Tim Leach - Smile of the Wolf

At last, he began to speak.

Sumardil?

You are so quiet in the darkness, I thought for a moment that you slept. So still, I might mistake you for the dead.

Sumardil. We have no strong drink left, yet still I have your name to speak, and it is sweet as mead upon my lips.

I am ready to speak that story now. I heard it first from his son, but now it is my story to tell. I am ready to tell you how Gunnar died.

We think of death in a feud as happening in a moment. The movement of a blade to open a throat, too fast to be seen. And what is the time it takes for the blood to pour from that cut? Count a dozen heartbeats and he will be dead before your lips say ‘twelve’.

But it is a slow thing, to die in the feud. A death by inches, as one’s favour slips away, as loyalties are tested and broken. Each day, there is one fewer man to count upon. Another sleepless night spent watching for enemies at the door. Crops that go unharvested, cattle that go missing. How many in a feud have died from hunger and sickness, and not from the blade? Too many to count. And it is after countless months spent sick, sleepless, alone, that finally the warband comes. By night, carrying fire, determined to end the feud before the rising of the sun.

Think of Gunnar, that night they came for him. For the first time in so long, he sleeps. With no companions left to him, he has not dared to rest, always watchful for the coming of the killers. But this night, the rain falls heavy and there is no moon in the sky. It is no night for a murder.

But the rain ceases while he sleeps. The clouds break open and the moon shines down. Men dress in black, the colour of killing, and steal from their houses, answering some sign or signal they have all agreed upon. They move across the dale – first one, then two, and soon a dozen or more, bearing weapons and torches. They know it is time, but Gunnar does not. He sleeps on.

What wakes him first? Is it the sound of footsteps across the roof? The clatter of arrows in a quiver as one is drawn? Or is it the crackle of fire as the first torch is laid to the longhouse? I cannot say. But in a moment of waking, he knows it is hopeless. He knows it is his time.

His axe is in his hand, the door is open a bare crack. He hopes that they will be foolish enough to rush the entrance, where he can fight them one at a time, but it is a vain hope. The fires are already lit, the house is burning. The men outside only have to wait. They know that Gunnar will come to them, as sure as a sailor knows the passage of the tides. It is as inevitable as that. Once the fires are lit, the men inside a burning house will come out to fight, and to die. For there is nothing else to be done.

Does he think of me, in that moment? I hope that he does. But what if in that moment he remembers that it was my words that began this? That I sent him out hunting a dead man? Perhaps he does think of me, and before he dies, he curses me.

He speaks to them; calmly, without rush or anger, as he might greet a traveller on the road, or as a farmer tending crops in the field. He asks them a question and he receives no answer.

He steps out from his home, his axe low at his side, his shield held close against his body. He feels the metal edge of the steel, cold against his bare chest. He feels the softness of the mud against his bootless feet, and by instinct he bends his knees and goes on to the balls of his toes, though his careful footwork will be of no use to him. In the light of the fire he sees them all quite clearly. Men who have always been his enemies, men he had once known as friends. He smiles at them all, so that they will remember that he was brave, that he met his death well.

This is no song, where one man may stand against one hundred. It is no tale where the warrior kills his sworn enemy as he dies. He does not even see Björn when he takes the first cut. For they are around him on every side and the blades dance against his skin.

He swings out blindly, is cut again. Men are all around him, so close that he smells the stink of their sweat, the foulness of their breath. But whenever he strikes out, fast as he is, his axe finds no flesh. It cuts through nothing but air, until it catches in the slats of a shield; the head breaks from the shaft when he tries to wrench it free.

He falls to the ground; the broken axe is wrenched from his hand. There has been no pain until that moment and suddenly there is nothing but pain. He waits for the killing blow: the blade into the side of the throat that rips forward, or that slides between the ribs or down through the shoulder and into the heart. But it does not come. The hands grip tighter, he sees Björn come forward, and he knows the slow death they mean to give to him. And at the last, he is truly afraid.

The knives begin their slow work upon him, and he tries not to scream for as long as he can.

That is how my friend died.

I let Kari speak and I asked no questions. He spoke haltingly, as though he were relearning the words as he spoke them. Several times, when his hesitancy stretched on, he seemed almost to drift to sleep, and when this happened I reached out my hand and gripped his wrist. I kept my fingers from the burned flesh, but it was no mother’s touch I gave him. I let him know that he would have no rest until he had finished his story.

When he had done so, I watched his eyes close, his breathing go soft and steady. I thought of the story that he had not told me. The story that I knew well enough. The story of how his mother and sister must have died.

‘Should I have died with him?’

I started at the voice.

‘I thought you asleep,’ I said. ‘You should rest. You have earned it.’

‘Tell me, Kjaran. Please.’

Should I have given him the truth? Perhaps. But I found that I could not do it.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It is better that you live.’

‘There is no shame in it?’

‘Is there shame for me, that I was not there?’

‘You were not his son.’

I had no answer to that. I sat beside him and we watched the fire. After a time I felt a hesitant touch against my hand. His fingers reaching out, as Gunnar used to do. I clasped his hand in mine and I thought of the friend I had lost.

‘What will I do?’ he said.

‘We could leave Iceland. Find another country to live in.’

‘We cannot run.’

‘It is what Gunnar would have wanted.’

‘That does not matter.’ He shook his head, slowly, like a dozing drunkard or a man underwater. ‘There is shame in letting him lie unavenged.’

‘There is. But it is what Gunnar would have wanted.’

‘What of my mother? My sister?’

‘Björn would not kill them. He had more honour than that.’

‘But I heard—’

‘You do not know what you heard.’

He fell silent and I thought I had won. But I felt it, then. The way a wounded man does not know it at first, feels no pain. And a moment later, puts his hand to his chest and finds himself slain.

I thought of Dalla and I knew what she would have wanted. We could go from this place and find a new home. The shame of Gunnar’s death, perhaps I could bear that. But to leave a father unavenged – what a thing it would be for him, to live his life with that weight upon him.

‘I think you are right,’ I said slowly.

He looked up at me and his eyes were alive once more.

‘We shall kill them all?’ he asked, hope in his voice.

‘Yes.’

He smiled and for a moment he was a child once more, filled with the joy of the child at a dream. ‘How shall we do that?’