The Smile of the Wolf

by Tim Leach

  That day, of course, he spoke of murder.

  Had we done our killing a year before, a year after, we would not have had to listen to such a thing. We would have sat through edicts on theft of cattle, the settling of land disputes, the rights of men on common coastal land, the conditions of divorce. But that year the Lawspeaker spoke of murder.

  Not every killing is murder. What law would fully forbid bloodshed? Only the law of the coward. The duellist who cuts down his opponent in the holmgang, the warrior who answers a spoken insult with a retort of cold iron, these men are given scant punishment. They tell of their killing to the next person they see, for they have nothing to be ashamed of. They give their reasons to the court, a blood-price paid in silver to the relatives, and all wait to see if the feud will be buried or live on. But secret murder was another matter. To kill and not declare it was the act of the shameful man. And so Gunnar and I listened to the Lawspeaker speak of the crime we had committed.

  I resisted the urge to look at Gunnar for as long as I could, for I feared what I might see there. But when at last I turned to him, I saw that he showed no sign of guilt or shame. Instead he wore the blank, almost bored expression that I had seen him wear as he fought for his life on the battlefield, a more terrible thing for a warrior to behold than a berserker biting his own shield. It was the expression of a man to whom killing required no anger, no great effort of strength or will. The face of a man to whom a killing meant nothing.

  At last, the law was finished. A little sigh passed through the crowd, for it matters greatly to us, this law of ours. We are a shipwrecked, leaderless people, and this is a dream that we dream together – a fragile dream that keeps the peace.

  After the Lawspeaker had finished, Olaf was the first to stand.

  ‘I am Olaf Hoskuldsson,’ he said, though there were few there that did not know his name. ‘Some of you know me. Many more of you knew my father.’ A murmuring of condolence from the crowd. ‘There is little to be said. He was a good man and a great chieftain. He left a land at peace. I hope that my sons too may grow up in peace.’ He lifted his head and surveyed the great plain, and an icy stillness fell upon my skin. ‘To that end,’ he said, ‘I ask now. Is there any man in the Salmon River Valley who has a grievance unanswered? Let us settle it now, in the open. With words, not with blood.’

  A silence, and then a stirring within the crowd as a great figure came forward. It was Björn Haroldsson. The brother of the man we had killed.

  I saw Hakon Haroldsson reach a cautioning hand on to his brother’s shoulder, seeking to draw him back within the crowd, to confer a moment longer. Björn shrugged him off. ‘I would speak.’

  ‘What troubles you?’

  ‘I am Björn. Björn Haroldsson. Some of you may know me.’ He paused for too long, and the crowd stirred restlessly. The particular hesitance of a man unaccustomed to feeling intimidated. He was quick tempered, tall enough to tower over any but a giant. No doubt he was used to cowing men to his will. But there, with the eyes of half a nation upon him, I think that he was afraid.

  Gunnar leaned across to me. ‘I do not think he will make much of a skald.’

  ‘I had not thought of taking him as an apprentice.’

  Olaf broke the silence. ‘And what have you to say?’

  ‘My brother Erik was lost in the winter.’

  ‘I know of this already.’

  ‘But others may not.’

  ‘Speak, then.’

  ‘He left one night at the end of winter. His servant says that she heard him leave in the night. That he often walked at night and would not say why. And that night he did not come back.’

  He fell silent, and there was a restless stirring in the crowd. But Björn, like any skilless speaker, did not seem to notice the mood of his listeners. He stood blankly expectant, waiting for some other man to answer him.

  Olaf was not ignorant of the crowd’s contempt. ‘That is all you have to say?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have not seen a body? You have no witnesses to any wrongdoing? You have no case to put before us?’

  ‘No, but I—’

  ‘This is not place to guess. We have no time for this.’

