Then I was moving, retching and choking on the smoke that still rose, the smell of burned skin sharp in my nose. My eyes useless, my hands seeking, digging into the ashes of the home, pulling away pieces of burned timber, until my fingers found a different kind of warmth.
Half-buried, barely breathing. Kari, Gunnar’s son.
The sun was falling from the sky and I did not have much time. Even over the wet slap of hooves against the ground and the crying of the wind I could still hear the rattle and gasp of the dying boy.
He had tried to crawl into that tunnel. The gap in the wall where, three years before, he had escaped into the night, looking for a lost horse. But he had not gone all the way through. He had grown too broad in the shoulders, too much a man to make use of a child’s tunnel. And so he had lain there, trapped, as his family burned around him.
I had pulled him free and found that the fire had still reached him. Cloth burned away, the skin red and weeping. I lifted him in my arms, listened to the rattle and gasp of his breath, each one softer than the last. I threw him across my blown horse and pulled myself into the saddle, and set it to a gallop one last time. We rode for the coast.
Towards the sea we travelled. Towards a little longhouse that I had seen from afar, but never been too. For it was a luckless place, where a luckless man lived. Any who had wisdom would shun it.
The horse gave out on the edges of the farmland, going to ground as noiselessly as a man who is speared through the heart. I gathered the boy up in my arms and ran as best I could.
The longhouse was small. No great chieftain’s home, not even the place of a wealthy farmer. A home for a solitary man, a little scrap of land for one who had not earned the right to it any more.
I struck the door and tried to call out, but no sound came. I swallowed, spat and tried to call again, and this time my voice sounded.
I heard the shifting of a single pair of feet inside – no rush of a warband to the door. It swung open a fraction, and it was Ragnar who stood on the other side, looking at me with fearful eyes. Ragnar the Keel-farer, the Coward.
In his hand he held an axe in a slack, unpractised grip. He looked at me and I saw that he did not know me for who I was. I held up the boy in my arms a little higher, as though I were offering him as a gift.
‘It is Gunnar’s child,’ I said.
I saw his skin go pale, his hands tremble. For he knew me, then.
‘The others?’ he said.
‘They are dead.’ I felt the boy stir a little in my arms. Perhaps even in the depths of sleep he could still hear my words. That his father, his mother, his sister – they were all dead. ‘Can I come inside?’
I felt one hand on my shoulder, guiding me. I saw the other cradling the head of the boy in my arms, making sure that I did not strike it against a wall or the frame of a door.
In the light of the fire I saw that there were no others in that place. Everywhere there were mementos of his travels. Some piece of a stitched sail. Little relics of distant lands, coins and knives and worn pieces of whalebone. It was a captain’s home, and even it seemed to long for the sea as much as Ragnar did.
‘I know that you have no woman here. But I have nowhere else to go.’
‘I have a wife now,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh? I am glad.’
He flinched at the word. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘We must do what we can.’
The cooking fire burned high, though there was no one tending to it.
‘Where is your wife?’ I said.
‘She is at the shieling.’
‘Do you know anything of fire?’
He looked at the boy in my arms, reached out hesitantly to the red marks, the weeping skin.
‘I have seen men burned before,’ he said. ‘We must give him cold water. Only a little. But we must keep his throat cold, and clear.’
He passed me a horn of water and I tilted it towards the boy’s mouth. A few drops at a time, patient and constant, as falling water wears patterns into stone.
‘Later, we must clean the skin,’ Ragnar said. ‘It will hurt him terribly, but it must be done. And that is all I know to do.’
‘Will he live, do you think?’
He hesitated, his mouth working silently. Then shook his head. ‘Burned men almost always die,’ he said. ‘I am sorry, Kjaran.’
I looked down on the boy and watched my tears falling upon his face. I felt no shame. It was as though I watched another man weeping.
‘You must tell me what has happened.’
‘Much has changed since you left us,’ Ragnar said, and he seemed to diminish as he spoke.
‘Tell me of the feud.’
He dipped the horn into a barrel of water and this time he held it out to me. I touched it to my lips, felt the sharpness of the cold water like a blade against my teeth. I drank it down in one draught and held it out to be refilled. Again and again I drank, Ragnar saying nothing. When at last I wanted no more, he spoke.
‘They returned from the mountains. Björn and his kin. They said that they had caught you and killed you. And they bore Ketil with them, his leg maimed, as proof of what they said.’
‘Ketil lives?’
‘If you can call it that.’
‘And you believed them.’
‘Gunnar would not. But yes, the rest of us believed him.’
‘And what then?’
‘Nothing. Gunnar swore vengeance, but had not the followers to claim it. Neither side could move against the other.’
‘Until today.’
‘Until today.’
‘There were no followers with him,’ I said. ‘Do you think they fled the fighting?’
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘They left before the fighting.’
A silence for a time, as the fire burned and my tears no longer fell.
‘Tell me of this,’ I said.
‘There is little enough to tell. They left him, one by one. Some were bought, I think. With silver and promises of land. Others Gunnar drove away himself. Quarrelling with them, accusing them of betraying him, of betraying you. He was half-mad at the end, I think. And the last of them left when they saw this, for they saw no honour in dying at his side. So it went, until he stood alone in the feud.’ He breathed deeply and let his head hang low. ‘We have known this would come, sooner or later. One cannot stand alone for long.’
‘You would not stand at his side. You were afraid?’
‘He would have no company with me. He cursed me for letting you run to the mountains.’ He lifted his head and I could see the sadness marked on his face. ‘You must believe me.’
‘I believe you.’
His eyes drifted to the boy in my arms. ‘They burned them out?’
‘Yes. The cowards. Ten against one, and they would not face him as a man.’
‘He was a warrior out of the old times,’ he said. ‘They would not dare stand against him.’ Ragnar reached out and took the boy’s hand in his. ‘Where did you find him?’
‘The boy hid. It saved his life. It seems that all around Gunnar there were none but cowards.’
Ragnar flinched again.
‘What of Olaf?’ I said.
‘He sought to keep the peace. His lands lay between those of Vigdis and Gunnar, and he would not stand for warbands roaming across his fields.’ He rubbed his hands against each other. ‘But I do not think that he will be sorry to hear of the end of the feud.’
‘What end of the feud?’ I said.
He dropped his head, spoke bare above a whisper. ‘Even you must know that it cannot go on. You killed Erik and answered for it with outlawry. Gunnar killed Hakon and answered for it with his own life. The debt is settled.’
‘What of his wife and children?’