Following that thought, another six or seven tumbled in and Helga had to squeeze her eyes shut in order not to shout.
One question. She needed just one question.
Who did it?
The buzz and clatter of the longhouse intruded on her thoughts again, and she caught the gimlet glare of Hildigunnur’s eyes across the room. She stood next to Sigmar, who was deep in conversation with a heavyset, greying man who looked like Unnthor without the hill-troll heritage. Helga knew that look: Work, girl! And so she did, swinging by the table that held the mead jug and picking a route towards Hildigunnur and Sigmar that set her floating past Jorunn’s little circle.
‘. . . and I only just managed to sneak the eggs out of the way before he sat down. The king had no idea!’ Gales of laughter. ‘Can you imagine?’ Helga walked away as the rest of Jorunn’s story rolled off the tongue. Very much Hildigunnur’s daughter, that one – the rehearsed tale skipped along merrily, and while entertaining the men Jorunn would be measuring them, drawing conclusions, arranging them into groups: trusted and not trusted – no, soft or hard. That’s how the Riverside family sees the world, isn’t it? You’re soft – or you’re hard.
Her mother was definitely in the latter category. Helga had seen her play the game before, talking so no one else got a word in while weighing up options and deciding who to favour. Control. It was all about control.
‘You look thoughtful, darling daughter,’ her mother said once Helga was close enough. The mead was honey-sweet on her breath.
Helga smiled. It felt weak on her face, weak and false. ‘Lots of people,’ she muttered.
Her mother smiled back and Helga felt the familiar thin but warm hand on her forearm. ‘One day you’ll have a home of your own to run.’ Was she slurring ever so slightly at the edges? ‘A husband to give you children, and children to give you nothing but trouble.’ For a moment, the old woman paused. What is she thinking? She looked like she wanted to say something else, but then she thought better of it. ‘And you’ll be able to make this’ – she gestured across the hall, where guests were standing and talking, mixing with new people and having good-natured arguments – ‘happen without so much as an extra heartbeat of worry.’
Beside them, Sigmar stopped swinging his arms to make his point for a blink of an eye, and Helga refilled his tankard with a swift motion, taking care not to spill a single drop. She fought back a frown. She knew what awaited – husband, house and children – but . . . this?
I have to leave Riverside.
The impact of the thought was such that she only just managed to keep the smile stuck on her face and add a feeble, ‘Yes.’
No.
Absolutely not.
How long have I known?
Still smiling, she walked away from Sigmar and the big farmer, neither of whom had so much as acknowledged her presence. Must be nice, living in a world where your mug fills up without you noticing.
But there was no room for anything else in her head because the new thought was there, like a bear in a cage, thrashing about.
I have to leave Riverside.
She saw it now. The place was cursed. Anyone who grew up in this corner of the world was doomed to a life of violence. It wasn’t the world out there that had turned them bad – they were bad to begin with. She had to go and see other places, escape the shadow of the longhouse.
The thought of dropping everything there and then was pulling at her like a dream of sunshine and honey.
If I leave now, I’ll always remember him. I can’t let them get away with killing an innocent boy.
The memory of Volund’s eyes was cold water on her head. There was something rotten in Riverside – but what was it?
And who?
Chapter 17
Hunter
The smell of mead, breath and sweat pressed down on Helga. Out. Now. She caught her mother’s eye and gestured towards the water butt, then the jug, then the door. All she got in return was a shrug. The door beckoned and she slipped out as quickly as she could without actually running. The air outside was like cold water on a hot day. She drank it in, feeling her mind clear with each gulp.
Who did it?
The question nagged at her, biting at her heels, buzzing around the inside of her head. She walked towards the river again and started making a list in her head. ‘No,’ she snapped out loud, ‘that’s not it. No list.’ Instead, she tried to remember: Karl, lying flat in his bed, greyish-blue to look at, cold to the touch. The wound that killed him – two thin lines, one on each groin. Bjorn, dead. Lying half on his back, half on his side. Stabbed in the back, with force. The wound that killed him was . . .
