Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

“Undra min,” he said, so softly I could have missed it. My surprise. Then he looked away into the night, considering something unseen. He looked back at me, paused. And then all his boldness and grace dissolved.

  “Ginn,” he started, his voice broken, and then he stopped, closed his eyes and waited until it seemed he could speak again. “Jul is soon,” he said. The holiday feast? He confused me so often, with so few words. “I want you by me.” He closed his eyes. “I want—”

  The door closed with a muffled thump, and we both turned.

  Someone had been there.

  GOD-MAKER

  Peaceful morning came. I sat up in my bed and drew the curtains open, then rested with my knees drawn up and simply looked out. The house looked pretty, wintry and cozy, with furs all around. The roof was open and a fire burned today, cheerful and strong, not just smoking embers and hot rocks. The murmur of voices grew and resolved into words. Hemline and fish and fool. I watched Betta counting out bound stitches to Lotta, who sat pressed to her side, nodding seriously. One of her chubby baby fingers poked at the stitches. Ranka sat right next to them binding a sock, such a bigger girl already.

  Heirik had been angry when he heard that door close last night. Just a couple hours ago. It ripped us from a dream, destroyed a fragile moment between us.

  He left me in an elegantly silent fury, gone into the house, but he didn’t find anyone there.

  Then we went to our beds, he to his and I to mine. Not angry, nei. Frustrated. Wanting more. We would figure this out tomorrow. And now the day had broken, and it could start to happen.

  Thinking of his words about the Jul festival, my heart felt light and skittery like a beach bird. I want you by me. His voice was tangled with the words, nervous, urgent. Only later, dreaming of him before my eyes closed on the last hours of night, did I figure it out. He didn’t mean he just wanted me near him at the party. He wanted me beside him on the high seat. His wife. He was asking.

  The house breathed with me, and it was calm and lovely, flickering fire, braided girls, strong, playful men. Lamps gave more light to the work, and a soft scent of rosemary rose from a few where precious bits of herbs had been added. My house dog panted under the bench across from mine, dirty paws sticking straight out.

  For a shining moment, all of it was mine.

  “Child!” Hildur called to me, snapping me out of my reverie. “Butter and fish.” She held her iron ring of keys out rudely, arm extended, waiting for me to get up out of my blankets and come to her. Butter and fish. Any one of six people were sitting closer and could have helped.

  One more morning. It wouldn’t help to argue now. With a taste of defiance in my throat, I climbed out of bed and went to the pantry.

  I turned the biggest key over in my hand before I slid it into the lock. It had an iron shaft, as long as my fingers and palm, that twisted and curved into three big teeth on one end. Tiny dents pounded all over formed a twining design. It was warm. Hildur had sat by the fireside all morning, and it held the heat of her skirts, her body, but soon it would be mine. I rubbed my thumb over the curves of its decorative swirls, and I thought about Heirik so close in the next room. Wondered when he would come to me.

  Bringing butter to the hearth, I felt something underfoot. A toy? In a dream, I saw the butter flung out from my hands, the dry strips of fish flying up and ever so slowly floating down, caught in a moment between joy and horror. And I fell—arms outstretched like a lost lover—into the flames.

  Hands and skirts thrashing, I felt people pulling at me, up out of the fire, into cool arms. Someone drew me close, drew my head back to look in my eyes. They called for Bjarn. Pain came seconds later, the side of my face, left arm, hand exploding.

  I yelled for Heirik. I screamed for him, and when he didn’t come I shrieked, “Where is he?!!” Pain clawed up my throat. Breathing was too hard, and I struggled with it. I heard him, finally, and even his voice couldn’t stop this. I reached for him, desperate.

  “Leave the house,” he said, in the voice of the chief.

  Dresses rustled, children cried, doors closed. He was behind me then, his body big and snow-cold against my back, his arms came up around me, holding and rocking, talking low in my ear. “Litla,” he said, “Shhhh.” He pressed my unharmed shoulder tight to his body, trying to gentle and calm me.

