by Joanna Bell
"How much?"
"More than you can imagine. If you filled one of the traveling trunks three times over with gold, it would still not be a match for what that dagger sold for."
She was mad, the old woman. That must have been the explanation. "There is not that much gold between all the Kings of the Angles and all the Jarls of the North," I laughed. "And whatever gold there is, is worth more than a thousand, thousand daggers."
But she shook her head. "As I said, Jarl, the dagger is a precious thing here – more rare than gold and therefore more precious than gold. What I am saying to you, what matters, is that Sophie is a rich woman, and riches themselves mean more here than they do in the North."
"How is that?"
Instead of answering, Heather posed me a question: "What would a thrall do with a travel trunk of gold?"
"A thrall would never have a travel trunk of gold. But if he were to find one, or steal one, I suppose it would not be long before someone noticed it, and took it from him."
"Exactly. Because in the North – and in the Kingdom of the East Angles – the lowest people aren't free. A thrall has no use for a travel trunk of gold because no one will believe it's really his. We have no thralls here. Riches here are a kind of freedom, Jarl, that I do not know if you can understand. Sophie can do anything now. She can live anywhere. She can buy a house so large you will both be able to live inside its walls and not see each other for days. Not that she intends to do that."
"Why do you tell me these things?"
"Because you need to know that she is not your possession. Neither is her daughter or the child yet to be born. A woman is as free as a man here – and a woman with riches is freer than most men."
I could have been offended by the old woman's talk, I could have been angry. But the anger seemed to have subsided in me already. Also, although I did not know all the specifics, I had sensed on my first visit that the place to which I had now returned to was one in which women like Sophie had more of a say in their lives than they did in the North.
"It's as it should be," I said a moment later, thinking of the times when I had, as a child, noticed that my mother was in many ways quicker than my father – and yet she still needed to seek his permission to walk down by the river, even though the dullest men were free to do so at their whim.
"It is as it should be," Heather smiled. "I hope you will be of the same opinion when she tests you."
I ran my fingers over my chin. "Do you think she has not tested me already? Sometimes I think the gods sent her to me to do precisely that."
And as it turned out, Sophie was a wealthy woman. Not ten nights after I came back to her, she owned a new dwelling – a new house – in the town of River Falls. It was an old house, she told me, because she had a liking for old houses – and it had not cost very much because property prices in River Falls were not very high.
Of course I did not understand more than the smallest proportion of the things she said to me about the new house. All I knew was that it seemed to make her mood light.
The Yule season was fully upon us by then, and a great many people gathered at the new house. It was not so different, I thought, to the Yule festivals of my own people. The food was different, the songs were different, and there were strange little rituals I wasn't familiar with, but it was essentially a lot of food eaten with friends and family, a busy closeness with our precious ones punctuated by the quieter moments that come with the darkest time of the year.
I was included now, introduced to Sophie's mother, her friends, as someone important in her life, as the father of her baby. The main day of feasting saw everyone gathered at the new house, around a large table – not as large as those in the feasting halls of my people, but enough to seat ten and four people – and a feast of such variation and so many different flavors as I could never have imagined possible.
Instead of venison, pork stew, bread and preserved fruits we feasted on a turkey, which looked and tasted to me as would an enormous chicken, roasted vegetables, pies both sweet and savory and sweet biscuits that Sophie's mother had made herself and of which the child Ashley seemed particularly fond.
"Why don't you like the cookies, Ivar?" The girl asked me later that night, when she joined me outside as I sat in the cold air, hoping the chill might revive me from my food-slumber.
I watched her take a bite of a pale biscuit, filled in the middle with jam, but I did not take the one she offered me. They were too rich, too sweet. "They're not to my taste, child. Besides, I don't think there's room in my belly for any more food – perhaps not until the next moon."
"You talk funny," she said, in the way children say such things. "Grandma thinks so, too. But she says it's OK because you're a good man. Are you a good man?"
Light spilled out onto the deck from inside the house, along with the sounds of laughter and conversation. I missed being with my people at that time of year, but I could not pretend that Sophie and her people had not done all they could to welcome me. "I don't know," I told the child as she gazed curiously up at me, her expression so much like that of her mother. "In some ways, perhaps I am a good man. In other ways, perhaps not."
"Why?"
Ashley was, out of all the people I met in Sophie's world – including Sophie – the most recognizable to me. It was probably her age – she had simply not yet had enough time to become herself. She reminded me of Northern children, always brimming with questions, and unconscious of rank unless an adult impressed such things up on them. "I'm not sure," I told her, as a few snowflakes fell softly around us, "that I have done all my duties."
"What do you mean? What duties? You came back to my mom, didn't you?"
"You're quick," I told her, "just like your mother. And yes, I did come back. But in order to come back here, I had to leave other people."
"Other kids?"
"Some of them were children, yes. No doubt there will be more come the next summer."
