Beautiful Wreck (8 page)

Ranka went on about her little girl topics. She talked about everyone on the farm, and I could hardly comprehend or remember any of it. She had an urgent need to tell me everything she’d ever absorbed or thought. I could feel her unstoppable will to grow, and to be, and it made me ashamed of hiding back in that bed for even a minute. My heart filled with her excitement, and I breathed the fresh air and smelled grass and dirt, more vivid and animal than any city park. Bliss and pure wonder coursed in my veins.

Then she was talking about me.

“I heard that you came from the sea,” she said. My worry came back, a sudden hard ball in my stomach. She went on, oblivious to me. “My Da found you.”

An unaccountable feeling stabbed at my heart. My voice came out smaller than I intended. “I thank him, then.”

“Já … ” She trailed off, and the silence was stark after so much chatter.

She wanted to ask me something. I could hear it in the echo of her
yes
, the inflection that lingered in my ears, and I could feel her swaying back and forth on her knees while she arranged the wet hair around my shoulders. Finally she burst out, “So are you sent by the goddesses or not?”

Betta and I laughed out loud, then looked at each other and smiled. I thought of the programming team, of Jeff, and he was no goddess. “I don’t think so.”

Ranka’s father had found me at the ocean. She was his child, then. She was a bright and wonderful girl. So why did it make my heart hurt to know that she was his?

“So the chief is your Da.” I said it lightly, but the words burned in my throat. It was the smoke, still thick in my lungs.

Ranka gasped and dropped the comb with a glunk into the bath. The intensely bubbly girl who’d hardly stopped moving for a second in all the time I’d known her, became still.

“Oh nei, Lady, nei,” she whispered.

Betta was alert, watching me without moving. I’d said something wrong. I felt like I’d been walking in a grassy meadow and stepped in a cavernous hole.

Then Betta returned to herself. “Ranka’s Da is Arn.”

“And my Ma is Kit,” Ranka joined back in, picking up speed. “I have a little brother. We sleep in the next bed after you. The chief has his own room.” And she was off on a number of tangents at once, until my head was full of sheep shearing and spinning and horsies and kids who are nice and not nice. Betta lived down the hill at the thralls’ house. And Hildur—she was in charge. There were four girls who needed to be betrothed soon, in order from least pretty to prettiest: Betta, Thora, Grettis and Svana.

Ranka stopped short, realizing what she’d done, but Betta was turned away and I couldn’t see her smile fade. I only saw her sit up taller. Least pretty.

“It’s okay, Ranka,” I said, breaking into the silence. “I think it’s time for me to get dressed.”

Betta gave me a pair of gauzy wool pants for underneath my skirts, and I pulled them on quickly. We were far enough down from the house to be mostly hidden, but I could still see a swatch of the grass wall. A trick of the landscape that made this little spot visible from the yard. The bite of air felt unfamiliar on my breasts and thighs.

The pants were so finely woven, like clouds around my calves. I drew on the shift and underdress they’d given me. My extravagant red wool was still clogged with mud, so a borrowed, oatmeal-colored dress went on top. I thought of the Viking in the coffee shop. If it weren’t for him, I’d have washed up as a peasant girl, not a Norse princess in a lavishly dyed dress. Perhaps the chief would have sent me to Betta’s house, down the hill.

He could still send me there.

I looked back at the door to the tunnel. Grass grew off the hill down onto its little gable. Dragonheads crossed, frozen in the act of biting the crisp air. I took a few extra deep breaths before heading inside again. Before heading to meet this man who held my fate.

“Do you remember yourself?”

Betta’s question was asked so softly I almost didn’t hear. I turned to her, but she didn’t look at me. She watched the horizon and waited.

I thought about me—Jen—about my friends, my empty attraction with Jeff, my clean apartment. Thought about my job building fantasies for other people who had similar friends and lovers and homes. I thought about reading the farm notes alone in the dark.

“No,” I said, actually wishing it were true. That I didn’t remember me.