Helga squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember. Come on! She imagined Bjorn’s shift, his bunched muscles, the sticky spot on his back where the knife had entered, between the shoulder blades, probably straight through the heart on the first blow. It had either been very skilled, or lucky, and delivered with great strength or great fury . . .
But why couldn’t she remember the wound?
In her mind she could build a picture of Hildigunnur, looking at the body, then going straight into the hut – and then they’d found the knife.
We never saw the wound.
For some reason she couldn’t quite understand, this annoyed her tremendously. But before she could start thinking what she could do about it, her feet had decided for her.
*
The hut where they had put Bjorn’s body until the sun rose sat in the corner of the yard like a squat lump of rock dropped by a giant. It was an inglorious final resting place, but it was the only place that made sense after the god-speaking had decided. Unnthor would not want others around for the burial. The men had been talking about it at length, discussing the merits of various buildings – and they’d have taken half a day to get to it, too, except for the fact that Hildigunnur had inched her way into Unnthor’s field of vision, caught his eye and glanced towards the old hut. It had been easy enough work for Einar and Jaki to clear sufficient space to lay Bjorn down, and a lot harder for six men to lift and carry him to his resting place.
Helga put her hand on the latch.
‘Who’s there?’
Her heart stopped for a moment and her throat seized up in cold terror. Get a grip on yourself! Her ears caught up and as she recognised the voice, she silently cursed her mother’s kindness. Out of consideration Hildigunnur had asked them to make space for Thyri to sit by the corpse of her dead husband.
‘Who’s there?’ A rising note of fear.
‘It’s me,’ Helga said to the door, as softly as she could, ‘Helga.’
Silence. Then, ‘Oh.’ The door creaked open and a small bubble of soft warm light spilled out. Thyri had lit a candle inside. ‘Come in.’
Steady. There was a faint smell that came with the light. It was hard to detect at first, but it was definitely there. Steady! Slaughter season . . . stale blood . . . death.
SPEAK, YOU HALFWIT!
‘Thank you,’ Helga said, still keeping her voice down. It looked like the big man on the bier was just sleeping, and she was suddenly horribly afraid that she might wake him up and he’d start being loud again. Don’t be a fool, the voice in her head snarled at her. She grasped for words, weighed up choices and inched into the cramped space. Thyri reached past her hip and closed the door. Her body-heat added to the sensations – not unpleasant, but too close.
Everything in here is too close.
The hut wasn’t big to start with, and Bjorn’s body filled the length of it. On his other side, building materials had been stacked haphazardly around a broken cart and a load of sacks each about the size of a child. She struggled to make out the shape. Wool? Hard to tell – also, not important, she chided herself.
The square that Jaki and Einar had cleared for Thyri was no bigger than half a sleeping bunk, but they’d pro
vided her with a footstool to sit on, and she’d found a place on some boards to melt a candle onto.
It’s a den: a den with a dead animal in it. The cave where the bear crawled to die—
Quick. Say something.
‘So,’ she tried, cursing herself for how weak she sounded – what would Hildigunnur have done? Get her talking. ‘How . . . are you feeling?’ The light was soft, but not soft enough to hide the flash of contempt on the older woman’s face. Helga watched her bite down on it, swallow it down, replace it with kindness.
‘I’m . . . surviving.’
‘Sometimes that’s all we can do.’ She tried to leave the sentence on a pause, like she’d heard her mother do – gently nudge the door open for Thyri to start talking – but nothing was forthcoming. It was going to take more. ‘Have you spoken to Jorunn?’
‘No.’ The reply was clipped. If Helga was trying to open the door, this was a very real attempt to slam it shut again. She felt an unexpected flash of delicious, combative pride.
Do you not know who I am?
Do you not know where I am from?
I’m from Riverside, woman.
You cannot brush me off that easily.
‘It must have been hard for her as well, to find her brother like that.’ Thyri huffed, but there was no immediate rebuttal. Time to cast the net. ‘They had looked happy to see each other.’