"Your children?"
I smiled and shook my head. "Not my children, no. I don't have any children, save for the one growing in your mother's belly."
"Then why did you have to look after them?"
"Because I was their Ja –" I began, before stopping myself. Ashley did not even know what a Jarl was. "You don't have a King here, do you?" I asked.
She shook her head.
"But you have – you have leaders, right? If you go to war, there is someone in charge – is there not? And if an injustice is done –"
The sound of a door opening came from behind us, and Sophie stepped out. At once and almost in unison, her daughter and I both bid her return back inside, where it was warm. And then we turned to each other, grinning.
"I'm not going to be able to leave the house for the next five months with the two of you around, am I?" Sophie laughed.
"Ivar says he's a good man," Ashley said, looking at me. "And also not a good man. He feels bad because he's not with his family at Christmas."
Christmas, yes. That's what they called Yule. And once again, the child was right. Sophie gazed at me over the top of her daughter's head, and she didn't have to say anything because I saw in her eyes that she understood the weight of my presence there, with her, at that time of year.
"That doesn't mean he isn't a good man," she said, kneeling beside her little girl. "It means he is a good man. It means he cares about the people he loves. It means he misses them when he's not with them."
The child turned to me. "Did you miss my mom? Is that why you came back?"
"Yes," I replied, before her mother could shush her. "I came back because I missed your mom. I came back because I love her."
Twenty-Eight
Sophie
Strange as I know he often seemed to them, with his obscure vocabulary and his tendency to appear fascinated by various banal details of 21st century life, the people in my life welcomed Ivar. They saw that he loved me, they saw his solicitousness towards me – and eventually towards Ashley as well, and that
was enough for them.
We all lived close to each other by early in the new year, my mother and I three houses apart on the same street, Maria just around the corner on the next street, and Maria's parents and grandparents next door to each other just a few houses down from her. River Falls had originally been a mining community, although its fortunes – and its population – had been on the decline since early in the 20th century. The town had originally been parceled out into 5 acre bundles, given to miners who came from the old country with their families on the promise of jobs and land of their own. Few of the original farms remained, most having been broken up into smaller lots long since, but there was a single half acre on the block where my house stood, and Heather purchased it from the elderly owners for a tidy sum. Her main residence, though, was in a rambling farmhouse about twenty minutes outside of town, set in 25 acres of idyllic countryside and free of neighbors.
It was to Heather's farmhouse that Ivar would retreat sometimes, when he needed to get away from the future for a little while and spend time in the natural world, chopping wood and talking about his old life with someone who had lived it herself.
His adjustment was more difficult, I thought, than the small one I had gone through when I traveled to his time. Culture shock is one thing – time shock is another. Heather, Paige, Emma and myself had had to get used to a different pace of life, an analog existence, to the lack of separation between the necessities of life and the acquiring of those necessities. I'd seen life and death in the Kingdom of the East Angles, reality unfiltered through the sanitizing lens of modern life. I'd seen simple things, things I had never had to think of before – the spinning of wool, the foraging for berries, the repair of a broken axe rather than the unthinking trip to the hardware store to buy a new one. But although I had never seen such things before – and this seemed crucial – I knew what they were. I knew what their purpose was, what they were for.
And it was in this way that Ivar and to some extent Heather – who was almost more astonished than he was by many of the futuristic changes to everyday life, because she'd experienced their predecessors – understood their new surroundings. The Viking understood the oven because he recognized the need for a heat source to cook food and boil water. He understood houses, even if they looked nothing like the roundhouses of his people, because he understood the need for protection from the elements. All humans in all time periods understand such things. But there were other elements of life he didn't understand. Even months after he'd been back with me I would still catch him looking away from photographs, or from a video playing on my laptop, with an expression on his face like no matter how much I reassured him that these weren't magical devices, he didn't quite believe me.
I couldn't explain TV shows to Ivar, or photographs. I couldn't even explain how cars worked. And he needed to have these things explained. He needed to learn how to read.
I hired Maria, who had always been by far the most patient of the two of us – and who now had a lot more free time on her hands with her parents being able to afford to hire staff at their restaurant – to teach him. And Heather, too, after she admitted one night that she'd basically forgotten how to read and write.
It was an early spring afternoon in March when I found myself driving home with Ivar from a visit with Heather. He was making swift progress, especially for an adult, and reading out the road and business signs as we passed them by. "Ri – Riv – River. River F – River Falls. Suh – Subway. Lah – Lahn – Landromat?"
"Laundromat."
"What the hell is a laundromat?"
I laughed, both at the consternation in Ivar's voice and his use of the word 'hell' – which was new.
"It's a place to wash clothes. Not everyone has a washing machine and a dryer, so you can take your clothes and blankets to a laundromat and pay a small fee and wash them there."
