Beautiful Wreck (61 page)

He answered with an eloquent “já” that combined relief and gratitude with something like regret—an allowance that things might be easier for Heirik if he were dead—and finally chagrin for thinking so. We stayed quiet for a while, then, each thinking about the chief.

“You love my brother.” He stated, sure of it. He didn’t need to ask me.

I couldn’t explain how Heirik’s spirit and voice and eyes lit something inside me the moment I saw him on this very beach. The moment I heard him speak, I was at home. “I have since we met.”

Words came out of nowhere, and without thought or reason, I told Brosa about the fight here at the sea. About how Heirik saved my life, how he protected me. Brosa knew about it, of course, but he seemed surprised at my role in it. Surprised that Heirik had had to save me from Ageirr. Heirik hadn’t even mentioned that part? My brief abduction was a minor event in a long war—a feud that sprang from Brosa’s own tragedy. When I remembered his and Esa’s part in it, I felt hot remorse for being so self-centered. Of course Brosa wouldn’t have thought about that fight in terms of me. It was about his lost wife, the lovely Esa, only a child herself. It was about blood and honor and a cold baby he might have held in his hands. It was about Heirik standing in for him when that honor was challenged. I was a random detail in a thing beyond my reckoning.

Brosa moved on.

“You’ve seen my brother fight.” He said it as though this explained everything, from my love for Heirik to the turning of the stars. “Everyone who has seen him battle is fascinated.”

“Quite a change came over him.” I touched my wrist where Heirik had gripped me before he kissed me. Where Ageirr held me roughly not a half hour later.

“He’s the raven, já? But come before death.”

I shivered at the similarity with the image I’d seen that day. Brosa shifted in the sand so he could hold me closer.

“It’s alright, Ginn,” he said, returning to what lay unspoken about the fight. “I am not afraid of what is past.”

It hurt my chest to take a deep breath. I allowed a moment to acknowledge his reason and strength, to wonder at the sheer will of happiness that drove him.

“You love your brother, too.” It was so clear how much he did.

“He’s been my brother always. He taught me everything about how to be alive.”

“Hmmm.” I murmured into his warm chest, trying to picture them as children. Brosa, here and now, was so welcoming, so easy to melt into.

“Not just the good,” he mused. “Heirik has been a fine example of how not to live, also. He won’t allow himself a full life.” After a moment he added a final statement. “He won’t ever take you as his own.”

I had just said my mental goodbye to Heirik, and this—from the person who knew him best, or at all—pounded the last spike into the hull. “I know,” I said bleakly. I crushed my hope and grief into a tiny ball and wished it out into the Arctic sea. It stayed with me, though, stubborn as the man who inspired it. So I pushed it way down deep where I could forget about it. “
Goodbye
,” I whispered.

Brosa didn’t ask about the English word I’d spoken. He rested his chin on my head, spoke into my hair. I felt the heat of his breath as it ruffled the loose strands there.

“A man who has you wanting him is a lucky man.”

He drew back to touch my chin, to lift my face.

“My brother is a fool.”

His lips were warm and easy at first, a brush like autumn leaves and the faint sweetness of angelica. His kiss was gentle and considerate. He wanted to be sure it was okay. And I pressed my mouth against his harder, and opened my lips and said without speaking that já, it was.

He took my waist in one big hand and gently pinned me against the driftwood. His fingers moved up and around my back and shoulder blades. It felt good to be embraced, and I instinctively moved to give him the same in return. One of my arms went under his cloak and around his sturdy body. My other hand found the back of his neck, and the knotted leather and hot skin there.

He was light with his tongue, unhurried, and I couldn’t stand it. Brosa swept his fingers over my breast, and I reacted with a soft cry that was so unexpected, so uncontrollable, I ducked my head in embarrassment. He kissed my forehead then, and my eyelids. The soft brush of his beard moved across my nose and cheek. His hand moved up my leg, my skirt bunching around my knees, then higher. His thumb kneaded my thigh, stirring up flames.

“Stop.” I gasped, urgent.

“Not now.” He was breathless, drawing me onto his lap. His kisses no longer light, but demanding. Through the wool of my dress, through his clothes, I felt him hard and ready. He pressed his hips up slowly into me, and I met his body with mine. “Let go, Lovely One,” he whispered, and I felt the past several months dissolve, every minute, as if they were taken by a swiftly churning stream. Gone, until I knew only his mouth, again and again, his hands, his fingers, dark words in my ear.

A laugh came from down on the beach, so great it was like thunder. It woke me, and I drew my face away, pressed my forehead to his shoulder. My heart hammered. What was I doing?

With a strong hand on my chin, Brosa made me look at him. His eyes were not the open and easy ones of a few minutes ago. They had turned to wolf’s eyes. He would have me, they said, in every way that his brother would not.

My eyes burned, and I clenched them shut, willing everything—the entire night, my whole tumble into the past—to go away. I didn’t have any more ideas on how to get by. I would die right here and dissipate into the sea.

Then Brosa lifted me effortlessly and placed me in the sand. His voice came low and easy, coaxing me back. “Ginn,” he said. “I’m sorry. It is alright.”

I opened my eyes and he was normal again. He’d put aside the possessive intention that had gone straight to my heart and gut and he was smiling lightly.

“Stay and talk with me, já?” He stood up and handed me the blanket he wore. He dug in the sand with his foot. “I’ll strike up a fire.”

