The Could-Have-Beens
Category: Vinland Saga
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: Teens
Summary:
Thorfinn prays to Odin for another chance to kill Askeladd.
He gets it.
The first time he gets a second chance to kill Askeladd, it’s not what he expects.
Askeladd peers at him from the doorway and Thorfinn thinks, “I have the wrong man.” It is not because he looks any different. Not on the front of it, anyway.
Askeladd’s eyes are wary, but soft, cow-like - Thorfinn searches for a flicker of that shrewd light in them and finds none. There’s an old scar on his upper lip that he may have gotten from tripping into a table. Blades don’t cut like that.
The smell of daffodils is thick, cloying. This part of Wales is famous for them.
“Can I help you?” says Askeladd, at the same moment someone says, “Who is it?” and Thorfinn recognizes Bjorn’s voice. Thorfinn lets go of the dagger at his back. Bjorn’s comes up behind Askeladd and he’s got a rag around his neck and another over his shoulder. A baby’s wail comes from somewhere within in the house.
“Askeladd?” says Thorfinn, stupidly.
“Yes? Have we met?”
Thorfinn studies his face. It’s the way it always was, but there are laugh lines around his mouth, and his hair is thicker, like he’s got less to worry about. Another wail comes from the baby. Askeladd’s child, or Bjorn’s, or both, or perhaps some orphaned nephew. It doesn’t matter.
“No,” says Thorfinn. He takes a step back, then another. “We haven’t.”
He runs.
***
It’s a duel, and there’s frost in the crisp blond waves of Askeladd's hair. Thorfinn isn’t sure when so much white crept in; it wasn’t this prominent last he looked.
Askeladd laughs as the blood spreads beneath him, a grating wet rattle that has Thorfinn clutching his dagger even harder. “I won,” he rasps. “I won.”
“You did.” There’s something in Askeladd’s eyes that Thorfinn does not recognise. Perhaps it was always there and he simply never noticed. “Go. Be at peace.”
It’s not what Thorfinn expects him to say. He grabs hold of Askeladd’s cloak and yanks him up off the ground, ignores the thin high sound of pain Askeladd makes. “What do you mean,” he shouts. “Are you mocking me? You can mock me from the pits of hell.”
He leaves Askeladd there, in the midst of crumbling Roman ruins and overgrown weeds and the pale milk of moonlight. There is no burial. There will not be one. Bjorn is long dead, the men disbanded and scattered.
Iceland is cold when he goes back. Ylva tries to kill him with a harpoon, telling him where to get off for joking about her dead baby brother. He supposes she is right - her baby brother is no more. His mother frets and fusses and avoids his eyes. Leif is the only one who talks to him like the past twenty years never happened, prattling on about Vinland and Miklagard and lands farther east. It is even worse than his family’s misplaced concern.
He does not sleep well. He closes his eyes and Askeladd says, “Go. Be at peace,” and there’s a coarse rough hand on his cheek and he wakes up fighting to breathe.
On the anniversary of Askeladd’s death, Thorfinn gets drunk. He says it’s a celebration, it’s a happy day. His mother says nothing, and Ylva’s daughter says, What are we celebrating , and Ylva answers, Nothing, go help your brother in the pen . Thorfinn sits by himself by the dark crumpled sea and tastes the salt on the air and thinks about ships and daggers and English villages.
When the moon rises he smashes the bottle against an outcrop of rocks.
***
Thorfinn never gets on the ship.
He begs his father to not go to war, and gets a curious look in response. When his father shows no signs of budging, Thorfinn grabs him by the forearms. “Don’t go to the Faroe Islands. Don’t go, I - I had a dream, it was bad, it will be bad - or skip them over, go somewhere else - ”
His father looks bemused. Indulgent. “I’ll talk it over with Leif,” he says, in that soft soothing tone of his, rich and heavy like fur. Thorfinn loves that tone, loves it all the more because it is so uncommon among these northern men. He never wants to stop listening to it.
He watches as his father leaves with the other soldiers; he’d spent the previous night curled on his lap, bullying him into telling him stories. Almost, he’d mentioned Thorkell, and clamped down on it. Ylva had teased him in the morning, but he hadn’t cared.
“Helga, Ylva,” his father calls from the ship, “take care of Thorfinn. Raise him well.”
Ylva yells for him to bring back necklaces and pretty clothes and maybe a slave, they’d treat him well, they wouldn’t be like Halfdan. Thorfinn suppresses a cringe. She smacks the back of his head and says, Don’t worry, Papa, we’ll turn him into a man, a real, strong man .
It will be different this time, Thorfinn thinks, as the ship sails away towards the rising sun. He is not there to be taken hostage - he is not there to be protected. His father will have the upper hand.
Several days later Thorfinn wakes to muttering - it is early, and there is a draft. He slides out of bed to find Leif at the front door, talking to his mother. “I’m sorry,” Leif is saying, “I’m sorry.”
Thorfinn wants to burn his heart out of his chest.
***
“I had the wrong man. For ten years. I had the wrong fucking man .” Thorfinn’s blade is against Floki’s throat. Beads of blood well against it. “Do you have any idea what I went through? What I did?” Memories: smoke stinging his nose, a comb running through his hair, blood blotching the tunic his mother had sewed for him.
Floki has the gall to look him in the eye. “You didn’t have the wrong man. Your father died by Askeladd’s hand.”
“It was you who gave him the order.”
