Melt

by Robbi McCoy

  What must Kelly be going through? she wondered. She hoped she was okay. Being alone in a strange place, not knowing the route or the terrain, would she have attempted going on alone? Or was she still waiting for Pippa to reappear, frightened and huddled behind a rock against the wind?

  Driven by this image, Pippa gathered her strength and tried to ignore the pain as she crawled to the edge of the chamber and shined her penlight on the wall, feeling with her fingers for the edges of boulders. The continual low howl of the wind accompanied her orderly progress as she ran her hands over cool stone. After investigating one spot, she moved in a counter-clockwise direction, using the odd rock cairn as her signpost. When she returned to that, she would have made a complete circuit.

  Most of the boulders were tight against one another with little space between. About halfway along, she found one place where her hand did not meet solid rock. It was earth, gravel and dirt. She took out her pocketknife and poked into it. It was loose enough to dig into. This was one possible exit. She continued around the chamber until she was back to the rock pile. As she shined her light on the wall, she was startled to see scratches in the rock about a meter from the floor. She peered at them more closely. These were not random scratches. They were a straight line of faint characters etched into the rock. She could barely make them out in the dim light. Only a couple of them looked like letters at all and they made no sense to her. Maybe they were just random scratches after all.

  Momentarily distracted by these symbols, she was reminded of her purpose by the renewed pain in her head. She went back to the one spot she had found that seemed like a possible passage through the rocks. She turned off her light to conserve the battery and began to dig with her knife. Little by little, she scraped away pebbles and dirt, creating a pile of debris beside her knee. Periodically she shined the light to gauge her progress. She had exposed plant roots, which encouraged her to continue. Most of the tundra plants were small with shallow roots, extending only inches into the soil. The plants producing these roots couldn’t be far away, which meant that the open air had to be close as well.

  While she worked, she thought of Kelly, picturing her cute smile and the way her ironic hazel eyes laughed when she was joking. She was really nice. And smart. In the two weeks since they’d met, Pippa had gotten to really like her. She made her laugh. Pippa had never been friends with anyone like Kelly before. Most of the interesting people she met came and went so fast she didn’t have time to get to know them.

  The best thing about Kelly, Pippa admitted to herself, was that she was a lesbian, a fact that had sent her into flights of ecstasy when she first discovered it. Kelly had mentioned it casually, as if it were a fact about her no different from the town where she lived or her favorite color.

  “Is Chuck your boyfriend?” Pippa had asked her that first day when the two of them were on her Rodebay tour.

  She had laughed like it was an absurd idea, then said, “Just a colleague.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Pippa had persisted.

  “No. Nor do I have a girlfriend at the moment. I’m a lesbian.”

  “For reals?” Pippa had nearly pitched herself overboard in her excitement. After that, she’d wanted to know every possible thing about Kelly.

  In the two weeks since then, she had made it her business to drop by the boarding house in the evenings to hang out with her, which often meant hanging out with Mr. Lance as well and Mrs. Arensen’s boring grandson Jens. The times they were alone, playing a board game or just talking, were the best. Kelly was a super cool woman and Pippa wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. That was why she had suggested this hike. An entire day alone together would be awesome. It had been a good plan and had been going along great…until she’d fallen into this mess.

  She pried loose a rock that fell on the floor with a clatter, diverting her from her thoughts. Behind it was a mat of lichen. She put her knife down and grabbed a handful of plant matter, pulling it through the opening she’d made. She pulled in a couple more handfuls until her hand pushed through to the cold night air beyond. She looked out through a clean hole in the earth to the outside. Triumphant, she lay on her back and kicked at the hole with her good foot, knocking more dirt and plants out and widening the opening. Now she could easily see outside to the twilight. There was no way to tell what time it was by the light. It could be ten o’clock or three in the morning. She stuck her head through the opening and felt the cold air on her face. A flash of light caught her eye. She watched as it blinked on and off, appearing to move in a straight line across the sky. Then the faint and distinctive sound of a helicopter reached her. As she watched, she saw a spotlight beam down from it, aimed at the ground.

  They’re looking for me! she thought, and immediately returned to the task of widening the opening. There was a much better chance of being found if she was above ground and could attract their attention. She pulled out sod and rocks, certain that she could make an opening large enough to crawl through. If Asa could do it, she knew she could, because Asa was much larger than she was.

  By the time she had created a passage large enough to squeeze through, the sound of the helicopter was louder. She pulled herself through the tight space with her arms, wriggling her way to freedom. Once her hips made it through, the rest was easy. She rolled onto her back on the bare rock, looking up at the sky, triumphant. She scanned the sky and located the helicopter circling to the north. If she could climb out of the ravine, they should have no trouble spotting her. That could take some effort with only one good foot. In the meantime, she would turn on her penlight and hope it had enough battery power left to attract someone’s attention.

  She sat up and took it from her pocket, but fumbled when the world began to spin around her. She dropped the light and clutched the ground. Her stomach flipped and nausea assailed her. She curled into a ball on her side, her eyes shut tightly.

