The Dark Horse

by Marcus Sedgwick

  For just a moment there was a strange pause as each side regarded the other. Ragnald looked irritated for a moment, but then a smile spread across his face.

  “So,” he said, dropping the box.

  Mouse fell beside it in the dirt, moaning as if in pain.

  Ragnald pulled his long, toothed knife from his belt.

  “So!” Horn said, and stepped forward with intent.

  But as he drew his sword he remembered that all he had was the broken stump of Cold Lightning.

  He looked at it blankly, and as he did so Ragnald took the chance to cut his throat.

  Sif screamed.

  Olaf stepped forward. He had come unarmed. They had not expected this. Ragnald opened Olaf ’s belly with a single sweep of his knife, and Olaf fell dying in the dirt.

  Thorbjorn, who had a moment to gather his wits, shoved the burning flare he was carrying at the stranger’s face, but Ragnald was fast and sidestepped. The torch fell to the ground.

  “Ha!” he cried.

  He stepped past the burning brand and circled Thorbjorn until his back was to the door of the barn.

  He grinned and advanced on the now defenseless Thorbjorn.

  Then there was a slight scuffling, the sound of someone entering the barn.

  Ragnald began to turn, but before his face was even half toward the light, he was dead.

  He slumped forward on the ground, falling onto the flare, putting out its light.

  Behind him Sigurd knelt, staring at the broken stump of Horn’s sword, which he had thrust into the stranger.

  So, in about six seconds, it was over.

  Part Two

  THE DARK HORSE

  1

  To accord Horn the honor due him as Lawspeaker, we left his body on the hillside for the crows to eat.

  My father was not so lucky—we buried his body under a single slab of rock on the low hills behind the village.

  The death of a Lawspeaker is never a simple matter, but things were more complicated than normal. There was no obvious successor to Horn, just as there hadn’t been when he and my father fought. The difference was that no one really wanted the job this time. No man, that is.

  But before the tribe could even think of these things, there was the business of the departing dead to see to.

  We took Horn’s body on a wooden stretcher to the circle of rock fingers on the hill above the bay, known as Bird Rock. Everyone went, as is the law. Even Gudrun managed to walk up the hill—her first journey outside the village since her accident.

  Mouse walked next to me. I remember she was silent, so silent. Perhaps I should have realized then that something serious had changed in her. Something had happened to her when Ragnald had . . . what? I’m still not sure what he did to her, but he had changed her somehow.

  She had never been loud, but now she was quieter than ever. If it had been possible, I would have said she was even quieter than when she first came to us. But I did not realize this fully, my mind empty; I felt little. It was all a dream to me, just as it seems to me now, looking back after all these years.

  I suppose something of me died with my father. That seems likely, doesn’t it? Maybe that was why I felt nothing as we walked up the cold hillside.

  But Sif cried. I remember that well. I remember being a little surprised by it. I should not have been.

  We put Horn’s body on the stone table in the center of the circle, and Gudrun said some words. I do not remember them.

  Then Longshank spoke.

  “This place is now sacrosanct. It is forbidden to return to Bird Rock until the new Lawspeaker, whoever he may be, returns to light the bone fire.”

  Not that anyone ever went up there anyway, except Gudrun, and, I think, Mouse.

  Then we left Horn on Bird Rock for the crows to come and clean his bones.

  I was not sorry to leave, for my mother and I had our own duties to perform before the day was done.

  Once we were back in the village, my mother, keeping her dignity as well as she could, asked two or three of the men to help us. I didn’t really notice who.

  We carried Olaf out to the low hill where we buried people. We dug a shallow trench; it was only a foot or two to the bedrock, and then we put Father into the hole. On top we laid the biggest slab of rock we could move, so that people would know there was someone buried underneath.

  Then the men left, silently, and Mouse, Mother, and I stood around for a while, thinking our own things.

  Mouse, silent since Ragnald had attacked her, finally made a sound. But not exactly a human one.

  She whimpered, like an injured dog.

  Freya put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Shush,” she said gently, and Mouse grew silent again.

  Then we returned to the village.

  That was how we sent my father on his way to the next world.

  “What will happen now?” I asked as we walked back.

  Mother shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  2

  Longshank peered through the murk of smoke inside the great broch. The faces of the whole village stared back at him.

  Everyone awaited the result of his deliberation over the law.

  “Upon the death of the Lawspeaker,” he said, “the position shall be filled by the Lawspeaker’s son.”

  There was a murmur.

  Mouse saw Sif stare angrily through the fire.

  “But Horn has no son,” Longshank continued, “in which case the position shall fall to his nearest male relative.”

  There was another murmur.

  “But Horn has no living male relative,” said Longshank.

  “We know!” cried a voice from the back of the broch.

  Longshank jerked his head round to stare at the place the voice had come from.

  “Get on with it!” called out another voice.

  “Very well,” Longshank said. “In this case the position returns to the last person to contest the fight with the dead Lawspeaker, unless anyone wishes to challenge that person to a trial.”

