The Gargoyle

by Andrew Davidson

  “The problem is you,” she said. “And your trips, when I’m with child.”

  A smile spread across Einarr’s face.

  “Stop that! I’m not supposed to be pregnant again,” she lamented. “I’m old.”

  “But not too old,” said Einarr. “Apparently.”

  On the night before the men were to leave, Svanhildr served them smoked pork and her latest ale but barely spoke. The following morning, she did not accompany Einarr to the shore. She just slapped him once across the mouth at their front door to say goodbye.

  The raids went as they always did. The reputation of the Vikings was almost enough to win any fight before a sword was lifted and by the time they approached their final target, their ship was loaded heavily. Perhaps they had grown complacent, because they were less prepared than usual. The English village had been attacked many times without difficulty, but recently the townspeople had learned some methods to defend themselves in an attempt to restore their pride. They didn’t expect to defeat the Vikings, but they desperately wanted to take a few of the intruders down.

  As the Vikings poured out of their boat and across the sand, there came an unexpected exclamation of arrows across the sky. Sigurðr had a good eye; he spotted one arrow that posed a particular threat. He readied himself to move out of its path but then realized that if he did so, the arrow would hit the man behind him.

  Einarr.

  And so he did not move.

  The arrow cut through the pelts across Sigurðr’s chest and he fell to the ground with a sharp yell, his fingers wrapped around the shaft.

  After their initial surprise, the Vikings quickly regained control and the village fell to the attackers, as it always did. But the battle no longer involved Einarr Einarsson or Sigurðr Sigurðsson, who were back on the shore. The arrow was lodged deep in Sigurðr’s chest, embedded past the barb, and could not be pulled out without ripping the wound open.

  Sigurðr knew this. He was afraid but gathered his courage even as he felt his eyes glazing over like ice forming on idle oars. “Einarr?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am dying.”

  “You are not.”

  “Remember me.”

  “How could I forget a man,” Einarr replied, “so stupid that he believes he’s dying from a flesh wound?”

  “Einarr?”

  “What?”

  “There is something I need to tell you.”

  “You’re talkative for a dying man.”

  “No,” Sigurðr insisted. “Ég elska—”

  Einarr cut him off. “All this prattling makes you sound like a woman. Save your strength.”

  The look on Einarr’s face let Sigurðr know that the discussion was finished, so he closed his eyes and let his friend carry him back onto the longboat. There Einarr cut away the flesh around the arrow’s shaft, and Sigurðr howled in agony with each slice. When the trench had been dug wide enough, Einarr used tongs to pull out the arrowhead and then held it up so Sigurðr, barely conscious, could see the meaty fibers that clung to it.

  “Svan must have fed you well,” Einarr said. “There is fat near your heart.”

  Through the return trip, Einarr washed the bandages and checked Sigurðr’s wound for infection but it seemed to be, if not healing, at least not getting worse. Almost before Sigurðr knew it, he awoke to the sight of Svanhildr holding out a bowl of leek and onion soup.

  “The warmth will be good for you,” she said.

  “I can leave. It is not wise for a sick man to be in the home of a pregnant woman.”

  She seemed amused. “You are family, and we will hear of no such thing.”

  “But the baby…”

  “Drink up. If I can smell the onions through your wounds, I’ll know your insides have been damaged.”

  Over the following days Einarr and Bragi prayed to the goddess of healing, and Svanhildr continued to tend Sigurðr’s wounds. The local healer blessed a number of whalebone runes in exchange for one of Einarr’s best chests, and scattered them around the bench on which Sigurðr slept.

  It seemed to work; Sigurðr’s wound remained onion free. The first thing he did, when it was obvious he would live, was head into the workshop to bore a hole through one of the healing runes. This, he handed over to Svanhildr.

  “I would be honored,” he said, “if you added this to your treasure necklace. You don’t have to, but—”

  She cut his sentence short by throwing her arms around him, and nodding vigorously.

