I wanted Betta, but she was always busy, mostly helping her Da. Bjarn tended a steady stream of men who’d been dislocated, cut, crushed and punched senseless in small fights that sprung up all over the yard, all through the week. He removed more than one sore tooth, too, from men and women who’d been waiting for Jul to see him. Betta, emphatically silent, bent her head to change bandages and bring ale and honey and herbs and water.
A flock of women ate meals together, and so Betta blended in. In fact, most times she dissolved into the background of the house. She avoided talking privately with me. It stung my heart, the way she was always asleep before I turned in, as if she planned it. Or she waited until I was asleep before coming into the bed herself. In the morning, I’d find her covers rumpled.
Brynhild was a distraction. She was fawned over and chatted at, with plans for a big wedding, until her bright red hair and bold laughter became a symbol of midsummer—the heat and sun seeming like a far country that we all believed we would someday reach. Magnus watched her with fascination and longing, afraid to speak, and I laughed fondly inside, thinking about his life with this spirited woman. I liked her after a while—the bold and sensible way she pushed most of the attention away. She kindly but firmly let everyone know she was not the blushing sort of bride-to-be.
But she was only of momentary interest. What I wanted was my best friend.
The party went on for over a week, becoming louder and more boisterous the drunker everyone got. It was hot and crowded, and I started to loathe even the new and fascinating voices. Moments after Betta cared for the sick and broken men, they would be drinking together again, laughing. Their gestures and sounds—such a sensual treat at first—became inescapable and overloud. Every few hours, my body and mind would spasm like a trapped animal, and I would stand abruptly and press my hands into my skirt to try not to growl. Sometimes, I’d go to the back mudroom and put on snowshoes and tramp around the house.
I counted my steps along the back of the house, a habit now, and laughed as I fell and sunk into deep swells of whiteness. I smiled as I counted, because the total was coming out so different than my summer number. My steps were fewer in the knee deep snow, clumsy with the bulk of wooden nets tied to my feet.
I rounded the curve of the pantry and ahead of me was Heirik’s room. The outside shell of it. I groped along and half walked, half lunged for it, and I placed my hand hard against the place where he probably sat right now on his bed.
He was so seldom seen, after the party’s first night. I missed his laugh and stolen touches over our game board. Missed the everyday moments from before this endless festival.
He came out a few times and got uncharacteristically drunk in the snow with a few of the men.
I wondered if he even bathed, and thought probably not, with so many people in our house and yard, the bath clogged with them night and day. Maybe he washed in the snow, in the woods, alone. Maybe he stole away to the cave. I imagined him drawing up scalding water in his cupped palms, pictured the slick curves of his body where it ran off him in runnels and turned to steam.
Here in reality, I leaned my cheek against the cold wall. Skeletal fingers of frosted, brown grass scraped my face, gently.
There were more little ones—raucous adults, too—who needed the songs and long stories that would fill up our dreams and let us sleep. Very late at night, after even the near-constant feasting and drinking and fighting died down, the clanks of ale cups became softer, the mood of the party more contemplative. Children would come together and sit on the floor, parents all around, and Hár would lean in and tell a story.
Tonight, he told of an explorer and raider named Hundr Blacktooth, “for he was truly that ugly.” I smiled. Hundr meant dog, a singular insult to a Viking man, though I liked the actual dogs I’d met.
Hár told us that Hundr was beloved by his loyal men, and he sailed with them to the glorious places of the world. Here Hár might as well have been describing the moon, having never been, as far as I knew, anywhere but Iceland. He told of many wonders, nonetheless. They went to the end of the known world, Hundr’s crew, where they traded for slippery cloth spun by insects and drink that could make a man fly. They went across the far sea, to a coast with white sand and cunning little shells of sea creatures that could fit in your hand. “And to Norway. Where there are cows as big as horses, and grass as tall as your old uncle.” He hovered one hand above his own head, and the kids laughed.
