Winter Song (3 page)

    It's not any of the suns, she thought, and if that's a fire, then someone's farmstead is burning.

    But she couldn't think of any farmhouses in that direction. Too many trolls likely to midnight-raid the settlements, if the old records were true. And if it were a fire, then Hilda and the others would already be spilling into the courtyard to answer the distress calls.

    She lifted the latch carefully, and ducking to step down into the lobby shut the door behind her.

    A light snapping on blinded her, though it was only dim. Her vision cleared to reveal Thorir standing with sword in hand and an evil grin on his face at his cleverness in sneaking down from the watch-tower.

    Behind him, his wife Hilda stood with folded arms and bulging eyes: "Bera Sigurdsdottir! What on Isheimur are you doing? Have you lost your wits?"

    Nothing Bera could say would spare her from a scolding, so she just slumped.

    Hilda said, "Go back on watch, darling, while I sort this out." She snapped off the light. There were the noises of Thorir leaving, then Hilda hissed, "Stupid girl!"

    "Sorry," Bera said quietly.

    "Pappi took you in when his old friend died – you repay us by disturbing our sleep while he's away?"

    Even after six years, you haven't forgiven me? Bera thought. I don't want his attention!

    As self-appointed surrogate mother, Hilda didn't hesitate to "correct" Bera whenever Hilda felt it necessary, which was frequently. "We thought you were an outlaw – or worse."

    "Did you hear the sound?" Bera said, in a desperate attempt to distract her foster-sister. "Like muffled thunder."

    "Never mind that," Hilda said. Although she hadn't distracted Hilda, Bera's trick had at least robbed her rant of momentum. "Go back to bed. Try not to fall over the others on the way through."

    Bera wondered how much of Hilda's anger was that Bera had shown her husband, and therefore Hilda, for the fool he was. If Bera could slip out without him noticing, then raiders could do the same in the opposite direction.

    Or whether Hilda thought he hadn't been sleeping, but that Bera had paid him in kind to look away. Bera couldn't tell Hilda that she'd sooner drink acid than go with Thorin. Hilda wouldn't believe her, would instead point to the cairn as proof that Bera would go with anyone.

Next day in the kitchen no one spoke to Bera over breakfast, but that wasn't unusual. She had managed not to bump into the cots of the sleeping children and farm hands, so no one was angry with her – at least, no more than usual.

    All ten of Ragnar's grandchildren, from the youngest toddler to eight year-old Toti, Hilda's eldest, sat around the vast table, assembled by nanobots centuries earlier to resemble oak, now stained and pitted with age.

    Bera and the other women shuttled pots and plates to and from the vast stove, while the men were out checking the flocks as always.

    Except Yngi, of course. Bera had seen him at first sunrise, as Gamasol stained the horizon with its searchlight glare. She had snuck out again and clipped Brynja back to the water-tap, where a few shards of ice had half-melted in the direct sunlight, staining Brynja's white fur with muddy streaks. The puppy yapped as Bera walked away, but she hurried and was back indoors before anyone noticed… she hoped.

    Now she waited her turn for the porridge bowl, and when the others had taken their fill, scraped out the dregs of the weak, watery liquid. She got the last few bits when Thorbjorg said, "Why don't you lick the pattern off the plate?"

    Her face burned, but she didn't answer Ragnar's younger daughter-in-law. Thorbjorg was only four years older than Bera, but she was as pretty as Bera was plain, and used her voluptuousness like a weapon on the men. And besides, she was married, so respectable.

    "Well?" Thorbjorg challenged.

    "There is no pattern," Bera mumbled.

    Thorbjorg's laugh was a caw. "No there isn't, is there? You must have licked it off yesterday. Maybe if you weren't such a greedy pig, your teats would dry up – it's not as if you need the milk."

    Bera shut her eyes, dug her fingers into her palms.

    Hilda must have seen how intense the pain was, and if any of them would understand, she would – now the medic had said that any more pregnancies would pose a life-threatening risk. "That's enough," Hilda said. "Save your wit for later, Thorbjorg."

    Bera slid into daydream, her usual refuge. Maybe there was some kind of payback. Bera had felt sorry for Hilda when she'd heard the others talking about it: barren at twenty-seven, with only two children to her name.