  The recovery was not easy. Sigurðr had difficulty lifting his arms and occasionally there were shooting pains when he least expected them, but he soon grew tired of being looked after. He joined Einarr on his latest project, a boat intended to take Bragi into the coves for fishing. He was determined to paint every inch of it; such decoration was not necessary, by any means, but it felt good to have a brush in his hand again. The job dragged on for far too long, but Einarr never once complained about his friend’s slowness.

  Svanhildr’s pregnancy progressed without difficulty, despite her advanced years for such an adventure. When she went into labor, young Bragi ran to fetch the midwife while the men stayed behind to comfort her. Another boy, healthy and beautiful and named Friðleifr, soon joined the family.

  When it appeared certain that the child would survive, the men decided to drink to their good fortune. Even Bragi was allowed to stay up late and down a number of frost-cups filled with strong ale; since he now had a younger brother to watch over, his father contended that it was time for him to start drinking like a man.

  The room was aglow from the longfire and the blubber lamps, and Einarr laughed as his boy—now, he noted proudly, his older boy—stumbled to his sleeping bench on wobbly legs. “No, not quite a man yet,” he teased, while Sigurðr called out that the ale would put hair on Bragi’s chest. Or, at least, hair on his tongue the following morning.

  Within minutes the boy was snoring and Einarr, satisfied that his wife and new baby were also safely asleep, retreated to his workshop. He returned with a small bag that he tossed to Sigurðr; inside were a number of dried mushrooms. “Now we should truly celebrate. The gods smile upon us.”

  Each man ate a couple of the berserkjasveppur—Sigurðr didn’t like the texture, but was never one to refuse his friend—before Einarr dumped the remainder into the ale bowl on the longfire. “We will boil the rest. It doesn’t taste good, but the effect…”

  As they sipped late into the night, Einarr tried to describe the beauty of the free-flowing lines that floated all around him, and Sigurðr found himself laughing at Einarr’s every attempt. A few times Svanhildr lifted her head confusedly at one of Sigurðr’s exclamations, but settled back into sleep without a word. The men drank until the mushroom bowl was empty, and then ate the soggy remains at its bottom.

  “It was good when you gave Svan the rune for her necklace,” Einarr said with a slur. “I wish I’d thought of it.”

  “She looked after me,” said Sigurðr. “As did you.”

  “It was time for her to have something of you around her neck.”

  “I love,” said Sigurðr, “her.”

  “I know.”

  “Bragi,” added Sigurðr. “Bragi, I love, too.”

  “I have something for you.” Einarr once again retreated to his workshop, and this time he returned with the arrowhead that had entered Sigurðr’s body. He sat down heavily, closer to Sigurðr than before. “Give me your necklace.”

  “I didn’t know…” Sigurðr murmured. “I didn’t think you’d ever noticed it.”

  “I knew of it from the first, but was reminded when I cut this”—he held up the arrowhead—“from your chest.”

  Sigurðr handed over the leather strap, and when it was in his fingers, Einarr twisted it around and said, “It looks just like the day I wrapped Sigurðrsnautr with it.”

  Sigurðr stared intently into the fire, unable to meet his friend’s eyes, as Einarr slipped the arrowhead onto the necklace. Then he h
eld it out for Sigurðr to take.

  Sigurðr started to reach for it, but then changed his mind and bowed slightly instead. Einarr hesitated momentarily, and then slipped the necklace over Sigurðr’s head. Sigurðr could feel the hand brushing up against his hair, perhaps even grazing the nape of his neck. After all his years of imagining Einarr’s fingers there, they finally were.

  They paused a moment, eyes on each other.

  Sigurðr leaned in a bit, and Einarr did not pull back. They were so close. Sigurðr cleared his throat, which felt clogged with boiled ale and fungus, and his voice cracked when he released the words he had waited so many years to say. “Ég elska Þig.”

  Einarr narrowed his eyes a little, but otherwise his expression did not change.

