The Wound She Chose

Thorgunna Ormsdottir had two kinds of sight, and only one of them was worth a fee. Before that first night at Hoskuldsfjord was out, the smoke would show her the woman from across the fire putting a blade into her under falling snow, with a word on her mouth that Thorgunna could not hear; and her own eyes, which no hall had ever paid her for, had already told her, in the same look, that she wanted that woman's hands on her some other way first.

The hall at Hoskuldsfjord smelled of blood and boiled offal, which is how a hall ought to smell on the night of the slaughter, and she had smelled it in forty halls before this one.

She sat where they had put her, on the bench nearest the fire, and let them look at her while the meat came in. That was part of it. A seeress who arrives and is not looked at has already lost half her fee. Her cloak was blue-black lambskin, stone-weighted at the hem so it hung like something heavier than cloth; her staff stood against the post beside her with its brass-bound head; her gloves were catskin, white inside, and warm, and she kept them off until the proper moment because a woman who wears gloves at the meat looks like a woman who is cold rather than a woman who is other.

The byre-count had been made that morning. Half a month yet to Winter Nights. They had killed eleven beasts since dawn, and the district had come down the fjord-path in its good wool to eat the ones that would not have wintered, and under all of it the year was turning as it turned everywhere between here and Hedeby: the light going, the hay counted, the sea about to shut like a door.

Thorgunna counted the faces along the north bench under her breath, in her mother's tongue, as she had counted everything since she was five years old. A haon, a dó, a trí. Thirty-one on that side. Twenty-six on the other, and more standing. A good hall. Rónnat had counted sheep in that tongue, and stitches, and the days of a fever, in a household that never gave her back her own name, and Thorgunna had it off her along with the plant-lore and the charms said over a packed wound, and she used all three still and called them by her mother's names for them.

Ulfhild Asdisardottir brought her the meal herself and did not spill a drop of it, which at sixty-some and with hands like that was its own kind of skill. Kid porridge boiled in goat's milk. A wooden dish beside it with the hearts of the beasts killed that day, one from each. Thorgunna ate them in front of everyone with a brass spoon and a horn-hafted knife, slowly, because slowly was the point, and because the hearts were tough and there were eleven of them.

"They'll be watching your face," the housekeeper said, low, setting down the cup. "Not the meat. The face."

"They always do."

"Aye." Ulfhild's own face was the colour of tallow and gave away nothing at all. "Eat it all the same."

The jarl was in his high seat with his arms open, telling somebody's boy a story about a boat and getting the laugh he wanted. Torfinn Geirmundarson was fifty and going soft over a frame that had once been hard, close-cut grey beard, small quick eyes that were, unmistakably, warm. He had sent a man three days up the coast for her. He had paid her fee in advance, in weighed silver and not in promises, which one hall in five did. He had asked after her knees on the fjord-path.

Twenty winters on the whale-road had taught Thorgunna that this was the sort of man who paid well, and that it meant nothing whatever about him.

Across the fire, on the sword-side, a woman stood rather than sat: tall, heavy through the shoulders and the thighs as an oar makes them, ash-blonde hair cut short at the nape and pushed back off a wide jaw and a nose that had been broken once and set crooked. Undyed wool, a plain sword at her hip, hilt worn pale. She was not eating. She had her hand on the hilt in the loose, unthinking way that meant nothing, as another woman would have hooked her thumb in her belt, and she was looking at Thorgunna with the flat unsettled look of people who have not decided yet whether to believe.

Thorgunna had seen that particular look ten thousand times and had never minded it. She minded it now, faintly, the way you mind a draught you cannot find the source of. Before the singing was done she would know why, and it would be too late to unknow it.

Then the women sang, and there was no more time for looking.

They had four who knew the ward-songs, two more than most steads could manage, and one of them — a farmer's wife with a red, chapped face — had a voice like a bell going under water. Thorgunna climbed the seiðr- platform while they sang. Nine steps up onto the cross-beams, and then she was above the smoke-line, above the heads, in the shadow under the roof-tree where the soot hung in beards off the rafters and the fire was a bright pit below.

She drew her hood forward. She pulled on the gloves. She set her hands on her knees and let the singing come up the timber into the bones of her, and she went over as she had learned to go over: not a leap, never a leap. A leaning. A woman leaning slowly out over the edge of a jetty to see what is under the water, until the weight is more out than in.

The first part of it was not sight and she had stopped pretending otherwise twenty years ago. The first part was the faces, read off them below her while they thought they were only listening. The old man on the guest bench held his right shoulder wrong and had held it wrong all evening. The girl in the good green wool had her hand flat on her stomach twice and did not know she had done it. Two brothers sat with a gap between them that a knife could have gone into.

So she gave them the small true things. She told the old man his shoulder would mend before the ice went out if he stopped hauling with it and let the boy haul, and the hall laughed, and the boy went red, and the old man went redder, and every soul on that bench believed her a little more than they had a moment before. She told the woman by the loom-weights that the ewe was not taken by a fox but was on the fell above the shieling and would come down of her own accord when it snowed. She told the girl in green — carefully, not looking at her — that the winter would be harder on her than on the household and easier on her than she feared.

