Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  Her hands started to tremble as she picked up Lotta’s hair again and spoke to me, her words focused at the house, beyond the little girl’s head.

  “He is sorry now that he asked for me. He made a mistake.”

  Betta dropped Lotta’s hair, defeated, and thrust her chin into the breeze, looking far down the valley, a tear on one cheek. Lotta lifted her head, but didn’t get up and run away. She waited and listened in that way of little children, invisible, absorbing everything. She twirled the wildflower.

  “He takes me with his eyes, fiercer than ever,” Betta pulled on a clump of grass. “But he has not walked with me, ridden out with me. He wants me,” she ripped the chunk of grass out savagely. “But not as wife.”

  Hár had been staying as far from Betta as the house would allow. I’d seen it clearly myself and wondered about the endless tours of the walls with Magnus that kept them away for whole days, until hunger drew them home.

  “Do you think he’ll take the offer back?” She looked directly at me, wanting a straight answer, but also desperately craving assurance. “Pay it off?”

  My brows drew together in confusion.

  Oh. She thought Hár would pay her father, to dissolve the contract that had just been struck. She really thought so. Tears waited, ready in the half moons of her lower lids.

  “Have you lost your mind, Woman?” I asked.

  She pursed her lips, and it seemed she really wasn’t sure. Couldn’t even understand what I meant. I’d noticed it before—her second sight didn’t work at all when it came to her own heart. To Hár.

  “Betta.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what he does all day. But the way he looks at you. I have never seen a man’s heart so exposed.”

  Lotta turned her little blond head over her shoulder and asked, “Is he Grandda?” She flipped the flower over and back, loosening the petals.

  “Já, Child,” I answered her. “Your Grandda is going to marry Betta soon,” I admonished Betta with my eyes, “and be her husband forever.”

  Lotta nodded gravely. “Will there be a party?”

  I told her já, and I took over braiding her hair. I wove a story about a big party with songs, and honey in her milk. Grandda would have a shiny sword, and there would be a pretty crown for Betta and snowblooms and she would ride in on a horse. She would look like a handmaiden of a beautiful goddess.

  I heard Betta sniffling. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pick her own flower and slowly, carefully pluck the petals off. She gathered them in her lap, like drops of sun against her linen skirt. I could feel her relief like a great cloud clearing and letting the warmth in, bathing our skin. I stole a glance at her face, and she was smiling just a little. She might not believe me entirely, but she was okay.

  The bandage was just unwieldy enough to drive Har insane, as he tried to change it himself, one-handed. He sat, grumbling, on a big upturned log, one of the few in the yard that would accommodate him. A bowl of soapy water and a pewter cup cowered at his feet.

  I watched from the shadows of the door as he tried to untie the bandage, then tried again and growled louder. He stood, picked up his ax from where it gleamed in the grass. He turned to face the big log, and with a controlled rage he hacked it neatly in two.

  I stepped from the doorway and shielded my eyes from the sun, walked up to him and with my full five feet and three inches I ordered him. “Sit.” I gestured with my chin at the next biggest log in the yard, and he went to it. I took the sudsy bowl on my hip, the cup, which held clear water, in my hand. There was a small cup of honey, too, and new cloth.

  I knelt in front of him and worked slowly on his hand, wondering how I could start to ask. Why was he ignoring Betta? I didn’t know how to begin, and so the silence grew. He dropped a statement into it. An answer to a different unasked question.

  “I could not watch the sons of my brother,” he said. “Watch their stupidity, and not act.”

  He stopped then and lifted his eyes to me, and they were apologetic. But he didn’t back down from what he needed to say. “I couldn’t watch her go to another man.” He looked far down the hill at Betta, where she played with his granddaughter, tossing a flower at her. He seemed to forget about me. “I love her too much.”

