Winter Song

by Colin Harvey

  His freckled face was as transparent as any window, so she saw his disappointment. She added hastily, "I know you didn't mean to, but you should cough or clear your throat, or–"

  "OK, Bera," he said. Ruddy features lit up: "You need help with that? I'm stronger than you are, even if I'm not as clever."

  She shook her head. "No thanks, Yngi. I'm almost done."

  He turned to go, just as Thorbjorg's voice cut across them: "Yngvar Ragnarsson, get away from that whore!"

  Yngi cringed, and Bera swung round at his wife, anger at one humiliation too many finally breaking her self-control. Before she could speak, a shriek from the courtyard interrupted them: "Grandpappi! Grandpappi's coming!"

  Bera and Thorbjorg rushed out into the courtyard, Yngi hobbling behind. Both suns were now high in the sky, and Bera had to blink to focus. She followed the other's gaze down the valley to the west, and the men returning from a week at the Summer Fair.

  The two men at the front of the group rode shaggy Isheimuri horses, which stood only chest-high to a tall man, but were formidably strong. Ragnar liked to brag that his was the strongest horse on Isheimur, and the chunky buttermilk-coloured stallion needed to be to carry his owner and his belongings, which between them probably massed over a hundred and fifty kilos. Arnbjorn rode a slightly smaller horse alongside him.

  Surprisingly the other two horses were riderless, and Ragnar's tenant farmers walked beside their mounts, which were dragging something, but Bera couldn't make out what it was. Bringing up the rear of the procession were the farmer's eldest sons. Both had been unbearable ever since Ragnar had agreed to take them to the Summer Fair, and Bera suspected that they would be even more conceited now they had been, and would consider themselves too grand to mix with children. One had been flirting with Bera before she'd become pregnant, but had quickly lost interest when he learned of her condition, and probably wouldn't even speak to her now.

  "Come on, Bera!" Hilda interrupted her daydreaming. "They're ten minutes away yet, so back to work for a little while."

  Bera resisted the urge to say "Yes, boss." Sarcasm would only earn her a lecture.

  Instead she returned to grappling with the sopping wet clothes until shrieks from her foster-nephews and nieces announced Ragnar's arrival. His gravelly voice boomed, "What? No hug for your Grandpappi, then?"

  She felt the puppy stir beneath her bulky jacket, then return to sleep, and prayed that Brynja would sleep a while longer.

  By the time Bera had joined the others but watching from the sidelines, women and children were hugging men, the tenant farmer's mousey wives had erupted from their own dwellings, and the whole group had aggregated into one swarming, shapeless mass. Only Ragnar stood slightly apart from the reunions, a sad smile on his face.

  Then Yngi's wife Thorbjorg threw her arms around him. "Welcome back, Pappi!" It might have been Bera's imagination, but she thought she saw him grimace, before he made his dark, brooding features as impassive as before.

  He looked across at Bera. She gave him a little smile which she tried to make welcoming, but he only scowled, and she looked away so that he wouldn't see how hurt she was. All you have to do is give him the name of the father. Make one up if need be.

  Except that whichever name she gave Ragnar would be signing a man's death warrant, if such a name existed – and names were strictly bound by custom, like everything else here. Bera wondered how it would be to grow up on a world that had never splintered away from the rest of humanity, never been driven apart by a seemingly – to the rest of the Galaxy – insane urge to speak a different tongue and adhere to old ways. To call oneself what one liked, to dress how one liked, do what one liked…

  "What's this?" Hilda pointed to a travois, which was hitched to the two horses belonging to the tenant-farmers.

  "You heard the noise last night?" Ragnar said. "A meteorite crashed near where we'd camped." He continued, "We heard what we thought was a small volcano where it fell, so we rushed toward it for a look. It took us a half-hour. When we got there, we found only this character," Ragnar pointed at the travois, "lying in the snow."

  Bera eased around for a look, and gasped. The man lying unmoving in the travois was stark naked, his skin a copper so dark as to be almost purple. His massive chest rose and fell irregularly, but apart from that he didn't move. His eyes were closed. Bera had never seen such muscle definition on a man; corded, sinewy, he took her breath away. The face below the shaven skull was equally striking, with its chiselled zygomatic bones and almost inhuman symmetry. Bera looked down, then away, blushing, then glanced at him again. He was certainly impressive. She made her self focus instead on the splints on his legs.

  "Cover him up!" Asgerd said, Ragnar's older daughter-in-law reaching for a blanket from one of the horses. "He'll scare the children!"

  Ragnar reached out, and his daughter grew still. "You don't cover burns like that." He pointed to the man's lower torso, and clearly broken legs. His legs would have been long, strong and muscular before they were broken.

  Bera dragged her attention back to Ragnar, who said, "He was screaming, rolling around in the snow. We couldn't leave him like that. Either I killed him, and I'd no stomach for cold-blooded neck-snapping, or we brought him home."

  "Can we spare the food?" Asgerd said, her thin lips when she closed them giving her opinion: No, we can't.

  "You tell me, ladies." Ragnar opened his arms to include Hilda and Thorbjorg in the question. "The management of the household is your responsibility, after all. I wouldn't dream of interfering in your demesne."