    "How will we fill this big empty world if we can only have two children?" Thorbjorg had asked, smug in her brood-cow status. Bera had hated her for Hilda then: five children at twenty-one. Yngi might have been addled in the head, but his seed was potent – if it was his. Thorbjorg was always flirting with old Ragnar, always possessive with her hugs and touches.

    Bera had wished that it was Thorbjorg who had miscarried instead of Hilda. When the others had gone, she had slipped into Hilda's room and asked, "Is there anything I can do, Hilda? I'm so sorry to hear about…" and trailed off, not sure what to call it. Loss? Too tame. Miscarriage? Too clinical. So she had left the sentence unfinished.

    But Hilda had seemed to understand. She shook her head. "I just want to be alone."

    That had been the last half-civilised conversation between them. They had never been friends, but as long as Bera was duly deferential to Ragnar's eldest child, they had been civil. But a month later, two months after the Spring Fair, Bera had missed her period, and soon after, she knew that she was pregnant. Refusing to name the father meant that no bill of settlement could be made to another house, and as good as admitted that Bera would sleep with any man.

    "Bera!" Hilda's cry snatched her back, to the other's amusement.

    "Daydreaming again," Toti said. Like most children, he could spot a legitimate target for teasing. "Bera's daydreaming, Bera's dreaming of her boyfriend!" he sang.

    "That'll do, young man!" Hilda said. "Enough of that or you lose your time at the Oracle!"

    "Sorry." Bera went without prompting to the sink to rinse the pots.

    "You're washing clothes today." Hilda lowered her voice, "I've not said anything to the others about your star-gazing, but I will if it happens again. We can't afford to heat the countryside."

    "But I closed the doors straight away!"

    "And we'd have to send out search parties if raiders spirited you off. Bera, you're so selfish!"

    Bera managed not to snap back that she'd be the last person they'd send out rescue parties for, if outlaws, trolls or shapeshifters struck.
    Later, as Bera loaded up the vast tin bath with clothes and ran water from the hot tap into it, it struck her as odd that shapeshifters were always lumped into the same category as trolls and outlaws, snolfurs and other predators. But shapeshifters were so rare that no one – as far as she knew – had ever definitely been attacked by one. Maybe, if she could snatch five minutes on the Oracle later, she'd search.

    She managed to turn the tap off before boiling water ran over the pan's lip; at least – for all Hilda's carping – there was no shortage of heat and hot water. It was a shame that, according to the Oracle, there was no longer the resource to tip Isheimur's boundless lowlevel geo-thermal energy into full-scale vulcanism.

    She was used to washing by hand. The farm had finally run out of parts for the antique washing machine when Bera had first arrived from the North, and the Norns refused to consider such parts life-saving, so their petitions via the Oracle for replacements had been useless. But she hated the way it chapped her hands, and the effort required to wring out the sopping clothes left her hands and shoulders aching. Still, she managed to wrestle the sodden blouses and shirts into the mangle, bolt the rollers into place and then turn the handle against a wall of inertia.

    She jumped at the voice; "You want help?"

    She turned. "Oh, Yngi, you startled me." Isheimur only knew how Yngi the Halt with his club foot had managed to creep up on her.

    His freckled face was as transparent as any window, so she saw his disappointment. She added hastily, "I know you didn't mean to, but you should cough or clear your throat, or–"

    "OK, Bera," he said. Ruddy features lit up: "You need help with that? I'm stronger than you are, even if I'm not as clever."

    She shook her head. "No thanks, Yngi. I'm almost done."

    He turned to go, just as Thorbjorg's voice cut across them: "Yngvar Ragnarsson, get away from that whore!"

    Yngi cringed, and Bera swung round at his wife, anger at one humiliation too many finally breaking her self-control. Before she could speak, a shriek from the courtyard interrupted them: "Grandpappi! Grandpappi's coming!"

    Bera and Thorbjorg rushed out into the courtyard, Yngi hobbling behind. Both suns were now high in the sky, and Bera had to blink to focus. She followed the other's gaze down the valley to the west, and the men returning from a week at the Summer Fair.

