Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  He closed his eyes. “I regretted I would not live to tell you.”

  He’d meant to stay conscious just long enough to get home and tell me this, this thing I didn’t understand, and he was slipping away and hadn’t explained. But the little he said seemed to lift a terrible weight from him, as though his job was done. It scared me. He looked like having told me this much, he’d fulfilled his last task and was free to go. To seek that welcoming door in the dark, the incandescent, seductive hall where warriors drank, raucously calling him.

  Instead, he swam up again to consciousness. He sucked in air and placed the stick back between his teeth so Bjarn could rinse his wound once with more hot water. The cleansing made him bleed again, and the bowl filled with a festive pink froth.

  He shook his head, and I removed the stick for him. “That made me mad, já?” He continued, as though he hadn’t stopped talking about Lofn and regret. “Though my blood poured, I fought them all to come home to you.”

  “Let’s finish, Chief.” Bjarn cut in, dryly.

  He reached for a small iron knife that Svana had heated over a rush flame. I hadn’t noticed her doing this, hadn’t noticed him instructing her. The knife wasn’t glowing red, but it was hot enough that they used a cloth to handle it. Bjarn told the chief it would be now, and he pressed the iron to Heirik’s open flesh. Heirik’s eyes opened wide, and he jerked up off the bed twice, three times. A big wound, Bjarn said. There was nothing I could do in those moments, just press myself to Heirik’s body and let him feel my presence, if he could. Then it was done.

  Heirik breathed raggedly against my throat, and my hair stuck to his face as I pulled back and let him go. Svana, when I glanced at her, was a wan blue, a complexion of skim milk and terror. But she’d done a helpful job, had cut a number of strips and small squares from his ruined shirt, and when she handed them over, I caught her eye. She was watching Heirik and me, and she was solemn, looked humbled by us. I imagined her little girl mind, watching how a man and woman love one another. I raised an eyebrow, unamused. She would soon find out what I’d done with her mother.

  Bjarn covered one of the linen squares with honey and placed it face down on the fresh burn. He layered linen and dried peat moss over that. I wrapped Heirik’s waist with strips to hold the whole thing tight. I sat back and watched the muscles of his abdomen working as he breathed. Too fast, too hard, but he was breathing. It was wonderful.

  We had to repeat everything, of course, with the gash in his arm—including the soap and hot iron. His eyes looked determined one second, and the next the eyes of a trapped dog, wild and unseeing, fingers crushing my leg so that I knew I would stumble when I stood.

  It would be okay. Hár had gone through something like this with his finger, and he’d even done it himself, sticking his own hand into the fire. Hár had done it, and probably Brosa, too.

  Brosa.

  Even as I held Heirik and pressed him down with all my weight, part of me thought of his little brother and willed him to be alive. I wanted him to be alive for Heirik. I wanted him here for me, too. I could tell him how sorry I was, even though he had no idea how very far, and how long, I’d left him.

  As if conjured by my thoughts, Brosa burst into the room.

  Brosa pushed Bjarn away, gently but in a rush. He went down on his knees at Heirik’s bedside, much as he had knelt before him at the coast, in loyalty and love. He touched his forehead to Heirik’s hand.

  “I thought you were dead.” He drew heavy breaths between words. “I brought your blood to my lips, on the field,” he said, and then his voice twisted with tears. “It tasted of a mortal wound.”

  “It was Ageirr’s blood,” Heirik said.

  Brosa turned and spit on the floor, and Svana flinched and pulled her skirts aside as though Ageirr’s life force was splattered there.

  “I thought your body had been taken entire by the disir,” Brosa continued. “I wandered, grieving you. I didn’t want to come home.”

  “Shhh, nei,” Heirik said, and he reached across with his healthy arm, at painful cost. He touched his little brother. He brushed his fingers through Brosa’s golden hair and laid his palm on his head. “You see I’m still here, já?”

  Brosa nodded and bent his head in quiet relief and gratitude. Heirik brushed his brother’s forehead with his thumb.

  “Chief,” Bjarn said, from where he stood behind Brosa, and his voice held a steely command all his own, in this moment when he, the healer, was in charge. Heirik nodded and told his brother and Svana to go.