  Not much, Bera thought. Ragnar didn't hesitate when he felt it necessary.

  "Of course we can, my lord." Thorbjorg sensed as always which way the wind was blowing, and said what she guessed he wanted to hear.

  Ragnar's face split with a grin. "Then that's settled." He rubbed his hands together.

  "How do you know that he's not a vagrant?" Asgerd said.

  "We thought that initially," Ragnar said. "We were ready to leave him to die, until Bjarney pointed out that a trespassing vagrant can be indentured, if he recovers." He shrugged. "If he doesn't recover, he won't eat, anyway."

  "Hmmph," Hilda said, but didn't argue.

  "Funny," Ragnar said, "the snow was stained blue." Whether it was the colour or simply the fact that the snow was dyed, it seemed to Bera that Ragnar sounded uneasy. It was so rare that Bera couldn't help staring.

  He caught her looking and straightened, returning to his normal forceful manner. "Here's someone who can help. Bera, I need someone to safeguard our new investment. You can nurse our new worker."

  Bera looked down, bobbing her head in assent.

  Ragnar must have mistaken her shyness for reluctance, or his next words would surely never have been so cruel (at least, she thought, not before you got pregnant): "Well, come on girl! Look to it! You should be grateful – it'll give you something to think about, take your mind off that dead bastard of yours."

  She felt tears sting her eyes, and lunged toward the travois.

  But Ragnar must have seen her well up, for she heard him half-groan, and mutter, "Well, you shouldn't have brought shame on my house by opening your legs to the first man who ignored your plainness. My darling Gunnhild would spin in her grave if she could see what you've turned into."

  Bera wanted to shout that, but for the eruption on Surtsey, she would have gone home as soon as she was pregnant, but that was pointless. Her family was dead, and now she just had to get on with living.

  So she didn't answer, but instead wrestled the stranger off the travois. But in so doing, Bera scraped the stranger's back on the stones, and he roused screaming from his near-coma. Ragnar shouted, "Yngi! Thorir! Give her a hand with that!"

  The two men helped ease the stranger back into the travois and unhitch it. Thorir called, "Where do you want it?" He stood far too close to Bera for her liking.

  "Put it in with the animals," Ragnar said.

  Grunting with effort the men pic
ked him up, and staggered toward the stables. Bera shadowed them into the warm, odorous darkness. She gazed at the horses, three of which were hers. But the web of debts incurred had bound her too tight to indulge any fantasies of flight while she was pregnant.

  Ragnar appeared in the doorway. "Mind you take good care of him."

  Bera didn't answer.

  When she was sure that Ragnar had gone, she took Brynja from under her furs. Weeping quietly, she let the puppy nuzzle the other nipple from the one she had suckled the night before. "Like Romulus and Remus," she said, "but in reverse."

  "Let's hope it doesn't end in tears," Ragnar said, making her jump at his unexpected return. Luckily, he was so busy staring at the stranger lying on the hay that he didn't notice the puppy, instead assuming her reference was to the man. He kept staring at the man, barely able to conceal his repugnance. "It's an Icelandic tradition, to fear the stranger, but even so, this hairless stranger bothers me. His presence means trouble… we'll call him Loki. It seems fitting."

  "I'll do my best for you," Bera said, shielding Brynja by turning away slightly.

  Ragnar roused himself. "You will," he said. "We've a critical time coming. Once the crops ripen fully, it's a race to get them in. We'll need every able-bodied hand we can get. He can repay us our hospitality – if he recovers."

  "If he doesn't? Or he recovers, but stays an invalid?"

  "That won't happen," Ragnar said. The feral look on his face chilled Bera. "He'll have an accident before that happens. Clear?"

  Bera nodded, swallowing.

  THREE

  Loki

  The world through your eyes is full of pain and wonder, made even stranger by the whirlwind of voices shrieking for your attention:

  "The Mizar Quartet are Sol-type hydrogen-fusing dwarf stars–"

  "Isheimuri lingua confirmed as mix of Standard and Icelandic–"

  Some voices verge on making sense, but most babble gibberish. Each is accompanied by a dizzying sense of vertigo, and little shocks deep inside your body. Occasionally you smell burning. Sometimes you taste colours, can hear, flickering jeering shadows behind your eyelids.

  "Absolute magnitude uses the same convention as visual–"

  You are dimly aware that the nanophytes within you that keep your muscle tone even as you waste away are locked in a desperate fight against the cannibal predations of the remaining lifegel in a near sub-atomic battle of the idiots. Either through accident or a design flaw, the inhibitors appear to have failed, and if left to themselves will eat you alive.

  "The Long Night was the longest conflict since the Hundred Years War–"

  A strangely familiar voice cries out, "I won't lie down and die!"

  "The Isheimur populace is likely to suffer genetic drift and disease–"

  The man Ragnar's voice is a rumble from a mouth full of misshapen teeth, his words unintelligible.

  "Pappi: estimated height one-metre-eighty, mass eighty kilos–"

  The woman beside him answers, her voice lower. Her hair is lighter, but her features equally mismatched, one shoulder slightly higher than the other.

