Visitors of the Sea-thatch
Every winter, she stoically awaits his arrival upon the ice.
Old Vetr was bringing the pack ice late to their small fjord this season, she reflects. The daylight escapes between the high slopes above the waves, pursued by unseen hell-hounds whose chilly passage ruffles her hair.
As she had done annually for a decade, she stands on the wooden pier with bated breath each nightfall as she wills the sea-thatch to spread across their harbour with the half a dozen knarrs and longboats.
The villagers watch her from afar and with diffidence; she is, after all, the community’s seeress and healer. Behind her back, some of the youths also call her the frenzied one. She is aware of this, of course, and perfectly plays the role of the madwoman under the protection of Freyja’s consort, the lustful Odr, whenever any of the men develop ideas regarding the only mature single woman in the settlement beneath the mountain.
She has unquestionably no intention of submitting to a husband’s rule while waiting for him to return and take her far away. Her stay in this place had prolonged, first into a year and then dragged through a multitude of its recurrences. Yet they had planned for unforeseen developments, and he had pledged to come back at midnight on the thirtieth day before the spring equinox.
Each successive winter, her brain slowly, ever so glacially, loses its coherence and training as she goes through the motions of sleeping, eating and attending to her patients’ needs, avoiding most of the communal events of revelry. And this time, she understands he is no more, and this steep-walled, godforsaken bay would be her corpse-fjord.
She numbly watches a star break formation in the frigid inkiness above and fall unhurriedly, shimmering in hues and talking to her soothingly.
Indeed, she has finally lost it.
“She looks old,” Iaanda whispers disdainfully to Sorkaii in the kitchen as the spaceship’s inertia dampers shudder under the strain of rapid ascent.
“It’s called middle age,” Sorkaii grins, “and she is lucky to have survived all the diseases down there with a depleted nanotech egg. She was supposed to be in-country for only six weeks, and Garnaaq is out of his mind with rage. Central lied to him years ago about her death.”
The drone floats into the doorway and speaks ominously.
“I will conduct a talk with the Director when we arrive. I have her jacked up and triple-dosed on the microscopic buggers. The ageing should start reversing in a few days. But what I am worried is that her wits may have gone native …”
Garnaaq is cut off in mid-sentence by a hearty punch on one of his oscillating sides that shakes his metalloplast case. A rosy-cheeked figure of senior operative Dagh-Morraq in a bathrobe appears behind him.
“Worry not, you forgetful tin-can bastard! The moon is young, so let’s drink ourselves into a stupor and throw some axes!”
And the night was truly long as their evacuee recounted many stories of the blue-eyed people who could outsail the Dark Elves themselves past the ends of the world. Towards ship-morning, even the ice queen Iaanda joined in the laughter and banged her mug on the table.
This text was first published on X (Twitter) and is © 2024 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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