by Dale Peck
Susan opened her mouth to protest, but felt a hand on her arm. It was Mario’s.
“Not now,” he said, giving “now” the broadest possible meaning. “And besides, two groups can gain twice as much information as one.” And he nodded at Iacob.
“I thought you already talked to him.”
Mario grinned. “I haven’t got your charm, Susie, let alone your cross-examination skills.”
“Mario,” Susan said, fighting hard to keep a grin off her face. “Stop calling me Susie. And don’t think I’m happy about this,” she added, loud enough for Iussi, Gunnar, Uncle Farley, and the other men to hear.
“Girls never are,” Gunnar said, clapping a hand on Uncle Farley’s back. “Gunnar Thorvaldsson,” he said in a fraternal tone of voice.
“Farley Richardson.”
“Well met, son of Richard.”
“Her mother is my older sister,” Susan heard Uncle Farley say as he lifted Miss Applethwaite’s picnic basket and walked toward the entrance of the grass-covered building. “Believe you me, I know where Susan’s independence comes from.”
Gunnar laughed aloud. “The women of your country strike me as exceptional in many ways. Your wife must be a truly gifted weaver,” he said, reaching up and squeezing Uncle Farley’s fleece-covered shoulder. “And I cannot imagine what your mother fed you, to produce such a giant of a son.”
“Just wait’ll I open this basket. Have you ever had a turkey sandwich?”
“Turkey!” Gunnar exclaimed. “’Tis the food of legend!” And, smacking his hands, he and the other men vanished inside.
Susan turned to face Iacob. The boy looked at her with eyes that, like the ocean, were gray and deep—cold, yes, but also warm. Alive, in a way that none of the other men’s eyes were. It suddenly occurred to her to wonder why he hadn’t been invited inside either. What was this traitor business, or the stuff about his father opening a hole in the sky?
With a start, Susan realized the boy was staring at her as intently as she was examining him. His expression was neither curious nor defiant. Merely… appraising. Behind him stood a dozen or so buildings in various stages of disrepair, and beyond them were the fjords and the hills, the streams, the rocks, the sheep, the swiftly moving clouds; behind them the ocean swooshed and a stiff breeze clattered grains of sand across the beach. Iacob stood in the midst of all this, and yet he seemed distinct from it as well, an immigrant only partially suited to this environment. This image jogged some memory in Susan’s brain. And then it came to her: her tree. The redwood in Manhattan. Capable of living on the East Coast only because of a mistake in climate, yet adding beauty and grace to the land from which it grew. The motionless boy struck Susan as not quite of his world, but something she couldn’t imagine anywhere else either.
Standing up straight, Susan did her best to return the boy’s appraisal, taking him in from his blackened bare feet up to his shock of dirty brown hair, which stuck out from his face in a thousand different directions. Just give it five hundred years, she thought, and that hairstyle will finally be in style.
Susan laughed at her private joke. Iacob raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything. She took a step toward him and stuck out her hand.
“I’m Susan Oakenfeld.”
Iacob looked at her hand, and then he looked back at her face.
“He is my father.”
After a long moment, Susan realized the boy wasn’t going to shake her hand. Maybe he wasn’t being unfriendly, she thought hopefully. Maybe they just don’t do that yet. She shoved her hand in her pocket.
“Who is? Iussi? Gunnar?” Somehow she knew neither of these was the man Iacob was referring to.
“Karl Olafson,” Iacob said, his voice level and deep. Deep as his gray eyes. “Karl Olafson,” Iacob Karlson repeated in a voice as deep as the cold, cold ocean. “The man you have come here to kill.”
Susan opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Closed it one more time. She shook her head in confusion.
“We wouldn’t …I mean, I could never…I mean, kill someone? We just wouldn’t do that.”
“People will do anything,” Iacob said. “Under the right conditions, for the right reasons. Even kill.”
“No,” Susan protested, but her voice was weak. Bjarki had said that as long as the temporal squall raged they would be unable to return home, and it was starting to look more and more likely that the charm Karl Olafson had stolen from the Qaanaaq was at the center of it. But was it worth taking someone’s life to get it back?
