by Lucy Taylor
When we stopped to rest the horses and have lunch, I busied myself frying up the last of the potatoes to go with the strips of haddock and cod that were a staple of our meals. Graham scanned the cliffs with his binoculars and reported there was a wooded bluff above a gorge, but that the entrance appeared too narrow to navigate with the herd.
“Is that the canyon you’ve been raving about?” he asked Stolli.
Stolli had just made coffee. Now he set down the pot and brought Graham a full mug.
“No, it isn’t, my friend.”
“Then what canyon is it? Where the hell are we?”
“Know what, Graham, I don’t know. You were right. You’re always right. I’ve got us fucking lost.”
“Oh that’s just great,” said Graham. “Now what do we do?”
Stolli let out a booming laugh. “You should see your face, Graham! I was only kidding. That’s the canyon, all right. We made it.”
He tried to give Graham the mug of coffee. “Drink this, perk you up.”
“Dammit, I’m nervous enough,” said Graham.
“No kaffi?”
“I couldn’t stomach it. Not ‘til we’re back in Reykjavik.”
“Right you are,” said Stolli. He set down the mug, grabbed the iron skillet I was using to fry the potatoes and, wielding it like a tennis racket, smashed it across the back of Graham’s skull, crumpling him instantly.
“Jesus!” I shrieked. “You didn’t have to do that!”
But Stolli only shrugged and smiled. “What was I supposed to do, he wouldn’t drink the fucking kaffi!”
««—»»
We tied Graham, deeply unconscious, to the back of his horse. I stayed behind while Stolli rode toward the canyon, driving all the horses except my own ahead of him. I hoped Graham would remain unconscious, that he wouldn’t wake up at the last moment and see what was about to happen. It was a terrible way to die, but Stolli and I agreed the authorities would never question it.
As I watched Stolli ride away, I felt alone and suddenly vulnerable, aware of a solitude so profound and vast one might sink down in it and never resurface. Tears welled in my eyes. I thought about Graham’s gun and wished that I’d taken it from him before Stolli rode off.
Raising the binoculars, I scanned the cliffs at the highest point, where the basalt columns rose up like the pipes of a massive cathedral organ.
The man I’d met the night before was standing high up on the canyon wall, balanced on a ledge. His arms were folded on his chest and he was staring toward the mouth of the gorge, the direction from which Stolli would come. How he’d managed to cover the same amount of ground that we had, I couldn’t imagine. Even if he had a horse, we couldn’t have missed seeing him on the bleak, dark-sanded lava desert we’d traversed.
Saddling my horse, I galloped toward the canyon to warn Stolli. I was still a quarter mile away when I heard loud noises and the sound of Stolli yelling. Pulling my horse up short, I took out the binoculars and scanned the entrance to the canyon until I spotted him. He was using a chunk of lava to bang on a metal pan, spooking the herd into flight. I checked the cliffs again, but the man who’d followed us was gone.
I wondered how much he’d seen and what he might do about it.
As I approached the mouth of the canyon, I saw Stolli riding toward me.
“It’s done,” he laughed. “Heartiest congratulations to the grieving widow!”
“Shut up, you idiot, we have a problem.”
“What now?”
“That weird man I told you about—he’s here. He must have seen you.”
Shielding his eyes from the relentless sunlight, Stolli squinted up at the cliffs. “If someone’s there, I’ll deal with it. Let’s collect our victim of tragic circumstances first. Come on, I need your help.”
I doubted that. I thought Stolli took a sadistic pleasure in making sure that I saw Graham’s mangled remains. I didn’t want to be alone, though, so I rode with him.
At its widest point, the canyon was about three hundred feet across but after that, it veered inward and narrowed sharply. I could see fresh hoof prints in the dirt, where the herd, spooked by Stolli’s noise-making, had stampeded through.
A quarter of a mile in, the passage narrowed to the point where we could no long ride comfortably side by side and Stolli took the lead. I kept looking above, half-expecting a hail of rocks or even a boulder to descend on us. The horses were nervous, too, ears back, jittery in such close quarters. We dismounted and continued slowly until the passage began to widen again.
