since it was the first time he had shown any sign of such things. But Einar didn't even bother to reply—
it was too late to do that now and I think my father had known it even as he spoke.
So, huddled together and wrapped in cloaks against the cold, we sat and stared at the fire, listening to the shift and stamp and murmur of the vast camp, fiddling with straps and honing the serrated edges of blades, too tense to sleep.
After your mother died,' my father said suddenly, as the sky began to grey out of the night black, 'her father, old Stammkel, whom they called Refr, Fox, on account of his cunning, wanted the farm back. It came as Gudrid's dowry, see, so he had claim on it after she died.'
He was silent for a long time and I was breath-locked with this. I felt I was hovering on the edge of something, as if trying to persuade a sheep back from the edge of a cliff, where one sudden movement would make it shy and plunge over.
Of course, so did I,' he said eventually. And so did you, though you were barely getting to your feet at the time and were wet-nursed by a good thrall.'
`What happened?' I asked, driven to make a movement, however reckless, when the silence that followed became too harsh to bear.
He stirred. 'He took it to a Thing for judgement. He had many to speak for him and I had no one.'
`What of Gudleif? Or Bjarni? Or Gunnar Raudi, even?' I demanded, astonished that none of those had helped. My father laughed softly.
`Gudleif and Bjarni would not speak against Stammkel. Not big-balls Stammkel, he who roared and bellowed. Not even after he came back from his raid on Dyfflin, which they they went on. Some six hundred men went and four hundred of those never came back and the whole sorry episode nearly ruined Stammkel, which was why he wanted the farm in the first place.' He paused and shrugged, scrubbing his face. 'I think Gudleif and Bjarni felt they could not stand in Stammkel's way, having in some way failed him in the raid.'
`They only got back because of Gunnar Raudi,' I said, remembering what Halldis had told me. 'Didn't he help you?'
My father shifted, as if something dug him in the ribs. Ah,' he said, gentle as a sighing breeze into the night. 'Gunnar Raudi. He was away so long everyone thought him and the others dead . . .'
He stopped for a long moment, then: 'Did you know that Gudrid Stammkelsdottir had hair the colour of yellow corn and could tuck it in the belt round her waist?' He shook his head with the bright memory of it.
'Gold she was. Gold and glowing and slender as a wheatstalk—and everyone wanted her. But she came to me in the end. Came to me when her father came hirpling back from Dyfflin with his balls shrunk to walnuts and too many lives laid at his door.'
He stirred and heaved a long sigh. 'Narrow in the waist she was—and too narrow in the hip, as it turned out. But she wanted me and Stammkel had to give up a farm which he could not afford to do and still keep the partitions from going up in his hall.'
There was silence again.
`What of Gunnar Raudi?' I asked and my father stared at the fire for a moment longer.
`Gunnar spoke for me at the Thing and judgement was given in my favour,' he said, all in one swift sentence and I blinked at that, for I had expected a different tale entirely. Which was stupid of me, for I remember my father telling me he had sold the farm when he fostered me on Gudleif.
Still, I was thinking, this could not be the end of it and said so.
`No,' agreed my father, 'it was not. Stammkel hated Gunnar Raudi before this and, after that, tore his beard out over it and made it known he would have his farm, one way or the other. He hired two known hard men, Ospak and Styrmir, who claimed to be berserkers. Then he sent them round with two thralls to deal with me.'
He stirred a log back into the fire with his foot and watched the embers swirl like red flies in the dark.
`Why did Stammkel hate Gunnar Raudi so much?' I asked and he shot me a sideways glance.
`No matter,' he answered. 'So these men came to the hov this night, as they had announced they would, all four of them and well armed and me with only myself to face them.'
Wide-eyed, I waited and, when nothing came, I demanded, 'What happened?'
I died, of course,' he said and grinned as I blinked, then realised he had led me into the oldest and worst joke in saga-telling, which is just what a father does to his child at some point. I grinned back at him, my heart leaping with the warmth of it.
In fact,' he went on, 'I would have done just that, save that Gunnar Raudi swaggers up, as was his way, and winks at me as he passes me. 'Hello, lads,' he says to these four. 'No need for this, for Rurik here has decided to quit this place.'
`Which was news to me and must have sounded strange to them, looking at me standing there with a seax in one hand and a wood axe in the other and the look of a man not about to quit anything.'
He shook his head and chuckled. 'A deep thinker was Gunnar. 'Listen, lads,' he says. 'We'll drink on it and part friends and you can tell Stammkel to turn up the day after tomorrow, for then this place will be empty.' And he winks at me again and walks all four of them into the hall of my hov and sits them down, calling for ale and food.'
`What did you do?' I demanded and he shrugged.
`What else? I followed them in and sat down with them and we drank until it ran down our noses. After a long while, Gunnar Raudi gets up and announces he is off for a piss and goes outside. After a bit longer, we all remember he went and laugh at him, thinking he had probably fallen in the privy.
'But I had seen him wink on the way out, so I say to Ospak to go find him and he is drunk enough to do just that. After a while longer, of course, Ospak never comes back either and I mention this and put my head on my arms and pretend to sleep.
`So Styrmir gets up and goes out and the two thralls carry on drinking and laughing at me snoring, so that when Gunnar Raudi steps in, his blade all red and dripping, they piss themselves all over my floor.
And that was that,' my father said. 'Gunnar tells the two thralls to carry the bodies of Ospak and Styrmir back to Stammkel and tell him to give up any claims on the farm. 'The heads,' he says, 'I will keep and stick on poles, to watch out for more of Stammkel's foolishness.' Which he did.'
He stopped and squeezed his eyes shut, then rubbed them, for he had been staring into the embers too long. 'By the time all this had been done you were toddling around and causing trouble and, though I was left alone after that, I had no stomach for it, so I sold the place and went over to Gudleif with you.'
He looked at me, eyes watering from the staring so that they made my heart thunder, for the moistness was as like tears as not. 'I always meant to return,' he said. 'But I knew you would be safe with Gunnar.
More so with him than me.'
I wanted to ask more, but he clapped a hand on my shoulder and levered himself to his feet, then patted me gently a couple of times, as you would a horse or a dog, and moved off into the dark, leaving me with the fire and my thoughts whirling like the sparks.
At some point, I fell asleep and dreamed, though. Or thought I did. Or stepped into the fetch world, that half-lit Other.
I was in Dengizik's tomb again, alone, in a blue dark, like a night with a shrouded moon. The lines of soldiers, dead but still with eyes that followed me, were sitting patiently and Hild sat at the foot of the throne, chained to it by the neck.
I took a step to her and the soldiers shifted. I took another and they rose, with a hissing rustle like insect wings.
Then I ran and they surged on me, a blinding mass like bats, like a blizzard of dust and fury with no more substance than memory.
And, suddenly, I was there, looking into the great white-rimmed pools of Hild's eyes, while she smiled up at me. My arm rose and fell, the sword in it chopping the withered hand from Dengizik, which held Hild's neck chain.
It fell, slowly, slowly, tumbling, shredding scraps of flayed skin, dusty bone.
Then I was awake, by the fire, staring into the limpid eyes of Hild, who sat astride me, her face inches from mine. Her mouth worked, twisting this way and that; sounds tore from her in a rippling, wheezing hiss:
`Don't . . . go . . . with us. Live . .
Limpid eyes, dewed with . . . tears? I watched them expand, to where the black ate all the white, saw the
