Erik’s legs remembered how to hold him before the rest of him caught up equilibrium a half-second slow, depth perception guessing at distances through a filter of glowing threads he’d decided to stop questioning.
A week since the tide, and this was the first morning his body agreed to the arrangement without shaking.
The longhouse floor was packed earth worn smooth by decades of boots.
It held him.
He kept going.
Lagertha watched from the doorway.
She did not help.
Did not speak.
When he took three steps without falling, she nodded once and left.
He made it to the threshold and stopped.
The door was open.
Beyond it, Kattegat spread itself in cold morning light a working harbor of mud streets and timber halls and smoke from a dozen hearths curling into a sky that looked nothing like any sky he had ever stood under.
Even the blue was wrong.
Deeper.
Older.
Like the atmosphere itself remembered things industrial air had burned away.
Erik stepped outside.
The smell hit first.
Fish-drying racks.
Wet wool.
Peat smoke.
The slaughter-and-offal reek of a settlement that killed its meat within shouting distance of where it slept.
Underneath it all, the particular stink of a latrine trench that would not be emptied until spring.
His stomach lurched.
He swallowed bile and kept walking.
Mud squelched under the leather boots someone had left beside his furs.
They fit badly.
The soles were too thin, the seams uneven, and every step was a reminder that 2019 had ended and the world did not manufacture anything anymore.
It grew things.
Tanned things.
Stitched things by hand in rooms without electric lights.
The Worldtree threads pulsed overhead.
Translucent sky-lines connecting roof-peaks to doorways to the hands of a woman carrying water from the well.
He had learned to function through them the way a drunk learns to function through double vision acknowledging the overlay without stopping to parse it.
The alternative was freezing in place while his brain tried to solve an equation his eyes kept feeding it in a language he did not speak.
He walked the longhouse perimeter first.
Tracing the wall with one hand, cataloging joints and load-paths the way a construction worker catalogs a site before the safety inspector arrives.
The beams were oak.
The joinery was mortise-and-tenon, pegged, no nails.
The roof carried its weight well.
It would hold.
It was the first structure he had ever assessed that he knew with absolute certainty he could not repair if it failed.
No hardware store.
No lumber yard.
No steel brackets or concrete footings or anything his hands knew how to build that did not require a supply chain running backward through a thousand years of industrial accumulation.
His throat tightened.
He kept walking.
The docks were a hundred yards down a slope that had been churned into frozen ruts by cart traffic.
Erik took it slowly, boots slipping, one hand braced against nothing because there was no railing and the 9th century did not believe in OSHA.
At the bottom, the tide was out.
The harbor was a sprawl of beached longships resting on their keels like the ribcages of enormous fish, and the mud between them was littered with debris the sea had not wanted.
He walked the tideline.
Looking for wreckage.
Evidence.
Some fragment of the boat that had brought him here except there was no boat, there had never been a boat, and the thing he was looking for was an explanation his mind could not manufacture from the facts it had been given.
He found nothing.
Rope ends frayed by salt water.
A broken oar.
Gulls worrying at something dead and gray near the pilings.
The mud sucked at his boots and gave back nothing that mattered.
Erik stopped.
Stood in the cold with his back to Kattegat and his face to the empty tide, and let himself feel the full weight of what the absence meant.
He had drowned in Minneapolis.
Woken in the sea.
Been pulled from the water by a man who should not exist outside a television show, and there was no debris because there was no crossing.
There was only a door that had opened in twelve seconds of dying and dropped him into a world that had no slot for him.
Behind him, a man screamed.
Erik turned.
Near the docks, two Viking warriors had a thrall on his knees.
One held him by the hair.
The other drove a fist into his ribs methodical, unhurried, the way a man beats dust from a rug.
The thrall was older.
Forty, maybe.
Saxon by the look of his hair, cropped short in a way no Norseman would wear it.
His face was already swelling.
No one intervened.
A woman walked past with a basket of fish, glanced at the beating, kept walking.
A boy watched from a doorway, bored.
The sound was dull and wet and Erik’s chest seized with a pressure he knew too well twelve seconds under the scaffold, rebar through his spine, watching help walk past three floors below because no one had heard him fall.
His hands went cold.
The beating continued.
Fist to ribs.
Fist to jaw.
The thrall sagged in the grip of the man holding his hair, and the sound his body made when the next blow landed was the sound of structural failure something that had been holding now giving way.
Erik’s throat constricted.
Something rose in it.
Not a word.
Not a sound he recognized.
A pressure building from his chest into his mouth, shaped like language but not language he had chosen, and his mind had no referent for what his body was trying to do.
The air in his lungs wanted out.
The thing in his throat wanted form.
And underneath it all was the hot, irrational certainty that if he opened his mouth and let it speak, the beating would stop.
He swallowed it.
The effort left him gasping.
Bent at the waist, hands on his knees, gulping air like a man surfacing from deep water.
The pressure in his throat receded.
The beating did not stop.
The thrall’s head lolled forward and the warrior holding his hair let go, stepping back with a grunt of satisfaction.
The thrall slumped into the mud and did not move.
Erik straightened.
His heart was hammering.
His hands were shaking.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, underneath the scaffold-wound and the horror and the nausea, a colder part of him was taking notes.
The body had tried to do something.
The throat had shaped something.
The power if that was what it was had tried to fire, and he had choked it back through sheer animal panic.
He did not know what he had stopped.
He did not know what would have happened if he had let it speak.
“You are not from the sea.”
Erik spun.
Floki stood three feet behind him.
Forty, maybe older, lean and rope-muscled with eyes too wide and a face that looked like it had been assembled by a theologian with a sense of humor.
He was staring at Erik the way a man stares at a thing that might be food or might be poison, tilting his head in a gesture so birdlike Erik’s hindbrain registered raven before his conscious mind could correct it.
“What?” Erik’s voice came out hoarse.
Floki’s smile was a crack in stone.
“The sea does not make men who look at beatings the way you look at beatings.” He stepped closer.
His eyes were pale and unblinking.
“The sea makes men who beat or men who are beaten. You are neither.”
Erik said nothing.
There was no answer that would not make this worse.
Floki circled him once, slow, examining.
“Where is your boat?” he asked the same question Ragnar had asked, except Ragnar had been testing and Floki was diagnosing.
“Where are your oars? Your sail? Your crew?” He stopped in front of Erik and leaned in close enough that Erik could smell the woodsmoke and pitch on his clothes.
“Where is the water that carried you here?”
“I don’t know,” Erik said.
It was the only true thing he had.
Floki’s smile widened.
He laughed high and sharp and delighted, the sound of a man who has just confirmed a suspicion that pleases him immensely.
“Good,” he said.
“Good. The gods love a mystery.” He turned and walked away, still laughing, and did not look back.
Erik stood alone on the frozen mud and tried to slow his breathing.
The thrall was still slumped near the docks.
The Vikings were gone.
Kattegat went on moving around him voices, footsteps, the creak of a door, the low bleat of a goat penned behind one of the halls and none of it stopped for the stranger who did not know where his boat was or what his throat had tried to say.
He walked back to the longhouse.
Slowly.
One hand on the wall for balance.
Inside, he lay down on the furs and stared at the ceiling beams and counted the ways his body was no longer entirely his.
The threads were always there.
The sky would not stop glowing.
And now his throat carried the shape of a word he had not chosen, waiting.