Infinite Sacrifice (16 page)

I hear the door crash in on the
house next to us. Ma startles at the noise, takes Da’s sword in her
hand, and holds it up as she brings her slender finger up to her
pink lips. I lay my head down, and everything goes black as the lid
shuts. I hear her rattle with the lock and shuffle away. Our door
crashes in. Ma screams, and I hear things falling about the room.
Something heavy slams against the chest. My mother keeps crying,
and strange, deep voices fill the air. I almost scream when I feel
the chest move but try my hardest to be silent. I crash into the
sides as it tilts, rolls, and after a long while, finally hits the
ground.

I don’t know how long I am in the
dark; the air is getting harder to breathe. I wait for Ma to come
and open the chest. Wait for the jingling of the keys I saw hung
over the fireplace and cried so many times to be able to touch.
Suddenly the chest is dragged. I listen, trying to quiet my
breathing when—SMASH!

I jump back against the other side
as the whole chest shudders. The lid opens, and my eyes hurt with
the sudden light. I hear an eruption of laughter and feel a large
hand grab the back of my shirt and pull me up out of the chest like
a kitten.

I open my eyes to see the most
terrifying men I’ve ever seen in my life, all gathered aboard a
giant ship on the endless sea. Tall men with long yellow or red
hair and shaggy beards, covered in sweat, dirt, and blood. They
smell like old cheese. I scream and try to run in the air, causing
them to laugh louder. The one holding me turns me around to look at
him. He is darker than the others with two spots on the side of his
face where his beard doesn’t grow. He puts me down and grabs both
my arms to keep me from running. He brings my arms up for all to
see, flaps them up and down like a chicken, and laughter follows
again.

The man holding me speaks to me in
a language I cannot understand. He tries again, but it only makes
the others laugh. He shakes his head, puts me back in the chest,
and shuts the lid. Each day he opens the lid once and drops me on
the deck to drink beer from a bowl and eat some stale bread. As
soon as I finish, he throws me back into the chest. I have no safe
place; I can only disappear within me.

After a few days, the chest is
moved again and opened. I have to wait until I can see, and once I
can, I see a whole village surrounding me. Old people, young
people, children of every age all around me, staring at me, saying
things I can’t understand. One man steps forward with a giant
helmet and a long, fur-lined cloak pinned at the shoulder with a
large, gold circle. The opening of the cape reveals a massive
silver inlayed sword at his hip. He points to me and asks something
of the people. No one answers, yet many shake their head
disapprovingly at me. The man who took me comes forward and shoves
me out of the way. He bends down, grabs the soiled blanket out of
the chest, and throws it in a heap on the ground. He closes the
lid, carries it on his strong shoulders, and leaves the gathering.
The man with the large helmet shouts again, and no one replies. He
takes his sword out and points it toward the dark woods behind
them.

A fair girl begins to sob. I follow
the sound and see a slight girl looking at me with tears in her
shining eyes. Another man steps forward wearing the same cloth as
our churchman back home. He speaks to the helmeted man and
approaches, opening a small purse at his side and handing him
coins. The churchman comes to me, smiles, and points to the young
girl. She stops crying and walks up at the request of the
churchman. The girl puts her slender hand out to me, but instead of
taking it, I run back to get the blanket in the road. The girl
comes to me and bends down with a sweet smile. My eyes are drawn to
the slight space in her front teeth. She folds the blanket, as
filthy as it is, and holds it close in her arms. I follow her back
to her farm.

Chapter 2

Her farm is right outside the
village with many other farms up the road. Every farm has a fence
surrounding each property and outbuildings. We pass a well where
she brings some water up for me to drink; it tastes clean and cold.
As soon as she reaches a workhouse, she pushes the blanket into a
bucket of water and begins scrubbing vigorously. I look out to the
cattle grazing beside a long curved-roofed building and turn around
to see small horses running in the warm wind. A little dog comes up
and jumps on me, knocking me down. The girl shakes the water from
her hands and helps me up.

She points to her chest and says,
“Thora.”

I repeat it to her. She then points
to my chest with a small smile and I say, “Liam.”

She says it strangely, like it’s a
heavy word. I try to say it again so she’d say it right. She looks
at my dirty shirt, points to the stains, and then lifts it up over
my head. She cleans me from head to toe with a cold, wet cloth and
I begin to shiver when the wind blows. As soon as she puts the
shirt into the tub, she takes a shirt down from the line, and
places it over my head, warm from the sun. It touches my ankles and
hangs over my hands. She laughs, rolls my sleeves up, and goes back
to her scrubbing. They have every kind of animal I’ve ever seen at
market. Every direction I turn something is flapping, chewing,
grunting, braying, scratching, running, or jumping. She hangs the
blanket and shirt on the line and I watch as the water drips off
the corners.

