The Enemy Under Her Hands

Steinunn Halfdansdottir knew the day by her hands. The frost had come in the night, and by afternoon the puddles in the yard still held, white and starred, where the cattle had broken them. Cold made the scald-scars on her forearms tighten and shine, and it made the knuckles of the old man she was working on grind under her thumbs like gravel in a sack.

"There," she said. "That is the whole of it."

Thorolf flexed the hand and made a face at it. "It is no better."

"It's no worse. At your age that is the same thing." She wiped the grease off on the rag at her belt and set the crock back on its shelf, between the jar of honey she kept for wounds and the coil of waxed thread. "Come back after Yule and I will do it again. Keep it in the wool, not by the fire. Heat makes it feel mended and it is not mended."

He went out grumbling, which was how she knew he would come back. The door swung and let in a bar of white light and the smell of the fjord, salt and weed and cold stone, and beyond it the long black line along the bottom courses of the hall wall, waist-high, where the fire had not been cut all the way out. Three winters and the char-line was still there. Gyrid would not have it faced over. She said new turf on old char reminded a man what he was standing in.

Steinunn shut the door on it and went back to her bench.

The sick-house was hers in the way a boat is a man's — nobody else's business, and everybody's when they needed it. A turf-roofed shed of two bays set apart from the hall because sickness travels, with a hearth she kept small and a smoke-hole she kept clear, and a scale of iron scurf trodden into the packed earth by the door from the years when her father had beaten metal in it instead of mending men, which no amount of sweeping had ever lifted and never would. Along the north wall, her father's work: a rack of hooked probes and pincers and thin flat spatulas, three saws with the teeth set differently, the needle-case, the iron cautery with its handle wound in leather. Under them a shelf of clean linen, boiled and dried and folded, more of it than the stead thought reasonable. On the wall by the door, the two lengths of rope with the running knots for holding a man's ankles, because a leg that must be pulled straight will not be pulled straight by kindness.

And the bench. Oak, waist-high, scrubbed pale, with the black grain standing up out of the wood where thirty years of scrubbing had worn the soft part away. Her mother had bled out on a bench like it, in a different house, when Steinunn was nine. She had never once got up on this one herself and did not intend to.

She was sorting linen when she heard the shouting on the path.

Not the shouting of an accident. She knew that one — it came all at once, high and ragged, and it had a name in it. This came in pieces, men's voices low and then a woman's voice cutting across them, and under it the flat scuff of feet not keeping step. Carrying, then. Something heavy, coming down from the head of the fjord where the ice-road came in.

Steinunn put the linen down, took the fire-iron and pushed the embers together, hung the smaller kettle over them and went to the door.

They came in past the byre — four men and a door-plank, and half the stead trailing behind at the distance people keep from a thing they have not decided about. Kolbein at the front left corner, his jaw set. Two of the Bjarnason boys behind. Old Hauk's nephew on the fourth corner, walking badly because he was on the downhill side and the load had shifted toward him. On the plank a shape under a cloak, and out from under the cloak one leg, bound at the thigh with a strip of somebody's shirt gone stiff and dark, the foot bare and blue-white and turned outward at an angle Steinunn did not like at all.

She held the door wide with her shoulder. "Straight through. Onto the bench. Feet to the fire."

"Steinunn—" Kolbein began.

"Feet to the fire. Turn her. Turn — no. Lift the plank, do not slide her." They got the plank up onto the oak, and the shape on it made a sound down in the chest, not a cry, more like a man setting down something too heavy. "Now the plank out from under. On three. One, two."

They did it well enough. The plank came away and she put her hand flat on the sternum to feel the breath, and it was fast and shallow and hot, far too hot for a body just carried a mile in first frost.

"How long has she been like this?"

Nobody answered her.

"How long."

"Four days on the road," said Kolbein. "Maybe five. They came over the ice at the head and stopped short of the yard and put her down. The steward walked up alone and said his words to the mistress in the yard and walked back down, and then they turned round and went back."

"Who did?"

"Sigvat Bardsson's men. Ref Grimsson with them."

The name went through the room the way a draught does, and Steinunn felt the hair lift on her forearms and made herself not look up from the leg. There was time for names later. There was not time for this thigh.

She took the little knife from the block, the short one with the worn bone grip, and cut the binding away from the outside in, holding the linen up off the flesh with two fingers as she went so the cloth would not drag. It had been put on in a hurry and not changed since. It came away with a sound like a scab coming off a barrel-stave, and the smell came up with it.

She had smelled it before. Sweetish under the sourness, the way meat goes when it goes fast and warm. It got into the back of the throat and sat there.

