by Kim Wilkins
He smiled and propped his feet on the coffee table. “So I may as well head off to New Zealand?”
“I’ll miss you. Really, I will.”
“You can come and visit. It’s very pretty.” He shot out of his chair. “Do you want to see some pictures?”
“Um . . . sure.”
He paused. “Look at you. You’re so tired and here I am being an idiot.”
“You’re not being an idiot. I’d love to see pictures of New Zealand.”
“Lie down. I printed them off the Internet and they’re under a pile of work orders. Take me just a moment to find them.”
I lay down and pulled a cushion under my head. “Take your time. I’ve got all day.”
That was the last thing I remembered until I woke up nine hours later.
Gunnar had left me a note, telling me how peaceful I’d looked and he hadn’t wanted to wake me. I screwed it up with one hand and lobbed it across the room. Damn it! I had woken in time for the staff meeting, then, if Gunnar was right, my night shift. And I still hadn’t seen Vidar.
I raced over to the station to check the schedule, praying, crossing every finger, saying please, please, please in my head that Gunnar was wrong. But he was right. Magnus had crossed out Gordon’s name and put mine in. It was all too much for me to bear. I burst into tears.
“Victoria?”
I spun round, sniffing back my tears and forcing a smile at Carsten. “Hello.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
He peered over my shoulder at the roster. “Is that right? Did Magnus make you work day-night yesterday?”
“We had a disagreement,” I said, hearing my voice tremble. “He wants me on night shifts for a while.”
He shook his head. “No, no, that’s not right,” Carsten said. “I won’t allow it.”
“He’s the station commander.”
“I’m the medical officer. It’s an occupational safety risk. You go back to your own cabin. Go to bed and have a long rest. Let me take care of Magnus.”
I could have kissed him. “Really?”
“Really. Go on.”
“But the staff meeting?”
“Forget the staff meeting. You need to rest.”
I raced off to change and moved into the woods.
“Victoria. I thought I’d scared you away.”
“I had problems with my boss,” I said, standing uncertainly before him.
Afternoon sun revealed to me a warmth in the color of his eyes and tawny highlights in his dark hair I hadn’t seen before. I realized that the sunlight might be less kind to me with my pale coloring. My hands went self-consciously to my hair, pulling it over my cheeks.
“You are beautiful,” he said, as though reading my thoughts. He pushed my hands away and swept back my hair. “I could look at you forever.”
I fell into his arms and it felt like the safest haven I would ever know. Silence settled on us. I wished I would never have to speak or think again. This moment in his arms, just breathing, was too precious to ruin with anything so coarse as language and logic. He started pulling away and a sense of dread descended, as though I knew that what he said next would change everything.
“We cannot proceed another step until I’ve told you my tale,” he said, touching his lips to my hair.
My heart rose in my chest. It was ridicuous; why was I frightened? “Go on, then.”
“Let us sit down. Victoria, I will tell you things that might seem impossible at first, but if you listen and don’t push my story away, eventually you’ll start to believe.”
I lowered myself to the fur he had spread next to the fire. I felt like a small child, afraid of stories and words. “What do you mean?”
“Some of these memories are yours, but some belong only to me,” he said. “You need to hear them all.”
“Memories?” The familiarity of the forest deepened to such an intensity that my senses flared into hyperdrive. Everything grew brighter and louder.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked, and my own voice frightened me.
“Memories of us,” he said, grasping my fingers. “You know, don’t you?”
I tried to take comfort in his warm, firm hands. I wasn’t sure what he meant. “I don’t know anything.”
“Then listen,” he said. “Don’t say a word, just listen. And remember.”
Twenty-Two
[1004 Anno Domini]
I have done many things of which I am ashamed. I have waded deep in cruelty and pain, without an eye blink of thought for consequences. I have tasted much blood and breathed much battle dust. I don’t tell you this to frighten you, or to make you feel awe. I tell you this because it is true and I want to tell you only the truth.
