Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  Her hair was long and brown and indecisive. Not exactly straight, not exactly wavy. But freedom was so rare, it tumbled forth like a stunning waterfall, coursing over the prominent bones of her cheeks and shoulders. I combed it over and over. Wasn’t there some traditional or ideal number of strokes?

  When it was combed I coated my palms with the slightest sheen of oil and smoothed Betta’s hair down her back. I thought of Hár. How he’d done exactly this with his tough hands, looking out over the valley. Her sharp shoulder blades rose and fell with a giant sigh.

  I gathered hair from around her face and made two thin braids, lighter and looser than any she ever wore. Then I shaped the hair around them into soft coils that relaxed, when I let them free of my finger, into ocean waves turning back from the shore. Using thread and needle, I sewed on the straw crown that sat low on her forehead. She turned to let me see.

  She was a handmaiden of any fertility goddess. A creature of the woods and flowering underbrush. Her eyes and all the angles of her face seemed to soften in sympathy with her locks. I used my fingers and a bit more oil to shape the ends where they rested on her breasts.

  There was a familiar stomping and gusting of wind in the mudroom, the particular sound of wooden snowshoes on dirt, and the sonorous voices of men. In a minute, Hár ducked low to enter the room.

  I sometimes saw him as Betta did, a gorgeous man hiding a romantic soul behind his scratchy beard. Just now it was sparked with fresh snow, turning to water on his lips. I wondered if the scattering of scars on his face and hands were from fights, or simply forty years’ accumulation of the common accidents of farm life.

  Hár stopped when he saw us, and he changed at the sight of Betta. He gave away nothing to the men who stood behind him, but from where I sat I saw instant heat and sex and love fill up his eyes. A fearsome blue flame. Anger, too. He seemed perplexed and mad at what she could do to him without so much as moving or speaking. Arn and Magnus reacted, too, smiling at us girls playing dress-up, and surprised in a friendly way at Betta’s prettiness. Magnus smiled broadly. “Betta,” he said. “You steal my breath.” Hár failed to completely stifle a growl.

  The old man flipped his knife over in his hand, slipped it quietly inside his sleeve, and grumbled that he’d forgotten the blasted, short-witted blade back at the stable. He’d have to go out again. He disappeared back into the mudroom. A few minutes later, I made a moderately conspicuous request of Betta, that she go out and start cleaning up the back room. I’d be there to help in a bit.

  Minutes stretched out, the comb hard in my hands, turning over and over in my lap. I was jealous. I imagined what was happening between them in the dark. Maybe sitting on the bench, Betta straddling him, his big hands pulling her close. Gods, what was wrong with me? More likely, they were just enjoying a moment of closeness and intimacy. He was probably touching her cheek so softly with the back of his hand, like a wisp of smoke from a sweet juniper fire.

  A long time passed. I started to worry they would be caught talking closely or embracing in the lamplight.

  I found them in the mudroom, oblivious to everything but one another. They didn’t even hear me, didn’t notice me at first.

  Betta sat across his lap. His hand covered the back of her head, strands of hair caught in his fingers as though he’d dragged them through savagely, past reason and consciousness. His head was bent to her, so loving, his eyes closed, seeing the glory of the world beyond. Her hand was snagged in his hair, too, drawing it back from his face, shaggy and lit with silver in the small flickers of light.

  “Are you trying to kill me,” he whispered between kisses. “Elskan mín?”

  Oh. My heart melted. To hear him call her my beloved, to speak of his feelings, and to revel in them, so freely. Betta laughed and with her free hand she traced the line where his beard met bare skin.

  “Nei, Old Man,” she told him. “You must live long enough to love me. Ten thousand times.”

