Magnus

by Joanna Bell

  When I stumbled and fell to my knees, he started running towards me and even his run – Jesus, even his run was like Magnus' run. That same smooth, catlike gait, that same almost childlike bounce that had never left, even as the grays became numerous in his hair...

  "Oh my God," I cried, wiping my eyes as the man approached. "I – I'm sorry. It's just that you – you look – I'm sorry! I'm so –"

  "Heather?"

  He crouched down and I looked up, still on my knees in the gravel, still shaking. And when I looked up, I swear it seemed to be my husband. The way the last of the light picked out the jaw-line, and the ears...

  "No," I said to myself, out loud. "No. No. No."

  "Heather? Are you Heather? I am –"

  "Come here," I barked, taking his hand and pulling myself to my feet. "Come – come here."

  And then I fair dragged the poor young man – because he was young, I could see it by then – down the driveway, towards the light where I could get a better look at him.

  When I thought there was enough light to see properly, I dared to look at him once more. My eyes held his gaze for a second, maybe two before I had to look away, because I was sobbing.

  "A ghost," I cried, bringing my hands up to my face because it was too painful to look again at a person who I knew was not who he seemed to be. "A ghost before me, as if the years had not passed, and death not taken him from –"

  "Who do you speak of?"

  I didn't hear the question. My head was too full of grief, freshened by seeing a face so like the one I had known all those years ago. I could barely stand up, but I couldn't sit down, either. I didn't know what I was doing.

  "Why have you come?" I cried, when I could get the words to come out of my throat again. "Why – who are you – why have you come here?"

  "Who do you speak of? Who is it you say I resemble?"

  That time, I heard the questions. The man before me was young – very young, in his late teens or early twenties, and when I looked again at his face, squinting because it was almost like looking at the sun, I saw that he was in some distress too.

  "You look," I began, still out of breath with emotion, "like someone I once knew. You look like a man –"

  "Like who?! Who do I look like?"

  "Like my husband!" I cried. "You look just like Magnus! You look so much like him I half-believe I'm dreaming right now, to see you in front of me. Look at your –" I reached out without thinking and touched the young man's cheek – "face. Look at your face! It is just like his – even your expression is his. Oh, who are you? If this is a dream, let me wake now before I lose myself in grief once more. Let me –"

  "I am Magnus."

  My legs gave way underneath me and I would have fallen to the ground if two strong arms hadn't caught me. I don't remember seeing or hearing or really being aware of anything as I found myself helped to a carved wooden bench next to the door. And once I was there, it was a long time, many minutes, before I could speak again.

  "Who sent you?" I asked quietly, as the little moths began to flutter around the light, now the sun had set fully. "Who sent you to torture me? Who sent you, with your face so familiar it's as if he stands in front of me at this very moment?"

  "I came by my own will," came the response, and I could hear a wobble in the man's voice, as if he himself was near tears. "I came from the Kingdom of the East Angles, because my grandmother told me, in the winter that she died, that my parents were in that place, and that my father's name was Magnus."

  I looked up again, and forced myself not to turn away from the face that tore at my heart. He seemed to mean what he was saying. But it couldn't be. It couldn't.

  "In the Kingdom I found Jarl Eirik, and Jarl Ragnar in Thetford, and their wives Paige and Emma. When I told them of my quest to find my parents, and asked if they knew of a Northman with the name Magnus, and his wife –"

  "Emma?" I asked, dazed. "Paige and Emma? And Jarl Eirik – and – you're a Northman?"