  This love was a word I’d never heard before I came here. It didn’t appear in any of the sagas or poems and certainly not the legal documents—the words that were used and kept in public. It was private, unwritten, and I could tell in a heartbeat what it meant. A gorgeous mix of sounds and words, cherish, want, take all turned into a single verb. It melted my insides with the thrill of an unknown word and the depth and resonance of his voice as he gave it to her from afar. I love her, he’d said. Too much.

  Suddenly I felt very, very angry at Heirik, and it came out like a black wave at Hár. I yanked on the bandage too hard, and spat my words at him. “Then where are you all day?”

  He stared at me, completely blank.

  “Why don’t you show her? Ever since the coast—”

  I stopped myself. After all my help with their clandestine meetings through the long winter, I felt comfortable with Hár. But I was snapping at the one man who had admitted his true feelings and expressed them in a proposal based only on love.

  I tried for gentle curiosity. “Why do you ignore her?” I took a palmful of soapy water and bathed his hand.

  “Her father.” Hár winced at the burning soap. “He sits like a hawk on a branch.”

  I laughed out loud. He glared at me, but I laughed some more. It was too good and too easy. Relief passed through me like a tremendous, delicious wind.

  I dropped my eyes so I could hide my giggles, and I watched as the bloody runoff from his wound turned the bowl pink. Staring at the swirling colors, I tried to hide my continuing laughter, but my shoulders shook quietly. I couldn’t stop thinking about this prepossessing man thwarted by Betta’s weak, simpy Da. This patriarch, father of thirteen, reduced to a love-stricken, horny teenager.

  “But …” How could I say it kindly? Bjarn wasn’t even a man, fully. He was a thrall, and Hár had a right to marry his daughter without even asking. Yet, Hár feared him? It was impossible. “… Bjarn?” His name was nearly swallowed as I tried to contain a little more mirth.

  I dipped my fingers in golden honey, and it was silky, with a promise of tenacious stickiness to come. It smelled like late summer as I applied it to Hár’s wound. He sucked in air and gave me an evil glance.

  “Já, well, since I asked for marriage, he has grown a backbone.”

  I smiled and tried to be gentler. Tried to imagine how Betta would handle these beloved, damaged hands, with their promise of protection and pleasure. Hár saw Bjarn as a father, who had dreams for his daughter, no matter how far-fetched they had once seemed.

  “I’m sure you could persuade Bjarn to let you take a walk with your betrothed.” I tied a final knot in clean linen.

  “Nei,” he sighed, contemplating his fresh bandage as if his hand were new to him, and inconsequential. “He is protecting his daughter. For a man such as Bjarn, it is the greatest moment in his life.”

  Hár looked across the vast yard to Betta. Far down the hill with the children, she twirled, and her green skirt floated open like a trumpet flower. He looked with kind, thoughtful eyes. Then he shook his hand out once and grasped his knees, ready to get up and go back to work. With a deep breath he added, “I will not take his honor.”

  I looked up sharply at the echo of Heirik’s words. Leave me my honor.

  “Child,” he said to me, so gently. “You must know that Heirik grieves.”

  It was the first time I’d heard Hár use his name. The old man smiled. “He is trying to save you and all of us.” He looked around the yard and down into the valley, as if to measure what was saved, and it was impossible for me to tell whether he believed it himself. Then he added, “And he is a stubborn, stupid ass.”

  GATHERING

  After two weeks, the air all around the house came aliv
e with an almost audible buzz. The exact kind of tension felt just before a bow-shot.

  Brosa now went to the walls with Hár in the daytime, leaving me many hours without his warm protection. I tried to help with cooking, sewing, anything, and every time I touched a tool or bowl or spoon, Hildur would look up as though she could feel my intention, and she would hiss, “Rest, Girl. You’ve done enough.”

  Instead, I walked outside for hours, wandering in the twisty birches or sitting at the top of the sheer drop to the ravine. I squatted down to look at flowers and mosses more closely than I ever thought possible. I collected bits of pumice, pretty white florets of lichen, feathers.