“This isn’t possible,” said Stolli. “He isn’t here.”
“You’re sure this is where you left him?”
“Of course I’m sure! Right there, where the horses couldn’t miss him. He was still unconscious, but I tied him up just in case. Even if he woke up, there’s no way he could’ve untied himself and climbed out. It’s too steep.”
“It’s that man I saw. He moved Graham out of the way.”
“For what?”
“He’s a fucking do-gooder, Stolli, how would I know?”
««—»»
He relived the scenes endlessly, but in different order, key moments tossed and gathered up and flung again like bones hurled by a sorcerer.
Thorir’s kinsmen had been a savage lot, afire with bloodlust. After decapitating Gunnar’s brother, they slung his body across a horse and carried it away, seeking to desecrate the corpse further by denying it a proper burial.
Gunnar had retreated to the remotest part of the Sprengisandur, an area where even outlaws seldom ventured, and he watched his brother’s killer’s gallop toward the gorge. He knew they were using Egil’s body to lure him out into the open, that he was sealing his own fate when he crept into their camp that night, but as a man of honor, how could he do otherwise?
Two men were guarding the camp, but Gunnar came upon them so silently that he was able to kill the first one from behind, running his spear clear through the man’s chest. The second man came at him swinging an axe, but Gunnar blocked the blows with his shield and plunged his dagger through the man’s eye. Then, before the others awakened, he untied Egil’s body and carried it on his back up onto the bluff.
««—»»
As we continued searching for Graham, Stolli raged.
“Where is he? He didn’t just walk away.” Suddenly he whirled around and screamed in my face. “What did you do, Ellen? You get cold feet? Did you sneak back here, untie him, and hide him somewhere?”
“How would I do that…? Why would I do it?”
“I don’t know. But so help me God, Ellen, if you did, you’re gonna die here with him.”
At that moment, I didn’t think anything could have frightened me more than Stolli, but I was wrong.
“Shut up,” I shouted. “Listen!”
It was the sound that I thought Graham had imagined, the high-pitched, terrifying skreighing of stallions fighting, increasing in intensity until it seemed the battling horses must be just beyond us, at the other end of the canyon.
Stolli ran to grab the reins of his horse, but it reared and cantered away, my own horse right behind it. Above the sound of the stallions, there rose the dull percussive beat of hooves, as the herd reversed direction and raced back up the gorge.
“Climb!” I shouted, but Stolli was already grabbing at a handhold in the rock wall and hoisting himself up.
I put my booted foot up on a rock, grabbed a ledge above me—and fell back as the rock gave way. I could hear the horses pounding closer, terrified by the banshee-screams of the stallions.
Another handhold—this time, I got some leverage and pulled myself up a few feet off the ground. As I continued to climb, I looked up so I could follow the path Stolli had chosen and saw him already far above me, almost at the top. He was reaching for the final handhold to vault himself up. I saw a face peer down at him, a hand extended.
“Stolli, don’t!”
But there was nowhere else for him to go. He hesitate
d an instant, then reached up and grabbed the proffered hand. The muscles in the man’s thick forearm bulged as he gripped Stolli’s arm and heaved him up over the edge. When I saw Stolli standing, brushing himself off safely, I let out the breath that I’d been holding and reached for my next handhold. The horses were much closer now. The stallions, the damned stallions that I still couldn’t see, went on ripping each other.
Something tumbled from the cliff top—a brown-tipped scarlet bird, I thought, until I saw the bright blood spraying.
A few seconds after his hand passed by, the rest of Stolli followed.
He struck an outcropping of rock, rolled about twenty feet, and fell again, thudding to the canyon floor with a force that must have killed him.
It hadn’t. He flopped onto his back, face slack with shock as he stared at his pumping wrist and mangled legs and the horses racing toward him in full flight.
The lead horse instinctively jumped him, but the ones behind were bunched together and pulped him beneath their hooves.
I didn’t look again until I’d reached the top and pulled myself over. Below, what had been Stolli was now a gory mush. Except for a gyrfalcon that wheeled overhead, I was alone on a broad bluff forested with thickets of dwarf birch and willow.
