by Tim Leach
‘No birdsong,’ I said.
Thoris nodded. ‘Yes, they have gone. It will be winter soon.’
I looked down on my ruined hand: five fingers taken by the cold, and it had been late summer. I could not imagine what winter would be like in those mountains. I could not think of how we might survive it.
I have heard that in other countries winter is not so cruel. There are many who die in those winters, but through the slow deaths: the rattling cough that becomes wet and choking over many weeks, the endless rain that pierces a house and brings a killing fever, rot spreading unseen through a storehouse and ruining a winter’s provisions. But you will know that your death is coming, long before it reaches you.
In my country winter is a killer of men. It does not kill in weeks or months, but in moments. You step outside in winter and feel the wind as if it were fingers tightening around your throat, a cold blade laid against your wrists. You can feel it cutting, killing, and you retreat to the fire, wounded and beaten.
I knew a man who stepped outside to walk fifty paces to the outhouse. He left the fireside drunk and smiling, joking that the wind might sober him up. We waited for him to return, and he did not. We searched for him, called for him, until the cutting wind drove us back. Fifty paces to the outhouse and he was lost in the storm. And we found him months later when the snow had melted. Carrion-picked. Eyeless and lipless, smiling blindly at the sky.
The sun barely passes the horizon, is gone as soon as it comes. The sea fills with drift ice; even if you chose to take to the water, following the birds to the south, your ship would be torn to pieces. The entire island is sealed away from the world; none can come and none can go. And so we seal ourselves away, too. We sing and drink, and try not to think of the dwindling food and fuel in our stores, the cold death that knocks at the door with every gust of wind, asking to come inside.
*
We made no more raids on the fields. We butchered our cattle and salted the meat, harvested what grain we had. We dug a pit and buried much of what we had, and took the rest to the cave.
Before we placed the food in the cave, one could not stand fully upright in it. And once all of the food was in, I saw that we would have to crawl in. Live on our bellies like snakes and eat our way to the bottom of the cave again.
‘How will we know when it is time?’ I asked the outlaw.
‘You shall know,’ he said.
20
A day like any other. We were burying the last of our provisions. A stronger wind, a sharper wind than usual, but I thought nothing of it. I saw that Thoris seemed tense, uncertain, but I did not know why. He felt something that I did not, knew something that I could not.
The snow began to fall. What did that matter? It had fallen many times in the days before. But I saw that Thoris had stopped moving and was staring at the sky. I felt the wind again, that familiar, killing wind against my skin.
The snow fell, faster and faster, and I saw that it would not relent. That the gods would drown us on dry land if they could. We ran, then – we ran for our lives.
My half-hand pulled my cloak tight against my skin, armour against the blade of the wind. The other hand forward by instinct, for the snow was so thick that I felt the urge to part it, as if it were some heavy piece of cloth partitioning a longhouse.
Three times on the way back to the caves we found ourselves lost in the maze of snow. Lost on ground that we had trodden upon dozens of times, and there is no more fearful sensation than that of being lost on familiar ground. Yet each time we chose well, until we could see that black slit in the side of the mountain. We crawled into the cave and watched the snow fall.
All too soon, it was piled up to half the height of the cave. I made to go forward, to clear it away, but Thoris waved me back.
‘Let it be,’ he said. ‘There is no use in fighting it.’
I watched it build, the cave growing darker with each passing moment. The mad desire to rush forward, to flee out in the snow consumed me, for what man can be willingly buried alive? It was as though we lay looking up at the sky in our own graves, buried one handful of earth at a time, watching the sky disappear.
At last the entrance was sealed, and there was only darkness.
We lay in silence for a time, listening to the cry of the wind, feeling the cold begin to seep and settle upon our skin.
Then a voice from the black.
‘You had better sing,’ Thoris said. ‘But make your songs last. We have a long time to listen to them all.’
*
Let me tell you of a day in winter.
I woke in darkness, yet I knew that outside it was light. I felt it, as those animals do who live deep beneath the earth and can still feel the sun stirring. Beneath me, sacks of grain and salted meat; skins of water. Somewhere below was the stone floor of the cave. I feared to reach down and find it, for I knew that if I felt the cold stone it would mean that we had no food left. That touch would be like the hand of a god on my shoulder, telling me that it was time to die.
I crawled forward to the front of the cave, listening for the sound of snow and storm. There was none, and so I took up the wooden pick and began to hack at that white wall. Chipping away in the darkness, until a point of light broke through, like a dagger in my eyes. No heat from the light, and cold air came with it that left me shivering. Yet I basked in it as if it were a summer sun that shone upon me. That light and clean air were our treasures, taunting gifts from the gods, before the snow came and buried us again.
There were some days where we were given only a few moments of light before the storms returned, the white fire falling from the sky. There were times where the snowfall did not relent, when we lived in darkness and foulness for days at a time.
But this was not such a day. It was a still day, blue skies above. And I listened out for any sound at all from the mountains around us. Sometimes there was music in the mountains: the singing of the wind, the calving of ice, the chatter of rockfall. That day there was not a breath of wind, no sound at all to be heard. An utter, endless silence.