She leads me across the dirt path
to the center, where a long wooden house stands, much larger than
our houses at home. The roof is twice as high as ours, with a huge
open fireplace crackling in the center. There is no chimney, only a
gaping hole in the roof. A thin layer of smoke hangs in every room,
making me cough. Thora brings me to a back room where a wide oven
sits on the ground. She takes a loaf of bread cooling on the stones
and pulls off some to give to me. As I stuff the fresh bread in my
mouth, she leaves and returns with a rug that she flattens out on
the stamped ground. She lays on it, puts her arms up under her
head, and closes her eyes. I wonder if she’s going to sleep now,
but she opens them and points for me to lie down. I do as she did,
and she sits crossed-legged beside me and begins
talking.

Every day, she talks and talks to
me, and slowly I begin to understand her. I follow her everywhere
and actually feel like I can’t breathe when I wake up and she’s
already gone off with her mother. Her family sleeps together on a
raised bed beside the open hearth. There are other people on the
farm, but they live in the half-dugout buildings. They are the
workers and take care of most of the hard chores on the farm. These
workers are all grownups and never talk to me. Thora always brings
me food after her supper and tells me stories as I fall asleep
beside the oven, curled in my mother’s blanket.

Sometimes I’ll wake, screaming for
my ma. Thora will rush to me and lie bedside me on my rug and tell
me stories of strange things that live in this land. She tells me
of the dark elves who live underground with corpses and come up
only at night to play tricks on humans. They are cunning, quick,
and wonderful stone-and-metal carvers. She says they are horribly
ugly with unkempt, dark hair all over their blue-pale skin. Then
she speaks of the light elves that are the protectors of a house.
They live in the sunlight, and you can see them dancing in circles
in the early hours of morning or right as the sun is going down.
They are beautiful and live forever. Last, she talks about the
Loki, evil giants that roam the world’s outer realm. She shows me
the necklace her father gave her, the large hammer of Thor that she
has to wear for protection from these creatures. She pulls out
another one for me and places it over my head.

“Two circles?” I ask as I stare at
the two connected circles of intertwined reeds hanging on the
leather string.

“I made this for you. It’s not a
symbol of a god, but it came to me in a dream.” She drops it over
my head. “It will keep you safe wherever you go, even if it is
without me.” She laughs, since I even follow her to the outhouse
and wait outside for her.

As soon as the sun rises, I wait
for Thora outside the house, and once she comes, we go running out
into the fields to do her light chores or play in the pastures. I
help her roll beeswax candles, collect the honey, feed the small
animals, and work her loom. Her mother is too busy commanding the
other workers around, jingling the keys she hangs on her waist for
the outbuildings, and making sure the carts are loaded to bring to
market. She has to run the farm alone, since Thora’s father is away
so much of the time. She hardly notices me at all.

Every once in a while, I’ll hear
her say when she sees Thora sitting beside me, “Remember his place,
Thora.”

Which I never
understood; this farm
is
my place now.

Chapter 3

One rainy day, Thora brings me a
honey cake to my bed and says, “It was a year ago you came to live
with me, and since we don’t know your birthday, I will celebrate it
today.”

The small cake is covered in sticky
honey. I put my little finger in it and suck the sweetness off.
“How old do you think I am now?”

She thinks about it. “Six years
maybe?”

I try to remember if my mother had
ever told me my age and can barely remember anything from before
coming to Denmark. I look up at her and ask, “And how old are you,
then?”

“I will be thirteen next month.”
But she looks away. “I will be married at a great feast that
night.”

I glance up. “Does that mean you
will leave the farm?”

She looks into my eyes, her light
green eyes sparkling. “I will leave the farm but never you.” She
tousles my hair the same way Da did and laughs. “You are coming
with me whether you want to or not.”

There’s a great ruckus outside, and
Thora springs to her feet to see what it is. I run beside her as a
workman comes running out of the barn with a large shovel behind
his head. A skinny grey wolf darts out before him with a fat, dead
goose dangling from his mouth. The man pitches the shovel at the
wolf, narrowly missing him as the wolf shifts to his right and
escapes under the fence to freedom.

“Did he get only one?” Thora calls
out.

“Got her and her whole brood,” the
workman replies as he goes back into the barn.

That goose had six fluffy goslings
that hatched the other day. I run to the barn with Thora and see
five little yellow balls of fluff spilled out on the
hay.

“One is missing,” I tell
Thora.

She nods and looks around. A
high-pitched peeping begins, and the three of us move every lump of
hay in the barn trying to locate where it’s coming from. I turn
over a bucket and see the little frantic puff run out and into a
clump of hay. I reach in and pull it out as it squirms in my hand,
calling for its far-away mother.

“What will we do with it?” I say to
Thora as the workman walks away with the shovel full of the rest of
its sleeping brood.

She smiles at me.
“Now
you
will
have something to follow you around everywhere.”

I name my new little friend Borga:
saved one. After spending half the morning chasing her as she runs
away from me squeaking for her mother, she finally stops and begins
to stay close to me. I take her to the water bowl to drink and
watch as she snaps along the bottom of the bowl with her orange
beak, lifts her head up to drink as she watches me with her golden
eyes. I hold grain in my hands for her to eat and enjoy how she
follows with her tiny yellow wings out when she runs. At night,
Borga snuggles in with her head on my neck and makes little peeps
that lull me to sleep.