Winter Song

by Colin Harvey

  Bera breathed a sigh of relief when Karl accompanied Thorir to the sauna. Since he'd awoken she felt differently about him, and Thorbjorg's "witticisms" had rattled her. Karl awake was overwhelming. His muscular chest, the unnatural hairlessness of his head and body – maintained by his nanophytes – the feel of him against her as she propped him up, the slightly musky yet sweet sweat he exuded; it terrified her even as she wanted him. There was simply too much of him.

  By the time he returned an hour later, glowing and clean, she'd calmed down. "I'll help you to the barn," she said, "before I use the sauna."

  "You're going to wash?" Thorir said. "Blimey."

  There was no one else around, so Bera balled up her courage. "Piss off," she told Thorir.

  That night she slept in the big house for the first time since Karl's arrival, earning a few sly digs from the other women, and (though she'd probably imagined it) a disappointed look from Karl.

  So the next morning it felt as if in some way it were her fault that Loki stared at her from Karl's now slatehard eyes, as if she'd summoned him back with her absence.

  The day crawled past in one long jabber-filled drone, the alien rarely pausing for breath, leaving her to wipe the drool from the side of his mouth. He kept calling her Jocasta; after a while she didn't bother to correct him.

  When she relayed the news, Ragnar snorted. "He's trying to get out of the chores."

  "He won't," Bera said grimly, "He can peel the vegetables."

  She slept in the barn that night, awaking to the dog's frantic barking. Out in the yard, Thorir was standing eyeball-to-eyeball with the gabbling sleepwalker.

  "Go back to bed, boy!" Thorir snarled.

  "Don't hit him!" Bera pulled Loki away from the swinging rifle-butt.

  The next night, after another day of raving, poor motor co-ordination and Loki trying to grope her, she was half-tempted to abandon him for the house and the other's jibes, but she gritted her teeth.

  She awoke late next morning, muzzy-headed.

  Karl was sitting staring at the stars, now rapidly fading under the twin suns' onslaught of light. A solitary tear trickled down his face, and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, moved by pity.

  He touched her arm, when she jerked away.

  "Sorry," he said, wiping his eye.

  "It's OK." She couldn't tell him what was wrong, even if he'd emerged from his self-absorption. She'd spent too long bottling it up. "Sleep well?" Bera said.

  "Very," Karl said, contradicting the bags under his eyes.

  "Come on or we'll be late. I'll get food. We'll eat as we work."

  As they neared the laundry, Yngi shuffled past, flashing his toothy grin at them.

  Karl said, "Where's Yngi going in such a hurry?"

  "Taking care of the snawk," Bera said, helping him up.

  "The what?"

  But she didn't answer, instead leaving him in the laundry.

  She returned with bread and a boiled egg, some meat and a handful of dried berries. "Against scurvy," she explained as he pulled a face at the berries' sourness. They ate in companionable silence.

  Bera said, "What's a two-ring?"

  "Dunno," Karl said. "In what context?"

  "You said something about a two-ring test yesterday."

  Karl pulled a face. "When?"

  "You mentioned a two-ring test," Bera insisted.

  He sighed. "A Turing Test refers to Artificial Intelligence. My ship downloaded a random mass of information. It was probably amongst that."

  "Why would it… download information? How?"

  "How? Tight-beam transmission to an implant. Why? So I have information – much good it's done me."

  "Is that causing you to turn into Loki?"

  "It shouldn't." He took a breath. "Vocalising isn't so unusual when there's a lot of information to be assimilated. Though I have no idea what a lot of stuff that Ship downloaded is – I don't seem to know much about Isheimur, apart from basic stats, orbit, mass and so on. But sleepwalking doesn't fit assimilation protocols."

  "There's something you're not telling me."

  "More like something I don't know," Karl said.

  "Ragnar thinks you're… what's the word? Schizoid."

  Karl's laugh sounded strained. He raised his eyebrows. "Do you?"

  She waited a long time as they set up the wringer. "I don't know what to think."

  He frowned. "Have I harmed you? Do I seem like a threat?"

  Bera said, "No, but I don't know."

  "I'm a threat?" He looked upset.

  She said carefully, "You've not done anything to hurt me, but I get the impression that you could, not from malice, but because you're like a big child."

  She indicated the metal pail on the hob, stuffed full of washing. "Time we started work." The Sagas never mention laundry, she thought. As they lifted the first of the steaming cloths from the pail to the lip of the wringer she said to lighten the mood, "You never hear of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue wrestling with washing." She mock-complained: "Perhaps the Sagas didn't think it worth mentioning such mundane chores. Or maybe they were just dirty bastards who stank all the time."

  He smiled, but it was a thin effort.

  "I guess no one will sing skalds of Bera Sigurdsdottir's battles with the laundry-monster in centuries to come." She pulled the edge of the sheet into place and – it was so much easier with two of them – turned the handle.

  "I guess not," he said, grunting with the effort of holding up the other end of the sodden mass, while she fed it through the rollers.

