Bracelet of Bones (21 page)

Solveig slipped away into the darkness. She heard murmuring and then made out Edwin and Edith kneeling beside Sineus, tending to his foot wound.

“It’s still so black and swollen,” Sineus said. “Like a bloated bladder, all the way up to the knee.”

Edwin reassured Sineus that he would return to Saint Gregorios within the month and help him back to Kiev before the leaves turned.

Seeing Solveig, Edith stood up and linked arms with her, “I don’t want to but I must,” she said, and she firmly led Solveig and Edwin toward the stern. Bergdis was sitting there on her own.

In the dark or almost dark, the two women stared at each other.

Solveig could hear Edith’s breath quickening. She could feel the tightness of her forearm and elbow, locked now with hers.

“Unless I say this,” Solveig heard Edith say, “I’ll regret it until the day I die.”

Solveig looked down at Bergdis. Her eyes were darker than the dark, yet they were glittering.

“I know what you were going to do,” Edith said in a low voice. “Edwin told me. The men . . . the strangling . . .” Despite all her efforts to stay calm, Edith’s voice was rising.

Solveig gripped her arm to give her strength.

“The men . . . the strangling . . . the knife . . . your knife . . .”

Edith swallowed and broke off.

Bergdis didn’t move. She just looked up at Edith with her burning, freezing eyes.

“Your gods . . .” Edith went on. “I don’t know how to say it . . . Your gods, they’re nothing to me. Less than nothing. Your beliefs, they’re violent and cruel.” Edith paused. “And yet . . . the way you believe, Bergdis! The way you believe.
Not like a lily liver but with all your head and heart. With such a passion!”

Edith paused, and Solveig could hear how she was speaking more with awe than revulsion.

“What binds us,” said Edith, more calmly now, “is our care. Your care and my care for Red Ottar.”

Red Ottar, thought Solveig. His Angel of Death. And her victim.

“That will never change or die,” Edith said.

Edith’s a healer, Solveig thought. Bergdis and I pray to the same gods, but I can’t believe in such a sacrifice. It’s so violent. So unjust.

Edith wants to make her peace with Bergdis, and I admire that. Women must be healers.

Again the women gazed at each other. Again the night breathed, almost easy.

“Go!” said Bergdis in a biting, cold voice.

Then Edith and Solveig wheeled away with Edwin right behind them, still watching his back. They padded along the deck, glad it was over, glad of each other’s company.

It was Edith who broke the silence. “Bard will be up and about at dawn,” she said. “He’s always first.”

Solveig gave a prodigious yawn.

“I won’t wake him now,” said Edith.

“Or Brita,” agreed Solveig. And she yawned again.

But at that moment, Odindisa loomed up in front of them, holding a horn lantern, looking haggard. “Have you seen her?” she cried.

“Yes,” said Edwin. “Yes, Edith’s just been talking to her.”

“Where?”

Edwin looked over his shoulder. “There! Slumped in the stern.”

“No!” cried Odindisa. “Brita! I went to check her, but she’s not there. Her fleece is.” Odindisa sounded quite bewildered.

“We’ll find her,” Edwin assured her.

“She’s not on this boat. I’ve searched everywhere, and Slothi has crawled to both ends of the hold.”

“We’ll find her,” Solveig repeated.

“She knows she’s not allowed ashore,” wailed Odindisa. “Not after dark. What if . . . ?”

What if she’s gone overboard? thought Solveig. She can’t swim. We would have heard her. What if she’s gone back to the pyre? What if those men loitering down the far end of the harbor . . . ?

“Please,” begged Odindisa, and like white moths her eyelids fluttered.

“Ask Mihran,” Edith said.

“I’ve asked him already.”

“Tonight,” said Edwin patiently, “we’ll use our voices. At first light, we’ll use our eyes.”

“We’ll leave the gangplank down,” Solveig added.

“I’ll kill her,” Odindisa said fiercely. And then she begged: “Please . . . Not Brita.”

