Linjør
Summer 207
Vanja is small. A girl of only nine winters, she is skinny with the new growth of summer. The earth is still frozen, as it often is, in the North, but the night is warm. She is laying on her back, in a field near her home. She and her elder brothers spent the day threshing winter wheat with their father, and she can smell it now, the sweet, gentle earthen scent that promised fresh-baked bread and new bedding.
She hears boots near her. The heavy step of her father. The sound is muffled by fur wrappings, but he was injured long ago, and stands stronger on one side and so she knows it is him.
“What are you looking at, Skau Vanja?” he asks.
Vanja opens her eyes. She hadn’t been looking at anything at all, but now she looks up at her father, and the smile beyond the braids of his beard.
“Nothing,” she says.
Her father nods. “I will look at nothing, too.” He kneels down, with some effort, and lies with his head next to his daughter’s.
The sky above them is black, with only pieces of shattered moon.
They lay in silence, for a few moments, before the River appears. It is thin at first, a thread of smoke, gray against the black. Then, the light pours down, in green and gold and a distant edge of brightest pink. The River is lit by nothing but itself, moving across the sky as if pushed by a wind that Vanja can’t feel on her own skin.
Next to her, Vanja hears her father chuckle. “That is something to look at,” he says.
“It is only the River,” says Vanja. It is beautiful, but it is there most nights.
“Only the River?” her father says. He laughs again, “You sound like Sasha. Nothing worth paying attention to unless you can hold it in your hand. The River gives life. Strength and power, too. It can make a man a runemaker! It controls our very fate.”
Vanja is quiet, as she narrows her eyes at the sky. “But I control what I do,” she says. “The River doesn’t tell me what to say, or what to eat, or to run or stop or when to jump.”
“Ah,” says her father, “But it’s fate that determines if you land safely. If a jump you’ve made a hundred times suddenly causes you to fall.”
Vanja laughs at this. “If fate makes me fall then I will just get up.”
“That is a good thing,” says her father, “You’re a fighter. True blisterkere. It will be a hard hit that keeps you down. And you can fight fate. But it is hard to do.” He lets out a soft huff of air, at this, “The River flows in one direction. Actions cannot be undone.”
“So nothing matters?” says Vanja, “Whatever I might do? If the River flows on, in any case?”
“No, girl,” says her father, laughing, “Of course things matter! What we choose to do matters. The things you do will change your own life, and those who are near you, certainly those who love you. Something you do might change what path the River takes, even. It’s only that the River flows on, regardless, and with it, the fate of all of Jorung.”
“But we’re not in Jorung,” Vanja says.
Her father hums at this. “That is true, yes. But you and your brothers are Blood of the North. The River is in your very veins.”
Vanja is quiet. “Where does it go?” she asks, “If it flows on, where does it lead to?”
“It leads to many places,” her father says, “the land of the giants. The planes of old gods that no one prays to any longer. It is the path to the land of the dead, where our ancestors wait for us, watching over us.”
“The River flows to all these places?” asks Vanja.
“And more,” says her father. He holds his hand out, and Vanja can see it silhouetted black against the green as he traces the ever-shifting line of light above them. Vanja does the same, watching the Riverlight flow between her fingers, suddenly so bright she can see nothing else.
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