  A free father would have every right to kill Hár where he sat. But Betta’s Da—no more than an exalted thrall, and meek, plainer than she—would never take such payment from the past chieftain, grandfather of his known world. Hár could take whatever he wanted, and no thrall would wreck it. And while I saw the truth—that Hár loved Betta with a tortured desperation—the reality was, he held her very life in his groping hands. I wished I had a charm to touch, wishing safety for Betta’s heart and her honor. I breathed deeply through my nostrils, fiercely protective of my friend, and Hár’s head snapped up. Betta gasped and twisted to see who was there.

  Hár considered me from under his brows, annoyed and curious.

  “Old Man,” I said, and my voice was not as light as I expected. “If you mean to boast your accomplishments to the whole house, keep at it.”

  I tried to say it with affection, but I didn’t quite succeed. He growled at me, just a little, and then set Betta on her feet. He brushed off her skirt for her, such a gentle gesture. Betta reached a hand and grasped his shirts right over his heart, not gently at all. She held his linen in her tight fist, a quick taking before they would part. Before they would spend the next twenty hours, a hundred days, a million weeks, in an impossibly close room around an impossibly public fire.

  The calm clarity of this winter was the talk of the house. It was almost warm, people said, and still, as if the wind slumbered. The snow that seemed so high to me, was a subject of great interest, remarked on as so minimal it was like none in known history.

  And so tonight’s storm was a thing of giant, swirling terror.

  A horde of beasts circled and seemed to provoke the house. Wind moaned, audible even through the thick sod walls. The roof was closed up tight against the pounding, swirling snow, so we huddled around hot stones. I held a warm one in my lap, while Heirik and I played a game of tafl.

  A game of strategy, the only game we had. Betta had taught me to play, the first week of winter.

  The squat wooden pieces were just a little rounded on the bottom and gathered to gentle points on top. They reminded me of pictures I’d seen of acorns, small enough to fit in the cup of my hand. One of us played a chief who sat hunched in the center of the board, flanked by his men, and one played an invading army trying to capture him.

  Heirik was of course a natural, having lived through—nei, orchestrated—more complex strategies in real life than anything we could build on a little soapstone board.

  Tonight, I played the invaders, watching the stone chief, waiting for him to accidentally leave some opening for me.

  My head and shoulders ached, perhaps with the ridiculous fact of our roles and positions on the board. Or perhaps with the weight of my hair.

  Ranka had created a little girl’s braided masterpiece on my head. She’d plaited three long braids down my back, then woven those three into one giant braid. She piled the whole thing up on the back of my head in a mass. By this time of night, spiky ends escaped everywhere, and bone hairpins bore into my scalp.

  I envied Heirik his freedom. Two braids framed his face, but the rest of his hair fell loose. In fact, he was utterly unbound, a winter farmer, relaxed and drowsy with nothing to do. He lounged, stretched out on the bench, resting on his elbow and with one knee bent. No gauntlets for working outside, his sleeves loose at his wrists, even his boots were simply tied at his ankles with no bindings.

  The contrast fascinated me—his ability to swiftly blunt his speech and close his features into an imperious mask, and yet his natural physical ease. Comfort and efficiency on any horse, with any tool, doing any kind of work. Simply standing, arms folded, he seemed to have sprung from the grass itself, and moved over it like a native animal. The deft turning away, the hiding of his physical scar, was an extension of this easy control. As natural as breathing.

  He seemed designed by the gods to torment me.

  Now the bench, the game, his clothes were all burnished with lamplight in the living room. I watched his hair absorb bits of firelight and then let them go in
flame-like blue.

  “You play like a lame fox,” he said, moving another of his men, uncovering an unexpected escape route.

  “Hah!” I snorted. “Now you are …”

  I wanted to say talking trash. The sentiment was pure 21st century boxing, but it came out in Norse. “Bragging with a short blade.”

  He threw his head back and laughed, and it was a rare and gorgeous sound that no doubt shocked every ear in the house.

  “Such a poet,” he said, and with a charming smile he flicked one of my game pieces off the board and into my lap. I glared and replaced my piece, and he returned to studying the map of the board. He absently tucked a braid behind his ear, a little boy for a second. Unaware of how I watched him in such minute detail.

