by Tim Leach
‘Yes, I do,’ I said, as I stretched out my hands over the embers of the fire. ‘Who would hold land that the dead walked upon? Who would have a ghost for a neighbour?’
‘You are clever,’ she said. ‘That was what we thought.’
‘A trick. A trick to win land from other men.’ I took another sip of ale. ‘Was he your lover before Hrapp died?’
‘Erik?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, he was not.’
‘But afterwards, Erik came to you.’
‘Yes. I was lonely. He was kind to me.’
‘And was it your plan?’
She shook her head. ‘It was Erik. I was afraid to refuse him.’
‘I do not believe it,’ Gunnar said. ‘It was a womanly trick. Erik would not think of it.’
‘Believe what you want,’ she said.
Gunnar stood and raised his hand as if to strike her again. She did not start or flinch, merely stared back, unafraid, ready to take the blow. There was still dried blood on her lips and chin from where he had struck her before. Knowing the kind of man Hrapp had been, perhaps she knew what it was to be beaten and feared it no longer.
‘Gunnar,’ I said, a note of warning in my voice.
There was a hiss as Gunnar spat into the fire. ‘Enough of this. What need is there to speak? We have witnesses to the killing and can say that it was a fair fight. We will go to his family tomorrow, pay the blood-price and end this matter.’
I said: ‘Why should you pay for killing a dishonourable man?’
‘He has brothers, uncles, friends. I will pay them. Pay them well. That will be an end to it.’
‘No.’ The word cut through the darkness, but it was not I who spoke it. Vigdis waited until we both turned to her, before she bowed her head and spoke again. ‘Think of the shame of it.’
‘Why should we care for your shame?’ Gunnar said.
‘Not mine. Erik’s,’ she replied, and that was the thought that gave us pause.
Our lives are short on the cold earth and we all long to leave something behind. A little gold for our sons and daughters – but more than that, an honourable memory: to be spoken of as a good man. And here was Erik, playing at being a dead man, a coward’s trick to cheat his neighbours of their land.
‘What would you have us do, then?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
I saw Gunnar shudder. He whom none could call coward, and I saw the touch of fear on him. For a man may kill, and so long as he speaks of it openly, so long as he pays the blood-price to the family, it will do him no dishonour. Yet to kill and to conceal the killing – our laws knew no greater crime than that.
I thought on that, it is true. And I thought of how little Gunnar had to call his own, the price he would have to pay for the man he had killed. He had laboured for many years to have something he might leave for his sons. A little land, a decent herd, a few ounces of gold, a good sword. No king’s treasure, but something a father might be proud of. Now it would be taken from him.
I thought of how rarely a feud had been settled with silver, for all that the laws decreed. How the dead man’s brothers would come for us, if we allowed the killing to be known.
Gunnar looked on me then. In his eyes, I saw him asking me to decide.
*
We did not dare risk the light of a torch, for fear of who might see it. And so we dug through the snow and broke open the icy ground in darkness, a miserable act of labour that took the rest of the night. It is always harder work to bury a man than it is to kill him.
When we had covered the unmarked grave, Vigdis came to us with a skin of water. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and kissed our hands, our murderers’ hands.
‘You shall speak of this to no man?’ she said, and we swore that we would not. She clasped our hands in turn, as though we were merchants concluding our trade. When she took Gunnar’s hand, I saw him pull her close, whisper a question to her. But I did not hear the words, nor did I hear her answer.
We walked in silence for a time, and I thought of the man we had killed. I had sung in his little farm two autumns before, but had not sought to winter with him. He was a quick man with a jest, kind as well, but it was a wifeless and childless home he had and so he was always touched with sadness. I remembered one night, when we had drunk too much too quickly, I heard him weeping when he thought I was sleeping. He was lonely, I think, and I have always feared the lonely.
‘No good will come of this,’ Gunnar said.
