I remember your smile.
Even more than that night, that’s the one thing I remember. Your smile on the day I had first saw you. It seemed to me to be as bright as the sun. Thinking on it now, we were both young. So very very young yet why is it that it’s all I can think about?
I remember the day we first met. I remember how you looked with your hair in the braids in the style of the Northmen and how you had come from the port off one of those great big long ships boasting its speed and acting as if you knew everything even though it was obvious to all that you were just some runt from Norway, more fragile than even the infants that Hedeby had known. No matter how many days pass, I won’t forget the words you said to me, a stranger, in that bustling city of ours.
“The gods are surely smiling on me that I have arrived to Hedeby without any trouble from neither Loki nor Ægir on my journey.”
I remember thinking how this city would swallow you up, naivety and all, just as it had countless others before. And I remember my shock when we had met again in my father’s shop. At first, we did not know each other, but as you talked, I knew you to be the fool from the harbor.
And then the strangest thing happened, the city that had spitted on so many had accepted you. You found work under my neighbor John, a Christian, who owned the smith, and I began to see more of you and you of me. I remember what an oaf you had been and how I threw a bucket at your head for calling me an old maid.
I remember the day you said you fancied me and the day I realized that I had come to fancy you too. We had been walking by the port forced into errands by your master and my father and you stopped and looked at the sea and in your usual oafish manner you bluntly said how you fancied me without any of the pleasantries that a skald would have used.
I remember my shock and I remember returning home to realize that the gods truly did enjoy playing with me, that I would grow feelings for an oaf such as you. And then I remember our wedding. It was on a Frigga’s day as was custom and we had chosen to give a horse as a living sacrifice to Freyr so not to mar this joyous day with blood. I remember your family’s sword that you bestowed to me for our son as I gave you my own family’s sword. Though how you procured it is still beyond me. And I remember the rings we exchanged and how we wear them still. I remember how wonderful it was with the sun shining bright in the sky and our loved ones wishing us well.
And I remember the fire that arrived months later. How it came quickly and fiercely, devouring this city as we ran. How it raged and burned through everything we once knew and loved in but a single night.
But most of all I remember your hand that never left mine as we escaped and took one last look at the ashes of our beloved Hedeby.
And now that the years have passed and we reside in this keep that was once so foreign, surrounded by our children with family of their own, I look into the embers of the burning Yule log with you beside me and give a ghost of a smile at the thought that not all flames are so bad.
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