Floki laughs. Thorfinn almost decapitates him then and there. “All these years, and you still don’t understand Askeladd? You couldn’t make that man do anything. I gave him a job. He took it.”
Thorfinn thinks of Askeladd’s ragged butchered body in the hall. Askeladd riddled with arrows and labouring to his feet. Askeladd holding Bjorn in his arms as he delivered the final blow.
He presses the sword harder against Floki’s neck.
Floki keeps talking. “What’s it to you whether he’s dead or not? The man’s killed more people than I ever did. He wasn’t even Danish, he was the son of a whore, a dirty little Welsh slave sullying the ranks of - ”
Thorfinn’s fist cracks across Floki’s jaw. It’s broken, Thorfinn knows without checking, without seeing.
He does not kill Floki.
But it is a near thing.
***
“Who was he?” Ylva asks.
Thorfinn rifles through the options. Danish mercenary. Welsh spy. Murderer. Kingmaker. He gives her the first one, since it’s the simplest.
Truth be told, he’s not entirely sure who Askeladd was; the man was surprisingly elusive for such a strong personality. He asks sailors and they shrug. He asks soldiers and they shake their heads. The name Askeladd does not appear in any records, not even the official ones recounting Canute’s bloodstained journey to the throne. Thorfinn knows; he checked.
“You cry out his name,” Ylva says, “when you sleep.” Firelight flicks across her face.
“I’m not afraid of him. I never was.” He doesn’t know why he feels the need to say that.
“I didn’t say you were.” Her fingers drum against the table. “You were with him for over ten years.”
He remains silent.
“Did you care about him?”
The memories come unasked for: Askeladd setting Thorfinn’s shoulder back in its socket. Askeladd saying, Get some rest, we’ve got a long march tomorrow . Askeladd shifting his grip on his dagger, showing him the right way to hold it, the right way to kill. Thorfinn isn’t sure when he stopped fighting Askeladd and starting fighting alongside him. Doesn’t know why. “How could you ask me that?” he says. It sounds toothless even to him.
Ylva looks away. “Because it’s messy. People are messy.”
“He was a monster. His men were monsters.”
“Yeah?” Thorfinn doesn’t know where Ylva got her sardonic expressions from; they are not from their father, or their mother. They’re certainly not from Leif. “So were you."
***
“I’m here to help you.” Thorfinn’s outstretched hand remains empty. His neck is starting to hurt looking down at Askeladd; Thorfinn is not used to looking down at anyone, and with Askeladd, a man who always seemed bigger than he actually was, it is even stranger.
Askeladd looks at Thorfinn’s hand with unimpressed scepticism. He wipes ash from his cheek with his knuckle and only succeeds in smearing it further. “Why?”
Thorfinn wants to shake him by his bony shoulders till his teeth click. He wants to scream, Because I don’t know who I am without you . He does neither.
Askeladd, apparently having decided Thorfinn is either a frothing lunatic or a slinking lowlife, turns to go without another word. Thorfinn starts to panic - it is only with agonising planning and several close calls that he managed to sneak into the stables without the guards noticing. He can’t let Askeladd slip away now. He can’t.
A memory flickers. Snow. Blood. A sword cast away. Thorfinn changes tactics. “I can get your mother out of here.”
Askeladd looks back at him sharply.
“She’s Welsh. She’s descended from the hero Artorius. You take care of her.” Little by little, there, Askeladd’s face is changing. “How do you know?” he says. He shuffles his feet, like he’s ready to dash. Thorfinn wonders: if he pressed two fingers against Askeladd’s throat right now, would he feel his pulse fluttering? “Mother never spoke about you. I’ve never seen you.”
“I’m not a spy,” Thorfinn hastens to say. “I’ll explain once we’re on the boat.” It’s a small thing, barely enough for three people and their supplies, but it will do. He doesn’t know where he will take them - he can house them in Iceland, but they may want a place closer to Wales, with less hostile weather. Matters for later. Right now, all he wants is to get Askeladd out of here. I couldn’t save you then , he thinks, unwilling to taste the acid desperation on his tongue, but I can now.
Askeladd searches his face. His lips are pursed and he looks the way Arnheid did whenever they offered to help her carry her buckets.
They steal away under the cover of night. Askeladd’s mother is so thin, Thorfinn is afraid he might break her just by touching her. Her eyes are too big in her gaunt narrow face. When she speaks it is half in a language he does not understand, lilting and soft and wholly unlike Norse. He holds her hand as gently as he can, guiding her through trees and brambles and icy streams.
Askeladd follows behind them, glancing here and there, his forehead wrinkled. He will be out of here soon, on the North Sea. Askeladd had always been at home on water; will he be sick, now? Will he cling to the edge of the boat with his hair flopping wildly in the way?
An arrow lodges in a tree trunk a finger’s width from Thorfinn’s face.
Askeladd is screaming. Thorfinn hears the word traitor .
His bare fists are not enough. Something warm drips into his eyes and he is on his knees but he feels no pain. Beside him on the ground Lydia shudders and stares with unseeing eyes. She gasps something that sounds like lucius and Thorfinn does not know what she means.
On the boat with his hands on the slick rudders he looks to the sea of stars in the blue-purple sky and wonders which god is the cruellest.
In the end, Thors lives.
Thorfinn never meets Einar.
Canute does not become king.
