Between Two Fires

The steam house stood apart from the longhouse, half-buried in the hillside as though the earth had swallowed it to the shoulders. Ulf found it by smell: birch smoke, wet stone, something sharp and green underneath that he could not name. He followed the smell because his body had no better instinct left. Three weeks on open water, one ambush in the shallows outside the estuary, four dead men and one wounded one, and the wounded one was him, and so here he was, arriving at a stranger’s settlement at dusk with a torn shoulder and a story he had no appetite to tell.

The door to the steam house was low. He knocked, which felt strange, but knocking felt more honest than walking in on whatever a man got up to alone in such a place. The door opened from the inside, and the man who filled the frame was not what Ulf expected.

He was broad, the breadth of a man who carried heavy things by choice, repeatedly, because he had decided that was the kind of man he would be. His hair was dark and worn loose to his shoulders, damp from the steam inside. He wore nothing from the waist up, and what Ulf could see of his chest was matted and dark, a line running down the middle of his sternum, spreading as it went south. His arms were crossed. His expression was not unfriendly, but it was not yet friendly either.

“Einar told me you were coming,” the man said. His voice was lower than expected, almost careful, as if he had learned to use it in the way a bladesmith uses a fine tool: deliberately, without waste. “He said your shoulder is bad.”

“Einar talks too much.”

“He also said you would say that.” He stepped back to make space. “Come in, then. Or stand in the cold. Your shoulder won’t care either way.”

Ulf came in.

The healer’s name was Brann. Ulf did not ask, but Brann offered it in the same careful way he offered everything: as a simple fact, without performance.

The steam house was small and very hot. Brann had two fires going, one on either side of a central pit filled with stones that glowed orange in the dim light. Birch branches were stacked along one wall, green ones for the steam and dry ones for burning. It smelled like the inside of a forest after rain, if that forest were also on fire. Ulf’s lungs appreciated it in a way the rest of him was not ready to admit.

“Strip the tunic off,” Brann said. “It’ll need cleaning, and I can’t do that with half your body hidden.”

Ulf pulled the tunic over his head. The hot air hit his skin and he exhaled without meaning to, the sound of a man who has been tense for weeks and forgotten it until this precise moment. He set the tunic on the bench beside him. He was completely naked now, and Brann was still crouched in front of him, which put Brann’s face level with his chest, and Brann was not looking away.

Brann had taken off his tunic too and told Ulf it would make it easier to treat his injuries as the salve he used had a habit of breaking down the fibres of the leather and in such challenging times, neither one could afford to be ruining their clothing when they could be called to fight at a moment’s notice.

Brann crouched in front of him without ceremony and began unwrapping the cloth at Ulf’s shoulder. His hands were large, and his fingers were blunt at the tips, the hands of a man who worked, but his touch was not rough. It was simply precise. He unwound the bandage slowly, not to be careful, Ulf suspected, but because he was reading what he found as he went, taking note.

“Who wrapped this?” he said.

“Myself.”

“In the dark?”

“On a moving ship.”

Brann made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He pulled the last of the cloth free and considered the wound. It was a sword cut, long and not quite clean, sealed now but angry at the edges, the skin around it the colour of an overripe plum. Brann set his thumb along the edge of the wound, not pressing, just resting there, and Ulf held himself completely still.

“It will heal,” Brann said. “You did a decent job, considering.”

“I have had practice.”

“I can see that.” He was looking at Ulf’s torso now, not at the wound. Ulf wore his history there in the usual way: a catalogue of old cuts, burns, places where the skin had knitted back together at slight angles to what it once was. Brann’s gaze moved over them without comment but also without hurry, and Ulf realised he was not being assessed. He was being observed, which was different, and he did not quite know what to do with it. All he knew is that it made his thick hairy dick begin to swell a little.

He dipped a cloth into a wooden bowl of water that had herbs floating in it. The smell was sharp, herbal, and clean. Then he pressed it to the wound.

The sting was considerable. Ulf did not move.

“Good,” Brann said. Not praise exactly. More like: noted.

He worked in silence after that, cleaning the wound carefully, moving the cloth in slow, deliberate strokes that began at the wound’s edge and worked outward. Each stroke brought his hand a little further across Ulf’s shoulder, down across his collarbone, towards the centre of his chest. It was the work of cleaning, nothing more. It was also the particular intimacy of being touched by a man who was paying full attention, and Ulf’s body was making various unhelpful observations about this that he was choosing not to examine, but by now, they had both began to get erections, both of them saying nothing as their hairy viking dicks stood hard in the dim light.

Brann rinsed the cloth and wrung it out. He did not move back.

“Turn,” he said.

Ulf turned on the bench, putting his back to Brann, and felt the cloth move across his shoulder blades. There was another cut there, one he had forgotten about, shallower than the first. Brann found it without being told and cleaned it without comment. His left hand rested on Ulf’s shoulder to hold him still, and the heat of that palm was noticeable even over the room's ambient heat.

“How long were you out there?” Brann said.

“Three weeks.”

“Where?”

“East first, then north. Then we had to come back a different way.”