  "Yes, Heather," the young man replied, taking one of my hands in both of his. "I'm a Northman. So was my father. He had a wife in the Kingdom, and they had a baby – just one, and many years ago. The peasant girl who helped at the birth told them the baby died but he – I – didn't die. They stole me. They took me away to the North to be raised by my grandfather, the Jarl –"

  Maybe it should have been easy for me to see the truth. It was, after all, literally staring me in the face. He was the spitting image of Magnus, so alike him it was uncanny, and nothing he said violated any boundaries of possibility. But still, I could not believe it. Not right away. My heart rose in my chest with hope, and my mind almost shut down with how fervently I wanted it to be true. But still, I could not believe it. What if I was dreaming? What if I'd fallen in the kitchen, and bashed my head against that expensive range, and the young man in front of me was just a vision of my unconscious mind as I lay knocked-out on the kitchen floor? Even the tiniest possibility that it wasn't real was too much. To hear that my son – that our son – might have lived, to believe it, and then to wake to the cold reality where his tiny bones still lay in the thousand year old ground of the Kingdom would surely kill me.

  "Is it you?" He asked, as I sat silent and shocked beside him, my whole body shaking. "Did you have a husband named Magnus – a Northman? And did you have but the one baby, a son they told you died at birth? Please say something. Please, speak. I have thought of finding you – if it is you – every day since I was five and ten. I have – I have waited. I have hoped. And now, you say nothing. You leave me to wonder if my quest is over or if –"

  "Five and ten," I whispered, smiling to hear the way the it was spoken in that other place, where I had lived most of my life. "Five and ten. Is it you, my love? I don't speak because I don't dare. Is it you? How can it be you? I didn't even – I didn't even hold you! They took you from me before I was even allowed to lay eyes on you! They –"

  "It's me," he said, and then he did begin to cry. "It's me, Mother. It's me."

  We fell into each other's arms, and held each other tight as we cried for happiness. And when we parted, just briefly and many minutes later, I took his face – his beautiful face – in my hands.

  "Gods," I breathed. "Gods, look at you. You are just like him. You –"

  And then I remembered something. I remembered the day I lost my husband, and coming into the hall to find Ora bent over him.

  "He knew," I continued, astonished. "He – he knew! She told him! She must have told him, before he went. He was –"

  "Who? Who told –"

  "Your father," I replied quickly. "On the day he died I found the healer speaking to him in low tones – the same healer who delivered our son – who delivered you. And just before he went he said that you lived. I thought it the ravings of a man near death but now I understand that she told him the truth before he went. Oh, thank the Gods!"

  I reached out and grabbed the young man – my son – by the shoulders. "Do you understand what I'm telling you? He died knowing you lived! Oh, thank the Gods he knew."

  "So it's true? He's gone?"

  I nodded, seeing a flame of hope flicker out in my boy's hazel eyes. "Yes, many years – many winters ago. He died saving my life, protecting me. He was the best man I ever knew."

  That night, I woke many times. And each time, I had once again to go through the ritual of getting out of bed, and creeping down the hallway to one of the guest bedrooms, to peek in the door and make sure the young man, Magnus, my son, still slept there.

  I was almost sixty years old by then, and comfortable – even happy – with the idea that my days of love and adventures were over. When I looked back on my life, it was with clear eyes. Yes, I had suffered. But I was wise enough by then to understand that my suffering was never a punishment, that it was just the way things turned out for me. But I hadn't just suffered. I loved, too. And I was loved. And it was a great love, one of those loves that not even most of us get to experience. When I lay my head
on the pillow at night, it was truly without regret or grievance in my heart.

  So when the young man who looked so heart-breakingly like my husband showed up, and said he was my son, it didn't seem to fit into the story I told myself about my own life.

  Wait, I wanted to say. This doesn't happen to me. I'm not the person this happens to. I had my great love, and I was mother to a beautiful little girl and a lost son. And now this? The son I had thought dead returns, handsome and grown? Surely it's too good to be true. Surely I don't deserve such joy.

  But it wasn't too good to be true. The next morning, we sat at my huge kitchen table, the one I had bought specially so it could fit all of my friends around it, and glanced shyly at each other as we ate oatmeal.