My family are the Aesir. You may not have heard much of them in this life, but you knew them once. My father, Odin, believes himself a god. My brothers, uncles, sisters and aunts believe it too. I once believed it of myself, for we age slowly and only die if careless, but I no longer believe we’re gods. I know now that we are just a race of people; petty, brutal, stupid people. Centuries ago my family had many men to worship us. They built temples in our name, sacrificed their livestock, fought wars and had children for our honor. Every man in this part of Midgard had a story on his lips of us. Then, spreading from the warm parts of the world and moving up slowly through the rain and snow, came word of the man we called Hvítakristr: the White Christ. It was a tide that we couldn’t hold back.
Odin hated this new way of thinking. A god who rewarded meekness, gentleness, turning away from confrontation! He watched events on Midgard with horror. The king of Norway, Olaf Tryggvason, declared his kingdom part of the Christian kingdom, but many ordinary folk kept up the old faith. With Olaf’s death the country slid backward. The missionaries redoubled their efforts, taking the Christian faith to the new settlements. One of these missionaries was named Isleif Grímsson. I see a flicker around your eyebrows, Victoria, you recognize this name. This was your mother’s brother, and it was with him that you first came to Odin’s Island.
This island does not belong to Midgard, nor does it belong to Asgard. It lies between the two worlds, much as a stepping-stone lies between two banks of a stream. Odin had long used it as a place to exile the smaller creatures of Asgard who angered him, like your friend Skripi. By leaving them here, he hoped also to discourage settlements of mortals, and that has mostly worked for the last two thousand years.
Isleif Grímsson was young, energetic and extremely charming. He had brought Christ to many settlements in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, but he was very ill. A cancer grew inside him and he knew that it would kill him within a few short years. The turn away from Christ in Norway dismayed him and he wanted to finish his days in a Christian place, surrounded by Christian people. Odin’s Island already had a reputation among the folk of Norway as a place where any new settlers would be punished severely if they dared to make it a home. Isleif, I presume, did not believe in these folktales. He brought seventeen members of his family here, he built a church and he renamed the island Church Island.
Odin was at first unconcerned. He had creatures on the island to frighten the new mortals, he had a groundswell of renewed love for him in Norway. He thought the Christians would leave. Even after the church was built, and the three little wooden houses sprouted by the side of the fjord, he thought they would leave. The months went by and they did not leave. The wood wights frightened them, certainly, but rather than run away, the Christians began to ring their bells, morning and night, in the forest, over the water, so loudly and vigorously that we could sometimes hear it in Asgard, echoing over Bifrost on random updrafts.
At the time I lived in my father’s home at Valaskjálf. I had just returned from a battle on the borders of Vanaheim and barely had time to wash the blood from my hair before I received my orders from Odin.
Go to Odin’s Island, and put all mortals there to the sword.
I was once my fa
ther’s favorite son. I know this because he told me and everybody else, including his other sons. But don’t imagine some fond scene where he dandled me upon his knee and sang me nursery rhymes because of a special connection he felt with me. No, I was his favorite because I was marked out by fate. My destiny is one day to save his life at Ragnarok, the prophesied end of our world. So he took particular care in my education, taught me swordsmanship himself, kept me close by him. As I grew into a man, I could see how my brothers despised me for this, but Odin would not let them lay a hand upon me. I was too important.
For a long time, I was completely unaware that his affection relied on necessity. I gloried in his favoritism, I rose to his faith in me time after time. I killed for him, over and over. And this went on for many years and I never questioned it, just as I never questioned breathing.
At around the time when Christ’s name was first mentioned in our home, the questions began to bother me. If Odin was all-powerful, why was he so anxious? Some nights he would worry until he had to bend his head to the fire and vomit. If Odin was all-wise, why couldn’t he explain what would happen to us if Christ’s word did take hold in the northern lands? Instead, he would grind his teeth at the question and promise to hack the head off the next person who asked it. And if Odin was all-knowing, why didn’t he know that I had begun to doubt him and the life he had laid out for me? In my desire to please my father, I had turned my heart into a stone. And yet, somehow, it had begun to beat. In my last campaign, I had offered mercy to some of my enemies if they were old or frail. I had started to think about my mother and wondered about her life in exile. I was waking out of a long, dark dream.
