Vincent rose from the corner, insisting it was time.
“For what?” I asked.
“We must go to the hearth.”
“But was that Evelina in the facility? Was she dead? I still don’t understand how Laszlo Arros—”
He bolted toward me and shot up a hand, placing his finger to his lips. “Shush,” he said. “Now is the time.”
He tore me from the stool without touching me, and I gave in to the levitation, as if I had a choice to combat it. He dragged me backward, pulling me into the dark corner where he sat, and then I fainted, or at least I think I did. The next thing I knew, I was in a space so dim, I could not tell if I was still in the tower.
“Rest, Dagur.” It was a female voice, I was certain of it. “Rest, sweet child.”
“Mother?”
“Hush,” she said. “Keep quiet now. Go back to sleep.”
“My body hurts,” I whispered. “I hurt.”
“I know,” she said. “It can’t be helped. But you have done well.”
She sounded far away. “Take his pain,” I heard, and then oblivion swept me up again.
Endless minutes, hours or days may have passed. I had no idea how long I had been out when I woke, but I was famished. “Food,” I groaned.
A cool cup was brought to my lips and I sipped the water. With my eyes closed, I tasted the next morsel brought to my lips. The salty savor of Freyit’s dried strips of Arctic fox made my toes curl. The refreshment eased my emptiness, and I fell back asleep satisfied.
I called out for Evelina, as I woke. I had dreamed of her and mumbled her name in my sleep. Silence greeted me, and I lay in the dim space comforted by it, my ache lessened. I wanted to sit up but my body seemed held in paralysis, which may have explained why my pain had dulled. Fear did not nag at me, but loneliness seemed to pluck my nerve. Vincent had gone. I could feel it.
I woke a third time to the softest voice. “I am here,” he said. “See me. I have returned.”
I opened my eyes and a figure seemed to rise before me. His outline darkened with the dimness of the room, but he grabbed a source of light, as if from the outlying blackness, and held a candle to his face. “See me,” he said again.
“Gerenios?”
“I am here.”
“You’re back.”
“You must not speak, Dagur. Your silence will keep you safe.”
“How,” I mumbled.
The candlelight shadowed his face, and the seasons I had spent with him showed in the creases of his eyes.
“Tell me,” I whispered.
He covered his lips with his finger, and leaned forward.
Evelina, I mouthed her name unable to forget my nightmares.
“You must remain quiet. We cannot give up your position.”
His booming voice had shrunk to a gruff whisper, instilling me with a calm. Gerenios’s generosity had tempered my life with the settlers. He used to bring me slingshots made with branches from the tea-leaved willows he’d camp beneath while on a hunt. One time, he gave me a satchel he’d made from a reindeer hide and told me it was for the day I ventured beyond the colony. “I didn’t think you’d ever let me leave,” I’d said, jokingly. “We’ll all leave one day,” he’d replied without his usual smile.
“I assure you Evelina is alive and well,” he said. “She and the others will return to rid us of the nimrod.”
“Where am I?”
“Listen, don’t speak. This is all part of the plan. We knew this day would come, and I have waited.”
I bit my lip, though a million questions rushed to the surface.
“The world is not what it once was,” he said. “I know he has already explained that and you have seen the truth in his journals. The pieces he has you recording are the missing ones, those that tie it all together. But no story truly ever ends, and yours is only beginning.”
He touched my hand, and tapped it gently. “I have wanted to tell you for a long time, but swore to hold my tongue until he returned. He has granted me permission now, and I falter as eager as I am.”
He looked away and darkness fell over his face. The candle wax dripped onto the handle, and then his hand. The sting of the heat brought him back to the present moment and he cursed, placing the candle on the ledge beside him.