  The binding of his arm was a minor irritation. He looked several times like he wanted to swat Bjarn away like a fly. His eyebrows drew tight together, almost ready to complain, but in a sudden shift of features and will, he became the chief again. He composed himself and resumed dignity. Mouth resolute, face calm and closed. He watched patiently until Bjarn got the last strip wound around his arm and a final knot tied. He said thank you, nodding to Bjarn.

  Not to me. Everyone else had been excused, but I would stay, would always stay now. Until his last breath, be it today or in fifty years, I would be here.

  I helped carry things to the door, and Bjarn stopped me there. Salty tears dried on my face and throat, and my clothes were wrinkled from clutching and wringing, red from blood and wet with my saliva and Heirik’s. Betta’s Da looked with curiosity at my face, my blue ink. He took my hand and pushed my sleeve up to my elbow, revealing rings upon rings of knotted and winding tattoos.

  “Your scars are healed,” he said. Out of everything insane and different about me, that was what he chose to see—my healing.

  He glanced back at Heirik and told me, “It is hard when it’s your own.”

  Heirik was my own now. Já.

  I stayed with him all day and into night.

  At first, I straightened things. I drew the table and chair back in place, picked up shredded linen and made a pile by the door. Slitasongr lay in the dirt, thrown aside, crusted with dried blood. I lifted it, heavy in my arms like a child, and I felt its voice humming in the bones of my forearms and fingers. This was blood I’d called for, that I’d sent Heirik to get, and I wet one finger and very carefully drew it along the cheek of the blade, turning the rust to liquid red. I placed the ax carefully in the corner. Scrubbed the rest of the blood—Heirik’s own—into the dirt of the floor with my boot.

  I sank to my knees on that spot, and I took Heirik’s face in both my hands. With my thumbs, I smoothed his brows, and he breathed peacefully but did not wake. I followed his jawline with my finger, touched the bones and hollows of his cheeks, rested my hand on his scarred temple. His beard was too long, grown over the days that he had searched for me. I looked for him in there, and I spoke to him about summer and strong walls and how we would live together in this room if he would just stir, just wake up now. He didn’t. My tears fell onto his face, but he didn’t open his eyes.

  Standing on my toes, I opened the cover on the small window, and over many hours, I watched the rectangle of sun fade into a blue-gray absence, until just the wavering light from oil lamps remained. I watched the wooden walls. I breathed with the house, the strong scent of birch stealing oxygen and making my head light.

  I sat in Heirik’s chair, watching his chest rise effortlessly. He wasn’t laboring to live, wasn’t feverish even, just asleep. I dropped my head back and felt the air move through my own constricted throat.

  Our chair. Everything here was mine, too.

  Eventually, I slept.

  I rode in a fast boat, skimming over dark green and turquoise waves. Glacial ice had broken off and floated in big chunks all around, but the channel I raced along was free. Fine spray needled my face, and I closed my eyes and breathed in salt. Felt a broad hand placed against my low back, a warm and reassuring pressure. I didn’t turn to see him. I watched the water. A whale breaking the surface with its tail, the water falling like diamonds from its flukes.

  Abruptly it was gone. The sparkling ocean turned to a dark and
blood-sour room. Betta knelt at my feet, her head in my lap.

  Her features were cut sharp in the last light of a nearly empty lamp. She looked broken, just staring at Heirik, and yet also looking into the distance at something that was recently and irretrievably gone. Something big had died, stealing her spirit.

  My eyes shot all the way open, my heart pounding. I looked to Heirik first, then he breathed, and then I did. What, then?

  “Woman,” I shook her out of her glassy-eyed trance. “What is it? Is it Hár?”

  She sat up on her heels, but her blank look remained. Her brows drew together over washed out eyes.

  “Is he,” I stumbled over the worst question. How could I ever ask if Hár had been lost in the same fight that had put Heirik in this bed? But I had seen him carry Heirik. He’d been fine, já? “Is Hár well?”

  She smiled and her eyes came back to life. “Oh,” she perked up, and she took my hands. “Hár? Strong as a boat. He says the gash in his face is nothing.”

