár and ask for an assignment, something I could gather or pick, baskets I could fearlessly fill with berries and shells.

  Everyone was gone.

  While I’d been struggling with the ocean, Heirik and I had been left utterly alone. I hadn’t been given a job to do. It was just the two of us remaining at the water’s edge. We’d been left so efficiently and completely alone, that it dawned on me, and I thought, oh. Oh.

  I wasn’t here to do a job. I was here to just be with him. He took me on this gorgeous journey, wore his beautiful clothes, trimmed his beard, to have this day with me. This last breath of sky and landscape before the dark came. Gods, it was intense and sweet.

  Heirik turned Vakr, and with a shake of tails we rode just a few meters away and up a slight rise. Small, cave-like spaces were set into a tremendous rock face that loomed over the beach and stretched all the way into the sea. An epic wall, enclosing us. The caves weren’t deep, just depressions in the rock. Heirik found one that was hidden behind a giant limb of driftwood as big as a boat.

  I dismounted and let Drifa move off to eat. I met Heirik by the driftwood and sat next to him in the sand. I settled in as close as I dared, as close as I could handle with restraint. Without touching him tenderly, or trying to complete the sweet kiss we almost shared at the shearing, or perhaps grasping his clothes and pulling him viciously against my breasts and mouth. I sat just far enough from him to control myself, and yet near enough to smell the scents of fur and Heirik himself that I could never parse. They were both so much part of him and one another.

  I pulled the fox tight around my shoulders.

  “Part of my mother’s morning gift,” he said, calming me. He meant the silvery, luscious fur. It was his mother’s.

  “The blue fox is rare,” he told me. “My father’s arrow bit the animal the day they were wed.” As he spoke, he didn’t look at the fur at all, only in my eyes. He was checking that I was alright, but more than that. Maybe I was dreaming, but I felt he was falling into me, the way I did him.

  “This is where you came,” he said gently.

  I looked around, unnerved, my heartbeat scattered by fear and hope and lust. “The exact place?” My voice broke.

  He prompted me. “You have no memory.”

  I didn’t, truly. It had been a beach, the sand black and wet, but I’d been disoriented and half conscious. I couldn’t remember many details of that day, and this could have been any stretch of coastline. I had no idea this was the actual spot.

  “Just sand,” I muttered, and felt some between my fingertips. “Just this sand.”

  Heirik tightened the one-handed knot on his right gauntlet. The black leather was stiff from disuse, worn only for feasts and rituals, significant days.

  “I remember the whine of the wind,” I told him, discovering the memory even as I said it. But I found no way to describe the howling pain, the confusion and sorting of sounds and visions. I settled for insufficient words. “I was so cold.”

  “Já, you were blue.” The knot fell apart, and he absently let it drop. “I thought you would die on the journey.”

  An awkward silence fell after that frank r
ecognition of my mortality. He’d found me, though. I was alive. Silently, without permission, I took his black laces in my fingers and tied them.

  He watched my hands work in wonder, as if an exquisite, tiny bird had landed on his forearm.

  When I was finished, I slowly trailed my fingers down along the column of crossed laces. Even the feeling of his leather was forbidden, let alone the skin beneath it. But I took it. And just the leather itself sent a thrill through me that exited through my skin, everywhere at once. I trailed my fingers farther, until we were palm to palm, and then farther still until our fingertips touched briefly and let go.

  He dropped his hand to his knee and curled it into a fist. He looked at it while he spoke. “No woman has touched me since I was a child.”

  I let the words remain in the air, while I tried to absorb them. He hadn’t been touched by a woman, not even with the most minor ministrations, in more than a decade probably. No one had cut his hair for him, sewn his sleeves in the morning, nor even brushed fingers handing over a bowl of food or tapped his shoulder to ask him a question. How he must have hungered for even the simplest, most casual of those touches.

  He opened his fist, his upturned hand resting on his knee, and he looked at it with detached interest. I moved slowly. I laid my hand in his palm, like a wing gently spread. Hovered there, delicately introducing the idea.

