Beautiful Wreck (7 page)

Objects glinted in angled rays of sun that shot through a vent in the roof. Tools, axes that had been laid carefully aside, women’s knives and needles flashing. Two women sat like spirits in the drifting smoke and revolting stink of body odor and fish. I swallowed hard.

It was the hjartastein.
Heartstone.
A word that, in the Viking way, made a tiny poem out of the most ordinary thing. It was the main fire, the center of the living home. An elongated oval of rocks contained it. Sunlight coming through a hole in the roof carved a swirling column of ashes and smoke that rose slowly toward the sky.

I blinked the sequence to save an image, and a little tear of loss and frustration stung my eye. My contacts were gone, wouldn’t work anymore.

I searched the room, desperate to take everything in, every detail, for when I got sucked back into the future. I had no idea when it would be. I had to seize this, and I had to do it alone, with just my eyes and mind. I reeled, trying to see and listen and memorize, and when I stepped down out of the alcove I stumbled and my knees hit the ground.

From the swept-dirt floor I looked up in wonder. Across the way two stories of sleeping spaces were set into the wall, divided by big posts, entire trees holding up the house and dividing tiny sleeping quarters like animals’ dens. Most were enclosed with thin linen curtains, a rusty orange color that glowed almost pink where it was lit.

A few alcoves on the lower level were open to the room. In one of them, a man slept heavily with his mouth open against the wood bench, his belly crushed against a metal cup and several knives that hung from his belt. One arm bent, his hand rested on his ax blade like it was a lover’s cheek. Other than him, no men were present. Just the two women at the heartstone. They stared.

I reached blindly for Betta, and she squeezed my hand with her capable fingers, her cool and reassuring palm. She helped me up, and when we both rose to our full heights, she stood an inch or two above. A very tall woman in her place and time, probably five and a half feet.

She helped me walk the length of the room and through an archway into another. The second room was smaller and paneled with a blond wood that made it shine. I’d read about this! The room for women’s work. At the center, around a smaller fire, were a small clutch of women, vaguely threatening. Two sat spinning on glowing blond benches. The third paced with a baby at her breast, whispering to it and kissing its white head. Its soft hair waved with her breath. Betta didn’t introduce me, and I was grateful. They nodded, a couple smiled, and we moved on.

A door stood at the end of the room, all golden wood with iron hinges and a little gable with crossed dragon heads above it. A child’s dream door. Something breathtaking and special should be on the other side, like a world made of candy. And it was.

The mudroom at the back of the house was a great profusion, lit with the same little wall lamps stuck into the dirt walls here and there. They illuminated a rich and abundant life. Dozens of wool cloaks hung from pegs, leather boots lined up below, a tall stack of big bowls, so many baskets, tools, brooms. Bows and arrows hung on the wall, next to a pair of long, curved blades and a string of blunt ax heads, everywhere lay knives and axes and other bits of metal made for cutting. One corner was filled of wooden handles of every length from hatchet-sized to taller than Jeff. Another corner was stacked with crude snowshoes and long, flat slats that were the skið I had read about—
snow skates
—like thin wooden skis. Low benches lined the back wall, one piled high with folded blankets and sheepskins. Under the bench, a small wooden sword and tiny shield lolled, forgotten. The home’s true heart was not the fire pit, but here.

The room was chaotically alive and yet neat as a tack. A house run strictly but bursting with love, kept in order by a good wife. Maybe it was the one with the babe. Had she worn keys at her waist? A pang of emotion erupted in me, an anger so sharp that I staggered onto the bench. Who did she think she was, the woman who kept this house so beautiful? I was confused. Shocked at myself. Frustrated and mad at being lost and weak. This was a gorgeous home, bigger, more extravagant and comfortable than any longhouse I’d imagined, and I was lucky, so very lucky.

My head was a dead weight in my hands.

A little girl with long, brown braids knelt in front of me. “Come Lady, are you alright?”

I lifted my raw eyes to her, and she told me she was Ranka, exactly six. Betta knelt beside Ranka, looking speculatively between my feet and a little pair of leather ankle boots. I noticed my own by the door, two salt-watered lumps. She pursed her lips, matching my foot to a sole. Ranka gave advice in a sing-song voice about girls with growing feet.

Besides the way we came through, there were two other doors. One went outside, I assumed. Another had a complex iron latch. And there was also a passageway—a simple opening in the floor with steps going down into the earth, extending into a dark, unknowable interior.

I stood and wobbled, reached out my hand for the latched door, and Betta and Ranka nearly knocked each other over scrambling to pull me away. “Nei!” Ranka’s eyes were wide. “We do not go there.” I let them steer me away and down the dark stairs into the earth.

The tunnel wasn’t frightening. Just high and wide enough that Betta and I could walk comfortably, it looked like something built by friendly elves. Betta let Ranka hold a small torch, and I winced when she waved it too close to my face. We hardly needed it. In less than half a minute we could see a square of light where the tunnel ended. It was a charming little door with a paneless window cut out of the top half. We seemed to be inside a hill, and right ahead of me I could see the clean air.

