by Joanna Bell
She tried to shake herself free, but I held her steady. "I cannot let you go," I told her, and my own voice sounded heavy with sadness – it was the first time I touched my wife that way, to bar her, in a serious way, from doing something. "Come back inside, girl. The child breathes again. Put her in her bed and I will warm the –"
"NO! LET GO! Magnus, please! Please let me go!"
She struggled so hard that Eidyth woke fully, and began to cry when she saw her parents shouting and screaming at each other. And still Heather did not relent. Even as the child's cries became hysterical, and she began to cough again, her mother would not stop trying to shake loose my grip.
"Please," I begged. "Heather, you are out of your mind. I do not condemn you for it – I feel it myself, in truth. But look at the sun! It will be dark soon – do you propose to take Eidyth into the woods at night? To look for a tree I feel sure you do not remember the location of? There are wolves nearby, you've heard them howling yourself! I cannot allow you to –"
And then suddenly she broke free, because I had relaxed a little, thinking perhaps she was coming back to herself. At once I leapt after her, catching her arm again before she could escape the little courtyard that surrounded our dwelling. That time, I took Eidyth from her arms as she spun around and momentarily loosened her grip, and then she stood before me, demanding that I give her back.
"Give her to me. Magnus, give her to me! Give her –" she reached out, trying to snatch our daughter, who was screaming with fear and clinging to my neck, from my arms.
"STOP IT!" I shouted, when I could take no more. "Girl, come back inside at once. I'll send for the healer to bring you a calming –"
"Fuck the healer! It doesn't work, Magnus! Didn't you hear me?! It's not real! You think those herbs are going to do anything? They're not! She's going to die – she's not getting better, you see it as well as I do. If you want her to live, give her back to me. Now! Give her back so I can –"
I stepped forward to force her back into the cottage, but she caught my eye just as I was about to do so and I think she saw then that I was not going to give Eidyth back to her – and that she did not have the strength to take her from me.
"Fine," she said, breathing deeply, trying to get control of herself. "Fine. I'll go myself. I'll get – I'll bring back some medicine, I'll –"
I moved to grab her again but she jumped out of the way. And then she took off running. Heather was a fast runner – we'd had races on the beach before, which I had only barely won. And now I had a screaming child in my arms.
"It's alright," I lied to Eidyth because I needed it to be true as badly as she did. "It's alright, little one. It's –"
"Magnus?" Bradwin was at the half-height stone wall that surrounded my cottage. "I heard screaming – I – is the child hurt?"
The child wasn't hurt. She was sick. Sick enough that even as I hadn't agreed out loud with Heather's assessment, I feared that it was true – that Eidyth was dying. And still she howled in my arms, although a little less intensely now, and buried her face in my neck. And Heather was out there now, somewhere in the woods as the night began to close in.
"Where is –" Bradwin started, but I ran back into the cottage to get the little woolen bear that Ceoldor's wife had knitted for Eidyth and that she could not sleep without. And then I handed the bear, and my daughter, to my closest friend.
"Heather has lost her mind," I told him, barely managing to keep my own. "She just took off – she just ran off into the woods talking about – talking nonsense. She worries herself to mindlessness over Eidyth. I must go – there are wolves, you must have heard them! I must go and –"
"Go," Bradwin replied, taking the child, who began to scream again and reach for me. "Go now and bring her back, Magnus. We will watch her until you return."
There was no time to express my thanks to Bradwin, but I could see he understood. I darted back into the cottage to grab my sword, and then stopped for only a moment, to kiss Eidyth's cheek and whisper a promise that I would see her soon enough and not to worry, before racing down the path in the direction Heather had gone.
Chapter Seventeen
Heather
I ran faster and further, that evening, than I had ever run before. I ran until my lungs felt like they were going to burst and my knees throbbed from the many tumbles I took in the dim light. I ran until I physically could not run anymore, and all the while I tried to keep one eye on the woods, looking for a tree I thought I remembered clearly. Each time I thought I'd found it I leaned against it, flattening my hands against its bark, only to remain exactly where I was – in a forest in the Kingdom of the East Angles with a daughter at home who was sick enough to put a fear into me the likes of which I'd never known.
