I loved learning about the history of mapmaking. I dreamed that when I grew up, I would go to one of the big cities and study with distinguished scholars on a wide range of subjects, including maps and exploration. Or else fd be a poet.
I wrote one of my first poems about a wind rose:
The spear points north, south, west, and east,
Wind always shifting, a wandering least.
A beacon to sailors on the high seas,
Journeying afar on the wind's soft breeze.
The best that could be said of it was that it was short.
Father
ONE PROBLEM WITH MY being a mapmaker is that I hated to travel. ("A born southeast," Eugenia would say.) And I blamed myself when the mapmaking business failed. In fact, it had already been on shaky ground, but when Esbjorn and his wife died in an influenza epidemic and the business fell to me, it soon became clear that I couldn't make a go of it. It didn't help that two of Esbjorn's biggest customers had also died in the epidemic.
Eugenia had already worked her way through half of the compass points, so there were four children at home but not enough food to go around. When a distant cousin of Eugenia's offered us a small plot of land to farm, we seized the opportunity and moved the family to a remote pocket of northern Njord.
The cousin was generous, charging only a nominal rent, and all went well, for a time.
Until Elise died.
Rose
I CAN'T REMEMBER WHEN I first learned that I was born as a replacement for my dead sister, Elise. It was just one of the things I knew, the way I knew other things—like the story of the stormy circumstances of my own birth, the unending catalog of Mother's superstitions, and my father's skill at drawing wind roses.
Mother was always telling me about Elise—how good she was, how she always did as she was told, how she stayed close by, and what a great help she was to Mother in the kitchen.
I never could do any of that. It was partly that curious, exploring side of me—I just had to see or taste or hold whatever it was that had caught my eye. But it was also some crazy restlessness, like my legs needed to be moving. I could never keep still, except once in a while, when I was with Neddy.
It was during one of the rare moments when I was being still with Neddy that I first discovered sewing.
I was very young, maybe four years old. I was sitting on Neddy's lap and he was telling me a story about Bifrost, the rainbow bridge. In the old tales, Bifrost connected our world with Asgard, the home of the gods.
Mother was sitting across from us, by the hearth. And she was mending. I'd heard the word mending before but didn't really know what it meant, except that it had something to do with making clothing last longer, and that it was something I'd be expected to do someday—something that even at age eight Elise had done very neatly and always sat still for. So, whatever it was, mending had seemed a vaguely threatening thing, providing Mother with yet another reason to scold me.
But as I lay back in Neddy's lap, my eyes idly fell on some breeches of mine that Mother was just beginning to work on. There was a great ugly tear in the backside that I had gotten sliding down a small waterfall earlier in the day. My near drowning at the bottom of the waterfall had left me more subdued and tired than usual. I closed my eyes sleepily, drawn into Neddy's description of Thor swinging his mighty hammer as he crossed the rainbow bridge. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that the rip in my breeches had disappeared.
I sat up, wide awake. It was magic.
It might be thought odd that I had never noticed Mother sewing up a hole before, but usually she saved her mending for later in the evening, the peaceful time of day when I was asleep.
I was by her side in a flash, all trace of sleepiness gone, the Bifrost bridge forgotten.
"Do it again," I demanded.
"Do what?" she asked, bewildered.
"Make a hole go away."
She smiled and picked up another piece of mending. She showed me how she threaded the needle, then neatly stitched up a small tear in Sonja's smock.
I watched, avidly, and then said with conviction, "I want to."
Mother hesitated a moment, weighing her natural concern about little fingers and sharp objects against the desire to encourage this unexpected interest in mending. Realizing it was a way to keep me sitting still, she agreed, and though a few drops of blood were spilled, I stubbornly kept at it, determined to master this magical talent. As I poked and prodded the fabric, I badgered Mother with questions about the needle, the pins, and where the thread came from, amazed to learn it came from my own dear sheep Bessie and all her friends and relatives.
From that evening I was hooked, and I know both Neddy and Mother were pleased. Mending was one of the few things that kept me indoors where they could keep an eye on me.
Father
"YOU TELL ME ABOUT ELISE," Rose would say to me.
I suppose that was natural enough, though at the time I did worry that Eugenia spoke of Elise too much, setting her up as some sort of ideal that little Rose would never be able to measure up to. I needn't have worried. Rosie was her own person from the beginning. She never showed any signs of changing her nature to please her mother—or anybody else.
She did ask me once to draw her a picture of Elise. Her request took me by surprise, but the more I thought about it, her curiosity was understandable. I confess I spent far too much time on the little drawing, but I think the work did me good, and Eugenia, too. It brought back many good memories.
When I showed the drawing to Rose, I couldn't tell what she thought at first. She just studied it very carefully for a long while. I had used my small supply of paints to enhance the drawing with color, and the only question Rose asked was about Elise's hair: "Is that the right color, Father?" I said yes, it was a close match, and Rose leaned down and laid a small lock of her own chestnut hair next to the yellow.
"Neddy and I are the only ones who don't have yellow hair," she said matter-of-factly.
I nodded. "Your mother's father had your color hair. That's where you and Neddy get it."
"The one who sailed on ships?"
"Yes."
She smiled. Then she asked me, as she often did, if she could see her wind rose, the one I had designed for her. Shortly after the birth of our first child, Nils Erlend, I had drawn a wind rose especially for him. And though I did not believe in the birth-direction lore, I confess that I used images from it to design the wind rose. Nils Erlend's design contained, among other things, a soaring white tern (a bird indigenous to our most northerly lands), and a ledger and quill for toting up accounts.
I did the same for each child born. Rose, in particular, loved to pore over her drawing, tracing the lines with her fingers. I was always a trifle uneasy when she did, afraid that her keen little eyes might see the lie there. It was so glaring to my own eyes and it made me sad, for to me it marred the beauty of what was certainly the best of all the wind roses I had designed.
A few times late at night when the children were asleep and there was no danger of being overheard, I brought it up to Eugenia. The lie.
"Do you not think it would be best for Rose to know the truth of her birth? She is young yet, 'twould be less..." I paused. "...less harming, to learn it now."
"I do not know what you are talking about, Arne."
And truly she didn't.
She no longer saw the truth. She had erased it from her mind completely. And I wondered then if she wasn't a little touched—brann om hode, as they say in the old language. Indeed, the serene sureness with which she said that Rose was an east-born made me doubt my own sanity. Maybe it had never occurred. But of course it had.