by Joanna Bell
I followed it for five minutes, and then ten, and then what felt like more than fifteen. And then, as a sound my ears heard perfectly but my mind refused to take in began to rise through the trees, I suddenly stopped dead still.
"What is it?" Magnus enquired, and when I turned to look at him I saw that he had his sword drawn. He must have seen me eying it. "I am not an Angle, girl. It would be foolish to walk these woods without a weapon to hand."
The sound – a quiet roar, so familiar that just hearing it put me in mind of skipping school and going roller-skating at Venice Beach with Lisa Caldwell – was not going away.
And why did it put me in mind of the beach? Of sand and bikinis and bright blue slurpees? Because it was the sound of the ocean.
The sound of the ocean. In upstate New York, where I knew very well that there was no such geographical feature.
"What is that?" I asked, and for the first time since I had run into Magnus, I could hear the fear in my own voice.
"What is what? Do you hear something, girl? Speak now if you do, for there is only one of me, and one sword –"
"No," I said, nodding my head east, where what I could have sworn was the sound of surf was coming from. "That."
Magnus cocked his head at me, giving me the look I knew I had already given him more than once – the one that said he worried about whether or not I was of completely sound mind. "The sea, girl? Is that what you ask about?"
"The sea?!" I cried, dismayed because I knew that there was no way I was on Bill and Brenda Renner's property anymore – not if what I was hearing was really the ocean. And if I wasn't on Bill and Brenda's Renner's property anymore – then where the hell was I? And how did I get there?
"Yes, the sea. It's right – here, come, it's right here."
The man in leather, so tall the top of my head barely came up to the top of his chest, took my hand, then, and I yanked it away instinctively.
"I – I'm sorry," I babbled, when he turned back to me with a questioning look on his face. "I, uh, I –"
What was I supposed to say? That he was huge and armed and I wasn't even good with small unarmed men touching me? But in the end there was no need to say any of it because there was something about Magnus, perhaps his expression, perhaps something else, that just made it impossible for me to consider him a threat. When he declined to force me to take his hand it was actually I who reached out tentatively, a few moments later, to take his.
Magnus led me the rest of the way down the path, to where it ended. And at the end of it lay what I already knew was there – the sea. The ocean. What ocean? The Atlantic? I didn't know.
Was I losing my mind? I tried to keep my composure but such was my worry and fear that I choked up slightly, and tears of fright filled my eyes.
"You are lost," Magnus said gently, wiping a tear off my non-swollen cheek. "Do not despair, girl, we'll find your way back home. You saved my life there, in the forest. I will see you to your home."
I looked up at him as his image swam in my tear-blurred eyes, and saw that he meant what he was saying. I was so grateful I almost swooned with it when I imagined how scary it would be to be in my predicament alone, with no idea where I was, or how I had come to be there.
"Come," he said, "let us gather the kindling for a fire – it will give you something else to think about. And then we can –"
"I have no idea where I am."
He paused and looked at me. "I know it. But we will need to spend the night in the forest, and for that we need –"
"No," I said, my voice breaking. "You don't understand! I mean I have no idea where I am. I don't even know what country I'm in! I don't know anyone who dresses the way you do in New York – or even in America! I don't know how I even got here! I don't –"
I began to hyperventilate. My field of vision, full of an ocean I didn't recognize and a man I didn't know, began to narrow. A feeling of floating came over me, and I turned my head up towards Magnus as the darkness crowded out the light of the day.
My last thought: Fuck. I'm going to faint.
Chapter Eight
Magnus
I caught the girl's already-limp body in my arms, before she could fall to the ground, and carried her down to the water's edge. And when I knelt at the place where the waves met the sand, and reached down to scoop up a few droplets of cold water to sprinkle on her face, I caught sight of her cheek again.
I had almost broken the skin – in the center of the swollen welt was a dark red spot where her milky cheek had almost opened. And amidst the guilt that crowded my heart at having left such a mark, I tried to work out if she was child or woman. Her height was that of a woman, and her body full where women's bodies are full. But her skin – her face – was like nothing I had ever seen before. Flawless it was – as flawless as that of an infant. And her dressings so odd and masculine – was she one of Aethelstan's daughters, escaped from the royal party as they traveled from one stronghold to another? But how could she be, given her frightened tears at seeming not to recognize where she was?
It was as I pondered her that she stirred, her eyes fluttering open and looking to and fro until they finally settled, focused, on me.
"I'm still here."
"Aye," I nodded, dipping just the tips of my fingers into the water and bringing them to her forehead – something about her invited a gentleness I did not usually feel towards my fellow man – or woman. "You are. Did you hope to wake in another place?"
"I did. I hoped to wake up in River Falls. I need to get to the gas station so I can call Judy. But I'm back here, beside the ocean that shouldn't be there, and I get the feeling it's miles away from River Falls."
She wasn't crying anymore. Her voice was barely higher than a whisper, but the high emotion had passed. Instead there was in her gaze a quiet curiosity tinged with resignation. Wherever she wished to be, her eyes said to me, she was here. And from here we would both find our way, somehow, to the days and places that lay ahead of us.
