As they drew close to shore, the captain of each ship lifted a long, narrow object from the deck. They did so carefully, as if they held a child in their arms, unwrapping the sealskin blanket to reveal the treasure within. No gold or weaponry, but a simple piece of wood. Part of a door or a roof or a column from a high seat, some fragment of the home that they had left behind. And for some it was a coffin they unwrapped, one of their kin who had begun the voyage, but had not lived to see its end.
Each man threw his memento out into the wild waves and watched them go. Some of the pieces of wood went straight to shore, others followed the eddies into closed coves and fjords, others still were caught in currents and wandered to some distant part of the coast. Where each of those staves went, a ship followed. Where they washed ashore, there a family settled and made a new home from the wood of the old.
They came to build a country without kings and cities. A place where every man was equal, every man had land. A place with no rulers save for honour and the law.
And, for a time at least, it was true.
3
In the long winter, even the wealthiest of Icelanders curses the day that their ancestors came to this land. They forget the dream of the people, that dream of a world without kings, and know only that they live in a dark, lonesome place. But when the sun begins to ride higher in the sky and the snow begins to quicken and thaw, it is an easy land to love. The dream grows strong once more, for we are a stubborn people.
Men and women emerge from their homes like bears from their winter caves, the sunlight feeling as sharp on the eye as a blade against the skin. They break the ice from the rivers, begin the first sowing of the crops, free their herds to wander to the high mountain pastures, go to trade for supplies and visit distant friends. And as they travel the stories travel with them.
There had been no more sightings of the ghost of Hrapp. Rumour spread that it was Olaf who had killed the ghost, since he was the last to have seen and fought with it. He denied it, honourable man that he was, but they mistook his honesty for modesty, and so the story spread.
As for Erik, there were stories of him, too. Some thought he had fallen through the ice in a river, others claimed he had gone in search of lost sheep and wandered, lost himself, until the cold murdered him. There were many who said that the winter madness had taken him as it takes so many, that he had cast himself from a cliff or gone to lie down in the snow and waited to die. They had seen him lonely, as I had, and knew it was a hard thing for a man to make it through the winter alone. I waited to see if any would make the connection between the two stories, between Erik and the ghost. But no man did. It takes a woman to think in that way.
A pile of blunt weapons beside me and the whetstone at my feet – that is what the first day of spring means to me. For soon we would be hunting again, and so whilst Gunnar tended the herd I took the weapons of the house to the sharpening stone.
I was working on my weapon of choice, my spear, and enjoying the feel of the sun on my face, when I heard the door of the longhouse swing open. I listened; would it be the whispering footfalls of Freydis, Gunnar’s daughter? The stamping tread of Kari, the boy who wished to be thought of as a man, and who mimicked the heavy steps of his elders, though he did not have their weight? The children liked to play with me, fascinated by my red hair, convinced it was some trick or illusion. When the day’s chores were done I would lumber around on all fours chasing them through the house, or tell them the stories my father told me – the old Irish stories of the Red Branch and the Fianna – whilst Gunnar watched and grinned and shook his head, and told me I had missed my vocation as a nursemaid. Perhaps they had come to bother me early.
It was not the children who stepped out. It was the strong tread of Dalla, Gunnar’s wife, and I saw her lean around the edge of the turf wall and look upon me.
She could have been a rare beauty, black haired and pale skinned, were it not for her warrior’s nose, broken and reset long ago, so that it was almost flat against her face – a parting gift from her father, or so Gunnar told me. In truth her shattered nose suited her, for she was a hard woman, well suited to these lands. Without a word she dipped a horn cup into the pail of milk she carried and offered it to me.
‘My thanks,’ I said as I drank it down, still warm and thick.
‘Hard work,’ she said.
‘It is. Harder to sharpen a spear than to use it, easier to kill a beast than to skin it…’ I trailed off. There was an ending to that proverb that I did not wish to speak.
‘Easier to kill a man than to bury him,’ she said, finishing the saying.
The night we came back from hunting the ghost we had found her awake, for it was in the early hours of the dawn when we returned, stumbling with exhaustion and covered in the filth of battle and burial. Her hard eyes asked the question and perhaps words would have followed. But Gunnar had reached out and taken her by the hands. He closed his eyes, and I thought for a moment that he would shame himself with weeping. But when he opened his eyes again, they were clear. He kissed her on the forehead and said: ‘Please, do not ask me. All is well. But do not ask.’
She had looked at the bite on his hand, the blunted edge of his sword, the marks on his shield. She read a story in our eyes, the eyes of men exhausted with killing, and it seemed as though she did not wish the story to be spoken. She let us go to sleep, rolled up in furs upon the floor, and when we woke she asked no questions. From the way she acted, we could pretend we had dreamed it alclass="underline" a nightmare of blood and snow and an ill-struck pact.
I looked down and tested the edge of the spear against my thumb. Sharp enough. I took the next blade from the pile and said: ‘I am glad to see the end of winter.’
‘As am I. But I suppose you will be leaving us soon.’
‘I shall,’ I said. For soon it would be the Day of Movement, when a wanderer such as I would have to find a new place to call my home.
She put down the pail and sat upon the ground, her back against the house. ‘I wish that you would not go,’ she said.
I smiled at her and sang her an old quatrain:
Then I said: ‘It is ill luck to winter twice in one place. One winter makes a man a guest, two makes him a thief. I have never seen it go well.’
She did not answer. Instead she looked down on the weapons at my feet, at one in particular at the top of the pile. Gunnar’s sword, a blade of Ulfberht steel worth more than his farm, its edge still hacked and blunted from winter. I lifted it, and I began to sharpen it against the stone, as carefully as I would have tuned a rare harp.
‘Why would you want me to stay?’ I said.
Her eyes were on the edge of the sword. ‘I am afraid.’
‘There is nothing to be afraid of.’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly.’
She nodded slowly. ‘I shall hold you to those words,’ she said, and there was a hardness to her voice – the kind you hear in the words of a chieftain or the captain of a warband. For that longhouse was her domain: the key to the stores hung around her waist, not Gunnar’s. She would not have me in her home if she did not will it, no matter what Gunnar might say.