The Smile of the Wolf

by Tim Leach

  ‘The snow blesses us,’ he whispered. ‘A white blessing from the White Christ. Perhaps we may win this battle after all.’ He extended a finger towards the warband. ‘And look. There are only six.’

  ‘We are outnumbered. He is a boy. I am maimed.’

  ‘I am worth two of those men. Kari is worth two of those men. But are you?’

  ‘We must get away from here.’

  ‘It is too late for that.’

  I knew that he was right. ‘We could have waited.’

  ‘What need is there to wait? You promised me killing, and your faith. You would give me only half a bargain?’

  ‘I spit on your White Christ. I curse him. A coward’s god.’

  ‘And yet I am the brave man and you the coward if you will not fight today. You can curse my God, if you want to. But if you do, I shall not fight with you.’ The mad smile went from his face as suddenly as it had sprung upon him. ‘Pray to Him, Kjaran. Do it now, for we do not have much time. He will tell you what to do.’

  I put my hands against each other. I closed my eyes and I prayed.

  I could feel the closeness of death – like hands closing about my throat, a sharp coldness sliding between my ribs, touching against my heart. Death has a taste, I had learned: a dry taste, like iron upon your tongue. It has no smell at all: the sweat and stink of the world falls away, leaving nothing behind.

  I prayed to the White Christ and his father to give me strength in battle, the courage to destroy my enemies, to grant me vengeance for friends long dead. And it was but a moment before I felt the cold hand of God upon my shoulder.

  My eyes opened. The world shone a little brighter. The taste of death grew dull, and I could smell the earth and the air once again. He would fight with me; I knew then it was as the priest had said. That this was a God of revenge.

  I wanted to sing to Him then, and I thought to give a soft chant that the wind would swallow. I thought to give Him a new song, but I could not find the words. I tried to think of the old songs, ones that I had repeated a hundred times before, and though the words came close to my lips they would not leave them, like a river almost in flood that cannot break its banks.

  My songs belonged to the Old Gods, and I had abandoned them. My new God was one worshipped in silence. I would never sing again.

  Below, the warband turned the corner, and their talk and their laughter ceased. Björn and the others swung down from their saddles, came forward and faced the boy in silence. I do not think that they recognised Kari at first: they thought him dead, and his burned face gave them little to find familiar.

  I saw Kari speak, but I could not hear the words. And I saw those men shudder almost as one, a ripple of shame passing through them. No doubt they had tried to forget what they had done.

  Kari spoke again and Björn shook his head. The man pointed south, stabbing his finger towards the beach, towards safety.

  Kari spoke one last time, louder this time, a single word. A word, at last, that I could hear. ‘Coward,’ he said.

  Björn nodded, then. He pulled the shield from the saddle of his horse, drew the axe from his belt. Another man half-drew his weapon at the sight of this. But Björn snapped a curse at him, spoke loud enough for me to hear. ‘Do not shame me!’

  Gunnar’s sword was out now – too big for Kari, but he held it well. Oh, but he was his father’s son. The stance he held, the look in his eyes – even in that ruined face of his, there was still some ghost of the friend that I had lost.

  Björn hesitated once more, looking on the boy who stood before him. Viewed from a distance, through the turning curtain of the snow, it was almost as though I was watching some battle from the old stories. Not a boy standing before a man, but a man standing before a giant.

  The giant shrugged and spat upon the ground. And the iron began to sing.

  I half-rose, my grip tightening around my spear, but Thorvaldur’s hand was on my shoulder.

  ‘Wait,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  He did not answer. But I trusted him then. There is no trust akin to that of men who fight together. Whatever game he had been playing before, no matter how much he liked to make me dance for his pleasure – all that was gone now.