The Viking nodded, immediately understanding. "The Northwomen and the Angle women have to carry the dressings to the river, and beat the dirt out of them with sticks. And then they have to wring out the water and lay them on the grass to dry in the sunshine. It takes multiple days of that to wash the dressings and bed-dressings for a single family. If I took a washing machine back to them, the Angle women would surely crown me King."
That was one thing he didn't do, which I had almost expected him to. He didn't glorify inconvenience. Washing machines were impossibly quick and easy, and they did a better job than any Northwoman could do, no matter how clean the river or how strong her arms. As soon as he realized what washing machines did – or cars or any of the hundreds of machines that now did the jobs we used to have to do by hand – he pretty much accepted them as desirable. I didn't know how long it would last, this acceptance of the new, but it didn't waver in those first months.
"I think I'm starting to see why things are so different for your people," he said as we kept driving. "Look at all this – knowledge – around us."
"Knowledge?"
"Yes. Look at it everywhere. Look at all the words on the signs. There's too much for one person to understand it all! Look at you – you drive us back to River Falls in a car, but you don't understand how it works."
"Yes I do," I replied, a little hastily.
"But you don't woman, you –"
"Don't call me 'woman,' Ivar, it makes people think you're a savage."
The Jarl cocked an eyebrow up at me and grinned. "Savage or not, you still can't tell me how this car works."
"Yes I can! It's running because it has gas in it. I told you that already."
"OK, yes, you did. But how does it work? How does the liquid you showed me, from the gas station, actually make this car run?"
"The engine. The gas makes the engine run. There's a catalytic, uh, a catalytic – converter? – and it –"
Ivar leaned over to kiss my cheek. "My point," he said, "is that I can find all this out myself soon, can't I? I can find the knowledge about car engines in a book. Or on the internet, as you said. My point is that it's no wonder you have these machines, this whole layer of devices that seems to do most of the hard work for your people – it's because of knowledge and the passing of it between people. You can share it with each other. And you're beautiful."
I couldn't help but burst out laughing. "I'm beautiful, huh? I don't understand how anything works, but I'm beautiful? And your people can share knowledge, too, you know. They can –"
"Not like yours. Here you can write it down, and anyone else can see it – isn't that how you said it was with a book or with the internet? You can send a book across the world, and all of the information in it is available to whoever reads it?"
Even if I hadn't been in love with him, or pregnant with his baby, he would have been fascinating to have around for the insights into my own culture and society. I'd never thought about how little I actually knew about how things worked until Ivar pointed it out. I'd never realized how sweet even the supposedly non-sweet foods I ate were. Or how odd it was that everything from dish soap to laundry detergent was strongly and artificially scented. Heather and Ivar constantly commented on how much things in the future smelled, which was funny because I remembered learning in school that the past, without adequate running water and the technology to properly deal with sewage, must have smelled awful. And it was mostly true – I did smell a lot of things in the Kingdom of the East Angles. I smelled a lot of shit, for one thing – both human and animal. I smelled livestock and other people and the metallic liveliness of fresh blood when a deer was slaughtered. But both the Angles and the Vikings, although they didn't know what germs were or the technical aspects of how diseases were transmitted, understood that living close to your own filth wasn't a good idea. They understood that keeping food preparation areas clean was important, and that they would get sick if they didn't do it. It wasn't as uncivilized as I'd thought it would be, once I realized where I was.
And although Ivar was impressed with modern technology and our material progress – a nurse at the
hospital actually had to ask us politely to leave after my Viking spent way too long staring at the vaguely baby-shaped blob on the screen during one of my ultrasounds – he was not indiscriminately dazzled by life in the future. Some things he outright disapproved of. He disapproved of how individually we lived, how little time we spent with our families. He thought it crazy that little children were given almost no autonomy. In the Kingdom of the East Angles, small children were always around, underfoot, but not often specifically supervised by an adult. They were allowed to roam almost as soon as they could walk, and would spend their days running around in groups, exploring and getting into trouble.
"Your children are like livestock," Ivar said once, eying the playground as we waited outside Ashley's school to pick her up. "Look at them. They're right next to the woods and they stay within the boundary of the – what did you call it?"
"The playground."
"Yes. They should be splashing in the streams, climbing trees, throwing sticks like spears. You can see they want to do it, too – all children have the urge to explore. But the parents stand there like shepherds, watching closely. How strange it all is."
"Maybe," I replied, "but our children don't need to learn how to throw a spear, because no one uses spears here."
Ivar grinned and leaned in close to kiss my cheek. "I should teach Ash how to use a spear – I should teach you, too."
If I could use one word to describe the time of my life that coincided with my second pregnancy, it would be 'idyllic.' It was idyllic. I was no longer worried about money, because there was enough. There was more than enough. Everyone I was close to had been well provided for and millions sat in the bank accruing interest, an insurance policy that would last for the rest of my life - and my children's lives.