Under a continuous assault of Viking raids, England burns. That is the news that comes on the wind, spoken in whispers and accompanied by shudders and signs of protection. Thorfinn thinks of the Englishwoman who had given him her dead son’s clothes and presses his face into Gudrid’s back. He wonders if there is a world in which he is happy, where every step he takes is not shadowed by a spray of blood.
***
Thorfinn wants to crawl out of his blankets as much as he wants to lick the ground. “Please no.”
His mother pops her head through the door. “Don’t be rude. The man’s come all this way from the UK, he’s your father’s old friend. I’m sure you’ll have lots to talk about. He’s a professor of history.”
Thorfinn has no interest in history. He’s seen enough of it. Lived enough of it.
“Thorfinn.” His mother’s tone carries a warning note. He sighs and rolls off his bed, and her face brightens up. “Speak English in front of him.”
“Obviously.”
He takes his time picking out his clothes, combing his hair, and reapplying deodorant, and spends a good five minutes faffing around on his phone before dragging his feet out his door. What he would do for a bowl of crappy hot ramen right now. Murmurs float from the living room; his mother is laughing.
As he draws closer he starts to think he is hallucinating; one of the voices is terribly familiar. He slaps his cheeks; he has got to get out more.
A waft of coffee hits him before he enters. The table is laden: kleinur and cinnamon rolls and croissants and those little blue-and-yellow floral paper napkins that his mother only serves to guests she doesn’t want to kick out within a couple of hours. Thorfinn’s eyes are drawn automatically to the man occupying the armchair by the window.
He stumbles back, banging his back against the door.
“Thorfinn?” he hears his mother say. He is not looking at her.
A cup of coffee is halfway to Askeladd’s pursed mouth. Thorfinn knows that clothing has changed with the times, but that doesn’t prepare him for the shock of seeing him in a soft-looking navy cardigan and polished loafers. He’s wearing a scarf, like he’s cold, even though the house is heated, and an uncertain smile. His eyes dart to Thors, then back to Thorfinn.
Thorfinn realises he has been gawking like a fish.
“This is my old friend,” his father says, trying obviously to salvage the situation, “Lucius. We met while I was travelling with Leif to the Faroe Islands - you remember when I took that trip, right?”
“He was six,” his mother puts in dryly.
Thorfinn remembers. He remembers being unable to breathe, he remembers the walls closing in when his father had said the words Faroe Islands . He remembers thinking he couldn’t watch his father die again; he would go mad, he would throw himself into the sea. But two weeks later his father had returned, a little heavier, with his beard a little more unkempt, all smiles, and Thorfinn had thought, for a moment: Askeladd does not exist in this world.
But then, what reason would someone have to assassinate this world’s Thors? He is only a metalworker who sells his goods for too-low prices on indie websites. Helga is the one who foots most of their bills.
“Your father made quite the impression,” says Askeladd - Lucius - in a marked Welsh accent. His glasses are slipping down his nose. He’s got an almost dorky charm to him. Thorfinn clamps down on a hysterical giggle.
Thors laughs. “I should be the one saying that. The way you told that man - ”
“I’m sorry,” says Thorfinn, “I need to go. I have - work.”
His mother frowns. “But it’s Saturday, and you said you would be free.”
“Yeah, uh. It was. It just came in. On email. Gotta get it done or the boss will be mad.” He barely realises he’s switched back to Icelandic. He charges up to his room and leans against the closed door, his heart hammering. Air. He needs air. He wrenches open the window, and the snow-scented wind bites at his cheeks. Behind his closed eyelids a choppy grey sea bobs and weaves and a sail flutters at the edge of the world, and a voice cracks like a whip, Row, you ugly shits!
Why here? And why this moment? Thorfinn hadn’t - he’d thought -
Bug Eyes should be home - he’d said he’d planned to spend the weekend playing video games and maybe searching for places to visit in Istanbul.
Thorfinn punches in a text message to him and yanks his coat from his closet. No one notices him tiptoeing outside. What am I being so cagey for? he thinks, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. It’s not criminal to leave your own house.
He must have a sour expression on his face, because a couple of women take one look at him and cross the road to switch sidewalks.
Bug Eyes is not home. Neither is Leif, it seems, since no one gets the door. Bug Eyes still hasn’t replied to Thorfinn’s text.
The waterfront is his salvation. His boots crunch on the pebbles; his breath comes in a fog. Even in this life - his most surreal life, where houses are built with metal and there’s a year-round supply of spices in local markets and people take baths every day because there’s always hot water - the sea remains the same. If he looks out at it and ignores the occasional rumble of cars and trucks, he can almost imagine he’s back home - home home, with Leif painting his boat and Ylva racing with a harpoon at the sight of whales and the boys yelling, Hey, Thorfinn, you’re supposed to be dead.
And Askeladd - Askeladd . He is the same and not the same at all. Where does he get off, wearing black-rimmed spectacles and chatting about holidays and drinking coffee out of his mother’s blue-willow-patterned coffee set? Thorfinn thinks of the cup at Askeladd’s lips; did his whiskers catch on the pale cream froth? Did he laugh and wipe it with a paper napkin, or did he use a handkerchief he might have kept in his trouser pocket?
Thorfinn sits down cross-legged, heedless of the dampness on his pants, and puts his face in his hands. He does not understand what he is supposed to be to Askeladd, what Askeladd is supposed to be to him. When will he be able to rest? Jumping around like a cricket through different worlds for one man had gotten very stale very fast.
