Carefully, gently, I dug at the snow at my feet. Clearing a hollow, like a madman digging his own grave. And I crawled into it, pulling the snow back over me. I took my knife in my left hand, and I listened.
For a long time, there was nothing but the howling of the wind. My right hand held close against my chest as if to quieten the beating of my heart, my left hand burning in the cold, fingers locked tight around the handle of the knife. The pain of the cold was akin to nothing I had felt before and I bit the folds of my cloak to keep myself from crying out. Then, abruptly, like the striking of lightning against the ground, I felt nothing at all.
I heard him then: the heavy tread of footsteps drawing closer. And a voice calling out – too hoarse for me to know who it was.
‘Björn! Kari! Can you hear me?’
He was lost. Calling to his companions, mistaking my tracks for theirs.
What strange stroke of chance had brought him here? A twisting in the bowels that had set him behind his companions. A stone working its way into his boots that he had taken a moment to remove, then looked up and found himself alone.
He wandered closer and closer, until he was near enough that I could have reached out and touched him from my hollow in the snow. But he had no eyes for the ground. He was trying to pierce the storm, to catch the sight of his companions.
‘Björn!’ he cried once more, the wind swallowing the sound. Then, ‘Kjaran.’
He did not cry out my name. He said it quietly, to himself, a realisation. Then he looked down and his eyes met mine.
The snow flew from me as I rose, my shoulder into his knee, the knife searching and cutting at his leg. He fell, his body taut with horror, his lips moving but saying nothing. I crawled up him like a man climbing a mountain, and placed my fist into his mouth before he could cry out.
It was Ketil. Here for some duty he owed to Björn, some debt to be repaid in blood. No killer’s longing for him, a mere discharge of a duty. And of all the people I might have faced, the gods had brought him here to die at my hand.
I rolled back from him, scrabbling along the snow on all fours. He stared at me, disbelieving, and he tried to stand, his hand reaching for the axe at his side. He tried to stand and his ruined leg gave way beneath him. I had felt the skin part deeply under the cut I had given him, but he did not know his wound until that moment. I could see the white of bone, the cords of his leg exposed like cut worms.
He embraced himself, arranging and rearranging his arms again and again over the wounds I had given him, for there were too many to cover. He was lost for a moment in his pain – eyes closed and teeth bared. Then it seemed that he remembered me.
‘Do not shame me,’ he said.
I looked beyond him, into the storm. Thinking that I had heard distant sounds, drawing closer. That they were coming back.
‘Do not shame me!’ he cried again.
But I turned from him and ran back across the snow. Back to the rocky paths at the heart of the mountains, leaving a dying man behind. And, before all sound was stolen by the wind, I heard him plead with me one last time.
I heard him plead with me to kill him.
I wandered, lost in the storm, looking for a place to die.
Every step I could feel the life pouring out of me, like blood from some deep and terrible wound. All I wished for was sleep, to lie on the snow and sleep.
There is a longing of a man who faces hopeless odds in battle. It is the longing to kill one man at least, to not die without spilling the blood of one who has come for you. You have killed one, the mind seems to say, and that is enough. Lie down and die if you wish, for you have done enough.
The snow fell thicker and thicker, the memory of the blood the only warmth that I had. And as I took another step I knocked loose a rock, heard it dance and scatter down towards my left. I followed that sound, and beneath the snow and stone I saw something. Not a path, but a gully that seemed to lead down from the mountain.
I stumbled down: careless, clumsy steps that were buried in snow, slipped across icy stone. I fell, time and time again. Slumping against the white blanket on the ground, closing my eyes for a moment of exquisite rest, then coming to my feet again.
‘One more step,’ I whispered to myself. One more step.
And then the ground levelling before me, the storm growing weaker and weaker until the way was clear and I could see where it was that the gods had taken me.
It was another world of black stone. A bare and empty valley, no shelter to be seen, no grass. No man had walked in this place for a hundred years at least.
I fell and could not get back up. Again and again I tried to stand, but I could feel some great, unseen weight upon my chest. I knew that I had gone as far as I could. At least I would not die in the mountains. At least I would not die at the hands of those who hunted me.
I looked out at the hand that had held the knife, that had maimed a man I had once called a friend, and I could feel nothing from it. I lay down in the snow and I waited to die.
I wandered from sleep to waking, time and time again. I had hoped to dream of Sigrid, but I dreamed of nothing at all. Only a silent dimness, like being under deep still water.
I woke one more time, and before me there was a figure in the darkness. He was no trick of the mind, for I could feel his heavy tread against the ground. I thought, for a moment, that he was one of my pursuers, that against all odds they had followed me to this place. But it was a man I did not know.
A ghost, perhaps, of another outlaw who had died in this place, come to guard his territory from the living. His clothing a patchwork of rags, his eyes rolling wild, a chipped axe held in his hand. Yet there was a dripping carcass slung to his back – a fox, skinned and bloody, and I knew that he was no ghost. For the dead do not need to feed.
He knelt beside me, unstoppered a leather skin that he slung around his neck. I could smell the sweetness of mead. Life was in that smell, and poetry and love. The strength to stand and fight again. I ached for it and reached out, but he drew it back from my hand.
He gave a bark and a cough – a man remembering how to speak. Then he spoke.
‘Why should I save you?’
I could not understand and did not answer. He grabbed my chin and shook me.
‘Listen! Tell me why I should save you.’
My lips moved, but no words came. He sat back, preparing to stand, preparing to leave me in the snow. And, his voice marked with regret, he spoke to me one more time.
‘What can you do?’
I knew then what I had to say. What it was that I had to offer this man, the only thing of value that I had in that waste of ice and snow.
‘I can sing,’ I said.
I remember nothing more after that.
19
When I woke there was no sky above, no mountains surrounding me. Only shadows dancing on the walls of a cave. And, close by, the sound and the feel of a fire.
I shrank from it as the first man to strike fire must have done, fearing his own creation, believing that he was going to burn the world away with his strange, flickering gift.
It endured only for a moment. Then I had a hunger for the fire, crawling as close to it as I could stand. I held my hands out to it and could smell the hair burning, yet I could feel no heat in my fingers.
As I moved, something stirred on the other side of the fire. A great shadow moved on its hands and knees to my side, for he was tall and the top of the cave was close to me.
I saw him better now than I had out in the snow. His hair was the colour of wet iron, tied back tight against his head, yet his eyes were alive with youth, or madness. When he turned his head to face me, by the light of the fire I saw that one ear was gone, a ragged lump of flesh and scar all that remained on the right side of his head.