Tim Leach - Smile of the Wolf

‘Be patient. The slave takes revenge at once—’

‘But the coward never does,’ he said, finishing the proverb for me.

On the first day of spring I rose before the dawn. I moved quietly in the darkness, but confidently too, like a blind man in a place he knows well. Through touch, I found the things I had placed the night before. A sack of salted fish. Several skins of water. A thick blanket, marked up with earth and grass. I left Gunnar’s sword sheathed and lying by the fire. A parting gift for Kari. And when I was ready, I laid my hand to Ragnar’s shoulder and woke him gently.

‘Speak soft,’ I whispered to him. ‘Or do not speak at all.’

He nodded and waited.

‘I shall be gone for some time,’ I said.

‘Where do you go?’

‘It is better that you do not know.’

‘Kjaran…’

‘Do not speak. Listen. There is a chance I shall not return.’

‘What shall we do?’

‘Convince him to go abroad, if you can.’

‘And what else?’

I looked across to Sigrid. She lay still, with her back to me, in a semblance of sleep. I think that she merely pretended not to wake, but I could not tell for certain.

‘Raise your children well and be kind to her,’ I said. And as I spoke those words, I think I saw her shudder.

Then I was gone, out across the dale. On foot with no horse beneath me: a single whicker in the darkness might give me away. I walked and ran, stumbling and rising once again, heedless of the bogs and stones that waited to trip me. Winter had only just ended and the nights were still long, but I had to find my place before the rising of the sun.

I saw what I was looking for: a shadow on a hillside, squat and ugly like some great monster lurking in the darkness. I circled to the right, my hands held before me, until I felt branches twine against my fingers, budding leaves under my palms. I lay down amidst the brush and the low trees. I wrapped myself in a blanket and with my good hand cast earth and twigs over it.

The sun rose, slow and reluctant, still half-asleep from winter, and it shone down on a building amongst the hills. Not a longhouse, but a little shieling, on the good grazing uplands. And I hoped that what I had heard was true.

For days, I watched and waited.

It looked abandoned at first – the untended roof sagging inwards, one wall bowed and holed as a longship shattered on a reef. It was too early in the season for a man to be staying there. Soon the few sheep who had survived the winter would be brought to the highlands to graze, but not yet. It was no place for a man to live.

At noon on the first day a slave came to the door bearing bread, and he left with empty hands soon after. Later, I saw a man come from within, a thick-bearded man with no rings of silver upon his arm. A servant or a slave, for he did not have the look of a landed man. He chopped wood and took it within the shieling, but he left before nightfall. The wood he chopped was not for himself.

A second day passed, and a third, and I lay on the ground, unmoving except at night. If they came in search of firewood, they would catch me and kill me. But I had the favour of the gods, or simple luck, and no man came to the forest. Slaves and servants came and went, but no man of note: not Björn or any of his kin, or another from the war band. And I never saw the man who lived within. I saw the smoke of his fire, smelt the meat that he cooked. Sometimes I thought I heard a sound from within, the sound of a man singing softly to himself. But he never left the shieling.

I marked the comings and goings, scratching into the earth to count the men who came and went. But I had to wait for many days to be certain that the man within was alone. I had to be certain that the man I wanted was inside.

It was the fourth day, when I could feel a fever begin to burn underneath my skin, that I saw him. Just for a moment at the doorway, leaning out, his face pale and filthy. It was Ketil: the man I had cut in the storm and left to die in the snow.

On the fifth day I scratched and unscratched my marks on the ground, until I knew for certain that Ketil was alone in the shieling, that none would come to disturb us. The night fell and the wind began to whisper, carrying voices to me from memory. The voices of Gunnar and his children. I stood from the brush. I walked to the shieling, with no attempt at stealth, and I pushed open the door.

There was a small fire burning: a handspan’s worth of dung chippings and twigs, a fire built for a lonely man to sit beside. Ketil sat beside it, his crippled leg stretched forward, a rough-cut piece of wood beside him to help him walk. He lifted his head slowly as I entered, fixed me with a dull-eyed stare. His eyes widened at the sight of me for a moment, but then he nodded to himself and leaned back against the wall of the shieling.

There was an axe at his side, but he did not lay a hand to it. Not yet.

‘You are not a ghost,’ he said, flatly, after a moment’s silence.

‘You can be certain of that?’

‘You would have died too far from here to roam this far. From what I know of ghosts, at least. You would have haunted those mountains forever.’ He rubbed his thumb across cracked lips. ‘And I lived through that storm. Why wouldn’t you?’

‘I am not a ghost.’

He wrinkled his nose. ‘You smell like a dead man, though. I can smell your stink from here.’

‘I have been hiding in the brush for days. You should cut it down, if you do not wish to be watched.’

‘It did Gunnar little use,’ he said. Slowly, he rubbed his dirty hands against each other. ‘You have been waiting to catch me alone, then. Are you here to kill me, Kjaran? There is little honour in the murder of a cripple.’

I did not answer at first. I felt water dripping on me from the neglected roof, could feel the fingers of the wind finding their way to my skin through the broken walls.

‘Why are you here?’ I said. ‘You have a farm on the lowlands. And I am sure that Björn or one of the others would take you in.’ I glanced at his leg. Even beneath his clothes, I could see how withered it was, the strange angle that it hung at. ‘You have earned that much.’

‘I will not live on the charity of men such as that.’ He spat on the ground beside him. ‘I cannot stand the way that my wife looks upon me. Or my children. It is better that I am here.’ He lifted his left hand, moved his fingers in mockery. ‘I think you may understand that. We are no longer men.’

By instinct I drew my maimed hand behind me, and he laughed.

‘If you had come back unhurt, I would have killed you, cripple that I am.’ He hesitated and the smile faded from his face. ‘You did not answer, before. Have you come to kill me, Kjaran?’

‘No.’

‘Then what is it you want?’

I sat down beside him and I stretched one hand, my good hand, towards the fire.

‘Do you remember the feast that Gunnar had?’

His hand, which had been rubbing and pawing at his wounded leg, ceased moving.

‘I was not there,’ he said.

‘You were not at the table, but you were there. Watching from the shadows, with Björn and his kin.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You butchered the horse and put its head up on a scorn-pole.’

A pause, this time. Then: ‘Yes.’

‘But there was someone who led the horse to you. A man who was at the feast with Gunnar and me. A man who pretended to be a friend and who betrayed us. I want you to give me that name.’

He turned his face from me.

‘Do you know what I despise most of all? About being a cripple, I mean.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It has made me a coward.’

Even after all I had seen and done, I still shivered at that word. To hear a man confess himself the worst of things. To feel that cowardice in the room was akin to being trapped with a leper or a man dying of the rotting fever.