The last rays of the sun are disappearing from the sky when he gets back. He’s not done anything but walk at a meandering pace, but he is exhausted, ready to collapse into bed without dinner. His father meets him on the stairs, giving him a mildly admonishing look, and says, “Lucius will stay in Ylva’s old room. I asked her, and she said she was fine with it.”
That wakes Thorfinn up. “He’s staying here ?”
“He is a close friend, and he’s not made of money; I won’t ask him to book a hotel.”
Thorfinn wonders if he can sleep at Leif’s place. Surely Leif won’t mind. Thorfinn is a good cook. He misses Einar and his hugs terribly, all of a sudden, and a lump forms in his throat.
“Please be here tonight, Thorfinn. I’ve told him so much about you. He was excited to meet you.”
Thorfinn nods and internally flips the bird to Odin.
Dinner is as pleasant as one could imagine. It’s got an almost fairy-tale-like quality to it, with his father’s fatty lamb soup steaming on the table and cutlery and glasses of schnapps clinking away and the sound of laughter rising to the warm wall lighting. Thorfinn is so tense he can barely stomach a few spoonfuls of soup. He avoids Askeladd’s eyes, even though a part of him wants to stare, observe him like a butterfly in a jar. To Askeladd’s questions he responds succinctly, yes, no, no, at times, Uncle Leif, m-hm, over in Akureyri. His mother’s glare bores into him.
The second they all finish their food, Thorfinn leaps up and proclaims he will do the dishes. “Please, let me help,” says Askeladd, starting to get up, but Thorfinn cuts him off. “No! I mean, you’re our guest, I couldn’t possibly let you lift a finger, please, keep sitting.” Thorfinn rushes to the kitchen and fills himself a glass of water. He downs it, then another. Once he’s done with the dishes he tells everyone he is tired, and goes to his room and changes into his pajamas and lies in his bed. He turns over. He rubs his eyes. He takes off his socks.
He can’t sleep.
When he looks at his phone next it is 1:34 am. Bug Eyes has replied saying, Heyy sorry was with some peeps from the exchange program, all good? Rolling out of bed, Thorfinn pads down to the living room. Shafts of moonlight slant into the armchair Askeladd had occupied that afternoon. He switches on a table lamp and gazes at the armchair as if it will answer all his questions.
His walk was not enough. He needs to sink into a stack of hay in a barn. He is used to the cold - real cold, with no comfort of duvet or lick of fire or morsel of food, your body on the verge of not even shivering anymore. Too many people, here, now, say they enjoy the cold, but what they mean is they enjoy knowing it will not touch them. Not in any meaningful way.
Outside he looks up at the stars.
“I’m sorry if I took your usual seat.”
Thorfinn jumps a foot in the air.
Askeladd is cocooned in a blanket, even over his padded jacket. All that is visible of him is his eyes and tufts of pale hair sticking out from underneath his beanie. He would do that, sometimes, even when the weather was not harsh; eventually Thorfinn figured he just liked bundling himself up and tucking himself away out of earshot from his men. He’s never going to voice that it reminded him of a squirrel or some other small creature.
“It wasn’t my seat,” Thorfinn says.
Askeladd looks in the direction of the sea. “Bjorn never liked it when someone took his spot,” he says mildly, with the air of someone who is ruminating and possibly a little senile. This gives Thorfinn all the information he needs to know: Askeladd is trying to see if Thorfinn remembers, and if he does not, Askeladd can laugh and tell him to not mind an old man’s ramblings.
“I remember when he punched out Atli,” Thorfinn offers.
Askeladd sags a little. “So it’s you.” He puts his face in his hands, which is unlike him (or maybe it was always like him and he was just an actor par excellence.) He looks older than he is, his face worn, his shoulders stooped.
“I looked,” Thorfinn chokes out. “I looked for you.”
Askeladd’s voice is soft and tired. “I’m sorry.”
Thorfinn could never understand him. Couldn’t pin down his whys. He supposes it doesn’t matter.
Askeladd smells faintly of the mint bar soap that’s been in Ylva’s bathroom since forever. Thorfinn presses his face into his jacket. “Well, this is unexpected,” he hears Askeladd say, sounding bewildered but not unkind. Heavy arms wrap around him, hesitantly at first, and he is tangled up in Askeladd’s blanket. He does not know what he wants from Askeladd, but maybe it is close to this.
For a time the only sound is the distant murmur of the sea. The settlement is small. No one is driving around at this time.
Thorfinn chews his lip. “How long will you stay?”
“Ten days.”
“Where do you live?”
“Gwynedd.”
“Is it nice there?”
Askeladd shrugs, and Thorfinn gets another whiff of that mint. “Teatime gossip at the university is the most riveting part of my life. It’s quiet and a fence falling over is newsworthy. It’s what I wanted.”
For how long? Thorfinn does not ask.
Askeladd’s chest rises and falls. Slow and steady. Crest and trough. “There’s a spare bedroom in my house. It used to be my mother’s. It’s got a wall with red wallpaper.”
Thorfinn clutches the blanket till his knuckles go white. “I like red.” It’s getting chillier and windier, and he tells Askeladd to come inside so he can make tea and break out some biscuits. Askeladd never refuses food. He munches on the biscuits while the kettle whistles. “You should go to bed, baldy,” Thorfinn says once the cups have gone cold. “You’re too old for late nights.”
Neither of them moves. Askeladd seems to have exhausted his capacity for conversation for the night, and so has Thorfinn. They sit at the kitchen table till they no longer need the lights on. When Thors saunters in, yawning, breakfast is already made.