  Björn was afraid of that sword, for he had seen what it could do. I could see him dodge back further than he needed to, to place his shield precisely in its way. His strikes were hesitant, in spite of all his advantages. Yet it was already clear how the fight would end. It was a beautiful sword, but it could not undo a foot of reach and fifty pounds of weight. Kari fought well, but he could not break the larger man’s guard. And it was not long before Björn found his courage.

  Wood was flying from Kari’s splintering shield and I could see him gasping for breath as he backed away. He barely struck back, the occasional half-checked swipe with the sword, as he fought to hold the shield high as Björn beat against it. He had no art and little skill, but he did not need them: he only needed his weight, and time.

  Soon, Kari could retreat no further and his shield groaned and cracked with every blow. Below, I saw the other men lose themselves, the hands half-rise, imploring. Longing for the death to come, to give them their release. Lost in the dance before them, they had no eyes for anything else.

  ‘Now,’ Thorvaldur said. But I knew it before he spoke and I was already gone.

  Down the slope, leaping with great strides from tussock to tussock. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Kari had gone to ground, both hands holding up his shield, blood upon the fresh snow. But I could not look at him. I looked only upon the men that I had to kill.

  I could feel some great sound bubbling up within me, scratching at my teeth, closing around my throat, desperate to be born, but I would not let it loose. Not until my spear was in flight, not until it had struck home in meat and bone, not until a man was screaming on the ground. Hearing that, I let the sound come from within me. It was not a curse or a war cry, not a song or a scream, but laughter. For a joy spoke through me, then: the berserker’s joy, which knows only laughter.

  The battle was not motion, it was stillness. Moments where the world ceased to move, where everything can be seen. In between those moments, a mist took my sight. I could not speak. I could not sing. But I could laugh. And I could kill.

  In those still moments I saw everything so clearly. The white teeth of the man I had speared, the whorls of dirt on the hand he held up, the arcing shape of the blood as I brought my axe down across his mouth and left him a smiling corpse on the ground.

  The next man seemed frozen in mid-swing, his axe moving towards my head as slowly as the motion of the sun. It was such a simple thing to place my shield in its way. He had no time to take up a shield of his own and held up his hand by instinct to bar my way. That shield of flesh was gone in two strokes of my axe. I touched his stomach with the blade – the barest touch it seemed to me, yet he knelt upon the ground at once and spilt his secrets into the snow.

  His lips moved, but I could not hear what he said. I could hear nothing but the laughter.

  I saw Thorvaldur, too. No shield in his hand, just that terrible sword of his clutched in both hands. He moved like a dancer and he left only death behind him.

  And at the heights of my fury, I saw Björn. His leg laid open, yellow fat parted neatly before the bone. His shield cast down, one empty hand pressed to the ground, lifting him up. His other hand, the full hand, bringing his axe down again and again on the boy at his feet.

  We grow close now, don’t we? Close to the dawn, for the sun will crawl into the sky soon enough. And close to the end of my story. Our story, it would be more right to say.

  Oh, I see you stir at that, Sumardil.

  You will have it all, I promise. The end to all mysteries. All the truth that you could want – too much, perhaps. We shall see. I must linger but a moment longer, before we get to the end. I must speak a little more of Kari, Gunnar’s son.

  When I was a young man I never thought to have a
child. With no land to call my own, it was too much to hope for. In truth, it did not matter to me so much. I wanted nothing more than to wander and be free. I thought that my words would be my children. A good song lives longer than a good son, after all.

  When I found Sigrid and I thought we would be married, I felt for the first time that strange ache for a child. I understood it as I had not before. That longing to have more of the one that I loved brought into the world, to find a way to make your love cheat death. And I suppose in the end I did get my wish, though not as I imagined it.

  Kari was our child, mine and Sigrid’s, raised together. Not raised from his birth, but from his death. There was no child like him in the world.

  I have loved a woman. I have loved a friend. Sometimes, I wonder if I have loved anyone so much as I loved that child.

  Not even you, Sumardil.

  32

  The battle fury left me, and I could hear once more.