"You must keep your hands from your cheek," I told her as I helped her to her feet. "If you scratch it, or roll on it in your sleep, the skin will break. And if we can keep it from breaking, we can keep it from festering."
Heather lifted her hand to her swollen face at my words, but pulled it away without touching the welt. And then she looked at me.
She really was beautiful, her face a picture almost of someone who has not gone hungry for long periods of time, or suffered any long illnesses. Her lips were full, her smile wide and generous, and her teeth white and straight and gleaming.
"You said we needed to gather kindling?"
"Uhhh–" I replied, because I had been too caught up in staring at her to hear what she said.
She smiled, then, and asked again if we needed to gather kindling.
"Yes!" I told her, entranced enough by that smile to return it without thinking.
We walked up to the top of the beach and began to wander in the liminal place between the sand and the woods, looking for dried out twigs and sticks to start a fire. When I asked how old she was, she turned to me with a look on her face that said I had just asked something strange – even though I had not.
"What is it?" I said. "Why do you look at me in that way?"
"My mother says a man should never ask a lady her age."
"Is it so?" I questioned, not having heard of such a custom before. "It seems a normal thing to ask, does it not?"
Heather shrugged. "Actually it does. My mom just really likes following rules. Anyway. I'm twenty-two. How about you?"
Twenty-two. I could hear that she spoke numbers, but I did not quite understand them. "I'm ten and ten three," I told her. "And you are – can you say it again? Two and –"
"Ten and ten and what?!" She giggled. "Ten and ten and three? Like – twenty-three, you mean?"
Yes, she was definitely foreign. Even the Angles spoke of ages and amounts in the way we did in the North.
We went back and forth as we gathered wood for
the fire, until we came to understand that she was only a single winter younger than me – and she seemed as surprised by the fact as I was. When I told her she appeared to be much younger than ten and ten and two, she responded that it was actually I who appeared older than my age.
Strangers though we were, she was one of those people it's easy to be with. Some people – regardless of their sex – are difficult. The usual small misunderstandings breed confusion rather than amusement, and they seem to insist on making themselves difficult. Heather and I collecting kindling were not like that. I was about to remark upon it when I caught sight of something moving out of the corner of my eye and flung myself to the ground – taking her with me.
"What –" she began to speak, and I put my hand over her mouth.
"Shhh. There's someone there – up the beach."
I lifted my head just above the sea grasses, and squinted my eyes. There was someone there – three someones. They were not my people, though – and they were not armed. One of them carried a basket slung across his arm. Angles. They were gathering oysters from the beach. I took my hand from Heather's mouth and cautioned her to stay low. Unarmed Angles or not, I was in enemy territory – and it seemed increasingly likely that my companion was, too. Remaining hidden was the only thing to do.
"Who is it?"
"Stay down!" I repeated, more forcefully that time. "If they're on the beach there's probably another village nearby, and Jarl's son or not, I don't know how many of them I could take on alone."
Heather lowered herself again and peered at the figures on the beach. And then she peered at me, studying my face as I had done hers when she was in her faint.
I caught her looking at me the same way a few more times as we made our way back into the woods, and each time I expected her to say something – but she did not.
When we found a place off the path, and I thought of the possible proximity not just of the Angles but of my father and brother and our men – their men – it occurred to me that it might not be wise to light a fire.
"The day is warm," I told Heather. "It's probably best we have no fire while the sun shines – I did not think carefully enough about the smoke, nor the fact that I am now alone."
It was true. Even as I walked with the girl – and no other companions – it seemed a part of me still believed I was a member of a company of warriors from the North. A company of warriors from the North is one thing – a powerful thing, able to move at will through an ill-defended land. One warrior from the North, however, in that same foreign land – that is quite another thing. I had to be careful. I had to stop making decisions like I was still one of many, and like there were still five ten's worth of swords at my back.
"What about the smoke?" Heather asked.
"Mmm?" I looked up, lost in thought once more.
"What about the smoke? Won't it just blow away?"
"It will," I told her. "That's exactly why I don't think we should have a fire – the smoke will blow away and give our location to anyone who happens to pass by on the beach – or sail by in the coastal waters."
She was giving me that look again – the one that seemed to suggest she might think me crazy. "And why don't we want anyone to know we're here?"
I chuckled. "You look at me as if I am dull-witted, girl, and you ask question like that? Did you not just see my own brother and father chasing me down? What do you suppose they will do if they find us? Invite us to share their venison?"
Instead of answering, she picked up one of the twigs we had gathered and began to break it into smaller pieces, setting them beside her knee as she went. And then, a short while later, she asked what the people on the beach had been doing.
"The Angles? They were gathering oysters from the rocks for their supper."
I was glad of her presence. I would have been glad of her presence back in Apvik, too, for it's true that a pretty girl rarely finds herself unwelcome. But I was even gladder that afternoon in the Kingdom of the East Angles.