“They came to me long ago,” he said. “It was another world then, and this colony was nothing. We had only just begun laying the foundation for the hearth. Did you know it was named for a great hall written about in old poetry? Your guardian told me it was actually older still, from a song about a hero who saves a group of foreigners from a monster. The hero rode the seas to save the foreigners, wanting to claim fame and fortune. Heorot was where the king gathered with his people to dole out rings and celebrate unions, and so it became the name of our hearth, too.”
Gerenios had a knack for telling stories, but this was one of his favorites. I had heard the story of our hearth’s namesake many times through the seasons.
“Our hearth was to be a similar place,” he said. “And as we laid its foundation, they came, your ancestors, bringing a young girl with them for safe haven. She was unlike any I had seen before, with her chestnut hair and bright green eyes. Her bronze skin glistened like a god’s and I worshipped her.”
He looked away, hiding his sorrow.
“She did not stay that way forever,” he said. “Soon she grew up and became a woman, and they returned for her.”
“The hearth,” I whispered.
He gestured for silence again, and looked up at the darkness that surrounded us, suggesting we were underground, beneath the planks of Heorot.
“The hearth,” he said, “is above us. You are safe here as long as you remain out of sight.”
I looked around the cramped space and shivered at its dampness. Gerenios pulled on a cover that lay at my feet.
“There is more,” he said. “Her arrival is not the thing, and neither is her parting. It is what transpired between them which is most important.”
My mother, I mouthed the words as I had done for Evelina’s name, and Gerenios nodded.
“You do understand,” he said. “Let me tell you how I came to love Béa Bijarnarson, and how you came to be.”
The Arrival of Béa Bijarnarson
The band of visitors frightened us at first, but once we saw that one of them was a child, we welcomed them. We hadn’t seen others for so long we believed we were the last men. Our colony was small then, and many of us had barely escaped the first settlement. We rode the seas, like the hero of the epic, to find new land to begin again. Beginning and ending are the same thing, and one is always rushing into the middle of things.
“We have come for the girl’s sake,” the stranger said. “She needs a hearth to warm her.”
I didn’t know at the time I spoke to the one who would change my life forever. I thought he was her father, though she looked more like the woman at his side. It was just the three of them, Vincent, Lucia and her daughter, Béa.
“I have a proposition for you,” Vincent said. “If you accept, you will not die today.”
I had been elected our leader, and bore our guests with as much hospitality as I could muster. They didn’t want food. “Only for the girl,” Vincent said.
After that first night, after many hours of conversation with this enigmatic figure, this god of war and time, my life took a new course and found its purpose. I was to become Béa’s protector.
“One day she will be yours,” Vincent said. “But not until she has come of age, and I return.”
He explained some things, and others were left to what I knew of our biology. She was not like the rest of us, we determined that right away. She was a curious child, and when Lucia left her at the horned gates marking the entrance to the settlement, she didn’t weep for her mother’s departure. She showed a resolve I’d never witnessed in another.
She grew into a fine member of our colony, taking to our ways, learning how to hunt and fish and keep w
atch, all as I kept watch over her. When Vincent finally returned, many seasons had passed and she and I had fallen into an easy routine. As much as she was a child when she arrived, she had ripened, and I admired her.
We were sitting alone at the hearth one evening, after the others had gone to their shelters. She asked me to stay with her and finish the story I had begun the night before. “Where did I leave off?” I asked.
“The men and children scoured the tract of snow for the women,” she said. “But none were to be found.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, let me see. There were none to be found because they were buried deep beneath the snow.”
Béa’s eyes grew wide and she squeezed the mug of cider she held. Her face had come into a certain maturity, and she seemed to blossom right there in front of me by the firelight. My heart burned with a sorrow I could not explain, or have felt since.
“Go on,” she said. “Why’d you stop.”
“No reason,” I said. “I shall go on. So they had been transformed into little seeds, falling out of the pockets of gods and rooting down deep beneath the soil. The seeds could only grow alone in the dark without the bother of men and children. The men grieved for the women’s transformation, and the children wept. They would never again taste their favorite current and berry bread, and the almond butter they loved so well, and the cherry syrup they licked from their fingers after the thaw. But one day—”
The heavy door made from birch trees I’d felled flew open, letting the wind rush in and threaten to douse the fire.