  My mind lit for a second on each of a string of simple things. Pain, hands, tears on my face. Heirik. Just him, not even the man but him as a spirit, a thing. Lullaby words, hush, hush. The implacable flames that still burned in front of me, orange and mean, gray closing on all sides.

  I woke in misery. The hearth fire was in my blood, eating my skin. I looked at my arm, expecting to find it swarming with biting insects or angry spirits. It was flung out at my side, expertly wrapped in linen from my elbow down to my stinging fingertips. The sparking pain there was almost a comfort. I still had fingers.

  I would not touch my face.

  “Ginn,” Betta’s voice came clear and low. She petted my unhurt arm, steady and assuring. She spoke over her shoulder to someone else. “Tell the chief she is awake.”

  I closed my eyes again. I felt him there, suddenly, his weight shifting the bench, his scent coming near.

  “Hello, Litla,” he said. “You are here.” His fingers were light on the arc of my brow. Now I thought of it as his sweet habit, a favorite way of touching me, hand to bone. It made me smile, and the smile turned to pain.

  I tried to laugh through it. “I am not small, you know.”

  He laughed too, silently, and continued to brush his fingers across the unhurt part of my forehead.

  “Já, well, I am not handsome.”

  So there we were.

  Bjarn came and broke up the moment. He held something about as long as my hand and wrist, smooth, ivory-colored and hollow.

  “The bone of a wreck, Herra,” he said. A beached whale—a gift from the gods. Heirik took the bone shard and examined the markings on it.

  “They stand uncurved,” the chief agreed somberly, then took the bone and tucked it in the blankets by my side.

  He just sat with me for a while, his hand now resting on my hip, pressing steadily to gentle me. He kept the pain down. His presence, and an odd sense of tingling life that came from the bone resting against my ribs. When the pain in my skin clawed and scraped, the whisper of the whalebone and Heirik’s words, the soft surety of his touch, all mingled and covered me and made the pain bearable.

  I would bear it, já. For weeks after that. And every day felt as long as a lifetime, knowing I had lost him.

  Midwinter

  Heirik would stay by me through all time, he said, but we could not be lovers. “Too many times, you have been hurt after holding me,” Heirik told me. “I can’t risk hurting you again.”

  There was no worse pain he could have inflicted than those words. They made my chest tight, made me clutch my stomach alone in the night. But they weren’t surprising words. I’d known they were coming from the moment I woke in bandages, when he looked at me with such sad, caring eyes, regret rising off him as thick as smoke. He’d sat by me, and his fingers had traced the contours of my face. Now I realized he’d been memorizing me. Already saying goodbye.

  He didn’t leave the house and go to the cave like I thought he might. He checked on me every day. But he always stood back, looking serenely objective to anyone but me. I saw his hesitance, as if a single touch would complete the job and burn me to a pile of dust.

  Other than those gloomy moments with Heirik, I had a perverse need to stay by the fireside. I sat, linen wrapped around my head, ugly as a monster. Unable to sew, just staring for long periods. Betta would come talk to me, wrap a blanket around me like an invalid, and tell me little stories about goddesses and elves and what it would be like to go to the great meeting in the west.

  Each day, Bjarn changed the bandages on my hand and face. I knew when he took me outside, he would apologize and then scrape at my wounds. The pain seared away all thoug
ht, and words died in the sensation. I felt every swipe of rough cloth, felt the bones of Betta’s hand ready to break in my grip. Bjarn would pour soothing honey and herbs on me, and glance nervously around, searching for someone. Did the chief watch him?

  On the fifth day, Heirik did come, and he loomed over us while Bjarn peeled the bandages back and inspected my hand. The chief leaned so gracefully against the house, his everyday ax hanging lightly in his hand, looking just the way he had when I fell in love with him—dark and forbidding and decorated with blades. In the distance, I noticed Ranka peeking around the corner of the house, everyone watching.

  Bjarn looked at my palm, my wrist, and he swallowed hard. “It is good,” he stated, then let out a long breath.

  Heirik turned away for a moment, looking up the hills. Then he leaned his ax against the house, turned to nod at Bjarn and smile at me with a brilliant, warming smile—the sweetest since my accident.

