Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  He slurred his words, like he was drunk. “I’m sorry, Litla,” he said.

  I stood slowly, caught in the same sluggishness as he was, probably in shock. I watched him strip to pants and boots, his clothes making heavy sounds as they hit the dirt floor. He stumbled to the bed, laid down and dragged a single blanket over the whole sopping mass of himself, as if he were lying down for an afternoon nap. Hair dripping black with seawater, face pale as milk, he seemed smaller under the covers, and no warmer. Not at all. Though he had escaped to dry land, the sea was slowly claiming him.

  I went to my knees on the floor by his feet, moving in a nightmare. I worked his freezing boots off bit by bit. Then I pulled back the blanket to untie his pants. He grasped me hard by the wrist.

  “Enough,” he hissed. His eyes were blazing, emotions careening.

  “Don’t be a fool.” I told him matter-of-factly, “You will die.”

  He shook his head, then tried to command me with his chief voice. “Leave me.” Not in a million years, I thought. He didn’t know how mellifluous and tender that voice sounded to me. It could seduce me any time, but it didn’t scare me into obeisance. Certainly not now.

  I pushed him down and held his chest with my knee so I could get his pants untied, and he watched me with slow and listless eyes. I’d thought so many times about how it would be to touch the bones of his pelvis where they pushed up against his skin. I remembered his reaction when I finally did, a hiss on his lips, a buck of hips at the ticklish sensation. I shook my head and put those thoughts aside.

  He stopped my hands with one of his own and told me gently that he would do it.

  I turned away and let him. I didn’t want this miserable moment to be the second time I ever took the clothes from his body.

  “Too much wool,” he told me. “I’m warm enough.” When I turned back, he’d pushed the blankets away in a heap—every cloak that the women had thrown into the tent in terrible haste went across the floor, but for one he kept to hide himself. I picked up all the furs and blankets and piled them around him again, reasoning with him like a child.

  I got him tucked into a mountain of wool. But without any body heat to speak of, there was nothing for him to trap inside the layers, no spark for the tinder. I cast my mind about, trying to recall what I could do. Then I remembered something I’d read about twelve hundred years from now.

  I dropped my cloak to the floor and started to take off my boots. He watched me with curiosity.

  “You will die of …” I had no word for hypothermia, and I was in a hurry, taking off pounds of brooches and necklaces and belts and dropping it all to the floor. “… cold. Heirik, it’s serious. You need to get close to another warmer person.”

  When he realized what I meant to do, his black brows drew together. As my apron hit the floor, he started shaking his head. “Nei.” Another useless command. “You will not.”

  He had to give up the argument when his body seized in a fit of convulsive shivering.

  By the time his shaking ended, I was standing before him in just my shift. Freezing air whipped against the tent, and my nipples stood out hard against the paper-thin dress.

  He smiled slyly, his eyes on my body, his emotions taking another swerve. At the very edge of death, he was aroused, joking. Drunk with cold, thirty seconds ago he forbade me to join him under the covers. Now he asked through gritted, trembling teeth, “Do you wish to meet the ravens, too, or are you getting in?”

  I burrowed into the covers and pressed the length of my body to his. I expected to recognize his shape, his skin and the contours of his bones, but it wasn’t the same at all. Not like in the cave.

  It felt as if he’d been carved from one of the thirteen glaciers. He didn’t feel human. I wrapped myself around him and nestled my head into the space under his arm. Raging spasms began right away, and I had to hold on with all my strength.

  Slowly, over a long time, the spasms slowed and came at longer intervals, finally giving way to the smaller tremors, then everyday shivering.

  My cheek—sticky with sweat from hanging on to his bucking body—now fit perfectly against his chest. I closed my eyes in wonder at the feel of his skin and Thor’s hammer against my forehead. I’d longed so many times to lay my head in just this spot. I had protected the memory of the moments when I’d been allowed. But I never dreamed of a moment like this. When we fell into bed together in my dreams, it was hot and slick and delicious, with entwined legs and yearning flesh. Here we lay strange and cold, no part of us twined or hungry.