21

S
olveig lay very still. She took slow, deep breaths and tried to drift herself to sleep. But she was too aware of her companions, some sniffing, some snorting, some tossing and turning after the troubled day that had begun with the lighting of the pyre and ended with the search for Brita in the darkness.

Despite walking right around the little island and going back to the pyre where the embers were still glowing, Odindisa and Slothi couldn’t find their daughter. Torsten and Bruni and Edwin all called for her, but their voices fell into night’s dark pit.

I know sky’s made of air, thought Solveig, but sometimes when it breathes it’s so thick and heavy and smooth. It’s like that roll of material I saw in the market in Kiev. Velvet!

Skin can be like velvet, too. Brita’s cheeks, they are.

Where is she?

Flying late, a curlew cried out its loneliness and longing. Then a warm night wind got up and the giant fig tree growing beside their mooring flapped its leathery hands.

Then Solveig heard Brita’s voice, mellow as the low notes of Slothi’s pipes, saying: “I want to go with Solveig.”

Solveig sat up in the dark.

“I want to go with Solveig.”

She knew then where Brita was. Where she must be hiding and waiting.

Why didn’t I think of it before? she asked herself. And why didn’t I just stop thinking and let my heart tell me?

In the moonlight, Solveig stood up. She slipped on her shoes, padded down the gangplank, and picked her way to the huddle of little boats at the far end of the quay.

“Tucked in . . . next to the bigger one at the end.” Isn’t that what Mihran said?

The little boat was covered with some kind of skin—sealskin, maybe—glistening silvery in the moonlight.

Solveig listened. Nothing. Nothing but the sips and kisses of the great river against the sides of the boats lying side by side in the darkness.

“Brita!” said Solveig, under her breath almost.

Nothing.

A little more loudly: “Brita!”

Nothing.

Then Solveig got on her knees and reached down and grasped the skin. She lifted it and peeled it away from the stern.

And there, with Solveig peering down at her, the moon gazing down at her, lay little Brita—eyes shining, white-faced, and shivering.

Solveig reached down to her, and Brita reached up to Solveig.

Then, with her strong arms, Solveig lifted Brita into the air, up and out onto the quay. Without a word, the two of them embraced: Brita with her arms around Solveig’s waist, Solveig with her arms around Brita’s neck.

“I want . . .” whispered Brita, and she swallowed loudly.

“I know,” Solveig replied. “I do know.”

For a while, Solveig went on holding Brita, and Brita went on shivering.

What were you going to do? wondered Solveig. Cram yourself into the bows? You didn’t really think . . .

“Can I?” whispered Brita.

“Sometimes,” said Solveig in a low voice, “we have to do things we wish we didn’t have to.” She paused, trying to find the right words. “I mean, I wish I didn’t have to take you back. Brita, I wish you didn’t have to accept this. I wish I didn’t have to go to Miklagard without you.”

Brita buried her face in Solveig’s arm.

“Come on, now.”

“Third wishes,” sobbed Brita, “come true sometimes.”

Back aboard, Solveig let Brita find her own way back to her mother, and as she listened to their murmuring and sniffing and cooing, she felt so lonely. She thought of her mother’s grave by the stony, yapping shore. She thought of Edith’s children in far England. She thought of all the children on this middle-earth divided from their mothers by distance or death.

I know how much I want to see my father, she thought. He’s been father and mother to me. I’m traveling halfway across the world to be at his side, and there’s not been one day when I haven’t thought about him. With love, and with such longing, with everything I want to tell and ask him.

But then Solveig began to wonder what Halfdan would think when he saw her.

That dream I had when I saw my grandmother, and she was warning my father:
“You should have left her out on the ice . . . You mark my words, the day will come when Solveig’s weakness will harm others—maybe her own father.”

He will be glad to see me, won’t he? What will he say? What if he’s living with Harald Sigurdsson and all the other men . . . or with another woman? With her own children, like Kalf and Blubba? What if . . . ?

As Solveig left the sad island of Saint Gregorios, she almost took wing. Sitting alongside Edith and across the boat from Edwin and Mihran, she waved. She waved and waved until all she could see of her companions were pink hands, waving.