Hundr was an honorable and brave man, Hár said, and his ship bore him faithfully. “Its lines were sleek, seams well sealed, and its sail great enough to fill the sky.” He’d had many adventures and battles in that boat, and so Hár detoured to tell the children about them, taking as much time as possible to put every one of them to sleep. We held the little ones and rocked them in the smoky den. Hár met each of their wide open eyes with a steely gaze, commanding them to sleep and dream. I started to sway with tiredness myself, and I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.
A pair of fearsome birds lived in the ravens’ nest atop Hundr’s mast. One day the birds returned from roaming the sky, and their cries were loud and wingbeats mighty. Hundr took up his sword to defend himself and his men.
Hár continued, “One of the ravens croaked at Hundr as he swiped with his sword, ‘Come follow. You will see.’ And a great eel rose alongside the ship. It swam to the prow and it drew the ship’s dragon, who was very hungry after a dozen years at sea. And so Hundr came to an unknown land with trees as white as snow and sand as black as the chief’s beard.” The children didn’t laugh this time, and I thought they must be rapt and a little scared. I thought of Heirik’s beard, and how dark the sand was on that beach, where I arrived.
“Do you know what Hundr found there?”
There were a couple guesses, and a boy called out “a smelly troll.” Áki, a little boy of about three, added “A troll!” as though it was his original idea. Hár laughed with the sudden delight that sometimes exploded from him. “Nei,” he told us. “He found a beautiful woman.”
There were great groans from the boys.
“This is a good story, já” Hár defended. “Because she was no ordinary woman.” Kit made an indignant sound, and I opened my eyes to see Hár laughing silently.
“Her hair was spun of copper,” he continued, “her skin aglow like a midnight snowfield. And her eyes were of the most fertile farm, the exact green of grass waving in the sun.”
The children’s mouths hung open in concentration. Áki picked his nose.
Hár went on to describe how the woman led Hundr through the trees and to a sunlit, yellow clearing where there stood a strong house. The house was for him, but he would have to stay and clear the land and farm, leaving his men to sail his ship without him. While Hundr very much liked the beautiful woman, and went so far as to kiss her—which was as glorious as entering Valhalla—he said no to the house and farm. “Because he had a stupid idea.” Hár faltered, started again. “He had this idea that things would be best if he returned to the sea.”
He gathered himself fully and went on. “That night, Hundr slept on the deck of his ship where it sat on the sand, and he was sore and tossed and turned. And he was visited by one of his mad ravens. The bird woke him with a beat of its great, black wing. And then it spoke to him. In dönsk tunga, já?” The Danish tongue.
The bird told Hundr that she was the goddess Lofn, in raven form. It made me think of loaf and oven, the English words blending into a sound that was yeasty and plush. I began to slide into familiar, sensual bread dreams.
“The goddess of unions of the heart and body,” Hár explained, and his low and resonant voice drew me back. “Lofn told Hundr he should stay and farm the land. That if he did, an endless green valley would be his and his daughters’ and granddaughters’. But he drew his sword and chased the bird off the boat a second time.”
I opened my eyes with a start and found I’d missed some piece of the story. Some oaf among Hundr’s men had acci
dentally set fire to his ship, and it had burned until it was a black hunk on the sand. Hundr saw the raven wheeling overhead and understood, in a moment of clarity, that the fire-setter’s great stupidity was topped only by his own. I turned to look around the smoky shadows, and saw that Áki lay with soft abandon, asleep on his father’s lap. Wetness glinted at the corners of his pillowy mouth.
Lofn had done what she always did, the thing that was her special skill, her superpower. She had removed all obstacles—including Hundr’s ship and even his own stubbornness—so that he could have a union with the beautiful woman.
Hundr wanted the woman then, and he worried it might be too late, so he ran and crashed through the deep, dark woods to the farmhouse in the yellow clearing, where it was suddenly daytime. The woman stepped lightly from the door in a delicate dress, a single braid falling over her shoulder. Her form was finer than the curve of his ship.