  In the dying sun one night, Svana and Betta walked with me. Every time Svana’s pale hair and pink complexion came into view, I tensed and thought of her fingers, her hands, on Heirik. It drove me mad.

  Now, we stood at our ravine, the one that I felt belonged to me and the chief. We gazed out over the twin waterfalls, Betta, Svana and I quietly standing together and listening to the rush, the two courses of water always meeting just before they hit the roiling surface.

  We watched for a long while, each of us with our arms folded across our chests, as the light turned from pale sun to steel to navy blue. A velvet sky, spread out like a wing over our heads. Svana turned to me out of nowhere, her teeth flaring up tiny and white in the dusk, her words a sharp crack. “You cannot have every man in this family.” She walked away in a huff and sweep of skirts, one blond braid swinging out behind.

  I turned to Betta, who had a hand clasped hard over her mouth, eyes wide. I ducked my head and laughed silently, too. But ice melted down my spine. She’d gotten past Heirik’s boundaries. I wondered what she was capable of, the little creature. And what she meant to do.

  When the stubborn chief returned, he had ten more beastly men with him. More and more were coming along, gathering to go to the assembly, the Thing. He left them camping in the yard and spent his hours in his room, or gone off alone to the woods. He hardly met anyone’s eyes, least of all mine.

  Men, women and children had arrived at our house by the dozens. Among them, Eiðr came with his older niece, but not Ageirr. He hadn’t shown himself since the fight on the sand.

  By the day we left for the gathering, at least fifty of us set out together under a puff-clouded sky the blue of eggshells. Betta’s dream come true. We would camp three nights out under the stars, and ride four days to the Thing.

  Down by the river that ran just below the house, I turned Drifa back to look up once more at its snug greenness, the strong slope of its roof and sturdy doors.

  “I will be back,” I told the house, as if telling the dog to stay.

  Early summer

  The day stretched out long and lazy, and we rode with our cloaks thrown off in the sun.

  The chief’s family rode ahead of the crowd, and so I was surrounded by Brosa, Betta, Hár, Magnus, Svana. The sweep of sky seemed to lift and pull us along, leading a great train of people and animals. I could smell and hear the moving feast that slowly ate up the ground behind us. Voices joined and writhed, sparked with shouts and jolts of laughter. Children’s cries and infants’ squalls. The mellow stink of ale carried on the breeze whenever it whipped my hair forward, and the reek of sweat and horses pressed against our backs.

  Ahead of us, a vast wilderness opened wide and green. The rocky ground was lush with moss and complexly layered with white and copper lichens and tufts of spring grass, stretching farther than I could see until at last it disappeared in a cloud of ever-present mist. Framed against it all, Heirik rode out far ahead, facing the landscape alone and first. Every so often he would fall back to talk with his uncle or brother. Or Svana.

  The few times he came near, she spurred her horse to meet him, a little fox cub at his heels. They would talk until he turned away.

  Heading across the island to the meeting place, the route was different than our familiar byway to the sea. The rocks felt wrong under Drifa’s feet, and there were no stone sisters, only smaller cairns with different aspects.

  “Bit-meyla.” I spat the words out loud, then looked around to be sure no one had heard me. Biting little girl. I felt so stupid, then, I pressed my forehead into my hand.

  I couldn’t hear what she and Heirik talked about. Couldn’t hear anything but a sound like a savage ocean in my head.

  On the second afternoon, we came to a tremendous valley, miles wide. It sprawled under the sun, fuzzed with spring grass and framed on either side by woods of short, ragged trees. I walked off far ahead with Brosa, and at his side Drifa and I dropped down into that endless lawn.

  His boots rustled the ankle-deep grass, and the woods’ edge crackled with movement. Underbrush snapped and shivered. A pair of foxes lifted their heads as one and watched us pass. With a sudden harsh breeze, grass laid flat from our feet all the way to the horizon. Birds wheeled, threads of voices far up in the air. Snorts and hoofsteps, hundreds of them, moved behind us, always catching up yet never coming close.

