Tim Leach - Smile of the Wolf

It danced and chattered across the wall, rapping out a soft alarm call. I crouched down, hoping that I had not been heard. A whistle came to me from the doorway: the tune of a song that I had sung that night, of Odin and the Poet’s Mead. I whistled back the same set of notes.

‘Kjaran?’ It was Gunnar’s voice, coming from the doorway.

‘Yes.’

‘Come inside. Quickly.’

I ran across the open ground, expecting at any moment the thrum of a bowstring, the whistle of a thrown spear. But I was through the door, Gunnar’s hand on my back.

‘What—?’ I said, but Gunnar grabbed my arm and put his finger to his lips. I stood in silence and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.

When they had, I wondered if some madness had stolen over Gunnar, for I could see nothing awry. The guests were asleep, lying on the ground in every part of the room. The children had all been brought inside, but they slept too, exhausted and content. I saw no sign of wounds on anyone; no one save for Gunnar and his family were still awake.

But Freydis was crying, sitting in her mother’s lap and sobbing against her, as Dalla bounced the child on her lap. And Kari not quite weeping, but blinking back his tears, his mouth agape.

‘I thought that you might have been ambushed,’ Gunnar said. ‘I would have come out, but I could not leave them alone.’

‘I do not understand,’ I said. ‘What has happened?’

Gunnar did not reply. He pointed outside.

I saw nothing at first. The remnants of the feast, the ground marked by many feet. The barn, the hitching posts, the stockade – all was as it should be. Then the wind came once more and I saw a strand of rope dancing in the wind. One end knotted to the hitching post, the other wandering freely.

‘The horse is gone,’ I said.

‘Kari woke me. He says he heard men speaking, the sound of the horse crying out. When he came out, it was gone.’

‘It could have broken its tether.’

Gunnar snorted in disgust. ‘Do you really believe that?’

‘We must see for ourselves.’

‘I will go with you,’ Kari said.

‘No.’

‘I will go!’

Gunnar struck him – a measured, backhanded slap. ‘I told you, no. Do not make me say so again.’

Dalla pulled the boy close against her, and her daughter too. I could not meet her gaze, and so I took up a shield and looked to Gunnar. He nodded to me and we stepped out into the dark, our shields held high.

Out there in the summer night the land seemed alive with motion. My eyes made a nightmare of it all. A startled bird rising from the moor became an arrow flying towards us. A lumbering sheep, for a moment, changed to a man hunched over and walking on all fours. We walked amongst monsters in the darkness.

‘I wish it were winter,’ I said.

‘I do not,’ Gunnar replied. ‘I have always wanted to die in summer.’

I crouched beside the hitching post and in the blue half-light I tried to read the story of the ground. There were so many footsteps of men and horses that it seemed a hopeless task. But I studied the tracks like a priest reading an omen, listening for a voice from the gods that might guide us on the way.

‘What do you think?’ I said.

He ran his finger over the clean cut in the rope. ‘He did not break his tether.’

‘You believe that they are still out there?’

He looked at me. ‘Oh, that I know for certain. But we must still go searching for them. I’ll not hide in my home like a coward.’

‘I do not think they will fight us. If they wanted to kill me, they have but to wait a few days. They want to scare us.’

‘Then we shall not be scared. But keep your shield up. They may have an archer with them.’ He shook his head. ‘I wish we had armour.’

‘I have never worn mail. I would move like a fat old man.’

He laughed and I took what comfort I could at the sound. Even if we had the light of day and a horse of our own to search on, we would have had little chance of finding a runaway horse – and none at all if it had been stolen. But there was nothing to do but try. To wander in the dark, stumbling over rock and tussock, the weight of the shield burning in my arm, mouth dry as a stone. To wander into whatever trap might be laid for us, for the sake of honour and nothing more.

We circled the farm, always keeping it in sight on our left. Gunnar insisted on walking on the outside, his unprotected right side exposed to the open countryside and whoever might be waiting there. I listened for the whispering sound of footsteps in the darkness, the creaking of an unseasoned spear, the accidental rap of a blade against a shield.

‘Wait.’

I raised my shield when Gunnar spoke, and laid my back against his.

‘I heard something,’ he said.

We stood and listened. I heard nothing except the wind against distant trees, Gunnar’s steady breaths in and out. Yet I could feel his sweat-sodden tunic pressed damp against my shoulders. It seemed he could feel fear after all.

‘What did you hear?’ I asked.

‘Laughter.’

We waited, and I do not know how long we listened for, waiting for the sound to come once more. But it did not and we slowly resumed our circle.

We returned to where we had begun and saw no sign of men or of the missing horse. There had been no trail that I could read upon the ground. The creature had vanished.

‘Does that satisfy your honour?’ I said.

He nodded, exhausted. ‘Yes. Daylight will reveal the rest.’

Imagine a warrior waiting for a battle, knowing that the morning will bring his death. Yet the sun rises and, as he readies his arms, he is told a truce has been struck and there will be no battle that day. Or a man condemned to die at the order of some foreign tyrant, readying himself to be sent to the headsman’s block and given a coward’s death, only to find himself pardoned at the last moment. That was how I felt as we came back to that farmhouse.

Perhaps I would have met my death well, having known the woman I loved that night. But in that moment I knew it could not be true. I felt no peace, no readiness for death. For mine was a greedy love.

We passed through the door, back to the welcoming darkness. And the moment we stepped through, I knew that I had been mistaken. For Dalla came forward, her eyes rolling like a spooked horse, and she gripped her husband by the shoulders.

‘Where is Kari?’ she whispered. ‘Is he with you?’

‘Why would he be with us?’ Gunnar said.

Her mouth gaped in grief and she made no reply. She did not need to. We knew it then, without another word being spoken, even as we hunted with our eyes a boy who was not there.

Kari had gone.

It was behind the boards of his bed. I found it by passing my hand over the planks, feeling the wind against my skin. I rapped the wood, found it hollow, and lifted up the loose plank. And behind it a tunnel, cut through the turf wall, just big enough for a child to crawl through.

‘He said he wished to sleep,’ Dalla said. ‘He went to his bed. When I looked again, he was gone.’

I saw it all then: a bored child, trapped inside by the long winter, giving himself a project. Turning his home into a place to explore, a world of wood and earth given life by the mind. A child’s secret. An innocent thing, but he had found another use for it now.

‘I always thought this house was too cold in winter,’ Gunnar said. He spat in the embers of the fire and I heard it sizzle.

‘How could we not see him?’

‘He went along the riverbed, upstream or downstream. That is the only way that he could have gotten away without us seeing him.’

‘We must go back out.’

‘I will go with you,’ Dalla said. ‘If they are out there, they will not hurt a woman.’