‘Perhaps,’ I answered. And though we tried to speak again many times in that long walk back, we found no more to say than this.
Wait. Something is not right.
The fire grows low and we must not let it die. It is dark outside and I know you must be weary. We should let the fire burn to embers, we should lie down and sleep. But we shall not. There is much more I have to tell you this night. I will not give this story to you a piece at a time, like a starving old woman eking out the supplies from her petty pantry. We shall feast tonight on this story. I shall tell it all to you.
So – throw the good brush upon the fire. No, no, not that from that pile, use the best wood we have, there is no need to save it. Why? I shall tell you that, soon enough. But not now.
That is better. I see you clearly now. A good thing, to see that face of yours in this light. A sadness, too, of course. For once I spoke and sang in the longhouses of great chieftains, a hundred souls in a silent room, listening to my words alone. I never sang to a king’s court, not as those truly great poets do, but I did have some honour granted to my voice. Now it is you alone that I sing for.
The fire burns brighter. And now I will tell you another story. Let me tell you of how our people first came to this island.
Ah, yes – roll your eyes if you will. You shall tell me that you have heard this story many times before. This is true. But you will listen once more. For this is a story that cannot be told too many times. No other story matters, if this one is forgotten.
There was an empty land before them, a tyrant at their heels – that was the way the first men came to this island. That is the way all new countries are settled.
When they gathered on the shores of the old country, what they could not load on to the long ships they burned. They would leave nothing for the king who drove them from Norway, the man they called Harald Fairhair. They kissed the soil and the sand, and wept for the homes they would never see again. They cast away, that great fleet of exiles, out across the dark sea to a place known to them only by rumour and myth.
Not all lived to see the new land. Storms and drift ice tore ships open, sending many to feed the fell spirits that hunt in the black water. Others wandered lost in the storms, washing ashore in hostile countries where they received a welcome of iron, a home in shallow earth. But the survivors pressed on, sailing past the coast of Scotland, past the islands of Orkney and Faroe. At last, they reached their new home. Your family, and mine.
It was a great island in the midst of the cold sea, a place of green shores with an icy heart. An unpeopled country, its name hard and unforgiving, but that was what drew the settlers. It was their protection, to live in a land that no others wanted. A place that seemed uninhabitable. But with a little skill, and fortune from the gods, they knew there was a living to be made here. Not much of one, it was true. They would never be rich or powerful men – just a nation of farmers scratching at near-barren soil, fighting to keep their herds alive through the long dark. They told themselves they did not want wealth or power. Perhaps some of them even believed it.
As they drew close to shore, the captain of each ship lifted a long, narrow object from the deck. They did so carefully, as if they held a child in their arms, unwrapping the sealskin blanket to reveal the treasure within. No gold or weaponry, but a simple piece of wood. Part of a door or a roof or a column from a high seat, some fragment of the home that they had left behind. And for some it was a coffin they unwrapped, one of their kin who had begun the vo
yage, but had not lived to see its end.
Each man threw his memento out into the wild waves and watched them go. Some of the pieces of wood went straight to shore, others followed the eddies into closed coves and fjords, others still were caught in currents and wandered to some distant part of the coast. Where each of those staves went, a ship followed. Where they washed ashore, there a family settled and made a new home from the wood of the old.
They came to build a country without kings and cities. A place where every man was equal, every man had land. A place with no rulers save for honour and the law.
And, for a time at least, it was true.
3
In the long winter, even the wealthiest of Icelanders curses the day that their ancestors came to this land. They forget the dream of the people, that dream of a world without kings, and know only that they live in a dark, lonesome place. But when the sun begins to ride higher in the sky and the snow begins to quicken and thaw, it is an easy land to love. The dream grows strong once more, for we are a stubborn people.
Men and women emerge from their homes like bears from their winter caves, the sunlight feeling as sharp on the eye as a blade against the skin. They break the ice from the rivers, begin the first sowing of the crops, free their herds to wander to the high mountain pastures, go to trade for supplies and visit distant friends. And as they travel the stories travel with them.