  We began the long climb to warmth. In the stillness, I began to take on his cold, splitting what heat I had between us, until a fragile warmth took hold inside the blankets.

  At some point, I knew he would live, and then I realized just how close it had been. One more minute in that water and Heirik would be gone. We would be covering his corpse with these blankets. Now that the possibility seemed past, I gasped and sobbed, and he held me now, until my own tremors stopped.

  After an even longer time, we felt truly warm. Small stirrings of the muscles in his back and legs suggested he was safe. His shoulder felt alive under my fingers, and for the first time I consciously realized that I was holding him. Really holding him again, after so long. I was under a mountain of blankets with my arms around Heirik. It sent a thrill through my body, everywhere at once, washing me in arousal.

  It brought to my attention many other sensations, too. My arm and hip were numb. Sand and pebbles tormented me. I shifted my weight, and without exactly meaning to I pressed my hips into his.

  They met so naturally. If he were carved from a great glacier, I was the other half, made to fill the spaces in his body as he could fill mine. We slipped together. I felt him react, then, becoming hard against me, shockingly sudden and intense. I sucked in air, my lips against the cold skin of his chest, and he made a sound deep inside, underneath my kiss.

  But he was stubborn among a family of stubborn men. He didn’t give his hips to me, pressing with sensual slowness, didn’t roll me on my back and violently shove my shift out of the way to take me. He didn’t make a single move in fact.

  “Thank you,” he said, formally. Even as I felt the solid heat of his arousal growing against my damp shift, he whispered, “You should go.”

  I went dead, though my breath continued to make a moist warm spot on his skin. My voice continued to work. I murmured a question into his skin, asked him something simple. “Forever?”

  The quiet was long and brittle, and I held my breath. I sank into the pleasure of his arms and waited there, knowing I would have to go soon. Savoring this single moment before he said the word I didn’t want to hear.

  “I cannot be with you.” He said it with certainty. “I will not lead you to think I can.”

  It was reasoned and confident and final. In contrast to his words, though, he held me tighter. He wrapped a large hand around the back of my head and pulled me close. His lips touched my forehead. It was a press, not a kiss. It was the closest I would get.

  I tidied the tent before leaving, and it felt like a ritual. I folded blankets and put off the pressure of a coming wave of grief. While I stayed here, we were not completely severed.

  Heirik had turned to face the tent wall, and so I took my time. I took off my wet shift, and I put on my wool dress right against my skin. I combed my hair out with my fingers. Put my apron and jewelry back on, a cloak over that, a blanket too.

  With each layer of clothing, I felt a little stronger, a little closer to being able to go outside into a world where Heirik and I were really gone.

  Finally, I watched him breathe for just a moment, willing him to turn around and give in to me. Please, I thought, giving it one more second, and then one more. The fabric of the tent flap felt rough under my fingers, and the sky darkened outside. Please, again. One last time.

  I stumbled off away from gaiety and people and whale stench. On a rise above the beach, I found a big piece of driftwood, and I spent some tim
e laying out my shift to dry and making a little space in the sand so I could sit and lean against the big trunk. And finally there were no more tasks to do and I sank to the ground. I held my head heavy in my hands. And I faced the truth and began to say goodbye.

  I conjured up each one of Heirik’s features and gave the image a Viking burial. The dark silk of his hair, so beloved. It was the first part of him I’d ever noticed. I said farewell to his beard cropped close about his strong jaw and lovely chin, his dark eyelashes, his long, straight nose. A deep pang came with my whispered goodbye to his sidelong smile.

  I remembered private looks, when we played tafl, when we laid in the snow under stars. His scent, the feel of his skin, in a dark cave full of steam. His body held with such fierce elegance on his horse, laid back in the saddle to turn and fight—that one was like a dagger in my gut. So beautiful. I silently said goodbye to names, shoulders, stance, every small moment. One by one I let them go like ships.

  I couldn’t face saying goodbye to his voice. I remembered his first words to me—he’d asked my name, he’d told me his own. I thought of him calling me small, his surprise. Calling me Ginn. The way he said it, so honeyed and loving. He’d made it my name, even before it really was.

