Beautiful Wreck (21 page)

We reached the forest and ducked into the first few feet of dense trees. I let the basket and water skin drop to the ground and slid a small knife out of its leather sheath. I got to work on the lichens that would become tea and dye and medicine for Bjarn. The trees dripped with them. As I scraped and cut them away, the smell of bark sprang up rich and dirty.

I wished Betta could just tell me everything I needed to know to make it here. To live. Flat out tell me, comprehensively.

I worked on lichens and listened to the shushing of leaves. The cry of a bird far away, like a thin line. The work began to lull me.

What did Betta think of her situation? She was a woman, já? She must have had desires of her own, and even worse, knew they were hopeless to fulfill. I wondered if she pined for love, perhaps even someone in particular. What man could possibly snare the heart of such a solid, courageous, wary, shy creature? So complex, and with her wry sense of humor. Betta was not pretty, but she had an intensity of spirit, and a voice, that were sensual. She was of impossibly low status, but it was hard to imagine a man truly equal to her. A pang of fear hit me. If she married, she would leave here, and I didn’t want her to go.

I looked at her sharply braided head bent to her work, and I loved her.

“I have a secret,” she offered, never looking up from her lichens.

I shook myself. Maybe she did have a gift. She seemed to know I was thinking of her hidden heart.

“Já, I suppose you do.” I said playfully.

“What do you mean?” She looked up with piercing eyes, suddenly on guard.

She had smiled slyly at me more than a few times this week, teasing me for my devastating crush. It was finally my chance to laugh good-naturedly at her. “It doesn’t take a gift to see that you’re a young woman. You must have someone you think of. Some one person,” I tried to ask it casually. “A man?” Allowing for so many unknowns with Betta.

“Já,” she let her guard down and turned to liquid, and her cheeks lit up with shame and pleasure. “A man.” Her voice was a breath of fascination, the very essence of yearning. The words could not have been more beloved.
Oh.
I raised an eyebrow, and she shook her head, almost imperceptibly. She wasn’t going to tell me. She smiled her secret and turned away.

We scraped.

When she spoke again, her tone had shifted like a dark cloud. “I have the sight,” she said, gravely. I waited, and she went on. “A little. Not the sight of the future. Of today.”

“But …” I wanted to lift her heaviness. She made no sense. “Can’t we all see today?”

“Hah!” Her laugh was a bark, amused and wry. “You are naïve sometimes, Woman.”

That much was true.

“Undercurrents,” she explained, and she spread her hands out, palms down as if she could draw the thoughts up out of the earth. As though she could feel their contours and waves. “Things that people don’t yet realize, or admit.”

She turned her hands over to look at her palms, searching them with clear eyes. I tried to see the shapes of musings there. It came together, why she always seemed to answer my unspoken questions. Why she knew I was so bewitched by Heirik, almost before I did. She must be especially attuned to the smallest, involuntary glances, the flutter of hands, longing eyes, flushed skin, the scents and tensions of desire. She probably just saw all these things when they were tiny, before they hatched. Being hyper observant had always been one of my faults, but what if for Betta it was more than that? A real, extraordinary sense? I wasn’t an especially easy person to read—not overly difficult either, but she saw all of me as easily as she breathed.

“I don’t desire the chief,” she assured me bluntly. He wasn’t the one who made her heart beat. “But I’m a woman, já? With half a brain. Of course I’ve wondered.” I didn’t answer. I swallowed hard, singing in my mind to block out the many images that had been dogging me. She continued. “Thought about what he would be like.”

Gods, I gave up. I let the images in, like a tidal wave from behind a door. I opened it, and was subsumed. In my wild mind, I saw him leaning against a wall in his room, eyes closed, caressing himself through his clothes. His hand moved to his waist, to slip inside. What had Betta seen in her mind’s eye, when she had wondered about him?

“Were you afraid?” I asked, my eyes tightly shut. The women were all so scared of his body. Betta was so afraid of the chieftain. “Was it awful?”

“No,” she said so matter-of-factly, and she might have been telling me whether she’d liked her dinner.

“What I see of him, because you are wondering,” she eyed me shrewdly, “Is that even though he won’t touch a woman, he wants to. Freyr is still strong with him. He does not feel cold.”

I didn’t doubt her gift, not for a single second, and her words about Heirik relieved and excited me. It was possible. He wanted to touch a woman, hadn’t resigned himself to the years ahead like a barren expanse of ice. Betta hadn’t even said he wanted me in particular, but if it was possible, just maybe, then I could continue to inhale and dream.

“And no,” she added. “I don’t see exactly what he thinks or does, but I can see what’s in your head right now as plainly as your smile.” She winked. “And if he didn’t do that before you came here, he does now.”

Oh.
It came unbidden again, a vivid picture of Heirik removing his clothes. I saw him from behind, as in the pool, because I couldn’t even begin to imagine the rest. I could see his shoulder blades moving as he touched himself.

The lichens had such intricate, coralline shapes and gradations of color. The rust and palest green and peeling bark made a gorgeous mix, and it was no wonder these crusts would dye cloth like amber, like the sun.

“There are some trees we haven’t touched yet, Ginn.” She thrust her chin over her shoulder to point into the forest. “That way. Are you alright to go alone?”

