North Child Read online

  “Seven is a good number,” I replied. “But why seven? Is that a particularly lucky number?” I said with a teasing smile.

  “No, it is that I want one child for each point of the compass,” she replied.

  Puzzled, I said, “But that would be four, or eight perhaps…”

  “I have left out north, of course.”

  “Why not north?” I asked.

  “Surely you know about pure northern children?” she responded in surprise.

  “No,” I said, refraining from reminding her that no one outside her family would even be engaged in such a conversation.

  “Oh, they are terrible! Wandering and wild and very ill behaved. Northern people in general are that way. My own sister – surely I’ve told you this? – married a north-born (against the advice of our mother, needless to say), and he took off on a sailing ship when she was pregnant with their third child and has not been heard of since. I refuse to have a child I cannot keep my eye on.”

  I felt a sliver of worry at those words. “I hope you are not going to be an overprotective mother, Eugenia.”

  “Oh no, Arne,” she reassured me. “It’s just that norths are particularly wild. Always into trouble. But that is not the only reason I will not have a north bairn. There is another, of much more importance.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Some years ago I went with my sister to a skjebne-soke.”

  Though skjebne-sokes were scarce in our region, I was not surprised that someone as superstitious as Eugenia had managed to find one.

  “She was very gifted, this skjebne-soke. Why, she predicted to the day when Karin Tessel would have her first bairn! And she told my sister that she would lose her husband to the sea…” Eugenia trailed off, then fell silent.

  I studied her face. “The skjebne-soke said something about you having a north bairn?”

  She nodded, then said in a low voice, “She said that if I were to have a north-born, that child would grow up to die a cold, horrible death, suffocating under ice and snow.” She shuddered and instinctively I drew her close to me. Because avalanches were not uncommon during the winter in our country, especially on the seven mountains that surrounded Bergen, I could see that Eugenia took this ominous prediction quite seriously.

  I myself considered such prophecy and superstition to be nonsense, and perhaps if I had tried to reason with Eugenia, taken a stronger stand against her many superstitions right from the beginning, I might have averted much of the ill fortune that later befell us. But I did not. I saw her ideas as harmlessly eccentric, even charming at the outset, and I indulged her. I, too, wanted a large family, and seven seemed as good a number as any…

  But even Eugenia’s own mother thought that methodically planning the birth directions of each of her children was ill advised. Before she died she had cautioned Eugenia against it.

  “’Tis meddling in the affairs of God and fate, and only disaster can come of it,” she had said.

  Eugenia herself had been born due east. Her mother went into labour unexpectedly on a boat that was travelling down the Rauma River, which was notoriously twisty. Fortunately, Eugenia’s mother had had a leidarstein and needle with her (she carried both with her at all times during her pregnancy), and the owner of the boat brought a pail of water. While his wife laboured, Esbjorn magnetized the needle and floated it in the water, so it turned out that they were able to calculate the birth direction without much difficulty. “To think I might have been a north, had the boat taken a sudden turn!” Eugenia would mutter darkly.

  Eugenia began our family with northeast, Nils Erlend. Her reasoning was that she would tackle the most difficult direction first, when she was youngest and most vigorous; and the next most difficult (Neddy Wilfrid) at the end, when she was at her wisest and most experienced as a parent.

  It all went just as Eugenia had planned, from northeast to northwest.

  Nils Erlend, who liked to roam but had a frugal, organized side.

  Elise, the quiet, perfect east; practical and obedient.

  Selme Eva, who was comfortable and kind.

  Sara, a strong-willed, passionate girl.

  Sonja Wende, who was good with animals and a little bit prescient, farseeing.

  Willem, capable and decisive, who also had an easy hand with the farm animals.

  And Neddy Wilfrid, the only one with dark hair, though his eyes were as blue as his brothers’ and sisters’. Neddy had been Eugenia’s easiest birth yet, and he was a dear, quiet babe, smiling far more than he cried, which was seldom.

  Seven children in seven years. With a sigh of relief, Eugenia put away her supply of the herb feverfew (which eased morning sickness and the pains of childbirth), as well as her voluminous childbearing shift, which had seen her through the seven pregnancies.

  But then Elise, who at eight was our second-eldest child, died suddenly.

  Elise had never been a strong child, but Eugenia had had a special fondness for her, partly because she was an east-born like herself.

  There is no pain deeper than that of a parent losing a child, but there were still six children who needed our care, and slowly, time healed the sharpest of our grief. Yet even as it did, the empty space at the east point of the compass began to gnaw at Eugenia.

