The Smile of the Wolf

by Tim Leach

  I sat beside him and took his cold hand in mine. I rubbed the palm of my maimed hand against it, trying to instil some warmth in it. We sat together and I watched the fall of the sun from the sky.

  I do not know how long I waited there. But in time a sound came to me. A sound so soft that I thought it a trick of the wind at first. It came again, from behind me: a sucking of the air. A little gasp of pain. Turning my head slowly, I laid Gunnar’s hand back down and took up the sword.

  Something moved within the ashes of the house. At first I thought it to be a spirit, a ghost, for it seemed that no man or woman could have lived through such a fire.

  Then I was moving, retching and choking on the smoke that still rose, the smell of burned skin sharp in my nose. My eyes useless, my hands seeking, digging into the ashes of the home, pulling away pieces of burned timber, until my fingers found a different kind of warmth.

  Half-buried, barely breathing. Kari, Gunnar’s son.

  *

  The sun was falling from the sky and I did not have much time. Even over the wet slap of hooves against the ground and the crying of the wind I could still hear the rattle and gasp of the dying boy.

  He had tried to crawl into that tunnel. The gap in the wall where, three years before, he had escaped into the night, looking for a lost horse. But he had not gone all the way through. He had grown too broad in the shoulders, too much a man to make use of a child’s tunnel. And so he had lain there, trapped, as his family burned around him.

  I had pulled him free and found that the fire had still reached him. Cloth burned away, the skin red and weeping. I lifted him in my arms, listened to the rattle and gasp of his breath, each one softer than the last. I threw him across my blown horse and pulled myself into the saddle, and set it to a gallop one last time. We rode for the coast.

  Towards the sea we travelled. Towards a little longhouse that I had seen from afar, but never been too. For it was a luckless place, where a luckless man lived. Any who had wisdom would shun it.

  The horse gave out on the edges of the farmland, going to ground as noiselessly as a man who is speared through the heart. I gathered the boy up in my arms and ran as best I could.

  The longhouse was small. No great chieftain’s home, not even the place of a wealthy farmer. A home for a solitary man, a little scrap of land for one who had not earned the right to it any more.

  I struck the door and tried to call out, but no sound came. I swallowed, spat and tried to call again, and this time my voice sounded.

  I heard the shifting of a single pair of feet inside – no rush of a warband to the door. It swung open a fraction, and it was Ragnar who stood on the other side, looking at me with fearful eyes. Ragnar the Keel-farer, the Coward.

  In his hand he held an axe in a slack, unpractised grip. He looked at me and I saw that he did not know me for who I was. I held up the boy in my arms a little higher, as though I were offering him as a gift.

  ‘It is Gunnar’s child,’ I said.

  I saw his skin go pale, his hands tremble. For he knew me, then.

  ‘The others?’ he said.

  ‘They are dead.’ I felt the boy stir a little in my arms. Perhaps even in the depths of sleep he could still hear my words. That his father, his mother, his sister – they were all dead. ‘Can I come inside?’

  I felt one hand on my shoulder, guiding me. I saw the other cradling the head of the boy in my arms, making sure that I did not strike it against a wall or the frame of a door.

  In the light of the fire I saw that there were no others in that place. Everywhere there were mementos of his travels. Some piece of a stitched sail. Little relics of distant lands, coins and knives and worn pieces of whalebone. It was a captain’s home, and even it seemed to long for the sea as much as Ragnar did.

  ‘I know that you have no woman here. But I have nowhere else to go.’

  ‘I have a wife now,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Oh? I am glad.’

  He flinched at the word. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘We must do what we can.’

  The cooking fire burned high, though there was no one tending to it.

  ‘Where is your wife?’ I said.

  ‘She is at the shieling.’

  ‘Do you know anything of fire?’

  He looked at the boy in my arms, reached out hesitantly to the red marks, the weeping skin.

  ‘I have seen men burned before,’ he said. ‘We must give him cold water. Only a little. But we must keep his throat cold, and clear.’

  He passed me a horn of water and I tilted it towards the boy’s mouth. A few drops at a time, patient and constant, as falling water wears patterns into stone.

  ‘Later, we must clean the skin,’ Ragnar said. ‘It will hurt him terribly, but it must be done. And that is all I know to do.’

  ‘Will he live, do you think?’

  He hesitated, his mouth working silently. Then shook his head. ‘Burned men almost always die,’ he said. ‘I am sorry, Kjaran.’

  I looked down on the boy and watched my tears falling upon his face. I felt no shame. It was as though I watched another man weeping.

  ‘You must tell me what has happened.’

  ‘Much has changed since you left us,’ Ragnar said, and he seemed to diminish as he spoke.

  ‘Tell me of the feud.’

  He dipped the horn into a barrel of water and this time he held it out to me. I touched it to my lips, felt the sharpness of the cold water like a blade against my teeth. I drank it down in one draught and held it out to be refilled. Again and again I drank, Ragnar saying nothing. When at last I wanted no more, he spoke.

  ‘They returned from the mountains. Björn and his kin. They said that they had caught you and killed you. And they bore Ketil with them, his leg maimed, as proof of what they said.’

