Beautiful Wreck (65 page)

The beach became quiet. Even the relentless rhythm of the waves seemed to pause to be sure he’d said “Betta.” Betta stood with great poise and without looking at anyone else, she approached him. Thora stared open-mouthed at her Da, as he melted from angry old man to tender lover at the sight. Betta knelt beside him, and took his forearm to look at his wound, but he pulled his hand away.

“My hand is no matter, Woman. I need to talk.”

If it was possible, even more of the blood left her face, and she was a ghost, ready to dissipate. But she placed her hands steadily on her own knees and waited.

“You’ve heard I will marry.”

She nodded, holding back all emotion, more controlled than I could ever be. I thought of myself just yesterday, accusing and pleading. The things I’d said to Heirik.
Don’t give me away like a sack of grain.

“I meant to talk to you before there was word,” Hár told her, and his voice was gentle. Betta dropped her head, then, no longer able to bear what he was saying—giving her this speech, and in front of half the family. Her will failed, and her features crumpled with pain.

Hár was still talking, “And before this happened.” He gestured at the inconvenience of his severed finger.

Then he saw her face and quickly took her by the chin with his good hand. “Nei, nei, mo chuisle, shhh.” She had taught him the Gaelic words, and his voice was like I’d never imagined it could be, caressing the words, caressing Betta with them. “What are you about?” He shook his head, as if bewildered by the emotions of women. “I only wanted to know, first. If you would say yes.”

Her angled brows drew together, and I watched as his words very slowly made sense to her, and then her eyes widened and she just said, “Oh.”

They smiled just for each other, as if none of us were there. He cupped more of her face, covering her cheek, his fingers tracing her hairline where her tight braids began, and she tilted her head and leaned into his touch. Her hand came up to cover his, and her eyes slid shut in bliss and relief. Tears traveled down her pink cheeks.

“Well, hjarta mitt?” He added ruefully, “Are you through with me now that I have but one good hand?”

She burst out laughing, and so did all of us. And she told him she wanted to marry him.

He nodded then, that taken care of, and told her he’d need some new clothes and asked if she’d go find them.

They didn’t kiss, didn’t hold one another. Betta gazed up at him a bit longer, though, and it was stunning how they transformed each other. She was a gorgeous woman. And for a moment, Hár wasn’t a gruff and dangerous Viking. He was a lover, a husband of the heart.

On my muddled trip home, everyone else ranged intensely high, full of joy and whale and weddings. I heard music, but it came from far behind my back and belonged to another world, a small and colorful one. Here where I rode out in front, everything was washed out, colors indistinct, clouds unmoving in a plain sky. The luminous and ever-rushing river we followed through the valley, now slogged along through new grasses and shifting mud. We walked its banks, against its course.

I pushed on up front with my betrothed, still stunned at the word. Floored by the whole experience of meeting Brosa, let alone marrying him. Whenever he shifted to walk close to me, I tensed—Drifa snorting in response and tossing her head. Didn’t he see what his brother meant to me? Why did he persist with this?

Brosa tried to cheer me. He talked to me in bright and easy tones, but his voice was just a bit too smooth and light, the differences always coming to mind.

Mostly, I heard Svana’s teeny yips up ahead. “Herra!” She called after Heirik and spurred her horse up behind Vakr. What could that vapid girl have to say to him?

I would not tag along after them to find out.

I’d passed hands between brothers like an ax or horse.

Back at the house, I stood at the center of a storm of horses and whale meat and fat and bones. Provisions and shouts carried past in all directions. Home now, things that happened at the sea would become real, become everyday.

In the midst of the flurry, Svana stood beside Heirik. “Let me help you,” she said, and she tied the laces on his bracers. A simple gesture, at the end of a long day. Time seemed to slow down for me, every second a lifetime. I watched her hands shake as she touched him. Heard him say “Já,” distracted, staring into the homefield, maybe thinking of seeds and light. Not desiring her touch, but a
yes
nonetheless.

Beyond them, the house seemed to change before my eyes, from a protective and playful creature to a closed, frigid lump. The grass shriveled and turned to gray fingers and then to solid ice. A trick of the light.

When Svana was through, Heirik looked down at his hand, flexed his fingers and shook out his wrist. What did he see when he looked down at the top of her blond head? Or into her upturned spring-sky eyes?

I watched his future start, without me.

We didn’t see the chief again for fifteen days.

Brosa seemed to know this would happen, he fell so easily into his brother’s absence. It gave us time to know each other, he told me, as if it had been arranged. And over many days, I did settle into this quiet time, too, and into Brosa. I learned to like him very much.

