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Maybe it’s the fact that his eyes were too bright. Maybe it’s that his smile is too wide, his teeth just a bit too sharp. Maybe that his fingers are just a bit too long, or that he doesn’t move unless absolutely necessary.
Whatever it is, the man standing in the middle of the room is not someone Helga wants to meet or know. He returned with the other men and her husband after their raids in England, and Orm invited him to have dinner with.
She doesn’t know why, and she told him so.
“I don’t trust him.”
“Really?” he said, expression unbelieving, as if the words that came out of her mouth were complete nonsense.
“I find him quite pleasant to be around.”
It was at that time that the blond young man appeared behind them and asked, what was for dinner.
She gasped. He came out of nowhere, he was barefooted, and he was dangerous. Helga felt as if reaching inside a deep well, being at its edge, at the brink of falling in, and someone was behind you.
And just a push would be enough.
But her husband seemed to think the exact opposite, he smiled more brightly, he looked rejuvenated, and he gravitated towards the young man. They laughed about something while walking towards the woods, where Helga’s and Orm’s house was.
.
The way back was silent. Strangely so. Normally the birds would sing, gulls would shriek and sometimes Helga could see even some smaller animals, rabbits or others.
But there was silence while walking home. Complete and utter, the only sounds the conversation that she didn’t notice between Orm and the man. The forest was dense, it wasn’t natural, and though there was no wind, the leaves rustled as they all moved through the paths.
The branches creaked, and the shadows moved in tangent with the man. He looked at Helga, anxiousness obvious in her face. He stopped smiling immediately, like a mask falling off his sculpted features. Now it was like a statue, cold and marble.
Her eyes widened, and he turned back to Orm, mask back on, ominous laugh and a too wide smile with too long hands and fingers, barefooted inside the forest though no sound could be heard from him.
No crunch of leaves.
No footprints.
No mud clung to his feet, although it had rained.
.
While at the house, she ordered her oldest to watch the man while interacting with Orm, to catch anything suspicious. She then told her youngest to help her with the food. As she chopped onions and carrots and boiled water, the sounds of laughter were loud.
She also heard the laughter of her oldest daughter.
Helga continued preparing the food, as the sun dimmed. The forest had yet to make a sound.
The fire that crinkled was bright and red. It was still bright outside, so she allowed the children to play outside, although they were not to leave the yard. They whined, and Orm and the man heard them, because he proposed the man look after them.
Helga yelled, she said how could he let a stranger look after the children.
He is no stranger, Orm said, oddly calm.
Helga wanted to scream.
How could you not see how strange he is, she yelled. How could no one in this house understand how strange he is being.
The man merely smiled, lazily, like a predator playing with its prey before devouring it. He stretched, and it was as if all his bones cracked and splintered, before being put back in their places.
His shirt hitched up a bit, and around countless scars and wiry muscles, there was no belly button.
Thay will be safe with me.
They won’t, they won’t she wanted to scream. Though there was nothing she could do. The man towered above her, threatening and smiling and dangerous dangerous dangerous.
You are Swedish, aren’t you? He asked. She didn’t know how he knew, though that just made him smile more.
Run.
Run.
Hide.
Hide.
She let him take the children and play in the darkening woods. Her husband didn’t see anything wrong with that. The stew burned.
.
Helga stayed up until the stars twinkled and the weather turned cold. She stayed still and she waited in front of the silent forest.
Her children and the man arose from the wood, they were asleep, and the man was carrying them. The leaves parted to make way and the stars shone just a tiny bit more when he appeared.
The air was just a bit clearer.
The man left them to Helga’s care as he smiled brightly, teeth shining in the moonlight.
He yawned, and his jaw clenched and unclenched, going back into shape and cracking and crinkling and it was like a fire had gone close to Helga because she was not cold anymore.
But when she touched his hands, they were freezing, stone-like.
The children were still sleeping, so she reluctantly thanked him and put them on their beds. She turned to the man, but he was already gone.
There was seawater where he was.
Sand.
A sapling grew where he once stood.
Was he a troll, a fae, something different?
Whatever that thing was, it wasn’t human. Or maybe it was something barely mortal, trudging the line between human and inhuman.
Maybe it was just a blessed man.
Or, maybe, it was something else, oh so desperately wishing to be human.
.
The next day, the children told what happened in the forest. They said they talked with trolls and played with the fae, because they heeded the man, they listened to him.
Moreover, they said the man was for a moment something else, taller, to scare away the bad fae, the ones that would hurt them. They said he was unblinking, he was tall, he was hunching and hulking and made of wood and ships and nets and bedrock.
That his face was etched with mountains and his blood was cerulean blue.
That his laugh was of a woman and of a man and of a child and of the man living next door, and the poor woman across the village, and the children playing in the docks.
They thought they heard his thoughts, while the moon sang, and the stars moved in patterns unknown. A thousand people all speaking at the same time. A thousand wills, a thousand faces, yet they all were inside him, they all encompassed the hulking monstrosity and the man.
The man never told them his name. Because he was wounded, and he left, because his blood was cerulean blue, and his wounds looked like cracks, and his movements like a puppet and his eyes like animals, ancient, instinctual.
He never told them his name, though they all knew they knew him.
They felt him around them.
In the water.
In the rain.
In their language in which they spoke.
In the sea and the trees and the sapling that grew strange and malformed, the one that still lives, thousands of years later, because inside it live creatures without reason, living monsters that rose from the bedrock.
Hulking disfigurements of nature, defying physics and created by the will of men.
Monsters, loving, dangerous, disfigured, malformed, and beautiful.
Because what are Nations, but ideas defying logic, and walking beside their creators.