  We spoke at first of details. How had he found the tree? How did he find Sophie? And slowly the details became more intimate, so Magnus was asking me about his father, and Haesting, and how we had come to meet on that day so many years ago.

  And all the while I could not take my eyes off him. I could not stop telling him how much he reminded me of the older Magnus. He was pleased to hear it, too, even as he was slightly embarrassed at my constant repetition.

  What I did not do was ask if he meant to stay. He was grown, albeit very young still, and I knew that in the Kingdom – and in the North – people take on the responsibilities of adulthood sooner than they did in modern times.

  "You are wealthy," he said at one point, as I took him on a tour of my property, showing him the chickens, the cows, the horses and the neatly laid out planting beds. "Sophie told me as much. She said that my father had something to do with it – that he left you something?"

  "Yes," I smiled, slipping my arm through my son's – he was as tall as my husband had been – perhaps even slightly taller. "His dagger. I don't know how much Paige and Emma explained to you, but you understand that this place isn't just a different location, don't you? It's a different time. Over a thousand years separates the Kingdom of the East Angles, and the North, from this place. So if you can imagine, your father's golden dagger, which was already worth quite a lot in the old time, was worth so much more here."

  "The Jarl's wives told me that men no longer fight with swords – or daggers. If there is no use for it, then why –"

  "Its use is as an object," I replied. "A treasure. There were no intact Viking daggers left in this world – all had been lost to time, or to being broken down and melted for their gold and jewels hundreds of years ago. And then there was suddenly one intact Viking dagger. Can you understand how much something like that would be worth – the only thing of its kind in existence?"

  I could tell that Magnus still did not quite understand what I meant, because his mindset was still that of a Northman from the 9th century. A dagger was a tool to him, a weapon. It was to be used, not looked at. It was alright. He would, if he stayed, have much to learn about where his mother lived.

  "And now you are wealthier than a king?"

  "I don't know about that," I replied, leaning my head against his arm briefly – it was still difficult to believe he was actually at my side. "How wealthy is a king? I don't know any kings – we don't have them here."

  I showed my son my house, and my land. I showed him my livestock, and told him what seeds had been planted in the garden. I wanted him to know the type of person I was, and to understand that even though I no longer lived in the Kingdom of the East Angles, that it was still part of me.

  There was just so much to say. A literal lifetime to catch up on. We talked into the night on that first day, and then again on the second and the third and so on until it seemed there would never not be something to talk about.

  When he had stayed with me for a week, and we sat at the dining table eating a stew thickened with peas – my best approximation, as I told my son, of what his father and I used to eat almost every night – he asked me if I was happy he had come back.

  I looked up from my bowl, surprised. "What?" I replied. "Am I happy? Magnus, do I seem happy to you? Do you see how I have not stopped smiling since you arrived? Can you imagine what it is to lose your only son and then to – no, I suppose you can't imagine. You're too young."

  He nodded, and returned my smile. "Yes, I see your smile, Mother. But I know this is a complex meeting, is it not? That I am a fully-formed man and not a sweet little infant. I worry that you – that we – see each other almost as novelties. That –"

  I reached out, and took his hand in mine, holding it tight. "Novelties, is it? I do not know how you see me, Magnus – and it is not for me to say, either. But as to you? It is not complex at all. It is not something that needs to be pondered, or explained at length. You are my son. And when I say you're the spitting image of your father, I mean it. But I see other things in you now that you have been here for a few days. Your eyes are the same color as his, but the shape is like mine, is it not? It is true I still have difficulty sometimes, looking at you and connecting the man in front of me with the infant I was not even allowed to set eyes on all those years ago. It is not a difficulty in loving you, it is a difficulty in believing I would be so lucky, that fate would give me a second chance like that."

  "So you love me?"

  At first I thought I was mistaken, only imagining I heard a crack in his voice, when he asked me that question. But then I saw that his eyes swam with tears – and so, immediately, did mine.

