The women of Vardø gather at the scooped-out edge of their island, and though some are still shouting, Maren’s ears ring with silence. Before her, the harbour is wiped smooth as a mirror. Her jaw is caught on the hinges of itself, her tongue dripping blood warm down her chin. Her needle is threaded in the web between her thumb and forefinger, the wound a neat circle of pink.
As she watches, a final flash of lightning illuminates the hatefully still sea, and from its blackness rise oars and rudders and a full mast with gently stowed sails, like underwater forests uprooted. Of their men, there is no sign.
It is Christmas Eve.
Overnight, the world turns white. Snow piles on snow, filling the windows and the mouths of doors. The kirke stands dark that Christmas, that first day after, a hole between the lit houses, swallowing light.
They are snowed in for three days, Diinna portioned off in her narrow room, Maren unable to rouse herself any more than she can Mamma. They eat nothing but old bread, settling like pebbles in their stomachs. Maren feels the food so solid inside her, and her body so unreal about it, she imagines herself pinned down to the earth only by Mamma’s stale loaves. If she doesn’t eat, she will become smoke and gather in the eaves of their house.
She keeps herself together by filling her belly until it aches, and by placing as much of herself as possible in the warmth from the fire. Everywhere it touches, she tells herself, she is real. She lifts her hair to show the grubby nape of her neck, spreads her fingers to let the warmth lick between them, lifts her skirts so her woollen stockings begin to singe and stink. There, and there, and there. Her breasts, back, and between them her heart, are caught in her winter vest, bundled tight together.
The second day, for the first time in years, the fire goes out. Pappa always laid it, and they only tended it, keeping it banked at night and breaking its crust each morning to let the hot heart of it breathe. Within hours there is a layer of frost on their blankets though Maren and her mother sleep together in the same bed. They don’t speak, don’t undress. Maren wraps herself in Pappa’s old sealskin coat. It was not flensed properly and reeks a little of rotted fat.
Mamma wears Erik’s from when he was a boy. She is dull-eyed as a smoked fish. Maren tries to make her eat, but her mother only curls into her side on the bed, sighs like a child. Maren is grateful for the blankness at the window that means the sea is hidden from sight.
Those three days are a pit she falls into. She watches Pappa’s axe wink in the dark. Her tongue grows thick and mossy, the tender place where she bit it during the storm spongy and swollen, with something hard at its centre. She worries at it, and the blood makes her thirstier.
She dreams of Pappa and Erik, wakes dank and sweating, hands freezing. She dreams of Dag and when he opens his mouth it is full of nails meant for their bed. She wonders if they will die there, whether Diinna is already dead, her baby still paddling inside her, slowing. She wonders if God will come to them, and tell them to live.
They are both of them reeking when Kirsten Sørensdatter digs them out on the third night. Kirsten helps them restack and light the fire at last. When she clears the path to Diinna’s door, Diinna looks almost furious, the dull gleam of her pouted lip catching in the torchlight, hands pressed hard either side of her swollen belly.
‘Kirke,’ says Kirsten to them all. ‘It is the Sabbath.’
Even Diinna, who doesn’t believe in their God, does not argue.
•
It isn’t until they are all gathered in the kirke that Maren understands: nearly all their men are dead.
Toril Knudsdatter lights the candles, every one, until the room blazes so bright it stings Maren’s eyes. She counts silently. There once were fifty-three men, and now they have but thirteen left: two babes in arms, three elders, and the rest boys too small for the boats. Even the minister is lost.
The women sit in their usual pews, hollows left between where husbands and sons sat, but Kirsten orders them forwards. All but Diinna obey, dumb as a herd. They take up three of the kirke’s seven rows.
‘There have been wrecks before,’ says Kirsten. ‘We have survived when men are lost.’
‘But never so many,’ says Gerda Folnsdatter. ‘And never my husband among them. Never yours, Kirsten, or Sigfrid’s. Never Toril’s son. All of them—’
She grips at her throat, falls silent.
‘We should pray, or sing,’ suggests Sigfrid Jonsdatter, and the others look at her poisonously. They have been trapped apart for three days, and all they wish to talk of, all they can speak of, is the storm.
The women of Vardø are looking, all of them, for signs. The storm was one. The bodies, still to come, will be seen as another. But now Gerda speaks of the single tern she saw wheeling above the whale.
‘In figures of eight,’ she says, her ruddy hands arcing through the air. ‘One, two, three, six times I counted.’
‘Eight by six means not much at all,’ says Kirsten dismissively. She is standing beside Pastor Gursson’s pulpit with its engraved stand. Her large hand rests upon it, the broad thumb working over the carved shapes her only sign of nerves, or grief.
Her husband is among the drowned, and all her children were buried before they breathed. Maren likes her, has often gone about her tasks with her, but now she sees Kirsten as the others always have: as a woman apart. She is not standing behind the pulpit, but she may as well be: she watches them with a minister’s consideration.
‘The whale though,’ says Edne Gunnsdatter, face swollen so tight by tears it looks bruised. ‘It swam upside down. I saw its white belly shining under the waves.’
‘It was feeding,’ says Kirsten.
‘It was luring the men,’ says Edne. ‘It set the shoal about Hornøya six times, to be sure we’d see.’
‘I saw that,’ nods Gerda, crossing herself. ‘I saw that too.’
‘You did not,’ says Kirsten.
‘I saw the blood Mattis coughed upon the table a week ago,’ says Gerda. ‘It has never scrubbed off.’
‘I can sand that out for you,’ says Kirsten smoothly.
‘The whale was wrong,’ says Toril. Her daughter is burrowed against her side so tight she might have been sewed to her hip by Toril’s famously neat stitches. ‘If what Edne says is true, it was sent.’
‘Sent?’ says Sigfrid, and Maren sees Kirsten turn a thankful eye upon her, thinking she has found an ally. ‘Such a thing is possible?’
A sigh comes from the back of the kirke, and the whole room turns towards Diinna, but she tilts her head back, eyes closed, the brown skin of her throat gleaming gold in the candlelight.
‘The Devil works darkly,’ says Toril, and her daughter presses her face beneath her shoulder, cries out in fear. Maren wonders what terrors Toril has woven into her two surviving children these past three days. ‘He has power set above all but God’s. He could send such a thing. Or it could be called.’
‘Enough.’ Kirsten breaks the silence before it can deepen. ‘This will help nothing.’
Maren wants to join her in her certainty, but all she can think of is the shape, the sound that brought her to the window. She had thought it was a bird but now it looms bigger and more unwieldy, five-finned and upside down. Unnatural. It is impossible to stop it leaking into the corner of her vision, even in the blessed light of the kirke.