  Brosa walked beside Drifa and talked about boats. How long they should be, of what wood, how the planking should be layered. A good snekke had a keel ten men long. He drew the swoops and curves of hulls in the air and told me why each shape worked to slice the water, ride the whale road. The dragon’s eyes and mouth should be wide open, he told me, to eat up the waves and clear the way of spirits.

  He told me about the beauty of light glancing off the water, and I thought the color of his own eyes captured the idea perfectly.

  “I can see it, when you tell me,” I said, and he ducked his head, somehow shy after all.

  Drifa matched his footsteps, keeping a slow and easy time. He told me more. About the nausea of a terrible storm, he and his crew near to death. The seething black water and freezing rain seemed impossible from where we stood now, in this warm, yellow light. He remembered the desolation of too many days afterward, not knowing if they were still on course. He spoke of the burning of frozen cheeks and cracked lips, the anguish of hunger, of not enough water. “The stink of the other fools in the boat, as you might imagine,” he said, glancing back at the army that followed us.

  “Then there was a day when the raven flew farther ahead,” he said. “And there was home.”

  He looked at me with plain happiness.

  “And when I got home,” he said, in his way of turning everything into a bedtime story, “there was you.”

  “I was a surprise, já?” I smiled.

  “Not by the time I got to the house.” He laughed. “My brother took one minute to be sure I still lived, and then he told me about you. Many things about you. All the way from the sea to our back door.”

  My laughter sounded like chimes in the crisp air, so light and happy I hardly recognized it.

  “He talked of me?”

  “Well, já,” he said, “for quite some time. I knew all about how you came to be found on the sand, how you cut an acre of grass, how bad you are at spinning thread. I knew about your voice, and your lovely blue lips.”

  I closed my eyes and smiled, breathed in the whisper of a breeze laced with juniper smoke and ale. I felt Drifa move underneath me, her hips dipping to one side and the next, over and over, a confident and forceful little girl. Heirik’s gift to me, even before either of us understood how we felt.

  “We’ll camp here,” Brosa said, and I opened my eyes to find I was at the center of an eddy, horses and people drawing up on every side, nosing around, milling, trying to stop for the night.

  We camped in the lee of a rock at least six times my height. It loomed above our heads, encrusted with moss and copper lichens, and topped by a handful of scrawny birches. They looked black now, without a hint of green in the twilight.

  Cozy inside my blankets, I lay hip to hip with Betta. No one slept near us, two weird women betrothed to important men. Clouds passed in front of the moon, obscuring its bright arc with swirls of gray and deep lilac. The light filtered through the birches’ stark fingers,
and my eyes drifted shut watching it, closing once, then again.

  “The chief thinks you will find your family,” Betta stated, waking me. “A husband you are lost from.”

  “Nei,” I muttered. “He doesn’t.”

  I spoke without thinking, the truth slipping out through sleepy lips. At first, she didn’t say anything in return, and I almost thought she might let it go, let the words dissipate, unquestioned. But not Betta.

  “What do you hide from me?”

  Her voice sounded flat, dampened by our hard bed. It seemed like a simple question, but I knew her and I felt the complexity in it. She didn’t mean just now. Her question was patient and old, and I wondered how long she’d seen a lie in me.

  She was up on one elbow now, surveying me, and under her scrutiny, I hid. Out of habit, a trick developed at her own urging. I shielded my real self even as I turned under the covers to face her, and I dug in my heart and found one true thing I could tell her. Something that had been waiting behind my breastbone, ready to burst out one day. Now it did.

  “I have lain with the chief.”

  Betta’s face went blank.

  She tilted her head like a housedog with a sore ear. She looked harder at me to try to find the joke, but I nodded. She continued to stare at me, with no wit, no chiding, no expression at all. Betta was always so easy-spoken, so funny and cutting. I felt a silly satisfaction at stunning her speechless.

  “In his room?”

  I laughed out loud like a joyful shout, amused that this was her question.