Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  My eye was drawn to the hollow of Heirik’s throat, the silver hammer there, his linen ties hanging loose. “And he wore two shirts like you.” I reached out casually, tugged at one of the strings.

  Heirik didn’t play. He looked from the weaving room out through the door into the depths of the main hall.

  “You are lost from him,” he said without looking at me. “You did have someone like me.”

  “Nei,” I told him, the word fierce. “Look at me, Heirik. Right in my eyes.”

  He did.

  “Never like you,” I told him, and I wrapped my fingers as far as they would reach around his ankle, to draw him, to make him understand. My fingers couldn’t reach all the way around. He took in a sharp breath and looked down at my grasp.

  I shook my head with the impossibility of Jeff, or of anyone ever taking Heirik’s place. I told him, “No one is like you.” My thumb went under his linen, past his ankle bone.

  His reaction surprised me. “Já, then,” he said, and smug as a house cat, he blinked slowly, a very small smile forming at the corner of his mouth. “I believe that.”

  Gods, I wanted to smack him. It wasn’t fair, I thought dumbly, that he could draw away from me, perhaps never do again what we had in the cave, and yet still smile. Still revel in the fact that for me, he was the best. No man compared to him.

  I drew my hand away and swatted at his chest and he laughed hard. “Brusi,” I spat out at him playfully. He-goat. His smile was almost, but not quite, broad across his face.

  A draft came from the ceiling vent, and the passing cloud of smoke stole our mood.

  “There will never be anyone like you,” he said to me gravely, our touch completely wiped out, gone like the draft that had broken it. He picked up a game piece, held it loosely and let it roll out of his hand. It made a hard sound as it scrabbled across the bench.

  He seemed to ask the game and floor and house itself a question. “What will I do with you?”

  He’d said it before, and I didn’t like the sound of it.

  Jul came soon.

  Hildur set a small world into motion, preparing for the feast. She called up the thralls who trekked to the house to do the hardest work. She had the boys bring up food and drink from an underground store. More riches I hadn’t known about. Amazed at the abundance of meat and fish and cheese and the vast quantities of ale that came into the house, my mind turned to counting, over and over. I had a deep desire to manage it all, to be sure there was enough to extend the chief’s generosity.

  Instead, I was set to helping Avsi and Lotta polish cups. A hoard of lovely pewter cups sat in a basket by our feet, next to the hearth. We wiped until they shone, using pieces of worn linen and handfuls of ash.

  The girls were so little, chubby in their smocks, each with a tiny purse at her belt and a few beads draped across her apron dress. Lotta was all golden and round. She paid serious attention to her task, pink tongue sticking out at the corner of her mouth as she worked.

  I swirled a cloth inside a cup and watched her. Since the night Heirik and I shared in the cave, I’d prayed to all the gods and goddesses that I would have our child. Or, I wasn’t sure if prayer was the right word for it. More a wish in the gods’ direction, a kiss to my palm, sent into the night. But that possibility was past. Absently swiping at cups, I imagined it anyway. What it would be like to have a little girl Lotta’s age, but with midnight hair. A girl who looked exactly like her beautiful daddy.

  The thralls tramped up the long hill on snowshoes and worked to ready our house. Men and women cleared the ground of its waist-high snow, all around the doors and walls and out to the stables. They dug fire pits and filled them with stones, and children scattered the ground with precious hay. Tents were raised, with thick red and white fabric and floors of even deeper dry grass.

  In the house, I helped Ranka hang juniper boughs over the sleeping spaces, dark berries still clinging to the sticky wood. I tied the boughs and watched my left hand, healing but still angry red. I thanked the gods no infection had spread and made it dangerous to keep. If I were a thrall myself, what would happen then?

  And why wasn’t I a thrall, for that matter? A slave come by cheap, found on the beach like a shell that would make a good spoon. I wondered if it was only my rich clothes—an accident, the result of some play-Viking’s clumsiness in a coffee shop—that led the chief to welcome me as an honored guest. Was it because of my cherry dress? Or was it because I called him Heirik instead of Herra, with a voice full of nascent longing. Was that why I hung lovely boughs and polished cups now with two adorable girls instead of hauling hay and digging pits in the frozen ground?