  I could hear the calling of the wind and the rolling sea beyond the hills. Somewhere near me, a man lay sobbing. I could hear my own gasping breath, the beating of my heart like a fist pounding against a door.

  But there was one sound that I longed for, but could not hear. The sound of a word or a breath or a scream – none of these came from the boy on the ground. And even at a distance, I could see the blood that stained the snow.

  A wheezing, gasping chuckle, close to me. For Thorvaldur yet lived, hunched over and leaning upon his sword as an old man leans on a staff. I was bent over, too, for it seemed the battle had made old men of us both. And of Björn, it had made a child. I could see him dragging himself away, trailing blood behind him.

  He was the only one left. His brothers, his friends – those five men lay dead at my feet, and I could not remember which of them I had killed myself.

  The soft, wet sound of mud and snow beneath my feet, as I came forward to where Kari lay. He was on his back, arms thrown wide as though he meant to embrace the sky. One eye was gone, the other dark, like a bead of blackened glass.

  The rip of grass, the drag of a body through wet mud. Björn, trying to crawl away from us. I should have felt an urgency: my revenge was so close at hand. I should have worried that other men might come, for the coast road was well travelled. But there seemed to be no hurry. There was no rush to do anything anymore. For as long as the feud had gone on I had felt time slipping away from me. And now there was too much time. Too long left to live.

  Thorvaldur’s hand was upon my shoulder and I saw his weary, half-toothed smile.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  *

  Björn had not gotten far. I could see the evil wound upon his leg, a great cut of the sword that had split thigh and knee open to grin at the sky. Kari must have done it, as he lay upon the ground. Exhausted, shield broken, body cut open. He could have laid down still, played the corpse and the coward and saved his life. But he had found the strength for one more swing of his father’s sword.

  Björn rolled on to his back as he heard us come near. Axe held close to his chest, as though he were afraid I would snatch it away from him, the way a child holds a toy it fears will be taken from it. He looked up at me, and knew me then.

  ‘Are you a ghost?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘My brother?’

  ‘He is dead.’

  His eyes dimmed and the hand on his axe slackened. He cursed me then, and I waited for him to grow tired.

  When his oaths were finished, he said: ‘You have done this for Gunnar. Because of what we—’

  ‘No. It is not what you did to Gunnar.’

  ‘Then…’ He gasped with the pain and turned his head. ‘Then why?’

  I knelt down beside him, out of the reach of his axe.

  ‘The footprints,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When I came upon Gunnar’s farm, I saw the footprints. Two sets. One large, one small. They came out from the longhouse. Then they turned around and went back towards the fire.’ I saw the shame there in his eyes. ‘It was his wife and daughter, was it not? Dalla and Freydis.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me what you did.’

  He looked up and down the trail – grey-faced, the sweat running thick on his face like a blown horse after the gallop. But he could see that there was no rescue coming. Only the falling of the snow and the two men who stood over him.

  ‘We…’ he began, then trailed off, gasping. ‘They came out when we fired the house. I was going to let them go. I swear that. But…’ He paused and he looked at me. I do not know what he hoped to find in my eyes, but he did not see it there.

  ‘It was Vigdis. She told me… she said I would be a coward if I let them go. That my brothers would be ashamed of me.’ He closed his eyes at the memory and he said no more.

  I imagined it, then. A circle of men, a wall of shields. A burning house, the fire roaring high. A woman and her child beating against those shields, begging to live. And those men marching forward, one pace at a time, driving the woman back into the fire. Had they turned their heads from her, as they pressed her back towards the flame? Had they wept with shame behind their shields?

  Had Gunnar died seeing that?

  ‘It was a shameful thing we did.’ He was whispering now. Shivering, his face gone pale as ocean-washed bone. His hands slack around the axe. ‘I know Gunnar’s last words. I know what he said. Promise that you will kill me well and I will tell them to you.’

  I looked up to Thorvaldur. ‘Your choice,’ he said.