  Listening to it spoken that way, forgetting what I knew, I could see why Olaf would dismiss it. Men died in winter. Madness and sickness and the cold, they all took their harvest. Erik had no feud unsettled or debt unpaid that might bring a man to commit murder. The truth that I knew was one that no man would think of. Beside me, I saw Gunnar nodding to himself, willing Olaf on as he mocked the man who spoke. The way a man may wordlessly encourage a horse or a dog as it fights, fearful that if he speaks he will do more harm than good. That a loyal beast may turn towards the voice of its master and see its throat emptied upon the ground.

  ‘Does any man wish to speak of this?’ Olaf said.

  A moment of silence, of perfect silence. Then a cry behind us, a scream of horror.

  I once saw a mother pulling her dead child from a river. The child had fallen through the ice a month before and been entombed there, a shadow beneath frozen water. The woman had gone there every day, to peer into the depths and look upon her child. One would have thought that her pain, her grief, would have been dulled by time, by seeing the dead day after day. And yet when at last the river thawed and she held the stiffened flesh in her arms it was as though her son had died a moment before. The scream she gave, that was the same scream that I heard at the Althing. The scream of one looking on the dead for the very first time.

  It was taken up by others, and a wave of motion broke through the crowd, akin to the instant that a shield wall breaks and an army begins to run. I saw many hands reaching by instinct to weapons that were bound away, thinking only that some sudden attack could prompt such cries of terror.

  The crowd parted and I saw it was a single figure coming forward. It was a woman, and I smelt her before I saw her, the hot smell of decay, the stench of a battlefield a month after the killing.

  There was something in her hands. Something that had earned her passage through the crowd, that had set every man and woman who saw it to screaming. And though I knew this, could see it at the corner of my vision, it is not what I noticed first.

  When the heroes in the old stories meet their deaths, in those last moments they see not the faces of the men who have come to kill them, but focus instead upon some inconsequential thing. The dew upon the grass, the reflection of sunlight on a blade, the whorl of wood in a broken shield, a raven that watches from above. I had always thought it to be one of those lies that poets are so fond of, but on the plain at the Althing I discovered it was so. The first thing I saw was not her face or what she had brought, but the heavy curve of her belly, that she was heavy with child.

  Then it was that I saw the stinking thing swinging in her hands, the face that was familiar to me. I knew who she was and what it was that she carried.

  It was Vigdis, bearing the head of the man we had killed.

  Feud

  There is something that I have forgotten to say. There is something that I have always been afraid to speak of with you. But I must speak it now.

  Do we have ale left? Only a little? Well, no matter. Take a drink of it yourself. Come now, drink deeply, you may do more than wet your lips. This is a special day for us both, is it not? And I must drink too, for I have told you many stories and sung many songs, but none so long as this one. And there is much more for me to tell.

  There. That is better. Now I am ready. Now I may speak to you of revenge.

  Do not think it something of no substance. You can hold it, feel it, touch it. It is handed down from father to son, from brother to brother, from a husband to a wife. For whilst a man may inherit many things from his kin – land, cattle, a silver arm-ring, a favourite shield, a good sword – he also inherits something much more valuable. He inherits the duty of revenge.

  For when one has kin who lie unavenged in the ground, they do not lie quietly. The dea
d speak, and they only speak of vengeance. Sometimes they are soft, whispering in your ear as you make love to your wife. Or they may shriek at you at night, waking you from sleep. No, the dead are never silent.

  Those who hear such voices, they all look the same. Head cocked a little to one side, leaning towards a voice that only they can hear, their eyes blank, staring into a future that only they can see. When you try to speak to them, they pay no attention at first. You must fight to be heard, for there is a voice that you cannot hear, drowning out every word that you say.

  You may think it madness, until you have heard such a voice for yourself. Then you will do anything to make it stop.

  But it will take years. Long winters spent waiting for brief summers, brief summers spent waiting for some opportunity for the killing. Years that are spent watching and waiting, the whispering voice speaking louder and louder and louder in your ears, until you wish for madness or deafness to come. It would do no good to be thus afflicted. If you were deaf, you would still hear the words in your mind and have no other sounds to drown them out. And the mad – the mad hear the dead more than any. They hear not one voice, but an endless cacophony of all the unavenged dead, each clamouring to be heard over his rival.