Hár paused, and for a second his eyes rose to look deep into the dark of the house. It was as though he saw the ethereal woman in the flesh, her dress cool and white, a bare foot stepping from her farmhouse door. He shook it off, but his voice was a little broken.
“Hundr knelt before her and bent his head, holding not the sword of a raider but the ax of a farmer.” Hár leaned forward with his elbows on his knees to almost whisper the greatest part of the story to the children who remained awake. “And the woman was revealed as Lofn herself, who had spied Hundr on his boat and wanted him for her own, no matter that he was ugly as a boar.” The girls all gasped and the boys shook their heads and said nei. One of them tossed a little chunk of dirt at Hár’s feet in protest, and the old man gave him a look of steel, making the boy sink back onto his bench.
“And Hundr Blacktooth became a great chieftain, a prosperous farmer and consort of a goddess,” Hár finished, and I knew I wasn’t imagining the hitch in his throat, a single note of wistfulness swallowed by the thunder of his voice. “And he gave Lofn many daughters.”
Betta’s back was to me in the pantry. She stood on her toes, drawing something down from a very top shelf, and her shoulders moved with irritation as she shoved boxes around.
“Why won’t you speak to me?”
She stopped moving and settled onto her heels, but didn’t turn around.
I grabbed the biggest bowl I could find and just looked at it, waiting for her answer. Afraid, but needing to know. Wanting her back. It would have been the simplest thing, back in my original time, to buy a hundred bowls this size. Every one the same.
I filled it with dry fish, and I waited some more.
Something sunk in my belly. Would she say she no longer wanted me? We weren’t friends after all? Tears came quick to the corners of my eyes and I felt my whole face crumple.
“What do you mean, Woman?” She finally spoke, and it was so good. I held her raspy words in my mind. Yet it was no answer.
“You know what I mean, já?” My voice was slippery, and I hugged my bowl of fish. Finally she turned to me.
Her answer surprised me. “It is Hár,” she said.
Oh. Tremendous relief flowed through me.
Hearing it out loud, it seemed stupidly clear. This wasn’t about me. Ever since the first night of the party, Hár had been expansive and desperate. He crashed through the week, breaking things, fighting, drinking until he fell down into the snow and slept there, freezing, while Betta doggedly wrapped bandages and set bones.
“He’s out there shaking the house with his sighs,” I said. “And beating up anyone who looks at him.”
“Well …” Betta started, then, “já …” She squared herself up, then came toward me. She lifted herself up to sit on the high bench—the same one where Heirik had placed me when we kissed. I placed my bowl down and ungracefully made it up to sit beside her and waited until she was ready.
“I told him I am eighteen in summer,” she started. “I am obviously not going to be married to anyone young, and he is a burlugalti and dishonors me.”
I wanted to laugh at her description of the old man, a clumsy wild boar. But it worried me, that she’d challenged his honor. That was dangerous.
I felt like I was dipping my toe in icy water when I carefully asked, “And?”
Betta let it out with a short breath. “And,” she said. “If he won’t marry me, then we are done.”
The color rose on her face. “I won’t be hidden like a small fish.” Her description of herself was cutting. A small catch, too embarrassing to bring home.
“You’re right,” I told her, and I took her hand. “He loves you, and he should not use you like that.” And I took her in my arms and she turned to me and shook with quiet crying. Her hair caught in the tears on my own cheeks. I’d once promised myself that we would get the man she pined for. I’d been so naive. But at least now I could hold her through this. My shoulder was all for her. She was heavy, and I bore her up as she cried. She pulled away then, and her strong eyes filled to the limit with tears tore at my heart.
She wiped at them and straightened herself. She trailed her fingertips over the bench between us. “He will sleep here.”
“Here?” I asked. Befuddled, as always. “Sleep on this bench?”
