The Rule

‘Kelda, go back,’ he said, his eyes never leaving the man that stood poised in front of him. And this time she listened.

When they eventually found him, as the evening shadows began to fall, he was still standing exactly as he had been when Kelda left him, ankle deep in the water, knife in hand. But this time his tunic was ripped open from neck to navel. His skin was as pale as salt. Drops of blood dripped from his white-blond hair and daubed his trembling hands. And his eyes were staring only at the corpse that lay face down at his feet, half in and half out of the water.

Expecting to find two dead boys and a killer to trail, the search party had set three hounds upon the scent. The first that Gunnarr knew of their arrival was the slate-grey bitch that came sniffing around the corpses and licking at his fingers. He looked up and found Egil striding hurriedly towards him through the water, his black cloak streaming from his shoulders.

Ten or so other men had come with him. One of them carried Kelda on his back. She was shouting and pointing needlessly, for they had all seen him by now. The boys had been allowed to come as well, it seemed. Hákon, Fafrir, Bjọrn and Eiric were all there, running to keep up with the others. All of this Gunnarr witnessed only fleetingly, and then inevitably his eyes would return to the bloody pile at his feet.

Egil hugged him when he reached him, but Gunnarr barely noticed. Breathless and excited, the boys clamoured around him, all speaking at once, but he heard only some of their words. Someone gently eased the knife from his grip. He did not feel it go.

Hákon, the oldest of the boys at fifteen, stepped across Gunnarr’s vision and dropped to his knees beside the corpse, leaning very close so as to demonstrate that death and gore could draw no fear from him. He studied the body with a stern face, crinkling his nose slightly.

‘Gods, Gunnarr,’ he exclaimed, peering upwards, ‘you’ve made a right old mess of him!’

Gunnarr stared down at the corpse, the countless stab wounds that had left the man’s back a mire of red and pink. ‘He would not die,’ he said quietly.

Egil placed an arm across Gunnarr’s shoulders. ‘Sometimes a man will move even when the life is gone from him. But you are too young to be learning that.’

‘You were that busy stabbing him that you didn’t give him chance to die!’ Hákon jibed. The other boys started to giggle.

Egil’s stiff voice broke in and cut off their titters. ‘Do not tease your brother.’

‘I didn’t,’ Hákon protested, with a rebellious smirk. ‘I teased Gunnarr.’ He sauntered off to study the other body. The rest of Egil’s sons followed him, gawping and exclaiming.

An old lame horse had been towed up the trail with the men. When the time came to leave, darkness gathering, they wrapped Gunnarr in a blanket and lifted him onto its back, seating Kelda up in front of him and Bjọrn behind to keep him warm. Egil himself led the beast by the mane, the hounds padding along just in front, while Eiric scurried along at his father’s side and asked questions about death and dying, which Egil answered with brusque, direct replies. Fafrir and Hákon marched along some twenty yards in front of everyone else, half-jogging to make sure that it was so, two silhouettes shrinking into the sunset.

For much of the journey Gunnarr leaned back against Bjọrn’s chest and dozed, his chin resting on top of Kelda’s head as she did the same against him. When at one point a misplaced step from the horse jolted him half awake, he heard his name being spoken, and realised that Egil was in conversation with one of the other men. He kept his eyes closed and listened.

‘We are all happy to find him alive, Egil, but we cannot ignore the fact that we also found two that were not.’

‘Aye, and one of them the killer of the other,’ Egil replied dismissively.

‘Are we sure of that?’

Egil huffed with annoyance. ‘Of course we bloody are. Thorgen’s relationship with that boy was well known. Just ask his poor wife.’

‘Hákon says that Thorgen was using Rolf as a woman, and that Gunnarr was watching them so that he could learn what to do with Kelda.’ It was Eiric’s young voice. Both men ignored the comment, and Egil went on.

‘We have Kelda’s account to vouch for Gunnarr. He’s a boy of twelve, not some blood-hungry cur. Today is the first time he’s killed anyone, and the poor lad has scared himself half to death in doing so.’

‘I didn’t know that your rule made exceptions for youths.’

Egil’s voice quickened. ‘Randulf, our kingdom has only one rule, and I was the one that devised it. Do you think I’m likely to have forgotten what it says? When Thorgen killed Rolf, it was him that broke the rule. Gunnar witnessed it, and he punished the culprit. He has upheld the rule, not broken it.’

The man named Randulf persisted. ‘I still don’t think you can just ignore that this happened. People will ask questions.’

‘What do you want me to say, Randulf, that I will put my own son to death? Our people have barely made it through winter without starving. They have more pressing concerns.’

Randulf sighed. ‘You might at least punish him of sorts. To teach him, and the townsfolk, that his actions were at best reckless.’

‘I’ll do no such thing,’ Gunnarr heard Egil reply firmly. ‘Life has never been easy for Gunnarr. He lost Folkvarr in the time before there was a rule, and so he understands why we have need of one. Brave is what his actions were. And our town needs men brave enough to do what is right.’

They reached the town after darkness fell. A crowd had gathered just inside the gates to wait for their return. Night torches had been lit around the walls. By the glow of their orange light Gunnarr found his mother standing beside Kelda’s. She smiled cheerfully and raised her hand in a wave. Though she loved him more than any other, she had a trust in him that meant she was always the last to worry about his safety. The expression on Kelda’s mother’s face, though, could not have been greater in contrast. The sight of it cleared the sleepiness from Gunnarr’s head, and filled him with a sudden urgency.