  He grasped my wrist so roughly, he could have broken my bones. I gasped, wild-eyed. Thrilled.

  It was the first time he’d reached out to touch a woman. And now I didn’t just understand the word—untouchable—I knew in my body what it meant. He didn’t even know how. How strong or gentle to be. How slow or sudden. Or perhaps he did. After waiting so long, years of thinking about how he would do it if he could, maybe he knew exactly what he wanted. A rough ownership. No chance to turn back.

  He pulled me by the wrist, pulled me to him, and pressed his mouth to mine. His mouth. Gods, it was soft and I’d waited so long. I opened up to him, gave him my mouth, my very breath. He was possessive and impatient, wanting our kiss without knowing how to take it. I parted my lips to show him. I let my tongue brush against his, and he pulled back, so slightly I could still feel his lips hovering just beyond mine. He met my mouth again, murmuring a soft sound of comprehension, and he opened his mouth and gave me his tongue.

  My fingers followed the leather of his bracer and pulled his sleeve free so I could get my hand inside, moving up his bare arm, skin burning. With my other hand, I felt his long hair, as thick as I imagined it would feel. I pulled on the leather strip and it all fell free, over my hand in waves.

  We separated for a second, our foreheads together, breathing hard. Heirik’s hair fell forward over me, enclosing me, and he closed his eyes. He captured the back of my head with his hand. His other had pushed up my sleeve, was inside it, thumb pressed into the crook of my arm. He nuzzled the hair at my temple, pressing his lips to the skin there. I kissed him everywhere, his jaw, the corner of his mouth where he smiled. On his cheekbone I tasted salt. I kissed his throat, and he lifted his chin to let me burrow there, where I’d always wanted to devour him. My tongue traced Thor’s hammer, and Heirik growled a word into my hair. Incoherent lust and surprise.

  He grasped me hard by the chin, too hard, and took my mouth again. And then his fingers moved to explore our kiss. He touched the place where our mouths joined, as though he were blind, until his tongue and lips and fingers were one sensation.

  A wordless cry came from far down the beach. It was a mournful sound, almost lost in the sea, but Heirik heard it and broke away from our kiss. He was on his feet in less than a second, and mounted on Vakr in one more. I sat bereft in the sand, my breath coming hard.

  He was lithe getting on his horse, quick like a cold brook. Even as I wondered what was happening, passion still coursed through me, and I thought of taking his hips in my hands, feeling that fluid motion coming into me.

  The dream fell away when I saw him draw a knife from his belt. It had a strap he wrapped around his wrist, letting the blade fall and hang there. He looked down the frosted water’s edge, and I followed his gaze. Riders approached fast. I couldn’t make out who they were, could only discern a half dozen spears like quivering arrows pointing to the sky. A pair of great dark birds circled overhead.

  Heirik ordered me calmly. “Slitasongr.” I cast my eyes around where we’d just knelt together against the gray stones, black ground, ash-white wood. The ax laid somewhere melting into this blade-colored landscape. I found it. It was heavy in my hand, and I felt the energy in it, its voice. I handed it up to Heirik, and he took it from me without glancing my way.

  I stood beside him for a solemn moment that seemed to stretch forever, the riders never getting closer. His palm was on my hair then, his thumb brushed my forehead. “Get back, Litla, away from here.”

  We both turned to view the long slope on which we stood, the black rock face stretching forever, straight into the ocean. Shallow caves dipped into the rock everywhere, but none deep enough for me to really hide. Pain crossed his features like a breeze, there and gone, and he seemed to clear his face of all emotion. So I wouldn’t be scared, I thought. He looked down at my red dress. “Cover yourself,” he said. With those words, he took off fast, Vakr spraying my skirts with sand.

  I stumbled back to the place where we’d just held each other, an abandoned bower full of furs and love. His gauntlet sprawled there, his hair tie, his mother’s fur, and time seemed to slow almost to a halt, while I noted these things one by one. I’d pulled his hair loose to bury my hands in it, ripped the leather away from his wrist to get inside his shirts. Now he would fight with his hair in his eyes and one hand tangled in linen.