“Keep close to the hearth,” I said to Béa. “Let me see who has arrived.”
The planks beneath my feet seemed to creak with each step, as I made my way to the open door. “Who’s there?” I called. The whipping wind answered with a scream, and I stood in the doorway for a moment, contemplating whether the zephyr had actually pushed her way into Heorot.
“Gerenios,” Béa’s soft voice called to me. She had gotten up and come to where I stood by the door, her gentle hand touching mine, as she said, “I am ready.”
I turned to her and almost fell over when I saw that she was covered in blood from the waist down. “What has happened?” I pulled her up into my arms and carried her to the hearth. I could not see well enough until I fed the fire, but once I did, the moistness on her front seemed to darken.
“Where are you hurt?” I said. “I will send for Freyit.”
She steadied my hand and calmed me with her touch. “There is no need,” she said. “This is as expected.”
“What is?”
It may seem strange to say, but I was relieved when Vincent stepped forward from the darkness, and approached Béa. For a moment, I considered he would think I had harmed her, but he said, “Her ways of being are different from yours. She, unlike you, may perform miracles.”
Dumbfounded, I watched as he contemplated her physique and whispered in her ear something that made her smile. She nodded, and turned to go, leaving him to remove the scales from my eyes.
He explained many things to me that night, and I was aghast for most of them. I didn’t come from a place that would afford me such learning, but I believed everything Vincent told me, trusting him and the responsibility he forced on me.
“She is unlike you in so many ways,” Vincent said. “Her blood is pure, something you may not understand now, but will in time. She is one of the last of her race, and must not be the end.”
“Her differences mark her,” I said. “But she has fallen in with the settlers and we have grown to love her as one of our own.”
“I know,” he said. “You, especially.”
I dropped my head in shame. He had seen the desire I had tried so hard to hide. He had not been far from her, and had watched over her, witnessing her induction into the second colony of the resurrected.
“You have proven your worth, Gerenios, and you shall receive the reward I promised.”
I couldn’t imagine the ecstasy to come, my union with Béa brought me the greatest joy, and I would not forget it when even greater suffering was urged on me two seasons later. We had grown together as one, until that somber morning when she was taken from me. She had gone out to feed the fowl, only to disappear without explanation. We sent a search party out, and I combed the vast land in every direction until I couldn’t carry the burden of my suffering any longer, and returned to the colony, defeated and angry.
I began work on the tower that day, raising a summit so that I might see her return. Once completed, I sat in the studio at the top, my lookout, every night before sunset, and rose before dawn to witness first light. For days, and through the seasons, I waited for her to return, wondering if she had only ever been a dream.
Then one day, as I pruned a tea-leaved willow on the outer edge of the northernmost fence, I fell to my knees at the sound of her voice. “Gerenios,” she said. “I have returned.”
I could not turn to confirm if the wind had simply mocked me. I stood with my back to her for moments that seemed to last too long, until she reached out and touched me with a warm hand.
She had not changed a bit, she was as beautiful as ever, and when I looked upon her I wept. “Come now,” she said. “I have a gift for you.”
She stepped forward and wiped the tear from my cheek, and I pulled her into my arms, wanting to keep her between them forever. It was from that embrace that I spied the tot who had been hiding a few paces behind her. The small boy had a face I recognized.
“Hello,” I said, dropping to the ground to greet him properly. “I am Gerenios.”
The little boy mumbled a greeting, and Béa said, “This is Dagur. He is to stay with you for a time.”
“And you?” I asked, looking up at the only woman I could ever love.
She dropped her chin and shook her head, hesitantly. “I must return,” she said. “The others are waiting.”
“Where is Vincent?” I asked.
“He will come soon.”