While she was pondering this, Iacob whirled on his heel and started walking away from her. He walked slowly though, not as if he was leaving, but as if he wanted her to follow. Just as she caught him up, he said,
“You and your companions speak my language better than anyone I have ever heard.”
Used to being the one who asked the questions, Susan felt distinctly off balance. Now, stalling, all she could come up with was, “We do?”
“You do.”
Gravel gritted beneath Susan’s shoes and, less loudly, beneath Iacob’s bare feet. They reached the corner of the long house, and Iacob paused. He looked at the sea for a moment, then turned and started toward the hills. As she set off after him, Susan suddenly realized he was taking her on a tour of his home. He was showing her where he lived.
She looked at what he was offering her. The ground between the houses and the fields was covered in patches of grass and pebbles, and a thin stream snaked its way out of a cleft between two hills. Three more houses curved off to the left. Stingy threads of smoke came out of the chimneys of the first two; the third looked as though it had collapsed at one end. There was something that looked like a stone-walled corral beyond the last house, and then there was a fourth building, not as long as the houses, but taller, with two small windows on the side, their tiny panes filled with some opaque material. Its stone walls cut a sharp outline against the empty sky, but it wasn’t until she discerned the cross shape worked with white stones into the brown that she realized the tiny building was a church. A pair of sheep grazed in a fenced churchyard strewn with tiny piles of rocks—no, not piles of rocks, but tombstones. Many more tombstones than the number of living people Susan had seen.
It was suddenly impressed upon her that she was looking at something no one else from her time had seen: a thousand-year-old Norse settlement, the first-ever European town in the New World. The buildings were small, but the fact of their existence seemed disproportionately large. This was history, and she was seeing it. She was a part of it.
Susan realized Iacob was staring at her, waiting for an explanation of how she’d come to speak his language so well.
“Well, Uncle Farley’s research has taken him to all sorts of places—”
“He has never been here,” Iacob cut her off. And then, leaning close to her in a gesture that could have been threatening or simply conspiratorial, he hissed, “I think you are assisted in your smooth speech by the same magic that has claimed my father. What I want to know is, do you work this magic, or does it work you?”
Susan tore her eyes from the graveyard. “Wh-what makes you ask that?”
“Because after my father found what he found, he was suddenly able to understand the speech of the Qaanaaq, and not just the words we had picked up from trading with them. One time I even heard him speak to a Qaanaaq he had captured, and though it seemed to me he spoke our language, the prisoner seemed to understand him equally well, and was even in the act of answering him when my father slit his throat.”
Susan gulped. The ruse was up. “We believe your father has stumbled across something that is beyond his power to control. But we, that is my uncle Farley and my brother Mario, have studied these things, and we can help.”
“The boy is your brother?”
Susan didn’t give herself time to consider the question. “Yes,” she said firmly.
“There is something different about him.”
“Well, he’s my half brother.�
�
“Not that kind of different. Not”—and here Iacob reached out a hand and touched Susan’s short dark hair—“not a difference in hair color.”
The edge of Iacob’s hand brushed against her cheek when he touched her hair, and Susan felt a blush heat up her skin. She could feel her heart beating in her chest and she wasn’t sure why. To her surprise, Iacob blushed too, and he pulled his hand away and turned back the way they had come. With a start, Susan realized the tour was already over. In a hundred paces, they had seen everything.
“Um, yes,” Susan said, “there is something different about my brother. I would explain it to you, but I’m afraid I don’t really understand it myself.”
Iacob nodded. “It changes you.”
“It?”
Iacob waved a hand. “The magic. My father was always a hard man, but he worked for the good of our community. For as long as I have been alive he has led the Nordseta, risking his life to bring back enough food to see us through the winter, as well as such rarities as people from the Old World might desire, should they ever come here again. But now he has put all our lives in jeopardy. He has taken our boats, he has made the Qaanaaq our enemy. He is a murderer.”
“Maybe the magic doesn’t affect everyone the same way,” Susan said desperately. She didn’t want to believe her own brother could become as corrupted as the man Iacob was describing to her. Could slit someone’s throat.