Lichens were scratchy and abundant under my fingers. I looked up and down the length of the tree, and it was covered with them. Every tree around us was encrusted. Why would Betta send me off alone to look for more? And then it dawned on me, with a rush of embarrassment. I was mortified, but I nodded and picked up my basket. I quietly walked off, underbrush rustling with the movements of my skirts. Betta was more than astute, more than mature for her age. A very generous and witty soul. She’d just sent me off to touch myself.

I found a place, alone, not too far but far enough. And then I realized I couldn’t really do it. It was one of my only chances, the house so clogged with people. But I couldn’t. I leaned back against a tree, the tough bark cool on the back of my neck. I would just let myself think of Heirik doing it, free from guilt. That would be nice. I’d lean against this tree and think of him in just the same position. I let gorgeous, dirty thoughts fill me, images of him alone, and I pretended he was thinking of me. His eyes were brilliant with the pain of wanting me. My skirts were like clouds, bunched around my wrists where I’d hiked them up. I dreamed of his black hair against a tree like this, snagged in white bark, his eyes closed. Opening at the moment of release. Like mine. Oh, like mine. I opened my eyes to the dark blue sky through a canopy of birch leaves, my breath coming hard and fast, my hand slipping down my thigh.

We took a long, leisurely time to fill our baskets, talking about dye and beads and trade, Betta’s dreams of traveling across the island. I wanted to tell her what was there. I’d read in the arcs about vast fields of pumice, waterfalls, and fiery, spewing mountains. Baths that boiled so hot you could cook in them. I thought maybe my glacier was not far from us, and then the giant one that used to lay beyond. Or that did lay beyond, now. I thought of cold buildings, stretching to the sea.

“I think it’s all ice,” I told her.

“What is?”

“The island. All of it.”

“Nei, Ginn,” she told me. “It is beautiful under the stars. The men set up camp and they lay back and fall asleep watching Frigg spin the clouds.”

We walked home as the sky started shifting. It wasn’t getting dark—that wouldn’t happen for some hours—but something suggested that the light had peaked and was on its way down the other side of a great hill.

A lumpy knot in my dress flopped against one leg, holding my skirts up so I could walk easier through the grass that waved so tall now. Blades brushed, slim and sharp, against my calves, and they itched above my boot tops. The cadence of the knot bumping my leg, forward and back, forward, back, soothed me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Betta looked similarly quieted. Our steps started to match each other, the shushing of the grass a lullaby.

It was then we stepped into violence. The grass parted around a dead horse, its throat cut.

A jagged rent more than a foot long split his flesh, and he laid bloated and clotted with drying blood. The horse’s teeth were bared, tongue swollen, one eye open and lost to the sky. I felt like my organs had been sucked out. Hollow. I retched and stumbled, almost falling hands first into the corpse, but Betta caught me. I closed and covered my mouth, but my eyes were wide open. They wouldn’t stop looking, wouldn’t stop seeing it.

It was the golden horse Fjoðr, named for the wind. Brosa’s horse that lived unridden until his master came home. A gorgeous creature, a loving companion and wild spirit lying in a bloody heap, dotted with flies.

“Gods, why?” I mumbled through my fingers.

Betta grabbed one of my elbows and drew us both back and away.

“It was Ageirr,” she stated without question. The man who grieved, the one we’d met at the walls. Why would he do this?

Betta loaded both our baskets on one forearm, and with her other hand she held onto me and started trudging toward the house. With quick, serious strides, she pulled me like a little sister, bumbling behind. The blood kept coming to mind, the gash in Fjoðr’s throat, and at one point I stopped and tried to throw up but couldn’t. She dragged me along.

I felt about four years old when I asked, “Will Heirik kill Ageirr?”

Betta stopped walking. “Just go kill him where he stands?” She asked as if I were dense as a rock. “Nei.” She shook her head and started walking again. “Worse,” she added. “The chief will think.”

“Think?”

She stopped again and looked at me openly, searching, probably finding that I was truly ignorant. She grasped my wrist hard. “Woman, please, believe what I say. You don’t know him.”

Her words stabbed me. I felt like I was the only person who did know him. The fact that she had lived with him for a decade dawned on me, and jealousy filled me up, stupidly, reddening my face. How did she know him so well? I wanted to shout that nothing he’d ever shown her was real, that he showed me his true self.

“It’s not just his face that scares people, Woman,” she told me, and she might as well have said duh. Of course it wasn’t. Fear of a simple mark couldn’t be sustained across decades and a clan of a hundred people. There had to be more. Betta didn’t tell me what it was.

Her voice turned affectionate. “You see his heart,” she said. Her words were tender, but clear. “You don’t know his logic. What he’s capable of.”

My skin tingled and my head turned airy and light.

“This,” she turned to look behind and around her feet, as though we could see the very dread we were tramping through. As though Fjoðr was there on the ground all around us. “It is bigger than a horse”

We walked on for a few minutes longer, getting close to home. Emotions and thoughts came in great, rapid waves. Protectiveness. Heirik would be devastated by this, his brother’s horse. Defensiveness of my bond with him, as fledgling as it might be. Unformed apprehension, Betta’s words like a swirling mist. What he’s capable of. The bloody horror of the horse, flies stepping lightly on its face. Confused with jealousy of a past I could never have, of Betta watching Heirik grow from boy to man.