Читать книгу The Rule - Jack Colman, Jack Colman - Страница 10

On the eighth day following Olaf Gudrødsson’s arrival as a noose around Helvik’s throat, Gunnarr Folkvarrsson rose at first light. He dressed in hurried silence so as not to wake his wife and mother, before ducking out into the freshness of dawn to check his traps.

It was a routine that, by now, he could probably have conducted before waking. He let himself out through the bolted east side-gate and stalked through familiar parts of the lowland woods, carefully inspecting each snare. Unfortunately, the outcome of his forages had become all too repetitive as well. The land was parched of wildlife, and all his traps were empty. He wandered weary-eyed down to the shore, hoping to have had better luck with the sea.

By the time that the sun was fully risen, Gunnarr was stooped waist-deep in the ocean shallows. He wore an old pair of sealskin trousers to keep some of the water off, and stepped across the smooth ocean rocks barefooted. His hands moved in brisk, familiar patterns, working across the stiff twine of his nets. After a short while longer he sighed and straightened, smearing a dash of seawater across his furrowed forehead as he flicked a strand of hair away with the back of his palm.

His nets were empty, as usual. Once he would have undergone the laborious process of drawing them in to the shore first, and replanting them elsewhere if unsuccessful, but he had long since learnt that that was wasted effort. The disappointment had been too much to bear. He snatched a section of netting up to his chest and began trying to knot together an area where the salt had corroded through the joints. At another point further along he noticed a darker piece of material from where Kelda had repaired it previously, and he smiled sadly to himself. The poor girl had spent days trying to mend the nets at one time or another, using anything she could find that would tie, even lengths of her own hair when there was nothing else. With so few fish to be had it seemed there was little point to the exercise, but Gunnarr knew that it wouldn’t be long before she insisted on taking another look at them to see what could be done. He often wondered whether she had been born with that positivity, or if it had been beaten into her through Helvik’s hard schooling.

A movement inland caught his eye, and he raised a forearm across his brow to watch a rider climbing slowly up the hillside leading out of town. It could only be Hákon Egilsson. As the oldest son of the ruler of Helvik he had been riding the mountain path regularly to ‘negotiate’ with the invaders. Gunnarr felt that was a generous term for such one-sided bargaining, but this appeared to be one matter in which his opinion mattered little. So many days of ceaseless waiting had allowed the townsfolk time to scare themselves half to death. Many now saw Hákon as their only hope.

Pointing, he called across to the two friends who were also checking their catches at either side of him, prompting them to straighten their backs and wade over to his position. Ári and Hilario were their names. Like most of those in Gunnarr’s life, Ári had been with him for as long as he could remember. Hilario was one of the rare few who had come in from the outside, arriving as a boy with a sprawling family of travellers and finding as a man that he did not want to leave, even as the rest of his kin were disappearing over the hills.

‘Mine are empty,’ Hilario stated as he drew up beside Gunnarr. He was a short, curly-haired man with a face full of expressions. ‘Someone’s been at the nets,’ he concluded. He often chose being robbed over being unsuccessful.

Ári had caught something, albeit small, and he took a knife and skilfully emptied the fish’s innards into the water, using his thumb to hold back some of the dark waste flesh. The good meat would be saved for his wife and son, and the innards would make oil for his lamps. He would have whatever there was left.

‘How long do you reckon he’ll be up there this time?’ Ári asked, giving his blade a quick rinse in the water.

‘Not long,’ Gunnarr replied, still watching Hákon on his ascent. ‘I doubt they’re as welcoming when he comes empty-handed.’

Hilario ignored Hákon, instead running an inspecting eye along the lie of Gunnarr’s nets. ‘I suppose we’ll be some of the first to know whether he’s persuaded them to be patient,’ he said eventually. ‘He’ll be coming down that hill pretty quickly if not.’

Ári sheathed his knife with a click. ‘Or not at all.’

The others murmured in agreement. Together they started to wade back to shore, the splashing of water between their limbs steadily increasing in pitch as the depth shallowed off.

‘When will you next speak to Egil, Gunnarr?’ Hilario asked.

‘There’s to be a meeting when Eiric and Bjọrn return from their raid, to discuss a more permanent solution.’

Hilario smirked with light-hearted affront. ‘In the old days they’d hold great big gatherings for the whole town to attend. Is everyone invited to this one?’

‘I think Egil worries that might become unruly.’

‘Well,’ Hilario said, as they reached the stony beach, ‘if he does happen to ask for my considered opinion, tell him that if we’re going to end up fighting, I’d rather it was sooner than later. Anything is more fun than a famine.’