Behind me, I heard Thoris stirring. Then his voice.
‘How does it look?’ he asked.
‘Beautiful,’ I said. And it was.
I threw out fouled blankets, empty sacks, old bones. The hillside was covered in our filth, yet I knew that the next snowfall would bury it all as though it had never been there.
It was as beautiful a day as I could remember, but we would not leave the cave. I longed to walk upon that snow, to climb to the high places and look for some sight of distant lands, of home. But I knew that I could not. I had seen days such as this, clear and beautiful, be taken over by a blizzard in a matter of moments. Winter sought to lure us out for the killing: it was as wily as any murderer in a feud.
But I dared to go as far as I had been in months: to the edge of the cave, my back resting against the stone. From there I looked out on the valley.
It did not matter that the day was clear, that the sun was bright. I did not need light to know that landscape, for I had been staring at it for many months and knew every fold and turn by now. Like a prisoner in the old stories, whose only glimpse of the world is from a single barred window.
I tried to remember other places, the places that mattered to me. The mountains around Borg, the rolling landscape of the Salmon River Valley, the hillside of Hildarendi where my father lived. It should have been the simplest thing, to recall them. But I could not do it. They were fading from my mind – dust, and dreams. There was no place but this.
Thoris came out to sit beside me. He passed me a scrap of salted meat: the first thing I had eaten that day, for I had learned not to touch the food unless he permitted it. The custom was with us as it is with wolves, where none may eat except if the leader allows it.
We sat together and we did not speak. We watched the movement of the sun; it had been in the sky for so little time, and yet already it was fading.
He broke the silence. ‘We shal
l have a fire,’ he said.
‘Are you certain?’
‘Yes. Why not?’
I felt tears sting my eyes and turned my head so Thoris would not see them.
We gathered what little we had to burn, with all the patience at ritual of priests at a sacrifice. Every scrap of cloth, every fragment of wood, every piece of dung – all were so carefully placed. Nothing could be left to chance.
We waited for the sun to sink down and when it touched the horizon I struck sparks from the flint. A dozen points of light, each one visible for only a moment, yet I seemed to see all of them perfectly. I had such a terrible longing for that fire.
I watched the sparks that died and those that caught. I watched each place where the flames began – how they flickered and danced, grew and combined together – until the fire was burning strongly, the hiss and crackle of the flames like music to us. I held out that ruined hand of mine towards the fire and in the heat it felt whole once more.
The snow around us grew soft with the heat, melting and weeping like a woman at a funeral pyre. We grew busy, placing food over the fire, pots of snow to melt down for warm water. And I felt the longing that men and women always feel around a winter fire. A longing for memories and for stories.
I spoke. ‘Let me tell you of the woman I love.’
‘No,’ Thoris said. ‘I do not wish to hear that story.’
‘Then I will tell you of my friend Gunnar. A great warrior.’
‘No. I do not wish it.’
‘Then tell me—’
‘No,’ he said, stirring the pot with his knife. ‘I do not wish to speak.’
‘Why?’
He said nothing for a long time. Then he said: ‘There is no world but this place. There are no people other than we two. Do you understand?’
I wish that the fire had been stronger, so that I might have seen his face better, to know what it was that he meant. But perhaps I did understand.
‘Sing for me,’ he said. He had spoken those words many times before, but never as he spoke them on that day.
I had won my life with song, earned my keep with song. A cripple, unskilled in the arts of the outlaw, it was all I had to offer. He had always commanded and I had always obeyed. But that day his voice was different. He did not demand that I sing. He asked me to.
I gave him the song I knew he wanted, that he loved above all others, the first that I had given him. I sang of the death of Cúchulainn, and in those words perhaps he saw a death that he desired. Not frozen and starving, alone in the mountains. But dying in battle against hopeless odds.
I did not think of my death as I sang. That might have been the only hope left to him, but not to me. For he had given up on dreaming of those beyond the valley, of lives unlived and paths untaken. But I had not.
If I were to think of those that I might envy, there would be a danger there. Of Olaf in his great hall, filled with warmth and good company. Of Björn and Vigdis spending the winter in comfort, in victory. Perhaps this was why Thoris did not want to think beyond the valley. Perhaps there was a madness waiting there, in jealousy. But not that day.
I did not think of my enemies, or of fortunate men that I might envy. I thought of Gunnar, and of Sigrid.
I gave Gunnar a hundred different lives in my mind, imagining every path that he might take. I saw him on the water, captain of a ship once more. I saw him working his fields and tending his crops. I saw him clasping hands with his enemies and swearing to a peace. I saw him at the holmgang, dispatching his enemies one by one in honourable duels. I saw him die bravely in open battle, the blood of his enemies upon his sword.
I dreamed a hundred different lives for him and tried to think of which one might be true.
There was only one destiny that I dreamed for Sigrid. That she waited for me. I dreamed of a small stretch of farmland in the Salmon River Valley, where we might spend the rest of our lives. Of love in the darkness. Other dreams tried to find me, but I would not let them.
