The Smile of the Wolf

by Tim Leach

  ‘Speak soft,’ I whispered to him. ‘Or do not speak at all.’

  He nodded and waited.

  ‘I shall be gone for some time,’ I said.

  ‘Where do you go?’

  ‘It is better that you do not know.’

  ‘Kjaran…’

  ‘Do not speak. Listen. There is a chance I shall not return.’

  ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Convince him to go abroad, if you can.’

  ‘And what else?’

  I looked across to Sigrid. She lay still, with her back to me, in a semblance of sleep. I think that she merely pretended not to wake, but I could not tell for certain.

  ‘Raise your children well and be kind to her,’ I said. And as I spoke those words, I think I saw her shudder.

  Then I was gone, out across the dale. On foot with no horse beneath me: a single whicker in the darkness might give me away. I walked and ran, stumbling and rising once again, heedless of the bogs and stones that waited to trip me. Winter had only just ended and the nights were still long, but I had to find my place before the rising of the sun.

  I saw what I was looking for: a shadow on a hillside, squat and ugly like some great monster lurking in the darkness. I circled to the right, my hands held before me, until I felt branches twine against my fingers, budding leaves under my palms. I lay down amidst the brush and the low trees. I wrapped myself in a blanket and with my good hand cast earth and twigs over it.

  The sun rose, slow and reluctant, still half-asleep from winter, and it shone down on a building amongst the hills. Not a longhouse, but a little shieling, on the good grazing uplands. And I hoped that what I had heard was true.

  *

  For days, I watched and waited.

  It looked abandoned at first – the untended roof sagging inwards, one wall bowed and holed as a longship shattered on a reef. It was too early in the season for a man to be staying there. Soon the few sheep who had survived the winter would be brought to the highlands to graze, but not yet. It was no place for a man to live.

  At noon on the first day a slave came to the door bearing bread, and he left with empty hands soon after. Later, I saw a man come from within, a thick-bearded man with no rings of silver upon his arm. A servant or a slave, for he did not have the look of a landed man. He chopped wood and took it within the shieling, but he left before nightfall. The wood he chopped was not for himself.

  A second day passed, and a third, and I lay on the ground, unmoving except at night. If they came in search of firewood, they would catch me and kill me. But I had the favour of the gods, or simple luck, and no man came to the forest. Slaves and servants came and went, but no man of note: not Björn or any of his kin, or another from the war band. And I never saw the man who lived within. I saw the smoke of his fire, smelt the meat that he cooked. Sometimes I thought I heard a sound from within, the sound of a man singing softly to himself. But he never left the shieling.

  I marked the comings and goings, scratching into the earth to count the men who came and went. But I had to wait for many days to be certain that the man within was alone. I had to be certain that the man I wanted was inside.

  It was the fourth day, when I could feel a fever begin to burn underneath my skin, that I saw him. Just for a moment at the doorway, leaning out, his face pale and filthy. It was Ketil: the man I had cut in the storm and left to die in the snow.

  On the fifth day I scratched and unscratched my marks on the ground, until I knew for certain that Ketil was alone in the shieling, that none would come to disturb us. The night fell and the wind began to whisper, carrying voices to me from memory. The voices of Gunnar and his children. I stood from the brush. I walked to the shieling, with no attempt at stealth, and I pushed open the door.

  *

  There was a small fire burning: a handspan’s worth of dung chippings and twigs, a fire built for a lonely man to sit beside. Ketil sat beside it, his crippled leg stretched forward, a rough-cut piece of wood beside him to help him walk. He lifted his head slowly as I entered, fixed me with a dull-eyed stare. His eyes widened at the sight of me for a moment, but then he nodded to himself and leaned back against the wall of the shieling.

  There was an axe at his side, but he did not lay a hand to it. Not yet.

  ‘You are not a ghost,’ he said, flatly, after a moment’s silence.

  ‘You can be certain of that?’

