‘Well. Have you thought on my proposal?’ he said.
‘I have,’ she said.
‘And what do you think to it?’
‘I say no.’
‘I see.’ His mouth twisted as if he had bitten into rotten meat. ‘Then we have nothing further to discuss.’
‘What proposal is this?’ Dalla said. Gunnar did not reply and she spoke again, asking the question of me.
‘I know nothing of this,’ I said.
Vigdis tilted her head, like a mother speaking to a lazy child.
‘Dalla, your husband thought to marry me to his friend.’
‘Speak no more,’ Gunnar said. ‘It is finished.’
‘You thought to give me to him, the way you would give him a horse to ride or a knife to gut fish with. You think I would marry a man without a piece of silver to his name?’
‘I do not think you will have any better offers. To come and live in your ghost’s home.’
‘And yet the ghost no longer walks.’
‘Gunnar,’ I said. ‘You should not have done this. You should have spoken to me. This is not what I want.’
He cast the cup of water upon the ground. ‘I am sorry that you are content to live as a beggar, trading your songs for scraps of food. It is shameful. And you,’ he said, pointing at Vigdis, ‘You can go now. You have caused trouble enough.’
‘Our business is not finished.’
‘No?’
‘No. I do not wish to marry your friend.’ She stroked the hair of the child who sat beneath her feet. Then she said: ‘I wish to marry you, Gunnar.’
On my lap, Kari went still. He no longer twisted to face his mother or fought against my grip. He sat utterly still for a moment, and then he leaned forward and put his arms around me, and he buried his face into my shoulder.
Gunnar spoke. ‘What did you say?’
‘That is why I have come here. To tell you to divorce your wife and to marry me.’
‘You are mad,’ Dalla said, her voice soft.
‘I bear you no malice, Dalla. But I will not marry a beggar. And your husband is bound to me in ways that he has not told you.’
‘Out,’ he said.
‘Will you test this, Gunnar? Shall I tell her?’
The whispering of the embers, the low and flickering light. Dalla’s mouth tight with anger, and Vigdis at the centre of it all, her hands clasped neatly in her lap, her dead eyes unblinking as she looked upon us.
‘Take the children out of here, Dalla,’ I said.
‘No. I will not go. I will have no more secrets.’
Gunnar leaned forward and in the light of the fire I could see the hate in his eyes as he spoke to Vigdis. ‘Say what you want. Do as you please. But I will not leave my wife for you. For you are a whore. Or a witch. Or both.’
‘As you wish.’ Vigdis stood and smoothed down her dress. ‘But I will not tell your secrets for you. That you will have to do yourself.’ The light flooded in for an instant as she opened the door, harsh and pitiless. Then she was gone, and the darkness returned once more.
I looked up and even in the dim light I could see the timbers of the roof, pitted with salt and warped by water from their previous life as part of a longship’s hull. Gunnar always liked to stare at that ceiling, to remember the man he had once been: a great warrior of the sea. But it always made me uneasy, looking up at that upturned skeleton of a ship. The only man who saw a ship from below was a drowning man.
It fell to me to break the silence. ‘Kari, Freydis. Come with me.’
Kari shook his head. ‘I want to stay.’
‘Go with him,’ Dalla said. ‘Go with Kjaran.’
Kari went to speak again. A look from Gunnar silenced him. I wonder if he had ever seen that look in his father’s eyes before. The eyes of a killer.
I took each of the children by the hand and led them out of that place, out towards light and water and air. I did not move as fast as I should, for before we had left that place we all heard something we should not.
Behind me, I could hear Dalla talking, calm and insistent, though too softly for me to hear the words. And I could hear Gunnar weeping.
As soon as we were in the open air Kari shook himself loose from my grip and strode away from me. He snatched up a stick the size of a sword from the wood pile, and on any other day I would have struck it from his hand. Wood is a precious thing on the island and not a toy to be played with. That day I let him keep it.
He swatted the stick through the air, but it was no random play of an angry child. He held it in a swordsman’s grip the way his father had taught him, and every movement he made had the echo of a lethal purpose. The backhanded cut that will split a head from ear to eye; the quick sideways thrust that passes behind a shield; the low, reaping strike that flays a man’s knee. Only ten summers old, but he knew them all.
I let him lead the way, wandering behind him and guiding his sister’s steps, for she was content to move in a red-eyed silence, sucking silently on her thumb. We went beyond the boundaries of the farm, striking west, following the fjord. I wondered if he would go all the way to the sea if I let him, to fight the waves like Cúchulainn of the old stories.
Freydis looked anxiously over her shoulder, back towards the farm, shrunk to the size of a hand behind us.
‘That’s far enough, Kari,’ I said, but he ignored me. I let go of Freydis’s hand and ran after him. ‘Enough. Stop. It is not safe.’ And he turned on the spot and swung at me with the stick.
No doubt a better fighter would have dodged the blow, a slip of the shoulder to let the weapon go past. But I have never been a quick or skilful man with a blade. A certain brutal directness, a willingness to endure pain – these are what I bring to the fight. And so I did not try to dodge that strike, but instead lifted my forearm to meet it, skin and bone as my only shield.
The pain was so sharp that it stole my sight for a moment, and with the sound of snapping wood in the air I thought at first he had broken my arm. But the pain was useful, it gave me anger. Before he could draw back and strike again, I had his arm in both of mine, twisting his wrist until he shrieked and the stick fell from his hand. I hit him twice about the face, picked him up by the throat and threw him to the ground.
He lay quite still, the breath struck from him, croaking for air. I looked to Freydis to see what she would do: run or fight or cry. But she did none of those things, merely watched to see what would happen next. It must have been quite a thing, to see her brother treated like a man.
‘You shall have to save that trick for when you are older,’ I said, ‘or you have a sword in your hand. Until then, you do as I say.’
I offered him my hand, he took it, and I pulled him up to his feet. His knees bowed and his back bent as he continued to struggle for air, but he refused to go to the ground again.
‘Sit down. There is no shame in it.’
When he could breathe well, he said: ‘Did I hurt you?’ There was no apology in his voice. I would have been disappointed if there had been. I tried to shake some feeling back into the arm he had struck, for it was still half-numb.
‘Yes, you did. It was well struck. Another year on you and you might have broken my arm.’
He smiled and turned his gaze to his sister, who hovered uncertainly behind me. He beckoned her towards him and took her hand, like he was one of the warrior poets from the old stories who win a woman in a duel. She sat down beside him and put her head on his shoulder.
Cross-legged before them, a poet come to entertain that court of children, I said: ‘Do you want a song? A drapa or a flokk?’
‘No.’
‘A story, then. Of gods and heroes.’
‘No!’ He looked on me like I was a fool, and perhaps I was, for I knew then what he wanted to hear. What else would a child want to hear at a time like that?