I couldn’t take time to worry about Stolli’s death or Graham’s disappearance. I needed to get back to the camp, pack some provisions, and round up the two horses Stolli and I had been riding. My plan was to head north toward Lake Myvatn, which would be swarming with campers, hikers, and four wheel drive tours this time of year. I could get help and report two deaths.
I was already rehearsing what I’d tell the authorities when the man who’d just murdered Stolli emerged from the thicket of birch. At his waist a small axe hung from a leather strap, its blade so recently used that the bloodstains were not yet dry. He looked even more haggard and filthy than before. I realized then what it was that had struck me the first time I’d seen him but that I hadn’t been able to place—he was covered in sweat, dirt and blood, yet he had no odor.
As real as I am, I remembered telling Stolli, and yet how could he be?
He stared at me, eyes black with anger, and spat out words I couldn’t understand, but whose essence was all too clear—I was guilty, shamed, and stood convicted.
“Please,” I said. “Whoever it is you think I am, I’m not. Whatever it is you think I’ve done, I’m sorry.”
I stretched my hand out to him, beseeching leniency, and waited for God or Satan, one, to act on my behalf.
He gripped the axe, but instead of hoisting it to cleave my skull, he merely ran his thumb along the blade so that his thumbnail, when he raised his hand, was slick with blood.
He bared his teeth, part grimace, part deranged grin, the malicious smile of one who can afford to wait, because he has all eternity to do so.
I knew then that he would.
Behind him, the saplings bent and parted.
“Get away from her!” ordered Graham, aiming the Ruger. His forehead still oozed blood from the awful gash. He looked unsteady and demented, like a torn, wind-blasted scarecrow.
I raised my hands in an absurd gesture, as if my palms could deflect a bullet. “Graham, let me explain.”
“No need to.” His voice quavered and broke with exhaustion. “I know what happened. This madman attacked me in our camp. One minute I remember we were having coffee and the next I woke up here and saw him tossing Stolli off the cliff.”
Relief transfixed me. Graham didn’t know what really happened, and with Stolli dead, he’d never have to know the truth.
“Stay back!” Graham shouted suddenly, because the man had started inching toward him. His face betrayed no fear whatever of the gun. His eyes shone with bright malevolence as he freed the axe from his belt.
Graham stood rooted, frozen.
“Graham!” I shouted, “Shoot him!”
««—»»
Memories of bloody mayhem ebbed and flowed through his being like a lurid tide. He had never feared death, only cowardice.
It was retrieving his brother’s body that had proved his undoing. Three of Thorir’s kinsmen tracked him onto the wooded bluff above the canyon and cornered him at the edge of a cliff, but so fiercely did he fight that within minutes one of them was dead, the other dying.
The third man dealt such heavy blows with his sword that Gunnar’s shield split down the center. He tossed it aside and reached for his axe, but to his amazement, his final adversary had transformed into a withered, elfin man who wielded, not a sword, but a puny, inconsequential object with a round black eye. The strange weapon didn’t cause him pain, but the shock of the noise enraged and unhinged him, and he hurled himself at his enemy.
As he did, he saw Asgerd’s face and knew all that had happened to him was happening still and ever would be, eternity spent dying in the Sprengisandur, careening through the void.
««—»»
I stood immobile at the cliff’s edge, unable to comprehend what I’d witnessed.
As the man lunged toward him, Graham fired the gun over and over into his chest, but for all the damage it did, he might as well have flicked him with a feather. The huge man never faltered. With a roar, he flung away the axe and seized Graham in his massive arms, twisting, and then lurching backward as in a drunken pirouette. One minute he and Graham spun together in a bizarre embrace, teetering at the cliff’s edge. Then gravity took them and they were gone.
I was the only one who screamed.
I didn’t look right away and when I finally did, I saw what I feared seeing most—Graham’s body, but only his.
««—»»
In the end, I got everything I wanted and much that I did not. The deaths of Stolli and Graham were deemed accidental—it’s understood that those who venture into the harsh interior of Iceland sometimes meet grim fates. With the money I inherited from Graham, I bought Tolting Pony Farm, where I raise Icelandics, but it’s near Madison, Wisconsin, not outside Reykjavik. I travel widely, obsessively, but I’ve not returned to Iceland.