-end-
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: Teens
Summary:
Thorfinn prays to Odin for another chance to kill Askeladd.
He gets it.
The first time he gets a second chance to kill Askeladd, it’s not what he expects.
Askeladd peers at him from the doorway and Thorfinn thinks, “I have the wrong man.” It is not because he looks any different. Not on the front of it, anyway.
Askeladd’s eyes are wary, but soft, cow-like - Thorfinn searches for a flicker of that shrewd light in them and finds none. There’s an old scar on his upper lip that he may have gotten from tripping into a table. Blades don’t cut like that.
The smell of daffodils is thick, cloying. This part of Wales is famous for them.
“Can I help you?” says Askeladd, at the same moment someone says, “Who is it?” and Thorfinn recognizes Bjorn’s voice. Thorfinn lets go of the dagger at his back. Bjorn’s comes up behind Askeladd and he’s got a rag around his neck and another over his shoulder. A baby’s wail comes from somewhere within in the house.
“Askeladd?” says Thorfinn, stupidly.
“Yes? Have we met?”
Thorfinn studies his face. It’s the way it always was, but there are laugh lines around his mouth, and his hair is thicker, like he’s got less to worry about. Another wail comes from the baby. Askeladd’s child, or Bjorn’s, or both, or perhaps some orphaned nephew. It doesn’t matter.
“No,” says Thorfinn. He takes a step back, then another. “We haven’t.”
He runs.
***
It’s a duel, and there’s frost in the crisp blond waves of Askeladd's hair. Thorfinn isn’t sure when so much white crept in; it wasn’t this prominent last he looked.
Askeladd laughs as the blood spreads beneath him, a grating wet rattle that has Thorfinn clutching his dagger even harder. “I won,” he rasps. “I won.”
“You did.” There’s something in Askeladd’s eyes that Thorfinn does not recognise. Perhaps it was always there and he simply never noticed. “Go. Be at peace.”
It’s not what Thorfinn expects him to say. He grabs hold of Askeladd’s cloak and yanks him up off the ground, ignores the thin high sound of pain Askeladd makes. “What do you mean,” he shouts. “Are you mocking me? You can mock me from the pits of hell.”
He leaves Askeladd there, in the midst of crumbling Roman ruins and overgrown weeds and the pale milk of moonlight. There is no burial. There will not be one. Bjorn is long dead, the men disbanded and scattered.
Iceland is cold when he goes back. Ylva tries to kill him with a harpoon, telling him where to get off for joking about her dead baby brother. He supposes she is right - her baby brother is no more. His mother frets and fusses and avoids his eyes. Leif is the only one who talks to him like the past twenty years never happened, prattling on about Vinland and Miklagard and lands farther east. It is even worse than his family’s misplaced concern.
He does not sleep well. He closes his eyes and Askeladd says, “Go. Be at peace,” and there’s a coarse rough hand on his cheek and he wakes up fighting to breathe.
On the anniversary of Askeladd’s death, Thorfinn gets drunk. He says it’s a celebration, it’s a happy day. His mother says nothing, and Ylva’s daughter says, What are we celebrating , and Ylva answers, Nothing, go help your brother in the pen . Thorfinn sits by himself by the dark crumpled sea and tastes the salt on the air and thinks about ships and daggers and English villages.
When the moon rises he smashes the bottle against an outcrop of rocks.
***
Thorfinn never gets on the ship.
He begs his father to not go to war, and gets a curious look in response. When his father shows no signs of budging, Thorfinn grabs him by the forearms. “Don’t go to the Faroe Islands. Don’t go, I - I had a dream, it was bad, it will be bad - or skip them over, go somewhere else - ”
His father looks bemused. Indulgent. “I’ll talk it over with Leif,” he says, in that soft soothing tone of his, rich and heavy like fur. Thorfinn loves that tone, loves it all the more because it is so uncommon among these northern men. He never wants to stop listening to it.
He watches as his father leaves with the other soldiers; he’d spent the previous night curled on his lap, bullying him into telling him stories. Almost, he’d mentioned Thorkell, and clamped down on it. Ylva had teased him in the morning, but he hadn’t cared.
“Helga, Ylva,” his father calls from the ship, “take care of Thorfinn. Raise him well.”
Ylva yells for him to bring back necklaces and pretty clothes and maybe a slave, they’d treat him well, they wouldn’t be like Halfdan. Thorfinn suppresses a cringe. She smacks the back of his head and says, Don’t worry, Papa, we’ll turn him into a man, a real, strong man .
It will be different this time, Thorfinn thinks, as the ship sails away towards the rising sun. He is not there to be taken hostage - he is not there to be protected. His father will have the upper hand.
Several days later Thorfinn wakes to muttering - it is early, and there is a draft. He slides out of bed to find Leif at the front door, talking to his mother. “I’m sorry,” Leif is saying, “I’m sorry.”
Thorfinn wants to burn his heart out of his chest.
***
“I had the wrong man. For ten years. I had the wrong fucking man .” Thorfinn’s blade is against Floki’s throat. Beads of blood well against it. “Do you have any idea what I went through? What I did?” Memories: smoke stinging his nose, a comb running through his hair, blood blotching the tunic his mother had sewed for him.
Floki has the gall to look him in the eye. “You didn’t have the wrong man. Your father died by Askeladd’s hand.”
“It was you who gave him the order.”