I stepped out, and the sun off a million blades of grass slashed at my eyes. I cried out, covering them with my hands. I opened my fingers slowly, and when I was able to look, the world was stunning. We stood in a small bowl in the land, and emerald hills climbed everywhere, up from us in every direction. The grass grew down off them and right onto the roof of the tunnel door. The grass yielded to soft moss all over the stones at our feet. A circular, sea green pool sat calmly, waiting, glittering. And we were in the green. It wasn’t something seen against a screen or a white tile or metal tabletop. It was around us.

Betta took me farther past the pool, to a place where I could go to the bathroom. The future word stood out in my mind as ridiculous, given the circumstances—this bath that stood without walls, under the sky, a “room” that was no more than a private space in the bushes near a stream. In privacy, I took my dry contacts out of my eyes, rolled them up and stashed them in the cylinder of my needle case.

Then I floundered, figuring out what to do with my bundle of skirts. Grass scratched and tickled. So different from my apartment, I could barely comprehend what I was doing. Where I had come.

When we got back to the pool Betta started ordering me around, and her exaggerated gentleness dissolved into easy camaraderie. “Afkloeði, Kona,” she demanded.
Off with your clothes, Woman.
I burst out laughing at how much she sounded like Jeff. I would have to teach him that one.

My laugh stuck in my throat. Jeff. I wondered when I’d see him again. Would I be whisked out of this scene, back to the lab, at any moment—the wrenching metal in my brain as unexpected and fast as last time?

Betta’s toothy smile drew me back. She was easy and sweet, and when she smiled she was beautiful. Not pretty at all. She held the promise of later grace, of becoming gorgeous with age, growing into her wide eyes and learning to loosen her hair.

She helped me with my dress and got my shift off over my head. Belt, needles, necklace all heaped on the rocks. Holding onto her arm, I stepped into the pool, expecting it to be pleasantly warm. But it was almost hot, just on the edge of comfort. It was luscious, and I sank gratefully down into it and it cradled me.

We had a spa at the lab, a floating, melted space inside the heart of the glacier, but none like this. I’d never seen a pool that sat like a tiny bowl under a peach and moss-colored sky. I tilted my head back and an immense weight of openness—a sky unbroken by steel and glass—pressed down on me like a heavy blanket. So big. I breathed slowly, calming myself. I brushed my thigh, and the water was like silk on my skin. I gripped the silty bottom with my toes and played with the resistance against my hand as I swiped the surface. Mesmerized.

“Have you not had a bath before, Lady?”

Ranka sat cross-legged on the stones at the edge of the pool, her head so far to one side she was dipping a braid in the water. Her brows were scrunched into a tight V, a very adult look of concern on her face.

What did she think of me? As new and amazing as this pool was to me, I realized that’s what I was to her. Ranka’s world must have been small. Unbelievably small. I was the one glittering new thing that would come along probably in her entire childhood. She wanted to be part of me, of the occurrence of “Ginn.”

Worry crept over me and a chill shot through my bath. She was a child, open and intrigued, but what would the adults think? Where did they suppose I’d come from? I pictured myself lying on the black sand, my dress like a splash of blood against the dark. I had no explanation, and that seemed dangerous.

I floated over to the edge and asked if Ranka would do my hair.

“I will see what I can do,” she told me in a scolding voice, and Betta and I glanced at each other and stifled our laughter.

While I soaked, Betta swished her feet in the pool, and Ranka bathed my forehead with a linen cloth dipped in some sweet smelling water she’d mixed with flowers. White sprigs like bits of Queen Anne’s lace bobbed and swirled in her soapstone bowl. Snjorbloms she called them.
Snow blooms.
The farm wife had used that word in her diary, and now I knew it was angelica, before the Christians and botanists brought such notions to this place.

Ranka wiped my temples and the back of my neck, moving my hair around in soggy ropes. She talked in her little voice about how she would one day have jewelry like mine, and about feeding horses and learning to cut and sew a shirt for her father. It was a very big shirt. Soon she would need her own new dress, she was so tall.

She combed my hair with a beautiful comb, bigger than my hand. It had a curving back and delicate teeth, each one carved from bone. It gently scraped my scalp, waking up a million tingles and itches. I’d been sleeping on a hard bench, my hair damp and matted with sand. Every stroke of the comb made me feel a bit more human. Ranka industriously and carefully worked at the tangles, obviously proud that she was helping to wake me up and get me “ready.” She dipped the comb in the water and ran it down my hair, and I leaned forward so she could comb all the way down my back. Bunched with worry, I wondered. “Ready” for what?

She asked if she could wear my necklace someday, and I said yes, as long as she would tell me what this place was.

She paused. I’d said something strange.

“Já well, you’re at Hvítmörk!”

This was meant to thoroughly answer the question. And her tone strongly suggested I should be thrilled. Yes, I should know what Hvítmörk was.
White Woods.
It must be the name of the farm that lay before me, where these people worked and lived, where the chief went this morning when he left the house. The place I would eventually go, when this bath was through. It was a farm full of people who would expect me to behave in all the normal ways they did, and to know every common thing they did, let alone know where I’d come from and what had befallen me. How could I tell them? It was unthinkable. I didn’t understand it myself.