‘No. There is more. And I think that you wish to speak it.’
Thoris’s head rolled back, twisted away from us, the way a man in fever will contort himself, seeking somehow to escape his own body, the body that tortures him.
‘I do not know what kind of a woman she was,’ he said, the words drawn out like poison that is sucked from a wound and spat upon the ground. ‘That she could do such a thing. What kind of a man I am, who would love his brother’s killer.’
Thorvaldur nodded, satisfied. This, it seemed, was his ending. The Christian ending that he sought. ‘I thank you for this,’ he said.
There was no absolution from Thoris. No relief at telling the truth. Only the sullen air of a man who feels that he has been deceived.
‘There,’ he said. ‘You have had your story. Now, give me yours.’
Thorvaldur began to speak once again. Of God, of forgiveness, of redemption. I did not listen. I looked out on the valley and listened to the call of the wind, and wondered where it was that she was buried.
24
I had always wondered how an outlaw might know the day of their return. Those who flee abroad or have the wealth to make fortresses of their homes will know the date well enough. But what of men who flee to the ice and make their homes in the dead valleys?
For most, it does not matter. They die long before their day of freedom – starving or frozen, or dead on the spears of the men who hunt them. But what of those who do survive their three years? In all the stories that I have heard, it is never spoken that an outlaw comes back a day late.
Perhaps there were outlaws who had counted or marked every day, keeping their time with the greatest precision. Or did they have another art? I have heard of men in distant lands who may read the date from the movement of the stars.
No man would want to linger in outlawry any longer than he had to, yet it would be death to return before the time. Had a man ever come back a day too early and died upon the sword of the first man he greeted, hearing his mistake as the darkness closed over him?
No, before I was an outlaw I did not know how those men could know when they should return. And yet when my time came, I knew it without a doubt.
I felt the shifting of the seasons and knew that it was the late summer of my third year. I had thought that I would have to wait until snowfall to be certain of the time, to waste a month in the agony of waiting so that I could be certain. But I knew the day itself when it came.
It was no guesswork or a counting of the days. Nor was it blind luck, and I do not think it was the work of a god. It was memory alone that told me that I could go home.
There was so much that I forgot of those three years as an outlaw. There was so little to remember. Yet I remembered everything of the day I had been outlawed. The precise curve that the sun had taken through the sky. The pattern of the sunlight on the sea. The exact ripeness of the crops in the field, so that I could have picked out a stem of wheat from that day from a hundred of its fellows harvested a day later. For when a man or a woman longs for a day so completely, it will be known when it comes once more.
And so I woke in the cave on a late summer’s day and I felt the unseen chains fall away from me. I was a free man once more.
I could go home.
The others did not speak as I made ready to depart. Thoris sat on the floor of the cave, his long arms wrapped around his knees, his head towards the ground, his ruined ear facing towards me. Thorvaldur watched me, a faint smile on his face.
I took a little food, a single skin of water, for I needed no more than that. I was a free man once more: I could call upon any farm in the land and the law of guest friendship would compel them to give me shelter for the night. I could sing for my food, cut corn and tend cattle, and receive bread and ale in return. They, still outlaws, had more need of it than I.
I wrapped the fur cloak around my shoulders, struggling to tie the clasp one-handed – three years of practice, yet still I had not mastered this. The knife went into my belt, my killer’s weapon, its edge almost dull. Last of all, I settled the sword at my hip. Gunnar’s sword, a weapon of heroes, that had not left its sheath for all the time I had been exiled. That blade was still sharp.
‘It is time, then?’ Thorvaldur said.
‘It is.’
Thorvaldur nodded.
‘We shall walk with you. For some of the way at least. Come, Thoris. We must see him out of the valley.’
I did not think that he would follow. He had barely spoken a word to me for months, for the sooner we drew to the day of my freedom, the less he wished to speak to me. He counted the days more than any of us, though their passage could bring him no reprieve. And sometimes I awoke in the night to find him watching me, his eyes cold.
But he rose without a word, and the three of us walked out together.
Down into the valley, the place that I knew as I would know a lover. The tall smooth rock that curves and hollows like the body of a woman. The place where the winter ice was thinnest on the river, where we had broken it open a hundred times for gulps of the piercing water. The rock wall that looked like a giant’s face; the hidden hole in the moor that threatened to twist and snap an ankle.
We went to where the valley opened out, where the free lands of Iceland lay stretched before us. Distant, the movement of the herds, the dancing of crops in the wind. A different world, that I could enter and they could not.
‘This is as far as we may go,’ Thoris said.
For a moment I did not dare look back on them. For I wondered if they meant to let me taste freedom for a moment before they cut my throat. We held no bond of kinship, of loyalty. I might earn great renown, bringing back the heads of those two outlaws. Perhaps they could not take the chance of letting a free man go, knowing that valley as I did.
But when I turned back to face them, they greeted me with silver, not with iron.
Thoris stepped forward and handed me a silver arm-ring, the double of the one I had traded away in Borg. In the three years we had spent together I had never seen him wear it. He must have kept it hidden away, one last treasure. A relic from his lost life. Perhaps a gift from a friend, as mine had been.
‘Take it,’ he said. ‘You shall have more need of this than I.’
‘I cannot take this from you.’
‘What use have I for silver? I shall never spend it.’
In that cave he had been a tyrant and I had learned to hate him. I was free of him now, could nurture my hatred freely. And yet I felt no need for it.
‘Why have you given this to me?’ I asked.
‘You sing well,’ he said. He seemed to want to say more, but he could not find the words.
I turned from him and looked out on the frozen valley that I had called home. The prison which he could not leave.
‘This will make a good song,’ I said.
‘Three years in this place and you think it will make a good song?’
‘All men love to hear of outlaws.’
You will sing of me?’
‘I shall.’
‘What kind of a song?’ he said, and I think there was fear in his voice. Perhaps he feared a flyting song, strange as that seemed. This man who would be forever exiled from his people, and yet he still feared to be mocked behind his back. Perhaps that was all he heard when he closed his eyes at night. Men laughing at him, a fool who had killed his brother for love.
‘You have lived out here longer than any other outlaw. What is there to mock in that?’
He turned from me and began to walk away, slow and purposeless, like an old man who has forgotten himself.
‘It was not a shameful thing,’ I said, and he looked back to face me.