  The moon wobbled. The deadly sea, the people, all blurred. Two dozen or more men and women and children, colorful by the fire, framed against dark sand. They talked and handed around cups and smiled and joked. They didn’t realize they were huddled against an endless wilderness.

  Someone big approached in the dark, but it didn’t even startle me, I was so dead.

  “Woman, what are you doing alone? And so cold?”

  Brosa sank down to sit beside me, washing me in warmth and life. I hadn’t realized that I was freezing. Shaking from sobbing and a slow-growing cold that had blossomed while I wasn’t paying attention, I moved closer to him. He took a very big fur off his shoulders and draped it over my back, then put his arm and cloak around me.

  It was distracting, the ways in which he resembled Heirik. His body so similar, and yet a softer, rounder version, not made lean by constant farm work. The body of a strong man who’d spent nearly a year on boats and drinking by other men’s fires, not out on the land with ax or scythe.

  I had the impression, since the moment I saw Brosa at the fireside, that he was another version of his brother. But this close, I saw now the many ways he didn’t look like Heirik, how very different his face was. How his life had carved a permanently different aspect.

  Bits of black sand clung to his hairline. He must have washed with it. Surrounded by abundance and wool and safety, I closed my eyes and leaned into him. He smelled good, like rocks and sea and soap, a clean smell that had nothing to do with being elbow deep in whale. I breathed him in gratefully.

  “How is he?” Brosa asked.

  “He’ll live,” I said with some bitterness.

  He answered with an eloquent “já” that combined relief and gratitude with something like regret—an allowance that things might be easier for Heirik if he were dead—and finally chagrin for thinking so. We stayed quiet for a while, then, each thinking about the chief.

  “You love my brother.” He stated, sure of it. He didn’t need to ask me.

  I couldn’t explain how Heirik’s spirit and voice and eyes lit something inside me the moment I saw him on this very beach. The moment I heard him speak, I was at home. “I have since we met.”

  Words came out of nowhere, and without thought or reason, I told Brosa about the fight here at the sea. About how Heirik saved my life, how he protected me. Brosa knew about it, of course, but he seemed surprised at my role in it. Surprised that Heirik had had to save me from Ageirr. Heirik hadn’t even mentioned that part? My brief abduction was a minor event in a long war—a feud that sprang from Brosa’s own tragedy. When I remembered his and Esa’s part in it, I felt hot remorse for being so self-centered. Of course Brosa wouldn’t have thought about that fight in terms of me. It was about his lost wife, the lovely Esa, only a child herself. It was about blood and honor and a cold baby he might have held in his hands. It was about Heirik standing in for him when that honor was challenged. I was a random detail in a thing beyond my reckoning.

  Brosa moved on.

  “You’ve seen my brother fight.” He said it as though this explained everything, from my love for Heirik to the turning of the stars. “Everyone who has seen him battle is fascinated.”

  “Quite a change came over him.” I touched my wrist where Heirik had gripped me before he kissed me. Where Ageirr held me roughly not a half hour later.

  “He’s the raven, já? But come before death.”

  I shivered at the similarity with the image I’d seen that day. Brosa shifted in the sand so he could hold me closer.

  “It’s alright, Ginn,” he said, returning to what lay unspoken about the fight. “I am not afraid of what is past.”

  It hurt my chest to take a deep breath. I allowed a moment to acknowledge his reason and strength, to wonder at the sheer will of happiness that drove him.

  “You love your brother, too.” It was so clear how much he did.

  “He’s been my brother always. He taught me everything about how to be alive.”

  “Hmmm.” I murmured into his warm chest, trying to picture them as children. Brosa, here and now, was so welcoming, so easy to melt into.

  “Not just the good,” he mused. “Heirik has been a fine example of how not to live, also. He won’t allow himself a full life.” After a moment he added a final statement. “He won’t ever take you as his own.”

