Mamma stirs, as if from sleep, though the candles have been reflecting off her unblinking eyes since they sat down. When she speaks, Maren can hear the toll silence has taken on her voice.
‘The night Erik was born,’ says Mamma. ‘There was a red point of light in the sky.’
‘I remember,’ says Kirsten, softly.
‘And me,’ says Toril. And me, thinks Maren, though she was only two.
‘I followed it through the sky until it dropped in the sea,’ says Mamma, lips barely moving. ‘It lit the whole water with blood. He was marked – it was meant from that day.’ She moans and covers her face. ‘I should never have let him to sea.’
This brings a fresh wave of wailing from the women. Even Kirsten can do nothing to quell it. The candles stutter as there is a rush of cold air into the room, and Maren turns in time to see Diinna striding from the kirke. What words Maren could offer, as she puts her arm about Mamma, would be bitter comfort: There was nothing for him but the sea.
Vardø is an island, the harbour like a bite taken out of one side, the other shores too high or rocky for boats to be launched. Maren learnt nets before she learnt hurt, weather before she learnt love. In summer her mother’s hands are speckled with the tiny stars of fish scales, flesh hung out to salt and dry like white drapes of baby’s swaddling, or else wrapped in reindeer skins and buried to rot.
Pappa used to say that the sea was the shape of their lives. They have always lived by its grace, and long have they died on it. But the storm has made it an enemy, and there is brief talk of leaving.
‘I have family in Alta,’ says Gerda. ‘There is land and work enough, there.’
‘The storm did not reach so far?’ asks Sigfrid.
‘We will hear soon,’ says Kirsten. ‘I imagine they’ll send word from Kiberg – the storm must surely have struck there.’
‘My sister will get a message to me,’ nods Edne. ‘She has three horses, and it is only a day’s ride.’
‘And a rough crossing,’ says Kirsten. ‘The sea is still fierce. We must allow them time to reach us.’
Maren listens as others talk of Varanger, or more outlandishly, Tromsø, as if any of them could imagine life in a city, so far away. There is a small disagreement about who would take the reindeer for transport, for they belonged to Mads Petersson, who drowned alongside Toril’s husband and sons. Toril seems to think this gives her some standing over them, but when Kirsten announces she will care for the herd no one argues. Maren can’t imagine starting a fire, let alone keeping a herd of high-strung beasts through the winter. Toril likely thinks the same, for she drops her claim as quickly as she took it up.
Eventually the talk falters, finishes. Nothing is decided except that they will wait for word from Kiberg, and send for it if it does not arrive before the week is out.
‘Until then, it is best to meet daily at kirke,’ says Kirsten, and Toril nods fervently, in agreement for once. ‘We must watch for each other. The snows seem on their way out, but there’s no telling.’
‘Watch for whales,’ says Toril, and the light hits her face so Maren can see the bones work beneath her skin. She looks ominous, and Maren wants to laugh. She bites down on the tender spot on her tongue.
There is no more talk of leaving. Walking down the hill homewards, Mamma clinging so tightly it makes her arm ache, Maren wonders if the other women feel as she does: bound to the place now more than ever. Whale or no whale, sign or not, Maren was witness to the death of forty men. Now something in her is tied to this land, as tied as she is trapped.
Nine days after the storm, the year newly turned over, the men are brought to them. Almost whole, almost all of them. Laid like offerings on the small black cove, or else risen by the tide to the rocks below Maren’s house. They must climb to fetch them, using the ropes knotted strong for Erik to fetch eggs from the birds’ nests woven into the cliffside.
Erik and Dag are amongst the first to come back, Pappa amongst the last. Pappa has one arm, and Dag is burnt, a black line drawn from left shoulder to right foot, which Mamma says means the lightning struck him.
‘It would have been quick,’ she says, not hiding her bitterness. ‘It would have been easy.’
Maren presses nose to shoulder, breathes herself in.
Her brother looks as though he is sleeping, but his skin is filled with that horrible green light she knows from other bodies brought in by the tide. Drowned. Not so easy.
When it is Maren’s turn to descend the cliff, she retrieves Toril’s son, snagged like driftwood on the sharp-toothed rocks. He is Erik’s age, and his body slips about in its bones like jointed meat in a sack. Maren smooths his dark hair away from his face, picks a whisper of seaweed from his collarbone. She and Edne must tie him by the waist and ribs and knees, to keep him together as he is drawn up to his mother. Maren is glad she can’t see Toril’s face when she is brought her boy. Though she is not fond of the woman, Toril’s keens prick at Maren’s chest like tiny needles.
The ground is too hard for burial, and so it is agreed that they will keep the dead in Dag’s father’s first boathouse, the cold keeping them frozen as earth. It will be months before they can break the surface to bury their men.
‘We can use the sail as a shroud,’ says Mamma, after Erik is taken to the boat shed. She eyes the mended sail where it lies in the centre of the floor, as if Erik is already beneath it. It is exactly where they had dropped it nearly two weeks before. Maren and Mamma have been dancing around it, neither wanting to touch it, but now Diinna snatches it up and shakes her head.
‘A waste,’ she says, and Maren is glad: she can’t stand the thought of sending her father and brother into the ground with anything more of the sea upon them. Diinna folds the sail with deft movements, resting it upon her belly, and in her decisiveness Maren sees some of the girl who married her brother, laughing, a summer ago.
But Diinna disappears the day after Dag and Erik are brought back. Mamma is frantic that she has left to bring up the child with her Sámi family. She says some awful things, things that Maren knows she doesn’t mean. She calls Diinna a Lapp, a whore, a savage, things Toril or Sigfrid might say.
‘I always knew it,’ Mamma weeps. ‘I should never have let him marry a Lapp. They are not loyal, not made like us.’
Maren can only bite her tongue, and rub her back. It is true Diinna’s childhood was spent travelling, living beneath changing stars even in winter. Her father is a noaidi, a shaman of good standing. Before the kirke was more fully established, their neighbour Baar Ragnvalsson and many other men went to him for charms against rough weather. That had stopped lately, with new laws brought in to ban such things, but still Maren sees the small bone figures that the Sámi say will protect against bad luck on most doorsteps. Pastor Gursson always turned a blind eye, though Toril and her ilk urged him to come down harder on such practices.
Maren knows it was only Diinna’s love for Erik that made her agree to live in Vardø, but she doesn’t think Diinna would leave like this, not when they have already lost so many. Not with Erik’s baby inside her. She would not be so cruel as to take the last part of him away from them.
•
Within the week, they receive word from Kiberg. Edne’s brother-in-law comes with news that besides numerous boats moored in the harbour, they lost only three men. When the women gather in the kirke to hear the message, it stokes their unease.