  Father told me that he first began to design wind roses when he was engaged to Mother. As part of his apprenticeship, my grandfather gave him piles of maps to study. And he quickly noticed a symbol on almost every chart, usually in the bottom left corner.

  Father told me that the symbol was called a wind rose because it bore a resemblance to a flower, with thirty-two petals, and it had long been used by mapmakers to indicate the direction of the winds. Some were simple and some elaborate, but all used a spear-point fleur-de-lis as the northern point of the rose. He also said that mapmakers would paint their wind roses in brilliant colours, not just because they were prettier that way but also because they were easier to read in the dim lamplight of a ship’s deck at twilight.

  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 I’d 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 beast.

  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.

  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.

  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 catalogue 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.

  “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 colour, and the only question Rose asked was about Elise’s hair: “Is that the right colour, 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 colour 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 totting 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 with 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.

  It had been a month before Eugenia’s lying-in time when she and I went out to Askoy Forest to search for herbs. We tried to do this together every fortnight or so, a habit begun sometime after we moved to the farm. It was a way to spend a few quiet hours together, uninterrupted by a child’s cries or questions. When the children were young, our neighbour Torsk’s wife had volunteered to watch them while we were gone, but now we could leave Nils Erlend and Selme Eva, the eldest two, in charge.

  Eugenia’s pregnancy had been uneventful except for the extraordinary amount of movement from the baby. Eugenia swore to me that the baby had taken it upon itself to explore every last corner of her womb. One morning after a particularly sleepless night for Eugenia, I told her, “This child will be reaching for a map before her mother’s milk.”

  I instantly regretted my words, because Eugenia pursed her lips and said, “East-borns are not explorers.”

  I had a little shiver of foreboding at her words. Eugenia was so set on this unborn child being an east-born, so sure. It was like she was tempting fate.

  The day we went off herb hunting was cloudy. Eugenia was keen to find some burdock as well as more feverfew. She had just come across a lush stand of burdock, and was leaning over to pick some, when she staggered slightly. “Uumph.”

  “Baby kicking again?” I asked.

  “Like he’s trying to kick his way out,” she complained, straightening slowly.

  “She needs to learn some patience,” I replied with a grin. “Another four weeks to go, at least.”

  The sky rumbled softly.

  Looking up I said, “Best we be heading back. Those clouds to the north look black.”

  Eugenia nodded and moved towards her basket. But before she could reach it, she leaned way over, clutching her hands to her belly. Her protracted cry drowned out the rumblings of the sky. Eugenia lowered herself to the ground, her face twisted with pain.

  I was at her side in a moment, trying to keep my voice steady. “We’ll start back, soon as this pain passes.”

  Eugenia shook her head. “No,” she whistled through her teeth. “It’s coming. Fast.”

  “But I don’t…”

  “You’ll birth him, Arne,” she said.

  I had helped with all the other births an
d was not frightened of it. But a storm was about to break overhead and I was worried. As I set about trying to make Eugenia more comfortable on the ground, I murmured a silent prayer.

  She was deep into birthing pains now and her gusting screams echoed in the Askoy Forest.

  At one point her eyes flicked open and she looked around, panic-taken. “The sun, where’s the sun?” she muttered, then trailed into a drawn-out moan. It may have dimly registered on me that Eugenia was concerned about the birthing direction, but whatever I was thinking went straight out of my head when I realized that I was looking at the heel of a small foot.

  The baby was facing the wrong way.

  A hollow panic began to burn at the bottom of my belly. I closed my eyes and thought hard. What did the midwife do when the baby faced the wrong way? Some kind of herb, I guessed… I laid a hand on Eugenia’s stomach and focused my thoughts onto this unborn child. “Turn yourself about, bairn,” I whispered, willing the baby to listen. But nothing happened.

  “Eugenia,” I said softly into her ear, “the baby is facing the wrong way. I’ll need to go for help.”

  “No!” Eugenia cried out. “He’s coming now.” Her eyes roamed the bit of darkened sky she could see through the trees, looking for the sun. “Where is it…? What direction, Arne?”

  I felt a great weight of confused emotion. It was incomprehensible to me that with both her life and the life of our child in the gravest of danger, she could think only of her cursed superstition. Then I thought to myself that perhaps she did not truly understand the peril she and the baby lay in.

  “I can’t do it myself, Eugenia,” I said. “We need…”

  “The sun…” was all Eugenia said, only the whites of her eyes showing.

  Suddenly there was a great heave under my hands.

  Eugenia let out a scream and lifted her body, turning slightly to the right. Large raindrops began to pelt her upturned face.