At least not physically.
In dreams, I go there nightly, fleeing through the infernal bleakness of the Sprendisandur, pursued by something pitiless and savage. I cry out and try to run, but find myself ensnared by clumps of shadows that seethe like snakes around my feet. They slither upward toward my throat and I awake sweat-drenched and screaming.
I can’t see the one who follows yet, but I can sense him nearby, patient and implacable.
I know I don’t have long to wait.
Lately, just before I fall asleep, I hear the stallions screaming.
Nikishi
Seasick and shivering, Thomas Blacksburg peered out from beneath the orange life boat canopy, watching helplessly as the powerful Benguela current swept him north up the coast of Namibia. For hours, he’d been within sight of the Skeleton Coast, that savage, wave-battered portion of the West African shore stretching between Angola to the north and Swakopmund to the south.
Through ghostly filaments of fog that drifted around the boat, Blacksburg could make out the distant shore and the camel’s back outline of towering, buff-colored dunes. To his horror, the land appeared to be receding. Having been brought tantalizingly close to salvation, the current was now tugging him back out into the fierce Atlantic.
A leviathan wave powered up under the boat, permitting Blacksburg a view of houses strung out like pastel-colored beads. Impossible, he thought. This far north, there was nothing but the vast, inhospitable terrain of the Namib desert, an undulating dune scape stretching inland all the way to the flat, sun-blasted wasteland of the Etosha Pan.
Blacksburg calculated his options and found them few. So suddenly and fiercely had the storm struck the night before that no distress call had gone out from the ill-fated yacht Obimi. With the captain knocked overboard and the boat taking on water, Blacksburg and his employer, Horace DeGroot, had been too busy trying to launch the life boat to radio for help. The Obimi wasn’t exp
ected in Angola until the following Friday. No one was looking yet. And when they did look, there would be nothing to find. And now it was just him.
The settlement in the dunes appeared to be his only chance.
Checking to make sure the leather pouch strapped across his chest was still secure, he dove into the water.
««—»»
Hours passed before finally he hauled himself ashore and collapsed, half-dead, onto the sand. The fog had lifted, revealing a narrow beach hemmed in between two vast oceans—to the west, the wild Atlantic and, to the east, an unbroken sea of dunes that rose in undulating waves of buff and ochre and gold. Silence reigned. The hiss and thunder of the surf was punctuated only the cries of cormorants and the plaintive lamentations of gulls.
Believing that he’d overshot the settlement he’d glimpsed from the boat, Blacksburg trudged south.
Fatigue dogged him and acted on his brain like a psychedelic drug. Retinues of ghost crabs, fleet translucent carrion-eaters with eyes on stalks, seemed to scurry in his footprints with malevolent intent. Once he thought he glimpsed a spidery-limbed figure traversing the high dunes, but the image passed so quickly across his retina that it might have been anything, strands of kelp animated by the incessant wind or a small, swirling maelstrom of sand that his exhausted mind assigned a vaguely human form.
The hyena slinking toward him, though, was no trickery of vision. A sloping, muscular beast with furrowed lips and seething, tarry eyes, it angled languidly down the dune face, its brown and black fur hackled high, its hot gaze raw and lurid.
Blacksburg took in the clamping power of those formidable jaws, and dread threaded through him like razor wire.
He bent and scooped up a stone.
“Bugger off!” he shouted—or tried to shout—what emerged from his parched throat was a wretched, sandpapery croak, the sound a mummy entombed for thousands of years might make if resurrected.
The hyena edged closer. Blacksburg hurled the rock. It struck the hyena with a muted thunk, laying open a bloody gash on the tufted ear.
The hyena’s lips curled back and it uttered a high pitched whooping sound so eerie and wild that the temperature on the windswept beach seemed to go ten degrees colder. He heard what sounded like a Range Rover trying to start on a low battery, but this false rescue was only the guttural cough out of the spotted hyena’s broad muzzle. With a final saw-toothed snarl, the pot-bellied creature—which was 70 kilos if it was 10—wheeled around and loped back into the dunes that had spawned it.