  His body was so clearly defined – everything this man wolfed down seemed to turn to pure muscle. The first time she'd taken his arm and felt a little shock, he'd explained that the nanophytes worked his body constantly, even while he slept. Maybe they caused his sleepwalking?

  Karl was staring at the sheet. "You do so much washing and cleaning."

  "How else are we to stay clean? We've little tech left."

  "I suppose," Karl said.

  "You know what the secret to keeping the machines running is? To always have copies of all your parts." Bera said. She pulled another sheet onto the wringer's lip, banging it down. "That's why we don't have enough food." She banged the rollers shut. Every action was a slam, punctuating her comments. "Because every fair, Pappi takes any spare food to trade for machine parts. All the farmers are in the tents drinking and whoring and fighting, our people are trading for whatever bits and pieces of kit there are." Bang! She opened the rollers, and he heaved another shirt into place that she slammed down flat. Bang! "Tubes burn out and can't be replaced. Bearings and metal parts corrode. In olden-times people made so much that they could pretend that tech was inexhaustible." Bang! She laughed scornfully. "Don't look so surprised. I've studied things on the Oracle, when no one's around – even manthings that we breeders shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about!" She yanked the handle around, firing the cloth through. "If a situation is genuinely life-threatening, the Norns may facture equipment, or medicine. But likely not – they have their own priorities."

  "The Norns?" Karl said.

  "The remains of the Formers' machines." Bang! "I told you about them – oh, I told frigging Loki. Freya, do I have to tell you everything twice?

  "We understand what causes cholera and typhoid," Bera went on. Bang! "Technology is humanity's way of fighting entropy, but we can only make so much. We've lost our tech, but we're not savages."

  "You're right," Karl said. "I didn't mean to imply that you were."

  Bang!

  Karl said, "Why are you so angry?"

  "I'm always angry, Karl." Bang! "I just don't usually let it show. I'm not allowed. I'm just Sinderella."

  He looked baffled.

  "From the fairy tale. Sinderella was the poor girl. She got caught Deep Throating President Charming. Although he denied they had relations, he was impeached and she was sent to the kitchen with her ugly sisters." She shrugged. "That was on the Oracle as well." Bang! "I never saw
my parents from when I was eight, I'm treated like a whore, and if I say anything, I'm reminded I should be grateful. Grateful – they took my dowry and treat me like this. I can't even mourn my child!"

  Bera finally ran out of anger and took a deep breath. She looked up and her heart almost stopped, he looked so bereft. "Oh, Karl, I'm sorry. You must miss them every bit as much."

  He didn't speak, but his jaw-muscles worked.

  Bera asked, just to break the silence. "How many children do you have?"

  He looked at her. "I've a clone," he said, "though I don't suppose you'd count that as children. Karla was a long time ago, anyway."

  "Karla's your daughter?" She'd heard him say the name in his delirium.

  "Karla's my clone-wife." For the first time he really smiled, at her sky-rocketing eyebrows. "Who better as a partner? Though such marriages don't always work out – sometimes the last person we want to be alone with is our own reflection. As for children, Lisane – my brood-wife is due any week now with our first."

  "You've more than one wife?"

  "And a husband." He grinned at her open mouth and wide eyes. "Jarl. Each of them has three partners, of whom I'm one." The grin faded. "We've been trying for our first traditional child for twenty years."

  She'd guessed that he was in his thirties, though it was hard to tell. "How old are you?" To have been trying for a child for so long?

  Karl's smiled broadened. "Ninety-six."

  Her head swam. Older than anyone she knew. Those that scraped past sixty were worn down to the merest stumps of the vital people they would have once been. "Your life must be very comfortable." She knew that it was unfair to be envious, but she couldn't help it.

  "It's the Rejuve," he said. "Stretching our lives, making interstellar travel possible."

  "Ah." All this talk of children made her think of Palli again. She felt like a traitor, that this usurper could have driven her own dead son from her mind.

  She looked up and saw Thorbjorg standing in the doorway, watching Karl as the farm cats watched a mouse-hole. Thorbjorg balanced another container of dirty clothes on her hip, and dropping them into a pail, turned on the water.

  "You're wanted," Thorbjorg murmured to Bera, jerking her head toward the house. "I was told to replace you." She raised an eyebrow and her voice together, "Don't see why you should keep Mister Handsome to yourself."

  "Thorbjorg is Yngi's wife," Bera reminded Karl by way, though he looked sufficiently distracted that it didn't look as if the warning was needed.

  Thorbjorg scowled. "Get moving."

  Bera sighed, and pulled on her kapa.

  There was no sign of the others at the house, so Bera went searching. Asgerd was collecting eggs in the chicken run, while Yngi repaired a hole in the fence. A snolfur had tried to bite its way in, judging by the blood on the ragged wires, before deciding the hens were too tough a target. But the holes needed patching; the next snolfur might be more persistent.

  One of the women could have done the job just as effectively, but with his club foot Yngi wasn't particularly mobile, while his sausage-like fingers were surprisingly dextrous, so he acted as the farm's handyman. Everyone knew that it was make-work for the Gothi's son.

