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Beautiful Wreck

Page 45

by Larissa Brown


  Four small iron keys hung together, made for small locks on boxes or underground stores. Two of them had flattened heads a couple inches across, lacy with filigreed designs. The other two had been formed like cylinders, to fit into barrel style locks. Another key acted more like a pick. That one was for the dairy barrels. The longest key was as long as my hand, and it curved like a twisted hair comb, folding back in on itself. It had three teeth that fit into the pantry door.

  So many times she had handed it to me.

  I blinked hard and then opened my eyes wide, making the image larger. During haying. That was the first time that I’d held all her keys. When we got ready for parties and feasts, I often was given one or two to handle. The day I fell into the fire. That precious morning, when I thought for just an hour that everything around me would be mine, she’d barked at me to get fish and butter. She’d held the keys out at arm’s length, and they’d jangled, looking just like these.

  I saw Hildur’s hard marble eyes twitching. Svana had once warned me it would happen. Careful, Woman, she’d said. Where the wolf’s eyes are, the wolf’s teeth are near. I thought she was talking about Heirik. Now I knew that Hildur was the one I should have feared.

  My heart did not race with anger. It slowed down instead.

  I sat calmly in the center of my bed, almost meditative, and small moments came back to me gently, like ashes on a light breeze. Hildur saying there would be no true wife until Brosa came home. Hildur talking alone to Ageirr the day of roundup, handing him something before he rode away to chase the other men. Her startling command that made me jump and cut myself.

  I remembered a door slammed on that most intimate moment, when Heirik was asking me to marry him. The very next morning, Hildur had sent me to the pantry. I recalled her wicked hand on my shoulder, and something solid underfoot. I’d thought it was a toy, but maybe not. Was it her boot that tipped me into the fire?

  On my final night at the Thing, her daughter was the last to see me. Svana had nodded when I left the booth. Soon after, Asmund and Mord—who had been securely tied—followed me.

  For every terrible thing that had happened to me, Hildur was there. If not in person, then in some devious and hidden way.

  Like ashes, these memories accumulated, up above my chest now. The pile rose with every moment recalled. My lungs felt dry and too full.

  I pictured Heirik, the brave and terrible chieftain, dead. A young man alone, carried to his bower in the earth, Slitasongr by his side. And this room inside a glacier was my grave. Here on this colorless, pillowy bed, I would gratefully sink. I laid back, let my fingers spread open. I let the images go from my eyes, so that all I saw was the featureless ceiling.

  “Jen.”

  I sat up with a jolt.

  Jeff’s voice called from everywhere in the air around me, the whole room amplifying him. “You need to come down to the lab. I have something to show you … off your contacts.”

  Jeff hadn’t stopped trying to find something, anything, he could pull from my wrecked and shriveled contacts. They’d kept recording for some time, at the beach, before running out of power. He could see the record, but not the content, and so he kept working with them, on and off for these hundred days. A nerd’s dream, unlocking the evidence of time travel by digging into a midden of broken code.

  I walked, stunned, down the hallways, my anger at Hildur a stone in my throat that I had yet to swallow. I wondered what Jeff had found. I had no idea how big this accomplishment was. Maybe it would be a single grainy image. Tenth century seaweed. A rock. Mist from the air conditioning hovered above my head, and I pulled my sweater tight around me, locking my arms across my chest.

  The wall-sized screen waited, black and full of possibility, while Jeff mumbled commands. Morgan stood beside him silently, and I thought about what she might hope to see. A knife or arrowhead. She didn’t look at me, just the wall. Some code went skittering across it, a bright light flared, and then it was our beach.

  The black sand. Somewhere near the fishing camp. The scene was life-sized, just as it had looked to me when I woke there.

  Captivated, my eyes felt round, my mind slack.

  The image cut out and came back a few times, with some slightly different angles on the ebony ground and silver driftwood. My hands clawed the beach, blue and clumsy. I was watching my own fingertips struggle. Waves pounded constantly, water churning and foaming, wind moaning, a dumbfounding rage of sound.

  Then sharp voices made it through, and Hár and Arn were leaning over me.

