Tim Leach - Smile of the Wolf

I believed him as he spoke. That he was honest and true. And I knew it did not matter.

For Björn looked at me with a killer’s eyes. He would never stop hunting me. Three years or not, within the law or outside of it. But that was a matter for another time.

First, he would have to catch me.

The brothers went, and it was Olaf, Gunnar and I who remained behind. Gunnar and I sat upon the ground, and Olaf stood over us like a father before foolish children, waiting for one of us to speak.

At last, Gunnar raised his head. ‘Leave us, Olaf,’ he said. ‘We have nothing to say to you.’

‘You order me out of my own property?’

‘A request. I do not know what you want from me. Gratitude or shame, or some other thing. But you shall not have it.’

Olaf spat on the ground and spoke to me. ‘My debt is paid. Do not ask me for another favour. Never speak to me of this again.’

He left and I felt a weariness descend such that I have never known, not even after battle or lovemaking. I expected that Gunnar would speak more – there were so many things that he could have asked, answers that I wished to give. But he said nothing and it fell to me to break the silence.

‘Do you want to ask why?’ I said.

‘I think that I do not want to know. I think that it would shame me to know.’

‘As you wish.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Olaf knows a trading captain. Ragnar the Keel-farer. He sails in a month. Perhaps I will go to Ireland. I speak a little of their tongue. My father taught me.’

He nodded absently. ‘I do not think that I could ever leave Iceland. I think I would die before I let that happen.’

‘Three years is not so long a time.’

‘You will come back, then?’

I thought of Björn, waiting for me with murder in his eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will come back.’

Slowly, like a cut tree that falls of its own weight, Gunnar folded forward and put his head into his hands. I looked away and I tried not to listen or to see. I let my gaze drift to memory, my mind turn to song, and gave him the absence that he needed.

At last, he spoke again. ‘Will you stay with me? Before you go?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’

And with that, we both fell to silence. There was nothing more to say.

I did not think that I would see Sigrid again. As I walked about the Althing there were men who I had known for ten years, women who had played with me when I was a boy and laughed with me as a man, who stared past me as if I were a stranger to them. I was not an outlaw, not yet, but already they looked on me as they would look upon a dead man. Why should Sigrid be any different?

Yet I had not been long in my wandering on the plain – a purposeless, hopeless walk of farewell – before I saw her coming towards me. I turned aside, found a rock a little apart from the crowds to sit upon, its polished surface a testament to the hundreds of people who had sat upon it. Old men looking on their last Althing, young men brooding on feuds. And lovers, too.

She sat down and her eyes cut into me – unblinking, empty of tears. A fighting man’s eyes. ‘Why would you lie for him?’ she said.

‘You have heard the judgement, then?’

‘Everyone has heard it.’ She hesitated, her hands clasping and unclasping each other, as if she sought to break some invisible set of bonds. ‘Why would you lie for him?’

‘It was only half a lie. I put my blade to that man’s throat.’

‘But why do it?’

I looked to the ground. ‘Gunnar has a wife. Children. Land.’

‘You think his life is worth more than yours.’

‘I know it is. In every way.’

‘And what of me? Did you think of me?’

To that, I had no answer.

Her mouth twisted in grief, and she spoke again. ‘You are a fool. Weighing your life in land and family and the herd. It is always men like you who die first. And you bards never sing those stories.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘Oh, you’ll sing of those wealthy farmers, those mighty chieftains. The way they died bravely. But it always begins like this. Some poor slave or servant offered up as a sacrifice, sent to die on the command of their master. They are always the first to die. But they never sing songs of those men.’

‘That was your father’s fate, wasn’t it? He died in his master’s feud.’

At this, she flinched and could no longer meet my gaze. I had guessed well, it seemed.

‘You are meat for these men,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘To be cut and traded and destroyed. You owe them nothing. And now you will die for one of them.’

‘They have to catch me first.’ I waited for a moment, let her think on that. Then I took her hands in mine. ‘I will go for three years and this feud will die. And I will come back.’ I lifted my arm so that she might see the arm-ring I bore. ‘This is all the silver I have in the world. It could be a beginning for us. Some land, a little herd. Nothing more than that. But perhaps it will be enough.’

She tilted her head, her eyes still as hard as beads of glass. ‘You truly mean this, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do. Will you wait for me?’

She did not speak for a long time.

‘I will wait,’ she said at last, in weariness and defeat. For it is a madness in the blood, that love with a morbid heart. It is no blessing. But it is unalterable.

The madness filled me too, and I do not know what we would have done, had we been given a moment longer, together there on the plains. But there was no time left. Footsteps were coming towards us, a figure running across the plain.

Ragnar the Keel-farer, a man I half-knew, the sea captain who would take me on my exile a month hence. I thought at first that he had come to discuss our journey, to name his price. But one look at his face and I knew it was some other matter that drew him to me.

He was too breathless to say more than a word, but that was all he needed.

‘Gunnar,’ he said, and pointed back the way he had come, back to the heart of the Althing.

Blood spilled at the Althing – that was my first thought of what must have come to pass. That Gunnar or Björn had broken the truce, taken weapons on to the field and that one had killed the other, a crime that might make the People forget their injunctions against execution, and murder the transgressor where he stood. I did not know which I would rather see, Gunnar dead on the ground, murdered by a blasphemer, or with a bloody blade in his hand, soon to die a shameful death.

Gunnar and Björn – I could see that they stood close, heads bowed forward like bulls before the charge. Soon there would be the screaming that goes beyond words, after which blood flows as inevitably as the autumn floods. But not yet – we were still at words. There was still hope that the quarrel could be put aside.

I went between them, caught Gunnar’s head in my hands, placed my forehead against his.

‘Speak to me,’ I said. ‘Tell me what has happened. The feud is settled, is it not?’

He smiled at me, his eyes alive with honour and madness. He levelled his finger over my shoulder and said: ‘The horse.’

I looked upon it – a handsome black gelding that tossed its head and stared back at me, proud as a prince. The horse that Gunnar had come to buy, but I did not laugh. I had seen men killed for much less.

‘It must be a black horse,’ Gunnar said, ‘for Kari. I promised him. And it was promised to me.’

I looked to the trader – a man I did not know, thin and hunched, shifting from foot to foot.

‘A better offer was made,’ he said. ‘You cannot hold that against me. I sell at the best price, that is all.’