  This had been the case with Olaf and Horn, but there was a further problem: Olaf had perished at Ragnald’s hand.

  “But,” said Longshank, “since the challenger is no longer alive, either, the position falls to his son.”

  There was a huge uproar in the broch.

  “So,” said Longshank, though no one listened to him because they already knew what it meant, “the boy Sigurd shall be pronounced Lawspeaker, provided he passes his coming-of-age trial.”

  The tumult continued.

  Sigurd stared wildly about him. Why had no one told him this was possible? Surely someone other than Longshank knew the law.

  Mouse felt her heart quicken.

  Sif jumped to her feet.

  The room quieted a little.

  “Assuming,” said Longshank, taking the opportunity to finish, “that no one wishes to challenge the boy?”

  He looked around the room, at all the grown men who had grumbled about Horn and about how he had ruled. But they all were quiet.

  “No one challenges?” asked Longshank scornfully.

  “Yes! I do!”

  Everyone turned and stared at Sif.

  “Yes,” she cried, “I do!”

  3

  And so we fought. Sif and I. No one could stop her; no one could challenge her right to fight me for the position of Lawspeaker. Though a few people tried to point out that she was a girl and that a girl could not be Lawspeaker, Longshank had to admit that this was not actually recorded in the law. It was no more than tradition.

  And me?

  After the shock, the shock of finding out I would be Lawspeaker, a desire began to grow in me.

  It grew rapidly, and as I thought about my father, my dead father, and Horn, it grew even more. A desire to shake this tribe of stupid men and make something of them, despite it all.

  So when Sif insisted, as the days passed, that she wanted to fight me, and as all th
e strong men of the village stared at me when I walked by, I became more and more determined to take her on.

  Mouse didn’t want me to do it. I couldn’t find out exactly why she was so against it.

  “Why?” she asked again and again.

  I would look at her and shrug.

  “No one else wants to do it,” I would say weakly.

  But there was more to it than that.

  “Why don’t you want me to?” I asked her.

  Now it was her turn to be evasive.

  “You said you’d be my brother,” she said. “Always.”

  “But I’ll still be your brother,” I protested.

  “You’ll be Lawspeaker,” she said, and then, when I pressed her, “There is danger with it.”

  But she would say no more.

  But before Sif and I fought, there was more disposing of dead to be done.

  Ragnald’s body had lain under some sacking in the grain store, where he had fallen with Horn’s broken blade in his back. The sword that I had put there. Now it was time to do something about it.

  This reminds me that a strange thing had happened when we covered Ragnald’s body with the sacking.

  For the first time since Ragnald’s attack, I thought about the box. We had left it lying on the floor of the grain barn, where it had fallen from the stranger’s hands. It filled me with fear, and I wanted, if it was possible, to destroy it. It seemed to me that it must be full of evil magic. But while Freya was covering Ragnald’s body, I looked for the box. It was gone. I asked round the village, but no one claimed to have it.

  And I seemed to be the only one bothered by this.

  “A piece of magic like that,” people said, “so strong. It will have died with its owner. It must have vanished when Ragnald perished.”

  I forgot about it; there was other work to do.

  It was decided that the most fitting fate for a stranger who had come to try to harm us was to feed his body to the fish. So we prepared to take Ragnald’s body out into the bay in a boat.

  An interesting thing had started to happen. Since it had been announced that I might be Lawspeaker, people had taken more notice of me. And of Freya and Mouse, too. But mostly of me.

  Maybe because I had been the one to stick the sword into Ragnald. Maybe that had made people take notice of me. I had displayed bravery and strength, and those things were supposed to be important to us.

  And now the men who had supported my father and me stood around and asked me what to do, while those who had ridiculed him seemed lost. As indeed they were, leaderless without Horn. There was no way these men would support Sif, a girl, in her claim to be Lawspeaker.

  “Roll him up in the cloth,” I said, pointing at Ragnald’s corpse, “and get him into the boat. We don’t want his ghost haunting us here. The sooner the fish pick his bones clean, the better for all of us.”

  And everyone agreed. He was obviously some kind of magician; he would be more likely than most to prove a troublesome spirit after death.

  Mouse stood and watched with me as the men went about the work. We hadn’t spoken of that awful night since it had happened. Now I could not restrain my curiosity.

  “What did he do to you?” I asked. “With the box—what was he doing?”

  Mouse looked at me in her silent way.

  “He hurt me,” she said in the voice that meant I would get no more out of her.

  So we put Ragnald into the boat, rowed out to the waiting sea, and tipped him overboard.

  4

  “Sigurd Olafsson!” called Longshank.

  “Yes,” the boy answered.

  “Sif Hornsdaughter!” called the old man again.

  “Yes,” answered the girl.

  The pair stood opposite each other in a crudely marked circle of white pebbles on the black beach. The tribe watched from the high-tide line. Mouse held Freya’s hand. She didn’t know which of them was comforting the other.