  “His face?” Absorbed into this tiny room, watching this one man breathe, I had no idea what was going on outside.

  “Oh, Ginn,” she broke down, then, like I’d never seen. My strong friend, finally pushed past what her love could bear. “Oh gods, I stitched his wound myself. The first I’ve been close to him in weeks …” She dropped her head back into my lap and continued. “I thought he would break the bench in two where he held it. I thought I was doing it wrong, but Da told me nei, the needle hurts the toughest boar of a man.”

  Betta giggled, “I suppose with such a husband, I will have to learn to fix him.”

  “You are so good, Betta,” I told her, and touched her forehead like a blessing.

  “It’s not as if he was so pretty before,” Betta said. “But I would prefer if he stopped losing fingers and blood. And us not yet married.” We both laughed then, and it was a great relief, to feel some life in this dark space. A smell of sheep’s coat greased the air, and the tang of blood lurked. The room needed airing.

  I asked, “Is everything well in the house?”

  “Já, everyone is fed, getting ready for bed, not so worried as they were on the way home from the Thing.” Her mouth twisted in a wicked smile. “Hildur is sleeping in the barn.” She held a hand up to her mouth, trying not to laugh.

  “The barn is too good for her,” I said.

  “You have taken her keys,” Betta stated, looking at where they hung now at her own waist.

  “Já, well, I have married the chief.”

  She dropped her head in my lap again, and I could feel it in both of us—as surely as if I had her gift—the many shocks of the day colliding and paling in comparison to one another.

  Like it was the most normal thing, I asked, “See his ring?”

  Betta turned to look at Heirik’s ring, where it gleamed on his bloody hand. Then, slowly, as in a dream or sim, she went to Heirik on her knees. She dragged her skirts over the dirt floor, drawn by a powerful and unseen thread. She touched him.

  I held my breath and felt the pounding of life in my eardrums. Saw her reach out and touch Heirik’s ring finger, spread her hand out over his. I watched the signs of Heirik’s life, the rise and fall of his chest. Betta moved slowly, as if she swam through ghostly water. Her fingers hovered over his cheek bone, touched his jaw. Brave and curious Betta. No one else had ever touched him this way, like I did, with compassion and awe.

  Her voice came from another world. “The chief is not gone.” She turned her head to me. “He will wake and be with you.”

  “He had better.”

  He hadn’t reacted—even when I cleaned him and bandaged his wounds. Hadn’t moved for what seemed like a hundred hours. He was becoming part of the bed, part of the house itself, a living but inanimate thing.

  “I have something for you.” Betta drew me back from solemn contemplation.

  She placed a whorled, weightless ball of carded wool in my lap. In the lantern light, it looked like one of Frigg’s own clouds, ready to float into space, but it had an earthy smell that tethered it here and now.

  My nose wrinkled. I was suspicious of a gift of wool, and she smiled.

  “The chief’s fleece from last fall’s shearing,” she said. “He ordered Hildur to save it, in case you changed your mind.”

  I breathed it in, and I fell back into that sunny, sex-drunk afternoon. Heirik had been so alive that day, his eyes not only open, but on fire. I heard his gorgeous voice in my mind, freed by the presence of Freyr. Spin that fleece, he’d ordered me and smacked the wall with happiness. I had almost kissed him that day. So close. Despite his vows, his honor, his ugly curse, despite all those things, he had hoped that someday we’d be together. He was so vulnerable, not just now in his long sleep, but always.

  He’d kept this fleece, sentimental in the extreme, and suddenly I couldn’t wait to draw it through my fingers. As if reading my thoughts, Betta handed me a spindle.

  I looked at it, wanting to spin his thread, not remembering how. I turned the wooden dowel in my fingers. Ran my thumb along the bone whirl.

  “What were you staring at?” I asked her. “When I woke?”

  “A wreck,” she said. She tossed the word off, as though every day she saw a vision of a whale in the chief’s bedroom. She sat down on the floor and drew her knees up. “In my mind, it swam in sunlit water.”

