Yet soon I learned that we were to be what Icelanders had always been: farmers and herdsmen. For he had a small herd in one of the outer valleys. Year-old ewes, diseased and weak, worms dripping from their nostrils as they breathed. But he treated them as tenderly as if they were the finest of hillside cattle. The endlessly patient and exhausted love of a shepherd for his flock.
We had a little field of crops, too, in some rare patch of green land. They were blighted, half of them dead with frost, but gave a scattering of grain for us. We tended those crops and that herd in a desolate land, and I thought of those first settlers who had come to Iceland in the centuries before us. Perhaps this was how they had lived then, alone in the cold, fighting with the land to survive, with no kin to count upon if the harvest failed.
It was not enough – even I could see that. The meat and grain we would have might last us a few scanty months. But it was not enough to survive the winter.
When I told Thoris this, he nodded.
‘I lost much time caring for you. We need more food than I thought.’
‘What must we do, then?’ I asked.
He did not answer, for the answer was too shameful to speak out loud. He merely looked to the west, towards the lands of other men.
We waited for the clear nights to pass, for the clouds to come, for the moon to grow thin. We hiked by day across the barren mountains, slept a few restless hours in dusk, and when the night was truly upon us we went out into the fields of men we did not know.
We were the ghosts that leave a man’s sheep butchered in his fields, the trickster elves who steal wheat and corn from isolated shielings, the shadowy figures who send boys running across the heath back to their longhouses, screaming of monsters in the darkness.
I had never been on a Viking raid, but still I felt it in my blood. My mother’s people had been hunters and raiders, my father one of those taken as a slave in those same raids. And so I told myself that we were not thieves, but hunters. They had cast us out of the law, would kill us if they caught us. We owed them no shame. And so, night after night, we raided the farmers for grain and meat.
Always careful not to raid in the same place twice. Always taking little enough that the farmers might tell themselves that they had miscounted their herd, had forgotten where they had placed that sack of grain. They did not want to believe in thieves.
Sometimes we saw other men out on such night work – alone, for the most part, but sometimes in pairs like us. We kept far away from each other. A fear of discovery in large numbers, of a rivalry turning violent, and an unnameable fear of other outlawed men. For though they were like us, we feared them. We carried our bad luck with us like a stench: growing used to our own, but disgusted by others with whom we were unfamiliar.
We went many times, and I grew to long for those black nights. To walk in tended fields amongst cattle, in lands that were bare of snow and ice, was a little like being a free man once more. But I knew it would not be for long. I knew that it could not last.
We were walking back one morning, each with a ewe trussed up across our backs, when I noticed the change. Some absence that made me uneasy, a sensation that I had experienced many times before, but never as an outlaw. It was not until we were at the foothills of the mountains that I understood what it was.
‘No birdsong,’ I said.
Thoris nodded. ‘Yes, they have gone. It will be winter soon.’
I looked down on my ruined hand: five fingers taken by the cold, and it had been late summer. I could not imagine what winter would be like in those mountains. I could not think of how we might survive it.
I have heard that in other countries winter is not so cruel. There are many who die in those winters, but through the slow deaths: the rattling cough that becomes wet and choking over many weeks, the endless rain that pierces a house and brings a killing fever, rot spreading unseen through a storehouse and ruining a winter’s provisions. But you will know that your death is coming, long before it reaches you.
In my country winter is a killer of men. It does not kill in weeks or months, but in moments. You step outside in winter and feel the wind as if it were fingers tightening around your throat, a cold blade laid against your wrists. You can feel it cutting, killing, and you retreat to the fire, wounded and beaten.
I knew a man who stepped outside to walk fifty paces to the outhouse. He left the fireside drunk and smiling, joking that the wind might sober him up. We waited for him to return, and he did not. We searched for him, called for him, until the cutting wind drove us back. Fifty paces to the outhouse and he was lost in the storm. And we found him months later when the snow had melted. Carrion-picked. Eyeless and lipless, smiling blindly at the sky.
The sun barely passes the horizon, is gone as soon as it comes. The sea fills with drift ice; even if you chose to take to the water, following the birds to the south, your ship would be torn to pieces. The entire island is sealed away from the world; none can come and none can go. And so we seal ourselves away, too. We sing and drink, and try not to think of the dwindling food and fuel in our stores, the cold death that knocks at the door with every gust of wind, asking to come inside.
We made no more raids on the fields. We butchered our cattle and salted the meat, harvested what grain we had. We dug a pit and buried much of what we had, and took the rest to the cave.
Before we placed the food in the cave, one could not stand fully upright in it. And once all of the food was in, I saw that we would have to crawl in. Live on our bellies like snakes and eat our way to the bottom of the cave again.
‘How will we know when it is time?’ I asked the outlaw.
‘You shall know,’ he said.
20
A day like any other. We were burying the last of our provisions. A stronger wind, a sharper wind than usual, but I thought nothing of it. I saw that Thoris seemed tense, uncertain, but I did not know why. He felt something that I did not, knew something that I could not.
The snow began to fall. What did that matter? It had fallen many times in the days before. But I saw that Thoris had stopped moving and was staring at the sky. I felt the wind again, that familiar, killing wind against my skin.
The snow fell, faster and faster, and I saw that it would not relent. That the gods would drown us on dry land if they could. We ran, then – we ran for our lives.
My half-hand pulled my cloak tight against my skin, armour against the blade of the wind. The other hand forward by instinct, for the snow was so thick that I felt the urge to part it, as if it were some heavy piece of cloth partitioning a longhouse.
Three times on the way back to the caves we found ourselves lost in the maze of snow. Lost on ground that we had trodden upon dozens of times, and there is no more fearful sensation than that of being lost on familiar ground. Yet each time we chose well, until we could see that black slit in the side of the mountain. We crawled into the cave and watched the snow fall.
All too soon, it was piled up to half the height of the cave. I made to go forward, to clear it away, but Thoris waved me back.
‘Let it be,’ he said. ‘There is no use in fighting it.’
I watched it build, the cave growing darker with each passing moment. The mad desire to rush forward, to flee out in the snow consumed me, for what man can be willingly buried alive? It was as though we lay looking up at the sky in our own graves, buried one handful of earth at a time, watching the sky disappear.
At last the entrance was sealed, and there was only darkness.
We lay in silence for a time, listening to the cry of the wind, feeling the cold begin to seep and settle upon our skin.