  Oh, Hár! I miss you. I went to my knees on the floor of the lab and watched as if I were there again, on the ground before the old man.

  “She’s alive,” he called. He and Arn backed away, and Heirik came and knelt before me.

  I choked with longing, one hand to my chest, the other reaching for him. There he was, Undra Min. As frightening as the first time I saw him. A man the colors of wings and straw. Of blood. A touch of a smile came, brief on his lips, and I saw it—what I hadn’t seen then. From that very moment, he’d wanted me.

  “My God, Jen, is he—”

  “—Don’t!” I interrupted Morgan. My voice was vicious, my eyes intent on Heirik. “Don’t talk about him.”

  I moved toward him on my knees until I could press my forehead to the screen, right where he would kiss me. The picture laid flat under my hand. There was none of his scent, no fox fur or iron. My breath did not stir his hair.

  The sounds of the lab gave way to those from home. I heard the complexity within breezes, the whuffles and snorts of animals, soft susurrations of the house. The grass would be long on it by now, and emerald green. It would move with the air currents in silky waves. I closed my eyes and imagined the crackling of fire and water. I heard the sound of Betta breathing, lying in the brush next to me in the hours before she faced Hár on the beach. The rhythm was slow and steady, the confident life force of a young woman who, from where I knelt now, had been dead for over a thousand years.

  Life was quick. But single moments could open and flower, and bits of time that fit between breaths could expand or deepen endlessly. Twenty years with Hár, a part of each day, maybe 20,000 hours in his arms, weighed against that single terrifying moment when Betta knelt before him and silently asked Please, don’t hurt me. Love me.

  Gods, I was a coward. Raven starver. And so was my man. The chief and I could do better than this.

  “I’m coming for you.” I let the words go softly, but they didn’t find Heirik. My breath came back to me. His image disappeared from under my palm.

  Morgan’s studio was warm and redolent with scents of burning wood and metal. She’d called me here, on the last morning of my life in this time. I didn’t know why. Maybe to grill me one more time about the tools and all the silver I’d seen. I’d already told her about everything I could remember. About the many knives and hatchets and scythes, the keys, the torcs and bracelets, even the ring I wanted so much for Heirik.

  But she didn’t ask me anything. She messed with something on her back work table, polishing something small in her hand.

  Maybe I was here to say goodbye, then? She didn’t want to take the time to come down to the lab and see me off.

  I waded into her haphazard place. Gods, what would Heirik think of it? What would he make of the great contrasts, the offhand wealth and filth in one stroke? Strata of junk and clothing and abundant food came with this life. A pair of flip flops moldered on the workbench next to the finest tools, shining and unimaginably precise. A lifetime of silver—even for someone as rich as Heirik—scattered on every surface, even the floor. A fine film of mold sloshed gently when I touched a coffee cup. He was thoughtful, his things minimal, ordered. He worked with plain tools, sharpened by his own hands. When he toiled in summer’s night, it was only by the light of the midnight sun, not a diode.

  I ran my fingers over a finely honed hatchet. I thought he might like this place, actually. He was so curious, he would be open. Confused by t
he people of this time, já, but not entirely. He knew about hiding emotion so deep it ceased to exist.

  “Come, see this,” Morgan said. She cleared the worktable with the back of her hand and set down a ring.

  Plainer and simpler than the original, but still finely detailed. She’d changed the scrolling filigree to just a few strokes embossed in the silver—the firework forms of snowblooms. So subtly wrought, pure emotion came from just a few contours and lines. The dragon heads had become stylized, suggestions of wolves. The mouths searched in savage anger, and yet somehow I felt they teetered on the edge of a snarling, open-mouthed kiss.

  The ring was gloriously big and strong. I’d explored Heirik’s hand with mine, and I thought about the size of his ring finger. My heart was laid open, and I was back there on the beach, my fingers on his laces, under his sleeve, his fingers in my mouth.

  Morgan had made this for me to give to Heirik. I stood silently and deeply stunned. She would craft something so beautiful for me? I thought of Jeff, too. Jeff would break into the sealed lab to try to send me. I’d spent most of my life in this cold and inhospitable future. Here at the last minute, I was loved?

