On the Cold Coasts

and goods were driven up onto the various coastlines around the country.
    All able-bodied folk were sent to the beach to collect the timber and other goods. The timber from the shipwreck was a treasure, and the people hurried to gather as much of the spoils as possible before the greedy waves licked the coastline clean once more. Tomorrow was Good Friday, and on that day no one was permitted to lift a finger, not even to save the precious wealth that the sea had yielded. Later that day, when twilight had begun to hamper visibility, the corpses were laid two and two across the horses that carried the lightest loads, and transported the shortest distance to the church of Vidvik. Along the way, one of the men surprised everyone by showing signs of life; seawater was regurgitated from the belly of a skinny, black-haired youth and ran down the side of the mare that carried him, down to the tussocked ground. He coughed violently and called out something in his native language.
    On Saturday morning the seafarers, nearly thirty of them, were laid together in a single grave and a psalm was sung over them. The young man who had lived was taken to the bishopric at Holar in Hjaltadalur Valley, so the bishop, who was the most likely of the locals to know the odd word in English, could question him about the home ports of the ships that had perished, and ask news of England.
    Many people were gathered at Holar on the Saturday before Easter. His Grace, Bishop Jon Tofason, had invited the elite of the see of Holar to celebrate the resurrection of the Savior, and the mass for consecrating the fire was about to commence when the youth was brought in. The fires had been extinguished in the hearths of all the farmhouses, and the folk were on their way to the cathedral to watch the bishop light and bless a new and pure Easter fire.
    For that reason, the hapless and still badly disoriented seafarer was laid in a bed in the women’s quarters. It was still unclear whether or not he would survive past Easter Sunday. Wenches dressed him in woolen undergarments, and a few children were made to get into bed with him to help warm him even more. Blankets and still more blankets were laid on top of them, so eventually they grew impossibly hot and sweaty. Very soon the children became restless and snuck from the bed one by one when the womenfolk had gone off to attend to more important tasks. All except one of the sisters from the Akrar estate, the older one, which malicious tongues liked to say had a hint of native Greenlandic blood—Skraeling blood—in her veins.
    He had a tangle of seaweed in his tousled, shoulder-length hair, and he regained consciousness as Ragna was picking it out with deft fingers. It took some time, and while she did so she recited in a mellifluous voice the tale of Sassuma, Mother of the Greenland Sea, who sat on the ocean floor with seaweed in her great head of hair and drove away the hunters’ prey unless the shaman came to comb out her tangles, braid her hair, and sing for her. “This is how they sing…” And she sang to him, disjointed tones in no-man’s language: “ Qa-vam-mut kak-kak qii-ma-naq…”
    He did not understand a word of what she said, but he stared with ardent brown eyes at her dark-skinned countenance, and it calmed her to talk and to sing because just his gaze alone made her heart beat a little faster. His eyes shone, not from fever but from something entirely different. She remembered every line in his face, and how it lit up when he smiled, and every stroke of his hands, and the turbulence in her blood when he stroked her naked shoulders and belly and thighs. The pain she felt when he entered her took her by surprise but was instantly forgotten and of no consequence. He smiled and sighed with pleasure, and she felt his tongue in her mouth and sucked it greedily like a child sucks on its mother’s breast, and she licked his chin, rough with stubble, and felt the salty taste of the fierce and frantic waves that had washed him up onto the beach.

    Ragna felt a contraction and grasped her head in her hands with a low, pitiful howl. It was like her body was being split open from her pelvis, through her spine, and up; her bones felt pried apart, her world ripped apart. The room swam before her eyes; someone was bending over her. Was it her mother?
    “Mamma!” she screamed. “Help me!”
    Sigridur Bjornsdottir, known as Sigridur the Rich, had been the first to comprehend her daughter’s