And then I knew my answer, that this is what I would tell everyone. Betta, Ranka, the chief, the staring women. My worries about explaining myself were over. I just wouldn’t remember anything.

Finally Betta and Ranka had done all they could. They’d bathed and dressed me. Fed me a big, delicious cloud of goat cheese that I ate in great gulps with a spoon. Let me floss with thread and brush my teeth with a carved stick. I swished with the angelica water left in the bowl, trying not to think about how the comb had dipped into it so many times. Ranka arranged my braids one more time, drawing them down from my temples, smoothing the rest of my hair that hung long over my shoulders. I was ready. I would have to meet the chief.

While they worked on me, I thought about the way he talked, outside my bed curtain. He sounded cold. The way Betta and Ranka acted, I imagined he must terrorize this family. They were afraid he would be mean to me. But it was more than that. There was an icy dread underneath everything having to do with him, and I couldn’t name it even enough to ask. What was it that they feared?

By the time I was fully prepared, I didn’t know if I should expect to be welcomed to Hvítmörk or backhanded across the face and told to live in the stables.

Ranka pushed me in the right direction and ran away.

The chief was working with iron over a hot fire. He was sharpening a nasty looking blade, pounding it with a hammer against a rock. Again and again, flattening, honing. His hair—all of it this time—was tied out of the way with a strip of leather, and his temples showed slick with sweat.

He worked in linen pants and a thigh-length shirt. No, it was two shirts, layered like Jeff’s old t-shirts. They covered him completely from his throat down to a pair of leather gauntlets on his wrists. Not the romanticized version of a horn-helmeted warrior, the chief was big and lean and powerfully built from hard work in the sun. I was lulled by the changing curves of his shoulder blades as he worked. The elegant flow of muscle and bone under linen, so far beyond the reach of any programmer’s skill.

I shaded my eyes to watch, and the hem of my dress fluttered and caught in the grass. A quiet moment alone with him. It felt natural.

He stood up, dragging one hand across his forehead and the black strands that stuck there, looking as though he’d half forgotten about me. He had, I think, and he was bewildered and freshly annoyed at the idea of me. I had been soothed by the sun and breeze and his rhythmic work, but now that lurking dread came again.

I was lost. Stranded in a place where no elegantly curved Viking ship could take me home. At the mercy of a man who held his own family—every woman and child in the house—in fear and awe. What would he do with me? Scenarios flashed through my mind. Wind and rain whipping at me, cast out alone in the wilds of Iceland, or working on the farm, a slave. Bringing him his food, slipping the boots from his feet at night. What else might he want? Whether he threw me away or kept me, I would have little choice.

Then those gold eyes fixed on me.

“Heirik Rakknason,” he said of himself, without extending a hand.

Two boys fluttered around him, picking up his task where he’d left off. Heirik stepped away from the fire, and clearly I was supposed to follow. He crossed his arms over his chest and settled in to stand and talk.

“I take care of this family, this land.”

I looked past him and down into a stunning valley, where smoke from small fires climbed the air currents. Cows grazed randomly, like in a children’s book.

“Hello Heirik,” I said, amazed at how small my voice sounded, The hard A up front, the softly rolled R. “I’m Ginn.”

I tried out my name. Like my skirts, soft and mysteriously new.

I was afraid I’d be unable to look away from his birthmark. But I looked at him head-on, and in an instant it was as if the mark dissolved and I saw only him. His face was as sharp and breathtaking as I remembered from the coast.

He kept his arms folded tight, but he repeated “Ginn,” and a fleeting lightness lifted his voice. My name seemed to turn his eyes to honey, and a smile played at one corner of his mouth. It lit there for only an instant and was gone.

