Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Mooring at Bergenshalvoyen
I’ve found the fellow, Gunnar, from the longship that brought Sjókona and I to this land and he’s the one I told of her circumstance alone and waiting at the ruin of the house where it was known that sorrowing thralls put their infant girls out for exposure. He asks me what I know of her story.
I said, “Sjókona journeyed to that place with a longing for family, maybe twisted to fantasy by her own life story. She believed the pendant that saved her in infancy made her a goddess, immortal and wise. Her own mother had placed the pendant punched with lacing holes in her mouth instead of the suffocating cloth used to ease other infant girls to their deaths. She had breath when she was rescued from the rocks and taken into life by Auld Bjorn who let her grow up always believing herself to be a fantastical mother of something others would discard – a girl child, maybe, or a sea monster by myth. So, there she was where I left her longing to rescue an infant of her own or perhaps to give birth to a sea creature or a god or an immortal.
“So how did you find her?” I dared ask Gunnar.
“It was low tide when we moored at those rocks, and walked ashore. We saw a woman there, stretched out as though sleeping, but closer, we found she was dead, and those of us from the previous voyage, expecting to find Sjókona, were surprised that she was a different woman – older, wearing rich colors and silks, laid out on a bed of rocks as though the rocks were pillows. Surely, where she was then, the next tide would carry her into the sea. And it did.
“I looked toward the gapping ruin of a house, and there was Sjókona, in her cloud color robes luffing and shifting as a high cloud does on the breeze. Others believed she was the ghost of the old woman. If I hadn’t been on the boat bringing her over before that, I might have thought that too. I wasn’t really afraid of her, so much as I was curious. So, I went toward her and she invited me into the ruin of the house as though it were her own house. She passed me a wineskin of rancid water, pretending she was serving tea.
“We talked for a time.”
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 