  Nearby, I could hear the babbling of a stream. I knew then what to do.

  ‘Put down the axe,’ I said. He nodded, without thinking, and let me take the axe from him.

  ‘Give me your arm.’

  ‘What will you do?’ he said, his teeth chattering with the cold.

  I said nothing and I lifted him up so that he leant upon my shoulder. Thorvaldur came to his other side and together we helped him to the river – two brothers, helping an old father towards his bed.

  We laid him down there and he reached out one hand to cup the water, to bring it to his lips. Yet when he had the water in hand, he seemed to forget what it was that he wanted. The fingers opened and the water spilt back to the river.

  ‘Do you know how a man is made a Christian?’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We are reborn in water. I will make you a Christian and you will tell me Gunnar’s words.’

  ‘You will let me live?’

  ‘Tell me what Gunnar said.’

  He looked down at the water. When he spoke, it was as though he were another man speaking.

  ‘He called out your name. As if… as if you were some woman that he loved. That was all he said as he died. Your name, over and over again.’

  I tried to hear Gunnar, then. He had spoken my name as he died – perhaps his spirit spoke it still, was whispering it to me.

  I heard nothing. I thought of what I knew, of the words that a dying man must speak. I knew my friend then, for the first and last time.

  ‘Put your head in the water,’ I said.

  He crawled to the river’s edge. He looked at me once; doubting, afraid. Then he carefully placed his head into the running water.

  One of my hands went to the back of his head. The other, my fingerless piece of flesh, hooked under his arm, and all my weight was upon his back. He knew what I intended then, and he fought me as best he could. But he had no strength left: he had bled it all into the snow.

  It did not take long. When he was still once more, Thorvaldur spoke some words to me, but I could not seem to hear them. I found myself back beside Kari, the Christian trailing behind me. I sat and he sat beside me, but he knew not to speak first.

  There was blood on Thorvaldur’s teeth, dribbling from his mouth and on to his chin. But he smiled at me and I knew he was not badly hurt. The boss of a shield or the haft of an axe had struck him in the mouth, but it was no killing wound.

  ‘What
will happen to him?’ I said.

  ‘Kari?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He died a warrior of Christ. His sins forgiven. He is in heaven now.’

  ‘And what of his parents?’

  ‘They died as pagans. He will never see them again.’

  ‘A hard kind of justice, that our God offers.’

  ‘It is a hard time we live in. A war for men’s souls. A war we must win.’

  I took the sword from where it lay on the ground beside Kari, and with my cloak I began to wipe the blood from it.

  ‘Do you still wish to kill me?’ said Thorvaldur.

  ‘No. It was not you that killed the boy.’ I sheathed the sword, the slap of metal against leather. ‘I did. I should have taken him far from this place.’

  ‘It is done, now. The spirits of the dead rest easy. You should be thankful.’

  ‘I am not thankful.’

  ‘It was a good fight. You fought well. I had not thought you to be a berserker, but I have heard that the poets often fight in such a way.’ He grinned that awful, broken-toothed smile at me. ‘A good fight,’ he said once more.

  My shield lay nearby and I took it up and placed it over the boy’s face, so that I would not need to look on it any longer.

  ‘He stood against Björn for as long as he could,’ Thorvaldur said. ‘He would not fall.’ He spat blood upon the snow. ‘It was a good death.’

  I did not answer. I took the boy’s hand in mine, as I had once held his father’s.

  When I looked up again, I found the Christian watching me, his head cocked to the side, a smile dancing on his lips.

  ‘What amuses you?’ I said.

  ‘It was for the boy, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All of this. The feud. You did this for him, didn’t you? You would have run, but you fought for him.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was for him.’

  He clapped his hands together in delight, still grinning like a madman.

  ‘That love you have for other men’s secrets,’ I said. ‘It will get you killed, one day.’

  ‘I doubt it not,’ he said. ‘But not today.’