  If you are lucky, the moment will come at last. Your quarry will venture into common lands alone, and some loose tongued shepherd will tell you so. And when last you give the killing blow to an enemy, after the war cries have fallen quiet and the last shield is broken, you stop and listen and you hear nothing. The chattering dead at last fall quiet. There is nothing sweeter than that silence. There is nothing more beautiful than revenge.

  I see that you do not believe me. Perhaps you believe in another false god. In love or song. Friendship, perhaps, or honour, or the joy of battle.

  It does not matter. You will learn the truth in time.

  8

  At first, there was nothing but sound. Women screaming, men shouting. The stamp of hundreds of feet against the earth; as some crowded forward to hear and see more, others ran from the plain to gather their kin as witnesses. My eyes were open, but could not seem to see. I could feel the crowd closing around me, their hands upon me. Someone had grabbed my arms, but I felt his grip go slack a moment later, struck by uncertainty, not knowing what it was that he should do.

  I closed my eyes, an instinct I learned as a child to wake from terrors in the night. If I closed my eyes in the dream, when I opened them again it would be in the waking world and my nightmare would dissolve into the dark. When I opened my eyes this time, my vision returned to a thousand eyes looking upon me in silence.

  We were in a closed circle. Had I a sword in hand, I could not have swung it without striking half a dozen men. At first it was only Gunnar and I, but the mob parted a little and others joined us. I saw them then, the three brothers. Hakon, Björn, Snorri. And then their lost brother was there too, eyeless and lipless, grey skin and white bone, swinging from the hands of Vigdis.

  I do not know how I appeared to them at that moment. But I could see that Gunnar did not wear the face of a guilty man. He looked like a man betrayed.

  It was Hakon who spoke first. ‘Gunnar,’ he said, ‘what did you do?’

  Gunnar did not speak. He did not take his eyes from Vigdis.

  ‘Will you speak it now, Gunnar?’ she said. ‘Or are you still a coward as well as a murderer?’

  A wordless cry from Gunnar, a roar like a great wave breaking against a cliff. Then he did find words: ‘I gave him a warrior’s death. And you would call me coward?’

  ‘It is true, then?’ Hakon asked.

  A shudder passed through the crowd at those words. I looked on the faces of those who surrounded us, saw that killing coldness stealing into their eyes. We would die there, I thought, and I only wished that my weapon was not bound, so that I might take good company with me into the darkness. I looked at the men closest to me and tried to think which of them would come for me first. Of how I would put my thumb into his eye, tear his cheek open with my teeth, beat his throat closed with the palm of my hand. I might, if I was lucky, be able to kill one of them.

  ‘Enough!’

  A new voice speaking – Olaf the Peacock, fighting his way through the crowd with a dozen of his thingmen. They were around us in moments and, though they were but few against many, the crowd drew back.

  ‘Speak no more, you fool!’ he said to Gunnar, his face white with rage. He pointed to me. ‘Even the poet here knows to hold his tongue.’

  Björn spoke to Olaf then, shoving forward against the men who fought to hold him back. ‘You will protect a murderer?’

  ‘Will you kill a man on the plains of the law and live in shame of it? You will have your justice. But by the law, not here.’ He looked to us. ‘Come with me. Now.’

  ‘I will not run from men like this!’ Gunnar spat upon the ground. ‘I will not run from this woman.’

  I put my hands on Gunnar’s shoulders. ‘Come,’ I said. ‘We must go.’ He shook his head, and so I spoke again. I spoke the words I knew that he would listen to. ‘Revenge, Gunnar. Think of revenge. We cannot have it if we die here.’

  He smiled at me, then – a monster’s smile of teeth below dead eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Revenge. I will have it.’ And he moved away, encircled by Olaf’s men. But they did not stand too close. They knew him to be a cursed man.