  While I waited, I reached up and removed the bone pins from my head, and the giant braid fell with a thump on my back.

  Heirik looked up at me and froze.

  Oh. Something was off. It was another sinking moment, when I’d done something unexpected, wrong. I dropped my hands to my lap, and my giant braid fell over my shoulder, the ends brushing my breast. He glanced there with a stricken look, then dragged his eyes away and up to my face.

  “You would sit with me to do this?”

  I lifted the braid, and his eyes shifted again to watch my fingers play with the whitish strands. I could see him struggle to swallow. The moment was awkward and hot. With his irises so pale, his eyes almost disappeared.

  “Why not?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if we were talking about hair anymore.

  We were, actually.

  “Another memory you’ve lost,” he said. “A woman taking her hair down at day’s end is done before her husband.”

  He looked past my shoulder and out into the room. “It is not something that would disgrace you, if you did this here, with me.” His voice dropped low on the last two words, holding them preciously on his tongue. He picked up a game piece with slow and deliberate form, still resting on his elbow, studiously casual. “It’s not a formal gesture. Just a quiet moment to end the day.”

  I drank in the sound of that. A quiet moment together, an end to the day, the beginning of a shared night. “It would be okay, then?”

  Head bent to the game, he looked up from under his black lashes. “I have longed for it.”

  The house and all its scents and murmurs seemed to drop away with those words, and we were alone. Arousal rose right to my skin, lighting up my neck and arms, and I couldn’t stop it, no more than I could stop the oil from burning in the lamps.

  I tipped my head back and closed my eyes, undoing my big braid, relieving my scalp. When I opened my eyes I found Heirik concentrating on the chieftain, a hunched figure at the center of the board, besieged on all sides by acorns. But I knew he watched me.

  Betta watched me, too. I felt her now, like a night bird in the dim room, shifting and settling her feathers, owl eyes open. Seeing me—us, Heirik and I—doing something so intimate. I looked over at her and smiled and she ducked her head.

  I undid everything, and brushed my loose hair with my fingers, letting the braids fall open. I looked at the game and made another move. Matter of factly I said, “Now let me do yours.” I flicked my chin toward a dark braid that fell across his cheek.

  He made what might have been a light joke, “Everyone in this house would be planning our wedding feast.” But his voice was flat, and out loud it sounded bitter.

  We dropped like twin stones into a strained quiet. Heirik had already made a vow to me—a kind that came without ceremony or feast. No swords or ale or catcalls following us to our marriage bed. It was a promise that came without joy.

  Into the quiet, Magnus burst into the room, in a swirl of cold and snow so violent, it looked like the blizzard had lifted him and followed him right into the house. He shouted, his breath ragged, “Four sheep are missing.”

  Heirik was up and moving before I could take a breath. Every man in the house followed, grabbing at wool cloaks and hats and boots in an orderly madness. Women lifted children and toys out of the way. Food and drink were dropped in an instant, warm rocks tossed into the hearth.

  I drifted behind them, following the men to the mudroom, and I hovered there with Betta by my side. I saw Heirik open the door to the storm, and if he hesitated for one second he didn’t show a sign. He walked into pure, blistering white. And every man in the house waded in after him.

  NIGHT SKIING

  At first we did things like move our plates and sewing around, all of us women pretending nothing was happening. If we didn’t look at each other, we didn’t need to ask with our eyes, how long will it be? Will everyone come back? But after a short time, the tasks ran out and we started to pass glances like hesitant questions. Will your man return? And yours? I wondered, too, about how many sheep would return. Maybe enough. With Heirik. He would bring them home.

  We tended to children who were confused by the silence, paced and bounced the littlest ones. I held Lotta and pressed her head to my shoulder. She was heavy, almost too much for me to carry, but I held onto her tight with one arm cradling her under her bum. We sat by the game board, and I showed her the little pieces and murmured silly things about the little men they represented.

