Beautiful Wreck (40 page)

The house closed in on itself, beginning to stew with heat from the fire, packed in and reflected by the insulating snow. It started to stink right away, and I had to get out. I went through the tunnel to the welcoming, little pool.

The horror of the fight, my new and epic love, my concussion, all kept me preoccupied, and I’d forgotten the sky. When I stepped from the tunnel, I almost fell to my knees with the weight and glory of it. Stars! They pressed down on me, a million of them at least!

The enormity of the sky, its depths, bewildered my senses and I pressed my fingers to my temples, trying to fathom it. The big stars were the same ones that I’d known. But in among them were packed a thousand more for every space I used to think of as empty. A sky of sifted sugar. It was really, truly dark out, and I was stunned.

I floated in the hot pool, my head thrown back on the stones. At first, I felt trapped by the stars’ density, their unimaginable numbers, but then my eyes and mind adjusted and the sky opened to me with its depths and distances. So many things here—almost everything—were more heartbreakingly beautiful than I dreamed.

The welcoming, little pool became an oasis, where I could be small amidst the stars and steam. Betta and I took the little girls with us twice a day and floated and told stories about fine dresses and foxes and hawks.

They asked about how I came from the ocean, and I told them a big bird had dropped me on the sand like a stone. I thought they would laugh, but they looked at me with gigantic eyes, and I had to tell them I was kidding, that I just didn’t know.

Inside, Betta taught me to play tafl. It was a game of strategy, with smooth, round wooden men and one tiny carved chieftain, who hunched, curled around his long beard and gripping it with two hands. I’d learned the game before of course, in the future, but I pretended not to know. I let her show me how to move, to protect my chief, to take. We played with Magnus and Haukur, and it filled up some of the hours.

On the second full day that Heirik was gone, Hár showed the little ones how to make char with the tiniest bits of linen that could no longer even be mended or used as a cloth. He stuffed them into a tiny metal box with a hole in the top and roasted it on the fire.

I watched the smoke climb to the roof, and I sewed languidly, never finishing anything. I named the new colors that spread through the house and settled in. A dusky plum in the shadows, deepening until the eye couldn’t parse it from espresso, moist earth, then black. I thought of espresso fondly, like a long-ago lover.
Doppio con pana.
I put my finger in my mouth as if to lick the whipped cream.

Not as though I’d forgotten where I was. Nei, I felt my home around me more acutely than ever, every hawk’s eye on me, wondering about me, probably searching for my reasons to want such a frightening man, because I clearly did. I couldn’t hide it. Striving for this rich house probably, to be the mistress of it despite the master I’d have to endure. That was a likely conclusion.

About the lying, they would be right, not in the way they might think.

I pretended I’d pricked myself, regarded my needle with mild betrayal. I went back to my lazy, disinterested project. A hem maybe. I wasn’t even sure, and had to look for a long moment to remember the soft, worn shirt in my hands.

Men went to the stables to check after animals. They came back with brilliant sparkles of melting ice in their beards and the fur that ringed their hats. They brought out skið and rubbed them with foul-smelling fat, and again Magnus sharpened every knife in the house.

Children played at fighting with adorable shields and axes, and the girls put imaginary babies to their breasts and then to bed in soft furs. Still Heirik didn’t come home.

On the third day, I switched to binding socks, and immersed myself in memories of kisses, my eyes going soft, entranced. I mused about why he’d gone away, wishing and hoping that it wasn’t for Ageirr. That it was something else, anything, that would not lead him into danger and bloodshed. I imagined what it would be like when he came back. I wanted to rush to him and greet and hold him, but I knew I would not.

When he did come home, I heard him first, talking with his uncle in the back of the house. My heart sped up, but I made myself appear unfazed. He would come to me, and I could wait until then.

But he didn’t. He never came to see me, not even after he’d been home for what felt like a thousand hours. Not even after the evening meal, when the house was settling into night and there was no more chance for him to casually walk into the main room and say hello.

My throat tight and full of questions, I went to straighten up the back mudroom.

Wooden snowshoes stood against the wall, and though the men and kids had taken care to hang up everything they wore outside, most of it was weighted with dripping snow and had slumped and fallen. Cloaks and blankets and boots gathered on the benches and stone floor like knots of birds around crumbs. The ones still on the hooks hung lifeless as though brought home by a hunter.

The room was scented pleasantly with mud and snowmelt. The cloaks themselves smelled of wet wool, a sheepy smell, but processed by carding and spinning and felting, not like the spiky reek of the animal itself. I folded and stacked them, satisfying myself with mindless hand work, trying to trick myself into believing I wasn’t watching his door. Nei, I didn’t care if he was in there. I didn’t long to knock.

I’d always liked to smooth blankets and hang them over the back of my couch, one on top of another until there were more than enough for any dark and frigid day—as if my apartment could ever approach a cold like this. A bone-blasting, deep cold I could never have imagined, much less believed I could live with.

I heard the crunch of footsteps, and in a breathless moment Heirik was filling up the room, stamping his snowshoes and boots, and taking off furs and wool. I took a sharp breath, always stunned by him. He turned, and for an unguarded second, he saw me. He said my name, in that way that turned his voice and eyes to honey. My name was the most subtle and lovely thing he ever said.

“You were outside,” I said dumbly.

He sat on the bench to undo the leather laces of his snowshoes. “Já, everyone settled.” He pulled off his hat, and his hair fell loose with no braids or ties. Just him. It was more stirring than if he’d taken off his clothes, that untamed hair was so naked. He saw me looking and ducked his head.