‘He liked Jorunn.’ There was a husky note in her voice.
Helga reached out and placed a hand on Thyri’s forearm. She felt the flinch, but Bjorn’s wife did not pull away. ‘He seemed to like most people.’
‘Huh. Most, yes.’
‘But not Karl.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Thyri said, ‘I think he maybe liked him more than he let on. Karl was a bastard, but you always knew where you stood with him. They went through some things together, and I think Bjorn will . . .’ Her voice trailed off, then she swallowed and finished, ‘I think Bjorn would have fought for his brother in any kind of circumstance.’
‘Oh, absolutely.’ Not a chance. ‘They must have been quite a pair when they were younger.’
‘They were,’ Thyri said, and her voice warmed with memory.
Helga looked down, partly to hide her smile. In the net you go, little fish. ‘I bet you know some stories.’
‘Oh, I do. But you’ve probably heard them all.’
‘Me? No – you know Unnthor and Hildigunnur, they’re always thinking forward, always wanting to get to the next year, next harvest, next lambing. They’re not big on old tales.’
‘So have you heard nothing of your near-brothers in their youth?’
‘Not really, no,’ Helga said. So this is what a hunt feels like. Careful, now. ‘There was one story I heard, just recently.’
‘Which one?’
‘About how Jorunn ran away with a pretty stable-boy?’ She could sense tension rising in the woman across from her and forced a light note into her voice. ‘She must have been about my age, maybe? Headstrong and ready to go out into the world?’
‘That was a bad business,’ Thyri said. ‘I saw the boy, and he truly was a beauty to behold. No wonder she jumped him. But he had cruel eyes. He’d have left her pregnant in a fishing village somewhere before moving on to the next one – rumour had it he’d already done so twice, and that was why he was up in the valleys.’
‘And did Bjorn and Karl go after him?’
‘No,’ Thyri said firmly.
Then who did? The question bounced around in Helga’s head, but she managed to hold it back for a moment. ‘So does anyone know what happened, exactly?’
‘No,’ Thyri said, ‘but Aslak disappeared shortly after Jorunn did, and they rode back together. I can only assume that the boy ran away down to the coast or something.’
For a moment, Helga felt like she could feel her skin crawling away from her. Aslak’s carved face stared at her from inside her eyeballs, grinning like a nasty mouser in an old barn. Sure he did. That boy was buried in the woods. ‘Imagine that,’ she said, stopping just short of pulling the corners of her mouth up by hand. ‘But I reckon if Bjorn had just cleared his throat at the right moment, he could have scared the lad straight.’
‘I know what you might think,’ Thyri said, ‘but despite what he looked like, Bjorn wasn’t actually like that. Had Karl been near his size, he might be king now.’
‘So Bjorn rarely had a fight?’
Thyri looked down on the prone body with deep affection. ‘Barely needed to. They’d take one look at him and get a real need to be somewhere else. And I wouldn’t have let him fight, anyway.’
‘How so?’
‘When we met, he was . . .’ She swallowed. ‘He was always in the middle. People were drawn to him because he was loud and funny and hard to lose sight of. And girls would throw themselves at him, ask him to lift them up and fondle his arms.’ Oh. So that’s it. In the darkness, Helga’s eyebrow arched. You could skin a deer with the sharpness in Thyri’s voice. Suddenly the idea of this tiny woman ordering the giant Bjorn around didn’t sound too far-fetched. ‘There was one – Alfhild, her name was – who found him after I’d laid my claim. She was absolutely sure that he’d drop me and choose her, just because she was rich and pretty.’
What do I say? Helga went with a vaguely sympathetic ‘. . . Oh! What happened?’
‘She fell on a rock.’ A satisfied pause. ‘Four times.’
‘He was smart not to stray, then.’
‘Yes, he was.’
Or something awful might have happened to your husband as well. Helga looked at the other woman with as much focus as she dared, but the sharp words had taken the wind out of her sails somewhat. She looked deflated and was pursing her lips in some discomfort.