“It is his rightful room.” She said. “It became so, after Heirik grew up.”
I hadn’t thought about the arrangements before I came here, about where Heirik slept when he was a boy, where his uncle did. This was the only other room that locked. Hár would begin to sleep in the pantry to hide from everyone and perhaps beat the walls with his stupid fists.
Winter into spring
It was a long snowmelt.
Everyone talked about how the winter was mild but everlasting, the longest in memory. Outside an eerie white and electric blue permeated everything, refusing to lift into yellow and green.
Inside the muffled bulk of the house, we found the same things to do. Tension electrified everything, even the most mundane task, making it exhausting to sew a seam or repair a sock. Hár grumbled and made char cloth in the corner, and, after each meal, tramped off to the snowy stables or the pantry. Eyes followed him, people wondering without asking what drove him back to sleeping there now, after years of not caring to use that bed.
Heirik hardly ever came out. He passed his time alone, and at many points I was sure he’d left the house altogether and was gone away, probably in the cave.
The snow was no longer high, but instead a relentless slush filled every crack in the ground and made its way in under the mudroom doors. Everyone was miserable and began to talk worriedly about animals and planting the homefield. An unearthly spring, too long in coming. It was a curse, Hildur said, but to no effect. After a long winter, not even the most superstitious among us could hear her pronouncements anymore.
She looked around like a hawk and often her gaze rested on Betta with suspicion, Svana with irritation, or me with open fear and hostility.
The children, dreadfully bored, tried to make frost cups, just like the chief’s rare, clear drinking glasses. It was almost too late in the season, but they desperately hoped they might still freeze. Magnus and Haukur helped the littles ones clear snow away from a spot where there was no underground stream. They dug molds deep in the hard ground and let the children fill them with water.
It might just work. There was enough cold still gripping the earth. I crouched over the little freezing cups in their hole in the ground, with my skirts hiked up out of the slush. I looked at the big, gray sky and laughed hard, a single sharp sound that went into the atmosphere and was lost. I thought I’d surely come to rock bottom—a place and time where the most interesting thing to do was stare at a pit, waiting for water to freeze. I vaguely thought that in spring, when it was dry again, I would have to do something, go somewhere else. But spring seemed like a dream from another life.
After more days of this than anyone could bear, I thought I saw daytime starting to return, the grayish play of noon light becoming stronger, the landscape’s waking hours longer.<
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I thought I might be delirious, but then it was there again, the sun, and I realized it must have been happening gradually over a long time. Opening like a flower, so that even as I watched, I could never see the exact moment it changed. The smoke vents in the roof started to turn a paler blue, like an eggshell seen in an arc. For hours at a time it became easier to see.
And with this weak and newborn sun, our spirits started lifting, sluggishly as though we’d been sleeping off an epic ale feast. We talked about how everywhere else in the world, everywhere outside Hvítmörk, it must be spring by now. The woods and waves would be passable. Farmers in other parts of the island and as far as Norway must be planting their homefields, letting their animals free. It wouldn’t be long until we did those things, until we saw grass again and smelled dry dirt.
The days became bright with promise, as if the oddest things might be possible.
Even so, it was shocking when we heard that Brosa’s boat had been spotted.
The chief and Hár were on their horses in seconds, a spray of gray slush thrown up in their wake. I watched Heirik go, and I pressed my fingers to my lips and then the wind, hoping so hard. Hoping that when he got to the water he would find what he’d sought in his heart all this long and dreary winter. Not the blades and berries and honey from Norway, or cloth and silver from the east. But his brother.
Our hearts that had been tentatively lifting, suddenly soared. Everyone woke all the way up and beamed with energy. The house itself seemed to wake too, shaking winter and stretching like a giant dog. We knew somehow that Brosa still lived.
It took a long time for Betta and I to put away the honey, nuts, dried fruit, spices, casks of mead, all the while an unease gathering in my stomach.
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