  A day later, the first boys arrived. In the lung-searing cold, they came coughing and shivering at the door, and they had news. The fabled man named Egil—the rich one—and his children were making the trip. They were on their way, skiing three days, camping two nights, to make it to our house for Jul.

  Gossip circled, swift and bright. Egil would be the guest of honor, an important man, almost as rich as the chief, whose great house sat further east along the coast of the island. The big meal, the official beginning of a long and raucous festival, would take place tonight if the gods helped his family along in time.

  This meant a lot more people. Not just the man himself and his close family, but dozens who would follow in his tracks. Hildur paced the house to check on everything a hundred times, chasing chickens into corners over and over, tugging at tent fabric, testing the hay in the yard with a stick.

  In a fit of anticipation, it was decided we should bathe and dress.

  I sank into the pool and with a sense of blankness, I listened to women chatter around me—Svana’s, Thora’s, Betta’s voices all swirling with the water churned up by their arms and floating toes. I turned away from the water, rested my chin on my folded arms and watched Ranka mashing something dark and powdery in a small bowl. She saw me staring.

  “Cinders, Lady,” she said. “For our eyes!”

  She loved to teach me things, but her half-answers often made no sense. I’d given up on asking every one of my questions. I’d wait, and explanations would come some time, and so I forgot the bowl of ashes and floated with an absent mind. Something bitter just at the back of my throat, but I didn’t know what.

  I washed myself slowly and stood in the freezing air a moment too long before I put on my red dress. I watched the fabric unfold over my gauzy shift and underdress, and I swished my hips to let it fall. I pressed the cherry and amber wool against my thighs. I’d felt like a princess in this dress when I went into the tank. But it wasn’t as beautiful as Signé’s gown, hers the color of a cold fall sky, a time when blue was still possible.

  Slicing my thoughts open, Betta talked in a low and secret voice. “Woman, you know it would not be right to wear his mother’s clothes. Not now.” The rest went unspoken. Not now that it was over between us, that my right to that dress was gone.

  “Wear this,” she said. “It will lighten your mood.”

  She dipped the tip of her pinky in the dish of cinders and told me to look at the sky. I jumped when her fingernail stung the soft skin under my eye. She smudged the black ash. The stars wobbled in my wet vision. With her finger, she swiped away my tears so they would not show in front of all the women.

  We helped each other with belts and jewelry, and Ranka did my hair. She liked to create braids and loops that hid my scar, but today I asked her to pull it back tight on top and just let the rest fall. I was in no mood for prettiness.

  In all of time, there’d never been anyone so capable and determined as Viking travelers in winter.

  In my old life, winter was a landscape of tunnels and lighted, covered walkways. It wasn’t hard, and was not at all special, to arrive somewhere. To the guests here, it would be an act of sheer will, their own and the gods’. Braving the wind-driven cold, camping some place isolated, maybe a cave in the woods, they would come on skið and snowshoes, unstoppable.

 
After the boys, who now sat choking down fish and warming themselves, came a group of men, ten maybe, traveling together and no doubt steered the last mile by our smoke.

  I approached the front door when I heard Magnus talking to them. The mudroom was dark, and I saw him silhouetted against the snow-bright and moon, standing at his greatest height. He told them they could keep their small knives, but they had to leave their hatchets at the door.

  His voice flowed without breaking, solid and deep. “No skull cleavers in the chieftain’s hall.” He stepped deliberately over the threshold and rested his hand on his own ax, which I noticed was allowed to hang by his side. “Drop them, or leave this house.”

  The mess of grumbles thrilled me. All new voices! I closed my eyes to savor the sound, and in the darkness, I felt Heirik step up beside me. Eyes closed, I knew him, his weight, the space and air he took up, his scent. We stood together in the doorway, and I opened my eyes to gaze out at the guests, a bedraggled crew, snot dripping from red noses, ice in messy beards.