“Poor Brita!” she said. “I wish I’d given her a bone pin or something. I hope she’ll get back to Kiev safely.”

“So do I,” said Edith anxiously.

Solveig turned to Mihran. “But now!” she said, her voice lifting. “Now! Three days?”

“Three four,” said Mihran.

“Is the water black?” Solveig asked him. “In the Black Sea.”

“Darker than the Baltic,” Mihran told her. “Darker than Marmara and the Great Sea.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s so deep. So deep there are mountains under the sea.”

“How do you know?”

Mihran shrugged. “Everyone knows.”

“Have you heard of the White Sea?” Solveig asked him.

“I have,” said Edwin. “It’s north of Norway, north of north. A traveler came to the court of King Alfred and told him about it.”

“Sometimes it’s covered in ice and snow,” Solveig explained. “That’s why it’s white.”

“And the Red Sea,” Mihran told them, “is next to Egypt. The shores are red, and the people there have red skins.”

“Is there a Yellow Sea?” asked Solveig.

Mihran screwed up his face. “I hope not,” he said. “A whole sea of scummy piss!”

The boat was much as the river pilot had told them: just the hollowed-out trunk of an oak tree, shaped to have a shallow keel, fitted with a small mast, a single sail, and oarlocks and oars and a steering paddle in the stern. And if he and Solveig and Edwin and Edith had lain head to toe, head to toe, they would have been longer than their boat.

“Long and narrow,” said Mihran, “Easy to capsize. Bend your knees when you’re moving around, keep as low as you can.”

“And turn your backs,” said Edwin, “when one of us has got to turn the Black Sea yellow.”

When he smiles like that, thought Solveig, his buckteeth stick right out. He looks as much like a rabbit as a human being.

“I’ve never seen a boat like this before,” she said. “It’s not a smack and not a skiff, not a scull and not a shell and not a canoe, not a coble and not a coracle.”

“You could call it a dugout,” Edwin suggested.

Mihran nodded. “That’s what it is.”

The farther the little boat skipped and slid, skated almost, the wider the Dnieper became.

Solveig could see people on the banks, but she couldn’t really see what they were doing. And the light was so bright that for much of the time she had to screw up her eyes.

“Hot and damp,” said Edith, pink-faced and squirming. “It makes me sweat.”

“All the same,” said Edwin, “better than a black wind. Better than a skriver or scouring of hail.”

“Today’s like a sponge,” Mihran said.

“What’s a sponge?” asked Solveig.

Mihran smiled. “Sponge!” He opened his hands, slowly squeezed his fists, opened them again. “Grows in water.”

Solveig shook her head.

“We use for cleaning us. Washing us. Blue sponge.”

So the hours passed, not so much with thinking about everyone they’d left behind and everything that had happened as with responding to the smells and sights and sounds around them. And when Solveig trailed her fingers
in the water, her whole body felt how quickly the boat was skimming downstream.

In the evening, Mihran and Solveig rowed the dugout to one bank or the other and bought food from the villagers. They scooped out a fire pit and grilled river fish on it. They ate grainy bread and summer fruit—plums and cherries. They drank ale. They slept unafraid.

“I told yous,” Mihran said. “Downhill. Tomorrow, the Black Sea. And the last danger.”

“What danger?” asked Solveig.

But Mihran didn’t reply.

So the river opened her arms to the sea. Beneath the boat the water began gently to rock, and Solveig could feel it was at one moment holding them back, the next drawing them forward.

Some days pass so slowly, thought Solveig, some so fast. It’s only four days since we left Saint Gregorios, but I’ve seen so much that it seems a long time since I found Brita nestling here.

“Black Sea,” announced Mihran very proudly, almost as if he owned it. “No more reeds rushes.”

Edith gently shook her head. “No more water lilies,” she said, remembering something.

“But fields,” said Edwin. “Crops. What’s that over there?”

“Flax,” said Mihran. “Blue purple flowers. And there—how do you say?—tea.”

Solveig frowned. She’d never heard of it.