I thought of the callouses of Gunnar’s hand when he clasped mine. The fineness of Sigrid’s hair running between my fingers. The way her eyes seemed to catch fire a moment before she smiled. How strong and proud Gunnar looked when he shifted one foot a little in front of the other and took up the warrior’s stance. I was losing those memories – hoarding them like a miser, and every day there seemed to be fewer to count. But that night by the fire, the memories seemed to grow stronger, not weaker. For a time, sharing our songs and dreaming our dreams, we were the living once more.
The flames began to die. We huddled close around it in silence, our hands outstretched and almost touching the embers. Until it was as though our roles had been reversed, that fire and I: as if I were trying to give my heat to the fire, trying to keep it alive. And just as the final embers winked out and went cold, the snow began to fall once more. Those steady, heavy pieces of snow, handfuls cast down by a god. We crawled back into our tomb and waited to be buried. The living became the dead once more.
As we did every night, we wrapped our arms around each other, sharing the warmth that was our most precious gift. And I tried to find sleep and dreams, before the cold gripped too tightly.
I could have told you of many other days. Of the days when winter sought to kill us: the day it grew so cold that my lips froze to each other and ice coated the inside of our cave, where we fought to light a fire with shaking hands. Or the day we were buried so deep beneath the snow that the air suddenly turned foul, and we fought against the snow like duellists in the holmgang, hacking and gasping and retching, until the clean air broke through and we could breathe once more.
And there were worse days than those that I could speak of. The days of emptiness that outnumbered all of the rest. Lying still in the dark, wordless, shivering, feeling the winter madness scratching at my mind, trying not to scream.
But I wanted to tell you of that day.
A good day.
21
Every winter of my life I had known what it was to be trapped in a valley. The plains around Hildarendi when I was a boy, the Beautiful Valley, the Salmon River Valley. Yet even in the worst of winters I could find a sign of another life. A trail of smoke from a cooking fire. A distant shadow moving on a hillside. A voice raised in song, carried on the wind. But not in that valley of the outlaws.
There were no others within the valley, and none would come. Even if our enemies had been mad enough to pursue us in winter, every pass was sealed with ice and snow. They could not come in to the mountains and we could not get out. We were alone.
We each grew sick in turn. Kept awake by the rattling coughing of the other man, too tired to feel pity, wishing only that he would either grow well or die. For there is a madness that comes without sleep. And we were both mad before long.
We barely ate. Scraps of dried meat, bowls of cold oats and snowmelt. Our flesh thinned, our bones grew light, until we were each reduced to a pair of aching lungs, a sluggish beating heart. I wondered if there would come a time when we knew that there truly was no hope. When we would go to our knees in that tiny cave, reach for our knives with shaking hands. When we would agree to try and give one another a warrior’s death, rather than waiting to starve like cowards or beasts.
The snow grew weaker. The light grew stronger. The season began to turn. Yet for us, nothing changed.
At last there was a day when we had nothing left to eat. Our hands touched the bare stone of the cave floor, our fingers ran over bones that were notched with tooth-marks and scoured of any fragment of meat.
We broke open the snow and found it softer, wetter than it had been before. I stepped out and stumbled on shaking legs like a newborn lamb, the only sound that of the wind when it stirred, the crunch of snow beneath our boots. When the wind was still, when we were still, there was nothing.
At the frozen river at the bottom of the valley, the ice broke quickly. I filled a bucket, lapping the water from it as a dog would, careful not to reach in and gather the wate
r in my palms. Thoris had warned me not to, for he had seen men maimed that way: a single touch of water on the skin that froze when the wind turned. I had no wish to lose the fingers on my other hand.
We went to a place where we had buried our supplies, chipped at the ground, digging up grain, frozen meat, icy wood to try and burn. Moving as much as we could that day, for who knew when the storms would come again? There was still so little light, so little time.
That night, as we lay exhausted in the cave, Thoris pressed me for a song more insistently than he ever had before. But I found that I did not have the heart for it. For the first time in as long as I could remember, the words would not come; I could not sing.
‘It will come,’ Thoris said. ‘The first winter is the hardest. You will learn. And it is passing now. It is ending.’
I heard his words, knew them to be true. Yet still I did not believe.
‘I should have gone abroad,’ I said. ‘I should have taken my place on that ship. I was a fool to stay.’
There are words that a man speaks, in the cold and the dark, that he does not mean. Winter can take over a man like a fever, and falsehoods tumble from his tongue. So long as he gives no insult that must be answered with blood, he will be forgiven for it. But I meant those words. I did not speak lies, but the truth.
There in the dark, I saw Thoris shudder.
*
There was a day, like every other before it. Of shivering cold and hunger. Of squalor and boredom. A clearer day, so we walked through the snow towards one of our more distant caches of supplies. Sick, bent double with coughing, for we were both consumed by the same sickness.
It seemed impossible that summer could come again, we had been so long in the dark and the cold. I had not seen any other man or beast apart from Thoris for so long that the thought crept into my mind that there were no others left. That we alone in the world had survived that winter, that Ragnarök had come and gone and even the gods were lost. That we were the last men left in the world.