  ‘You would have died too far from here to roam this far. From what I know of ghosts, at least. You would have haunted those mountains forever.’ He rubbed his thumb across cracked lips. ‘And I lived through that storm. Why wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I am not a ghost.’

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘You smell like a dead man, though. I can smell your stink from here.’

  ‘I have been hiding in the brush for days. You should cut it down, if you do not wish to be watched.’

  ‘It did Gunnar little use,’ he said. Slowly, he rubbed his dirty hands against each other. ‘You have been waiting to catch me alone, then. Are you here to kill me, Kjaran? There is little honour in the murder of a cripple.’

  I did not answer at first. I felt water dripping on me from the neglected roof, could feel the fingers of the wind finding their way to my skin through the broken walls.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I said. ‘You have a farm on the lowlands. And I am sure that Björn or one of the others would take you in.’ I glanced at his leg. Even beneath his clothes, I could see how withered it was, the strange angle that it hung at. ‘You have earned that much.’

  ‘I will not live on the charity of men such as that.’ He spat on the ground beside him. ‘I cannot stand the way that my wife looks upon me. Or my children. It is better that I am here.’ He lifted his left hand, moved his fingers in mockery. ‘I think you may understand that. We are no longer men.’

  By instinct I drew my maimed hand behind me, and he laughed.

  ‘If you had come back unhurt, I would have killed you, cripple that I am.’ He hesitated and the smile faded from his face. ‘You did not answer, before. Have you come to kill me, Kjaran?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what is it you want?’

  I sat down beside him and I stretched one hand, my good hand, towards the fire.

  ‘Do you remember the feast that Gunnar had?’

  His hand, which had been rubbing and pawing at his wounded leg, ceased moving.

  ‘I was not there,’ he said.

  ‘You were not at the table, but you were there. Watching from the shadows, with Björn and his kin.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You butchered the horse and put its head up on a scorn-pole.’

  A pause, this time. Then: ‘Yes.’

  ‘But there was someone who led the horse to you. A man who was at the feast with Gunnar and me. A man who pretended to be a friend and who betrayed us. I want you to give me that name.’

  He turned his face from me.

  ‘Do you know what I despise most of all? About being a cripple, I mean.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It has made me a coward.’

  Even after all I had seen and done, I still shivered at that word. To hear a man confess himself the worst of things. To feel that cowardice in the room was akin to being trapped with a leper or a man dying of the rotting fever.

  ‘I was close to death, out there, after you left. As close as a man can come.’

  ‘I was there as well. Afterwards, in the storm.’

  ‘I do not want to go to that place again. Or beyond it. I do not like what I saw there. Yet all men do. And I shall go there soon. The next winter will finish me soon enough. As it should have done three years ago. As it should have killed you.’

  He looked back at me and there was a strange hunger in his eyes – a kind of needful madness.

  ‘Has it done the same to you?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am not afraid.’

  The pain broke across his face, and sham
e as well. But he nodded, accepting.

  ‘Why did you not kill me? Why not spare me this shame?’

  ‘I knew it would slow the others. That they would not leave you. That was all. I would have killed you, if it were not for that.’ I hesitated. ‘What will you say to the others?’ I asked.

  ‘To Björn? And his kin? Perhaps I would speak of you to them, if ever they came here. But they do not. I will not speak of your return. I do not care who else dies in this feud. But you are a fool if you continue the killing.’

  ‘And a coward if I do not.’

  ‘And there is the trap. Our people came to this island to be free. Of kings, tyrants, men who would tell us what to do. Yet here we are. With less freedom than a slave.’

  He picked up a stick and poked at the little fire.

  ‘Put this aside, Kjaran,’ he said. ‘I am not a wealthy man. But I will give you silver – twice the blood-price for Gunnar and his family. Enough to settle the feud honourably. You can go to some other part of Iceland and begin your life again. Or I will give you the name. What is it that you want?’

  ‘I must have the name.’