“Drink,” Mihran told her. “Hot. Very good.”

Solveig smiled. “I want to try it,” she said eagerly.

“Now,” Mihran told them, “we sail west. We stay close to shore. All the way to the river.”

“Another river?” complained Edwin.

“Danube,” said Mihran. “Long as Dnieper.” He pulled a long face.

“No!” said Edwin, looking concerned.

Mihran grinned. “We go past her,” he told them.

It’s true, thought Solveig. The Black Sea is much darker than any water I’ve seen before—the mountain streams dashing and clattering down to the fjord, and the many-fingered fjord itself, and the Baltic Sea between Sigtuna and Ladoga, and the rivers of Garthar, and Lake Ilmen.

“Many moods,” Mihran told her. “Sudden wind. Sudden rain.”

“Squalls,” said Solveig.

“But now . . .” the river pilot went on with the most expansive gesture.

“Sunlight,” said Solveig. “Calm seas.”

“Jason sailed from here,” Mihran said.

“Who?”

“Jason!” repeated Mihran, as if everyone in the world had heard of him. “He could only win his kingdom if he found the Golden Fleece.”

“Fleece?”

“Golden,” said Mihran.

“It sounds like sheep grazing up in Asgard,” Solveig said. “The realm of the gods. Did he find it, then?”

“He did,” said Mihran, “and he sowed the dragon’s teeth, and he came into his kingdom.”

Will I? wondered Solveig. Will I come into my kingdom?

To starboard lay fields and more fields, fields of flax and maize, apple orchards, pear orchards and, on the slopes above them, woods of beech and alder. To port lay the subtle black and silver sea. Above and around stretched the crown and girdle of the sky, crisscrossed by black cormorants and red-breasted geese.

“I saw a wonder!” announced Edwin. “That’s how one English poem begins. Here, there are wonders everywhere! Red-breasted geese, water mint, bald ibis, tamarisks.”

“It’s how you see,” Edith said. “If you’re sharp-eyed, anything and everything becomes a wonder.”

Before long, Solveig rummaged in her bag, pulled out a little slat of bone, and began to carve. And as she did so, she talked to Edith.

“Do you keep thinking about Red Ottar?” she asked her.

Edith’s brow tightened, and she sighed. “Yes . . . well, no. More about his baby.”

“Oh, Edie! If it’s a girl, will you keep it?”

Edith gave Solveig a startled look. “Of course! Of course I will. I’m not a Viking.”

“Where will you go?”

“When?”

“After Miklagard?”

At once Edwin replied, “Back to Kiev.”

“Kiev!” exclaimed Solveig.

“Until I can ship you back to York,” Edwin told Edith. “Back home, back to your children.”

“Emma and Wulf,” said Solveig. “I remember.”

Then Solveig told Edith she kept thinking about her father, wondering what he’d say when he saw her and whether he’d be glad. “And then I start to worry,” she said. “I mean, what if he’s not there? Harald Sigurdsson’s followers are fighting men. They may have gone away. To fight.”

Edith placed a warm hand over Solveig’s carving hand and her metal pin.

“Or to die,” said Solveig in a dark voice.

“What did you suppose before you left home?” Edith asked her.

“Not those things. I was so miserable and so lonely. That’s why I decided to come. But I was still afraid. Afraid and yet hopeful.”

“That’s how you have to be now.”

“I know, but what if he wishes I hadn’t come? What if . . . ?” Solveig’s bright blue eyes were full of doubt. “I keep telling myself I’ll be all right, and I’ve come here on my own from Trondheim, so I must be strong enough to look after myself. I keep saying I can ask Edwin and Edith to help me.” Solveig could hear her voice rising. “But you’re going back to Kiev.”

“What about Mihran?” asked Edith.

“He’ll go away too. He’s a river pilot.”

“If you were back at home now,” Edith asked, “would you still choose to make this journey?”

“Oh, yes!” cried Solveig.

“Everyone would say you’re brave,” Edwin chipped in, “but some would say you’re foolhardy.”

“What’s that?” asked Solveig.