When the sun sank fully below the horizon, and it became impossible to see – I had not thought to bring a torch with me – I found my way back out to the coast and collapsed on the beach, sobbing. I wanted to believe that it was all going to be OK, as my husband told me it was. But it didn't take formal medical training to see that whatever it was sending Eidyth into fits of coughing, it was no harmless cold. I could still feel the echo of her limp weight in my arms when she had stopped breathing and lost consciousness – Magnus was right that I was hysterical when I tried to take her with me on my search for the tree, but he was wrong if he thought there was no reason for it.
There was nothing else to do but go back to River Falls. To the 1990s, which it would then be. I wouldn't have any money when I got there, and I would be dressed like a homeless person, but I would be there. I would be in a place that had cough medicines and decongestants and antibiotics. Eidyth needed medicine. She wasn't getting better – quite the opposite. Without something more than herbs, she was going to die. And I could not allow that to happen.
I resolved to continue the search for the tree at the first light of dawn. It was north of Haesting, in the woods but close to the coast. I would just have to start methodically taking every path that led inland, seeing where it went, and laying my hands on every tree that looked like it could be the one.
My sleep was fitful. I was tired from the running and the high emotions but the dread in my belly would not let go. I spent the night waking what seemed like every few minutes, confused at first about my whereabouts and then crushed anew every time by the remembrance of Eidyth's sickness.
At dawn, I resumed the search, stiff with discomfort and soreness from the previous night's run. Sleep-deprived and aching, I began to make my way north again, turning west down every path that led into the forest, following it for as long as I thought necessary to spot the tree, which in my memory was not too far from the coast.
As I remembered it, the tree was iconic. It stood apart from other trees – its trunk much thicker, paler than the others, its canopy thicker. But it had been almost ten years then, since I'd last seen it, and all the trees in the woods as I searched began to look the same.
By the time the sun was high in the sky that day, a painful cramp had developed in one of my sides, and my mouth was dry because I wasn't taking enough water. The soles of my feet were bloodied in spite of the leather I'd wrapped them in. I was losing hope.
My husband found me kneeling in the middle of the path, retching and almost delirious with thirst, and immediately held his water-bladder to my lips.
"Oh Heather," he whispered, alternating between holding me against him, stroking my hair, and pulling away to look at me, horrified. "What have you done, girl? What have you done to yourself? Your – your feet! They're like raw pieces of pigflesh! Come, I will –"
"I'm not a 'girl' anymore, Magnus," I replied quietly, my voice hoarse. "You should stop calling me that."
I couldn't have fought him, even if I wanted to. My strength was gone. I began to cry, as the understanding that I was probably not going to be able to find the tree came over me. And I was so dehydrated that there weren't even any tears left to tumble down my face.
"You're always going to be my gi
rl," he replied, holding me tightly to his chest. "When you are nine tens, you are still going to be my girl."
"She's going to die," I rasped, looking up at him imploringly, desperate for him to understand. "If I can find the tree, I can go back to the United States. They have medicines. Not herbs from the healer, but medicines that work. We have treatments to stop coughing, to stop sicknesses. Children don't die of coughs anymore, where I come from. I could go to a pharmacy and get –"
"Heather, you are coming back to Haesting with me now. Even if what you say is true, and your people have more effective potions for illnesses, how long will it take us to find that tree again? Of all the trees in the Kingdom, how will we find that one?"
"It looked different," I replied. "It – it was bigger – wasn't it? Don't you remember? And we don't have to search the whole Kingdom, because we know it was north of Haesting, right? We –"
"It did not look different," he stopped me. "Girl, the tree was as any other. A large one, yes, but it had no mark to set it apart. Come now, I cannot listen to this any longer – you give us both false hope."
