Tim Leach - Smile of the Wolf

‘This is not place to guess. We have no time for this.’

Listening to it spoken that way, forgetting what I knew, I could see why Olaf would dismiss it. Men died in winter. Madness and sickness and the cold, they all took their harvest. Erik had no feud unsettled or debt unpaid that might bring a man to commit murder. The truth that I knew was one that no man would think of. Beside me, I saw Gunnar nodding to himself, willing Olaf on as he mocked the man who spoke. The way a man may wordlessly encourage a horse or a dog as it fights, fearful that if he speaks he will do more harm than good. That a loyal beast may turn towards the voice of its master and see its throat emptied upon the ground.

‘Does any man wish to speak of this?’ Olaf said.

A moment of silence, of perfect silence. Then a cry behind us, a scream of horror.

I once saw a mother pulling her dead child from a river. The child had fallen through the ice a month before and been entombed there, a shadow beneath frozen water. The woman had gone there every day, to peer into the depths and look upon her child. One would have thought that her pain, her grief, would have been dulled by time, by seeing the dead day after day. And yet when at last the river thawed and she held the stiffened flesh in her arms it was as though her son had died a moment before. The scream she gave, that was the same scream that I heard at the Althing. The scream of one looking on the dead for the very first time.

It was taken up by others, and a wave of motion broke through the crowd, akin to the instant that a shield wall breaks and an army begins to run. I saw many hands reaching by instinct to weapons that were bound away, thinking only that some sudden attack could prompt such cries of terror.

The crowd parted and I saw it was a single figure coming forward. It was a woman, and I smelt her before I saw her, the hot smell of decay, the stench of a battlefield a month after the killing.

There was something in her hands. Something that had earned her passage through the crowd, that had set every man and woman who saw it to screaming. And though I knew this, could see it at the corner of my vision, it is not what I noticed first.

When the heroes in the old stories meet their deaths, in those last moments they see not the faces of the men who have come to kill them, but focus instead upon some inconsequential thing. The dew upon the grass, the reflection of sunlight on a blade, the whorl of wood in a broken shield, a raven that watches from above. I had always thought it to be one of those lies that poets are so fond of, but on the plain at the Althing I discovered it was so. The first thing I saw was not her face or what she had brought, but the heavy curve of her belly, that she was heavy with child.

Then it was that I saw the stinking thing swinging in her hands, the face that was familiar to me. I knew who she was and what it was that she carried.

It was Vigdis, bearing the head of the man we had killed.

There is something that I have forgotten to say. There is something that I have always been afraid to speak of with you. But I must speak it now.

Do we have ale left? Only a little? Well, no matter. Take a drink of it yourself. Come now, drink deeply, you may do more than wet your lips. This is a special day for us both, is it not? And I must drink too, for I have told you many stories and sung many songs, but none so long as this one. And there is much more for me to tell.

There. That is better. Now I am ready. Now I may speak to you of revenge.

Do not think it something of no substance. You can hold it, feel it, touch it. It is handed down from father to son, from brother to brother, from a husband to a wife. For whilst a man may inherit many things from his kin – land, cattle, a silver arm-ring, a favourite shield, a good sword – he also inherits something much more valuable. He inherits the duty of revenge.

For when one has kin who lie unavenged in the ground, they do not lie quietly. The dead speak, and they only speak of vengeance. Sometimes they are soft, whispering in your ear as you make love to your wife. Or they may shriek at you at night, waking you from sleep. No, the dead are never silent.

Those who hear such voices, they all look the same. Head cocked a little to one side, leaning towards a voice that only they can hear, their eyes blank, staring into a future that only they can see. When you try to speak to them, they pay no attention at first. You must fight to be heard, for there is a voice that you cannot hear, drowning out every word that you say.

You may think it madness, until you have heard such a voice for yourself. Then you will do anything to make it stop.

But it will take years. Long winters spent waiting for brief summers, brief summers spent waiting for some opportunity for the killing. Years that are spent watching and waiting, the whispering voice speaking louder and louder and louder in your ears, until you wish for madness or deafness to come. It would do no good to be thus afflicted. If you were deaf, you would still hear the words in your mind and have no other sounds to drown them out. And the mad – the mad hear the dead more than any. They hear not one voice, but an endless cacophony of all the unavenged dead, each clamouring to be heard over his rival.

If you are lucky, the moment will come at last. Your quarry will venture into common lands alone, and some loose tongued shepherd will tell you so. And when last you give the killing blow to an enemy, after the war cries have fallen quiet and the last shield is broken, you stop and listen and you hear nothing. The chattering dead at last fall quiet. There is nothing sweeter than that silence. There is nothing more beautiful than revenge.

I see that you do not believe me. Perhaps you believe in another false god. In love or song. Friendship, perhaps, or honour, or the joy of battle.

It does not matter. You will learn the truth in time.

At first, there was nothing but sound. Women screaming, men shouting. The stamp of hundreds of feet against the earth; as some crowded forward to hear and see more, others ran from the plain to gather their kin as witnesses. My eyes were open, but could not seem to see. I could feel the crowd closing around me, their hands upon me. Someone had grabbed my arms, but I felt his grip go slack a moment later, struck by uncertainty, not knowing what it was that he should do.

I closed my eyes, an instinct I learned as a child to wake from terrors in the night. If I closed my eyes in the dream, when I opened them again it would be in the waking world and my nightmare would dissolve into the dark. When I opened my eyes this time, my vision returned to a thousand eyes looking upon me in silence.

We were in a closed circle. Had I a sword in hand, I could not have swung it without striking half a dozen men. At first it was only Gunnar and I, but the mob parted a little and others joined us. I saw them then, the three brothers. Hakon, Björn, Snorri. And then their lost brother was there too, eyeless and lipless, grey skin and white bone, swinging from the hands of Vigdis.

I do not know how I appeared to them at that moment. But I could see that Gunnar did not wear the face of a guilty man. He looked like a man betrayed.

It was Hakon who spoke first. ‘Gunnar,’ he said, ‘what did you do?’

Gunnar did not speak. He did not take his eyes from Vigdis.

‘Will you speak it now, Gunnar?’ she said. ‘Or are you still a coward as well as a murderer?’

A wordless cry from Gunnar, a roar like a great wave breaking against a cliff. Then he did find words: ‘I gave him a warrior’s death. And you would call me coward?’