Beautiful Wreck (51 page)

That day, my skin throbbed and stung for a long time. It burned hotter than the companionable pain I’d come to hold day by day. After sitting by the hearth for more than an hour, I stood with a surge of frustration and anguish and asked Hildur for the pantry keys.

I made it to the cool solitude of the little room and closed the door behind me. The pantry wall was the sod of the house itself, and it felt yielding and smelled brown, with the promise of growing things. Roots, seeds, a future. I leaned my head back against it and breathed. I turned and pressed my one good palm to it, listening to my heart galloping.

I went to the deep barrel. With one hand and one hip, and with grim determination, I rotated the giant lid. A rangy, milky scent flew out like a moth that had been caught, waiting under the surface. I dipped a small bowl into the sour milk. It was cold to the touch, and I soaked my hand in it.

I slowly got food out for dinner. A bowl of butter, a basket of dried meat. I set aside skyr and dried berries for a second trip, and for the hundredth time I dreamt of an orange. Radiant. Its specific scent so sweet and pungent. My palm curled around the cold bumps of its skin. My fingernails longed for the soft resistance of pith and peel. My teeth and tongue wanted that faint pop upon biting. I felt the juice on my chin and fingers.

Here in the real world, I snuck a handful of horribly wilted weeds that we’d collected in fall, to sustain our teeth. I filled a bowl with fish halves like crackers. These dried cod, and the flat grainy loaves Ranka made, were the closest we got to bread. Oh gods, I wanted bread. I wanted a crispy, chewy baguette to fill my senses, on the heels of the orange. I would bury my nose in it, if it were here. I would sink to my knees on this hard dirt floor and consume the entire thing.

The orange and baguette got caught up in each other. They swirled together with the base hunger brought on by Heirik’s last kiss, and something else—a tiny, invisible fear—in my stomach. The notion, growing unseen like a root, that he might be right. He might be cursed.

I put my arms around myself and crouched in the pantry, staring at the bowl of fish at my feet. Sometimes I still couldn’t believe where I’d come. I thought I’d wake to find Morgan at my bedside in a hospital, telling me I’d been sleeping for two hundred days.

I snapped out of my dreams when Ranka bounded in. She stopped short just inside the door and stared at me, obviously holding back a question.

“Já, Ranka,” I said, still crouching on the floor. “Are you here to help me?”

“Lady,” she started, and she spoke slower and more carefully than usual. “Why did the chief look scared?”

I asked her what she meant.

“When Bjarn changed your bandages, the chief got a funny look, like he saw a spirit.”

She’d watched us, and seen Heirik hovering over me. A spirit had passed.
Oh.
Realization came suddenly and my head swam. He’d been holding that big blade for a reason. He’d meant to use it, if my hand was dying. I remembered his ax sliding out of his palm to rest against the house. I could only imagine what expression Ranka had seen on his face.

“Dear Child, sit with me.” We sat on the floor, and I spoke to her eye to eye. “I don’t know how I came here to Hvítmörk. That has always been the truth.” It was a bent truth, but I didn’t actually lie to her sweet, open face. “Even so, I can tell you that I am no spirit. I’m just not afraid of the chief.”

I said it out loud, testing the words myself, and they wavered like light on water. My own voice told me the truth, I was scared after all.

“But he is fearsome to everyone,” Ranka said, reflecting my thoughts. She spoke to me clearly, as though I were dumb, or I’d told her the sky outside was yellow.

“Child, know this.” I tried for a fierce conviction. “To my eyes, the chief is beautiful. I see no curse.” The tie on Ranka’s braid was loose, but with only one hand I could not fix it. I brushed my fingers through the silky ends. “Only a lovely family with a very good farm.”

She looked deep into my eyes, and I thought, or perhaps just hoped, that she would believe me. That she’d see there was room in this world for the possibility that Heirik was not a monster. But how could I convince her, when my own voice wobbled?

“Já, then,” I straightened up slowly and smoothed my skirt. “Let’s get this food out there where everyone can eat it.”

“Já, Lady, let’s do it!”

I turned to face the family, for once relieved that Heirik might be gone into the depths of his room.

Soon after we learned that my hand was saved, Heirik began talking to me again.

The news released a black and ugly spirit back into the night. It flew off, leaving only my man, the way I’d always known him. And he seemed to need my company like he needed fresh water and air.

I needed him, too. I needed his assuring presence, even if he wasn’t in the room. Just knowing he was here at Hvítmörk. His voice came to me from another part of the house, sometimes, and it brought back my first days here. I’d made it through that. I would make it through this.

And so we settled into a twisted sort of lovemaking, with words instead of bodies.

At the same time, the fear I’d felt in the pantry grew, ever so slowly, a stealthy little newborn creature at the back of my consciousness.

For days and days, we played tafl and talked for hours over our game board, holding phrases between us with unfathomable tenderness, caressing with voices, weighing pieces in our palms. Too disgusted to try to capture a chieftain, I asked that we change the names of the sides. Sometimes with great humor we played circling birds against Ginn. More often we were ravens wheeling around a fine warrior, or fishermen and a great whale.