Iacob squinted at her. “I think you know no more about the amulet than I do.”
Susan tried to keep her voice neutral. “Amulet?”
A look of confusion crossed Iacob’s face, and Susan, fingering the translation vial beneath her jacket, found herself wondering what word he’d really spoken, and what word he’d heard from her mouth. But all he did was make a circle of the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and bring it to his throat, as if indicating a charm hanging from his neck.
“You understand?” “Yes.” Susan’s nod felt jerky to her. “What, um, what’d it look like?”
“You don’t know?”
Susan had anticipated this question. “I just want to find out if it’s the object we’re looking for,” she countered smoothly.
Iacob peered at her. The trace of another grin curled his lips, but Susan couldn’t tell if he was on to her. “My father showed it to no one, not even me. But I caught a glimpse of it once.” He paused, as if debating whether or not to describe it, then nodded. “It was golden. Shaped like an arrowhead, and marked across with lines.”
Susan had a flash. They had come back to the front of the houses, and she looked around for a stick but didn’t see one, so she dropped to her knees and used her finger to draw in the stony soil. She drew the seven lines that had been impressed into the cover of the book Mario had given her and Charles.
“Did it look like this?”
Iacob’s eyes went wide. “So it is yours!” For the first time, Susan heard a trace of childlike eagerness in his sober adult voice. Eagerness, but also suspicion: this amulet had turned his father evil, after all.
“Actually,” Susan admitted, “I don’t know who it belongs to. Mario might, but I think even he knows only part of the truth. But we, that is, my other brother, Charles, and I, we received something that was marked with the same insignia. And we think it’s somehow causing problems in our—” Susan was going to say “time,” but changed her mind. “In our world.”
Before Iacob could respond to this, a loud voice split the air.
“Heathen!”
Susan whirled around. A wild-haired figure was striding rapidly toward them from the direction of the church. Tattered robes flapped from his body, and something glittered in his outstretched right hand. Susan thought it was a short sword at first, then realized it was a cross.
“Devils! Demons! Away with you!”
“Father Poulsen,” Iacob whispered to her. “He carries his cross with him at all times, because he is convinced Gunnar would melt it into a rake if he ever set it down.”
“Step away from the witch-girl, Iacob Karlson!” Father Poulsen said now, waving his cross as if he were swatting at flies. Susan could see that the priest’s vestments had once been richly embroidered but were now tattered and held together with bits of twine and leather patches. Beneath the dirty hem, his feet were as bare and black as Iacob’s. But something that looked like a ruby glittered on the bar of the thick silver cross, and it was almost as big as her fist.
“She is no witch, Father. Just a traveler from Ropia.”
It took Susan a moment to realize this last word meant “Europe.” Of course, Iacob would think that anyone who possessed the material goods she and Uncle Farley did must come from the Old World. She wondered why the translation charm hadn’t fixed it, though. Maybe it was attempting to render his lack of knowledge? Or maybe it was wearing off? It would be awkward to have to reapply it in front of Iacob, let alone the raving newcomer.
“Bah!” the priest cried now. “Black magic swirls about her, from the tips of her shorn raven tresses to her shadowed ankles, which are as delicate as a reindeer’s.”
Everyone looked down at Susan’s ankles, including Susan. She was wearing black socks, which she guessed was what the priest meant by “shadowed.”
“Is it magic you see about her?” Iacob said in an amused tone of voice. “Or merely a temptation to renounce your vows?”
For the second time in their brief acquaintance, Susan felt her skin grow hot. The priest, however, was not amused, and he stuck his ruby-fronted cross right in Iacob’s face.
“Watch your tongue, child. Between the sins of your father and your affection for the Qaanaaq, you are but a half step from damnation yourself.”
At the mention of his father, Iacob’s face went cold and his hands balled into fists. Susan was afraid he was going to strike the priest, but fortunately another voice broke the standoff.
“Here now,” came Iussi’s levelheaded call. “What’s the commotion?”