"Magnus, no. I –"
But I could not keep speaking. I was too weak. I was too weak even to stand, so my husband carried me back down the coastal path over his shoulder, back to Haesting. And the whole journey there, as I slipped in and out of consciousness, the seed of anger that had been planted at his refusal to take me seriously about the medicines buried itself deep into the soil of my heart.
Eidyth survived that first sickness. But she did not survive it in the way a child from the USA survives a cough – the way I myself had survived numerous childhood colds. She was weakened by the whole episode, so even as she was 'healed' – as the Angles insisted she was – her lungs were weakened. Every time it rained, every time she did not get enough sleep for two or more nights in a row, the cough would come back. She did not lose weight, exactly, because we made sure she always had enough to eat, but where she had previously thrived and grown like I expected children to do, she, after her illness, began to look more and more like the Angle children – pale, not as tall or as solid as I would have liked.
It was not just Eidyth who was different. I was different. My marriage was different. I could not forgive Magnus for bringing me back to Haesting that day, when I had meant to find the tree. Every time I looked at Eidyth and thought her chest a little sunken, or the darkness under her eyes a little too pronounced, rage welled up inside me. Sometimes it felt as if I was barely holding it in, as if at any moment I was on the verge of launching into a screaming tirade, accusing him of being the cause of her weakness, condemning him for forbidding me, like one would forbid a child, to look for the tree.
I did not do a good job of hiding my anger, either. And in his turn, my husband drew himself away from me, becoming more impatient with me when I needed help or did not understand something he spoke of. Eidyth sensed that not all was well with her parents, and herself became more withdrawn. The cottage, which had once echoed with laughter and work and the busy, happy tasks of being a family, became a quieter place – a darker place.
"You must stop punishing him," Brona said to me one day as we – Brona and I, Eidyth, and a few of Brona's younger children – collected oysters at the beach. "It is not the Northman's fault that your daughter got sick. I know the temptation to lay blame, Eltha – believe me, I do. I have never felt rage as I have when my children suffer for no good reason. But it is not his fault. You cannot make him the target of your ire, simply because he is the closest to –"
"You don't know what you're talking about," I replied stiffly, twisting an oyster from one of the seaweed-covered rocks and looking up to see where Eidyth played. "You don't. I don't blame him for her sickness. I blame him for not letting me – I tried to – oh, goddamnit! You're wrong, Brona! OK? I don't think he made her sick – that's so stupid, why would I think that?!"
My friend went back to picking oysters quietly, hearing my strident tone. But that evening, when we walked with the children back to Haesting and stood beside the stone wall to my cottage dividing the oysters between us, she put her arms around me and whispered in my ear:
"I'm not your enemy. I don't give you advice because I think myself above you. I give advice because I have been where you are. Magnus loves the child as much as you do. You must see it. What is more important than her happiness, now? Do you think she cares what hurts her parents carry in their hearts? See how quiet she is, Eltha. See how she wishes her mother smiled again."
It was difficult – it was more than difficult – to hear words like that as anything other than a condemnation. Even as Brona walked away after kissing my cheek, I wanted to shout after her she didn't know anything. That the best thing for Eidyth was to have a mother who would do anything for her – and not a father who stopped her mother from doing those things.
But I did not shout. I just watched, in silence, as she led her brood back down the path to their own cottage. And that evening, I watched my own husband, and my own child, without the veil of anger over my eyes. Magnus looked the same as ever – in his mid thirties by then, he did not, to me, look a day over twenty-five. He was as strong as ever, as upright in his bearing, just as hard-working. But he did not look at me as he used to. In fact he seemed to avoid my eyes altogether.
And Eidyth had the same quality about her – a wariness in her smile, a barely-perceptible hesitation before she spoke or looked at me.
I thought I had been doing a good job. I watched her like a hawk, my chest tightening at the merest hint of a cough, or even a labored breath. At night I knelt beside her as she slept, and wept with fear that she would get sick again. Every day, I made sure she had enough food for every meal, taking my own portion of cream in the springtime and pouring it with her own over her morning porridge, or giving her my portion of meat for her supper. It was not only I who did these things. Magnus gave up his own meat and butter just as often.