  I covered myself entirely with my cloak, like a child hiding, and my breath was hot and ragged inside my little fur tent. Hoofbeats fell right outside, and I heard Heirik shout, “Ageirr!” And then the fight came nearer, bellowed oaths and warnings clear now, horses screaming. I thought of Drifa with alarm and almost jumped up to search for her. But the din of men and beasts mingled with the pounding and roaring of the sea and the sounds came closer and closer and pinned me, shaking, to this rock. I melted into it, a thin slime under my cheek.

  Heirik had ridden out to meet them, but somehow the fight had come right back here. Right to me.

  The clang of iron and grunts of men were no more than two house-lengths away. A horse squealed above the din, more urgent than the rest, a man cried out and the ground shook with a thud that resounded even among the downpour of hoofbeats. There were more strangled cries, and angry words slashing. None were Heirik’s. I would know his injured voice from the others.

  Would he, maybe, call for me if he fell? What if a spear ran through him, or an ax cleaved his head? I thought of his enigmatic smile, his golden eyes going blank and dead, lost to me before I’d ever truly known and had him. I didn’t want to cower with my eyes shut and cheek pressed to the wall while my love was torn up and wasted. I wanted to be present, wanted him to know I was here. I heard Hildur’s words about his brother Brosa—tall as the chief and just as fierce. I willed it to be true, that Heirik was fierce. I pulled the cloak down from my head and opened my eyes.

  My blood ran cold when I saw him. He’d pulled Vakr back from the fight, skirting the outside at an unbelievable speed, and his hair flew out behind him like in an epic poem or a painting from history. Savage and intent, his face smeared with sweat and blood and misted with the spray of the sea. He was the raven, the last sight before Valhalla.

  Rearing back on Vakr, he swung his ax above his head in a splendid arc and connected with the wrist of one of Ageirr’s men. It was his brother! Eiðr’s hand fell to the ground, neatly severed. I retched and doubled over, forehead on the sand, grit in my nose, in my mouth, choking, whimpering. Violence too hard, too near, my body was screaming to run.

  Drifa’s scent came strong and near. I looked up to find her pressed against the rock wall beside me, crying, a sound like nothing
I’d ever heard. She was in danger. I needed to reach her. And she was a way out. On her back, I could get away. All I wanted was distance, to be far from knives, axes, horses fighting with a demented will. I staggered to my feet, lurching for her, and climbed up on her back. I turned to find my way past, and found Ageirr looking at me.

  Ageirr’s eyes were lost in the trance of fighting, but I watched as they cleared. He came at me, and I turned Drifa and tried to run away, but there was only rock face in both directions. I didn’t know how to get past him, nor did she, just a baby, shaking with fear underneath my thighs. Ageirr was upon us in a second. And in the next second, he’d torn me off of Drifa’s back and had me in front of him on his own horse. The animal reared savagely, and I screamed. I fought with fingernails, arms, feet, but Ageirr was immovable.

  And then there was silence. Time slowed down again, in its odd way of changing and stretching in moments of fear and flight, and I could see the scene laid out before me. The fight was over. Heirk, Hár and Magnus were there, alive, bloody. Ageirr’s family had fled. None but he remained.

  I stopped struggling and watched as Heirik’s head turned toward my cry. A terrible focus moved over his face like a cloud covering the sun. He spoke with an even cadence and low, soothing voice.

  “Ageirr,” he said.

  His voice made me feel secure. Ageirr’s horse settled, too, Heirik charming us all.

  “Ageirr, what are you doing?”

  Ageirr didn’t answer, though I felt him shake his head. His horse tripped backwards over driftwood, making it skittish again, wary. It came to me plainly, Ageirr had no plan. He’d grabbed me on impulse, and now he was the only one left. Aggressive, wounded, full of rage and jealousy and grief. His arm tightened around my waist. He smelled like blood and metal and sickness.

  Heirik continued to talk to him from a distance. He didn’t come forward to save me. I wished for him, remembered his strong hands on me and wanted them now, willed him to come. But he did not meet my eyes, only Ageirr’s.