Tim Leach - Smile of the Wolf

We each grew sick in turn. Kept awake by the rattling coughing of the other man, too tired to feel pity, wishing only that he would either grow well or die. For there is a madness that comes without sleep. And we were both mad before long.

We barely ate. Scraps of dried meat, bowls of cold oats and snowmelt. Our flesh thinned, our bones grew light, until we were each reduced to a pair of aching lungs, a sluggish beating heart. I wondered if there would come a time when we knew that there truly was no hope. When we would go to our knees in that tiny cave, reach for our knives with shaking hands. When we would agree to try and give one another a warrior’s death, rather than waiting to starve like cowards or beasts.

The snow grew weaker. The light grew stronger. The season began to turn. Yet for us, nothing changed.

At last there was a day when we had nothing left to eat. Our hands touched the bare stone of the cave floor, our fingers ran over bones that were notched with tooth-marks and scoured of any fragment of meat.

We broke open the snow and found it softer, wetter than it had been before. I stepped out and stumbled on shaking legs like a newborn lamb, the only sound that of the wind when it stirred, the crunch of snow beneath our boots. When the wind was still, when we were still, there was nothing.

At the frozen river at the bottom of the valley, the ice broke quickly. I filled a bucket, lapping the water from it as a dog would, careful not to reach in and gather the water in my palms. Thoris had warned me not to, for he had seen men maimed that way: a single touch of water on the skin that froze when the wind turned. I had no wish to lose the fingers on my other hand.

We went to a place where we had buried our supplies, chipped at the ground, digging up grain, frozen meat, icy wood to try and burn. Moving as much as we could that day, for who knew when the storms would come again? There was still so little light, so little time.

That night, as we lay exhausted in the cave, Thoris pressed me for a song more insistently than he ever had before. But I found that I did not have the heart for it. For the first time in as long as I could remember, the words would not come; I could not sing.

‘It will come,’ Thoris said. ‘The first winter is the hardest. You will learn. And it is passing now. It is ending.’

I heard his words, knew them to be true. Yet still I did not believe.

‘I should have gone abroad,’ I said. ‘I should have taken my place on that ship. I was a fool to stay.’

There are words that a man speaks, in the cold and the dark, that he does not mean. Winter can take over a man like a fever, and falsehoods tumble from his tongue. So long as he gives no insult that must be answered with blood, he will be forgiven for it. But I meant those words. I did not speak lies, but the truth.

There in the dark, I saw Thoris shudder.

There was a day, like every other before it. Of shivering cold and hunger. Of squalor and boredom. A clearer day, so we walked through the snow towards one of our more distant caches of supplies. Sick, bent double with coughing, for we were both consumed by the same sickness.

It seemed impossible that summer could come again, we had been so long in the dark and the cold. I had not seen any other man or beast apart from Thoris for so long that the thought crept into my mind that there were no others left. That we alone in the world had survived that winter, that Ragnarök had come and gone and even the gods were lost. That we were the last men left in the world.

A sound came to me as I trudged through the snow. A soft, fragile sound, like the first note struck by an unpractised musician. I thought it a phantom of the mind at first, for in the sleepless darkness of the winter I had grown used to hearing voices and sounds that were not there. I heard it again and could not make sense of it. Again and again it came, soft still but insistent, for the musician was growing more confident, was remembering what it was to play.

I turned back to face Thoris to see if he heard it too. He had stopped walking, stood in the snow with his head tilted shut and his eyes closed. I knew that he heard it too. I knew then what it was.

I needed to see it. I would not believe unless I saw it. And though until that moment I had not known if I had the strength even to walk, suddenly I was stumbling and running through the snow, casting my head about. I clapped my hands, yelled curses, hoping to scare out the source of the sound.

There! A moment of brown motion, an angry cry, and I saw it. A little brown bird, rising from skeletal brush exhumed by the sun. It circled me, scolded me, twitched its wings and was off.

He was the first, but others would follow. The birds had returned and spring would follow them.

I sank to my knees in the snow and gave my thanks to any gods who might hear me. I looked to Thoris and found him grinning at me. A child I must have seemed to him, for he had known this moment would come. To be at the worst point of winter, where no hope is left, and to hear the birds sing.

We laughed together like madmen, howling and screaming with joy, wrestling in the snow like children at play. If a god had spoken to me at that moment and told me that I would die the next day, it would not have mattered to me. To live to hear birdsong again, it was enough.

When we were exhausted, sitting in the snow and drunk on the memory of that music, I said: ‘We shall have another fire tonight.’

‘We shall.’ Thoris scratched at his mutilated ear. ‘Do you still wish that you had taken your place on that ship? Was it not worth the suffering, for this?’

I hesitated, considering the lie, but already it was too late. He saw the truth of it in my face. He stood and struck the snow from his clothes with rough, chopping blows of the hands.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘We must go back to the cave.’ He began to walk away, but he had not gone far when he turned back to speak once more. ‘I will have a song tonight,’ he said.

He did not speak it as a request: it was a command.

‘Do you see him?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘What shall we do?’

‘I cannot say.’

I lifted my hand to shield my eyes from the sun and looked again down the valley. The day was clear, the sun was high, and yet still I could not believe what it was that I saw. There was a man walking through the valley. One man alone, coming towards where we lay in the snow.

It was spring – my first spring as an outlaw, and we had been going to tend the sheep that morning. Our new herd, for we had stolen some pregnant ewes whilst the nights were still long enough. And as we went to tend them, we had seen movement at the edge of the valley.

We thought him one of the other outlaws at first, one of those shadows we saw on the high mountains from time to time, and kept well away from. A thief who had come to take from us the cattle we had stolen.

But this man was different. Even from a distance we could see that he was well clothed. He walked like a warrior, not the shambling, exhausted steps of the outlaw who is always hungry, always exhausted. And he carried something in his hands, something long and slender. A staff, perhaps, though he did not use it to help him walk.

‘One of the men who hunts you?’ I said.

‘Fool,’ he snapped. ‘Who would come here alone?’

‘Another outlaw, then.’

‘Perhaps.’

He was going towards the herd; soon he would see them. Half a dozen sheep, all marked with a different man’s brand. There would be no mistaking them for anything other than the work of a thief.

‘If he takes the cattle, we die,’ I said.

‘It does not matter if he takes them, if he has seen where they graze. He cannot leave. We cannot let him go.’