On the Cold Coasts

greeted people to the left and right, and Michael watched eagerly as Thorsteinn turned his attention to Ragna and presented her. She collected her skirts in her left hand and curtsied deeply, and with her right she took the bishop’s extended hand and kissed his ring. That same moment a large man came walking toward them, with sharp eyes, a bare face, and flaxen hair. He was clearly a priest, judging by his crown and attire, and Ragna retreated away from him so quickly that she nearly fell. The boy watched his mother’s expression change from fear to anger to shame in an instant, and he was filled with a sudden and inexplicable fury. Impulsively, as was his wont, he ran to the front of the crowd to stand next to her. Without knowing how it happened, he slipped at the same moment as he reached his mother, almost as if someone had tripped him. He grasped at the air as he fell, his hand finding red fabric that gave way and tore along a seam, and then he was lying flat in the sand in front of all those people, gasping from the humiliation and also the tremendous blow he had taken to the solar plexus when he fell on a rock. The flaxen-haired man reached down, took hold of one of his ears, and pulled him to his feet.
    “How dare you disgrace the bishop, idiot boy!” he said derisively, shaking Michael so that he thought his ear would be torn clean away from his head. From the corner of his eye, he saw his mother color crimson, and the expression on Thorsteinn’s face made him wish he had wings like his namesake, the archangel.
    “Let the boy go, Thorkell,” said Thorsteinn coldly. The ear was released, and Michael felt himself shoved to one side. Ragna pulled him close. She said nothing, just held her arm tightly around his shoulders.
    “Mr. Craxton, my grandson Michael,” Thorsteinn said, and a narrow smile forced its way onto his lips as he gestured in the boy’s direction. “I ask Your Grace to kindly forgive this unhappy incident. The boy is impulsive and lacks refinement.”
    The bishop’s stone-gray eyes met Michael’s brown ones. The boy tried to return the gaze with his head held high, but his cheeks burned from the bishop’s stinging gaze, and to his despair he found that his eyes were beginning to water. Craxton’s expression grew milder. He smiled, revealing large, yellow teeth. He patted the boy awkwardly on the shoulder, at the same time touching Ragna’s milky white hand, as if by chance.
    “It is only natural for young lads to be energetic,” he said, speaking slowly and with a foreign accent, though he was easily understood. “If his mother is willing to have my cloak sewn, we shall call it even.”
    Ragna curtsied and gave Michael a poke. He bowed down as far toward the sand as he could, and an audible sigh of relief passed through the crowd. A moment later people had begun to chat as though nothing unusual had taken place. Michael had planned to sneak away to get a better look at the bishop’s ship, the three masts so amazingly tall that it would take a true hero to climb up to the highest rigging without catching vertigo, but his mother refused to let go of his hand. To his relief, however, she said nothing about the unfortunate event. She rarely scolded him, in any case; she treated him more like a friend than as a child. If he was to be punished for misbehaving, she usually got him off, and she never hit him. Thorsteinn mostly ignored him, and his aunt Kristin—who was only seven winters older than he—was kind to him and even spoiled him a little. Thus he had more freedom than many children of the same age and could come and go as he pleased without anyone chiding him for it, so long as he carried out those few chores that he was assigned. He was taller than most of his peers and fought with knuckles and fists against anyone who dared tease him about the absence of his father.
    “My father is an important sea captain in England,” he boasted to anyone who would listen. Except of course the people back home, at Akrar. There was not much talk of this there, and indeed many things were not spoken of.
    For the most part, it was his grandmother Sigridur who disciplined him, but she, too, took pity on him when something was amiss. Perhaps there was something about the boy that reminded her of her sons who were buried in Greenland. He could just as well have inherited his dark appearance from Gauti, who had had Skraelings among his forebears, as from his father, that hapless