  Sif had continued to insist that she go through with her challenge to Sigurd’s right to become Lawspeaker.

  “You know why you are here? You know the rules by which you must abide?” asked Longshank.

  “Yes,” answered boy and girl together.

  “Then begin!”

  But the fight was over almost as soon as it started.

  Sif was a tall, strong girl, but at sixteen Sigurd was bigger and stronger than some men ten years older.

  She made the first move and charged at Sigurd, screaming loudly.

  She made an impressive sight, and for a moment Sigurd was thrown by her aggression.

  As she reached him he recovered himself, bouncing his body weight into his knees. A moment before she would have struck him, he shifted onto his left foot, and Sif flew past. As she did so he swung into her stomach with a tight fist.

  Sif lay sprawling, winded, on the sand. Sigurd put his foot on her throat.

  “Yield,” he said, but quietly and without show.

  Sif tried to wriggle out, but Sigurd put more weight on her.

  “Yield,” he said again, and then whispered so that no one at the beach could hear, “Your father would be proud.”

  Sif stopped wriggling. After a long pause she raised a hand in submission.

  A murmur came from the watching crowd.

  Sif stood and glared at Sigurd, her nose just a few inches from his. Then she spat in his face and walked back to the brochs, her rage still twisting inside her.

  Sigurd followed more slowly, and behind him walked Longshank, with due solemnity.

  As Sigurd reached the people Longshank called out, “Hail to the new Lawspeaker!”

  There was a shout, but it was subdued. As if for the first time, what was happening was sinking into everyone’s mind.

  Sigurd met every gaze as he walked through the tribe, which parted to let him into his village.

  All was total silence, apart from the whisk of the wind coming off the sea. Then a woman’s voice muttered, “Are we really to be ruled by a boy?”

  Sigurd stopped in his tracks. He looked about him for the source of the voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “Since no man is bold enough, you will be ruled by a boy.”

  No one spoke.

  Evening fell.

  Inside his broch, with all the people hidden in their own dark homes, Sigurd shook and cried like a small child while Freya held him tight.

  Mouse sat at his feet, quiet.

  “Your father would be proud,” said Freya again.

  5

  Then Longshank decided that I should undergo my coming-of-age ordeal. In this way, he said, I would become a man, so the tribe would have a man for Lawspeaker after all, and not a boy.

  I was not afraid either way. I wanted to do it.

  So the morning after I had defeated Sif in the fight, they set up the arch made of turf on the grass between the village and the fields.

  To complete the ordeal, all I had to do was walk under the arch. If it fell down while I did so, then my manhood would be a poor affair. If not, then I would prosper.

  I walked under the low arch made of a single thick sod of grass curved up into the air. It held, and it was over.

  I raised my hands.

  “What now, Lawspeaker?” asked Longshank.

  I remember how strange it felt to be called by my title.

  I pointed at Bird Rock.

  “To the hill,” I said. “We have bones to burn.”

  We went to make the bone fire.

  6

  Dusk on Bird Rock.

  All day under Sigurd’s direction the village had dragged long, neat logs up to the top of the hill to the circle of rock fingers. Now night had started to fall, and they would have liked to be safely back in the village. But there was work to be done still; the final episode in Horn’s life.

  Their first arrival at the site had not been pleasant.

  Horn’s body was not what it had been. The crows had been at their work and had stripped much flesh from the bones, but
they had worked messily. The picked and pulled remains of Horn lay both on and around the central table rock of the circle.

  In theory the body should have been left until the bones were clean, but in practice that never happened.

  So Sigurd directed men twice his age and more to build a funeral pyre around the base of the table rock. It was a massive pyre, but it would take a lot of heat to burn the bones.

  It would also take all night.

  As night fell a select few of the villagers gathered around the stack of wood and bone.

  There was Sigurd, obviously. Sif was there. She was silent. She neither spoke nor even met anyone’s gaze. Gudrun, who had come up at dusk, hovered first near Sigurd, then near Sif, then withdrew to the shadows. She waited while the final preparations were made. There was Herda, to sing a lament, and Longshank, to instruct in the procedure. There were one or two who had been Horn’s favorites.

  Finally all was ready.

  “Do it, then,” said a weary voice.

  “Yes,” said Sigurd, and he shoved a firebrand into the base of the wood.

  Before long the fire crackled and flames leaped up into the air around the circle.

  Gudrun stepped forward and began to say final words for Horn.

  Night fell, and the small group watched the fire, till one by one they fell asleep. In the morning the breeze would blow the ashes into the air, and Horn’s life would have been properly respected.

  7

  They were strange times, those first days after I became Lawspeaker. The world moved like a dream that I was watching, and not even my own dream. It seemed like someone else’s life that I was stealing a part in.

  We sat at the top of the hill and watched Horn’s bones burn.

  Longshank fell asleep first. Then Herda.

  Sif and I watched each other across the fire, brooding on our own thoughts. Then she fell asleep, too.

  I was alone at the top of Bird Rock. All other minds had left me.