  It wouldn’t make me stay. Nei, I was made for a different world. This time I wouldn’t fall into it. I would dive.

  The ring was easy in my palm, with an inner hum.

  “You look … pretty,” Jeff said over the sound system, from behind the glass partition that separated us, his voice volleying and landing in the corners of the lab.

  His skin flickered with blue and white lines reflected from the screens he watched. He was reading double, data in his palm and in his eyes, and it made his focus strange, his mien like a lost and starving ghost.

  He looked up and smiled a lopsided, cute smile.

  I lifted my right hand to him, palm out, and waved my fingers.

  It was sweet of him to lie, but I knew I didn’t. I’d looked in the mirror one last time. I was the angel of death, in a dress that swept the ground like night. A black fur rose bearlike and formidable around my shoulders and the back of my neck. A tendril of white scar marred my cheek, my pale face and neck wreathed with images of wrecks. The split tail that swept my orbital bone, a great body, hidden, diving down the nape of my neck. Grim determination focused my eyes, which really did look like ice. My mouth looked like Heirik’s, resolute. I would be terrifying to anyone but him.

  I would have another, plainer dress when I had settled things. A happy dress. But this was the one I needed to travel. I’d sewn Heirik’s ring inside my sleeve, the stitches tight and protective, made with my needle from home. The leather purse at my waist held three small satsuma oranges, and my needle case rattled with kale seeds. The only things from this time that I wanted to share.

  On a chain around my left wrist, I carried a little metal cage, small enough to fit in two hands. It swung, hidden inside my draping, midnight sleeve. A real, tiny rabbit bumped around inside. I’d gotten it from a fanatic realist, the last thing I needed before I could go. I felt its little nose poke through the bars and sniff at my fingertips.

  Jeff’s smile was gone, his eyes back on his sets of numbers, or whatever he looked at. I didn’t know what variables such a man considered. Not wind and weather and walls.

  While he readied these unknowable factors, I knelt in the lab, ready to welcome the sensation of a pummeling wash, a river, the way the tank always felt. I waited for it, and I said goodbye to many things. To glass windows, to the brilliant splash of blue-green filtered sunlight in my apartment, the humming that passed for silence. I said goodbye forever to coffee and strawberries, to afternoon naps on a cushioned couch, to the brays and croaks of city crows. All the things I felt I had to say goodbye to, even though I would not miss them. They were already absurd. Receding as though some part of me was already a hundred years away, a thousand, almost there.

  I reached into my sleeve and set the tiny cage on the floor.

  The rabbit fit into my hand, vibrating and silky, and when it sniffed at my palm it tickled. I exhaled on its fur and the little hairs splayed out and caught the lab light. I held the cold of Swimmer in my hand, and I appealed to several gods and goddesses, one by one. To Freyr—the first god I had seen come alive in Heirik’s flesh. And to Saga, who drank from the water of time, who could see the past and the future in its currents. She could send me upstream, I was sure, and so I beseeched her. Let me get there. I would do the rest, whatever needed to be done. Just deliver me. And I appealed to Lofn, who removed all obstacles for lovers. Please, I begged her as I watched the rabbit’s blood seep across the white lab floor.

  I immersed my hands.

  A house sprang up around me. Mean and plain compared to mine, the heartstone cold at my knees. I brought two soaked fingers to my lips. Let him have waited for me.

  SWIMMER

  Early Summer

  I opened my eyes to the tenth century sea. I was here. The tank had taken me back.

  I knelt at the water’s edge, swaying, entranced by the ruffly white edges of waves. The sky was eggshell gray, just becoming light. I struggled to stay upright but my head reeled and echoed with the metal screeching and the calls of real birds, swarming overhead.

  My stomach clenched. Was it the right time? The right place?

  Splashing came from close by. Someone was here with me, coming toward me through the water. Heirik! It was just like my anesthesia-laced dream. He was here. He had been longing for me, waiting by the water. With great resolve, I lifted the weight of my head to turn to him.

