‘Perhaps she still cooks him supper at night,’ Gunnar said, looking at the smoke.
‘You think the ghost can be hungry?’
‘Let us find out.’
I began to laugh, but the sound caught and died in my throat. For it was then that I saw it. A quarter mile distant, a dead man walking through the snow.
His back was to us as he moved with a heavy, steady tread, seemingly ignorant of the cold. There was no mistaking him for anything else. He was no farmer chasing after a wandering flock, no lover sneaking back from a midnight tryst in the next valley. He wore a helm on his head, a shield on his arm, and an axe – Hrapp’s old axe – in his hand. He was wandering his old lands, seeking men to kill.
‘Do you see him?’ Gunnar said.
I did not reply at first. I did not want to believe.
He spoke again, barely louder than a whisper. ‘Am I mad? Do you see him?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see him. What should we do?’
Gunnar did not reply with words. He beat his blade against his shield – a hollow, echoing sound, like a knocking on a tomb. The ghost turned towards us then, though we could not see his face in the darkness, and Gunnar gave the battle cry.
We did not run, the way you may have heard the old stories say. A warrior does not waste his strength, does not commit to questionable footing in the dark. We stalked forward, always keeping our left foot ahead, our shields presented, moving together as a shield-wall of two.
A howl split the night, the scream of the dead man answering our battle cry. A sound like nothing else I had ever heard, but we did not falter. Then the ghost took a few steps back – no doubt seeking a better footing, though it looked for all the world as though he were preparing to run.
We were close now, close enough to see the pale eyes glittering through the eyelets of his helm, to see the breath frosting upon the air, for it seemed that ghosts still breathed as we do. The dead man offered a warrior’s salute, and Gunnar, grunting in surprise, returned it in kind. Seeing such a sign between them – a challenge offered and accepted – I let Gunnar go forward alone. Even a ghost deserved to be fought honourably.
They gave no further sound as they closed the distance, for men fight like dogs do: all screaming and howling at play, silence when they fight for their lives. There was only the sound of deep, steady breathing, of boots crunching against snow. Then the sound of iron into wood.
The ghost fought with reckless fury, and Gunnar was forced back at first, kicking up little puffs of snow from the ground as he retreated. A quickening of fear stole through me to see him so hard-pressed.
But I was a fool to worry. They will still be telling stories of Gunnar a hundred years from now, for my friend was a patient warrior who knew his trade all too well. He did not fight the man, he fought the shield, catching the blows that came to him on the metal boss, answering them with strikes to the wood. Always to the same side, the left side, a woodsman chopping at his mark. I could hear the shield cracking and groaning, and then, under a great back-handed strike from Gunnar’s sword, the shield fell in half.
Now it was Gunnar’s time. He circled to his right with every step, towards the broken shield, driving the dead man’s guard wider. The ghost fought as best he could, but it is exhausting fighting with half a shield, every movement doubled. I could hear the sobs he gave with each blow struck back, could see his movements slowing.
Then it came, the killing moment – Gunnar feinted another step to the right and the ghost’s shield went with him. But my friend danced to the left instead, levelled the sword and thrust forward, into the break in the guard.
‘Wait!’ the ghost said and my heart went still at the sound of his voice, a voice that I knew. But it was too late. The sword was already through him before he had finished speaking the word, the snow darkening at his feet.
And it was then, in the distance, that we heard a woman begin to scream.
Settlement
2
The voice seemed to come from all around us in the dark, as though every woman who had seen her kin slain were screaming down upon us. It took me a moment to see her – another figure in the dark, running at us from Hrapp’s longhouse.
The light of the moon caught her face as she drew close; it was Vigdis, the wife of Hrapp, who was screaming. I saw another thing under that light, that it was no ghost on the ground before us. It was a living man who lay there, gasping wetly for air, drowning in blood on dry land.
He wore Hrapp’s tunic and his face was daubed white with curdled milk, but there was no mistaking who he was now that battle fever had left us. A neighbour of ours: Erik Haraldsson, one of the first to tell the stories of the dead man walking.
‘Erik,’ I said.
The dying man lifted his head at the name. He tried to speak and bubbles of blood burst upon his lips, black under the light of the moon.
I did not even see her move, she was so quick. In a moment Vigdis had leapt at Gunnar and held his right hand with both of hers, trying to wrestle the blade from him. And when he tried to pry her away with his free hand, she sank her teeth into the flesh of his hand, right between the thumb and forefinger.
He bellowed in pain and struck her. She twisted away, nose pouring blood and legs shaking, but still as full of fight as any young warrior. Her eyes strayed to the axe on the ground, and perhaps she would have taken it up and fought like a shield maiden from the old stories if she had faced one of us rather than two. As it was she watched us silently, teeth bared and eyes black.
I knelt beside Erik. I showed him the knife; he wept and clawed at the red snow with his hands. Then he nodded. He watched the knife come, but at the last moment he closed his eyes and turned his head away. He could not bear to watch.
The blood steamed against the snow; the sound was like river water when you break the ice in spring. And though I thought she would fight and struggle and kick and howl, Vigdis gave up all fighting the moment the knife bit deep. She stood still and soundless and watched the man die.
I rubbed my hands clean with snow, stood and faced her.
‘What is your part in all this?’ I said.
‘It is cold out here,’ she said. ‘Come with me. I will tell you all.’
‘We must bury him and mark the grave. We must tell his family what has happened.’
She looked up at the stars, judging the colour of the sky: the time we had left until the sun rose upon the killing.
‘It is cold,’ she said again. ‘That can wait.’
She turned from us then and picked her way carefully through the snow, back towards the squat house in the distance. And, like the fools we were, we followed her.
They are as dark as tombs, the houses of the Icelanders. In other lands some light may bleed through a thatched roof; the occasional gap in the walls is permitted to let in a little light. But our homes are without windows, walled over with earth. They seal out the winter cold, and sun and moon and stars are sealed out as well. There is only the light of the cooking fire to see by, and that is little more than embers at the end of winter.
Vigdis gave us bread and that watered-down, end-of-winter ale that I had grown to hate. She moved around the narrow building and I could see that she was a handsome woman, slender and flaxen-haired. More beautiful than in daylight, as I was to learn later, for in daylight one could see her eyes – thief’s eyes, my people call them. But in that half-light of the fire, I began to understand why she was a woman that men might fight and kill for.
We sat together in that homely barrow and did not speak for a time. Had some lost wanderer come in, we might have looked like any other household. Family and friends, host and guests. Not the killers that we were.