If Freya hadn’t gotten pregnant, and if Mila hadn’t also gotten pregnant, I’d have stayed away longer. But one thing or another seems to drag me back. My father’s loss is still felt. My mother’s is too, but she passed not long after I was born, so I have no memory of her. My father was all the parent I ever had, and his absence rings hollow through the house.
I almost expect him to come walking in the front door, wrap me in a hug, and tell me I don’t have to do any of it if I don’t want to. Or I walk into the kitchen, and I expect to smell his specialty cake. But he’s gone, and new family members are arriving, and that is how life is.
For the last few months I have been off in the far lands, herding goats. It’s not glamorous, but it spared me the attentions of local warriors who would fight each other for the right to make me their wife. My plan is to stay in the longhouse with Freya until she gives birth, then go back to the goats before any men get the very silly idea of trying to marry me.
“Assuming what she wants is to be picked by a warrior and have his babies,” Mila says. “It’s time she grew up. She can’t run around in the fields with animals forever.”
“Ha fucking ha.” I scowl at my older sisters.
Freya is cool about it, because it’s her second baby and she’s always been cool about most things. Mila, on the other hand, is having her first baby, and she’s acting like nobody else has ever done it, and everyone should do it immediately. Accordingto Mila, if you’re not currently having a baby, you might as well throw yourself in the river. And don’t get her started on me not being married. She’s married, naturally, as is Freya, as is practically every female in Weltheim City, because it’s basically mandatory in an unofficial sort of way.
In spite of Mila’s occasional obnoxiousness, I’m excited. I love babies. Bjorn came before I left, and getting to hold him when he was small is a memory I will always treasure.
Right now, all three of us are staying at the old longhouse, our family home. My father built it with his own hand when he brought my mother here as a very young man, and helped found the city. It’s hard to believe that all of Weltheim was developed in the last thirty or so years, but technology means progress is swift.
Freya needs our help because her husband is a soldier and as such has been sent off to do soldiering. He’s not even on the planet, which is fine because he’s pretty useless by all accounts when he is around anyway. Freya is five years older than me. I was thirteen years old when she was selected by Ragnar.
I was not impressed by him then, and I’m not impressed now. He should have gotten leave to come home. Pregnancy is a fairly predictable affair. Nine months, and all that. His poor wife shouldn’t be waddling about trying to fend for herself as well as Bjorn.
“I’m not going to run around with animals forever. At least not Earth animals,” I tell them. “I’m going to be selected for the next expedition. I’ll be in another solar system by the end of the month.”
My sisters roll their eyes at me, but while looking at each other. I don’t know why nobody in the family takes me seriously when I tell them I intend to be an interstellar sailor.
“You’re 5′5,” Freya says. “Have you seen the warriors who get to go off-world? There’s not one of them under 6′2, and that’s on the small side. You’re too small. And you refused to do any further education, so you won’t be qualified for scientific posts.”
“And you’re too small,” Mila adds, redundantly and unnecessarily.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I don’t want to be a soldier. I want to go see wild places. I want to discover new worlds. And take goats there. And I’m going to try out for the mission regardless. They said anyone can try. It’s an open call. I’m anyone.”
Mila just smirks at me. She enjoys winding me up. The middle child is supposed to be the peacemaker, but Mila didn’t get that memo.
“Before you head for the stars, would you run out for me and get some bread?” Freya says. “I would have baked some, but I have to sleep so much more at the moment.”
“Of course,” I say. “I’ll go to the corner shop.”
“No, get the shuttle and go into the city. There’s a bakery that makes a special pregnancy bread. It makes me feel less nauseous.”
Freya can ask me to do literally anything and I will do it. I am the baby of the family and I’m supposed to be spoiled, but I guess alot of familial memos got lost in our family. This is something a husband should really be doing, but I’m actually very glad both Mila’s and Freya’s husbands are currently elsewhere. It’s so nice to enjoy our family home as sisters again without loud, bearded men saying loud, bearded things.
Before I go out, I put on a shawl and head covering, just to try to stay out of the eye line of any stray men, in case Mila was right about a slew of eligible bachelors spying me and assaulting me with their many marriage offers.
I am dressed plainly compared to most of the women I see on the streets. They are wearing quite gorgeous dresses in myriad colors and wefts. I am wearing a skirt that covers pants, because I have spent the last year clambering through brambles and I’ll never trust a garment that doesn’t completely cover my legs again. You get a thorn in your you-know-where and you don’t forget it.
I stand out, I’m afraid. I feel as though I don’t belong here, in one of the nicest places in the world, and in several other worlds besides.
Weltheim was a spot on the side of the river when my father built the house as a young man. Now it’s a thriving city. When I step out of the fence line, I am almost instantly swept up into a crowd that is flowing toward the center. On either side of our pretty grassy section replete with trees and flowers, and the river flowing at the back, are apartment buildings that tower dozens of stories into the sky.
Our family has maintained a little slice of heaven in the middle of relentless development, and I am so proud of all of us for holding our ground. We get offers on the place all the time, but nobody can stomach the notion of the house that our father builtbeing bulldozed to make room for a big box filled with hundreds of strangers. We still believe in his dream.
But the city has grown even more since I was last here. It feels like progress is swallowing the world up, almost like the city is an entity of its own, and its growth doesn’t really have anything to do with what we people want. It’s just what it was born to do.
We are Vikings, after all, and Vikings do two things. No, not those two things. We travel, and we build. Our society has stood the test of time, through eons of war. Our clan, the Frayer, is considered the most learned and advanced of the clans. Traditionally, our society was arranged around bloodlines, but it is too large to do that now. The Frayer contains millions of souls. But blood still matters, and that is why my father’s house still stands, and why everybody in this city owes something to our family.
Our greatest enemies are the Vikar. None are to be found in this city. They are a brutal clan of raiders who spend their days traveling from world to world, wreaking havoc on unsuspecting colonies.