The forge stood uphill from the house, and he looked into the distance, down into the valley, in a direction I thought was the sea. A chill breeze came up and lifted the loose strands of hair from his face. He was head of a huge household and farm. Probably two dozen people lived in the big house alone. He was young, not much older than me, but still in this time and place he would have a family, a wife and kids already. He no doubt counted farmers, fishermen, hunters and traders among the extended family whose land and huts sprawled in this valley and on the slopes of surrounding hills. He was bound to protect and lead them. What I amounted to was a small irritation. He needed to decide what to do with me, so he could move on to the next challenges of the day.

He smelled like fire and leather.

He took a deep breath, as though he knew this would go nowhere but he just had to ask. Looking out over the grassy vista he said, to the air as much as me, “What happened to you, Ginn?” The bracers at his wrists were tied with leather strips, and with his right hand he began loosening the laces of the left. It was as though he cast the question out like a stone in a pond, and then focused his eyes elsewhere while he waited for the ripples.

“I don’t know.”

It was the truth. I didn’t know anything about how I’d come.

He nodded. He looked at me again, looked into my eyes for a moment that was too brief. His half smile returned. “Have you seen the woods?” He raised his chin.

I turned around to follow his gaze and gasped. I had been staring at him, watching him work, looking down into the grassy slopes of his farm, and all the while behind me was Hvítmörk. A glorious, heart-stopping forest stretching for miles, farther than I could see. From up here, the woods stirred, alive with a thousand whispers and breezes. Mysterious and lush, a place for elves and land spirits to live, for children and lovers to hide. The canopy gleamed, dark and glossy from above, but the slanting light of afternoon reached the interior and lit the woods with a haunting white glow.
Oh.
I was looking at a million trees, every one of them a silver birch.

“Oh, Heirik,” I whispered. “Your woods are beautiful.”

I turned back to him wanting to see his smile again, but found him considering his ax blade. “Go to Hildur,” he told me, the lightness gone. “She will have you work.” He walked away.

SPINNING

It was to be the last time I’d use his name. Hildur made that clear soon enough.

We sat atop a grassy wall that was pleasantly heated by the sun. It was a rock and turf circle that enclosed the stables, no more than fifty feet from the back door of the house.

There were five of us women and Ranka, like birds in a line. We’d helped each other get up to the top, which was just about my chest height. A pretty girl named Svana clasped her hands for me to step on. Her fingers were so slender and white, I was sorry to plant my damp leather boot on them. She just smiled and then climbed up on the next girl’s hands in turn. When she met me up top she was a little breathless, and she laughed and brushed my cheek, sweeping off something, some twig or dirt that clung to my face.

“Have you never climbed a wall, Woman?”

Even Hildur, at twice my age and around four foot ten, climbed up in a heartbeat. The whole time, she maintained an air of strict superiority.

Keeper of the keys. I learned Hildur was mistress of all that happened inside the house and everything women touched and made. Every ounce of spun fiber, every slab of fish and drop of ale were hers to demand or deny. I knew intellectually that this was how it was done, that a woman ran the house and a man the farm, but they were usually married. I guessed Hildur was about fifty. I thought she was much too old for the chief.

She had not grown tired, though, with decades of work, nor plump or doughy. Not overly kind like a fairytale grandma, either. She was short, slim, and sinewy. Her eyes were quick and dark under a severe arrangement of graying blond braids, and her expression flashed rapidly and frequently from exasperated to resigned to mirthful. It seemed she could be funny as well as fierce. And as far as I could tell, she ran a perfectly functioning, huge and prosperous house. She and Heirik made an oddly matched set of tough strategists with changing eyes. Together with him, Hildur ruled this place.

She was smart. I was sure she could see me calculating, wondering.

“You will call him Herra,” she told me.
Chief.
“No one uses his name.” She nodded to herself, checking that off her list of the many things I needed to learn.

In a sideways manner, Hildur had welcomed me. She’d watched me put on the new socks and boots I was given. I wrapped and tied the leather with little hitch knots, and Hildur, without breaking her sewing stride, glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. I wondered if this was not an alright way to tie my shoes. Finally she said, “We have enough.” Meaning, I could keep them.