  He waited for a time, his eyes fixed on mine. He gave me as much time as he could to change my mind.

  28

  I left the shieling and struck out across the dale. I did not go to the west, towards the sea and Ragnar, Kari and Sigrid. I went south, along the familiar path. And I broke the promise that I had made to myself, that I would never set eyes on the valley again.

  I walked down through the mountain passage and at the first farm I came to on the other side I traded my last silver arm-ring – the one Thoris had gifted me – for a good horse. I rode until I was in sight of Borg, the mountains and the sea. It was time to turn east then, to travel along the path of exiles and outlaws.

  I was afraid that I would not remember the way, but I need not have worried. Every point on that journey was marked in my memory. There was no shape of stone, no cliff face or river or curving line of earth that I did not remember.

  The passage was easier this time. It was the beginning of summer and the snow was gone from the lowlands. Yet still, I came to the heights and here the snow remained upon the ground, for it is a place that knows no summer.

  The coward’s fear was building, every instinct I had warning me off that place. The horse beneath me felt my fear, in the way that beasts always do, wiser than men and cursed with silence. But as he danced and whickered beneath me, he reminded me to be brave. I touched my heels to his flanks and rode on.

  It was before me once again. The valley where I had spent three years as an outlaw. A nameless place, for who would name a land where no man would wish to go to, where only the forgotten choose to live?

  I could not see the herd of stolen sheep that should be wandering in the valley; perhaps Thorvaldur and Thoris had not gone raiding this early in the year. I tethered my horse at the bottom of the valley and it called out to me as I left it there. For he, too, could feel that this was a place where nothing should live and nothing could grow; the horse was afraid of being left there alone.

  I began the slow climb up the side of the hill, pushing through snow slush and bog. I made my way towards the cave and I was afraid of what I would find there.

  Perhaps they would cut me down: I was a free man and they still outlaws. But I had nowhere else to turn. And so I made my way up that hill and I remembered every step of the path, each little trap of earth and stone that waited to break my ankle, shatter my knee, leave me dying on the ground. Even the earth itself seems to long for the killing in such a place.

  I smelt the cave before I saw it: the hot stink of close living that I had grown unaccustomed to. And I saw the shallow slit, in the side of the hill, above where some god or dragon slept. I let my hand drift to the knife at my hip as I drew close.

  It was empty. I waited to see if some outlaw would stir from the blankets and filth, like a cursed man rising from a grave, but there was no one. I knelt beside the entrance, running my hand through the ash of a recent fire, the gnawed bones in a land where there were no flesh-eaters but men. In the air, the fresh stink of men in confinement. They had been here so I sat to wait, sitting atop that familiar warm stone at the back of the cavern where, deep below, a dragon still slumbered in the heart of the mountain.

  *

  I remembered lying in that cave, rotten with fever, my left hand dead to the touch. I remembered Thoris nursing me as he might have nursed a child. I remembered the coming of the Christian, the slow breaking of our friendship. I remembered swearing that I would never return to this place – another promise unkept. Then I heard the breaking of snow and there was no more time for memory.

  A shadow at the entrance, the low sun at his back. I could not tell who it was at first. Once I would have known those men apart by smell alone, but I had lost that gift.

  ‘Welcome, Kjaran.’ It was the voice of the Christian that spoke.

  ‘Thorvaldur,’ I said.

  A pause. ‘I do not know that I am glad to see you again.’

  ‘Where is Thoris?’

  Thorvaldur made no reply at first. He slung his burden from his back: a skin full of water, fresh from the frozen river. He offered it to me first, as was my right as his guest. I let my hand wander from my knife to the water, but when I drank it it was sharp and piercing against my tongue. I winced, for I had grown unused to such things, and handed it back to the Christian. He chuckled a little and drank slowly, unmoved by the cold.

  ‘Thoris died, in this past winter.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’ I said, speaking softly.