  ‘Ketil lives?’

  ‘If you can call it that.’

  ‘And you believed them.’

  ‘Gunnar would not. But yes, the rest of us believed him.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘Nothing. Gunnar swore vengeance, but had not the followers to claim it. Neither side could move against the other.’

  ‘Until today.’

  ‘Until today.’

  ‘There were no followers with him,’ I said. ‘Do you think they fled the fighting?’

  ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘They left before the fighting.’

  A silence for a time, as the fire burned and my tears no longer fell.

  ‘Tell me of this,’ I said.

  ‘There is little enough to tell. They left him, one by one. Some were bought, I think. With silver and promises of land. Others Gunnar drove away himself. Quarrelling with them, accusing them of betraying him, of betraying you. He was half-mad at the end, I think. And the last of them left when they saw this, for they saw no honour in dying at his side. So it went, until he stood alone in the feud.’ He breathed deeply and let his head hang low. ‘We have known this would come, sooner or later. One cannot stand alone for long.’

  ‘You would not stand at his side. You were afraid?’

  ‘He would have no company with me. He cursed me for letting you run to the mountains.’ He lifted his head and I could see the sadness marked on his face. ‘You must believe me.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  His eyes drifted to the boy in my arms. ‘They burned them out?’

  ‘Yes. The cowards. Ten against one, and they would not face him as a man.’

  ‘He was a warrior out of the old times,’ he said. ‘They would not dare stand against him.’ Ragnar reached out and took the boy’s hand in his. ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘The boy hid. It saved his life. It seems that all around Gunnar there were none but cowards.’

  Ragnar flinched again.

  ‘What of Olaf?’ I said.

  ‘He sought to keep the peace. His lands lay between those of Vigdis and Gunnar, and he would not stand for warbands roaming across his fields.’ He rubbed his hands against ea
ch other. ‘But I do not think that he will be sorry to hear of the end of the feud.’

  ‘What end of the feud?’ I said.

  He dropped his head, spoke bare above a whisper. ‘Even you must know that it cannot go on. You killed Erik and answered for it with outlawry. Gunnar killed Hakon and answered for it with his own life. The debt is settled.’

  ‘What of his wife and children?’

  ‘You must know that to be an accident. They would not kill a woman and child deliberately. It would be a shameful thing.’

  ‘Perhaps. You are right.’

  ‘You have suffered much. But the feud has to end. You do know that, don’t you?’

  I closed my eyes. ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘Whatever I can do to help, I shall. But Kjaran, there is something more that you must know.’

  ‘Tell me, then.’

  ‘I do not know how to speak this.’

  ‘What can you say that can hurt me now? I am beyond such things.’

  He licked his lips. ‘We thought you dead,’ he said.

  We. I would not have known, if it were not for that word. If he had said I, I would have lived in ignorance a little longer. But he said it, and I knew.

  I heard the sound of the door as it swung open. And in a moment, she was there.

  I could not look at her face, at first. To see the face that I had fought to remember in that maze of ice and snow, the sharp lines of her face, the light dancing in her eyes – I knew I had not the courage to look there. I looked instead upon her hands, remembered the way she had once touched my face with them, the touch light and soft as snow. I remembered the turn of her waist as it had felt under my hands, but now the key of the house was tied about her waist, as was her right. In the way she stood I could see the strength of a housewife who walks many miles in front of her loom each day – a serving maid no longer. No sign of a child on her body, yet somehow I felt that one was there. I knew it in a single look.

  I bowed my head and stroked the hair of the dying boy on my lap.

  I heard Sigrid sit. Then I heard Ragnar speak.

  ‘They came back from the mountains. Björn and the others. They came back bearing a crippled man and stories of your death.’

  ‘And you believed them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You believed the stories, too?’ I said, looking at her for the first time.

  Those strange eyes of hers met mine and there was no pain in them. Only a certain cold anger, the eyes of one in a feud.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But what does that matter?’

  ‘You may stay as long as is needful,’ Ragnar said.

  I gave a gesture of the head that could have been a nod, if they chose to take it as such.

  ‘What will you do?’ Ragnar asked.

  ‘Will you care for the boy?’ I said to Sigrid. ‘I must go back to Gunnar’s house.’

  ‘What will you do there?’ she asked.

  But I had already stood, was already gone.

  *

  Above me, scattered clouds and a hollow moon. Below, the wet earth, scoured with rain. And soon enough, the smell of ash in my nostrils, the taste of it on my tongue.

  It was dark by the time I returned to the farm. It was better work done at night, for the dead almost seem alive in the darkness. I was not digging graves, it seemed, but shelters. Beds carved into the earth, for them to rest and rise again.

  The greatest men and women are given a boat filled with treasures to take them to another world, piled high with weapons and gold and slaves with their throats freshly cut, for their service does not end with death. What gifts could I find for that great warrior Gunnar, against whose sword none could stand? What gifts for his wife and child? A few carved chess pieces, a little wooden horse that had somehow escaped the fire, the chain of stones looped on to a silver wire. What had not burned had been taken, and these were all the treasures that I could give them for the afterlife.