  Soon, we each sat around the hearth and were still, with no will left to pretend.

  Haukur was the first one back, holding a two-hundred-pound sheep in his arms like a bride, Magnus right beside him holding the door. The sheep was let down on the floor by the heartstone. It looked already dead, its eyes obscured and crusted over with snow, blank white as if nothing stirred under the frost. But the animal shifted, moved some more, and let out a weak cry.

  Hár soon followed with a big animal in his arms, and the other men stumbled in after him. Two sheep saved, and every man back except one.

  The bluster of men and sheep died down into an awful silence. Heirik wouldn’t come back.

  No one would say such a thing, but it had been too long. Too stunned to speak, the family started going about business now. Dalla fussed over her husband and Thora over her brother and Da, the men trying to shrug them off. The family immersed themselves in cleaning up and herding children and sheep. Hildur secured the animals at the end of the main room, and the children were drawn to them. Lotta poked a handful of something at their faces, trying to feed them, and I watched her fondly, trying to ignore the growing panic in my gut. I counted the twists in her little braids. Started again.

  People glanced at me and then down, an unexpected, half-hearted acknowledgment of what Heirik meant to me. Too little, too late, I thought.

  Betta watched Hár blatantly, clenching her hands in her dress, unable to go to him and wipe the cold water and worry from his face. Instead, she took my hand and looked down at our twined fingers. I couldn’t stand the kindness. I pulled away and picked up a game piece, so compact and contained. My palm closed around it completely.

  “He plays with you,” she said.

  My panicky sickness was disturbed by her voice. “Hmm?”

  “The chief. He plays with you.”

  “Já,” I answered, as if she were dense, and I showed her the game piece. “We were just playing now.”

  “Nei,” Betta said, “I mean he is …” She searched for a word she didn’t find. “Is like a small dog with you.”

  I thought of the littlest house dog, how it wagged and snapped and rolled over. She meant playful. She meant that Heirik laughed and batted game pieces at me. I thought of him splashing me in the ravine, racing on our horses.

  Though my heart clenched, I tried to sound light. “Já, he is like that sometimes.”

  “Nei,” Betta said. “Nei, he is not. I’ve never seen it in my life.”

  “I hope you will see it again,” I stated, so cold now, not even warmed by her words.

  It was a long time, or maybe a few seconds, before I dropped the game piece and stood up, drawn to go wait. Hár stood at the exact same time, and the two of us walked to the back mudroom in uns
poken agreement. Hildur and Betta were drawn too.

  Hár opened the back door and stood like an expectant dog waiting for its master. Wind and snow whipped into the room, and the biting cold stole every wisp of warmth.

  “Shut it, Fool,” Hildur crabbed at him, but Hár held up a hand and silenced her. He stared into the blizzard, a white and silver wasteland. And Heirik came. He lurched into the mudroom, four hundred pounds of sheep under his two arms. My heart soared for a second and then crashed in a bedraggled heap of relief. He was alive.

  He dropped the animals, as if both irritated and satisfied, and stumbled past us all to his room. He was barely able to work the latch with his frozen fingers, and then he was through the door, leaving Hildur and Hár to tend to the giant, frozen sheep that filled the room. Leaving me wide-eyed and without a purpose. Betta put her hand to my back, and I felt her soft pressure of reassurance, but it hurt as if every nerve was on the surface, raw. I shrugged away and started cleaning up the room.

  Dozens of wet cloaks and boots littered the floor, puddles forming all around, and I picked them up and felt the unpleasant, icy drips start to seep into my sleeves. Thoughts and questions gathered. Was he okay? How had he ever found the sheep? How did he make it back? I knew the answer. He simply had to. He made it by sheer force of responsibility, his honor like an ax over his head. And a deep desire to be good, to be needed, even by fools. He was behind his bedroom door now, safe.