  "Oedipus: son of King Laius and Jocasta of Thebes–"

  You realise that the voice refusing to die was your own, but it sounds strange. It should be alto but is tenor instead. Perhaps your voice-box was damaged in the accident?

  "Pantropy lost favour as Terraforming grew easier–"

  The accident. The pain increases as a shard of memory brings with its suddenly perfect recall the accompanying agony: the smell of burning dust, the isolation, the heat. After a while your throat hurts with the scream – which tails off into a whimper.

  "A quasar at absolute magnitude −25.5 is 100 times brighter than our galaxy–"

  The girl – barely a woman – Bera strokes your head. "Hush, Pappi, he kannske skilja you," she says. Her breasts ooze milk, and a part of you realises that while she has given birth in the last three weeks for there to be lactation, there is no sound of a baby. The rational corner of your mind tucks this away for later, but the animal part that has control has you lunging forward on all fours, scrabbling at her clothes.

  "Humanity only found other sentient life after four centuries of spaceflight–"

  "Neh!" The sting of her palms raining down on your face and head are microscopic compared to the waves of agony that ripple across you, but still they are enough to make you pause. You stare up at her dark hair, wide-set eyes and full mouth and wonder what her lips would taste like if you ripped them from her face.

  "Oedipus left for dead with a shepherd but adopted–"

  "He eats like an hungradur dyr," Bera says, becoming more understandable with each sentence, as the linguaweave begins to take effect. "He almost choked on that meat we fed him before. But he can eat elda food now. No more breastfeeding–"

  "An Icelandic chieftain was politician, lawyer, and policeman combined–"

  Some residual decorum makes you lurch away from her into a corner.

  "Grain was only grown in limited quantities in Iceland–"

  "Agh, he's vomiting! He splashed my best boots!" Pappi kicks you. You growl, but you are too busy gazing at the pool of vomit to attack.

  "The Mizar B pair mass approximately 1.6 times that of Sol–"

  "No, Pappi! He doesn't know what he's doing. The horsemeat was too much for him to digest at this stage of his bati."

  "In Iceland, the chieftain's position could be bought or sold–"

  "Well, keep him away. Oh, what's he doing now? He's eating his own puke!"

  "Nanotechnology requires vast consumption of energy–"

  The undigested horsemeat still tastes much as it did before, though now with a rancid flavour that may be the bile that you've brought up with it, but there are also others: salt and a metallic taste. By squinting you can zoom right in and see shapes invisible to an unenhanced human eye crawling among the chunks of meat. You have vomited up nanophytes with the food. From somewhere comes the knowledge that vomit is as corrosive as battery acid – their tiny carapaces must be almost indestructible to withstand it.

  "Sheep farming was the most common type in Iceland–"

  You know you must eat it to get the nanophytes back into your system, but Bera clings onto you, trying to pull you away as you gobble the vomited meat.

  "Isheimur has a lower water content than Terra–"

  "No, no, Loki! Don't eat that! Here!" She undoes her blouse but you ignore her, concentrating on re-ingesting the refugee nanophytes. You don't know whether they're still locked onto you as their source/target, but you can't risk them eating the planet in some long-term runaway disaster. You brush against her face; you feel wetness, and note that she is weeping, and another corner of your broken mind wonders why.

  Finally, when you've eaten all the meat and licked up the liquid, you allow her to guide you to her breast. "It'd give Palli's death meaning if his milk were to save another's life," she whispers.

  "Isheimur's mass is 0.80 of Terra, but its gravity is only 0.67 – sub-optimal for atmospheric retention–"

  "Jao," Pappi growls assent.

  "At 1.7 AUs, its year is 2.85 Terran years–"

  She sobs, even as she strokes your head. "This is the last time I'll do this," she says to the Ragnar-man as you nuzzle her nipple. "I wasn't going to let him feed today, but if it stops him eating his own puke, then I'll make an exception. But after this, no more breastfeeding: you can whip me or starve me, but I'll not do it again. I can't cope with this. It's like an eighty kilo baby with the habits of a wild animal."

  "Isheimur's year comprises 1096 days of 22 hours 37 minutes–"

  "Agreed," Ragnar says, and you see the surprise dart across her face. He turns to go. "I've no desire to see any more of this sick, feral creature, anyway, even if he has displayed almost superhuman powers of recovery. Odin's Beard – to think that he only came out of his stupor yesterday!"

  "Hunger is my friend." The words echo through your mind as you swallow the w
arm, rich milk. "When I'm trying to lose weight, I embrace my hunger–"

  You release her nipple, which she rubs.

  The fool that said that clearly never had hunger eating them from within like a black hole, sucking everything into it, consuming it yet still wanting more more more–

  "Isheimur is so cold, its air so thin that the colony's longterm survival is marginal–"

  "Stop it!" you scream, clutching your head. Bera frantically hushes you, tries to pour sugared water into your mouth, but you gag.

  For a while, as if taking pity, the voices fade away almost to nothing…

  "We'll feed him from our stores for another few days," Ragnar says.