She kissed my cheek and placed the child’s tiny hand in mine. Then she bent down and touched the tip of his nose with hers, pressing her forehead to his, telling him to be good. He was barely of speaking age, but mumbled a term of endearment before she turned and headed down the path from which she had come. The lump in my throat prevented my calling after her, and the warmth of the little boy’s hand in mine made me stay.
The Face of Truth
Gerenios rubbed his eyes and smiled. “It took me a while to put everything together,” he said. “But soon I could see that as much as you were hers, you were mine too.”
Still forbidden to make a sound, my face betrayed my shock.
“Yes, Dagur, I am your father,” he said.
The dimness of the crawl space beneath the hearth kept us from facing the truth too readily. I couldn’t look for my features in his face, but he’d never been on my list of candidates. I was told my mother had come to the colony after I was born, and left me with the settlers because she was dying. I believed the story I was told, neither my guardian nor Gerenios giving me reason to suspect its veracity.
“We are different in kind, though,” Gerenios said. “You’re correct in thinking you aren’t like the other colonists. You are your mother’s offspring through and through. It’s her blood that is yours. You have none of mine in you. A male cannot pass on his type. The blood of the female is everything.”
All his talk of blood made my stomach turn, and I regretted the strips of Arctic fox still working to settle in my bowels. I held my tongue, as he had commanded, but I desperately wanted to know more about my mother. I laid back down on the pile of straw beneath me, and closed my eyes.
Gerenios patted my hand and said, “Yes, my boy. You rest again. You need to replenish your stock. They will come for you when it’s over.”
Until then, Gerenios’s low voice had been the only sound, but a din arose from somewhere else, a place far above us, and I bolted upright. Panic marked Gerenios’s face, too, as he brought the candle up to blow it
out. He leaned forward in the darkness, and put a hand to my mouth. I bit my lip again, for fear I would whimper.
The last thing I heard was, “Do not be afraid,” and then I passed out.
The oblivion into which I fell was darker than I had known till then. The deepest spaces of my mind called to me, as the opiate in Freyit’s fox worked its magic. They robbed me of my senses purposefully, attempting to dull the memory of staying hidden beneath the floorboards of Heorot, where the hearth had often comforted me with food and stories about times I’d never known.
I woke with a jerk, my mind struggling to pull my body up from the vat of honey into which it had sunk.
“I will finish the story,” Vincent said.
I sat up and looked around at my familiar space, my drafting table and pens awaiting me to take to them again.
“What happened?” I whispered. “Where was I?”
“Never mind,” he said.
“But you are injured,” I said, jumping up from the bed. I must have risen too quickly since my legs buckled as soon as I stood. Swift as ever, Vincent caught me and laid me back down.
“It is nothing,” he said.
His arm hung low, pulled from his socket, and his stony nature seemed anything but. I asked him again what happened.
“Do you recall anything?” He asked.
“Gerenios,” I said.
“Yes, he has told you.”
I couldn’t look away from him, and he turned to the side, pulling his injured shoulder from my sightline.
“I am sure you have questions,” he said. “But I must finish my tale first.”
“Why is that more important than this?” I said, pointing to his arm.
“Only blood will heal it,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, my stomach growing weak again.
His expression softened, and the strings beneath my flesh tightened. His subtle fangs gleamed in the candlelight, and my head grew heavy. The idea of feeding him seemed less and less horrid, as he leaned in, bringing my arm up to meet his mouth. His kiss inflicted a sting like the one I’d gotten from an angry wasp once as I walked through a clearing of waist-high grass along the Ellidaár River. I rattled the nest in the grass and sent a swarm of wasps into a rage. I barely ducked the mist of angry stingers, before a stray got tangled up in my loose hair and pricked me with the same vigor. Vincent’s bite sent a fire up my arm and down my neck, through my spine. I closed my eyes and waited for the horror to pass. The intimacy was binding, but the sobriety of his act unraveled me.
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 63