Brosa didn’t seem to believe me when I told him we couldn’t marry, could never happen. He charmingly wooed me, shooting arrows with me in the yard and walking to the stable to talk privately with the horses. He sat with me by the fire, moving closer until our bodies rested against one another and I felt heady with his presence.

As the mornings and evenings passed, I felt Heirik’s absence less, felt almost disconnected from the thread of him. A sensation of freedom and sickness in my heart. When I recalled Svana touching Heirik casually, speaking gently to him, it felt like those things happened in another lifetime. Here, now, Svana’s gaze would rest on me and Brosa, and her little teeth had never looked whiter.

Brosa came to me again and again like a puppy, until finally, sometimes, I played. Tonight, I agreed to walk out with him, and he’d led me halfway around the field where barley was beginning to grow. He pushed me gently back into the homefield wall, deep in this unfathomably soft spring evening.

The loam smelled damp and clean, and he cradled my face in his palm. My cheek fit into the cup of his big hand. He bent to kiss me. Undeniably delicious, his lips carried traces of after-dinner honey. His beard scratched my chin. He pressed into me now, pinned me to the wall. The pressure and weight of his body, the heaviness between his legs, carried me off. I closed my eyes.

My hands went to his hips and I found his curves so familiar. I swept his broad back with my fingers, the nape of his neck. His hair felt just like Heirik’s. With one hand, I gathered it roughly in a ponytail and held it that way, and when he uttered a soft sound of desire the image was complete. For a glorious moment, it was Heirik who had me against that wall, ready to love me well, until I forgot my name.

He bent farther to kiss my collarbone, the sensitive skin above the neckline of my dress. I whimpered without thought, and it made him harder. Instinctively, I rolled my hips. They weren’t a perfect god-made match, but in fairness we were standing, slipping then, melting into a grassy wall. Sliding down to the ground, my cheek against the grass, hands caught up in his hair. I was on my back, then, Brosa a gorgeous weight on top of me.

Nei, I would not.

“Stop,” I told him, and this time I meant it. I pushed him away, and he drew back to search my face.

He must have seen my conviction, because he nodded and rolled off of me. He laid on his back, staring at the sky and panting like a house dog. I struggled with my skirts and sat up, my back against the homefield wall, and we both breathed and calmed ourselves. We stayed there together, slowly returning to the world—to the grass and earth and moonlight surrounding us with silver. The complaint of a goat.

It was hard to imagine a less sensual sound, and we both laughed, broken free from the trance of sex.

I sat against the wall, Brosa’s head in my lap, and I stroked the hair off his forehead. It looked like gold, unstoppably sun-drenched even in the dark. His weight was simple and intimate, and holding him this way was more familiar than I expected. It was effortless, his eyes watching the sky. I traced his cheekbone with my thumb.

We didn’t talk. Mainly he looked at the stars, and I looked at the field around us, the immediate grass, the darkness beyond. I indirectly looked at him, and he was breathtaking, his eyes upturned to the sky. He seemed not to notice me, not even notice my fingers in his loose hair. I didn’t know what he might be seeing.

“Esa had already died when I named my son.”

He said it as though he’d picked this statement casually, like a wildflower. But his voice was smaller than I’d ever heard it. Smaller than seemed possible for such a bear of a man.

He reached up to his forehead as if to stop my hand, then just held onto me there, both of our hands against his cheek. He looked into the sky, not at me, and he was so young, so lost and scared. He was back in the moment, stunned by quick grief and confusion. He told me how he’d gone to his knees beside Esa, holding her hand. Hildur had been there, had dragged him up off his knees and told him to sit on the bench.

“She told me to hurry and take him in my lap, that he would not last.” Brosa absently made the sign of Thor’s hammer on my hand, the same way he had blessed his child. “I wanted him to die as part of the family.”

A sighing of grass in a small breeze drew my attention to the fields, the valley I knew was out there in the dark. A quiet moment passed.

“I named him Arulf,” Brosa continued. I had heard this whole story from the little birds while spinning, but I knew Brosa now. Now I could imagine him in his moments of loss. He’d held the child, and named him for his own father, Ulf. “Arulf Brosuson.”

Hearing the child’s full name was a sharp stab. I opened my palm against Brosa’s head, pressed and held him there.

“A good name,” I told him through my tears.

The wall at my back sheltered us. Brosa smiled then, and turned his head to burrow into me, into the warmth of my lap. He crossed his arms on his chest and closed his eyes, lashes against my red wool dress. We could sleep here, I thought, just stay still and he could breathe deeper and slower until the waking world passed, and I could follow him and sleep, too.

“I can never replace them,” I whispered into the air, my fingers finding his curls, soft like those of a little boy.