Read Online Beautiful Wreck by Larissa Brown - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Larissa Brown
Tags: Historical fiction, Science-Fiction, Romance, Time travel, Speculative Fiction, Viking, Iceland
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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
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
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