  "Someone wanted me," Bera said.

  "Nope," Asgerd said. "Hilda's on mother-duty today. Maybe she needs help."

  Bera thought it unlikely. Hilda's looking after all the children freed the other women to cook, clean and forage near the house. Even before Karl's arrival, Bera had been exempted since – in her distraction after Palli's death – she had allowed one of the younger girls to wander off.

  After five minutes' fruitless searching, she saw Hilda with the children near a geothermal vent.

  By the time she had climbed to where the children were playing around the steam, Bera was out of breath and perspiring under her fur kapa, despite the cold. It took her a few moments to get her breath back. She spent them watching the children's fascination with the vaporous swirls. They were safe as long as they were kept away from the hot pipes, and Ragnar believed it did them good to learn that hot things burned.

  Bera took a deep breath. "You wanted me."

  Hilda looked surprised. "Why would I? The children are fine. I don't need help."

  "Someone wanted me. Thorbjorg said so. It isn't Asgerd, I asked her and Yngi. The men are out starting the round-up."

  "Sounds like a stupid prank," Hilda said, and her mouth compressed into a line. "Or a misunderstanding – you're sure that Thorbjorg sent you? Who did she say wanted you?"

  "She didn't say who," Bera said, and rubbed her face, which burned with embarrassment. It was obvious that Hilda thought she was making it up. "I'll get back to work."

  When she stormed back into the laundry-room, there was no sign of Karl or Thorbjorg.

  A vision of the two locked together in an embrace flashed through Bera's mind, and her rage, already burning her chest with acid claws, threatened to overwhelm her.

  "Karl! Karl!" She stormed around the farm.

  There was no response anywhere. No sign of them in the courtyard, in the barn, nor anywhere in the big house. Surely they wouldn't be rutting in the grass like animals? Though she'd put nothing past Thorbjorg. She saw movement through one of the windows in Bjarney's house and frowned.

  It took Bera only a minute or so to walk down to Bjarney's house. "Hello?" she called.

  An answer came in the form of giggles and Karl's voice: "No, I'll hold it, you push it in."

  Her eyes widening, Bera rushed into the house.

  The heavily pregnant Salbjerg sat in her dining room. It was smaller than Ragnar's, as befitted their lower status. Salbjerg was fanning herself while watching Karl and Thorbjorg.

  Karl was holding the end of Salbjerg's table, while Thorbjorg was down on all fours underneath, gazing up at him with a lascivious grin.

  "You need to move that block of wood," Karl panted. "I can't hold this all day."

  "OK," said Thorbjorg. "Though I could watch those muscles for hours. Are you ticklish?"

  It was too much for Bera. "Thorbjorg!"

  Thorbjorg's head snapped up, hitting the underside of the table. "Ow!"

  "Move that damned block," Karl's voice grated with the effort.

  Bera shoved Thorbjorg out of the way and pushed the wooden block so that it was beneath the table leg. Karl put the table down as Bera backed out from beneath it. He gripped each side and wiggled it. "It should be steady now," he said.

  "We were helping Salbjerg with the table," Thorbjorg said sulkily, rubbing her head. "As you should have been doing. She had to come and get us; her in her condition."

  Bera couldn't see why the table needed stabilising at that precise moment, but that was typical Salbjerg. Whatever she wanted needed to be done there and then, that second. But it wasn't Salbjerg's impatience that provoked Bera. "You said the others wanted me! You never mentioned Salbjerg!"

  "I said you were wanted at the house!" Thorbjorg shouted.

  "You said I was wanted by the others, and you certainly didn't say it was here – you sent me off on a wild goose chase!"

  "Pardon me for not drawing Her Ladyship a map, perhaps I should've personally escorted you here? And carried your kapa?" Thorbjorg's voice grew ever shriller; "I said you were wanted here! If you wander off with your head in the clouds, Bera Sigurdsdottir, don't you blame me!"

  Bera saw Thorbjorg glance toward the door, and looked over her shoulder, at where Hilda stood in the doorway. Her face was white, her eyes wide and nostrils flared.

  "Ladies," Hilda said with icy emphasis, "Perhaps we could spare poor Salbjerg the unpleasantness of you bickering like a pair of harlots at the Summer Fair?"

  "Poor Salbjerg" looked as if she was lapping up the entertainment, Bera thought, and felt tears prickle at the way Thorbjorg had manipulated her.

  Bera's heart raced, and she took deep breaths through her nose to stay calm. She walked outside, deliberately slowly, trying to regain some self-control. As
soon as the others emerged from Salbjerg's house, she whirled to face them. "Ask Karl – he'll tell you! Didn't she, Karl? She said I was wanted by the others?"

  Perhaps his mind was elsewhere. It was hard to tell, for as a shaft of sunlight pierced the clouds, his eyes darkened for a moment. The clouds occluded the suns again, and as his eyes returned to normal, he saw a hunted look in them.