  That day, my skin throbbed and stung for a long time. It burned hotter than the companionable pain I’d come to hold day by day. After sitting by the hearth for more than an hour, I stood with a surge of frustration and anguish and asked Hildur for the pantry keys.

  I made it to the cool solitude of the little room and closed the door behind me. The pantry wall was the sod of the house itself, and it felt yielding and smelled brown, with the promise of growing things. Roots, seeds, a future. I leaned my head back against it and breathed. I turned and pressed my one good palm to it, listening to my heart galloping.

  I went to the deep barrel. With one hand and one hip, and with grim determination, I rotated the giant lid. A rangy, milky scent flew out like a moth that had been caught, waiting under the surface. I dipped a small bowl into the sour milk. It was cold to the touch, and I soaked my hand in it.

  I slowly got food out for dinner. A bowl of butter, a basket of dried meat. I set aside skyr and dried berries for a second trip, and for the hundredth time I dreamt of an orange. Radiant. Its specific scent so sweet and pungent. My palm curled around the cold bumps of its skin. My fingernails longed for the soft resistance of pith and peel. My teeth and tongue wanted that faint pop upon biting. I felt the juice on my chin and fingers.

  Here in the real world, I snuck a handful of horribly wilted weeds that we’d collected in fall, to sustain our teeth. I filled a bowl with fish halves like crackers. These dried cod, and the flat grainy loaves Ranka made, were the closest we got to bread. Oh gods, I wanted bread. I wanted a crispy, chewy baguette to fill my senses, on the heels of the orange. I would bury my nose in it, if it were here. I would sink to my knees on this hard dirt floor and consume the entire thing.

  The orange and baguette got caught up in each other. They swirled together with the base hunger brought on by Heirik’s last kiss, and something else—a tiny, invisible fear—in my stomach. The notion, growing unseen like a root, that he might be right. He might be cursed.

  I put my arms around myself and crouched in the pantry, staring at the bowl of fish at my feet. Sometimes I still couldn’t believe where I’d come. I thought I’d wake to find Morgan at my bedside in a hospital, telling me I’d been sleeping for two hundred days.

  I snapped out of my dreams when Ranka bounded in. She stopped short just inside the door and stared at me, obviously holding back a question.

  “Já, Ranka,” I said, still crouching on the floor. “Are you here to help me?”

  “Lady,” she started, and she spoke slower and more carefully than usual. “Why did the chief look scared?”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “When Bjarn changed your bandages, the chief got a funny look, like he saw a spirit.”

  She’d watched us, and seen Heirik hovering over me. A spirit had passed. Oh. Realization came suddenly and my head swam. He’d been holding that big blade for a reason. He’d meant to use it, if my hand was dying. I remembered his ax sliding out of his palm to rest against the house. I could only imagine what expression Ranka had seen on his face.

  “Dear Child, sit with me.” We sat on the floor, and I spoke to her eye to eye. “I don’t know how I came here to Hvítmörk. That has always been the truth.” It was a bent truth, but I didn’t actually lie to her sweet, open face. “Even so, I can tell you that I am no spirit. I’m just not afraid of the chief.”

  I said it out loud, testing the words myself, and they wavered like light on water. My own voice told me the truth, I was scared after all.

  “But he is fearsome to everyone,” Ranka said, reflecting my thoughts. She spoke to me clearly, as though I were dumb, or I’d told her the sky outside was yellow.

  “Child, know this.” I tried for a fierce conviction. “To my eyes, the chief is beautiful. I see no curse.” The tie on Ranka’s braid was loose, but with only one hand I could not fix it. I brushed my fingers through the silky ends. “Only a lovely family with a very good farm.”

  She looked deep into my eyes, and I thought, or perhaps just hoped, that she would believe me. That she’d see there was room in this world for the possibility that Heirik was not a monster. But how could I convince her, when my own voice wobbled?

  “Já, then,” I straightened up slowly and smoothed my skirt. “Let’s get this food out there where everyone can eat it.”

  “Já, Lady, let’s do it!”

  I turned to face the family, for once relieved that Heirik might be gone into the depths of his room.

  Soon after we learned that my hand was saved, Heirik began talking to me again.