Still, the idea of butchering mortals caused me only the faintest disquiet. It would be unpleasant, but I would do it quickly and keep the peace at Valaskjálf. When I arrived on Odin’s Island I was not the man I should have been; my resolve was vulnerable, and I had not reckoned with meeting you.
These are your memories too, Victoria. I’ve held them for a thousand years. As they unfold back to you, you may feel strange or even frightened. It is all past, now. The threads have been unraveled and cast back into the dark. There will be time for fear, but later. Not now, not here with me. Close your eyes if you wish and see yourself as I saw you that first morning in autumn.
I had arrived the previous night and camped. When morning came I set out toward the settlement with my sword in my hand. You must imagine it, a gleaming immortal sword with a broad flat blade, perilously sharp and battle-hardened, forged by fire giants and called Hjarta-bítr, the heart-biter. Mortal flesh would be butter beneath it.
As I approached the lake, a flash of dazzling white caught my eye and I paused among the trees. The dappled light illuminated you there, kneeling by the lake. You had been drawing water, but had stopped to watch your own reflection. At first, it was only curiosity that made me wait and gaze at you. Your hair and skin were so fair and the effect of the sunlight on you was to make you look like a carving. You wore a dress the color of the leaves fallen around you. You were stiller than the surface of the water, but then a breeze picked up your hair, trailing a strand across your face, and you brushed it away with your fingers and sat back, looking up toward the branches moving above you.
I could see your pulse beating in your throat and the faint blue lines of your veins. And a sudden understanding was upon me. Mortal. You were so vulnerable, only a soft blink away from death at any time. All I had to do was spill the blood in those veins, still the pulse in that throat, and your light would be extinguished. An unfamiliar ache swelled inside my chest and I dropped my sword.
“Is someone there?” you called as the weapon landed in the undergrowth.
I stepped out from my cover. A sunbeam flared in my eyes and you were swallowed by light. I shielded my vision with my left hand and saw that you were smiling at me.
“Who are you?” you asked. “Have you just arrived on the island?”
“Yes,” I said. “My name is Vidar.”
You rose and brushed a fallen leaf from your skirt. “I’m Halldisa Ketil’s-daughter. Everyone calls me Halla.”
I see the twitch of recognition on your brow again, Victoria. You recognize the name by which you were once known. By now, I hope, this story has begun to seem real to you and not the mad ramblings of a desperate man. Though I am desperate, make no mistake.
Still, you were smiling at me, and I wondered at how trusting you were.
“What are you doing here on Church Island, Vidar?” you asked. “Have you come to join my uncle’s mission?”
I recoiled involuntarily and you laughed, freely and beautifully, as though we had known each other for years. “So, Vidar,” you said, “you must learn to hide your reluctance to be part of Isleif’s good Christian kingdom. All my brothers and I have. You must simply make a very somber face and talk endlessly about damnation. That keeps him quiet.”
“I do not know Isleif,” I said. “I am a stranger here.”
You tilted your head. “We are all strangers here, Vidar.” You sighed. “I yearn every day for my home and my friends, but that life exists many miles over the sea. It goes on without me.”
I was fascinated by you. I had never talked to a mortal before and the idea that you yearned for something touched me unexpectedly. “What does it feel like when you yearn?” I asked, moving closer and putting the sun at my back.
“That’s an odd question,” you said.
“Can you answer it?”
You closed your eyes and drew down your brows. “It feels like my heart is being pulled from somewhere far away.” Then you opened your eyes and laughed again. “That sounds like nonsense.”
“No, not at all,” I said. “That’s how I feel when I yearn.”
You sat on the ground among the fallen leaves. “What do you yearn for, Vidar? Sit down and tell me.”
