The servant had placed Kama’s jar on the bedside. Kama threw it off the table. The jar banged against the wooden floor, the poisonous broth spreading across the planks.
Kama had no words for what she felt. Sad, unhappy, afraid—none would reach far enough and explain the unthinkable. Don’t try to understand. Plan a course of action. Her reaction was partly a response to Mother who could never act but cried instead when facing adversity. At first, Mother’s worries had been small and immediate. She would wait at the door, peering through the shutter, watching for Kama or Father, forgetting he was always late, fearing more when the ice was closing in. She imagined the worst, Father dead, captured by pirates, his ship capsized—any number of horrific incidents. Terrible things happen, and life’s events can be worse than any imaginings, but Mother seemed unable to understand the futility of worry, which annoyed Kama and left her impatient with her inability to quiet one’s own thoughts. Mother was a child who imagined dragons and monsters. Kama tried to hold every fear inside an iron clamp, thinking even the smallest uncertainties would turn her into Mother. Mother could never step out of her own emotions long enough to understand how small her pains were.
Then Kama wiped away that thought. Mother had clearly acted. Decisively. She had planned and acted. Kama could not trust her own judgments. She had never known her own mother. She had made assumptions, because she felt confined by this woman who wanted to trap her inside the townhouses with useless women who told the same stories and shared the same worries every day. If Kama had known what was taking place, she could have intervened, but instead, she had carried Mother’s poisoned pots. Perhaps some one would think Kama had done it intentionally.
But who had helped Mother? Where had she found the venom? How had she known how to flavor a stew to hide the taste? Was this a skill she had learned in the convent in Constantinople? Was this how the women in the nunneries found their revenge and regained their honor? Was this Mother desperate and afraid to be left alone, because all she had was Kama and Father, and she knew she was losing both? Could Mother even think that clearly? Had she planned to murder her too? Had Kama eaten from the same stew?
Kama ran from Father’s room to the townhouses.
Desperately, she twisted the handle and banged her fist, listening for the shuffle of footsteps. Kama continued to bang until finally the door swung open. Standing in the doorway was a silhouette with dancing eyes. At one time, Mother's world had been refuge from the cold and dark, but now new dangers lurked here. Kama needed to start somewhere. Take control. Take charge. Introduce order. Perhaps she would remember a conversation or a phrase that would tell her what day it was. She wiped her tribe’s woman costume from her face, then began opening her braids. Her hair reached as far as her lap now when it hung loose. She noticed too it was darkening with black among the blonde. At one time, she had thought it would turn black like Mother’s. She had imagined herself tall with green eyes and exotic black locks. But that day never came, and today she only wanted to pull out each and every dark strand.
“Remember the garden,” Mother would say sometimes now, staring out the open door into the courtyard, bare-branched trees looking like spider webs against the gray sky. Kama and Mother had never had a garden, but Mother wasn’t talking about an ordinary, everyday orchard. She was dreaming of a better world.
“You have no idea how I miss it,” she would say. “Everything was beautiful. Fruit everywhere and sunshine. Adam and Eve were happy. They ate food without having to plant it. Their bodies were one. They loved without touching.”
Why hadn’t Kama sensed that these weren’t just ordinary wishes, but signs of a mind rotting, like wood turning black from worms and too much moisture, like cheese turning to mold, the blue slowly overtaking the white until the original no longer existed. Mother’s god invited people into the silent darkness of their own minds, and Mother had become lost in there, convinced she had a separate being inside her, something she called a soul. Someday god would set it free. But gods care only about themselves, and all Mother’s prayers would never stop Loki from playing and upsetting her best-laid plans.
2
The day came when they would take Mother into the wilderness and leave her alone to die, the way they did with all those who had gone mad. Kama hid inside her bed closet. She pulled the cover over her face, hoping to muffle all sound. Why do the weak and small just wait? Could we push back in that quick second before the intruder’s hand punches open the door? Is there a way to stop all time and breathe him away? This was not the right time. It would never be but this was the worst—early and dark, and Mother asleep with her ragged hair.
Monsters are always ready to show off their brutality. They are fulfilled only when there is war or broken laws. They believe only in right and wrong, good and bad and never understand nuance—that a mind can crack, that a heart can break. Any mind. Any heart. Anytime.
Kama heard pots and jars crashing to the floor. Tables and benches overturned. She heard him grab Mother—tiny Mother who was too small to pull herself free and too broken to know why this ugly soldier needed to break her further.
And then there was screaming in the room. It was Mother’s voice.
Why did Kama want to comfort her, this woman who gave nothing and wanted everything from her? Why could Kama never bear the sound of Mother’s cries? Mother and daughter could never truly be separated. First they pull the child from the mother and later the mother from the child. What was this unexplainable connection?
Kama wanted Mother to stop crying.
And then there were more voices. Loud. Louder. Kama had to look now. She pulled back the bed closet curtain. She saw Tova punching the man with the chest wider than any shield. Inga was there somehow, biting him, biting his arm. The man shook her off and threw her against the wall. Inga fell and then bit his leg, deeper this time. And then someone somehow on the man’s shoulders. She was beating his face and covering his eyes as though he were a horse. She poked at his eyes.
Why did men always win? Of course, that thought wasn’t true. Father had lost to Mother. But most men? Usually? All the time? All the women in the townhouses could not wrangle Mother free from the one brute with arms as wide as massive stones and hands like shovels. Why was there never any way to resist and win?
The cacophony ceased, but Kama was not alone. One of the townhouse women, Tova, was there at her side, offering tea, then broth. She stroked her arm and hair and told her she would get through this. She said Kama had strength; no one was stronger than Kama. She let her cry. She told her it was good to cry. Kama had never heard these words before but wanted to believe them. And so she sipped the broth and let the tears fall. The heavens seemed to be opening and the world shaking. Kama wondered if she would still exist after or would the tears flood Midgard, carry her away, and leave her on the shore like washed up refuge for gulls to explore?
Tova stayed, and the tears came and went with memories. She recalled Father telling her what a beautiful princess she was and what a beautiful queen she would become. But Father would never speak again. She would never again hear his stories of Constantinople, city of beauty and buildings and glorious glass. And then sometimes she felt relief that she would never need to leave Mother. Kama had always wondered how she would manage that day when she would need to sail away to Hedeby, leaving Mother all alone, but now that day would never come.
Instead she had this day, the day Mother left her.
3
Katerine was on a sleigh. Rope held her down. Wind was spitting in her face. They had given her something to drink that made her feel tired. She was hungry but no one cared. If only the horse would slow, so the bumping would stop. Our father who art in heaven, she prayed. The words gave her something to hold on to. She tried to imagine god’s face to block out