  While she waited for the vertigo to retreat, images of Asa, one after the other, ran across her mind like scenes from a film: the Viking woman wearing Thule garments marched steadily across a hostile landscape with her child by her side, two desperate and wretched people with a single goal: to get home.

  Pippa sank again into blackness. When her vision returned, she was walking, feeling tired, but with no pain in her ankle. A pair of yellow sealskin kamik adorned her feet and the small fingers of a child were encased in her hand.

  She walked up a rise and was finally able to see over the promontory she had focused on for the last half hour. She was overjoyed to see that the island she had hoped for lay there, its jagged contours cradling sleeping birds. There was no doubt this was Thor’s Hammer. A landmark she knew at last! She whisked Gudny joyfully atop her shoulders and pointed.

  “Look! We’re almost home!”

  Gudny clapped her hands, trusting and believing. The girl had never been this far from home. The island meant nothing to her. But it meant everything to Asa.

  The closer they got to home, the more familiar everything was and the lighter Asa’s heart became. But now she began to worry about what she’d find when she arrived. It was possible Bjarni had survived his wounds and was still recovering from them, too badly injured to go out looking for her. What of Alrik, her son, she wondered. She hoped he’d had the sense to hide during the Skræling attack. And the rest of the village? Would there be anyone or anything there to welcome them home? She clung to hope in all these matters, and hope would be her companion until she reached her destination when it would be replaced, good or bad, with truth.

  She searched the horizon for the church steeple until she remembered that the church had been on fire during her abduction. So she watched instead for the house of Hoskuld, always the first house to come into view because of its high place on a hill. When she saw it, standing there as always, her heart leapt to her throat. It felt like she’d been gone for a lifetime, yet it had only been a matter of days.

  Gudny was excited now too because she recogni
zed the scattering of buildings and the enclosures made of rocks that marked their grazing fields, empty of livestock as they had been for some time. Everything was quiet as usual at this time of night. Behind the village was the hill where the cemetery stood. Asa wondered how many new graves had been added since she’d been gone.

  As they entered the cluster of homes, she saw that Soldmund’s house was a pile of ash. But her own house was still standing. Gudny took off running to it and disappeared inside. Asa was too weary to run. When she entered her house, Gudny was darting from room to room calling for her father. The house was empty. The hearth was cold. The beds had been stripped of their coverings.

  “Where’s Papa?” Gudny asked, looking up at her mother with innocent confusion.

  Asa lowered herself into a chair and pulled Gudny into her lap. “Are you happy to be home?”

  Gudny nodded and laid her head against Asa’s chest.

  “Me too. Very happy.”

  She sat without moving for several minutes, too tired to rouse herself. Gudny fell asleep in her arms. She noticed it was getting lighter outside. Morning was approaching. She was finally able to urge herself out of her chair. She put Gudny on her bed and covered her with the coat she’d been wearing. Then she went through the narrow passage connecting their house to Bjarni’s mother’s rooms.

  She found Hild asleep, snoring deeply. She shook her gently awake.

  “Mother,” she said quietly. “Wake up. It’s Asa.”

  Hild opened her eyes and gasped, then sat up and stared. “Asa?”

  Asa hugged her briefly.

  “Where have you been? What happened?” Hild asked.

  “I’ll tell you everything later. We are now safe.”

  “We?”

  “Gudny is with me.”

  “Oh!” Hild clasped her hands together and looked heavenward. “Thanks be to God!”

  “Tell me what has happened here,” Asa implored. “Bjarni?”

  Hild’s eyes grew sad and moist. She shook her head and lowered her gaze.

  Asa took a deep breath. “Alrik?”

  Hild shook her head again, then looked up with tears in her eyes. “Like a grown man, he fought alongside his father. And with him, he went down. Both of them, gone.”

  Asa slumped forward, her heart pierced through with the news. “Who else?” she finally asked.

  “Asa, most of the men are dead. Olaf is alive, but he was injured badly and we had to take off his leg. Old Gest is still with us, but he’s useless, as you know. The only strong man left is Asvald. It was a vicious fight. The Skrælings tried to kill us all, but the women and children hid. When we came out from our hiding place, we found a massacre. They took the whale meat. They left us with no hunters and no food.” Hild peered more intently at Asa, then recoiled. “These are Skræling clothes you’re wearing.”

  Asa nodded. “They kept us warm on our journey home. What about our goats? Where are they?”

  “Gone. After you were taken, Asvald decided to feed the village with your goats. I told him they belonged to me. Bjarni was my son. He said we couldn’t have that kind of thinking now. We few left are like one family and have to combine our property to survive.”

  “How will we survive with no men?”

  Hild shook her head. “We can catch birds and fish.”

  “But we can’t catch enough to put away for the winter. We need reindeer and walrus and seal meat.”

  The prospect of winter always loomed over the village like a shroud of doom. Even when times were good, winter was nearly too much to bear. There were always deaths. The villagers and their livestock huddled together in their homes, waiting for the dark, freezing gloom of winter to pass so they could start living again. If they could have slept through it like hibernating animals, they would have. Finding food in winter was dangerous and difficult. The only way to survive was to lay by enough food in the summer to last. Hild knew that. They all did.

