Beautiful Wreck (71 page)

Heirik looked past the man into the dark.

“Já,” he said absently. “She is.”

It didn’t touch me. In my mind, I was already heading to the sea.

When I went, it was with Heirik’s whetstone in one hand.

I crept into his bedroom, ducked past the sheet and saw the place where he would sleep later in the night. The rough wood of the booth was not our home, and this was not his real place, but the bed was a mess of sheepskins and furs that still held his impression from earlier in the day.

He’d sat right here. Had lain his head here.

I gathered the covers up in my arms, and I drew a deep breath of him, to take with me into the future. Then I stole his sharpening stone. I didn’t know what I would do with it. I just wanted it.

I held it in my left hand, and with my right I took out my new knife. It needed a name before I left. It was little, and it needed a name that felt small but strong.
Swimmer
came to me, suddenly and in English.

Before I left, I swept my eyes over the sleeping women, and it was still and peaceful. I didn’t even need to tell anyone I was going to the stream. The only one who saw me go was Svana, and she nodded. She would wonder when I didn’t come back, but more likely she’d be relieved. Rid of me.

Drifa was inside the tent, and so I took a nameless horse that chewed on the grass outside.

I asked a woman on my way out of camp whether I was heading to the ocean, and she nodded, looking like I was impossibly stupid. I thought maybe I was just that, a wandering and stupid thing. The horse stepped carefully through a maze of tents and sleeping bodies.

I thought of Brosa, so brave. He adored and feared his big brother, did all that he asked. He would change his whole life for Heirik, give up everything he desired. And yet he’d stood up to him today and said stop. Brosa would be alright without my kiss goodbye. He could take care of himself, and without me he could build his ship and sail away.

Betta sat on the bed with Hár, safe and joyful. I couldn’t face saying goodbye to her, so I just imagined her a few months from now, crowned in flowers, holding his sword in her lap on their wedding day. She would be fine, too.

My mind was already separating from them, going ahead of my body into the future.

The flat stone fit perfectly in my palm. A dark lava rock, Heirik used it for sharpening knives. It usually hung at his waist. I held it tucked inside my closed hand, just one finger holding the horse’s mane.

We rode for an endless, featureless stretch of time. The sky had turned completely dark at last, and I could feel the cold coming off the ground and up the horse’s legs, under my skirts. We passed right through a birch forest, on a road that was no more than a wide, cleared space in the trees. I shivered and swayed along with the horse’s cadence.

A crack sounded in the woods, and my senses woke. A tail flared in the brush, a blink of white highlighted by the moon. It happened again, a long while later or maybe just a few minutes, the sound of movement. There was nothing to see. Nothing lingered.

It must have been hours later when I snapped out of my trance again. Salt slowly registered in my brain, the smell of the sea. And then I got so close, I could imagine the crashing, and then I could really hear it. The waves.

I salivated, desparately wanting what I had come for. The oblivion I would have soon.

I slipped from the horse and let it go. Eyes soft and unfocused, I struggled on foot the rest of the way. I stumbled when my skirts snagged on big pieces of driftwood. My dress collected the smaller ones, and I brought them with me back into the water, where we’d all come from, me and the sticks.

I went to my knees in the foam, and the cold struck me like a searing burn, for just a second, before my body gave up. I swayed with the water’s pull, in and out. It was time.

I placed my hands in the water, then raised my fingers to my opposite wrist to tap out.

I had loved here. I’d thought I found my soul’s match, my rightful place, all those serenely satisfying moments that make up a good life. The moments in the farm notes, come to life. But I’d come to a place I could study, just like I studied that book on a screen. I could hear the real language, the way I’d dreamed. Could study the gestures and emotions. But it was their place. A place of harsh logic I could intellectually understand, but that my heart couldn’t weather.

Could it?

I wondered at the simple question, and I drew my submerged hand out of the water and spread it flat so I could skim the surface, foam bubbling up between my bony fingers. I rested them gently on my other wrist, just for a second so I could think.

The diary, my romantic heart, they were what I was good at.

My sweetness had the strength of ten Viking boats. Was it really broken?

