Michael Ridpath: 66 Degrees North

Harpa led them down one of the little side streets off Hverfisgata, on the route she knew Gabríel would take. Sure enough, there he was, head down against the snow.

She stopped in front of him. ‘Gabríel Örn.’

He looked up in surprise. ‘Harpa? I thought we were going to meet at the bar?’

Harpa felt a surge of revulsion as she saw his face. He was a couple of years younger than her, a little flabby around the jowls and neck, fair hair thinning. What had she ever seen in him?

‘No, I want you to come with us.’

Gabríel Örn glanced behind her.

‘Who are these people?’

‘They are my friends, Gabríel Örn, my friends. I want you to talk to my friends. That’s why you have to come back with me.’

‘You are drunk, Harpa!’

‘I don’t care. Now come with us.’

Harpa reached out to grab Gabríel on the sleeve. Roughly he shook her off. Frikki growled and strode up to him. The boy wasn’t wearing a coat, only his Chelsea football shirt, but he was too drunk to care.

‘You heard her,’ he said, stopping centimetres away from Gabríel. ‘You’re coming with us.’ He reached out to grab the lapel of Gabríel’s coat. Gabríel pushed him back. Frikki swung at him, a long wide arc that someone as sober as Gabríel had no trouble avoiding. Gabríel was a good fifteen centimetres shorter than Frikki, but with one hard jab upwards, he caught Frikki on the chin and felled him.

As Frikki sat on the ground, rubbing his jaw, Harpa was surprised. She had never expected Gabríel to be capable of such physical prowess.

Gabríel turned to go.

The anger exploded in Harpa’s head, a red curtain of fury. He was not going to walk away from them, he was not.

‘Gabríel! Stop.’ She reached out to grab him, but he pushed her back. She lurched into a low wall surrounding a small car park. On the wall was an empty Thule beer bottle. She picked it up, took three steps forward and, aiming for the bald spot on the back of Gabríel Örn’s head, brought it crashing down.

He staggered, swayed to the right and fell, his head bouncing off an iron bollard at the entrance of the little car park with a sickening crack.

He lay still.

Harpa dropped the bottle, her hand flying to her mouth. ‘Oh, God!’

Frikki roared and ran at the prone body of Gabríel Örn, launching a kick hard into his ribs. He kicked him twice in the chest and once in the head before Björn grabbed him around the waist and flung him to the ground.

In a moment, Björn was on his knees examining Gabríel Örn.

The banker was motionless. His eyes were closed. His already pale face had taken on a waxy sheen. A snowflake landed on his cheek. Blood seeped out of his skull beneath his short thin hair.

‘He’s not breathing,’ Harpa whispered.

Then she screamed. ‘He’s not breathing!’

August 1934

‘AAAGH!’ Hallgrímur swung his axe as they came at him. Eight of them. In a frenzy, he chopped off the leg of the first warrior, and the head of the second. His axe split the third’s shield. The fourth he hit in the face with his own shield. Swish! Swish! Two more down. The last two ran away, and who could blame them?

Hallgrímur flopped back against the stone cairn, panting, the fury leaving him drained. ‘I got eight of them, Benni,’ he said.

‘Yes, and you got me too,’ said his friend, rubbing his mouth. ‘It’s bleeding. One of my teeth is loose.’

‘It’s just a baby tooth,’ said Hallgrímur. ‘It was coming out anyway.’

He relaxed and let the weak sun stroke his face. He loved the feeling right after he had gone berserk. He really felt that there was so much repressed anger in him, so much aggression, that he was a modern berserker.

And this was his favourite spot. Right in the middle of the twisted waves of congealed stone that was Berserkjahraun, or Berserkers’ Lava Field. It was a beautiful, eerie, magical place of little towers, folds and wrinkles of stone, speckled with lime green moss, darker green heather, and the deep red leaves of bog bilberries.

The lava field was named after the two warriors who had been brought over to Iceland as servants from Sweden a thousand years before by Vermundur the Lean, the man who owned Hallgrímur’s family’s farm, Bjarnarhöfn. The Swedes had the ability to make themselves go berserk in battle, when with superhuman strength they could smite all before them. They proved a handful for the farmer of Bjarnarhöfn, who passed them on to his brother Styr at Hraun, Benedikt’s farm on the other side of the lava field.

There had been trouble between Styr and his new servants, and the berserkers had ended up buried under the cairn of lava stone and moss, right where Hallgrímur was leaning.

Of course Hallgrímur had grown up knowing the story of the two berserkers, but his friend Benedikt had just started reading the Saga of the People of Eyri , and had come up with all sorts of new details, the best of which was that one of the berserkers had the same name as him, Halli. At eight, Benedikt was two years younger than Hallgrímur, but he was a brilliant reader for his age. Their favourite game had become to stalk the lava field pretending to be the berserkers. It worked quite well, Hallgrímur thought. Benedikt came up with the stories, but Hallgrímur was much better at going berserk. And that was, after all, the point.

‘What shall we do now?’ he asked Benedikt. It was more of a command for Benedikt to come up with another game than a question.

‘Any sign of your parents?’ Benedikt asked.

‘Father won’t be back for ages. He’s gone to look for a ewe on the fell. I’ll just check for Mother.’

The cairn was in a depression, out of sight of grown-ups, which made it such a good playing place. Hallgrímur climbed the ancient footpath between the two farms, which had been hewn out of the lava a millennium before by the berserkers themselves, and looked west towards Bjarnarhöfn. It was a prosperous farm, nestling beneath a waterfall which tumbled down the side of Bjarnarhöfn Fell. It was surrounded by a large home field, bright green against the brown of the surrounding heath. A tiny wooden church, little more than a black hut, lay between the farm and the grey flatness of Breidafjördur, the broad fjord dotted with low islands. Just up from the shoreline were wooden racks on which lines of salted fish hung out to dry. Hallgrímur could see no sign of life. His mother had said she was going to clean the church, something she did obsessively. This seemed a pointless activity to Hallgrímur, since the pastor only held services there once a month.

But there was no reasoning with his mother.

He was supposed to be in the room he shared with his brother, doing arithmetic problems. But he had sneaked out to play with Benedikt.

‘All right,’ said Benedikt. ‘I have heard that Arnkell’s men have stolen some of our horses. We must find them and free the horses. But we must take them by surprise.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ said Hallgrímur. He wasn’t entirely sure who Arnkell was, he was probably a chieftain from the saga. Benedikt would know the details.

They crept southwards through the lava field. It had spewed out of the big mountains to the south several thousand years ago, ending up in the fjord just between the two farms at a place called Hraunsvík, or Lava Bay. For several kilometres it flowed in a tumult of stone and moss, twenty or thirty metres above the surrounding plain. It was possible to crawl along the wrinkles of the lava, to slither through cracks, to lurk behind the extraordinary shapes that reared upwards. There was one spot where the lava seemed to form the silhouettes of two horses standing together, when viewed from a certain angle. That was where they were heading.