“Because of the ambush.”

“Because of the ambush.”

Brann was quiet for a moment. The stones in the pit crackled. Steam rose in slow white ropes towards the ceiling and dissolved into the wooden beams. Ulf could feel the sweat beginning now, his body surrendering to the heat, and with it something else, some maintained tension in his back and neck that had been there so long he had mistaken it for his natural shape.

“Who did you lose?” Brann said.

Ulf considered not answering. “Four men,” he said. “Gunnar, Sven, Torald, and a young one called Petter. Sixteen years old.”

Brann pressed the cloth flat against the cut on his shoulder blade and held it there. He did not say anything about the dead. He did not offer the usual words, the reassurances about Valhalla and the honour of battle, and Ulf found he was grateful for that. He was tired of those words. They were true words, perhaps, but they were also a door that closed.

After a long moment, Brann took the cloth away. He reached up, lifted a bundle of green birch branches from the wall, and dipped them into the bowl of water. Ulf heard the leaves rustle and looked over his shoulder.

“The shoulder won’t like this,” Brann said, “but the rest of you will.”

He began to switch the birch across Ulf’s back, the traditional way, the leaves flat and wet and sharp against the skin. It was not pain exactly. It was more like being woken up, each contact reminding the skin that it was alive and attached to something. Ulf closed his eyes. The heat rose off the stones. The birch struck again and again in a steady rhythm, and after a while, he stopped counting the strokes and simply sat there in the steam and the smell of green wood, being pulled back into his own body, portion by portion, like a rope coiled in from the water.

He did not hear Brann set the birch aside. He became aware of him again when both of Brann’s palms settled flat on his shoulder blades, warm and still, and stayed there.

Ulf stopped breathing for a moment.

“You’re carrying this wrong,” Brann said quietly.

He did not mean the wound.

“I know,” Ulf said.

Neither of them moved. The fire crackled. The steam shifted. Brann’s hands were very warm, or perhaps it was that the rest of the world had gone warm around them and his hands were simply its centre.

Brann moved slowly because he was a man who understood that slow was not the same as cautious. His palms moved from Ulf’s shoulder blades inward, towards the spine, down, working the muscles as if a man who knows what he is doing and equally what he intends. Ulf sat and let him. He was done pretending this was only medicine.

He turned on the bench, which brought him face to face with Brann at close range. Brann did not step back. He looked at Ulf directly, brown eyes steady, a small line between his brows that was not a frown but rather concentration.

“I don’t know you,” Ulf said.

“No,” Brann agreed.

“I may never come back this way again.”

“I know that too.”

Ulf reached up and set his undamaged hand at the back of Brann’s neck, and Brann leaned in to meet him. The kiss was not tentative. It was the kiss of two men who had both decided that they were not interested in the performance of uncertainty. The heat of the room pressed in around them, the steam rising off the stones, the birch smoke threading through everything, and Ulf pulled him closer with the one good arm and felt Brann’s hands settle on his hips, gripping with the same deliberate precision he applied to everything else.

They stayed like that for a long moment. Then Brann pulled back far enough to look at him.

“Lie down,” he said. “The bench is wide enough.”

Ulf looked at the bench. “You have done this before.”

“The bench is wide for practical reasons.”

“Practical,” Ulf said.

“Lie down,” Brann said again, and his voice had dropped into something else, something still careful but also certain in a way that settled in Ulf’s chest and stayed there.

Ulf lay back on the bench. The wood was warm and smooth, worn by use. The heat from the stones rolled over him in slow waves. Above him, the ceiling sweated. Brann stood over him and looked at him for a moment in the firelight, all of him, with a directness that Ulf did not look away from.

The fire crackled. The steam house held them. Outside, the village was quiet, the long summer dusk doing what northern summer dusks do: lasting, and lasting, and refusing to resolve into full dark, as if even the sky understood that some things deserve more time than night allows.

What happened in the steam house stayed in the steam house, not because it was shameful but because it was complete in itself: a thing that needed no audience and no narration, conducted between two men who both knew how to be present and both chose to be, for as long as the fires held.

When Ulf finally opened the low door and stepped out into the evening air, the cold hit him like a wave, and he stood still in it for a moment, eyes closed, steam rising from his damp skin into the cooler air around him. The sky was still that indeterminate northern purple that wouldn’t quite go dark. The settlement was quiet. An ox lowed somewhere in the distance.

He heard the door open behind him, and Brann appeared at his shoulder, also bare-skinned and steaming, and they stood together outside the low earthen roof of the steam house, looking out across the slope of the hill towards the water below.

“Your shoulder will need fresh binding,” Brann said.

“I know.”

“In the morning.”

“Yes,” Ulf said. “In the morning.”

Brann turned and went back inside, ducking through the low door without looking back, because there was no need to. Ulf stood in the cooling air a moment longer, his shoulder aching in a clean way now, a way that felt like progress rather than damage. Then he followed.

The door closed behind him. The steam curled up from the roof into the purple sky. Somewhere in the trees at the edge of the hill, a bird called once and was answered, and the long evening continued its refusal to end.

The End.