Beautiful Wreck (9 page)

She’d also made it quite clear that I would work immediately. Today, I would re-learn how to spin, considering that I must have known and lost the memory. Tall, angular Betta handed up a basket with several spindles in it, and billows of cloudy, whitish fiber, before she pushed herself up, too.

The stables were set into a single round building with cave-like openings on all sides where the animals huddled and slept. Since it was summer, Svana explained, the stinkiest animals—the sheep and cows—were in the highlands grazing. There were a couple of goats here, a mess of chickens, two house dogs. A few of the horses stayed down all year working. The smell of animal hair and dung was stunning, like a physical blow, and I had trouble imagining how much worse it would be when the entire population came down from the hills and gathered in close.

My eyes watered from the stink. I blinked and cleared them and lifted my face to see the farm.

Only when the chief showed me the forest had I gotten any sense of the enormity and wonder of this place. Coming out here, and sitting up on this wall, a green and purple and white immensity opened up and crushed me.

I was small. A breathless speck under this sky, boundless without buildings to divide it. My breath came fast and shallow and I dug my fingers into the sod on either side of me. I told myself it was just the outside world the way it used to be, before glass towers and labs. I’d dreamed of it. I forced my lungs to work slower, to breathe deeper. I let my mind adjust. And finally my fear fell away, dissolving into the grassy, velvet beauty.

The house and stables sat on the only flat plane in sight. Hills climbed and fell in a dozen directions, like green waves slapping and sloshing in a pail. Chaotic, and so vivid I could taste grass in my throat. Down to the bath, up to the forge, and beyond, maybe, to the highlands. Land seemed to spill right from our laps and all the way to the distant sea. The merest sparkle of ocean lit the horizon, or perhaps I dreamed I could really see it. A river of impossibly sky-blue water ran past not far below the house and wound through the landscape toward the sea. Where I’d come through. My one link to home.

Far down the slope, almost too far around the curve of the forest’s edge to see, a single big fire sent out gray billows. I squinted and could make out a long building, another house. A neighbor, so close? Nei, it was the thralls’ house. Where Betta lived.

I blinked in sequence to save the image and shook my head. Would I be here long enough to learn? My contacts would have been able to take an image, and would have told me just where I sat on the map of the city. Now they sat dry and curled like dead bugs inside my needle case.

I turned to Hildur, resigned to try spinning.

I dreaded it. Morgan had replicas of two dozen of the spindle whorls discovered in excavations across Europe. Hers were stone, ceramic, and even one dazzling beauty carved of amber. They were conical, flat, convex, all manner of shapes and weights, and I’d tried at least one of every type, without success. These seemed to be made of bone, though to carve these solid pieces, it must have been the bone of something massive. I looked around nervously, my eyes settling on the edge of the trees. Only little animals lived here, I reminded myself. Birds mostly. Foxes.

Hildur handed me a spindle that was already started. She placed the shaft against my leg and drew it from knee to thigh, knee to thigh, three times over, then lifted it away and it was spinning. She showed me how the thread was forming, how to feed the fiber, like spun sugar in my hands, a tiny bit at a time. I took over the spindle and tried to let in the right amount of wool, but a familiar sense of being chased came over me.

In the arcs, the demonstrators said spinning was relaxing, but I felt threatened by it. It was menacing, the way the twist climbed inexorably toward my hand. I knew I would never feed just the right amount at the right time. I would get bound up, the twist getting out of control, the thread turning on itself and bundling. It was exactly what happened every time I sat in front of a screen and tried to mimic the motions. My stomach clenched in a familiar knot that perversely made me homesick. It made me miss Morgan’s hands turning over her rare spindles to show me their beauty, pointing with her deep blue polished fingernails. The closest I’d had to a friend.

Hildur’s nails were pale. Her hands were thin and avian.

She ordered me to keep starting over and trying again, and she remained patient for a very long time. Her assertion—no, command—was that any woman with two hands would learn. “Slow and sure.” Yes, I thought, definitely slow.

Three more tangles later, she looked at me skeptically. “You make me wonder if you’re lazy, Child. Remember,” she said with a wink, “no battles are won in bed.”

The girls giggled.

“Mother!” Svana gasped.

I gasped, too. Hildur was Svana’s mother? Svana, whose neck was long and lovely like her namesake bird’s, whose hair was soft like buttercream frosting. Ranka had noted her as prettiest on her marriageable list. Tough, middle aged Hildur had made this vision of loveliness. I tried to imagine the housekeeper younger, picture her flitting, lovely, through the trees, presumably with a gorgeous man. An image lost to time. She must have been pregnant when she was over thirty. Svana must be around fifteen.

“Keep your hands moving,” Hildur chided her pretty daughter.

“And you can stop wondering, Girl,” she said with a jut of her chin toward me, as if she might dispatch with all my questions in one swift stroke. “There is no real wife of this house, and there will not be until the chief’s brother returns.”

She said this brusquely, and with absolute finality, and no one—not even her sweet, pouty daughter—spoke up. In fact, Svana dropped her eyes and blushed. There were undercurrents here, underneath the surface of this idyllic pool, and Hildur’s statement had hardly stopped my wondering.

Varieties of pain—stabbing, dull, constant—occupied my shoulders, my spine, my lower back. I’d spent what seemed like endless days, eight or more hours each, trying to make thread. My fingers were silky soft, my skin a red and tenuous barrier. My neck throbbed, and still I spun for three hunched-over days.

