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Why can’t you be more like your sister?
Nefja Holmunardottir sits in her shared bed, watching her sister in the night, keeping vigil over her. Eyfura’s face is flushed and hot, and every few moments she lets out a low, wheezing cough that only barely passes for breathing. Their mother lies in the bed on the other wall, peacefully asleep, unaware of how her frequent recurring criticism of Nefja rolls around in her mind.
Those words will never keep Nefja from donning her armor and joining her thegn on the field—or rather, it seems more likely that it will be her thegn’s eldest child, her childhood best friend whom she will serve alongside. The words never keep her from practicing with her spear until her sweat runs rivulets down her back and hits Skjern’s cold, hard soil.
But she remembers the words. And she thinks of them while she is with her sister.
In the morning, before the sun comes up, Nefja lifts Eyfura from the bed. It is summer, and it has been nearly a week since her twin has had a bath, so Nefja will bathe her in their home and then bundle her back into her clothes before she can freeze in the ever-frigid air of Skjern. She heats the water, and then some extra to maintain the temperature while her sister sits in the water, and she carefully helps Eyfura out of her clothes. She pulls off fur and linen, layer after layer, until her sister is bare.
Eyfura’s lungs sound a little bit better when she says, “Thank you, Nefja.”
Nefja shakes her head with a long-lasting if a bit pained smile, and replies, “I’m just doing what a sister does. No thanks necessary.”
Nefja helps Eyfura sit in the bath before taking to washing her all over, with her hands and a wet cloth, taking special care to not upset or wet her hair. If the weather permits, Nefja or their mother will bathe her once a week or so, but her hair is only washed once a season, if that. She gets chills if her hair is damp for too long, and it takes quite some time to unbraid Eyfura’s flaxen hair, to brush it out, wash, dry, and braid it up again. They don’t often have time for it.
Already, the post-bath routine is flurried and rushed, with their mother adding some extra firewood to heat their home marginally more and Nefja hurrying to re-dress Eyfura before helping her back to bed (or carrying her, if it’s a particularly bad day). Nefja carries her today, watching carefully for discomfort as she wedges her sister back underneath the piles of furs that they sleep under. Having done that, settled her sister as much as she possibly can, Nefja sets out for the day, off to hone her skills as a warrior in service to her clan. Their mother watches her go with a sigh and a shake of her head.
Nefja spends a few hours receiving tutelage from the few warriors that are still around in Skjern instead of off traveling with the thegn, and then she spends the next few sparring with a few friends. Her spear crosses with swords, shields, though it is padded at the tip for now. Their clan cannot expend the resources to heal up an unnecessary wound frivolously. The most she or anyone she runs with end up with are bruises from being knocked flat on their asses or being stabbed with something that’s not truly sharp.
She spends some more hours acquiring meat from Ketill’s family, and a few herbs from the witch in the bog. These, she gives to her mother, smiling at her sister before she goes back out to spend a little more time helping around the homestead. The hours always pass quickly, the sun streaking through the sky before she knows it. Clanmates and those who wish to trade or seek audience with their missing thegn come in and out of Skjern, and then suddenly the day is over, meals and work and some amount of play all passed.
Suddenly, it is night, and Nefja still thinks of her sister.
When Nefja tilts her head back at the sky as the twinkling stars begin to show their glittering tapestry at night, she wishes that she could bring Eyfura out into the world, to show her everything that she gets to see. But even if they were to bring her with all of the furs and blankets that she is currently bundled in in their bed, Eyfura would become so ill as to never recover, doomed by their tempting of the fates. She cannot come out and watch the stars with Nefja, though for Nefja this is so easy and simple a task as to become trivial. It is merely a quiet moment at the end of a rigorous day spent doing other things considered far more worthwhile. Her armor and spear lay at her feet, her effort expended for the day—and she will have more tomorrow. Nefja will always have more energy tomorrow.
Even such a simple pleasure as looking up at night and seeing the splendor of nature, of the gods and the world around them, is stolen from her twin by mere virtue of her being born with a weaker body than Nefja was. Eyfura cannot feel the brisk air of Skjern, nor listen to the seawater lap upon the shore, nor hear the raucous laughter of a feast once things have gotten a little two rowdy a few pints of mead in. The unfairness of it all strikes at the core of who Nefja is, but if the gods have seen fit to yoke the two of them unevenly in this manner, all Nefja can do is serve her clan and cling to her sister so closely that the gods take pity on them and bless Eyfura, finally.
Nefja knows that they are closer than siblings are generally meant to be—despite how she had insisted to her sister that her actions were merely sisterly—but how could they be anything else? They are two halves of a matched set, both only part of what their mother would want of them: health, but no feminine softness, and feminine grace without health. Sometimes she herself looks upon her sister’s naked, emaciated body in the bath and she does not know herself if some part of her wants to be Eyfura, or if that part of her wants Eyfura instead.
It’s been a question that resurfaces uncomfortably often, and as Nefja looks upwards, she still finds no answers.
When Nefja returns to their home for the night, she manipulates and articulates her sister’s arms and legs for her since she’s too weak to do so herself. Sometimes the hesitation in her lungs, the chronic cough, makes it so that she is too weak to move. Nefja would not let Eyfura’s muscles atrophy more than they already have, and so she spends some time each night before bed moving her sister. It eases the strain in Eyfura’s body, only very slightly, but when the line between life and death, between staying with Nefja and leaving her for the afterlife, Nefja will take “only very slightly.”
Eyfura sleeps, but she sleeps fitfully, restless twitching characterizing her gaunt face. Nefja remains awake for quite some time, and she watches her mother stoke the fire a little more before going to sleep herself. Nefja resists the urge to place another log on herself—the house can get too warm for her ailing twin, after all. Everything is constantly in delicate balance, between health and illness, and illness and death.
Even when the house is silent except for the slight crackle of their life-giving fire, Nefja remains upright as she watches over her sister. Eyfura’s been getting worse, and they haven’t had the means lately to go and see the Gydja in Ribe to beg for more of the only medicine that has seemed to work for her. Eyfura rolls, her feverish face in some amount of discomfort even in slumber.
“You will be fine, Eyfura,” Nefja whispers desperately in the night as she keeps her lonely vigil on her side of the bed, watching her sister struggle just to stay alive. It is prayer, blessing, beseeching, all at the same time.
She does not know what she would do without her twin, how she would manage to go on as she has in a world where Eyfura is not waiting for her at home. They are two halves of a mismatched set, similar in appearance and yet greatly unbalanced in so many ways that matter.
Nefja’s hand only barely trembles when she brushes the back of it tenderly along Eyfura’s forehead, wiping away some amount of fevered sweat with her own skin.
“You have to live.”
She hopes that that is true more than anything. She has to believe that her sister will live.
She cannot do anything else.