  The news released a black and ugly spirit back into the night. It flew off, leaving only my man, the way I’d always known him. And he seemed to need my company like he needed fresh water and air.

  I needed him, too. I needed his assuring presence, even if he wasn’t in the room. Just knowing he was here at Hvítmörk. His voice came to me from another part of the house, sometimes, and it brought back my first days here. I’d made it through that. I would make it through this.

  And so we settled into a twisted sort of lovemaking, with words instead of bodies.

  At the same time, the fear I’d felt in the pantry grew, ever so slowly, a stealthy little newborn creature at the back of my consciousness.

  For days and days, we played tafl and talked for hours over our game board, holding phrases between us with unfathomable tenderness, caressing with voices, weighing pieces in our palms. Too disgusted to try to capture a chieftain, I asked that we change the names of the sides. Sometimes with great humor we played circling birds against Ginn. More often we were ravens wheeling around a fine warrior, or fishermen and a great whale.

  Sometimes we touched. Our hands might come together on the game board, and we gave and took sensual brushes. A palm moving up a forearm when no one observed. Hours might be easy with camaraderie, and then a single moment would flare with longing. Confused. We could not have what we wanted, and yet we couldn’t stop.

  My hand, no longer bandaged but still far from healing, was now red as his. As bold and scared as cornered animals, we matched ourselves to one another.

  Soon my strategy got good enough for me to win a few times. Every once in a while, my defending whale got away, or on the other hand my small round pieces blocked Heirik in.

  We spoke ever so quietly about the future. People steered clear of us anyway, so it was easy, when we played at night, to confide and ask and answer questions. In a handful of dirt, I drew a map for Heirik, of Iceland as seen from space.

  The chief wanted to know about farming a thousand years from now, how families lived in the land in new ways. I could hardly answer. How could I tell Heirik there were no farms, no animals? That food was made from other food, not cows and goats, and Hvítmörk itself was gone so completely that no one even remembered its name. It would be as hard to accept—or even comprehend—as it would be for me to imagine a world without voices and speech. It would break his heart.

  How would I describe everything, anyway? I thought of drawing a city in the most basic sense—a place
where houses were strung together, with rooms that were perfectly square and bright. Whole families lived right next to each other, so close they could touch hands through a window, or even a single person could live in a space as big as this house. I imagined telling him that the expanse of this beautiful island sat packed with such boxes, until there was no room left for a single fox to house her cubs. Then layers of more stacked on top. People living up off the ground, suspended right over one another. And another layer and another, until the houses touched the clouds, and their floors trapped the mist under the ground.

  I wondered if he could imagine enormous glass windows, entire buildings made of the precious material of frost cups. Lamps and candles that burned acid-bright without stopping, a light so intense it ate the sky, eclipsed the sparks of Ymir’s skull and left only a handful of stars.

  Smaller questions seemed more approachable. He asked what the men wore.

  “Many things,” I said. “Not just one like here.” I tried to explain that in the future people played with clothing on a lark—a difficult concept, when here every bit of fabric was precious, made of the animals Heirik raised, painstakingly spun and sewn by the women of his family and his thralls. A length of wool cloth took weeks of a woman’s life, and a shirt was a love token of the tenderest worth.

  I thought of Jeff’s t-shirts, torn, thrown away without a care. “The one man I knew the most,” I started to tell Heirik. And then it hit me, how long I’d been away. Memory woke like a bow shot in my brain, everything about Jeff coming back. His hands, faded jeans, long lank hair the color of strawberry sun, tattoos circling his wrists like Heirik’s silver bracelets. I heard Jeff’s easy laugh in my mind, smiled at the memory of his shameless flirting.

  “He wore much tighter pants,” I said with a small smile.

  Then I recalled Jeff’s cold, listless eyes, never truly looking at me. His great height. I could never stretch up just so slightly on my toes to place my chin on his shoulder, like I could with Heirik. I was faced with the wall of Jeff’s chest, thoughts opaque, dreams never shared. Or maybe he had none. Though Jeff had been the one man I knew the most, I didn’t really know him at all.