  *

  There is comfort in darkness. Any Icelander knows that, or must learn it to survive the long winter without madness taking his mind. To sit still and be unseen, to almost live through sound and touch alone – this can be a pleasure, if one is attuned to it. As we sat together in Olaf’s hut on the plain, sun creeping through the reeds but much of the room still in shadow, I have never been so grateful for the darkness. We might be dead before the day was out, yet I felt calm. There, in that moment, there was only Olaf and Gunnar and I. The rest of the world, for a time at least, did not exist.

  Olaf leaned towards us, hands clasped together in the way that I had heard that Christian men prayed. Gunnar was in one corner slumped against the wall, but it was in rest, not defeat. The warrior’s habit of gathering strength at any opportunity, never knowing when he will be forced to fight.

  Olaf broke the silence. ‘Tell me what you have done.’

  Gunnar looked at him with contempt and shook his head.

  ‘This one seems determined to die in silence,’ Olaf said to me. ‘And you?’

  ‘I will speak,’ I replied. Gunnar raised a hand – imploring or in anger I could not tell. ‘Gunnar, I must speak. If not for us, then for your family.’ At these words, he fell back once more.

  ‘Be quick,’ Olaf said.

  I told him the story, then. Of the ghost in the night, iron singing against iron. Of our bargain with Vigdis to keep our silence, spare the dead man’s shame. Of the price she had asked from Gunnar and how she had been refused.

  ‘I would believe it from no man but you,’ Olaf said, once I had finished. He sat back, one hand toying with a silver arm-ring, turning it over and over again. I listened to the sounds coming from outside, for the crowd was gathering once more, though it seemed that they kept their distance, that their respect for the chieftain still held. It was only once or twice that I heard shouts from Olaf’s men, driving away the packs of curious children who had come to see a murderer.

  ‘This is what we will do,’ Olaf said, waiting a moment to see if Gunnar would offer any response, any objection to his words. ‘We speak to the brothers in private. We tell them what you have told me. They will know that their brother was dishonourable, playing a womanly trick. They will take a lesser settlement. They will not ask for your life.’

  ‘You think they will believe us?’ I asked.

  ‘It is too strange a tale to be invented.’

  Gunnar shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We will say nothing. A woman cannot be a witness under the law.’

  ‘You have spoken it!’ Olaf said, rising to his feet, angry at
last. ‘Spoken your guilt in front of a thousand men.’

  ‘As she intended,’ I said.

  ‘As she intended,’ Olaf repeated. ‘You were tricked by her. Now you will pay the price for it.’

  Gunnar turned his face to the wall. He no longer wished to look on either of us. ‘What must I pay?’ he said.

  ‘Give them your farm, Gunnar,’ Olaf said. ‘Your herd, too. And that sword you are so proud of. That may be enough. You may come to my home, be one of my thingmen.’ He turned to me. ‘I owe you your promise and I have kept my word. Though you should feel shame for your trick.’

  ‘I do. And you have my gratitude.’

  ‘There is much unsettled between us,’ Olaf replied. ‘I do not think well of your deception. I think that this will not end as you would wish it.’

  ‘Your gift of prophecy again, Olaf?’

  ‘One does not need the second sight to know how a man like you will meet his death.’

  In his corner, Gunnar stirred at last. ‘What promise is this?’

  I hesitated, thinking that I might find the right words. But Olaf spoke before I could: ‘You are a luckless man, but you are fortunate to have this one as your friend. He came to me begging for my favour. Begging that I would protect you in some unnamed feud. I see now why he came. Because you are too proud to beg.’

  At this, Gunnar smiled. ‘I will not give up my land,’ he said. ‘I will not be punished for killing a man in a fair fight.’

  ‘It is that or they will make you an outlaw.’

  ‘So be it.’

  ‘You will not last a single winter,’ Olaf said.

  ‘I would rather live and die that single winter in my own home than beg your charity.’

  ‘Die then, Gunnar. It means nothing to me. I offer my help and consider my debt paid.’ Olaf turned from us then, his hands held up, and Gunnar smiled once more. That warrior’s smile that confronts hopeless odds with a light heart. I knew then that he truly would die before accepting Olaf’s help. I knew then what I had to do.