  Every one of them had forgotten Magnus and was on bent knee, gaping up at me and the chief.

  I turned to Heirik and saw him in his midnight dark clothes, commanding and beneficent. I imagined the picture of him and me together barring the threshold, our serious eyes of ice and fire, mine rimmed with black ash. Hair pulled tight, scar shining, still red from the inferno. Heirik wore his hair the exact same way as mine, his own scar similarly on show, priceless silver at his throat, clothes the color of death.

  “We make quite a pair.” I whispered so the men could not hear me. “Welcome to Hvítmörk, já?”

  Heirik laughed out loud. The rich sound I loved filled the air, louder than ever before.

  The guests cowered. And for a moment I saw the chief’s eyes and bloodied face as they did, heard his laugh rumbling like savage weather. I saw him through their eyes, and he looked demonic. I wished for once that I hadn’t lightened his mood.

  A dozen ax handles thumped against the wall.

  Once the men had bowed to him and dropped their weapons, the chief was through with them. They were released into the party like sheared lambs. Heirik turned me away from the door and backed me up into the shadows as all the grumbling men passed into the house. He was so quiet, I almost couldn’t make out his words. “It would be an ill omen for a man to die in my fire.”

  My laugh was like a mad bark. “An ill omen, indeed,” I said.

  He came even closer, and I felt the whisper of his breath, deep with ale. I backed up against the cool wall. He was a little drunk, and it surprised me. He didn’t do this before toasts and blessings and the first dangerous and tedious hours of a festival were through. He didn’t ever, in fact. But this was one of those nights when his emotions ran high and confused, when adulation and duty and entitlement and fear mixed into a mess.

  A drinking horn hung from his hand, half full. He was loose and very, very near.

  “There is something wrong tonight.” He could sense my emptiness.

  I breathed deep and felt the blood rush through me at his closeness. I didn’t want to talk about my unrequited wish, the lost idea of a little girl of our own. My need to take care of this home, to see to it that his generosity was great. My need for him. I wanted him to hold me and tell me that these things would happen one day. I nodded my head. Já, there was something wrong.

  “I am sorry,” he said, swallowing more ale. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then his eyes settled on me. “This was our night.”

  Oh.

  The memory was quick and brutal. Him pressing me up against the wall outside the back door, talking about Jul. This was the night, tonight. He’d intended to seat me next to him at the head of the table, in front of all these people. Had intended to place his sword on my lap and make me his wife, make this my home. He drank tonight perhaps to forget grief, or at least to get through this party, when his vision of it had been so different.

  I reached for his cup and took a mouthful of ale myself, swallowing tears.

  Like a breath across my brow, his fingers brushed the place he’d always loved to touch. I gasped with pleasure and surprise, and I took his hand and pressed it to my scar until it hurt.

  “I want you,” I told him, resting my face in his palm, so that he could feel the words as they formed. “I would do anything to kiss you right now.”

  He dropped his forehead to my shoulder, and his breath caught on his answer. “Until later, Beautiful One,” he said. His tone was vague and unreadable, his hand gone from my face, head lifted from my shoulder before I knew it. I couldn’t tell if he meant he would come find me later, maybe to give me the kiss I craved, or whether he meant goodbye.

  Just minutes later, I heard the news.

  I’d walked out onto the big cleared space of the yard, with a woolen wrap pulled close around me, a fur trimmed hat on my head. A brief whip of wind came, and my dress blustered like a spray of blood around my ankles. The fur of my hat fluttered against my forehead and eyebrows. I stepped inside an empty tent.

  I was surprised at the warmth it gathered, how much it blocked out the cold. I trailed my fingertips along the taut, thick fabric. The perfume of sweet and grassy autumn rose up from the hay floor and brought memories of sunlight and blistered hands, of clearing my acre, of kneeling in snowblooms.

