It was before me once again. The valley where I had spent three years as an outlaw. A nameless place, for who would name a land where no man would wish to go to, where only the forgotten choose to live?
I could not see the herd of stolen sheep that should be wandering in the valley; perhaps Thorvaldur and Thoris had not gone raiding this early in the year. I tethered my horse at the bottom of the valley and it called out to me as I left it there. For he, too, could feel that this was a place where nothing should live and nothing could grow; the horse was afraid of being left there alone.
I began the slow climb up the side of the hill, pushing through snow slush and bog. I made my way towards the cave and I was afraid of what I would find there.
Perhaps they would cut me down: I was a free man and they still outlaws. But I had nowhere else to turn. And so I made my way up that hill and I remembered every step of the path, each little trap of earth and stone that waited to break my ankle, shatter my knee, leave me dying on the ground. Even the earth itself seems to long for the killing in such a place.
I smelt the cave before I saw it: the hot stink of close living that I had grown unaccustomed to. And I saw the shallow slit, in the side of the hill, above where some god or dragon slept. I let my hand drift to the knife at my hip as I drew close.
It was empty. I waited to see if some outlaw would stir from the blankets and filth, like a cursed man rising from a grave, but there was no one. I knelt beside the entrance, running my hand through the ash of a recent fire, the gnawed bones in a land where there were no flesh-eaters but men. In the air, the fresh stink of men in confinement. They had been here so I sat to wait, sitting atop that familiar warm stone at the back of the cavern where, deep below, a dragon still slumbered in the heart of the mountain.
I remembered lying in that cave, rotten with fever, my left hand dead to the touch. I remembered Thoris nursing me as he might have nursed a child. I remembered the coming of the Christian, the slow breaking of our friendship. I remembered swearing that I would never return to this place – another promise unkept. Then I heard the breaking of snow and there was no more time for memory.
A shadow at the entrance, the low sun at his back. I could not tell who it was at first. Once I would have known those men apart by smell alone, but I had lost that gift.
‘Welcome, Kjaran.’ It was the voice of the Christian that spoke.
‘Thorvaldur,’ I said.
A pause. ‘I do not know that I am glad to see you again.’
‘Where is Thoris?’
Thorvaldur made no reply at first. He slung his burden from his back: a skin full of water, fresh from the frozen river. He offered it to me first, as was my right as his guest. I let my hand wander from my knife to the water, but when I drank it it was sharp and piercing against my tongue. I winced, for I had grown unused to such things, and handed it back to the Christian. He chuckled a little and drank slowly, unmoved by the cold.
‘Thoris died, in this past winter.’
‘Did you kill him?’ I said, speaking softly.
He laughed again. ‘No, no. A fever took him. Quick and true.’ He leaned forward and put his hands together. ‘And now tell me, what brings you back here?’
I did not answer.
‘You longed to see us once again? I had not thought that of you. Or have you earned outlawry once more through some rash action?’ He rapped the fingers of one hand on the pommel of his sword. ‘Or have you come to claim some reward, for the killing of an outlaw? I did not think you fool enough to come alone, if that be your intention.’
‘You said that when we met again I could choose. Between your God and a death in battle.’
‘That I did. Are you ready to choose?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I wish to choose both.’
He stared at me for a moment, his eyes hunting across my face. Perhaps he thought I mocked him, an insult that he would answer with blood. But when he saw that I meant what I said he crowed with laughter, eyes rolling like a berserker, clapping his hands against his thighs in delight.
‘Oh, Kjaran,’ he said, ‘you do not know how long I have hoped to hear an answer such as that. The true answer. I have asked many that question, and none have spoken as you have.’ He cocked his head to the side. ‘Why do this?’
‘There are men I must fight. Too many for me to face alone. Will you stand beside me? Will you fight and die with me against them, if I swear to your God?’
‘Your feud?’
‘Yes.’
His fingers tapped against his sword, dancing and moving, as if it were an instrument on which he played a silent tune.
‘Are they Christians, the men you will fight?’
‘No.’
He paused, considering. ‘Then yes,’ he said. ‘But you must be made a Christian at once. There is no time to spare.’
‘What must I do?’
He smiled at me, that half-toothed smile, a corpse’s smile.
‘Come with me,’ he said.
Frozen water does not lie silent. It moans like a dying man. It barks like a mad dog. And when the wind runs across it, one can hear the sound of scratching fingers, of all the dead men that the water has swallowed, begging to be let out.
It was the start of summer and yet here the river was still frozen. I placed each foot carefully, hunting for where the ice seemed thickest, even as it groaned beneath me. I had seen a man swallowed by that kind of ice when I was a boy. A snap and he was gone beneath the water. By the time I got to him, slipping and sliding across the ice as I ran, the water had frozen over once more. I saw him beat against that ice once, twice, three times, but already I knew it was too late.
Thorvaldur strode out ahead of me, trusting the god to guide his steps, only pausing from time to time to look back and mock me with a smile.
‘You are afraid to die? I thought better of you than that.’
‘There is still much that I have left to do.’
He shrugged. ‘Here, then,’ he said. ‘This will be far enough.’ And he took a small axe from his belt; he handed it to me and told me to break the ice.
I have heard tell of how sometimes, in the worst of the feuds when an avenging warband has a man at their mercy, they will refuse to grant him an honourable death, a death in battle. They hand him a tool rather than a weapon, and they make the doomed man dig his own grave.
You may question why a man would do such a thing. Why he would not simply refuse and call on them to kill him cleanly. On this the stories are silent. Perhaps it is the threat of torture that compels him, or it may be that they promise to hand him a weapon if he does as they ask, to give him a chance to die well. Whatever it may be, it seems that the doomed man will always do as they ask. And whatever bargain is made for an honourable death, the killers refuse it. They put him into that grave and they bury him alive. They let him drown beneath the earth.
As I worked the ice, Thorvaldur sitting cross-legged on the frozen water and watching me in silence, I thought only of those stories. And yet I could not seem to stop.
I cut a circle in the ice – a fisherman’s circle, though there was nothing to catch in this dead water. And Thorvaldur spoke the words in some tongue that I did not understand, his hands clasped together in prayer.
‘A spell?’ I said, when he had finished.
‘There is no witchcraft here. Only words. And water. And God.’ He pointed to the ice. ‘Kneel with me.’
I felt his hand against my neck, the sound of more words, the cracking of the ice beneath my knees. Then the world swung upwards and I felt the water close around me. And from my mouth, the deadened sound of screaming underwater.