Summary
A phantasmagoric tapestry unfurls across the fjord-licked hamlet where bloodlines braid like witch-knots: three dynasties—once bound by oaths carved into driftwood—now circle one another like starved ravens above a dying whale. Bastard heir Nicolai Johannsen returns from Arctic exile, frostbite still nibbling his cheekbones, clutching a rusted sabre etched with runes that remember every throat it ever tasted. Carl Hintz, the land’s Lutheran bailiff, sermonizes by day yet by night seeds bastards in haylofts, convinced God’s ledger tolerates white ink. Across the heath, Alfred Osmund’s mercantile clan hoards grain while Oscar Nielsen’s fishermen barter daughters for nets, both clans unaware that E. Krarup’s lens-maker has ground a monocle revealing the hour of each man’s death. Viggo Wiehe, a consumptive poet, scribbles prophecies on birch bark then swallows them to keep warm; Anna Margrethe Molstadt, promised to three rivals, drowns herself in a peat bog only to stride out again at the autumn slaughter, hair dripping like mossy curtains. Mischa Krettingen’s itinerant violin saws a single chord that raises the herring—yes, the fish levitate—while Judith Bruun’s midwife stitches newborns’ lips so they will never speak the family curse, though the infants still hum it through their noses. Knud Rassow’s blacksmith forges a gate that will never open, Louis Møller’s sheriff counts bullets like rosary beads, and every hearth crackles with tales of a beast that wears grandpapa’s face. When the winter sun skims the horizon for forty-three minutes, the clans meet on the salt-flat where sea meets soil; they brandish heirlooms—an elk-horn comb, a Lutheran hymnal with pages licked by flame, a seal-pelt purse of stolen teeth—until the tide hauls the battleground away and the combatants must fight while sinking. Blood darkens the foam; gulls stitch the sky with cries; and somewhere inside the glacier an ice-blue girl—born of a rape no one admits—opens her eyes for the first and last time, exhaling a wind that topples every weathercock in the parish. No victor emerges, only a silence so absolute that the fjord itself forgets how to wave.
