Leo, too. He pointed to a small structure with no roof and said gloomily, “I think this is the old smithy.”

There was nothing smithish about the old smithy. Joanna put her hands on her hips as though she were interested in smithery, though all she could feel was her heart beating warrantless through her body. She knew she and Leo would forgive each other. She knew that it was her duty to solicit forgiveness from everyone, but just then she was tired of men whose feelings were bigger than hers. She felt as though she’d grown up in a cauldron of those feelings and had never gotten out.

“Okay. What’s next?”

“The medicine woman’s hut.”

Inside the medicine woman’s hut, a squinty, hardy-looking woman of about sixty sat on a low bench, stirring an open fire with a stick.

“Hi, hi,” said the woman. This was the jaunty way some Danish people said hello, and Joanna always felt exhilarated and frightened saying it back, as though she might pass for Danish a few seconds more. Which was worse, being found out as American, or as a fraud? It was a big space, illuminated by the fire and the sunlight coming through the front and back doors. The fire was directly underneath the highest part of the thatched ceiling: Viking fire safety. “Say hello,” said Joanna to Leo.

A preposterous command. He didn’t.

The medicine woman gestured to a low long bench across from her. In English, in the voice of the iron age, the woman said, “Welcome. Where do you stay?”

Were they supposed to be ancient, too?

Leo tried to feel it. Before Denmark, he hadn’t realized how much he wished to be ancient. To be Danish. To be, he thought now, otherwise for a reason.

His mother said, “Last night, near Svendborg.”

The medicine woman nodded, as though approving of this wisdom. “It is beautiful there.” She withdrew her stick, inspected the end, stuck it back in. “You have been to Langeland? The ‘big island,’ you would call it?”

“No.”

She nodded again. “You must.”

She was the medicine woman: everything she said had the feel of a cure and a curse. Yes: they would go to the big island. It was inevitable.

On the big island, thought Joanna, she might forget her big mistakes; on the big island, they would scatter their memories, if not her father’s ashes. They had not brought his ashes. There were too many of them.

“There is an excellent cold war museum,” the medicine woman said.

What was a cold war, in the land of the Vikings?