  "Do I love you?" I asked. "Magnus, there hasn't been a single second that I did not love you, not since the day the healers confirmed you were in my belly! Do you understand? Do you think love ends when death comes? It doesn't. I have loved you every day, every moment since then!"

  I made him laugh, then, because the dining table was so big it actually took me some time to get up from my chair and run all the way around to where he sat on the opposite side, and then to put my arms around him.

  "Next time just ask me to come across the table," he said, laughing through his tears.

  "Will do."

  A few minutes passed quietly as I held my boy – who was so big I could barely get my arms around him. And then he spoke again.

  "I used to think about you," he said. "When I was young. I didn't talk about it very much, because I didn't want to hurt my grandparents – and because, perhaps, I sensed even then that there was some part of the story I had not been told. But I thought about you all the time. They told me Asger was my father, and that he was a great man. I thought I had some idea, then, of who he was. But you? You were a mystery. I used to watch my friends when they hurt themselves, and how their mothers would bend over them and whisper comfort in their ears and tend to the their wounds. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to bear it and I would run away to the woods to cry for you – to cry that I didn't have you to do the same for me."

  "Oh my God," I whispered, as my heart fair broke in two to think of my boy when he was small, crying for his mother. "Oh my God. Magnus, I'm sorry. I –"

  "It's not your fault, Mother. I know it –"

  "I don't mean it like that. I just mean that to think of you as you just described almost feels like it will kill me. I want you to know, my love, that if you stay in this world, I will spend every single day of the rest of my life making certain that you never feel that way again. Do you hear me? There is nothing so important to me as you. Please don't ask me to explain – you are like me in that way, you know. Your father was always getting annoyed with me for needing an explanation for everything! As it is, it is just the truth of my heart I tell you now."

  He stayed. He stayed into the summer, and we would sit out on the back porch of an evening, sipping lemonade and commenting on how the light did not last as long into the night as it did in the North.

  He met the people in my life, too. Sophie and Ivar and their children, Maria, Sophie's mother and all of the extended social group. Only Sophie and Ivar knew his full story, and it was Ivar who took him under his wing.

  "He's got a strong heart," Ivar said one night as we stood outside afte
r a light summer meal, and Ashley chased Freya around our legs. "He is like his father, as you say? He says if he had stayed, he would be the Jarl by now and I can only believe that he would have been a great one. He has all the qualities of a Jarl, including a quick mind – and he still has his youth."

  Ivar must have then seen the anxiety on my face because he asked at once what was wrong.

  "You say he would be a great Jarl," I replied. "Do you think it best for him if he returns to fulfill that destiny? He will not be a Jarl here, as you know. It is the reason I have not asked him if he means to stay for good. I worry that he would not live the life here that he always envisaged for himself."

  I half-expected Ivar to talk once again of the medical advances in the future, and the prosperity and the safety of even the lower people – as he often did. But he turned to me, with his brow furrowed, and gave me a real answer.

  "I have daughters," he said. "Perhaps one day I will have a son, but as it is my children are girls. And they are growing up here, in a world without Jarls and Kings and warriors making up a large proportion of the people. I am free not to worry about whether they will compare their lives here to what they might have been in the past – because in truth there is no real argument, given the fact of their being girls, that here is the preferable time and place for them. But for a boy? For a young man, as Magnus is – as strong and smart and vital as he is?"

  "Exactly!" I replied. "What will he do here? If he stays, will he wake up one day when he's forty and regret that he didn't take his place as a Jarl, in the past? Will he believe that he wasted his youth on –"

  "Why don't the two of you just ask me these things, if they concern you so?" Magnus' voice joined us suddenly, making me jump. He'd snuck up behind us, unheard – as he was in the habit of doing.

  Ivar turned to him, smiling. "We can't ask you these things. You are too young yet to know the answers. We only speak of it because who you are is so obvious, and your mother worries that you will not find fulfillment in this life, where there is little of the glory available to young men as there is in the North."