Beautiful Wreck (3 page)

Her words laid captured in a wooden, iron-hinged box. The scan said it was no bigger than my two palms. The front of the box swung open like two doors, an entrance to a fairytale world. Guarded by an iron dragon’s-head clasp.

The image of the box hovered next to the rough pages, all cracked and stained. The first few contained simply dates and trades, numbers of cows and days. After the last entry, words appeared that caught the breath like a flash of light—a lullaby! It was the first entry among the wife’s quotidian moments.

Her words went on for a dozen more pages, filling up all but the last few centimeters of space. There, on the last wisp of birch-bark, sat a love poem. The kind of poem that was not believed to be written down until a hundred years later. The dangerous kind, that could get a Viking man killed.

… of yellow birch leaves spattering light

across lattices of bright white bones

where kisses

come without question or consequence;

where my hand would rest on your belly

and move only with your breath.

These words were crafted by a hand unused to writing, the letters shaky and uneven. They traveled to the edge of the page and stopped, as if the poem might continue somewhere else.

The pages must have been delicate to scan, and in places they were lost altogether. Just twelve remained, in various states of crumbling decay. Three for animals and weeks and silver, and then the diary, filling up everything else.

The woman who wrote it was concerned with cod and fleeces and butter, not spirits. I pictured a niece of the scary chieftain maybe. A young woman who wrote surreptitiously in the dark, binding her words in a leather book, lovingly made by a normal husband. A farmer with grass and animals and axes on his mind, not a quest for fearsome power over settlers and spirits.

I cherished the well-kept secret of this book, which would have been some of the earliest colloquial writing. Her language was strange and wonderful—a poetic and unexpected mix of Norse and Icelandic and something unknown, in between worlds. The words of a completely foreign territory—a rugged wilderness on the cusp of becoming a governed country. A language slowly turning from what was left behind in Norway to a new set of sounds, a new voice in the air.

Mostly, I loved her everyday moments. In a time of vivid imagination and people who were larger than life, this diary was intimate, life sized.

I read it as easily as drinking water. Word choice, order, rhythm, came freely like waves. A flash of raven hair against cool linen, the smell of birch tar and herbal bite of a root called snowbloom, a winter-sparked landscape seen from the threshold of the farm wife’s house at bluest dawn.

Other translators might have called them “dark hair against a shirt,” or “a snowy morning,” but I saw them fully detailed as though the memories and words were alive on my tongue and in my hands. Eyelashes on cheeks, the beloved shape of an ear.
Crushed juniper on my hands and throat, for heat
, she recorded.
For scent.

Sometimes I threw the words up on a wall screen, huge.
Skating the stream. The sky was big today, all ice and violet.
I could tunnel deeper and deeper into the strokes of ink. Each year, each night, each word gone by. I looked harder and harder, as though I could climb inside.

I tried not to read it too much, on lonely nights. It was pitiful to huddle in my blankets surrounded by her trees and buzzing flies, her grass and horsies and enormous sky. Her family and husband.

There was someone real for me somewhere. Someone I could really know, could really love, and some part of me admitted I would never find him here in my room, my eyes shuttered, heart in the past.

The boundaries became indistinct. The coffee, the pillows and covers, the way I thought real fur might smell, the green wet grass and pungent scent of stripped bark. The presence of people seemed real. The farmer himself, her husband, so clear I could touch him. He’d been her bones and blood and home—her house itself—in a way that I hadn’t ever known. The words intoxicated me.
Full dusk, orange light on fourteen good fleeces. Rinsing his hands, he is sweet to my eye.

My empty mug cooled between my palms, the apartment’s heat winding down for the night. I slid into the couch cushions, eyes heavy under their contact glaze, and I let my cup drop softly to the floor, burrowing deep in blankets, sleep coming. Inside my closed eyes, the words still hovered.
Hot from haying. Exhausted and hungry, backs thrown into feeding us for the winter. Mine sleeps, reckless as a child.

My irises opened on my room with a jolt, the farm diary thrown open, daylight screeching in. I shaded my eyes and turned away from the window, and blinked hard.

I thought I’d left my walls on a farm scene, but now they showed an eerie, dark green blue. I sat inside a liquid ocean, and a crystal ice-colored sun reached from above the surface. My ceiling glowed with an icy, sun-sparkling blue.

A dark hump moved, just a shadow, a place of even deeper blue against the thick water. A familiar beast I’d seen and heard in arc videos.

“Gone in the dark to the whale road,” I whispered, then thought the rest of those words I’d memorized.
I dream them at the camp, all spears and fire. Four nights now, alone in our bed. My hand closes on this white fur, his on black sand.
The whale’s haunting voice, just like it sounded in the arcs, swelled to fill my room.

I woke again to the apartment blaring at me, shouting the time. I was late.

I dressed in a stumbling daze, dribbling drops in my eyes and muttering for the alarm to stop. I pulled on clothes—linen shift, overdress, apron, beads and tools. I wrapped my signature bead-and-needle-case necklace twice around my neck. My braided leather belt kept slipping through my fingers, tangling in itself. I was going to hold up today’s tests of the tank. We were warned about lateness, given an image of the minutes running freely like blood when the tank was online and no one was in it.

I shouted “the usual” at my apartment. It would lock after me, get warmer near 19:00, lights at 25 percent. I grabbed my little knife from the hall table and slipped it into the leatherette sheath at my waist. At the last second, I grabbed a beaded necklace I’d been making for Morgan. I was out in ten minutes flat.

C
OFFEE SPLASHED ONTO MY DRESS, A FINE SPRAY MISTING MY
cheeks and eyes. I stood still and dumb in the door of the cafe, staring down at the stain spreading across rare, handspun flax.

“Gods, I’m sorry.”

A big Viking took me by the arm. I looked down at his huge wrist where he gripped me. It was covered in a tattered leatherette bracer with iron buckles. Both hand and gauntlet were scarred, bit by dozens of weapons. My heart raced. Was it real, from a cow? Was he a fanatic realist?

Chain mail clinked as he drew me aside to the edge of the doorway. I looked up to his eyes, and they were amiable and sky blue. I watched them light up as he noticed my hair and clothes—the long braids, simple fillet across my forehead. The glass beads and pewter needle case that hung at my chest.

He switched to Old Norse. “May I help you, Maid?” He sounded practiced with the language, almost perfect. His voice was deep, and for a second I imagined he was a little dreamy. But I had to go.

“Neinn,” I answered in the old tongue, almost a sigh. “It is nothing. I’m near my place of work.”

An impatient Ninja pushed past us, iced latte sloshing.

The Viking and I looked at each other for a moment more, and then his eyes softened and lost focus. He was reading something. My height, maybe, or a weather alert. The smile faded absently from within his bushy beard.

“Fare well, Viking,” I told him and ducked away.

He didn’t say anything. I left him lost in his own eyes, not a fanatic realist after all. He’d looked so alive in an unusual way. But he seemed too sweet to sacrifice real animals, to wholeheartedly plunder or hurt a maid such as me. Besides, he was holding a tiny espresso.

Clear and sunny, my contacts told me it was 65.2 F, 18.4 c. Cool for an August morning, but the rays were warm enough to make the coffee on my chest start to dry and smell bitter. Fine then. I’d have something real to smell in the tank all day.

A clutch of men came toward me, laughing, wearing the cornflower jackets of Confederate soldiers, one with a faux musket casually resting on his shoulder. Words came up before my eyes, appearing to float alongside the soldiers.