Using one of the small knives I carried with me, strapped to my right ankle, I began to sharpen the point of a stick – which had just the right amount of dryness to be strong and just the right amount of sap still in it to be flexible – into a point. Rabbits were plentiful in the woods and my stomach was beginning to growl.
"What are you doing?"
Something about Heather's eyes made me think her quick-witted. But she had a lot of questions about obvious things, I had to admit.
"I thought I might catch a rabbit or two for supper, unless you prefer to forage for berries?"
"I thought you said the smoke from the fire would give our location away?"
I ran the fat pad of my thumb over the tip of the spear – it was still not sharp enough – and went back to peeling thin layers of it away. "Not after dark, girl. The sun will hang in the sky for a long time tonight, as it does in the summer – but you'll be grateful of something to eat when the darkness comes."
"You talk funny."
I raised my eyes from the spear to see the girl smiling at me. "Do I?" I asked. "I was just thinking that it was you who arranges her words in strange ways."
When the spear was finished, I instructed her to stay where she was and not to move or wander.
"So I should just sit here and wait?" She asked, seeming to be offended. "You don't need any help with the, uh, with the hunting?"
"Do you know how to hunt?" I asked, raising my eyebrows and suspecting I already knew the answer.
"No. I mean – no. But I could help carry something, couldn't I? Or –"
"Rabbits don't weigh very much, girl," I told her. "I see fire in your eyes but I only ask you to stay here for your own sake. If we come across the Angles – or Gods forbid any of my father's men – I can't say I'll be able to fight many of them off before numbers overwhelm me. Do you want to keep your head on your shoulders or not?"
Heather picked up another twig, which she again began to break into small pieces. "I want to keep my head on my shoulders."
"Good. Wait here. Hopefully our bellies will not be empty tonight."
As it was I managed to catch three rabbits. The creatures were well-fed and slow in the Kingdom, where the weather was milder all year round, and the wolves not as plentiful as in the North. And when I returned to the place where Heather waited for me, I saw that the pile of broken twig parts beside her had grown considerably.
I lay the rabbits down between us, proud as men often are at their simple offerings, and she reached out tentatively to touch one, snatching her hand away when her fingers came into contact with a small patch of bloodied fur.
"Ugh!"
"What is it?" I asked, alarmed. The rabbit was fresh-killed, surely the maggots had not had time to grow in the flesh yet?
But there were no maggots. There was nothing except fresh blood – indeed it was the blood itself that seemed to give Heather such disturbance. I watched as she wiped her fingers on her dressings, over and over again, and then dragged them through the dirt as if they had touched something especially foul.
"Do you not like rabbit?" I asked.
She turned neatly to the side, as I began to skin one of the animals, and gagged noisily. And then she kept her eyes averted from what I was doing and put her hand over her mouth. "I've never eaten rabbit. Where did you learn how to do that anyway? To just kill rabbits with spears?"
"My father taught me. Well, my uncle taught me how to choose the right stick – not too green, but not too seasoned either – and then how to carve one end into a sharp point. But my father taught me how to hunt with it."
"Why not just use a gun?"
"A what?" I asked, pulling the skin from the third and final rabbit and piercing the length of its body with a thin length of wood.
But Heather was too busy staring, wide-eyed, at my handiwork. And to my disappointment she did not seem impressed so much as she seemed disgusted. If I hadn't been so pre-occupied with other thoughts at the time I might have seen fit to be irri
tated at her ungratefulness.
There was a lot on her mind as well as my own, that was plain enough to see. We were both lost in our own ways – she in terms of her place on the earth and me in terms of my place with my people. We did not speak of it as the sun dipped low in the sky and the evening stole the light away from us. What was in my heart was too much, at the time, too fresh to speak of just yet – and I suspected it was the same for her. So instead I showed her how to do little things, like how to dig a fire pit in the earth and then how to select stones from the beach in the right shape with which to line the pit.
"Is this right?" She asked, holding up a rock as I kept one eye on our surroundings next to the water.
"Aye, that's right. They only need to be flat on one side."
Back at our little camp, as the first stars began to show themselves over our heads, Heather watched me peel filaments of wood fibers off a piece of sun-dried bark, and then pile it under the crude fire-making contraption I had fashioned from two larger sticks.
"You know how to do a lot of things," she said, clearly impressed, as I coaxed a small ember that had formed where I rubbed the two pieces of wood against each other into the pile of wood floss.
I picked the bundle up, cupping it between my hands, and blew on it until a flame suddenly leapt up, reflecting itself in the shining pools of her eyes as it did so.
"Quickly!" I said, placing the now-burning bundle into the kindling. "Don't let it go out!"
But she still did not seem to know what to do, so I piled the smallest pieces on myself, and then larger ones when the fire had caught, until it was burning hot and full enough to sit back.
We sat silently for a little while, transfixed by the flames, and then I asked her why she didn't know how to do any of the things that I was doing – things that did not seem especially impressive to me.