Beautiful Wreck (11 page)

And I realized it wasn’t a campfire story. She was serious.

She must have never seen a raven. She knew of them because of religion and superstition, passed down through the family and clan. But they didn’t fly around the farm, apparently. And Hildur had gone nowhere else in her life, just the coast, the hills, this wall. Had she spent her days in a place so small, such a tiny crevice in the universe, that she’d never seen a black bird? In her mind, they’d grown to be tremendous and gruesome beasts. They ate the dead. When a warrior saw them, he knew his end had come.

And she thought the chief was aligned with them, because of his long black hair, its intense iridescence. All these girls thought so. They thought he was perhaps one of the ravens himself, come in human form to lead them, willing victims, to what? I opened my mouth to say something. I wanted to tell all of them that I’d seen ravens in documentaries. That they weren’t gigantic beasts, just birds. Big ones, yes, inky black, but just birds. In the city we had crows. I’d seen a few of them eat a lost, old pancake in the park. I’d certainly never seen one eat a dying soul.

I felt crow-like and dark myself. It came over me like fast-moving storm clouds, anger as rotten as the flesh in Hildur’s vision. It came up in my throat. With a great effort, I didn’t say a word, just turned back to spinning with a vengeance. My best thread all day.

I could feel Betta looking at me. I saw her in the periphery of my vision. She had the largest, roundest eyes I’d ever seen, clear green and almost expressionless, her whole body transformed into the act of observing. I noticed, then, that all the other women and Ranka were looking downhill.

The chief was coming from far down the slope. They were stunned, each one mentally comparing the atrocious vision Hildur had just described with the flesh and blood monster who approached. The monster sworn to protect them, who kept them alive and safe. Who was right now working to raise food for them to eat, coming home from chopping wood to keep them warm. He was closer now, and I could see the mark on his face clearly. A bloodied man, who held their lives in his revolting hands.

He was lovely. He walked with an unhurried, steady gait, an ax hanging casually from one hand. His hair glinted in the sun, and it was exactly like a crow’s feathers, mysterious and deep.

It was that time of night when everyone roamed the farm, walking in the clear sun of ten o’clock. Women and girls took off in groups to wander around the pretty birches and watch the rushing water. Up behind the house, Magnus and Haukur trained the little boys with wooden axes and shields.

I hadn’t found anyone in particular to be with, to follow, and I didn’t want to spend the time with the dogs, so I walked alone. I watched my boots smash the grass as I tramped up a series of hills that took me farther and farther from the house. The air was alive with moisture, and I raised my face to the sky and the dozens of peaks and slopes that surrounded me.

White mist rose from every hilltop, evaporating off of lavender and black rocks and dissolving into the sky, only to be followed by more and more steam, always coming off of the landscape. It shifted and billowed and covered the very tops of everything. And I was below, looking at the underside of earthly clouds.

I came over another small hill and stopped short, a sound of surprise escaping. A lovely glen opened up before me. Birds glided casually over the narrow little valley, a stream rambling below them. Grass grew right over its banks, almost covering it, but I could hear its constant gushing. Louder and wilder than the stream I’d wished that Jeff could give me. I had to touch it.

I skidded and tripped down to the water.

The grass, when I got very close, was cushy. The stream was less a waterway and more a drenching of the land. What looked like a bank was a cushion of saturated moss, and everything that appeared solid was sluggishly floating. My boots started to sink. My heels were sucked down by greedy mud. I panicked for a second, lifted my skirts and drew away.

I followed the thread of the stream at a safe distance, up where the ground was solid. I picked my way through grass and yellow flowers that grew taller and taller. Birds traced oblongs in the sky, lower now, close enough for me to see their long, curved beaks. I was so close to real birds! Ones that could fly with air under their wings, not pixels on a screen. One perched on a lump in the grass and complained, its call rhythmic and harsh like a honk.

The bump in the land looked unnatural, not like the other lumpy rocks that sat about the glen and streamside. The shape was familiar.

Birds opened their needle beaks and scattered as I took the last few steps to reach it.

Oh.
I exhaled with surprise.

It was a longhouse. Just like the one the family lived in, but knee height. The tall summer grass and wildflowers almost obscured it, but a diminutive gable peeked out, and I cleared the way to a door no more than eight inches tall. Over my shoulder, a bird blared its rhythmic cry once more. My skin prickled with the thrill of it—of being in a world of actual brooks and animals. Being near creatures who circled in the air above a grass-roofed dollhouse. I knelt all the way down and got onto my elbows to open the door.

A hole in the roof let in just enough light to see.

The house’s interior was spare and eloquent. The floor was packed dirt, and an oval of little rocks formed a heartstone—the bones and pulse of a house, nothing more. A bird passing low overhead made the light flicker as though the hearth was lit with flames.

I walked my fingers over the threshold but didn’t reach in any farther. There was a pleasant stillness that I didn’t want to disturb. I imagined the little girls playing here and wondered if the house had belonged to generations of children. Whether Betta had used it, whether Uncle Har had kept it in shape, trimming the weeds each summer and shoring up the little walls.

A rush of blood hit me when I sat up and rocked back on my heels. I’d had my head down longer than I realized. I looked to the sky, and my view swam with birds. A dozen or more defining elegant curves against the colors of evening. The mist had closed down tighter, now a translucent but oppressive gray. My feet tingled when I stood and I stamped them gently, wincing at the sharp pins and needles.