  I had just said my mental goodbye to Heirik, and this—from the person who knew him best, or at all—pounded the last spike into the hull. “I know,” I said bleakly. I crushed my hope and grief into a tiny ball and wished it out into the Arctic sea. It stayed with me, though, stubborn as the man who inspired it. So I pushed it way down deep where I could forget about it. “Goodbye,” I whispered.

  Brosa didn’t ask about the English word I’d spoken. He rested his chin on my head, spoke into my hair. I felt the heat of his breath as it ruffled the loose strands there.

  “A man who has you wanting him is a lucky man.”

  He drew back to touch my chin, to lift my face.

  “My brother is a fool.”

  His lips were warm and easy at first, a brush like autumn leaves and the faint sweetness of angelica. His kiss was gentle and considerate. He wanted to be sure it was okay. And I pressed my mouth against his harder, and opened my lips and said without speaking that já, it was.

  He took my waist in one big hand and gently pinned me against the driftwood. His fingers moved up and around my back and shoulder blades. It felt good to be embraced, and I instinctively moved to give him the same in return. One of my arms went under his cloak and around his sturdy body. My other hand found the back of his neck, and the knotted leather and hot skin there.

  He was light with his tongue, unhurried, and I couldn’t stand it. Brosa swept his fingers over my breast, and I reacted with a soft cry that was so unexpected, so uncontrollable, I ducked my head in embarrassment. He kissed my forehead then, and my eyelids. The soft brush of his beard moved across my nose and cheek. His hand moved up my leg, my skirt bunching around my knees, then higher. His thumb kneaded my thigh, stirring up flames.

  “Stop.” I gasped, urgent.

  “Not now.” He was breathless, drawing me onto his lap. His kisses no longer light, but demanding. Through the wool of my dress, through his clothes, I felt him hard and ready. He pressed his hips up slowly into me, and I met his body with mine. “Let go, Lovely One,” he whispered, and I felt the past several months dissolve, every minute, as if they were taken by a swiftly churning stream. Gone, until I knew only his mouth, again and again, his hands, his fingers, dark words in my ear.

  A laugh came from down on the beach, so great it was like thunder. It woke me, and I drew my face away, pressed my forehead to his shoulder. My heart hammered. What was I doing?r />
  With a strong hand on my chin, Brosa made me look at him. His eyes were not the open and easy ones of a few minutes ago. They had turned to wolf’s eyes. He would have me, they said, in every way that his brother would not.

  My eyes burned, and I clenched them shut, willing everything—the entire night, my whole tumble into the past—to go away. I didn’t have any more ideas on how to get by. I would die right here and dissipate into the sea.

  Then Brosa lifted me effortlessly and placed me in the sand. His voice came low and easy, coaxing me back. “Ginn,” he said. “I’m sorry. It is alright.”

  I opened my eyes and he was normal again. He’d put aside the possessive intention that had gone straight to my heart and gut and he was smiling lightly.

  “Stay and talk with me, já?” He stood up and handed me the blanket he wore. He dug in the sand with his foot. “I’ll strike up a fire.”

  Brosa left to walk the immediate area and search for twigs and logs. Left me alone with my slowly down-shifting body and mind. He must have been taking the time to adjust, too. We’d both been immediately, fiercely aroused. I envied him the task of gathering wood, something to do, to calm and center himself. I hung my head and shook it, but it didn’t clear.

  He returned and knelt by the small pit he’d made, and he crushed little twigs until they formed a delicate nest in his palm. He set it in the sand. Sparks fizzed and flew from his fire-steel and caught in a piece of touchwood. Brosa was good at making a fire. Of course. He was good at everything.

  He dropped the touchwood into the nest and exhaled the slightest breath into the tangle of twigs, where a small, pink-orange spot grew and took hold. When the fire had started, he sat back to feed it and to talk.

  He told me stories about his ship, of a voyage that was wonderful and disgusting and dangerous. About Norway and the amazing things that could be had from as far as the unknowable east, the honey and hazelnuts and new linen and delicate horn cups, trimmed with silver. Soapstone and leather and exotic ink, sold in miniature bottles stopped with corks. Slender bones, sharpened to write with. Bracelets and fillets of rare beauty.