  Before I cast the first handful of earth down on to Gunnar, I looked on the sword at my hip.

  ‘I cannot return this to you yet,’ I said, ‘for it is still bright and unbloodied. I will stain it for you first.’ And I thought I saw his ruined face smiling up at me from his grave.

  I could feel madness so close that I could touch it. Like a hand that is proffered in a dance by a smiling girl – one has only to reach out and take it. And I would, I promised myself, for that would be my reward. But not yet.

  I laid the earth upon the dead and then I laid down myself upon it. No green fire dancing in the sky, not this early in the year. It was a short night, that late in summer. A few hours of darkness, and I did not sleep.

  One more time I looked on what remained of the longhouse, the fields, the hills around it, the grave at my feet. I did not look on that place to fix it firm in my mind. I looked on it and I wanted to forget.

  I looked down on the tracks, clear-marked in the wet ground, and not yet washed away or trampled and forgotten. The killing was there, simple enough to read. I saw where the men had circled the longhouse, where they had come forward to throw their torches and retreat just as quickly. I saw the single trail of footprints where Gunnar had gone to fight them alone. How he had reached a place, then turned in every direction, surrounded on all sides. And I saw another set of tracks, leading from the longhouse and back once more. I saw those footprints and I saw the story written there. I knew what had been done.

  26

  After a night without sleep, all things seem as dreams do. That morning I walked back through the valley as I might have walked through such a dream, through a world that no longer made sense to me. And so when I saw Sigrid sitting outside in the sun, outside a little longhouse such as I had one day hoped that I might own, it seemed to complete the vision. How many times had I dreamt of such a thing, in those years of exile?

  It was only as I drew closer, and saw her stitching together two pieces of a sail for her husband’s ship, that the dream was broken. She looked up, her hands curling into fists as she saw me.

  ‘If we still lived in a time when women wielded swords,’ I said, ‘you would have been quite the warrior.’

  ‘Do you think there was such a time? You poets like to sing of it, but I do not think I believe you.’

  ‘I do not know. Perhaps.’

  She looked me over, seeking some sign of where I had spent the night. Some mark of earth or of blood.

  ‘Where did you go last night? How little courage you had, to stay and speak to me. I would have thought I had earned that much.’

  ‘I went to bury Gunnar and his kin,’ I said, and I saw her eyes dim for a moment.

  ‘That was well done,’ she said.

  I sat on the ground before her and made no answer.

  ‘A battle?’ she asked, looking at my maimed left hand.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The cold.’

  She paused for a moment. ‘I often hoped that you suffered,’ she said quietly. ‘I do repent that now.’

  ‘Which of the three winters past did you spend learning to hate me?’

  ‘The very first,’ she said.

  ‘So soon? I see that our love was worth little enough to you. A little matter to pass a summer, I suppose. But it meant more than that to me.’

  She tossed her head at that. ‘What was it that you said Gunnar called you? Kjaran the Kind.’

  I did not answer.

  ‘I thought that once, too. Then I found a man who was truly kind.’

  ‘And a coward.’

  ‘I care not. Neither do you, I think.’

  ‘I think much of Ragnar.’

  ‘Do not think it some marriage of pity,’ she said. ‘He is a better man than you.’ She cursed and threw her stitching to the ground. I waited.

  She turned to me. ‘You want to ask me why. So why not ask?’

  ‘Did you think me dead?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I did not know. I had always thought that I would know if you had been killed. When my fathe
r was killed I seemed to know it before they spoke it. A touch of his ghost on my shoulder, a whisper in my ear, and then he was gone. But I never heard you speak to me.’ She picked up the two squares of the sail and began to sew once again. ‘And I had decided before they returned, before they spoke of your death.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When they told me that you had not left with Ragnar. That you had chosen to stay.’

  ‘You did not think that I stayed for you?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  Her mouth twisted. ‘You see? I am not such a fool as you think. Tell me why you stayed.’

  I could not answer for a long time. When I spoke, I said: ‘I looked on the mountains and the sea and I thought it beautiful. I thought my country too beautiful to leave. So it was not for love of you. But for this island.’ I looked down at my one good hand, turned palm upward to the sky. ‘I suppose that sounds foolish to you.’

  She said nothing for a time. Then: ‘I have often wondered at the lies men tell themselves. I see that you tell them, too.’

  ‘You think that I lie to you?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Tell me, then, why it was that I stayed. Since it seems you think you know better than I do.’

  She closed her eyes and shook her head, and it seemed at first that she would not answer.

  ‘For pride,’ she said at last. ‘You were too proud to run.’

  To that, I found I had no answer.

  She finished her stitching and rolled it up.

  ‘Will you stay with us, this winter?’ she said, and there was a challenge in her tone.

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then I shall. For I have no place else to go.’

  ‘And if you did, then you would.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. But when I looked at her I could see the hurt that word gave. ‘But I thank you for your kindness. I will stay with you.’

  She leaned forward, letting her hair fall across her face, hiding it from me. ‘What will you do now?’

  ‘Wait for the boy to die.’