I heard a splash of something big in the water. I thought the horse had followed me, but then there was a groan, a man’s harsh voice cursing. Fear spasmed in my chest. I whipped my head up and saw Asmund and Mord wading through the water toward me.

They’d hunted me, and like a pursued animal, my heart raced hard and I shrieked. My hand spasmed, fingers tapped my wrist, once, twice, and I felt the familiar endless falling, the blinding pain. A serrated knife dragged through my brain.

I convulsed on the floor of an empty lab, alarms blaring on all sides.

FREEZING

The future

The company hid me. They wouldn’t let me go.

I told everything to Jeff and Morgan. I told them about my family, about the smells and sounds of the house and farm, about haying and the ocean and feasts and axes. Morgan’s interest perked up around weapons and jewelry, and she listened more closely. Words tumbled out about everything, the ravine and the enormous sky.

About Heirik. I could hardly describe him. I was loved by a powerful chieftain, had been close to becoming his wife. None of those words worked.

A long stream of people wanted to talk with me, more than ever before. Programmers, physicists, historians, therapists. A reconstructive surgeon. Even the elusive, never-before-seen owners of the company sent their people. Neurologists grilled me about the sensations I’d experienced and the physical aftereffects. Costume historians asked about the exact design of my shift, which now sat in an air-tight baggie somewhere deep in this glacier. My cherry dress—the one I’d loved and lived in for so long—laid there with it, maybe hanging, freeze-dried like a fish.

Now I wore clothes like an inmate, drawstring pants, soft t-shirts. They wanted to study me, study what happened, avoid trouble, delve into possibility. I huddled the whole time everyone came and went and talked, my knees drawn up, a big pale sweater wrapped tight, my arms lost inside.

They said I would be given the best of everything, anything I wanted, as long as I stayed put. As long as I told no one else about where I’d been. As if these were choices.

They had never made it public that one of their people was missing. The secret of my disappearance became the secret of my return—and of what they now knew the tank could do.

They gave me two impeccable, frigid rooms to live in, inside the prettiest blue cave of the glacier. I didn’t struggle against it. I could have lived anywhere. I burrowed into the downy blankets of those rooms and stared. Mist crawled out of air conditioning vents, high on the walls. It formed a cloud cover, as if there could ever be a sky in here.

When I asked the room, a fire sprang up in my fireplace, without scent. Without wood or smoke at all. I looked into its blue falseness and thought of Brosa, breathing life into an apricot-orange ember.

Morgan visited sometimes, and I gave her coffee and listened to her questions, over and over, about the jewelry and knives we’d seen at the market, the bracelets Heirik wore, and for which occasions. I told her about his hands.

I let my heart pour out, bloody on the white rug, telling her how powerful my love was, how I belonged at his side, at the head of my household and farm. I told her about the fight on the beach, and she asked about spears. I talked of Ageirr’s hatred and grief, how I had to tell Heirik about Fjoðr. I tried to capture in words what the chief was like at feasts, that indescribable mix of angry and entitled and proud and shy. Heirik was gorgeous, I told her, even though everyone said he was so ugly. I told her about his voice, his bloody mark, his pitch-dark hair and incandescent eyes. Told her how people didn’t truly see him.

She wanted to know about his ax. The manner in which its head was attached to its handle.

“Jen,” she said. “He’s been dead a thousand years.”

I made a small plan. It wasn’t an escape plan, or even a good or honorable plan at all, just a set of instructions to get my heart to stop aching.

I would read the diary, but only after a hundred days. I’d save it, with the sure knowledge that it waited in my electronic files, just as patiently as
Swimmer
waited under the mattress of my cushy bed. And then on Day 100, I would read it all, every poetic and lovely line, and I’d destroy it. I would dissolve the files in the river of time, and they would rush away in pieces so small they could never be found.

I’d destroy anything I had left. Even
Swimmer
. I’d sneak into Morgan’s studio and melt my little knife. That was my plan.

I set the apartment to count down the days, telling me how far I’d come. It was the only way I knew that time passed.

On Day 29, the psychologists and surgeons agreed I was ready to heal.