Floki laughs. Thorfinn almost decapitates him then and there. “All these years, and you still don’t understand Askeladd? You couldn’t make that man do anything. I gave him a job. He took it.”
Thorfinn thinks of Askeladd’s ragged butchered body in the hall. Askeladd riddled with arrows and labouring to his feet. Askeladd holding Bjorn in his arms as he delivered the final blow.
He presses the sword harder against Floki’s neck.
Floki keeps talking. “What’s it to you whether he’s dead or not? The man’s killed more people than I ever did. He wasn’t even Danish, he was the son of a whore, a dirty little Welsh slave sullying the ranks of - ”
Thorfinn’s fist cracks across Floki’s jaw. It’s broken, Thorfinn knows without checking, without seeing.
He does not kill Floki.
But it is a near thing.
***
“Who was he?” Ylva asks.
Thorfinn rifles through the options. Danish mercenary. Welsh spy. Murderer. Kingmaker. He gives her the first one, since it’s the simplest.
Truth be told, he’s not entirely sure who Askeladd was; the man was surprisingly elusive for such a strong personality. He asks sailors and they shrug. He asks soldiers and they shake their heads. The name Askeladd does not appear in any records, not even the official ones recounting Canute’s bloodstained journey to the throne. Thorfinn knows; he checked.
“You cry out his name,” Ylva says, “when you sleep.” Firelight flicks across her face.
“I’m not afraid of him. I never was.” He doesn’t know why he feels the need to say that.
“I didn’t say you were.” Her fingers drum against the table. “You were with him for over ten years.”
He remains silent.
“Did you care about him?”
The memories come unasked for: Askeladd setting Thorfinn’s shoulder back in its socket. Askeladd saying, Get some rest, we’ve got a long march tomorrow . Askeladd shifting his grip on his dagger, showing him the right way to hold it, the right way to kill. Thorfinn isn’t sure when he stopped fighting Askeladd and starting fighting alongside him. Doesn’t know why. “How could you ask me that?” he says. It sounds toothless even to him.
Ylva looks away. “Because it’s messy. People are messy.”
“He was a monster. His men were monsters.”
“Yeah?” Thorfinn doesn’t know where Ylva got her sardonic expressions from; they are not from their father, or their mother. They’re certainly not from Leif. “So were you."
***
“I’m here to help you.” Thorfinn’s outstretched hand remains empty. His neck is starting to hurt looking down at Askeladd; Thorfinn is not used to looking down at anyone, and with Askeladd, a man who always seemed bigger than he actually was, it is even stranger.
Askeladd looks at Thorfinn’s hand with unimpressed scepticism. He wipes ash from his cheek with his knuckle and only succeeds in smearing it further. “Why?”
Thorfinn wants to shake him by his bony shoulders till his teeth click. He wants to scream, Because I don’t know who I am without you . He does neither.
Askeladd, apparently having decided Thorfinn is either a frothing lunatic or a slinking lowlife, turns to go without another word. Thorfinn starts to panic - it is only with agonising planning and several close calls that he managed to sneak into the stables without the guards noticing. He can’t let Askeladd slip away now. He can’t.
A memory flickers. Snow. Blood. A sword cast away. Thorfinn changes tactics. “I can get your mother out of here.”
Askeladd looks back at him sharply.
“She’s Welsh. She’s descended from the hero Artorius. You take care of her.” Little by little, there, Askeladd’s face is changing. “How do you know?” he says. He shuffles his feet, like he’s ready to dash. Thorfinn wonders: if he pressed two fingers against Askeladd’s throat right now, would he feel his pulse fluttering? “Mother never spoke about you. I’ve never seen you.”
“I’m not a spy,” Thorfinn hastens to say. “I’ll explain once we’re on the boat.” It’s a small thing, barely enough for three people and their supplies, but it will do. He doesn’t know where he will take them - he can house them in Iceland, but they may want a place closer to Wales, with less hostile weather. Matters for later. Right now, all he wants is to get Askeladd out of here. I couldn’t save you then , he thinks, unwilling to taste the acid desperation on his tongue, but I can now.
Askeladd searches his face. His lips are pursed and he looks the way Arnheid did whenever they offered to help her carry her buckets.
They steal away under the cover of night. Askeladd’s mother is so thin, Thorfinn is afraid he might break her just by touching her. Her eyes are too big in her gaunt narrow face. When she speaks it is half in a language he does not understand, lilting and soft and wholly unlike Norse. He holds her hand as gently as he can, guiding her through trees and brambles and icy streams.
Askeladd follows behind them, glancing here and there, his forehead wrinkled. He will be out of here soon, on the North Sea. Askeladd had always been at home on water; will he be sick, now? Will he cling to the edge of the boat with his hair flopping wildly in the way?
An arrow lodges in a tree trunk a finger’s width from Thorfinn’s face.
Askeladd is screaming. Thorfinn hears the word traitor .
His bare fists are not enough. Something warm drips into his eyes and he is on his knees but he feels no pain. Beside him on the ground Lydia shudders and stares with unseeing eyes. She gasps something that sounds like lucius and Thorfinn does not know what she means.
On the boat with his hands on the slick rudders he looks to the sea of stars in the blue-purple sky and wonders which god is the cruellest.
In the end, Thors lives.
Thorfinn never meets Einar.
Canute does not become king.
Under a continuous assault of Viking raids, England burns. That is the news that comes on the wind, spoken in whispers and accompanied by shudders and signs of protection. Thorfinn thinks of the Englishwoman who had given him her dead son’s clothes and presses his face into Gudrid’s back. He wonders if there is a world in which he is happy, where every step he takes is not shadowed by a spray of blood.
