The Rule

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.

Chapter Five (#ulink_78951aca-4fc2-5f95-9ec3-a6344a78d2cd)

Olaf Gudrødsson stood framed against the rumbling sky, watching the horse pick its way over the final few yards to the summit and clack across the stones towards him.

‘Greetings, Hákon,’ he called, stepping out onto the track.

His visitor plodded a few steps closer, and then stopped and gave a nervous nod. He was dressed in the same ancient ringmail he’d be wearing the first time, though he appeared to have left the sword behind. He stayed on his horse, and his eyes darted around the deserted hilltop. ‘Do you have somewhere we can speak?’ he asked.

Olaf smiled, and swept an arm out to his side. ‘This sodden earth is my bed, the leaky sky my blanket, and what little we have to discuss we can do on this very spot. The wind is strong today, but even a voice as treacherous as yours will not carry as far as your father’s town.’

Hákon scowled, but made no reply. He glanced around behind his shoulder, and then slid from the saddle with a splash. Short, Olaf remembered, narrow-shouldered. And yet strangely arrogant.

The visitor did not appear willing to speak, so Olaf made a show of leaning out to one side and studying the rear of Hákon’s horse. ‘You didn’t bring your little pack pony with you,’ he observed.

‘I need some more time,’ Hákon replied. ‘My brothers are yet to return.’ He was staring away at the ground to his left, barely parting his lips. Some men might have pleaded the words, but this one looked like he was sulking.