The Tricking of Freya by Christina Sunley

Author:Christina Sunley [Sunley, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Iceland, Family & Friendship
ISBN: 9780312378776
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2009-03-01T07:00:00+00:00

Birdie dropped the things on my lap and I screamed. Animal skins with gristly tendrils still clinging to the hides. Birdie took them from my lap and tossed them in back on top of the sleeping bags. Started up the jeep again laughing her loud raucous laugh. "Hush, elskan! That's enough fuss. Cat skin is called for, but I imagine seal hides and mink pelts will suffice."

She was shifting again, into a state of what seemed to me pure nonsense, mumbling Odin the hanging god, sacrificing himself to himself, discerning runes from branches, humans strung from the World Tree, anything for inspiration until I thumb-plugged my ears and merged her words into engine-rumble and wheel-spin on gravel. Birdie's mad. The old Gimli rumors truer than true. Utterly vitlaus, crazy-stupid-wrong. Something broke in me then, a sickening shift of my own. Odd as it may seem to you, Cousin, up until that moment I had revered your mother; yes, she was moody, sometimes rageful, but she was also a charm-sparkling genius. I'd been enthralled in both the modern and ancient senses of the word: enchanted, enslaved. Now the spell had broken and I saw her as something sick and terrifying, hands trembling on the wheel, a tic I'd never seen before twitching the corner of her mouth, words rushing from her lips in a wide-ranging deranging torrent. No fanciful word-meadow but a nauseating word-spew. My lip was bleeding by the time we reached the town of Egilsstadir.

Maybe it's grown by now, but Egilsstadir then had nothing but a gas sta tion, grocery, post office, and a few stores. Birdie pulled into the Esso station, yanking the pink head scarf nearly over her face before approaching the attendant, an uninterested teenager who clearly did not know us from Egil. No one else was around. Tank full up, Birdie maneuvered the jeep over a sidewalk and behind a closed fish-packing plant, hidden from the road. She ordered me to lie down in the backseat and covered me with Saemundur's army green sleeping bag. Don't move. I did not. I lay panicstiffened under Saemundur's cover, inhaling its musk plus a stale stink of canned fish, worrying our fate. Jail in Reykjavik? Returning not only emptyhanded but handcuffed? Certain disgrace. Or maybe Birdie would lose control on the way back, wreck the jeep over a sheer cliff and into an icy fjord below .. .

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