  Hild took Asa’s hands in hers. “God will provide,” she said earnestly, but the desperation in her voice hinted at her doubt.

  Asa was too tired and demoralized to reply.

  She soon learned that everyone else seemed even more disheartened than she was. Hope, which was always in short supply, seemed to have taken leave completely. Their small group teetered on giving up. Some were preparing themselves mentally for the end, like Hild, who spent all her waking hours in prayer, dreaming of Heaven. Old Gest decided he preferred Valhalla and talked of the old gods as if they were his best friends. He claimed Odin had a fine milk cow he was going to bring by next week along with a dozen sheep, so he needed help repairing his corral. He became angry when no one would help him. Madness was one way to deal with despair, Asa reflected.

  With most of the men gone, Olaf with only one leg and Old Gest half crazy, Asvald was now their leader. He sent every woman and child out every day to hunt. Only the elder women stayed in the village to care for the small children.

  Asa went out hunting with the others, bringing back enough food to meet their day-to-day needs, halibut, hvan gathered near streams and birds they snared in their rookeries. But they had no luck with large animals. They hadn’t even seen a whale or a walrus, and if they were lucky enough to see one, Asa wasn’t optimistic they could take it.

  One day when she was scouring the coastline in search of driftwood for their winter fires, she spotted a sled in the distance, a Skræling sled with a team of dogs, speeding across the frozen surface of the bay. She watched the sled disappear from view and thought again of the wild idea that came to her more and more frequently. She had so far kept it to herself, hoping their fortune would take a turn for the better. But the weather had already turned colder and their time was rapidly running out.

  She took her idea to Asvald.

  “You want to live with the Skrælings?” he asked in disbelief.

  “I want to live. I want my daughter to live. We will not survive the winter here on our own. And if by some miracle of God’s benevolence, some of us do survive, how will we survive the winter after that? We are too few to make it on our own. The Skrælings know things. They are strong. They can hunt. They will not starve.”

  Asvald shook his head. “Their ways are not our ways. To live with them, we would have to turn our back on God. Then we would have nothing. Forsaking God, we would lose our souls. We will do our best here, Asa, but if God has decided to take us, it is our duty to go in dignity, solidly in His faith. This life is hard, but it is mercifully short.”

  “But my daughter is only five years old. Doesn’t she deserve to live?”

  “The time of her body on earth is unimportant. She will have everlasting life in Heaven.”

  Asa spoke no more about this idea until a few days later when she had made her decision. Then she went to her mother-in-law and told her she was leaving and taking Gudny to live with the Skrælings.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Hild asked. “What did those savages do to you?”

  “If we stay here,” Asa explained, “we’ll die.”

  “You don’t have enough faith, Asa. You have to put your trust in God. God will provide.”

  “I fear God has forgotten us.”

  “Blasphemy! You would give yourself to the devils who murdered your husband and son?”

  “Then you will not come?”

  “I would rather die than go begging on the mercy of those heathen savages. At least I will die a Christian.”

  Asa saw there was no chance of persuading her. “Yes, you will. Goodbye, then, mother.”

  For Asa, the courage to act came almost entirely from Gudny, that happy child who deserved to live. It was for Gudny she felt compelled to do this.

  She gathered a small bundle of belongings from her house. She took only necessities. She stared for several minutes at her family’s wooden cross above the hearth. It symbolized a link to her Norse ancestors and to the homeland she had never seen. And never would see. This land, this Greenland, was her homeland. No
t Iceland where her grandparents had been born. Iceland was nothing to her. Nor Norway, even further removed in time and space. Why did these people have such a strong bond with a place they had never been? Why did they even call themselves Norsemen? Every one of them was born here in Greenland. They were all Greenlanders, and it was the only place any of them had ever known.

  She left the cross where it was. Likewise, she left behind her Bible and her book of Icelandic sagas. In those three choices, she reluctantly turned away from her family, her religion and her history.

  She dressed herself and Gudny in their Skræling garments. She felt guilty for leaving and fearful of where she was going. She couldn’t be sure the Skrælings, if she found them, would even allow her to live with them. They might kill her or chase her away. Then what would she do? Come back here and endure the scorn of her kinsmen? She tried not to let these fears overwhelm her resolve. Her short stay with the Skrælings had shown her a possibility, one apparently too far-fetched for her kinsmen to consider.

  She met the others in the center of the village where they had gathered in a huddle of disapproval.

  Olaf, once their best hunter, leaned on a crutch, standing on his one leg next to his fifteen-year-old son Grif. His wife had died last year in childbirth and he and Grif lived alone now. It seemed every household was bereft and in mourning. Old Gest, crazy fool, glared at Asa wordlessly as if she were the Devil himself.

  “You cannot do this,” Asvald told her sternly.

  “Let her go,” one of the women said. “She’s bewitched.”

  “She doesn’t pray anymore,” Hild accused. “Those heathens did something to her.”

  Gudny clung to Asa’s leg, frightened and confused.

  After an uncomfortable two minutes of deliberation, Asvald took Asa’s hand and said, “I will not stop you. God protect you.”