There had been no more sightings of the ghost of Hrapp. Rumour spread that it was Olaf who had killed the ghost, since he was the last to have seen and fought with it. He denied it, honourable man that he was, but they mistook his honesty for modesty, and so the story spread.
As for Erik, there were stories of him, too. Some thought he had fallen through the ice in a river, others claimed he had gone in search of lost sheep and wandered, lost himself, until the cold murdered him. There were many who said that the winter madness had taken him as it takes so many, that he had cast himself from a cliff or gone to lie down in the snow and waited to die. They had seen him lonely, as I had, and knew it was a hard thing for a man to make it through the winter alone. I waited to see if any would make the connection between the two stories, between Erik and the ghost. But no man did. It takes a woman to think in that way.
*
A pile of blunt weapons beside me and the whetstone at my feet – that is what the first day of spring means to me. For soon we would be hunting again, and so whilst Gunnar tended the herd I took the weapons of the house to the sharpening stone.
I was working on my weapon of choice, my spear, and enjoying the feel of the sun on my face, when I heard the door of the longhouse swing open. I listened; would it be the whispering footfalls of Freydis, Gunnar’s daughter? The stamping tread of Kari, the boy who wished to be thought of as a man, and who mimicked the heavy steps of his elders, though he did not have their weight? The children liked to play with me, fascinated by my red hair, convinced it was some trick or illusion. When the day’s chores were done I would lumber around on all fours chasing them through the house, or tell them the stories my father told me – the old Irish stories of the Red Branch and the Fianna – whilst Gunnar watched and grinned and shook his head, and told me I had missed my vocation as a nursemaid. Perhaps they had come to bother me early.
It was not the children who stepped out. It was the strong tread of Dalla, Gunnar’s wife, and I saw her lean around the edge of the turf wall and look upon me.
She could have been a rare beauty, black haired and pale skinned, were it not for her warrior’s nose, broken and reset long ago, so that it was almost flat against her face – a parting gift from her father, or so Gunnar told me. In truth her shattered nose suited her, for she was a hard woman, well suited to these lands. Without a word she dipped a horn cup into the pail of milk she carried and offered it to me.
‘My thanks,’ I said as I drank it down, still warm and thick.
‘Hard work,’ she said.
‘It is. Harder to sharpen a spear than to use it, easier to kill a beast than to skin it…’ I trailed off. There was an ending to that proverb that I did not wish to speak.
‘Easier to kill a man than to bury him,’ she said, finishing the saying.
The night we came back from hunting the ghost we had found her awake, for it was in the early hours of the dawn when we returned, stumbling with exhaustion and covered in the filth of battle and burial. Her hard eyes asked the question and perhaps words would have followed. But Gunnar had reached out and taken her by the hands. He closed his eyes, and I thought for a moment that he would shame himself with weeping. But when he opened his eyes again, they were clear. He kissed her on the forehead and said: ‘Please, do not ask me. All is well. But do not ask.’
She had looked at the bite on his hand, the blunted edge of his sword, the marks on his shield. She read a story in our eyes, the eyes of men exhausted with killing, and it seemed as though she did not wish the story to be spoken. She let us go to sleep, rolled up in furs upon the floor, and when we woke she asked no questions. From the way she acted, we could pretend we had dreamed it all: a nightmare of blood and snow and an ill-struck pact.
I looked down and tested the edge of the spear against my thumb. Sharp enough. I took the next blade from the pile and said: ‘I am glad to see the end of winter.’
‘As am I. But I suppose you will be leaving us soon.’
‘I shall,’ I said. For soon it would be the Day of Movement, when a wanderer such as I would have to find a new place to call my home.
She put down the pail and sat upon the ground, her back against the house. ‘I wish that you would not go,’ she said.