Behind her, one of the Bjarnason boys turned aside and was sick into the ashes.

The wound was a split across the outside of the left thigh, a hand and a half long, running down and forward, the sort of thing a spear-butt does when the spear-head has already gone somewhere else, or a shield-rim driven with the whole weight of a body behind it. It had been sewn once, badly, by somebody in a hurry with a leather-needle, and half the stitches had pulled through and were hanging in the flesh like fish-hooks in a lip. The lips of it were rolled back and shining. Along the lower edge, where the fluid had tracked down under the skin, the flesh was going a dark red that was not red any more, and when Steinunn pressed the pad of her thumb beside it and lifted, the dent stayed.

Under her hand the muscle was tight as a strung rope, and hot. The heat came up through her palm and into her wrist and she thought, with the flat part of her mind that did this work: tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight, and even tonight may be late.

Then she moved her hand up to feel the groin for the swelling, and looked at the face.

She knew the nose first. Broken and set by somebody who had not cared much, so that the bridge sat a little to the left and the whole face was pulled a fraction out of true by it. Then the hair — black, cropped close to the skull with a knife, growing out unevenly, black as no one on this fjord was black; her mother's hair, they had said, a Hebridean woman taken young and married in, and hadn't the daughter heard about it. Then the shoulders, thick and dense, an oar-and-shield-rim body.

Then the face itself, and it did not need any of the rest.

Steinunn had seen it once, from the top of the home-field with a bucket in each hand, on a night when the sky over the hall had gone orange and the thatch was going up in ropes of fire and the hall door was jammed and there had been a woman standing on the sea-side of the yard with her shield still on her arm and her hair long then, not shorn, giving orders in a voice that carried over all of it. Not shouting. Giving orders. That was the thing Steinunn had never been able to put down: the woman had not been in a rage. She had been working.

The room had gone very quiet. Steinunn became aware, all at once, that the doorway was full. Kolbein, and the boys, and behind them the yard — Gyrid's household, the two shepherds, the woman who did the dairy, Aslak somewhere at the back of them wriggling through to see. They had not come to help carry. They had come to see what she would do.

"That's Yngvild Bardsdottir," said Kolbein. He said it slowly, and he was not telling her; he was putting it on the ground in front of her, like a stone. "That's the one who stood in our yard."

"I know who it is."

"His own sister. He sent us his own sister instead of the silver."

"I know what a surety is, Kolbein."

"Then you know what she is for." His voice cracked in the middle of it. He was thirty-two years old and his father had died six feet from the hall door, and Steinunn had held the man's hand for an hour and a half afterwards and knew exactly what she was hearing. "She is a debt. She is eight marks with a face on it. She is not a guest and she isn't sick, she is—"

"She is on my bench."

That stopped him. It stopped all of them. It was not an argument; it was the shape of the world, and every one of them had been under her hands at some time, and knew it.

And it was a lie, or near enough to one, because what Steinunn wanted, in the deep of herself where nothing was oiled or sharpened or laid in its place, was for the woman to have died on the path. Four days on the road. They had put her down short of the yard and gone back. If they had put her down a half-mile further out, or if the men had walked a little slower, or if Steinunn herself had taken longer over Thorolf's hands, then this thigh would have gone on rotting in the frost until it stopped, and nobody on this fjord would have had to decide anything, and the debt would have been the jarl's to answer after all. She wanted that. She wanted it with a completeness that would have shown on her face if her face had been in the habit of showing things.

She had sworn the craft-oath at fourteen, standing in this shed with her father's hand on the back of her neck: mend whoever is laid on the bench. Not whoever deserves it. Not whoever is ours. She had kept it through two feuds and a winter of the bloody flux, and she had kept it because it was the one thing in her life that no jarl and no husband could take off her, and she understood, standing there with her hand in a stranger's groin feeling for the swelling of a poisoned leg, that it was going to make her do this.

"Out," she said. "All of you. Kolbein, not you. I need you and I need one more, and I need the fire built up and both kettles on, and I need Gyrid told, and somebody had better tell her before somebody else does."

They went. Slowly, and grudging, and looking back.

Steinunn pushed the sleeves up past the scald-scars and laid both hands on the thigh, one above the wound and one below, and took the weight of the leg against her forearms. The heat of it came into her like water into a boat.

The dark eyes came half open. They did not focus on anything. But the body under her hands had gone rigid all the way up through the belly and the ribs, the way a body does when it is holding itself against what is about to be done to it, and that was going to make everything harder, and it was going to tear what was left of the stitching.

"Breathe out," Steinunn said.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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