***
Thorfinn wants to crawl out of his blankets as much as he wants to lick the ground. “Please no.”
His mother pops her head through the door. “Don’t be rude. The man’s come all this way from the UK, he’s your father’s old friend. I’m sure you’ll have lots to talk about. He’s a professor of history.”
Thorfinn has no interest in history. He’s seen enough of it. Lived enough of it.
“Thorfinn.” His mother’s tone carries a warning note. He sighs and rolls off his bed, and her face brightens up. “Speak English in front of him.”
“Obviously.”
He takes his time picking out his clothes, combing his hair, and reapplying deodorant, and spends a good five minutes faffing around on his phone before dragging his feet out his door. What he would do for a bowl of crappy hot ramen right now. Murmurs float from the living room; his mother is laughing.
As he draws closer he starts to think he is hallucinating; one of the voices is terribly familiar. He slaps his cheeks; he has got to get out more.
A waft of coffee hits him before he enters. The table is laden: kleinur and cinnamon rolls and croissants and those little blue-and-yellow floral paper napkins that his mother only serves to guests she doesn’t want to kick out within a couple of hours. Thorfinn’s eyes are drawn automatically to the man occupying the armchair by the window.
He stumbles back, banging his back against the door.
“Thorfinn?” he hears his mother say. He is not looking at her.
A cup of coffee is halfway to Askeladd’s pursed mouth. Thorfinn knows that clothing has changed with the times, but that doesn’t prepare him for the shock of seeing him in a soft-looking navy cardigan and polished loafers. He’s wearing a scarf, like he’s cold, even though the house is heated, and an uncertain smile. His eyes dart to Thors, then back to Thorfinn.
Thorfinn realises he has been gawking like a fish.
“This is my old friend,” his father says, trying obviously to salvage the situation, “Lucius. We met while I was travelling with Leif to the Faroe Islands - you remember when I took that trip, right?”
“He was six,” his mother puts in dryly.
Thorfinn remembers. He remembers being unable to breathe, he remembers the walls closing in when his father had said the words Faroe Islands . He remembers thinking he couldn’t watch his father die again; he would go mad, he would throw himself into the sea. But two weeks later his father had returned, a little heavier, with his beard a little more unkempt, all smiles, and Thorfinn had thought, for a moment: Askeladd does not exist in this world.
But then, what reason would someone have to assassinate this world’s Thors? He is only a metalworker who sells his goods for too-low prices on indie websites. Helga is the one who foots most of their bills.
“Your father made quite the impression,” says Askeladd - Lucius - in a marked Welsh accent. His glasses are slipping down his nose. He’s got an almost dorky charm to him. Thorfinn clamps down on a hysterical giggle.
Thors laughs. “I should be the one saying that. The way you told that man - ”
“I’m sorry,” says Thorfinn, “I need to go. I have - work.”
His mother frowns. “But it’s Saturday, and you said you would be free.”
“Yeah, uh. It was. It just came in. On email. Gotta get it done or the boss will be mad.” He barely realises he’s switched back to Icelandic. He charges up to his room and leans against the closed door, his heart hammering. Air. He needs air. He wrenches open the window, and the snow-scented wind bites at his cheeks. Behind his closed eyelids a choppy grey sea bobs and weaves and a sail flutters at the edge of the world, and a voice cracks like a whip, Row, you ugly shits!
Why here? And why this moment? Thorfinn hadn’t - he’d thought -
Bug Eyes should be home - he’d said he’d planned to spend the weekend playing video games and maybe searching for places to visit in Istanbul.
Thorfinn punches in a text message to him and yanks his coat from his closet. No one notices him tiptoeing outside. What am I being so cagey for? he thinks, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. It’s not criminal to leave your own house.
He must have a sour expression on his face, because a couple of women take one look at him and cross the road to switch sidewalks.
Bug Eyes is not home. Neither is Leif, it seems, since no one gets the door. Bug Eyes still hasn’t replied to Thorfinn’s text.
The waterfront is his salvation. His boots crunch on the pebbles; his breath comes in a fog. Even in this life - his most surreal life, where houses are built with metal and there’s a year-round supply of spices in local markets and people take baths every day because there’s always hot water - the sea remains the same. If he looks out at it and ignores the occasional rumble of cars and trucks, he can almost imagine he’s back home - home home, with Leif painting his boat and Ylva racing with a harpoon at the sight of whales and the boys yelling, Hey, Thorfinn, you’re supposed to be dead.
And Askeladd - Askeladd . He is the same and not the same at all. Where does he get off, wearing black-rimmed spectacles and chatting about holidays and drinking coffee out of his mother’s blue-willow-patterned coffee set? Thorfinn thinks of the cup at Askeladd’s lips; did his whiskers catch on the pale cream froth? Did he laugh and wipe it with a paper napkin, or did he use a handkerchief he might have kept in his trouser pocket?
Thorfinn sits down cross-legged, heedless of the dampness on his pants, and puts his face in his hands. He does not understand what he is supposed to be to Askeladd, what Askeladd is supposed to be to him. When will he be able to rest? Jumping around like a cricket through different worlds for one man had gotten very stale very fast.