    The two men at the front of the group rode shaggy Isheimuri horses, which stood only chest-high to a tall man, but were formidably strong. Ragnar liked to brag that his was the strongest horse on Isheimur, and the chunky buttermilk-coloured stallion needed to be to carry his owner and his belongings, which between them probably massed over a hundred and fifty kilos. Arnbjorn rode a slightly smaller horse alongside him.

    Surprisingly the other two horses were riderless, and Ragnar's tenant farmers walked beside their mounts, which were dragging something, but Bera couldn't make out what it was. Bringing up the rear of the procession were the farmer's eldest sons. Both had been unbearable ever since Ragnar had agreed to take them to the Summer Fair, and Bera suspected that they would be even more conceited now they had been, and would consider themselves too grand to mix with children. One had been flirting with Bera before she'd become pregnant, but had quickly lost interest when he learned of her condition, and probably wouldn't even speak to her now.

    "Come on, Bera!" Hilda interrupted her daydreaming. "They're ten minutes away yet, so back to work for a little while."

    Bera resisted the urge to say "Yes, boss." Sarcasm would only earn her a lecture.

    Instead she returned to grappling with the sopping wet clothes until shrieks from her foster-nephews and nieces announced Ragnar's arrival. His gravelly voice boomed, "What? No hug for your Grandpappi, then?"

    She felt the puppy stir beneath her bulky jacket, then return to sleep, and prayed that Brynja would sleep a while longer.

    By the time Bera had joined the others but watching from the sidelines, women and children were hugging men, the tenant farmer's mousey wives had erupted from their own dwellings, and the whole group had aggregated into one swarming, shapeless mass. Only Ragnar stood slightly apart from the reunions, a sad smile on his face.

    Then Yngi's wife Thorbjorg threw her arms around him. "Welcome back, Pappi!" It might have been Bera's imagination, but she thought she saw him grimace, before he made his dark, brooding features as impassive as before.

    He looked across at Bera. She gave him a little smile which she tried to make welcoming, but he only scowled, and she looked away so that he wouldn't see how hurt she was.
All you have to do is give him the name
of the father. Make one up if need be.

    Except that whichever name she gave Ragnar would be signing a man's death warrant, if such a name existed – and names were strictly bound by custom, like everything else here. Bera wondered how it would be to grow up on a world that had never splintered away from the rest of humanity, never been driven apart by a seemingly – to the rest of the Galaxy – insane urge to speak a different tongue and adhere to old ways. To call oneself what one liked, to dress how one liked, do what one liked…

    "What's this?" Hilda pointed to a travois, which was hitched to the two horses belonging to the tenant-farmers.

    "You heard the noise last night?" Ragnar said. "A meteorite crashed near where we'd camped." He continued, "We heard what we thought was a small volcano where it fell, so we rushed toward it for a look. It took us a half-hour. When we got there, we found only this character," Ragnar pointed at the travois, "lying in the snow."

    Bera eased around for a look, and gasped. The man lying unmoving in the travois was stark naked, his skin a copper so dark as to be almost purple. His massive chest rose and fell irregularly, but apart from that he didn't move. His eyes were closed. Bera had never seen such muscle definition on a man; corded, sinewy, he took her breath away. The face below the shaven skull was equally striking, with its chiselled zygomatic bones and almost inhuman symmetry. Bera looked down, then away, blushing, then glanced at him again. He was certainly impressive. She made her self focus instead on the splints on his legs.

    "Cover him up!" Asgerd said, Ragnar's older daughter-in-law reaching for a blanket from one of the horses. "He'll scare the children!"

    Ragnar reached out, and his daughter grew still. "You don't cover burns like that." He pointed to the man's lower torso, and clearly broken legs. His legs would have been long, strong and muscular before they were broken.

    Bera dragged her attention back to Ragnar, who said, "He was screaming, rolling around in the snow. We couldn't leave him like that. Either I killed him, and I'd no stomach for cold-blooded neck-snapping, or we brought him home."

    "Can we spare the food?" Asgerd said, her thin lips when she closed them giving her opinion: No, we can't.

    "You tell me, ladies." Ragnar opened his arms to include Hilda and Thorbjorg in the question. "The management of the household is your responsibility, after all. I wouldn't dream of interfering in your demesne."