A bird swooped by just ten feet away and lit on a mossy rock. It scolded me, its long beak open. Another whizzed past my head, even closer, and then a hint of anxiety came, a gentle nudge of something not right. Wild birds weren’t like house dogs. They didn’t come over to be petted.

I turned to head back to the house, and the glen had changed to a big valley stretching endlessly up and away in every direction, disappearing into the growing mist. My heart pounded. Which way was home? I walked fast, taking big squelching steps. Birds were massing on every side. They flew in close to my face, so close I could see their round and unemotional eyes. Up close, their beaks were as long as my hand, curved and thin like the biggest sewing needle.

With the stream and little playhouse as a guide, I made a desperate stab at the right direction, and I ran. They followed me, crying out, and I was rushing now, my head light and full of adrenalin. I imagined them stabbing at me, tearing at my skin and hair. I stumbled up and out of the glen and kept racing, tripping over rocks, dress catching on flowers, nose running. The birds fell back, but I still struggled ahead.

I thought I saw the house, our big one, but in the green of full summer it was almost invisible until I was upon it. Sagging against it. Home.

Betta stepped out from the front door, saw me and came toward me, and she looked like salvation. I could tell her how I was so afraid and she would listen and say it was nonsense. I could imagine her comforting arm around me, her cool and sure hand on my forehead. But she froze in her tracks. Curious for one moment, her fingers clutched at the neckline of her dress, then she ducked her head and went back into the house.

“Ginn.”

The chief was behind me.

He said to my back, “What happened?”

“Birds,” I started, and it sounded so dumb. “I was walking in a pretty place.” I pointed vaguely away from us, up the hills. “There was a tiny house just like this one, and then birds attacked me, all around my head—”

“—You are here now.” His voice was safe, like a lullaby. He moved closer behind me. “Touch the wall.”

I put my palm on it and it was strong. I gripped a handful of grass. My cheek felt hot against the relief of the turf. “My body hurts from spinning,” I admitted. Then the words started to come fast and free, every one of them condemning me as ungrateful and lazy. “I’m sick from wool and dry fish and smoke and my lungs burn and I’m hungry all the time. And the farm is so beautiful. I’m just so alone.”

It felt good to say it out loud, that I was lonely. “And I’m afraid of birds.”

My words hung pathetically in a brief silence.

“Turn to me,” he said with a sort of demanding kindness. Different from the way I’d heard him command Magnus to settle the horses or direct Hildur to prepare for an earlier morning meal for the men. There was no question that I would obey him, but the instruction wasn’t cold.

My face felt wet and raw when I faced him.

I expected his to be implacable, but it wasn’t at all. His emotions were visible and chaotic, surprise foremost. His eyes, wild gold, quickly searched mine then looked elsewhere, the house, the ground. His fingers found the grass between us. “I apologize,” he told me.

“For what?”

He looked back up, and his dark brows briefly drew together. He looked for something in my features, but whatever it was, he didn’t find it. “I only wanted to see your face.” He was flushed and ashamed, and I didn’t know why.

“Follow,” he said abruptly. He turned and walked along the house, around toward the back, his palm trailing on the wall. Grass sprang up where his hand passed, and I followed, gliding my fingers over the same disturbed places. I was careful not to touch him.

He must have seemed like a giant to Svana or Hildur who stood shy of five feet. I myself had five inches on the women here, and my eyes were even with the leather tie in the chief’s hair, the nape of his neck and the collars of his two linen shirts. I thought of Jeff, whose broad, easy smile was a foot above me. Even in his arms, he’d always seemed so far away.

“My mother showed me this,” the chief said, moving along the back of the house. We turned a corner to follow the contours of the pantry. “When I was alone …” He trailed off. Since we started talking, he’d been losing whole phrases, sentences, quietly losing control. I hadn’t heard him this way before.

He was still facing away when he finished, a bit more neatly. “Know this house is here for you.” Another tender command.

I tried thinking of his home as mine for a second, and it felt immediately natural. My house.

“One hundred fifty six of my paces around the back,” he told me. We stopped at the corner and he faced me. “Now that I’m grown.” The corner of his mouth turned up in a disarming way, a smile there and gone in a heartbeat.

He smelled like fresh sweat and something else, like cinnamon.

“All grown up,” I repeated softly, like talking to a child.

He smiled again. “How old do you think I am?” I could see he wanted to amuse me, occupy me and take away my sadness. It was charming.

I didn’t know what to say. He was grown up, yes, very much a man. But I had a feeling it had little to do with age. He couldn’t be more than thirty. I guessed. “Twenty seven?”

He laughed, a sound I hadn’t imagined.

“You would have me with the ravens so soon?” He told me seriously, “I am twenty-two years this fall.”

My god, he was a boy. Younger than me.

A breeze rose, and the scent of iron came too. He held his ax, so easily I wondered if he remembered it was there. The birthmark reached to the back of his hand, mostly hidden by his scarred leather bracers.

He saw me looking. He was so open right now, I could hurt him if I stared. I had to do anything but focus on his mark. Desperate, I said “Your ax is lovely.” Duh, I thought.

He lifted it, slipped it into his right hand as though it weighed nothing, and said “Já, it is,” and I was relieved to find that it was entirely ordinary to him, not at all awkward to receive such a compliment about a tool. “Ulf’s ax,” he explained. “My father’s.” And then I realized what I was looking at.