“Saying goodnight to the farm, my mother called it,” he huffed as he pulled off the big, unwieldy snowshoes. “We would walk all around the outside of the house and stables, counting animals and people. And then go to bed and directly to sleep, I suppose was the idea, já?” His half smile was luscious.

I smiled too, at the thought of little Heirik, this fierce and commanding man a four year old child. But I couldn’t conjure a steady image. Without a photo it was hard to pin down. Hard to really understand how this towering person with rough beard and serious eyebrows used to be a little boy with tousled black hair, saying goodnight to the sheep and grass and horsies. How could I ask him,
what did you look like?
It struck me that he didn’t know what he himself looked like now, let alone then. There were no mirrors here. There were various surfaces of water, reflecting indistinct and riffled images. Mostly everyone depended on others to know how they looked. Men depended on women to trim their beards, cut and comb their hair, react with longing and flirtation, or not. In Heirik’s case, most often with fear or revulsion. No wonder he thought he was a monster. He couldn’t see his own divine face.

He sat with his elbows resting on his knees, his capable hands hanging between his thighs. It was too much to look at it. I turned to study the cloaks on the wall, stroking them aimlessly. I drew my shoulders forward ever so slightly, offering my back to the steady, hot pressure of his gaze.

“Do you remember the names of the stars?”

I thought of the five I could see in my original time, and the press of the multitude I could see now. I had a feeling he didn’t mean NGC 3576. Flustered, questioning whether I should pretend to know or not, I turned to him and nothing mattered. There he was, and I knew him well. He was unsettled.

He stood. “Come look.” As always, confident his word would be followed.

I looked down at my dress and glanced back at the house where my own cloak and blankets lay neatly folded and stacked in my alcove.

“Not through the house.” He told me to wait where I stood, and he ducked low into the door to his room. He brought out an armful of silvery fur, and unfolded it for me. Oh gods, it was a breathtaking coat. Made of blue-fox and wool, thick and heavy, but small, a woman’s coat. Despite its bulk, it was almost fitted through the waist, and I tied it tight with its leather sash. Straight out of a fairy tale, it had a pointed hood rimmed with fur. Its giant bell sleeves were chased with fur, too, the whole thing falling down past my waist. The coat of a princess.

“My mother’s,” he explained.

Oh.
Heirik was loaning me another beloved heirloom, something that had belonged to the only other woman who loved him. I turned from side to side to show him.

“Put on these blankets, too.” His voice was hoarse. He liked me in the coat. “As many as you can.”

It was the sleepy time of night when I let my hair hang freely, like his, the long white-blond strands fell all about my shoulders. I felt like he and I were two horses, covering our manes with fur-trimmed warmth. Flaxen eyes watched me, and I couldn’t tell if it was fire or tension I saw there. He was taking me outside, alone. There weren’t that many reasons why he might. I burned with the possibility.

He took a couple more blankets under one arm, and we pushed out into the knife-like air. My head fell back and I watched the steam of my breath rise to the stars. My head spun and breath stopped in my throat, and I put a hand out to steady myself on Heirik. He closed his eyes, just for a moment.

“Walk in my footprints,” he offered. They were big enough to easily contain mine.

Even without a moon, starlight glinted off two or more feet of snow. A blue skim-milk glow, enough to see Heirik ahead of me, a dark warm giant. It was a short distance to the stables and through the ring of sod wall that surrounded the building. As we tromped there, he told me, “My brother is not the only one who can follow the stars, já? Someone here has to know what time it is.” I followed his footsteps, holding my skirts and stepping up high over the snow to land down in the next crater and the next one.

The animal stalls were open to the outside, like little caves in a snowy rock face. He led me to one of the openings. The stink overwhelmed my lungs, then mellowed into a constant and familiar smell. A faint echo of sunshine in fleece. Heirik built up a little snow bank just outside the sheep stall and lined it with blankets, so we could sit with our feet inside, but still see the stars. He sat and rested himself against the snow, his feet extended into the warm stable.

When he looked up at me in welcome, my heart skipped. I sat beside him to share the little snow bank. I leaned back like he did, into the frosty cradle, our bodies near but not yet touching. Why not touching? Up close to him, the sheep aroma was replaced by his leather and the cinnamon of fur. Or perhaps that was the natural scent of his skin. I wanted to press my lips to his throat and breathe in, to memorize what he himself smelled like, without fire or tools or clothes.

He settled in, an arm behind his head, as though this little snow bank was a mess of down pillows in a vast wintry bed. “The snow will warm us soon.”

It was clear at once that his room in the house was not his real private space. This world was his place. Not a bed made of polished wood, but of snow or grass or field, with a ceiling of sky. He could stretch out here, the full length of him.

Knee-high boots wrapped tight in leather laces hugged the shape and contours of his calves. I stretched my legs out beside him, crossing my ankle-length boots. Leather touching, bodies meeting in this one small, hot place. I almost forgot to look at the stars.

When I did, they pressed in on me as they had before. The immensity made me feel tiny and pinned to the earth, snowbound underneath a million far-off fires, each bigger than all our world. To Heirik it was likely a dome, lit with sparks and flares from a god’s firestriker. I liked that. It did look that way.

“Look at the brightest only. Three in a line.” He drew the line in the sky, a child’s lesson. I wanted to take his fingers in mine.