I saw Kari speak, but I could not hear the words. And I saw those men shudder almost as one, a ripple of shame passing through them. No doubt they had tried to forget what they had done.
Kari spoke again and Björn shook his head. The man pointed south, stabbing his finger towards the beach, towards safety.
Kari spoke one last time, louder this time, a single word. A word, at last, that I could hear. ‘Coward,’ he said.
Björn nodded, then. He pulled the shield from the saddle of his horse, drew the axe from his belt. Another man half-drew his weapon at the sight of this. But Björn snapped a curse at him, spoke loud enough for me to hear. ‘Do not shame me!’
Gunnar’s sword was out now – too big for Kari, but he held it well. Oh, but he was his father’s son. The stance he held, the look in his eyes – even in that ruined face of his, there was still some ghost of the friend that I had lost.
Björn hesitated once more, looking on the boy who stood before him. Viewed from a distance, through the turning curtain of the snow, it was almost as though I was watching some battle from the old stories. Not a boy standing before a man, but a man standing before a giant.
The giant shrugged and spat upon the ground. And the iron began to sing.
I half-rose, my grip tightening around my spear, but Thorvaldur’s hand was on my shoulder.
‘Wait,’ he said.
‘For what?’
He did not answer. But I trusted him then. There is no trust akin to that of men who fight together. Whatever game he had been playing before, no matter how much he liked to make me dance for his pleasure – all that was gone now.
Björn was afraid of that sword, for he had seen what it could do. I could see him dodge back further than he needed to, to place his shield precisely in its way. His strikes were hesitant, in spite of all his advantages. Yet it was already clear how the fight would end. It was a beautiful sword, but it could not undo a foot of reach and fifty pounds of weight. Kari fought well, but he could not break the larger man’s guard. And it was not long before Björn found his courage.
Wood was flying from Kari’s splintering shield and I could see him gasping for breath as he backed away. He barely struck back, the occasional half-checked swipe with the sword, as he fought to hold the shield high as Björn beat against it. He had no art and little skill, but he did not need them: he only needed his weight, and time.
Soon, Kari could retreat no further and his shield groaned and cracked with every blow. Below, I saw the other men lose themselves, the hands half-rise, imploring. Longing for the death to come, to give them their release. Lost in the dance before them, they had no eyes for anything else.
‘Now,’ Thorvaldur said. But I knew it before he spoke and I was already gone.
Down the slope, leaping with great strides from tussock to tussock. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Kari had gone to ground, both hands holding up his shield, blood upon the fresh snow. But I could not look at him. I looked only upon the men that I had to kill.
I could feel some great sound bubbling up within me, scratching at my teeth, closing around my throat, desperate to be born, but I would not let it loose. Not until my spear was in flight, not until it had struck home in meat and bone, not until a man was screaming on the ground. Hearing that, I let the sound come from within me. It was not a curse or a war cry, not a song or a scream, but laughter. For a joy spoke through me, then: the berserker’s joy, which knows only laughter.
The battle was not motion, it was stillness. Moments where the world ceased to move, where everything can be seen. In between those moments, a mist took my sight. I could not speak. I could not sing. But I could laugh. And I could kill.
In those still moments I saw everything so clearly. The white teeth of the man I had speared, the whorls of dirt on the hand he held up, the arcing shape of the blood as I brought my axe down across his mouth and left him a smiling corpse on the ground.
The next man seemed frozen in mid-swing, his axe moving towards my head as slowly as the motion of the sun. It was such a simple thing to place my shield in its way. He had no time to take up a shield of his own and held up his hand by instinct to bar my way. That shield of flesh was gone in two strokes of my axe. I touched his stomach with the blade – the barest touch it seemed to me, yet he knelt upon the ground at once and spilt his secrets into the snow.
His lips moved, but I could not hear what he said. I could hear nothing but the laughter.
I saw Thorvaldur, too. No shield in his hand, just that terrible sword of his clutched in both hands. He moved like a dancer and he left only death behind him.
And at the heights of my fury, I saw Björn. His leg laid open, yellow fat parted neatly before the bone. His shield cast down, one empty hand pressed to the ground, lifting him up. His other hand, the full hand, bringing his axe down again and again on the boy at his feet.
-
We grow close now, don’t we? Close to the dawn, for the sun will crawl into the sky soon enough. And close to the end of my story. Our story, it would be more right to say.
Oh, I see you stir at that, Sumardil.
You will have it all, I promise. The end to all mysteries. All the truth that you could want – too much, perhaps. We shall see. I must linger but a moment longer, before we get to the end. I must speak a little more of Kari, Gunnar’s son.
When I was a young man I never thought to have a child. With no land to call my own, it was too much to hope for. In truth, it did not matter to me so much. I wanted nothing more than to wander and be free. I thought that my words would be my children. A good song lives longer than a good son, after all.
When I found Sigrid and I thought we would be married, I felt for the first time that strange ache for a child. I understood it as I had not before. That longing to have more of the one that I loved brought into the world, to find a way to make your love cheat death. And I suppose in the end I did get my wish, though not as I imagined it.
Kari was our child, mine and Sigrid’s, raised together. Not raised from his birth, but from his death. There was no child like him in the world.
I have loved a woman. I have loved a friend. Sometimes, I wonder if I have loved anyone so much as I loved that child.
Not even you, Sumardil.
32
The battle fury left me, and I could hear once more.
I could hear the calling of the wind and the rolling sea beyond the hills. Somewhere near me, a man lay sobbing. I could hear my own gasping breath, the beating of my heart like a fist pounding against a door.
But there was one sound that I longed for, but could not hear. The sound of a word or a breath or a scream – none of these came from the boy on the ground. And even at a distance, I could see the blood that stained the snow.
A wheezing, gasping chuckle, close to me. For Thorvaldur yet lived, hunched over and leaning upon his sword as an old man leans on a staff. I was bent over, too, for it seemed the battle had made old men of us both. And of Björn, it had made a child. I could see him dragging himself away, trailing blood behind him.
He was the only one left. His brothers, his friends – those five men lay dead at my feet, and I could not remember which of them I had killed myself.
The soft, wet sound of mud and snow beneath my feet, as I came forward to where Kari lay. He was on his back, arms thrown wide as though he meant to embrace the sky. One eye was gone, the other dark, like a bead of blackened glass.