Magnus

by Joanna Bell

  "I am grateful for your help, Northman," he said one morning as we walked from the training ground back to the hall. The Angles never stopped calling me 'Northman,' – it just changed over time, from a term laced with suspicion to one spoken with affection and fun.

  "As it is, Haesting is my home now, Lord. It would not do for me to wish it vulnerable. Part of me is surprised my father has not returned, to punish me for Asger's death. If he ever sees fit to sail back across the sea to this place, we will be ready for him."

  "Your father will not return," Eldred replied, stopping to ruffle a child's hair. "He will not face you again, his shame is too great. What a curse the Gods placed upon his head when they made the second son the superior of the first."

  I had become almost a son to Eldred by then, or at least a trusted advisor, and he knew of the family history that led to the scene at Haesting's gates, where a son put a sword through his own brother.

  "And with this talk of sons, Magnus, I thought it fit to send for one of the King's healers to visit Haesting – I thought she could see to your wife."

  Worried, I looked up sharply. "My wife? Lord, is she ill? Is something kept from me about her –"

  Eldred lay a hand on my shoulder. "I do not know that your wife is ill. But the time comes for children, does it not? I see the two of you together, and I wonder where is the child that will make you a family?"

  "Ah," I replied quietly. Two winters had passed since our wedding ceremony, and Heather's belly did not swell. In truth it was more worrisome for her than for me at that time, and my reply to Lord Eldred was more out of concern for Heather than concern for my own bloodline. "Yes, Lord, it plays on her mind. She tries not to speak of it too often, but I see her looking at the other women with their infants, and..."

  "The King's healer comes before the next moon. I will send for your wife when she arrives."

  And so the King's healer came, and Heather saw her for an entire afternoon, answering questions about her blood cycles and how often we lay together and even what she dreamed of at night.

  "She says I am young enough still," my wife reported when she returned that evening. "And that I don't lack enough food to get pregnant. She gave me some herbs to take every day in a tea and a little song to chant every night before I go to bed, to bring dreams that will make my belly more receptive to a baby. Not that I think singing songs is going to help anything."

  "Do you not?" I asked, surprised that she would question the importance of our dreams in the events of our waking lives. "Why?"

  "Why? Why would they? Whatever the problem is, it's not about dreams, Magnus."

  I knew at once that this was one of her beliefs that she still carried with her from home. I was not sure if she even noticed it herself, how dismissive she could be of some of the Angles' beliefs – of some of my beliefs. When the Angle women warned her not to swim in the river that ran out to the sea south of the estate, for the ill health and evil presences that lurked in the depths, Heather laughed and ignored them completely. She did not seem to have the fear of unseen things that the Angles – and my own people – had.

  When I asked why she wasn't afraid to swim in the river, after she had returned one day from doing just that, she shrugged, as if the question itself was ridiculous.

  "There aren't demons in the water, Magnus," she told me pertly, as a mother will tell a child that sheep cannot fly. "It's just a story they tell to frighten themselves away, because they can't swim. It's useful, but it's not true."

  That's how she was with the healer's advice about the songs before bedtime. Completely dismissive.

  "But why not try?" I asked, baffled as I had been during the discussion about the river at her certainty. "What if –"

  "What if what?!" She responded, her voice suddenly despairing. "What if singing a song before I go to sleep could help me get pregnant? It can't! I wish it could – believe me I wish it could! Do you think I wouldn't do anything? Don't ask me to have hope where there is none! I will take the herbs. But I won't start singing songs to have dreams for my belly or whatever the hell it was the healer said. The last thing I need is false hope."

  It was not the time to question my wife on her strange beliefs. Her eyes shone with tears as she looked at me, and I pulled her onto my lap and held her close.

  "I love you," I told her. "I love you, girl. Whether we have ten children or none, my love for you will be the same, just as ardent, just as constant. It fair causes me pain to see you this way, and it kills me that there is nothing I can do to change it."

  A child did not come. When the winters since our marriage were five, Heather seemed to become accepting of the circumstance. My own travels on that unhappy path were different, and I found myself with a feeling of hollowness in my chest sometimes, as I grew older and came to understand more what a family was, and what it was to be a father. Eadwin and Bradwin, my closest friends, each had many children. So many I had trouble recalling all their names.

  My friends often complained of their responsibilities, of how they longed for the time before it was on their heads to keep small bellies full. But I, not being responsible for any small bellies, only saw the love they had for their offspring. Bradwin had a little daughter, her eyes as blue as her mother's and her temperament as mischievous as her father's, and she would often find her way to the fields, or wherever it was we were working that day, to walk back to Haesting with us. In truth, it made my heart ache to see them together, although I did not show it.

  At night, I began to dream of children. Little girls with braids as dark and glossy as Heather's. Little boys who would reach for me the way Bradwin's girl reached for him. I dreamed of my wife with a babe in her arms, and the look of contentment on her face that I saw sometimes on the faces of the Anglo women, as they held their infants. And always, I woke up to the reality that none of those children were real outside the landscape of my dreams. Their smiles flickered away as wakefulness came upon me, their giggles fading like echoes bouncing down a canyon.