The last rays of the sun are disappearing from the sky when he gets back. He’s not done anything but walk at a meandering pace, but he is exhausted, ready to collapse into bed without dinner. His father meets him on the stairs, giving him a mildly admonishing look, and says, “Lucius will stay in Ylva’s old room. I asked her, and she said she was fine with it.”
That wakes Thorfinn up. “He’s staying here ?”
“He is a close friend, and he’s not made of money; I won’t ask him to book a hotel.”
Thorfinn wonders if he can sleep at Leif’s place. Surely Leif won’t mind. Thorfinn is a good cook. He misses Einar and his hugs terribly, all of a sudden, and a lump forms in his throat.
“Please be here tonight, Thorfinn. I’ve told him so much about you. He was excited to meet you.”
Thorfinn nods and internally flips the bird to Odin.
Dinner is as pleasant as one could imagine. It’s got an almost fairy-tale-like quality to it, with his father’s fatty lamb soup steaming on the table and cutlery and glasses of schnapps clinking away and the sound of laughter rising to the warm wall lighting. Thorfinn is so tense he can barely stomach a few spoonfuls of soup. He avoids Askeladd’s eyes, even though a part of him wants to stare, observe him like a butterfly in a jar. To Askeladd’s questions he responds succinctly, yes, no, no, at times, Uncle Leif, m-hm, over in Akureyri. His mother’s glare bores into him.
The second they all finish their food, Thorfinn leaps up and proclaims he will do the dishes. “Please, let me help,” says Askeladd, starting to get up, but Thorfinn cuts him off. “No! I mean, you’re our guest, I couldn’t possibly let you lift a finger, please, keep sitting.” Thorfinn rushes to the kitchen and fills himself a glass of water. He downs it, then another. Once he’s done with the dishes he tells everyone he is tired, and goes to his room and changes into his pajamas and lies in his bed. He turns over. He rubs his eyes. He takes off his socks.
He can’t sleep.
When he looks at his phone next it is 1:34 am. Bug Eyes has replied saying, Heyy sorry was with some peeps from the exchange program, all good? Rolling out of bed, Thorfinn pads down to the living room. Shafts of moonlight slant into the armchair Askeladd had occupied that afternoon. He switches on a table lamp and gazes at the armchair as if it will answer all his questions.
His walk was not enough. He needs to sink into a stack of hay in a barn. He is used to the cold - real cold, with no comfort of duvet or lick of fire or morsel of food, your body on the verge of not even shivering anymore. Too many people, here, now, say they enjoy the cold, but what they mean is they enjoy knowing it will not touch them. Not in any meaningful way.
Outside he looks up at the stars.
“I’m sorry if I took your usual seat.”
Thorfinn jumps a foot in the air.
Askeladd is cocooned in a blanket, even over his padded jacket. All that is visible of him is his eyes and tufts of pale hair sticking out from underneath his beanie. He would do that, sometimes, even when the weather was not harsh; eventually Thorfinn figured he just liked bundling himself up and tucking himself away out of earshot from his men. He’s never going to voice that it reminded him of a squirrel or some other small creature.
“It wasn’t my seat,” Thorfinn says.
Askeladd looks in the direction of the sea. “Bjorn never liked it when someone took his spot,” he says mildly, with the air of someone who is ruminating and possibly a little senile. This gives Thorfinn all the information he needs to know: Askeladd is trying to see if Thorfinn remembers, and if he does not, Askeladd can laugh and tell him to not mind an old man’s ramblings.
“I remember when he punched out Atli,” Thorfinn offers.
Askeladd sags a little. “So it’s you.” He puts his face in his hands, which is unlike him (or maybe it was always like him and he was just an actor par excellence.) He looks older than he is, his face worn, his shoulders stooped.
“I looked,” Thorfinn chokes out. “I looked for you.”
Askeladd’s voice is soft and tired. “I’m sorry.”
Thorfinn could never understand him. Couldn’t pin down his whys. He supposes it doesn’t matter.
Askeladd smells faintly of the mint bar soap that’s been in Ylva’s bathroom since forever. Thorfinn presses his face into his jacket. “Well, this is unexpected,” he hears Askeladd say, sounding bewildered but not unkind. Heavy arms wrap around him, hesitantly at first, and he is tangled up in Askeladd’s blanket. He does not know what he wants from Askeladd, but maybe it is close to this.
For a time the only sound is the distant murmur of the sea. The settlement is small. No one is driving around at this time.
Thorfinn chews his lip. “How long will you stay?”
“Ten days.”
“Where do you live?”
“Gwynedd.”
“Is it nice there?”
Askeladd shrugs, and Thorfinn gets another whiff of that mint. “Teatime gossip at the university is the most riveting part of my life. It’s quiet and a fence falling over is newsworthy. It’s what I wanted.”
For how long? Thorfinn does not ask.
Askeladd’s chest rises and falls. Slow and steady. Crest and trough. “There’s a spare bedroom in my house. It used to be my mother’s. It’s got a wall with red wallpaper.”
Thorfinn clutches the blanket till his knuckles go white. “I like red.” It’s getting chillier and windier, and he tells Askeladd to come inside so he can make tea and break out some biscuits. Askeladd never refuses food. He munches on the biscuits while the kettle whistles. “You should go to bed, baldy,” Thorfinn says once the cups have gone cold. “You’re too old for late nights.”
Neither of them moves. Askeladd seems to have exhausted his capacity for conversation for the night, and so has Thorfinn. They sit at the kitchen table till they no longer need the lights on. When Thors saunters in, yawning, breakfast is already made.
-end-