Brosa left to walk the immediate area and search for twigs and logs. Left me alone with my slowly down-shifting body and mind. He must have been taking the time to adjust, too. We’d both been immediately, fiercely aroused. I envied him the task of gathering wood, something to do, to calm and center himself. I hung my head and shook it, but it didn’t clear.

He returned and knelt by the small pit he’d made, and he crushed little twigs until they formed a delicate nest in his palm. He set it in the sand. Sparks fizzed and flew from his fire-steel and caught in a piece of touchwood. Brosa was good at making a fire. Of course. He was good at everything.

He dropped the touchwood into the nest and exhaled the slightest breath into the tangle of twigs, where a small, pink-orange spot grew and took hold. When the fire had started, he sat back to feed it and to talk.

He told me stories about his ship, of a voyage that was wonderful and disgusting and dangerous. About Norway and the amazing things that could be had from as far as the unknowable east, the honey and hazelnuts and new linen and delicate horn cups, trimmed with silver. Soapstone and leather and exotic ink, sold in miniature bottles stopped with corks. Slender bones, sharpened to write with. Bracelets and fillets of rare beauty.

He told me about his uncle. Stories of Hár caring for him like a father, teaching him about axes and stars and boats. He loved him almost as much as he loved Heirik, or more but in a different way.

I told him about summer and spinning and distaffs billowing with clouds, about the fields and walls. I told him about learning to ride Gerdi, and we laughed about her somnolent way of transporting me. I could walk faster than ride that girl, but I had some affection for her. I told him about Drifa. About how I felt so at home in the white woods. It stabbed my heart to think about Heirik there with me, but if felt good to tell Brosa about the beauty of the quiet, and the baskets of leaves and herbs and lichens for dyeing. I told him I’d yet to find Saga back among the trees, though I could feel her presence there. And somehow Brosa’s way of listening made these minor adventures seem as exciting as a trading voyage.

In the quiet moonlight, something made him change direction entirely—perhaps our talk of the goods he brought home, or the cloth and bread and bandages I’d made. The things that would sustain us. It was almost a whisper. “This wreck,” he said, gesturing with his chin toward the whale. “It is my mother’s blessing.” Wreck was fond. A way to name the whale. Something good, given by this lethal sea.

“I know,” I whispered back. The animal would feed the whole extended family for some time. There was abundance, beyond enough, just like every year since Signé married Ulf. “I’ve heard very much about her.”

He smiled, inwardly watching his mother. Then he looked at me. “I could tell you one more story, before you fall into sleep.” Brosa touched my toe with his, in a friendly way. It was true, I was tired.

His grandfather, Magnus Heirikson, was among the first settlers. “They were rich,” he said plainly, nowhere near describing their wealth. “They came in two great ships with people and animals and thralls. Jewelry and weapons and tools.” He chuckled and shook his head in wonderment. “I think of my grandmother on a ship, with sheep at her knees. I don’t know where they thought they were going with their glass cups and furs. But I am glad now that they brought them,” he said, and with his foot he nudged the fur that now lay across my lap, much bigger than any Icelandic animal, a treasure beyond price. It brought to mind Signé’s fox jacket. The one Heirik let me wear months ago in the snow, the night we were lovers.

How could I really let him go? He’d pushed me away finally this time. Absolutely. But I’d felt his need first tonight, not Brosa’s, in my heart and against my thighs.

I drew their grandmother’s fur around my legs and rested myself heavily in the hollows of my log. I had a powerful urge to go to sleep, to put aside this muddled mess. Put aside the unassuming but steady fact of Brosa’s foot still resting against my leg.

“They waited until dark on the night the farm was born.” He looked into the firelight and began to tell it like a children’s tale, the way he must’ve heard it a hundred times in his blankets, curled into the body of his loving uncle. “And Magnus took his fastest horse and lit the fires all around.” He poked at our small fire with his stick. “And Amma could see it from the hill where she waited, the farm lighting up like a fiery ring in the wilderness. And where she stood, they built our house.” He drew a rectangle in the sand, to be the house.

His voice was deep, the cadence reverent.

“Then what?” I whispered, in a kind of trance.

“Já, well,” he said at full volume. “Then, a whole lot of backbreaking work began, and everyone was very sorry they’d come to Iceland.” A laugh rumbled in his chest.

Awake, I kicked his foot, a bit harder than he’d done mine.

“Alright, alright.” He smirked. He got up and came to sit next to me again, putting his arm around me. “But you have to close your eyes, Litli Sládreng.” Words like
small
and
slain
mixed together to mean
tired little boy
. What he was called, when this story was told to him?

He stroked my shoulder and started in again with the bedtime story, wrapping me up in a rhythmic, slow litany of all the things that were blessed with sacrifices of all kinds and sizes. The fields and house and barn and woods and bath and sea. The weapons and tools, the hearth, the horses, the walls as they were built. The beach where we sat now, the fishing camp. And the gods were very pleased, and Magnus and Amma had many children, including two sons, Ulf and Hár. “Ulf married a beautiful princess named Signé. And Ulf and the princess had two pups.”

I could feel him smile at that. As a child this part of the story must have been very exciting and silly, when it got to the part about himself. I smiled, too, and nestled into the darkness of Brosa. In the second before sleep took me entirely, I heard him whisper, “And Ulf and Signé died and had no other.”

I woke, curled around the silver remains of a driftwood fire. Its warmth had faded to a few embers, and I shuddered with a deep cold, blinking my stiff eyelids. Then I felt him, warm against my back, and I smiled. I pressed myself into the solid heat behind me, snuggling into him. I remembered waking once before like this, his voice a murmur against my shoulder.