This is no song, where one man may stand against one hundred. It is no tale where the warrior kills his sworn enemy as he dies. He does not even see Björn when he takes the first cut. For they are around him on every side and the blades dance against his skin.
He swings out blindly, is cut again. Men are all around him, so close that he smells the stink of their sweat, the foulness of their breath. But whenever he strikes out, fast as he is, his axe finds no flesh. It cuts through nothing but air, until it catches in the slats of a shield; the head breaks from the shaft when he tries to wrench it free.
He falls to the ground; the broken axe is wrenched from his hand. There has been no pain until that moment and suddenly there is nothing but pain. He waits for the killing blow: the blade into the side of the throat that rips forward, or that slides between the ribs or down through the shoulder and into the heart. But it does not come. The hands grip tighter, he sees Björn come forward, and he knows the slow death they mean to give to him. And at the last, he is truly afraid.
The knives begin their slow work upon him, and he tries not to scream for as long as he can.
That is how my friend died.
27
I let Kari speak and I asked no questions. He spoke haltingly, as though he were relearning the words as he spoke them. Several times, when his hesitancy stretched on, he seemed almost to drift to sleep, and when this happened I reached out my hand and gripped his wrist. I kept my fingers from the burned flesh, but it was no mother’s touch I gave him. I let him know that he would have no rest until he had finished his story.
When he had done so, I watched his eyes close, his breathing go soft and steady. I thought of the story that he had not told me. The story that I knew well enough. The story of how his mother and sister must have died.
‘Should I have died with him?’
I started at the voice.
‘I thought you asleep,’ I said. ‘You should rest. You have earned it.’
‘Tell me, Kjaran. Please.’
Should I have given him the truth? Perhaps. But I found that I could not do it.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It is better that you live.’
‘There is no shame in it?’
‘Is there shame for me, that I was not there?’
‘You were not his son.’
I had no answer to that. I sat beside him and we watched the fire. After a time I felt a hesitant touch against my hand. His fingers reaching out, as Gunnar used to do. I clasped his hand in mine and I thought of the friend I had lost.
‘What will I do?’ he said.
‘We could leave Iceland. Find another country to live in.’
‘We cannot run.’
‘It is what Gunnar would have wanted.’
‘That does not matter.’ He shook his head, slowly, like a dozing drunkard or a man underwater. ‘There is shame in letting him lie unavenged.’
‘There is. But it is what Gunnar would have wanted.’
‘What of my mother? My sister?’
‘Björn would not kill them. He had more honour than that.’
‘But I heard—’
‘You do not know what you heard.’
He fell silent and I thought I had won. But I felt it, then. The way a wounded man does not know it at first, feels no pain. And a moment later, puts his hand to his chest and finds himself slain.
I thought of Dalla and I knew what she would have wanted. We could go from this place and find a new home. The shame of Gunnar’s death, perhaps I could bear that. But to leave a father unavenged – what a thing it would be for him, to live his life with that weight upon him.
‘I think you are right,’ I said slowly.
He looked up at me and his eyes were alive once more.
‘We shall kill them all?’ he asked, hope in his voice.
‘Yes.’
He smiled and for a moment he was a child once more, filled with the joy of the child at a dream. ‘How shall we do that?’
‘Be patient. The slave takes revenge at once—’
‘But the coward never does,’ he said, finishing the proverb for me.
On the first day of spring I rose before the dawn. I moved quietly in the darkness, but confidently too, like a blind man in a place he knows well. Through touch, I found the things I had placed the night before. A sack of salted fish. Several skins of water. A thick blanket, marked up with earth and grass. I left Gunnar’s sword sheathed and lying by the fire. A parting gift for Kari. And when I was ready, I laid my hand to Ragnar’s shoulder and woke him gently.
‘Speak soft,’ I whispered to him. ‘Or do not speak at all.’
He nodded and waited.
‘I shall be gone for some time,’ I said.
‘Where do you go?’
‘It is better that you do not know.’
‘Kjaran…’
‘Do not speak. Listen. There is a chance I shall not return.’
‘What shall we do?’
‘Convince him to go abroad, if you can.’
‘And what else?’
I looked across to Sigrid. She lay still, with her back to me, in a semblance of sleep. I think that she merely pretended not to wake, but I could not tell for certain.
‘Raise your children well and be kind to her,’ I said. And as I spoke those words, I think I saw her shudder.
Then I was gone, out across the dale. On foot with no horse beneath me: a single whicker in the darkness might give me away. I walked and ran, stumbling and rising once again, heedless of the bogs and stones that waited to trip me. Winter had only just ended and the nights were still long, but I had to find my place before the rising of the sun.
I saw what I was looking for: a shadow on a hillside, squat and ugly like some great monster lurking in the darkness. I circled to the right, my hands held before me, until I felt branches twine against my fingers, budding leaves under my palms. I lay down amidst the brush and the low trees. I wrapped myself in a blanket and with my good hand cast earth and twigs over it.
The sun rose, slow and reluctant, still half-asleep from winter, and it shone down on a building amongst the hills. Not a longhouse, but a little shieling, on the good grazing uplands. And I hoped that what I had heard was true.
For days, I watched and waited.
It looked abandoned at first – the untended roof sagging inwards, one wall bowed and holed as a longship shattered on a reef. It was too early in the season for a man to be staying there. Soon the few sheep who had survived the winter would be brought to the highlands to graze, but not yet. It was no place for a man to live.
At noon on the first day a slave came to the door bearing bread, and he left with empty hands soon after. Later, I saw a man come from within, a thick-bearded man with no rings of silver upon his arm. A servant or a slave, for he did not have the look of a landed man. He chopped wood and took it within the shieling, but he left before nightfall. The wood he chopped was not for himself.
A second day passed, and a third, and I lay on the ground, unmoving except at night. If they came in search of firewood, they would catch me and kill me. But I had the favour of the gods, or simple luck, and no man came to the forest. Slaves and servants came and went, but no man of note: not Björn or any of his kin, or another from the war band. And I never saw the man who lived within. I saw the smoke of his fire, smelt the meat that he cooked. Sometimes I thought I heard a sound from within, the sound of a man singing softly to himself. But he never left the shieling.