Egil came to a halt with the horse and the mothers started to make their way over. Hands reached up and guided Gunnarr down from his seat, and as soon as his feet touched the ground he turned around to face Kelda. She was still half asleep, her eyes wrinkled against the glare of the torches, but she pushed her lips into a conspirator’s smile when she looked at him.

‘I’m sorry that you’ll get in trouble now,’ he told her.

Kelda made a face, and was about to reply when her mother arrived and took her sharply by the arm.

‘Just look at the state of them,’ she exclaimed, standing back to gaze in horror at the two children. ‘I’m sorry Frejya, this is no reflection on you, but I will not have the two of them playing together any more, I just won’t.’ She jerked Kelda by the arm and started dragging her forcefully away, continuing to scold her as they went.

‘Goodnight, Kelda,’ Gunnarr stepped forward and called after her.

Kelda looked back over her shoulder and darted free of her mother’s grasp. Reaching quickly inside her smock, she produced something from her pocket and placed it between her hands. Just before her mother wrenched her away again, she snatched her thumbs up to her lips and blew. A whistle pierced out into the night’s sky, as clear and pure as any birdsong.

Chapter One (#u689bde14-3e41-523e-8035-767e6748a265)

The outrider approached at a gallop, hair billowing, and reined to a skidding halt at Egil’s right hand. His horse’s mouth and nostrils were covered in strings of white mucus. Blood ran down its pasterns from kicking up the sharp mountain stones.

‘How many?’ Egil asked gravely, reaching up to take hold of the bridle.

The scout’s name was Torleik, a son of Egil’s cousin. He slid down from the steaming mount with a thud. ‘Enough for me to see that there was little use in counting them all.’ His mouth twitched briefly into a quivering smile, but he swallowed with uncertainty halfway through, and it did not return.

Egil tugged at the horse’s noseband as it snorted and threw its head. ‘Do they march?’

‘They make camp, just beyond the ridge. The rearguard is still arriving.’

Egil nodded brusquely, and turned away. Slowly, he let his eyes wander up the beaten highland path that wound into the mountains until it was lost, trying to take it all in. The horse shied again and he lost patience with it, thrusting control of it back to its rider with a growl of annoyance.

‘Father. Steingarth?’ he heard his second son, Fafrir, venture from behind him, and other voices murmured in concurrence.

‘Aye,’ Egil sighed, turning back to Torleik, ‘what of Steingarth and the other hill settlements?’

‘Fallen, I suppose,’ Torleik answered, still breathless from the ride. ‘Of prisoners I saw no sign, but there is smoke to the north-east, and I think I saw some to the west as well, where Blendal sits.’

Egil sucked on his lip and spat on the ground. Only a fool could have expected different. That black part of the night before dawn had brought wails and clangs and rumbling footsteps tumbling down off the slopes, as if all the barrows had opened and the ghouls were running riot in the darkness. Now he knew that something far more threatening awaited them beyond the horizon.

It was approaching mid-morning already, the sunlight still pale with immaturity. Egil stood just below the summit of the first of the foothills, at the elbow of a sharp twist in the road where a weary old hawthorn tree grew so stooped that the children would run up and down its trunk in summer. At his back were his most trusted men. They had dug out their shields and tough leather armour, the swords and spears of their fathers, and now they were waiting, tense and restless. In number, they were no more than ten: his sons, old friends, wise heads. As he turned around to face them they pressed inwards with anticipation, but Egil looked off beyond their eager eyes and instead gazed down at the paltry town some five hundred yards in the distance below.

Helvik. His town. He’d become an old man quickly during the years of his rule, and his sons were pushing for him to name a successor and step aside, but Helvik was still his town. She sat miserably on a scrap of bleak coastline, hunched around a wind-battered bay that bordered the green seas of the north. From a distance, her surrounding pasture looked bleached and poxed, her wooden stockade all sunken and damp and mouldy. So few buildings sat within her walls that outsiders might call her a village or an outpost rather than a town. To Egil, she resembled a tired old grandmother clutching a gaggle of children within her feeble arms. And as he looked down upon her, it was as if he could see her dying quietly before his eyes.

‘Father, we cannot just stand here. We must act!’

It was Hákon, eldest of Egil’s sons and growing more assertive by the day. He wore the rusted coat of ringmail that had belonged to Egil’s own father, though it looked to be too broad for his shoulders. The other men, Egil could see, were becoming just as restive, but he was now sufficiently old that his silence ought to have been able to hold an audience as well as his words could. He rolled an admonishing look in Hákon’s direction, and resumed his contemplation.

For years his town had been dogged by sickness. It was mid-autumn. The women should have been in the barn winnowing the barley, the boys and girls out in the fields pulling turnips amid the gentle warmth of a benevolent sun. Instead, the sky was choked with rain clouds, as it had been for the past three harvest seasons. Any crops that had scavenged enough sunlight to grow now lay rotting in the fields. Once, Egil’s people might have relied on the fruits of the sea to sustain them, but the fish that once had teemed in the cold clean waters were gone, hunted to exhaustion or tempted away by some enticing current, so that the longboat beached on their shore might as well have been driftwood. The scrawny beasts that sniffed around the fields did not have the meat on their bones to make them worth killing, though killed they would have to be once winter came, or else lost to the cold or starved out on the frozen grass. It was set to be the worst famine of all those that Egil could remember. And now this.

‘They could be here at any moment,’ Hákon pressed. ‘We must at least tell the men to arm themselves.’