She did not tell the brothers anything. You did not touch a quarrel from a platform in front of sixty people.

"And the district," said Torfinn Geirmundarson, comfortably, from his high seat. "Come, seeress. The house has fed you eleven hearts. Tell us how Hoskuldsfjord stands."

He said it the way a man asks for a song he already knows. There was silver in his hand; he was turning it over so it caught, not to threaten her, but as a man plays with a thing while he waits to be pleased.

Easy money, Thorgunna thought. She had given this answer in thirty halls. The district stands well, the district's luck is in its lord, three good hay- years and a hard one in the middle of them, mind the fourth. Say it slow. Take the fee.

She leaned out.

And the smoke gave her a boathouse.

Night in it. Winter, or near it. A candle-end standing on a shelf at the end where the tools hung, with a bad wick, so that the flame leaned, and the shadow of the roof-beams swinging with it. Augers on pegs along the wall, big to small, in the order some man had left them in a long time ago, and one of them with its handle worn pale where a hand had been. A boat up on the trestles — six oars, a good boat, somebody's good boat — and a man crouched under the curve of her with his back to the door.

He had the smallest of them down off its peg. He was boring up through the strake, low down, a hand's span below where the waterline would sit when she was loaded, and he was doing it slowly and quietly, turning and stopping and listening, turning and stopping, and the curls of pine came away pale off the bit and lay on the shingle by his knee, and he brushed them under the keel-block with the side of his hand. Careful. A careful man.

Then tallow. A lump of it, worked soft in his fingers first, then pressed into the hole with his thumb and smoothed off flat, and the wood wiped, and the candle-end lifted off its shelf and held close to look, and — this was the thing, this was the thing Thorgunna would remember for the rest of her life — a nod. A small, satisfied nod at good work.

Then grey water.

There was no drowning in it. The sight is not merciful and it is not cruel; it does not linger. It gave her the water and it gave her one hand out of it, not grasping, only there, and then it took that away too and gave her, instead, a high seat, and the same man in it with his arms open, telling somebody's boy a story about a boat and getting the laugh he wanted.

Thorgunna heard her own voice a long way below her.

"The lordship of this district came out of a boathouse," she said.

Sixty people. She felt the hall go still. Somewhere in the roof above her a rafter ticked in the heat, and the woman with the bell-voice let a note go crooked, and Thorgunna, out over the edge of the jetty with her weight all the wrong side of it, could no more have stopped her mouth than she could have stopped the tide off the skerries.

"It came out of a boathouse," she said, "at night, with a candle, and there was an auger in it, and a hole bored under the waterline of a borrowed boat, and it was stopped with tallow by a thumb, and the man who did the work brushed the shavings under the keel-block after, and looked at what he had done, and was pleased with it — "

And the sight turned on her.

It did that perhaps twice in a life. It had done it to her once before, at nineteen, and she had never told anyone what it showed her that time either.

Snow. Falling straight down and thick, the way it falls when there is no wind at all, and cold in her mouth, and torchlight somewhere behind her turning the flakes orange. A black cloak, close enough to touch, hanging heavier down the left side than the right. A hand on a hilt, freckled across the back of it — not loose this time. A sleeve falling back off that wrist and catching at the base of the thumb as the arm came up. A sword coming out and up, and one small bright notch in the edge of it, a finger's breadth back from the point, catching the torchlight.

Then the blade going into her. Low, in the shoulder, on the left, and the cold of it worse than the snow, and her own weight going forward onto it because her legs had stopped being hers, and the snow coming up, and the hem of that cloak settling into it beside her and lying there, wet at the edge, weighted, while she looked up past it.

And above it all, holding the sword: a wide jaw. A nose broken once and set crooked. Short ash-blonde hair, and eyes wet with something, and a mouth open on a word that Thorgunna in the vision could not hear.

She came back into her body so hard that the platform boards rang under her.

The hall was staring. The singing had stopped. Down below her, on the sword-side, in undyed wool with no cloak on her at all and a sheathed blade at her hip, the shield-maiden stood with her hand on her hilt and her chin up, waiting like everybody else to hear the end of the sentence.

Thorgunna shut her mouth.

She sat with her gloved hands on her knees and the sweat going cold in the small of her back and she said nothing more. Not a word. The silence went on past the point where it could be mended, and then past that, and somewhere in it the jarl of Hoskuldsfjord laughed and said that the seeress had gone travelling and it was ill manners to call a woman back off the road, and somebody laughed with him, and then more of them, gratefully, and the meat went round again.

Torfinn was still turning the silver over in his hand.

Thorgunna climbed down the nine steps by herself. Ulfhild was at the bottom with a cup, and took a long look at her, and did not ask.

Hafgrim's Sea-Mew lay at the fjord-mouth with her cargo in and her sail bent, waiting on a wind. The last passage south before the ice. Two days, they had told her at the wharf. Three at the outside.

Thorgunna drank what was in the cup and thought: three days is nothing. Three days is a walk to the beach. And she thought, in her mother's tongue, a haon, a dó, a trí, and could not make it come out any longer than that.

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

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