But I forced myself, after Brona's words, to watch my husband and my child over the next days. And I forced myself to do it without the always-constant righteous anger lurking in my heart, the feeling that not all that could have been done for Eidyth had been done – and the conviction that it was specifically Magnus' fault. Without that anger, it was easier to see what was in front of my eyes. He did love her as much as I loved her. He loved me, as well. What must he have thought that night, when his wife took off into the dark woods, where wolves had been sighted, and his daughter's chest heaved with sickness?
And the worst of it, the part that even weeks and months later I found it most difficult to let go of – was that he was right about the tree. I wasn't going to find it again. And given that truth, Magnus could not have been said to have done anything wrong in preventing me from killing myself looking for it. Seen in that light, from a different perspective, he had no choice but to bring me home that day. To have done anything else would have been to fail at his job as a husband – protecting his family.
It was news from one of the Angle women, within the walls of the Haesting estate itself, where I went to trade a measure of dried peas for some tallow, that drove me out into the fields later in the afternoon a few days later to find my husband.
Ardith, Ceoldor's wife, was dead. She had developed a fever in the night, and died before the sun had set on the next day. The Angle women spoke of it in tones both somber and unsurprised. How long was it going to take me, I wondered as I headed back to my cottage with a small cask of tallow under one arm, until I knew the kind of place where I was? I mean, I knew where I was. But I still acted as if I didn't. Word of a woman's death was still enough to shock me. Even as my own child had nearly died!
Late that afternoon, after sending Eidyth to spend it with Brona's children, I made my way out to the fields where Magnus worked with the men to plow some freshly cleared land. It did not miss my notice, either, that when he spotted me a certain rigidity took over his body. Still, he jogged down to greet me.
"What i
s it?" He asked, worried. "Is the child –"
"She's with Brona," I replied. "She's fine. You don't look fine, though. You look worried. Do you remember when I used to come and visit you during the day? When I would bring you some ale and buttered bread to eat?"
"Aye," my husband replied, wiping the sweat from his brow. "I remember. All the other men were so jealous of me, to have a wife like you."
"And they're not jealous anymore?" I asked, although in truth I already knew the answer.
Magnus fell silent for a moment, and then he reached out and took my hand in his. "There are seasons to everything, girl – not just the weather. There are seasons to a marriage."
"And ours is in winter right now. I think I may have made it winter," I replied, looking back up to the field where the men were adjusting the leather collar that bound the oxen. "You must hate me."
"Hate you?!" He replied at once. "Hate? Is that what you think, girl?"
I shrugged. "You're a better person than me, Magnus. I see it now. Maybe I always saw it? I don't know. But even now, after I've treated you coldly for months, you're trying to make me feel better. You –"
"I don't say anything I don't believe to be true," he broke in. "Do you think I don't understand? Do you think I don't see that it is the mother in you that drove you into the woods that night, that made you fight me – and that even now leads you to resent me?"
I almost laughed out loud, but not because anything he said was particularly funny.
"What is it?" He asked, when he saw my expression. "Why do you wear that strange smile on your lips?"
"Because you're so – perfect!" I cried. "I've been a total bitch for months and I came up here to say sorry and to try to see what I could do to make it up to you and you're standing there like some kind of endlessly patient priest, making excuses for –"
"No," he stopped me before I could go any further. "No. It is not excuses I make for you. This is not a petty matter, girl. This is not an argument over whose job it was to close the sheep in the shelter at night. You are Eidyth's mother. As her mother, you would do anything to keep her safe and well – including killing yourself. You had to leave that night, to find the tree. I understand that. It is what any mother would do, if she thought she could do something to heal her sick child. But just as you had to do it, I had to stop you. I had to come for you, and bring you home. Do you think I don't know why you're so angry with me? I do. I accept your anger. But it does not change what my job is as your husband – and as Eidyth's father."