I smiled at her and sang her an old quatrain:
One must go on, and not stay a guest
Forever in one place:
A loved one is loathed if he lingers too long
In another man’s hall.
Then I said: ‘It is ill luck to winter twice in one place. One winter makes a man a guest, two makes him a thief. I have never seen it go well.’
She did not answer. Instead she looked down on the weapons at my feet, at one in particular at the top of the pile. Gunnar’s sword, a blade of Ulfberht steel worth more than his farm, its edge still hacked and blunted from winter. I lifted it, and I began to sharpen it against the stone, as carefully as I would have tuned a rare harp.
‘Why would you want me to stay?’ I said.
Her eyes were on the edge of the sword. ‘I am afraid.’
‘There is nothing to be afraid of.’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly.’
She nodded slowly. ‘I shall hold you to those words,’ she said, and there was a hardness to her voice – the kind you hear in the words of a chieftain or the captain of a warband. For that longhouse was her domain: the key to the stores hung around her waist, not Gunnar’s. She would not have me in her home if she did not will it, no matter what Gunnar might say.
‘Your husband has done nothing to bring shame to you,’ I said. ‘He is an honourable man.’
‘As are you.’
I shook my head. ‘No. Honour is a luxury for the wealthy, the brave. I am neither of those things. I cannot afford it. I settle for cunning and loyalty. But Gunnar is an honourable man.’
And as if my words had summoned him, I saw him crest the rise of the hill, bearing a trussed sheep beneath his arm, the stray he had gone in search of. Even at a distance I could see the smile on his face as he waved to us, and I waved back to him and took up a brace of spears from the ground. Once again, it was time for us to hunt.
*
‘Why were you speaking with my wife?’
A dangerous question that Gunnar asked me, as we walked towards the sea. Many have answered it poorly and paid for it with their lives. But Gunnar asked it with a smile on his lips, and so I answered him in kind.
‘The business of love, of course. It is a difficult thing to conduct a love affair in winter. This spring season suits me better.’ I levelled a finger
at him, and sang:
For when a husband shepherds sheep
Even a wolf may woo his wife.
He roared then, but there was laughter in it, and in a moment we were wrestling on the ground, laughing and cursing each other in turn, fighting for the lock of the head or trap of an arm that would end the contest. I could not have stood against him with a blade for more than a moment, but there in the grapple his tall and rangy swordsman’s build worked against him and we were evenly matched. Perhaps I could even have beaten him if I had truly been trying, but after a time I was careful to offer him a left arm that he could easily put into a lock. We might have been friends, but it would not do to show up one’s host.
When we rose from the ground, brushing the dirt from our clothes, he handed me the spear I had cast down when we fell and clapped me on the back.
‘We should find you a wife,’ he said. ‘That might stop you from chasing after mine.’
‘A man of no property does not hope for such a thing. Nor does a wanderer want it.’
‘There is a time when you will grow tired of moving on, Kjaran.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Where will you go to this time? To Olaf’s house?’
‘The Peacock? Perhaps. I have never much liked a chieftain’s home. Too many people.’
He chewed on the corner of his moustache, his habit when thinking of what to say. I saw it often, for he was not much a man with words. ‘I would like you to stay.’
‘One must go on and not stay a guest – ’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know that song. You have sung it often enough. But I wish that it was not so.’
As he said those words we reached the top of a hillock and what I heard struck me into silence. For the first time in many months, I could hear the sound of the sea.
We are a people that came from the sea. We have given it up now, broken our ships for timber, set aside the life of the Viking for that of the farmer, chosen peace. And yet it still calls to us, fills us with that longing to wander upon it, to listen to it speak. It is a great prophet, is the sea: one need only sit upon the shore for a time to know that the answers to all mysteries are contained within the chanting of the waves. But we have lived apart from the sea for so long that we no longer speak its language. And so we look upon it like deafened men towards a singer, trying to understand what has been lost to us.
