I thought of the callouses of Gunnar’s hand when he clasped mine. The fineness of Sigrid’s hair running between my fingers. The way her eyes seemed to catch fire a moment before she smiled. How strong and proud Gunnar looked when he shifted one foot a little in front of the other and took up the warrior’s stance. I was losing those memories – hoarding them like a miser, and every day there seemed to be fewer to count. But that night by the fire, the memories seemed to grow stronger, not weaker. For a time, sharing our songs and dreaming our dreams, we were the living once more.
The flames began to die. We huddled close around it in silence, our hands outstretched and almost touching the embers. Until it was as though our roles had been reversed, that fire and I: as if I were trying to give my heat to the fire, trying to keep it alive. And just as the final embers winked out and went cold, the snow began to fall once more. Those steady, heavy pieces of snow, handfuls cast down by a god. We crawled back into our tomb and waited to be buried. The living became the dead once more.
As we did every night, we wrapped our arms around each other, sharing the warmth that was our most precious gift. And I tried to find sleep and dreams, before the cold gripped too tightly.
I could have told you of many other days. Of the days when winter sought to kill us: the day it grew so cold that my lips froze to each other and ice coated the inside of our cave, where we fought to light a fire with shaking hands. Or the day we were buried so deep beneath the snow that the air suddenly turned foul, and we fought against the snow like duellists in the holmgang, hacking and gasping and retching, until the clean air broke through and we could breathe once more.
And there were worse days than those that I could speak of. The days of emptiness that outnumbered all of the rest. Lying still in the dark, wordless, shivering, feeling the winter madness scratching at my mind, trying not to scream.
But I wanted to tell you of that day.
A good day.
21
Every winter of my life I had known what it was to be trapped in a valley. The plains around Hildarendi when I was a boy, the Beautiful Valley, the Salmon River Valley. Yet even in the worst of winters I could find a sign of another life. A trail of smoke from a cooking fire. A distant shadow moving on a hillside. A voice raised in song, carried on the wind. But not in that valley of the outlaws.
There were no others within the valley, and none would come. Even if our enemies had been mad enough to pursue us in winter, every pass was sealed with ice and snow. They could not come in to the mountains and we could not get out. We were alone.
We each grew sick in turn. Kept awake by the rattling coughing of the other man, too tired to feel pity, wishing only that he would either grow well or die. For there is a madness that comes without sleep. And we were both mad before long.
We barely ate. Scraps of dried meat, bowls of cold oats and snowmelt. Our flesh thinned, our bones grew light, until we were each reduced to a pair of aching lungs, a sluggish beating heart. I wondered if there would come a time when we knew that there truly was no hope. When we would go to our knees in that tiny cave, reach for our knives with shaking hands. When we would agree to try and give one another a warrior’s death, rather than waiting to starve like cowards or beasts.
The snow grew weaker. The light grew stronger. The season began to turn. Yet for us, nothing changed.
At last there was a day when we had nothing left to eat. Our hands touched the bare stone of the cave floor, our fingers ran over bones that were notched with tooth-marks and scoured of any fragment of meat.
We broke open the snow and found it softer, wetter than it had been before. I stepped out and stumbled on shaking legs like a newborn lamb, the only sound that of the wind when it stirred, the crunch of snow beneath our boots. When the wind was still, when we were still, there was nothing.
At the frozen river at the bottom of the valley, the ice broke quickly. I filled a bucket, lapping the water from it as a dog would, careful not to reach in and gather the water in my palms. Thoris had warned me not to, for he had seen men maimed that way: a single touch of water on the skin that froze when the wind turned. I had no wish to lose the fingers on my other hand.
We went to a place where we had buried our supplies, chipped at the ground, digging up grain, frozen meat, icy wood to try and burn. Moving as much as we could that day, for who knew when the storms would come again? There was still so little light, so little time.
That night, as we lay exhausted in the cave, Thoris pressed me for a song more insistently than he ever had before. But I found that I did not have the heart for it. For the first time in as long as I could remember, the words would not come; I could not sing.
‘It will come,’ Thoris said. ‘The first winter is the hardest. You will learn. And it is passing now. It is ending.’
I heard his words, knew them to be true. Yet still I did not believe.
‘I should have gone abroad,’ I said. ‘I should have taken my place on that ship. I was a fool to stay.’
There are words that a man speaks, in the cold and the dark, that he does not mean. Winter can take over a man like a fever, and falsehoods tumble from his tongue. So long as he gives no insult that must be answered with blood, he will be forgiven for it. But I meant those words. I did not speak lies, but the truth.
There in the dark, I saw Thoris shudder.
There was a day, like every other before it. Of shivering cold and hunger. Of squalor and boredom. A clearer day, so we walked through the snow towards one of our more distant caches of supplies. Sick, bent double with coughing, for we were both consumed by the same sickness.
It seemed impossible that summer could come again, we had been so long in the dark and the cold. I had not seen any other man or beast apart from Thoris for so long that the thought crept into my mind that there were no others left. That we alone in the world had survived that winter, that Ragnarök had come and gone and even the gods were lost. That we were the last men left in the world.
A sound came to me as I trudged through the snow. A soft, fragile sound, like the first note struck by an unpractised musician. I thought it a phantom of the mind at first, for in the sleepless darkness of the winter I had grown used to hearing voices and sounds that were not there. I heard it again and could not make sense of it. Again and again it came, soft still but insistent, for the musician was growing more confident, was remembering what it was to play.
I turned back to face Thoris to see if he heard it too. He had stopped walking, stood in the snow with his head tilted shut and his eyes closed. I knew that he heard it too. I knew then what it was.
I needed to see it. I would not believe unless I saw it. And though until that moment I had not known if I had the strength even to walk, suddenly I was stumbling and running through the snow, casting my head about. I clapped my hands, yelled curses, hoping to scare out the source of the sound.
There! A moment of brown motion, an angry cry, and I saw it. A little brown bird, rising from skeletal brush exhumed by the sun. It circled me, scolded me, twitched its wings and was off.
He was the first, but others would follow. The birds had returned and spring would follow them.
I sank to my knees in the snow and gave my thanks to any gods who might hear me. I looked to Thoris and found him grinning at me. A child I must have seemed to him, for he had known this moment would come. To be at the worst point of winter, where no hope is left, and to hear the birds sing.
We laughed together like madmen, howling and screaming with joy, wrestling in the snow like children at play. If a god had spoken to me at that moment and told me that I would die the next day, it would not have mattered to me. To live to hear birdsong again, it was enough.