  I dropped to my knees in the dim tent and ran my fingers through hay. I lifted a few pieces to my lips and kissed the grass we’d gathered and stored. Maybe this hay was mine, that I had cut. No matter how Heirik could or could not love me, I had a place here.

  “… A new wife in this house.”

  The words shot out sharp and clear from among the women’s spiraling voices and chirps of excitement.

  “Unexpected match,” someone else said, breathlessly surprised. “Beautiful,” another voice added. My heart beat swift and hard. A wife, here. We would meet her tonight.

  Heirik was afraid to take a wife, wasn’t he? Afraid of holding a woman close to him, afraid of what evil spirited children a union might bring. The whole family feared it. He wouldn’t do this, já? The little, nibbling fear in my gut suddenly grew. Disgust and fear drove me down onto my hands and tears clogged my throat, trying to come up. I asked the air and the hay, “What about me?”

  Women still gossiped outside the tent, about how there was wind but not much snow. Egil’s daughter would be here with the old man. “They are hearty people,” another voice said. “Even she, at such a young age. And her father, he is like an ox.” His house was grand, they said, the only other in Iceland as big as this one.

  It would be a powerful union.

  There was some logical reason Heirik would do this, and that fact made me sick. The chief would always think, and his logic was always elegantly hard and true. Yes, he would do this if he felt it was the answer to our tangled mess.

  He’d said goodbye to me, just moments ago. This was why.

  Something thumped on the outside of the tent. A loose flap of fabric, beating like the wing of a massive bird. I shook my head and stood, brushed hay off my dress with shaking hands. Outside the door, I looked hard into the unknowable expanse. As if conjured by the women’s frosty words, four dots of light crested a hill. They floated and bobbed like fireflies, tiny in the vast valley, but as they climbed toward the house they became steadily larger.

  I pressed my hand to the tent frame and thought of Saga, asked her what the hell she intended.

  Egil was a friendly bull. He entered the house in a gust of frosty air, arms spread wide in greeting, and cheers erupted from the dozens of people already drinking inside. He owned the room with that sense of authority and privilege that I’d only seen in the chief.

  Quiet as a shadow in comparison to Egil, the chief nonetheless drew everyone’s attention when he approached. Silence hovered in the air until he formally welcomed his guest. Heirik greeted the man with a small but real smile, his eyes bright against the wool of the blue swan.

  Then Egi
l announced, “My daughter, Brynild.” He beamed, and stepped aside to present a young woman who was consumed by cloaks. Her face was rimmed with a charming gray and white fur hood, pulled tight so that all I could see were dark eyes and a button nose, red as meat. “She skied like Skadi herself,” Egil said with broad pride. His voice was like the eruption of Hekla.

  “I was not staying home,” she stated tartly. She drew the fur hood back and golden-red hair sifted down, straight and sleek. She shook it out, down past her shoulders, and its brilliance shamed the hearth fire itself. “I am old enough to travel, Da.”

  She sounded like any fifteen year old, but she said it without a pout. Inquisitive, smiling, her voice and her years could not keep up with such bold and smoky eyes. Such a spirit, and powerful body to match, as though she were born from a giantess of the mountain snow.

  Heirik bowed his head to Brynhild and cold fingers climbed my spine.

  “I’ve heard so much about you, Rakknason,” she said. “The God-Maker.”

  I’d never seen a woman look him over without revulsion or at least hesitance. Her eyes took Heirik in actively, and she pursed her lips, undecided, and then moved into the room. My face felt hot and my stomach roiled with sickness. I didn’t like how she consumed him with her gaze. How her voice sounded when she called him a name I’d never heard before. God-Maker. Nei. I’d rather die than ever hear it again.

  I didn’t like how she looked at our house. It was beautiful tonight. The big room glittered with a hundred little fires from lamps hung everywhere. The curtains on the sleeping alcoves were all drawn aside, tied back in pretty swags, with juniper boughs over every bed. Long tables lined the room, every bench draped with furs and people. The heartstone crackled with a cozy flame. Brynhild took it all in speculatively, as if she were buying it.