  He laughed again. ‘No, no. A fever took him. Quick and true.’ He leaned forward and put his hands together. ‘And now tell me, what brings you back here?’

  I did not answer.

  ‘You longed to see us once again? I had not thought that of you. Or have you earned outlawry once more through some rash action?’ He rapped the fingers of one hand on the pommel of his sword. ‘Or have you come to claim some reward, for the killing of an outlaw? I did not think you fool enough to come alone, if that be your intention.’

  ‘You said that when we met again I could choose. Between your God and a death in battle.’

  ‘That I did. Are you ready to choose?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I wish to choose both.’

  He stared at me for a moment, his eyes hunting across my face. Perhaps he thought I mocked him, an insult that he would answer with blood. But when he saw that I meant what I said he crowed with laughter, eyes rolling like a berserker, clapping his hands against his thighs in delight.

  ‘Oh, Kjaran,’ he said, ‘you do not know how long I have hoped to hear an answer such as that. The true answer. I have asked many that question, and none have spoken as you have.’ He cocked his head to the side. ‘Why do this?’

  ‘There are men I must fight. Too many for me to face alone. Will you stand beside me? Will you fight and die with me against them, if I swear to your God?’

  ‘Your feud?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His fingers tapped against his sword, dancing and moving, as if it were an instrument on which he played a silent tune.

  ‘Are they Christians, the men you will fight?’

  ‘No.’

  He paused, considering. ‘Then yes,’ he said. ‘But you must be made a Christian at once. There is no time to spare.’

  ‘What must I do?’

  He smiled at me, that half-toothed smile, a corpse’s smile.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said.

  *

  Frozen water does not lie silent. It moans like a dying man. It barks like a mad dog. And when the wind runs across it, one can hear the sound of scratching fingers, of all the dead men that the water has swallowed, begging to be let out.

  It was the start of summer and yet here the river was still frozen. I placed each foot carefully, hunting for where the ice seemed thickest, even as it groaned beneath me. I had seen a man swallowed by
that kind of ice when I was a boy. A snap and he was gone beneath the water. By the time I got to him, slipping and sliding across the ice as I ran, the water had frozen over once more. I saw him beat against that ice once, twice, three times, but already I knew it was too late.

  Thorvaldur strode out ahead of me, trusting the god to guide his steps, only pausing from time to time to look back and mock me with a smile.

  ‘You are afraid to die? I thought better of you than that.’

  ‘There is still much that I have left to do.’

  He shrugged. ‘Here, then,’ he said. ‘This will be far enough.’ And he took a small axe from his belt; he handed it to me and told me to break the ice.

  I have heard tell of how sometimes, in the worst of the feuds when an avenging warband has a man at their mercy, they will refuse to grant him an honourable death, a death in battle. They hand him a tool rather than a weapon, and they make the doomed man dig his own grave.

  You may question why a man would do such a thing. Why he would not simply refuse and call on them to kill him cleanly. On this the stories are silent. Perhaps it is the threat of torture that compels him, or it may be that they promise to hand him a weapon if he does as they ask, to give him a chance to die well. Whatever it may be, it seems that the doomed man will always do as they ask. And whatever bargain is made for an honourable death, the killers refuse it. They put him into that grave and they bury him alive. They let him drown beneath the earth.

  As I worked the ice, Thorvaldur sitting cross-legged on the frozen water and watching me in silence, I thought only of those stories. And yet I could not seem to stop.

  I cut a circle in the ice – a fisherman’s circle, though there was nothing to catch in this dead water. And Thorvaldur spoke the words in some tongue that I did not understand, his hands clasped together in prayer.

  ‘A spell?’ I said, when he had finished.

  ‘There is no witchcraft here. Only words. And water. And God.’ He pointed to the ice. ‘Kneel with me.’

  I felt his hand against my neck, the sound of more words, the cracking of the ice beneath my knees. Then the world swung upwards and I felt the water close around me. And from my mouth, the deadened sound of screaming underwater.