The time passed in a strange, uneven way. Was it a hint that I might suddenly return? The way a moment watching thread twirl could last a hundred years? The way sleeping seemed to last a second?

Every time I woke, it was another teasing moment when I expected the soft nudge of my apartment’s voice, the clean light through glass windows, the smell of coffee. Then that still moment of potential would pass, yet again, into the heat and stink of the longhouse.

To pass the time and keep our blood flowing, we broke off in pairs and small groups and walked and gossiped. And I learned about Betta. Like Hildur, Betta’s father, Bjarn was a kind of hired help. A thrall, but more like an upheld servant. If not for her Da’s healing gift, Betta would live somewhere else, not as lovely and rich as Hvítmörk. He’d made a good life for his little girl. And as a third generation thrall, Betta was free.

Besides this tale, and lessons about the family tree, there was not much else to talk about.

Everyone longed to go places. Roundup would come in a few weeks, where they would see other families from the surrounding farms, and from all over this clan’s own land. The women talked about minor intrigues, stolen horses, lazy shepherds. About boys, some that were attractive, some dumb. They talked of Eiðr who was ugly but smart and strong. His big brother Ageirr, a pinch-faced man whose house was renowned for its grimness. It hadn’t always been so sad, and when the women said so their voices were chilly and fascinated. Hands fluttered nervously in clouds of fiber.

Their words turned broad and free when they spoke of Egil, a bear of a man, descended from one of the greatest settlers. His house was magnificent, his farm as vast as Hvítmörk. Haukur was his son. The chief fostered the boy here, and Haukur wouldn’t see his Da again until the Jul festival. Egil’s animals grazed farther away.

The women planned for a trip to the coast. Most of them went twice or maybe three times a year to gather eggs and herbs and juniper berries and to help process the birds and fish the men would kill, the “leaping salmon” of the arcs, the “great and clumsy auks.” They would ride every one of their horses, pulling children and supplies on sledges, stopping to walk down rocky slopes between here and the ocean.

Betta dreamed bigger, of someday riding to the gathering of all the men in Iceland.

The chief and Har went every year to a new kind of meeting, of everyone from everywhere. It had been growing until men from all over Hvítmörk now joined in the trek.

They went without children and with only a few of the women, but Betta had heard stories from Har. He told them around the hearth at night. Stories of riding so long they had to stop and sleep three times under the sparse stars of early summer.

In Betta’s mind those stars shone on a landscape of gold and icy beauty. She pictured herself riding through it on a soft brown horse. There would be booths and tents to live in at the gathering. Merchants, other families and different chiefs, betrothals, liaisons and feuds. Betta was absorbed as she told me, and she set her spindle down without knowing she’d stopped making thread. There would be parties! More people than she had seen in her life. There would be jewelry and blades to look at and want. She spread her hands out in the air, palms down as if to contain the profusion of her dream. The river would run bigger and bluer there, she said. The knives would glint in a different sun.

I’d seen the place she spoke of, where the althing was held each spring until centuries after Betta herself would be gone. It was a deep rut in the ground, surrounded by glass towers that blocked the sun. A track of ground where people walked single file, their eyes furtive as they consulted their contacts.
The althing was formalized here circa 930 AD.
I recalled the dry lesson.
Chieftains and their men assembled each summer until the end of the Old Commonwealth in the 13th century.
Betta made me want to go now with her, to see the real thing. To see a bigger world through her eyes.

But she would never go. At best, she wasn’t important. She would stay at Hvítmörk when the real men and women were gone.

A week later, I remained.

One night, the air turned crisp with a bite of something cold, the prickling of rain to come, and everyone left the house after the evening meal to walk and breathe. They smiled, chatting, calling to each other. Ranka’s Da lovingly grabbed her mother, Kit, and dragged her away from talking with the girls. Three-year-old Lotta stopped to adjust her little boot and tried to race after the bigger girls wailing, “Nei! Nei!” I drifted a little bit after them, drawn by their wake, then stopped and stood. I didn’t know which way to go, or who to bother. Awkward and frozen, I looked toward the ocean.

No more than ten days ago, I’d washed up there. Carried into a place of profuse, willful life, so vivid I ought to feel submerged in it. But I floated, so alone, even here in a place I’d fervently dreamed of.

The loneliness was most often a subtle little thing casually chewing at my edges. Now, in the languid stretch of evening, it hit me like a blow. The force of it drove me to the ground. I sat right there, a hundred feet from the house, my skirts in a cherry red billow around me.

I drew my knees up, and they felt bony when I rested my chin on them. I was thinner already. The food here choked me, and a slight hunger was my constant companion. Sour whey curdled in my throat and gut, porridge lodged like dull cement. I drew a braid the texture of straw over my shoulder. My hair was wrecked from just two washings with lye soap. I wrapped my arms tight and allowed myself to sob, just once. Gods, how had this happened? Why wasn’t I sucked back into the twenty-second century, as randomly I’d been forced here?

I wasn’t going to be. I could tell.

I rocked myself and drew a few hitching breaths.

I cleared a small space in the dirt, and with my finger I drew Iceland. I’d done this before, a few times since I came, trying to piece together where I was. Whether I sat, right now, where my gleaming apartment would stand, or whether I’d gotten lost far across the island as well as through time. I remembered Betta’s words, about how the men had to sleep outside three nights to reach the althing. I drew lines emanating from Thingvellir. How far could that be, if it took four days? My finger was too big, the lines too fat. I brushed the map away. I had no idea.