A chance. Take it – take it!
‘It must be hard to sit the vigil all by yourself,’ Helga said.
‘It’s been much better, thanks to you.’
‘It’s one thing, being lonely . . .’ What had she seen Hildigunnur do? And how? ‘. . . and another being absolutely fit to burst.’
A tiny burst of laughter popped out of Thyri, and for a moment her eyes twinkled in the candlelight. ‘You’re not wrong, daughter of Riverside.’
‘I can sit here for you, if you need a couple of moments to . . . um . . . appreciate nature.’
Thyri’s smile was conspiratorial. ‘Thank you,’ she said as she rose with some urgency.
Three . . . two . . . The moment the door closed on Bjorn’s wife, Helga moved. ‘Right, big boy,’ she muttered under her breath, ‘time for you to tell me a secret.’ The body was uncomfortably cold, like a massive slab of meat laid out for carving. She pushed her arms under Bjorn’s side and heaved. ‘And the fact that you weigh about as much as an ox isn’t one of them,’ she grunted. The body shifted slightly, then sank down on the bier again. ‘Come on!’ she hissed, heaving again. This time she managed to lift his side a half-hand off the table, but then her arms started to ache and she couldn’t possibly shift him to his side. Think, girl. THINK. Looking around, she grabbed a fist-sized block of wood. ‘Last try,’ she muttered, and heaved. She knew his weight now, and it was ridiculous – but still, she managed to pull and create a little space to wedge the block in under his shoulder blade. Quickly, now! Moving the candle as close as she dared – burning down the vigil would probably be unpopular – she peered at Bjorn’s back.
Shit.
He’d been dressed in a new tunic.
Moving quickly, Helga stepped to the left and found the line of his trousers. Tracing his spine with her fingers, she worked her way upwards to where she could feel the wounds, touching the point where his skin had split under the blade.
And at that moment, she knew.
There was no way the wounds had been made with the same knife.
She didn’t even need to see them
to tell. These had a thick, split edge to them where the flesh had been ripped out. Karl’s wounds had been little slits, a thin wedge cut into the flesh. These were holes, punched by something broader and much heavier. So there had to be another knife, and—
Footsteps.
Straining, she lowered the massive weight of Bjorn down as gently and quietly as she could, sat down and took a deep breath, calming her thudding heart just moments before the door opened and Thyri entered.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I really needed that.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Helga tempered the smile on her face. Just enough, no more. I’ve done nothing wrong. She could feel the coldness of Bjorn’s body on her fingertips and she wondered, in an idle, detached way what Thyri would have felt about her dead husband being touched by another woman the moment she left the hut.
‘You’re kind.’ Thyri paused. ‘There’s something good in you. And around here, that’s . . . unusual.’ Her voice trembled slightly at the edges. ‘So you should go now, and do what you do every day, and wait until all of this is over.’ Fine. Even though she’d discovered big, new things, Helga still felt oddly hurt by the woman’s dismissal. She rose and started to leave.
The touch on her arm was so light that she almost didn’t feel it. In the flickering light, the older woman’s face looked haunted. ‘Be safe,’ the widow whispered.
The outside was colder than she’d expected.
*
The journey from Bjorn’s final resting place to the longhouse suddenly felt like it could take her for ever. Two killers. The thought went round and round in her mind. No, not necessarily – but two knives. Still the idea of the two killers wouldn’t go away: one furious and rough, the other measured and calm.
Two killers.
‘But why?’ she asked no one in particular. The words felt good, liberated from her head. ‘Why? Why steal Mother’s knife for the first one if you had a perfectly good one yourself?’ She stopped and looked at the longhouse, her home for the last eleven years. Light seeped out from the cracks around the door, escaped into the dark sky through the air slits, chased by chatter and bursts of laughter. She suddenly felt sick, so she turned on her heel and strode off towards the new barn. Anywhere – anywhere but here.
Kin (Helga Finnsdottir) Page 23