I shook myself. A few minutes ago I had been prepared to murder you, but now I was being invited to sit by you and tell you what I yearned for. Confusion held my tongue.
You scooped up a handful of leaves and threw them at me. “Come on, we’ll be here until Michaelmas.”
“My family doesn’t celebrate Michaelmas,” I said.
You shrugged. “I don’t care what your family does. I asked you a question.”
I was overwhelmed with strange feelings. All I knew to do in such a situation was kill something or retreat. I turned and, without a backward glance, walked away.
“Vidar, where are you going?” you called.
I scooped up my sword and disappeared into the forest. You didn’t follow, and for that I was glad.
I spent the day pacing the beach, trailing my sword in the wet sand. I felt the keen discomfort that only a man who brings shame upon his family can know. My brothers would laugh at me, my father would bellow until the hall shook. I could not kill you. I recalled the light in your eyes when you laughed, and knew it was too precious a thing to extinguish. Confusion drove me up and down the water’s edge. My father’s hall and all the brutal laws that filled it had seemed as fixed as ancient stone, and yet the sand was moving underneath them, just as it slid and skidded under my feet. Why kill the mortals? Why spend my days winning battle glory against the Vanir? Why snarl and set my eye only on the honor of my family, when my family had so little to honor—their petty quarrels, their trivial desires, their cruel humor?
I began to shed my family that day, adding up their wrongs, finding the sum too great to measure. The tide crept in. I thrust my sword up to its hilt in the sand and sat back on the beach to watch as the sea swallowed it. The afternoon grew pink and mauve, the wind was cold, the sun disappeared.
Odin would know, of course, that I had not killed you or your family. I believed I would have to convince Isleif to leave the island and take his followers with him. The next morning, I dressed for battle and rode Arvak down the edge of the fjord toward the church. Three little girls played in the grass, an elderly woman hung wet blankets over a tree’s br
anches, and Isleif Grímsson stood at the entrance to his home—one of three unfinished ash cabins—at the side of the water.
“Ho, stranger,” he called. “Have you come to find God?”
I did not reply. I rode up to him, and I could see unusual strength in his face. He must have been frightened of me: I was a stranger, I wore a bloodstained coat of mail and a scarred iron helm. Isleif betrayed no fear. Rather, he emanated an odd serenity, a bemused acceptance of whatever it was that I was bringing to his family.
“You must leave this island,” I said as I drew even with him.
The elderly woman had paused to watch from a distance. One of the little girls ran toward us and the woman tried to stop her.
“All is well, Gudrid,” Isleif said to her. “Let the child come. This man means no harm.”
The little girl snuggled under Isleif’s elbow. “Who are you?” she said to me.
“My name is Vidar,” I said, without dropping Isleif’s gaze. “I bring you a grim warning. You must leave this island. This island belongs to Odin.”
“Odin isn’t real,” the little girl said confidently.
“I assure you he is,” I said.
Isleif patted the child’s head. “Odin only exists because God permits it,” he said. “I am not afraid of him or of his family.”
“You must be,” I said, “for you have angered us greatly by building your church here. You and your settlers are all in danger.” I looked around, and noticed that one of the cabin doors had opened and two young men peered out. You were with them and you were still smiling.
“God will see to it that no harm comes to us,” Isleif said. “Would you like to give yourself to God, Vidar?”
Anger tightened my guts. I spat on the ground. “No, I would not,” I said, “for among my family, God’s name is abhorred.”
“If you change your mind, I’ll still be here,” Isleif said, and turned his back on me, still with the little girl under his wing. I had never seen anyone turn his back on me before, leaving himself so vulnerable to the point of a sword. I had little time to wonder if Isleif were brave or foolish, because the two other little girls had run toward me and were asking me if I’d let them ride my horse. Arvak whickered anxiously—he was used to armed warriors, but little girls’ probing fingers were new to him—so I turned him sharply and rode out of the mission, into the trees.