‘You must know that to be an accident. They would not kill a woman and child deliberately. It would be a shameful thing.’
‘Perhaps. You are right.’
‘You have suffered much. But the feud has to end. You do know that, don’t you?’
I closed my eyes. ‘Yes. I know.’
‘Whatever I can do to help, I shall. But Kjaran, there is something more that you must know.’
‘Tell me, then.’
‘I do not know how to speak this.’
‘What can you say that can hurt me now? I am beyond such things.’
He licked his lips. ‘We thought you dead,’ he said.
We. I would not have known, if it were not for that word. If he had said I, I would have lived in ignorance a little longer. But he said it, and I knew.
I heard the sound of the door as it swung open. And in a moment, she was there.
I could not look at her face, at first. To see the face that I had fought to remember in that maze of ice and snow, the sharp lines of her face, the light dancing in her eyes – I knew I had not the courage to look there. I looked instead upon her hands, remembered the way she had once touched my face with them, the touch light and soft as snow. I remembered the turn of her waist as it had felt under my hands, but now the key of the house was tied about her waist, as was her right. In the way she stood I could see the strength of a housewife who walks many miles in front of her loom each day – a serving maid no longer. No sign of a child on her body, yet somehow I felt that one was there. I knew it in a single look.
I bowed my head and stroked the hair of the dying boy on my lap.
I heard Sigrid sit. Then I heard Ragnar speak.
‘They came back from the mountains. Björn and the others. They came back bearing a crippled man and stories of your death.’
‘And you believed them.’
‘Yes.’
‘You believed the stories, too?’ I said, looking at her for the first time.
Those strange eyes of hers met mine and there was no pain in them. Only a certain cold anger, the eyes of one in a feud.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But what does that matter?’
‘You may stay as long as is needful,’ Ragnar said.
I gave a gesture of the head that could have been a nod, if they chose to take it as such.
‘What will you do?’ Ragnar asked.
‘Will you care for the boy?’ I said to Sigrid. ‘I must go back to Gunnar’s house.’
‘What will you do there?’ she asked.
But I had already stood, was already gone.
Above me, scattered clouds and a hollow moon. Below, the wet earth, scoured with rain. And soon enough, the smell of ash in my nostrils, the taste of it on my tongue.
It was dark by the time I returned to the farm. It was better work done at night, for the dead almost seem alive in the darkness. I was not digging graves, it seemed, but shelters. Beds carved into the earth, for them to rest and rise again.
The greatest men and women are given a boat filled with treasures to take them to another world, piled high with weapons and gold and slaves with their throats freshly cut, for their service does not end with death. What gifts could I find for that great warrior Gunnar, against whose sword none could stand? What gifts for his wife and child? A few carved chess pieces, a little wooden horse that had somehow escaped the fire, the chain of stones looped on to a silver wire. What had not burned had been taken, and these were all the treasures that I could give them for the afterlife.
Before I cast the first handful of earth down on to Gunnar, I looked on the sword at my hip.
‘I cannot return this to you yet,’ I said, ‘for it is still bright and unbloodied. I will stain it for you first.’ And I thought I saw his ruined face smiling up at me from his grave.
I could feel madness so close that I could touch it. Like a hand that is proffered in a dance by a smiling girl – one has only to reach out and take it. And I would, I promised myself, for that would be my reward. But not yet.
I laid the earth upon the dead and then I laid down myself upon it. No green fire dancing in the sky, not this early in the year. It was a short night, that late in summer. A few hours of darkness, and I did not sleep.
One more time I looked on what remained of the longhouse, the fields, the hills around it, the grave at my feet. I did not look on that place to fix it firm in my mind. I looked on it and I wanted to forget.
I looked down on the tracks, clear-marked in the wet ground, and not yet washed away or trampled and forgotten. The killing was there, simple enough to read. I saw where the men had circled the longhouse, where they had come forward to throw their torches and retreat just as quickly. I saw the single trail of footprints where Gunnar had gone to fight them alone. How he had reached a place, then turned in every direction, surrounded on all sides. And I saw another set of tracks, leading from the longhouse and back once more. I saw those footprints and I saw the story written there. I knew what had been done.
26
After a night without sleep, all things seem as dreams do. That morning I walked back through the valley as I might have walked through such a dream, through a world that no longer made sense to me. And so when I saw Sigrid sitting outside in the sun, outside a little longhouse such as I had one day hoped that I might own, it seemed to complete the vision. How many times had I dreamt of such a thing, in those years of exile?
It was only as I drew closer, and saw her stitching together two pieces of a sail for her husband’s ship, that the dream was broken. She looked up, her hands curling into fists as she saw me.
‘If we still lived in a time when women wielded swords,’ I said, ‘you would have been quite the warrior.’
‘Do you think there was such a time? You poets like to sing of it, but I do not think I believe you.’
‘I do not know. Perhaps.’
She looked me over, seeking some sign of where I had spent the night. Some mark of earth or of blood.
‘Where did you go last night? How little courage you had, to stay and speak to me. I would have thought I had earned that much.’
‘I went to bury Gunnar and his kin,’ I said, and I saw her eyes dim for a moment.
‘That was well done,’ she said.
I sat on the ground before her and made no answer.
‘A battle?’ she asked, looking at my maimed left hand.
‘No,’ I said. ‘The cold.’
She paused for a moment. ‘I often hoped that you suffered,’ she said quietly. ‘I do repent that now.’
‘Which of the three winters past did you spend learning to hate me?’
‘The very first,’ she said.
‘So soon? I see that our love was worth little enough to you. A little matter to pass a summer, I suppose. But it meant more than that to me.’
She tossed her head at that. ‘What was it that you said Gunnar called you? Kjaran the Kind.’
I did not answer.
‘I thought that once, too. Then I found a man who was truly kind.’
‘And a coward.’
‘I care not. Neither do you, I think.’
‘I think much of Ragnar.’
‘Do not think it some marriage of pity,’ she said. ‘He is a better man than you.’ She cursed and threw her stitching to the ground. I waited.
She turned to me. ‘You want to ask me why. So why not ask?’
‘Did you think me dead?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I did not know. I had always thought that I would know if you had been killed. When my father was killed I seemed to know it before they spoke it. A touch of his ghost on my shoulder, a whisper in my ear, and then he was gone. But I never heard you speak to me.’ She picked up the two squares of the sail and began to sew once again. ‘And I had decided before they returned, before they spoke of your death.’