Gunnarr sat, and began to sweep the dirt from the soles of his feet. He could manage a smile at the words, but he wasn’t surprised when Ári did not do the same. His friend had been a stern adolescent when Gunnarr was a child, son to a proud old metal worker who had liked nothing better than to spend the day working himself into the ground whilst complaining about the damage that it did to him and the laziness of those that did not do the same. As a boy, Ári had had a man’s concerns. Now a man, he showed no sign of taking the opposite approach. Not that he had any choice.

‘You have only yourself to worry about,’ Ári said dismally, and his face appeared drawn with the strain of the last few days. ‘My Tyr is too young to fight, and before long he’ll have a little brother to protect as well as his mother.’

Hilario scoffed, striving, as always, to keep the mood light. ‘Well, it seems I’m the only one with a bit of sense in this town. There’s little enough food and few enough breasts to suckle on around here without having to share it all with some squalling child.’ He looked down at Gunnarr, smiling. ‘How long for Kelda now? I saw her yesterday; she looked as if she’s carrying an army of her own in that belly.’

Gunnarr’s bleak expression made way for a brief smile with the thought of Kelda waddling around beneath the weight of the first child she was carrying. ‘Before the close of the moon, they say. Poor lad couldn’t be born into a worse situation. He’ll probably try and climb back inside once he gets out.’

The three men produced a muted bout of laughter, and Gunnarr began to pull on his boots. At dawn it had looked like the day might stay clear, but already the clouds were rolling in, the same colour as the wet stones on the beach.

‘Another day for inside work,’ Ári said, glancing up at the sky.

Gunnarr sprang to his feet and brushed off his legs. ‘I have two tups turned out on the hillside. I may go and bring them in, before they find themselves roasting over an army’s camp fire. But that depends on Eiric and Bjọrn.’

He went over to stand beside Hilario, who was gazing out to sea.

‘They’re out there somewhere,’ Hilario said. ‘But I don’t see any sign of them coming back today.’

The others agreed. For a few moments they stood and stared out beyond the waves. Of raids they knew nothing, for Egil had put an end to what had been a dying occurrence. Enough lives had been lost on home soil without going looking for fighting overseas as well, and in some cases it had been asking for bloodshed even to put certain men in the same boat together. There had still been deep-water fishing trips though, sometimes even whale hunts, and as sharp-eyed young lads Gunnarr and the others had been stationed around the prow and told to bellow when they saw something. Gunnarr remembered crowding along the rail with the other sighters, waiting for a glistening back to crest the surface with a hiss from its blow-hole and present them with a target they could drive in to shallow waters and strand on the beaches for killing. But that he had seen once, maybe twice. As with everything else, the people of Helvik had soon learnt to give it up.

‘Gunnarr?’ From behind them, the sound of a female voice interrupted their viewing.

‘Fun’s over,’ Hilario sighed, without turning around. ‘Is that wife or mother?’

Gunnarr swivelled and located the source of the sound. A dainty figure waited politely for him at the edge of the beach.

‘Looks to be neither,’ he replied, with an air of intrigue.

‘Aren’t you the lucky the one?’ Hilario grinned, suddenly keen to take a look for himself. Gunnarr ignored the comment and left them, walking steadily across the shore to meet the woman.

‘Forgive my interruption,’ she called in a quick, nervous voice as he approached, and Gunnarr smiled away the apology as he made a short study of her appearance. She wore grubby woollen skirts, tattered and muddied around the bottom and flecked with stains across the front. Her limbs were slim, too slim, and though she attempted to hold herself presentably, her posture was slumped with a look of perennial exhaustion. She smiled self-consciously, and Gunnarr realised that she could be very pretty to some, but for the gauntness of her face, the skin around her eyes being dark and sunken from lack of food and sleep, and the element of worry in her expression.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, his voice soft with immediate concern.

‘My name is Tyra,’ she began, with an effort. ‘Do you know me?’

Gunnarr saw her on her knees in a mess of trampled snow, her face wailing with anguish, blood and tears running down her cheeks. ‘Yes,’ he answered, stirring with recognition. ‘You sometimes speak with my wife. I knew your husband,’ he added warily, and her eyes flicked immediately to the ground.

‘Perhaps you’d like to sit?’ Gunnarr suggested, attempting to smother a moment of awkwardness, but she smiled and shook her head.

‘I will not keep you long. I wouldn’t have come to you if I were not desperate.’

Her hands were shaking, Gunnarr noticed. The nails on her fingers looked torn and brittle, many of them gone completely. He said nothing, waiting for her to gather the momentum to speak, and she did, with sudden emotion.

‘It’s my neighbour, Brökk; a brute of a man, just like them all.’ She faltered. ‘Forgive me,’ and Gunnarr shook his head and motioned for her to continue. ‘He’s been taking the vegetables from my land. I dug some drainage for them last year, and they’ve come on better than most. It would not be so bad, but I have no animals of my own, and no husband to hunt. They are all I have to feed my boy on.’ She hesitated, as if suddenly worried that she was wasting her time. ‘I was told—well, I know—that you are the man to help me with such things.’