  Asmund and Mord waded toward me.

  They stopped dead, their mouths falling open. Mine did, too.

  Last time through, I’d been barely, intermittently conscious. Right now, even with all my preparation and grim resolve, I was slipping from all thought and sense. My head wanted to thud down on the sand.

  In all the plans I’d made, the ones where I braved the disorientation, the frigid sea, the mile to the fishing camp, I was alone. In my mind, I gathered myself up and I walked, graceful and resolved, a hundred pounds of midnight dress dragging a snail’s path in the wet sand. My wake filled up slowly behind me with dark seawater. I would get a horse at the camp, a white one, fast and strong, and I would ride and ride.

  Of all those plans and dreams, not one included this. I never thought about returning in the very same moment I left.

  We looked at each other from a safe distance. Asmund and Mord had been chasing me for a hundred and one days. Or—I stopped at the sudden disorientation—just one. One full and dangerous day at the Thing.

  They’d escaped our booth, no doubt untied by Svana, and followed me all night, putting their lives at risk to capture me. Now, just a house-length away from their goal, they stood stunned. They didn’t come any closer. The last fingers of waves came and wrapped around their ankles.

  Oh.

  In a flash, I saw myself as they did. I had been gone for months. I’d painted my body, healed my hand, learned to fight in my cold room. I’d spent lonely hours walking the halls of the glacier. To Mord and Asmund, I had just changed in a single breath. My cheerful dress had turned to death in the ocean’s foam. My ghastly scars had transformed into ink. The tail of a beautiful wreck erupted on my face, dark blue fins blooming suddenly on my cheek, encircling my angry eye.

  Asmund seemed to make the decision first, that he would carry out his job no matter.

  He started toward me. Mord followed a moment later, taking on Asmund’s bravery. They were afraid of me, but they couldn’t stop. They wouldn’t.

  I staggered to my feet to fight.

  I could still feel the raw ripping in my brain, hear the echoes of the metal shearing with the force of two ships grinding together. Wet from the knees down, my dress was a morbid tangle. My legs caught up in it, and I stumbled and went down. I fell on my cheek and salt water stung my sinuses. I watched wet boots come toward me. They made sucking depressions in the sand. One of the men gripped my shoulder like iron. I felt a rope a
round my wrists, and I blacked out.

  I woke on a moving horse. Unlike my first evening ride in this land, no tender Viking held me up, no flying Byr took me home. This animal was slow and tired, and it flung its head frequently, trying to nip at my legs. Ropes cut into my wrists, and Swimmer was gone. I saw Asmund drop it into the pocket of a leather bag.

  He walked several feet away, leading my horse by a rope, careful not to touch me. He had tied my hands in front so I could grip the horse’s dirty mane. Mord rode on another swaybacked animal. We didn’t talk all day.

  My thighs, out of practice, became miserably sore. As the hours went by, I secretly worked the rope around my wrists, though it sawed the skin right off. When I got tired, I had to concentrate on staying upright, tangling my fingers in thick horse hair. Finally, I laid down over the animal’s back, my cheek laid against her scratchy hair that smelled of neglect, of carelessness. I whispered to her that she was a good girl.

  At this unnatural angle, I watched the ground go by, lichen by lichen. Small shots of adrenalin pulsed through me every time I thought of Hildur’s wrinkled face, Svana’s sharp teeth. For half the day I was stone bored. The other half my heart dripped with rage.

  I couldn’t help review it all again and again. I had watched Svana. She trembled when she touched the chief. She had become fascinated, but she didn’t really want him.

  Her mother did.

  Hildur had worked for Heirik a long time, always in charge and yet never truly. Never powerful, like a real lady of the house. I imagined her building a bitter dream of scraping her way up to own everything. Svana, so pretty, was her ticket. Brosa would return from trading, Svana would capture his heart. Ageirr would help get Heirik out of the way, goading him until he escalated their fight. Finally, the chief would give Ageirr the license to kill him.

  Except that I washed up out of the ocean and changed everything. The chief did the unthinkable and fell in love.

 

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