Susan turned and saw Uncle Farley and Iussi and Gunnar walking up from the house they’d gone into a half hour ago. The picnic basket, apparently empty, swung lightly from Uncle Farley’s hand, and Iussi had both hands on his stomach and was rubbing contentedly.
She jumped when she felt a thump on her shoulder: Father Poulsen had “tapped” her with his cross, which was every bit as heavy as it looked.
“This witch-girl is casting spells!”
A frown crossed Iussi’s lips, still greasy with what appeared to be turkey gravy. “Spells?”
“Look!”
Susan gasped. The priest was pointing at the ground where she had just drawn the symbol that had been on the cover of Mario’s book. But then she gasped again, because the symbol was gone, smeared out by several long foot-wide swathes.
The priest whirled on Iacob. “Don’t think you can hide the evidence of her sorcery, boy. I saw her scratch her satanic design into our soil. This land is cursed now. Cursed!”
Iacob turned and looked at the sheep on the distant hillside. A thin, innocent whistle passed his lips.
“This land has long since been cursed,” Gunnar said, although his voice was not particularly concerned. His lips glistened with the last traces of Miss Applethwaite’s meal, and his beard was full of breadcrumbs. “Neither God nor devil has much use for it as far as I can see.” He stifled a burp. Well, actually he didn’t stifle it. He just burped.
“Silence your blasphemy,” the priest declared, waving his cross wildly, “lest I accuse you of being in collusion with the devils as well!”
“Er, Father Poulsen,” Iussi said. “We are in, um, collusion with them.” His voice was fat and lazy, and he licked his fingers with visible relish.
The priest took a giant step backward, holding his cross in front of his chest.
“Not you, Iussi!”
Iussi nodded, switching from the fingers of his right hand to his left. “They have come to help us against Karl Olafson.”
“The only help aga
inst Karl Olafson can come from God. If these strangers claim power to rival his, its source can only be in Satan.”
“Then Satan has a good cook,” Gunnar said. “I have never tasted ambrosia or manna, but if this is the food they serve in hell, get me a shovel.”
The priest recoiled in horror. Yet at the same time he licked his lips, as if the thought of good food were enough to tempt even him. Susan wondered how long it had been since these people had had a meal they genuinely enjoyed. Something besides—ugh!—seal.
Uncle Farley took advantage of the priest’s confusion to say to Susan, “The combination of Miss Applethwaite’s picnic basket and your brother’s negotiation skills proved very persuasive. Apparently this Karl Olafson has gone to Leifsbudir,” Uncle Farley continued, “on Vinland. What we know as Newfoundland.”
“Aye, Vinland,” Iussi said again, a slightly confused expression on his face. “Leif Erikson landed there four and a half centuries ago, and it has been almost that long since any of our kind visited it.”
The priest shook his fist. “Iussi Karlgren! At the price of your almighty soul, I demand that you cease your interactions with these agents of the devil!”
Iussi looked at the priest benignly. “Forgive me, Father, but it is a risk I have to take. We have agreed to journey with this off-lander to Leifsbudir and recover the artifact that Karl Olafson stole from the Qaanaaq.”
“Journey? How?”
Before anyone could answer, the priest strode a few feet toward the sea and shielded his eyes with his cross. “By the saints! You cannot think such a vessel is any but the devil’s barge!” He whirled around. “Iussi, Gunnar. You are men of sense. Their food must have bewitched you! I beg you. Tell me that you will abandon this accursed plan.”
Iussi turned from the priest. He stared out at Drift House for a long time without speaking. Finally, he looked back to the assembled group.
“I admit that I cannot fathom how people who can build such a vessel could want anything that such as we possess. Even your clothing surpasses my understanding,” he said, running an admiring hand over Uncle Farley’s jacket. “Soft as a hog’s intestine, and yet it doesn’t putrefy!” He looked back at Susan and the others. “And yet there is a compelling honesty to the way you speak, and you offer us much as well, and not just in the way of victuals. I cannot vouch for the other men, but Gunnar and Ulvaes and Hejnryk and I will accompany you. Father Poulsen,” he added, “I entrust the safety of Osterbygd to you in our absence.”