  It was into this situation that Lord Eldred came to us one evening, after the work of the day had been done and my wife and I took our supper. When I opened the door to see him a surge of energy ran through my body, and I looked to my side to see that my sword was where it always was.

  "We aren't under attack," the lord said, seeing my reaction. "Actually I came to see the two of you with a matter that has been on my mind since the last moon."

  We invited him inside and gave him ale and bread, and the lord of Haesting told us that a young peasant girl had died in childbirth, and that the baby, which had also been expected to die, had managed to live a full moon.

  "It is fortunate," I replied, as Heather sat uncharacteristically silent beside me.

  "Yes," Eldred replied, coughing. "Ceoldor's wife has taken the child to her own breast..."

  I sat waiting for the lord to continue, because I did not yet understand why he'd come to tell me of a peasant girl's child, or that it lived even after its mother's death. Children and their mothers were vulnerable, especially in the period close to birth – it was not a rare thing for one or both of them to pass into the next life from the ordeal.

  "I hope the babe will live," I offered a few moments later, when it became clear that Eldred was waiting for me to speak. "Ceoldor's wife is strong, she will –"

  And then I stopped speaking abruptly when a small cry suddenly came from the direction of the door. It was my wife who leapt to her feet and crossed the cottage in an instant, reaching outside and taking a little woven basket into her hands. When she turned back, and I saw that she was crying, I was even more baffled.

  "What is it?" I asked, alarmed. "Heather – why do you –"

  "Lord Eldred brings us the child!" She replied, understanding the situation much faster than I did – which was not an unusual circumstance. "Is it true, Lord? What of the father? Is there –"

  "The girl did not know who the father was, and none of the men have stepped forward. Ceo
ldor and his wife say they will keep it if no one else wants it, and I understand that an extra mouth to feed, one not born of your own union, may be an unwelcome thing. Still, I thought you might want to take the child yourselves, as the Gods have not seen fit all these winters to give you one in the usual way."

  I opened my mouth to respond, and found that I had no response. A child? A babe, freshly birthed? I did not know the first thing about the creatures – or keeping them alive.

  As it happened, none of what I knew or didn't know mattered, because the next thing I saw was my wife reaching into the basket and pulling a tiny bundle – so impossibly tiny – from inside, which she lifted up close to her face, where the tears ran freely down her cheeks.

  We kept the child. It was a girl, who we gave the name Eidyth because she smiled a lot and one of the Angle women told Heather that the name meant 'joyous.'

  At first, I did not take to her. It was not that I held any special disdain in my heart for the mite – but I certainly did not know what to do with her. Even as I held her in my arms, or tried to feed her goat's milk out of the leather bladder with a tiny hole poked into one corner that Heather had made, she seemed almost otherworldly with her strangely knowing eyes and her smallness that made me afraid I would break her bones.

  My wife took to her, though. My wife took to her like I had not seen her take to anything before – except me. She wore the child strapped to her back like the other women, and seemed to know within days what each of her cries meant, and how to soothe them.

  For the first time since meeting Heather, after Eidyth came I felt slightly unmoored. I'd seen it before, even as a child myself – a woman's all-encompassing interest in her baby. I'd heard Eadwin and Bradwin complain of it, when their wives had new babies, of how their husbands were forgotten.

  Heather did not forget me. Her attentions were elsewhere, at first, and that was a new situation, but I was not like Eadwin and Bradwin. Their children had come quickly, one after the other, and to see their wives with those children was not a noteworthy thing. For me, it was different. To have witnessed Heather's pain – to have felt that pain myself – was to understand what a precious thing it was we had been given. And even if at first I felt apart from the child, I would have had to be blind not to see the look in my wife's eyes as she gazed down at the baby when she slept.

  "I love her," Heather said one afternoon, when we sat at the top of the beach watching the sea and she held Eidyth in her arms. "When Lord Eldred brought her to us, I thought maybe I wouldn't. I thought maybe I could only love a baby I gave birth to." She looked up at me, holding up one hand to shield the sun from her eyes. "But I love her. I love her more than I could have imagined it was even possible to love her, Magnus. Sometimes, I –"

  She hesitated and looked back out at the sea. I put my arm around her, because I knew why she hesitated. "Do not worry, girl. There is room in your heart for –"

  "It doesn't mean I don't love you as much!" She interjected. "Or any less. I've been so worried that you would think I was trading one love for another. But that isn't what –"

  I waited for her to look back at me and then held her gaze, so she would know I spoke the truth. "I know it, girl. I know it. It's natural for a woman's focus to switch, when a child is so young. Do you think I resent it? Do you think I resent you – or her? No. I admit that at first I did not quite know what to make of her but as for you, my love? It has been one of the joys of my life to see you with her. Did you not hear me all those times I told you I loved you? Did you not believe me? Your contentment is my own."

  And it was. Heather and I were no longer separate people. Even in my thoughts, I would catch myself wondering sometimes if my laughter at an amusing comment was my own, or if I laughed only because I knew exactly how my wife would have done so. We finished each other's sentences, and found that there was often no reason to comment on a small matter, because each of us knew already what the other thought. So as Eidyth grew, and came to recognize me, to reach her fat little arms up for me when I came home after a day of work, it did not need to be explicitly stated that my heart grew new space for her just as Heather's had.