Gunnarr’s features had been set since the first of her words. The familiar flush of anger tightened his jaw.

‘I know the kind of man that Brökk is,’ he said plainly. ‘Leave it with me.’

Tyra relaxed visibly, and a proper smile flashed across her features for the first time. ‘Thank you so much, Gunnarr,’ she exhaled. ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

Gunnarr waved away her thanks, feeling his anger doused slightly by the relief that he saw on her face.

‘Please, my son would like to meet you,’ she continued, and held out her arm, prompting a grubby little boy to dash out from where he had been stationed among the trees at the edge of the shoreline and career boisterously into her hip, almost knocking her sideways.

Gunnarr smiled through the twinge of guilt he felt upon seeing the child, and bent down to bow his head in greeting. The boy briefly reciprocated the gesture, as he had been taught, before being overcome with a sudden bout of shyness and retreating behind his mother’s skirts. It was clear where most of his mother’s share of food went, but even the child was scrawny and awkward.

‘He’s not usually this timid,’ Tyra said with embarrassment, trying to pull him gently out from behind her, but the boy gave a squeal and fought back gamely.

‘Please,’ Gunnarr said, ‘you must come and eat with us this morning. Kelda has been preparing a lovely stew.’

As he’d expected, Tyra refused with proud determination. ‘That is very kind of you, Gunnarr, but we have already eaten this morning. We won’t bother you any longer.’ She took her son’s hand, and started to draw away.

‘Me and Kelda will visit you tomorrow,’ Gunnarr told her, and Tyra thanked him again. The little boy shouted a brief goodbye, and scurried away into the trees.

‘Where are my two favourite women then?’ Gunnarr asked loudly as he stepped through the doorway of his house. It was the same home built by his grandfather many winters ago, with various patches of repair and slight modifications. It sat inland to the north-east, nestled on the fringes of the settlement beneath the sheltered canopy of a small group of rowan trees.

He found them kneeling together on the floor in the middle of the room. ‘There’s one,’ he said, grabbing his mother with one hand and pulling her playfully into his shoulder. ‘And there’s another!’ he exclaimed, reaching down to use his other hand to tug his wife gently upwards and kissing her lovingly on the lips.

Both women laughed happily as he held them in the double embrace. They appeared to have been carding odd scraps of wool and arranging the fibres on top of each other for felting. The square shape laid out on the floor looked to be the perfect size for wrapping an infant in.

‘Well that’s not going to fit me,’ Gunnarr commented, and his mother Frejya thumped him in the stomach. She was shorter now in her old age, and these days to hug her was more like hugging a younger sister than a parent. Strands of grey were beginning to highlight her dull blonde hair and faint webs of blue capillaries had crept across her weathered red cheeks. Yet her eyes were as quick and mischievous as ever, with deep laughter lines extending from the corner of each.

Kelda, to Gunnarr, looked just like she always had. In his eyes she would always be a girl of barely ten winters, with mud in her hair and bruises on her shins. She was almost as short as Frejya, with hair the colour of wet sand, and smooth, pale skin. She had crawled into Gunnarr’s heart as a child, without him even noticing, and though she was very much a woman now, more likely to chide his immature behaviour than join in with it, the memory of adventure had never left her face.

‘What a lucky man I am to have not one, but two wonderful women to return home to,’ he sighed cheerfully.

His mother leant out from his embrace to speak directly to Kelda. ‘Such charming words. Do you think there’s a chance he didn’t catch anything?’

Kelda laughed, and Gunnarr raised both arms above his head and released the pair of them with mock indignation. ‘How’s my big strong boy?’ he asked, stooping down to cup an ear against Kelda’s swollen belly, and then, after a brief moment, coming back up again to answer his own question. ‘Sleeping, as usual, lazy git.’

‘Gunnarr!’ both women scolded.

‘He can’t hear anything,’ Gunnarr protested. ‘How else would he put up with your nattering?’ He smiled away their reproachful faces and took a seat on the floor beside the felting. ‘What’s been the topic this morning?’

Before the words had even finished leaving his mouth, he regretted the question. The women looked at one another, and then Kelda replied glumly, leaning heavily on her husband’s shoulder as she lowered herself back down into a kneeling position.

‘Same as every morning, Gunnarr.’ She did not say any more. There was no need to. Silence followed her words. Gunnarr exhaled stiffly through his nose and hung his chin a little, as if unable or unwilling to give a reply. Frejya moved closer and placed an arm on the back of his head.

‘My son will protect us, Kelda,’ she said, with the unwavering confidence that a mother has in her child. ‘He has never once let me down, not even when he was a boy.’