  My heart raced and I sat all the way up, my hands and feet tingling. “You see the whale?” I whispered, as though a louder voice might shatter the precarious truth.

  “You do, too, then?” Gratitude and surprise rose in her voice. Finally, she wasn’t the oddest one here, the only one with strange sight. “I’ve seen her for months in my dreams,” she said. “I don’t know what she means.”

  “I may,” I said.

  Betta’s eyes shifted to my tattoo, and I watched her study it for the first time. We hadn’t had time to talk.

  “Já,” she said. “I suppose you would.”

  “Not that I can explain it,” I told her. “It’s not something I understand. Only Saga does. But whenever it happens, I’m at the sea.”

  “When what happens?” Her voice was a dry whisper, here eyes huge. A child at the hearth, listening to one of Hár’s stories, and I was a fairytale come to life. Or a ghost story.

  Half a year ago, I would have backpedaled, hid myself, said I couldn’t remember. Not now.

  “I come through time,” I said matter-of-factly.

  She looked at me for a long moment. “I knew you were something.”

  The rest was unsaid. Something special? Or monstrous? Otherworldly, a creature, not a woman, maybe cursed like Heirik was? I waited and steeled myself for her rejection and scorn, for all the lies and omissions, for all the disbelief that was sure to come.

  She smiled.

  “From when?” she asked, and her teeth stood out big and white in the lamplight. Before I could answer, she also asked, “And can you stay this time?”

  “Já,” I said, sure of it. “I’m home now.” I told her about the day during haying, when I first knew I didn’t want to go. And then I started to tell her everything. I began with the day I arrived. “I woke on black sand,” I said, and she settled in to listen.

  Betta took care of things, and I stayed with Heirik all night. I sat beside him and tried to spin. I talked with him in low tones, telling him stories of my glacier, and of the island, the way I knew it before Hvítmörk. All the good parts. Coffee and pillows and fighting you could enjoy without anyone having to die. The oranges he could try when he woke up. I knelt at his bedside and pleaded with him to wake up, my forehead pressed hard into his shoulder, my body shuddering. I crawled in with him and slept, and when I woke I felt him breathing under my cheek, and I had the sensation that we were normal, husband and wife waking to start the day. But I was the only one who got up.

  I cared for him, cleaned him. I washed his wounds with linen soaked in honey water, careful not to break the raw, seared skin.

 
I thought about going with him into death. When it finally came, would I be brave enough to go? He was a chieftain, but not the epic kind who ruled like a king in Norway or Sweden. Just here in the small world of our island. Would they push him away on an elegantly curved, flaming boat nonetheless?

  I pictured his belongings surrounding him, his ax and bracelets and glass cups. I looked to the chest in the corner, where he kept precious things, and a thought came to me slowly, just a wisp of smoke at first. I let my mind wander to the worst scenario, his possessions laid out in the boat that I’d seen tied up past the fishing camp. Beloved items, his father’s knives, mother’s furs. And a small wooden box.

  It looked exactly like the one in the archives, on the screen, only new. Just made a few dozen years ago, rather than twelve hundred. About two hands across, its doors closed with a dragon’s-head clasp, it waited among the furs in the chest.

  The box felt warm inside its nest, and I lifted it out like a perfect egg.

  I knew what was inside. In the frigid future, I’d clung to the image of this box and its diary, the proof that at least a few settlers had written about their own lives, far before the sagas. I assumed it was just something lost to the years, obscure but possible.

  Now I knew better, having lived here. No woman on a Viking farm could have kept that diary. No woman here could write. Except me.

  I looked to Heirik where he slept, raven hair against cool linen. The formidable chieftain with precious metal eyes, sleeping, reckless as a child. His wife wrote the diary. And in it, she told of so many things that hadn’t happened to us yet. Moments still to come. That woman, the writer, had a future with her dark-haired man. He was alive.

  My fingers touched lightly over the lock. With sure hands, I dug deeper in the trunk and found the key.

  The book looked so clean and new, the birch bark soft the way I always knew it would feel under my fingertips. The first three pages were scratched with dates and trades, the hash marks and awkward notes I knew so well. And then came blank pages. Nine of them.