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anyone with a gap in their teeth. Her hand twitched in her lap, as though she wanted to reach out and test me. As if where language failed, her fingers could find out what I was. She wasn’t afraid of openly observing.
    “You’re scared,” she said. Everything was stated matter of factly.
    She couldn’t know how deep my fear went, spiraling down inside me like a funnel of dark birds. Varieties of fear. I was insane, definitely. And stranded, abducted by realists? Stuck forever in some twilight of the tank? Or not. Afraid to admit it, my gut knew what was true. I was twelve hundred years from where I began.
    The shaking started again, and I drew five pounds of wool and fur up around me.
    “You have no need to be,” she told me. “The farm is green now. It’s summer, já?” She looked at my blankets, then reached for one and very slowly drew it away. “You need to come outside and breathe.”
    Breathing! The idea of fresh air came to me as if from a long ago story. I’d forgotten about it. There would be clear air outside the house. Air and sun and light. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait. I needed it. Tears sprang up, and I nodded, already gulping for it, singeing my lungs.
    Betta slid to the edge of the alcove and opened the curtains all the way. “Let’s see if you can walk.” Her strong fingers closed on mine, and she helped me out of bed and into the house.
    I stepped into a Viking dollhouse, lit by two dozen lamp fires that twinkled and flared along the walls.
    Benches stretched far away to my right, scattered with gray and white furs and sheepskins, their ends disappearing into the dark, limitless longhouse. In the firelight, the benches and walls were colored in butter and copper. Outside the reach of the small flames, they shifted into shades of rust, plum and darkest brown shadows.
    Objects glinted in angled rays of sun that shot through a vent in the roof. Tools, axes that had been laid carefully aside, women’s knives and needles flashing. Two women sat like spirits in the drifting smoke and revolting stink of body odor and fish. I swallowed hard.
    It was the hjartastein. Heartstone. A word that, in the Viking way, made a tiny poem out of the most ordinary thing. It was the main fire, the center of the living home. An elongated oval of rocks contained it. Sunlight coming through a hole in the roof carved a swirling column of ashes and smoke that rose slowly toward the sky.
    I blinked the sequence to save an image, and a little tear of loss and frustration stung my eye. My contacts were gone, wouldn’t work anymore.
    I searched the room, desperate to take everything in, every detail, for when I got sucked back into the future. I had no idea when it would be. I had to seize this, and I had to do it alone, with just my eyes and mind. I reeled, trying to see and listen and memorize, and when I stepped down out of the alcove I stumbled and my knees hit the ground.
    From the swept-dirt floor I looked up in wonder. Across the way two stories of sleeping spaces were set into the wall, divided by big posts, entire trees holding up the house and dividing tiny sleeping quarters like animals’ dens. Most were enclosed with thin linen curtains, a rusty orange color that glowed almost pink where it was lit.
    A few alcoves on the lower level were open to the room. In one of them, a man slept heavily with his mouth open against the wood bench, his belly crushed against a metal cup and several knives that hung from his belt. One arm bent, his hand rested on his ax blade like it was a lover’s cheek. Other than him, no men were present. Just the two women at the heartstone. They stared.
    I reached blindly for Betta, and she squeezed my hand with her capable fingers, her cool and reassuring palm. She helped me up, and when we both rose to our full heights, she stood an inch or two above. A very tall woman in her place and time, probably five and a half feet.
    She helped me walk the length of the room and through an archway