  Sometimes I would catch Heather watching us, as I held Eidyth on my lap and she ran her hands over my stubble and screamed with delight when I blew kisses onto her cheeks. In those moments I knew a true peace, a new kind of happiness. It was not even a winter after the little bundle had been brought to our door that it was not possible to distinguish between a family who the Gods had blessed with children of their blood, and my own family. It was just as Heather said – the love, when it came, was all-encompassing, uncomplicated, complete. By the time Eidyth took her first wobbly steps along the flagstones that led to our cottage, my pride was that of any father. In fact it was I who watched her that day, and called excitedly for my wife to come outside and see as our little one put one foot in front of another, and then another and another for the first time.

  "The Gods meant us to have her," I whispered one night as we peered into the cradle – a cradle the child was rapidly outgrowing – and watched her sleep. "You're going to ask me to explain, but I cannot. All I can do is feel the truth of it."

  "No," Heather replied quietly. "I won't ask you to explain, because I feel it too. Sometimes I think about what would have happened if the woman who gave birth to her had lived – and then I cry. I cry! Over the prospect of a young woman living rather than dying! It scares me sometimes, how much I love Eidyth. The things I would do for her..."

  It was not too long before I got a glimpse of how much my wife would do for our daughter. It was the second winter after she had made us a family that the girl woke us in the night with a cough that would not loosen its grip. I lifted her out of bed to find that she was wet with vomit, and that her breathing was labored.

  The cough lasted into the next day and then the next, and then, at the height of the fits, Eidyth began to slip into unconsciousness and Heather and I found ourselves caught in a flood of terror.

  "She's not breathing!" I heard, as I was returning from the estate with a small sack of herbs from the healers, to mix with tallow and rub on the child's chest. "Magnus! SHE'S NOT BREATHING!"

  Heather flew out of the cottage, her eyes wide, Eidyth limp in her arms, and we tried to rouse her in any way we could think of. When our daughter's lips began to turn blue and Heather looked at me to do something, it was the most helpless I'd ever felt.

  I gasped with relief when she opened her mouth and let out a whimper, and then I sat back on the stones that led to our front door and cried openly, as a child does. Heather did not cry – not right away. She stayed on her feet, her face white, her breathing shallow, and when I reached up to pull her down to me, she shook me off.

  "No. No. Magnus – she's dying. Eidyth is dying! I have to – I know where to take her. I know where –"

  I only ever saw Heather in that kind of panic a few times. The kind where her words ran into each other and her voice became high and thin and her hands trembled.

  "Lord Eldred has sent a messenger to the King's healer," I said. "They will have arrived by now, and by tomorrow –"

  "No," she cut me off, shaking her head. "No! These healers aren't helping – they never help! Can't you see that? It's all bullshit! It's all just – it's that thing where you believe something is going to work and so it does work – until it doesn't. I have to go! We – I have to go. I'll take her to a doctor, OK? A real doctor. I need to find that tree in the – Magnus, do you remember where it was that –"

  "Heather," I started, getting to my feet and wiping my eyes. "Heather. Heather! Look at me!"

  But she didn't look at me. She wasn't even listening. She ran back into the cottage with Eidyth, who was breathing shallowly by then but whose lips had returned to their usual pink hue. And then she started to wrap the leather sandals onto her feet, the ones she only wore when she was going to be walking on the sharp, barnacle-covered rocks at the beach, or if she was going to be traveling a
far distance on foot.

  "Where are you going?" I asked. "The child needs rest. I'll melt the tallow and we can mix the herbs –"

  "I need to find the tree," she repeated. "The tree! Remember the tree in the woods? Remember the day we met, when I took you to my world? I need – I need to find it. There are doctors – healers – there. Real ones. I can get some medicine. Where is the thick linen blanket? It's usually in bed – where is it?! Magnus!"

  My wife and I had come to an understanding of where she came from. I remembered the brief, strange journey to what she said was her homeland. She remembered it, too – obviously so, now that she was talking of going back there. But we didn't speak of it. It wasn't a secret, or something we had agreed not to speak of. Heather didn't try to mislead me about the place – quite the opposite, she tended to answer questions candidly when asked. But there were things she wouldn't explain. Or rather, there were things I couldn't understand, even if she did explain. And there was a shared knowledge that the place where Heather came from was not an ordinary place. It was not like the North or the Frankish Kingdom. It was not even like the far east, which I had only heard of from traders who brought colored silks with them when they returned from their journeys. It wasn't a place that could be walked or sailed to.

  So when she began to talk, in her panic, of taking Eidyth back to that place, which in my mind I associated only with a brief, long gone moment of fear and confusion, I could not allow it. When she moved to take our daughter out of the cottage only a short time before dusk, I took her arm in my hand and stopped her.

  "Let go!" She shrieked, looking back at me as if she was surprised to be touched. "Magnus! Let me – let –"