Sometimes we touched. Our hands might come together on the game board, and we gave and took sensual brushes. A palm moving up a forearm when no one observed. Hours might be easy with camaraderie, and then a single moment would flare with longing. Confused. We could not have what we wanted, and yet we couldn’t stop.

My hand, no longer bandaged but still far from healing, was now red as his. As bold and scared as cornered animals, we matched ourselves to one another.

Soon my strategy got good enough for me to win a few times. Every once in a while, my defending whale got away, or on the other hand my small round pieces blocked Heirik in.

We spoke ever so quietly about the future. People steered clear of us anyway, so it was easy, when we played at night, to confide and ask and answer questions. In a handful of dirt, I drew a map for Heirik, of Iceland as seen from space.

The chief wanted to know about farming a thousand years from now, how families lived in the land in new ways. I could hardly answer. How could I tell Heirik there were no farms, no animals? That food was made from other food, not cows and goats, and Hvítmörk itself was gone so completely that no one even remembered its name. It would be as hard to accept—or even comprehend—as it would be for me to imagine a world without voices and speech. It would break his heart.

How would I describe everything, anyway? I thought of drawing a city in the most basic sense—a place where houses were strung together, with rooms that were perfectly square and bright. Whole families lived right next to each other, so close they could touch hands through a window, or even a single person could live in a space as big as this house. I imagined telling him that the expanse of this beautiful island sat packed with such boxes, until there was no room left for a single fox to house her cubs. Then layers of more stacked on top. People living up off the ground, suspended right over one another. And another layer and another, until the houses touched the clouds, and their floors trapped the mist under the ground.

I wondered if he could imagine enormous glass windows, entire buildings made of the precious material of frost cups. Lamps and candles that burned acid-bright without stopping, a light so intense it ate the sky, eclipsed the sparks of Ymir’s skull and left only a handful of stars.

Smaller questions seemed more approachable. He asked what the men wore.

“Many things,” I said. “Not just one like here.” I tried to explain that in the future people played with clothing on a lark—a difficult concept, when here every bit of fabric was precious, made of the animals Heirik raised, painstakingly spun and sewn by the women of his family and his thralls. A length of wool cloth took weeks of a woman’s life, and a shirt was a love token of the tenderest worth.

I thought of Jeff’s t-shirts, torn, thrown away without a care. “The one man I knew the most,” I started to tell Heirik. And then it hit me, how long I’d been away. Memory woke like a bow shot in my brain, everything about Jeff coming back. His hands, faded jeans, long lank hair the color of strawberry sun, tattoos circling his wrists like Heirik’s silver bracelets. I heard Jeff’s easy laugh in my mind, smiled at the memory of his shameless flirting.

“He wore much tighter pants,” I said with a small smile.

Then I recalled Jeff’s cold, listless eyes, never truly looking at me. His great height. I could never stretch up just so slightly on my toes to place my chin on his shoulder, like I could with Heirik. I was faced with the wall of Jeff’s chest, thoughts opaque, dreams never shared. Or maybe he had none. Though Jeff had been the one man I knew the most, I didn’t really know him at all.

My eye was drawn to the hollow of Heirik’s throat, the silver hammer there, his linen ties hanging loose. “And he wore two shirts like you.” I reached out casually, tugged at one of the strings.

Heirik didn’t play. He looked from the weaving room out through the door into the depths of the main hall.

“You are lost from him,” he said without looking at me. “You did have someone like me.”

“Nei,” I told him, the word fierce. “Look at me, Heirik. Right in my eyes.”

He did.

“Never like you,” I told him, and I wrapped my fingers as far as they would reach around his ankle, to draw him, to make him understand. My fingers couldn’t reach all the way around. He took in a sharp breath and looked down at my grasp.

I shook my head with the impossibility of Jeff, or of anyone ever taking Heirik’s place. I told him, “No one is like you.” My thumb went under his linen, past his ankle bone.

His reaction surprised me. “Já, then,” he said, and smug as a house cat, he blinked slowly, a very small smile forming at the corner of his mouth. “I believe that.”

Gods, I wanted to smack him. It wasn’t fair, I thought dumbly, that he could draw away from me, perhaps never do again what we had in the cave, and yet still smile. Still revel in the fact that for me, he was the best. No man compared to him.

I drew my hand away and swatted at his chest and he laughed hard. “Brusi,” I spat out at him playfully.
He-goat.
His smile was almost, but not quite, broad across his face.

A draft came from the ceiling vent, and the passing cloud of smoke stole our mood.

“There will never be anyone like you,” he said to me gravely, our touch completely wiped out, gone like the draft that had broken it. He picked up a game piece, held it loosely and let it roll out of his hand. It made a hard sound as it scrabbled across the bench.

He seemed to ask the game and floor and house itself a question. “What will I do with you?”

He’d said it before, and I didn’t like the sound of it.

Jul came soon.

Hildur set a small world into motion, preparing for the feast. She called up the thralls who trekked to the house to do the hardest work. She had the boys bring up food and drink from an underground store. More riches I hadn’t known about. Amazed at the abundance of meat and fish and cheese and the vast quantities of ale that came into the house, my mind turned to counting, over and over. I had a deep desire to manage it all, to be sure there was enough to extend the chief’s generosity.