Gunnarr’s cheeks flushed with affection and embarrassment. ‘I have to go out,’ he announced, rising and kissing his mother and then his wife firmly on their foreheads, before going to the back of the hut to change his trousers.

‘Where to?’ Kelda asked casually, returning her eyes to her work.

‘Brökk Haldensson has been stealing food from the widow Tyra and her boy,’ he replied, hopping briefly as he dislodged the clinging trousers from each leg and searching momentarily for the second pair before snatching them up. ‘I told her I’d go and speak to him.’

‘As in speak to him with words, or speak to him with a sword?’ Kelda enquired with familiarity.

‘Sword,’ and she heard him fitting it under his arm.

She dropped the wool back down into the basket. ‘Brökk Haldensson is one of Hákon’s closest allies, Gunnarr. You’re not going to have a friend left in this town.’ She sought out Frejya’s eyes, trying to encourage her to offer some support.

‘You can’t change him, dear,’ Frejya said with resignation. ‘He’s always hated bullies.’

‘Brökk has never been my friend, and Hákon and I have not seen eye to eye since we were children,’ Gunnarr said as he appeared at Kelda’s side once more. He fastened the drawstring of his trousers and took a drink of water from his mother. ‘Besides, women like Tyra have no one else to protect them.’

‘You do know who her husband was, don’t you?’ Kelda reminded him, peering upwards so that she could study his reaction.

Gunnarr faltered for a moment, and then focussed his attention on retying his waistband, as if the comment mattered little. ‘He was a bad man, who deserved more than what he got, and she of all people should have the scars to remind her of that.’

‘But does she know that it was you?’

Of course, Gunnarr thought. How could she forget?

The quiet woman named Tyra had barely been known to anyone in the town. Her husband had made sure of that. He’d kept her like a beast, by all accounts, broken and obedient, penned up for any time of the day and night that she was not working, mastered by him and him alone.

As it was for most of the townsfolk, she had first come to Gunnarr’s attention on the day that a man, a boy in fact, barely fifteen, had made the mistake of offering to help her carry whatever it was that her husband had sent her out to fetch. It was said that she had hurriedly refused, but thanked him politely. Too politely for her husband’s liking. He had beaten the pair of them to within a yard of death’s door.

Tyra had barely been seen again afterwards, and from that moment there was growing disquiet about her treatment. But it was not for men of Helvik to tell others how to treat their wives. The father of the boy, whose right eye had turned white and gone blind after the attack, had made noises about claiming one back from the husband, but he was an old man, and he never fulfilled his promises.

It was Tyra’s brother who eventually decided he could stand it no longer, and he lost his life for it. The husband had gutted him in front of his sister, kept his body in their single-roomed hut for three days so that word would not get out. Yet, as always, word did get out, and it was then that Gunnarr had come to be involved.

He remembered being awoken from his bed on a freezing winter’s morning. Egil himself stood grave-faced at the door, the air still midnight black beyond his head. ‘I wanted to be here to restrain you when you found out,’ he said. ‘So I decided I would bring the word myself.’

As the sky began to grey, they had trudged through the crunching snow in silence. Egil had insisted that it be he that did the act. ‘A leader must be seen to enforce the rules that he creates.’ But in the chaos that followed, it was Gunnarr that struck.

The husband had heard them coming. His chosen first weapon had been the scream from Tyra’s mouth as he cut into her skin with every step the two men took towards him. Fortunately for them, he’d been the type of man that soon grew tired of a stand-off.

Gunnarr could still remember it all if he let himself. The clattering sound as he battered the husband’s sword away and sent it spinning from his grip. Hot breath freezing in the air. In the madness of love, or duty, Tyra had rushed forward to protect her man at the last, her babe in her arms. Gunnarr recalled knocking her to the ground. Her cries of pain and sadness and relief. A frightened look in a cruel man’s eye. Blood, almost brown in the pure white snow.

He knelt down and kissed his wife gently on the lips. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said. He went to get up and leave, but she kept a tight hold of his arm.

‘Please don’t go and get yourself killed, Gunnarr. Brökk is a big man. You’ve gained enemies all through the town by involving yourself in other people’s affairs like this.’

He remembered her saying almost the exact same words the last time, clutching at his hand in the doorway as the snow melted on her cheeks. He’d been able to withstand her then, and this time was no different.

He smiled and kissed her again on the upper lip, one hand placed protectively across her pregnant tummy. ‘Better to be yourself and have enemies, than to be someone else and have friends.’

There was a sound to the left. Frejya was smiling fondly, her features almost cracking into laughter. ‘How long have you been thinking up that one?’ she asked.

Gunnarr felt the haze of memory melt away and a grin return to his face. ‘Nearly three days,’ he said, and poked her in the stomach so that she doubled over laughing. He stretched up to his feet. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

He patted his mother affectionately on the shoulder and strode out through the doorway, just as the rain started to fall.