  Sigurðr leaned in a little further, and still Einarr did not pull away. So Sigurðr closed the remainder of the distance, settled his mouth to Einarr’s, and kissed him.

  Einarr did not react. Sigurðr read this as acceptance, and kissed harder.

  Then Sigurðr felt Einarr pull back, followed by an excruciating thud at the side of his head. The blow sent him toppling off the bench and he looked up just in time to see Einarr jumping forward, leg swinging. The kick caught Sigurðr full in the ribs and drove all the breath from his lungs. Using his sword arm, Einarr drove one punch to the center of Sigurðr’s stomach, and followed that with more. The attack was uncoordinated, heavy on frenzy and short on strategy, and mostly the blows missed.

  Sigurðr tried to retreat but Einarr drove his shoulder into his chest, sending Sigurðr sprawling into one of the lamps, knocking it over. He tried to use the momentum to roll away, but Einarr followed with more wild fists. So many blows, so fast, and everywhere—into Sigurðr’s jaw, off his shoulder, to his throat, and at the most tender place on his chest where the arrow had entered. He could barely breathe, both from the violence of the attack and the fact it was happening at all.

  The baby. Friðleifr was now howling in the dragon crib, aware that something was terribly wrong in the world he barely knew. Svanhildr had jumped up and was screaming at her husband to stop, and Bragi stumbled off his sleeping bench, confused both by the fight and by the ale that still ran through his veins. He could not quite control his legs, and the floor seemed to lurch like a boat deck during a storm.

  Einarr was beyond any understanding of the yelling voices. Whatever demons the berserkjasveppur were making him see, he was fighting them as if they were the only real things in the room.

  Sigurðr did not fight back with the conviction that one would have expected. His injuries limited his physical ability, true, but it was more than that: when he saw the stumbling boy Bragi and heard Svanhildr’s screams, he simply lost the will. He became aware, not consciously but nonetheless completely, that his moment of weakness was a betrayal of those closest to him, the family that had taken in a confused boy and given him the life of a man. In one lustful moment, Sigurðr had crossed the unspoken line he and Einarr had spent more than a decade constructing.

  So Sigurðr allowed his body to go limp; he would let Einarr punch that line back into existence.

  When Svanhildr saw Sigurðr give up, she was afraid for his life, and turned away from her path to the baby’s dragon cradle. She grabbed at Einarr’s right arm when it was drawn back for another blow, and her husband automatically spun around with his left fist. It connected heavily, sending Svanhildr sprawling headfirst into a pile of lumber.

  Bragi knew better than to engage his father directly; a boy who still played with toy swords was no match for a Viking. The beating of his uncle Sig terrified him, but Bragi could also see a greater danger: whale blubber had spilled out of the knocked-over lamp and ignited a pile of wood shavings, and the flames were spreading.

  Bragi began yelling that the room was on fire, but even this was not enough to bring his father back. Einarr’s fists, still inaccurate but unfailing in endurance, continued to rain down upon Sigurðr’s body and there was nothing in the attacker’s face but fearful rage.

  The benches along the walls caught fire and those flames reached up to grab at the birch twigs that stuck out of the walls. There would be no stopping the blaze and—worst, Bragi saw—it was headed towards his mother, who lay motionless where she had fallen. There was blood leaking from her forehead, into eyes that were no longer open.

  Bragi shook his mother, but without response. When he realized she could not be woken, he hooked his hands into her armpits and tensed his legs. He pulled with all his strength, but he was still too drunk and too small and he could only jerk her haltingly, a few feet at a time. Still, he would get her out. He had to.

  As Bragi dragged Svanhildr towards the door, Einarr continued his merciless attack. Sigurðr could no longer have fought back even if he had wanted: his face was bloody pulp, many of his ribs had snapped, and his legs twitched with each connecting blow. Still, he was able to spit a few words through his broken teeth.

  “Fire, Einarr,” he sputtered. “Wife! Bragi!”

  He kept repeating the words until they finally made it through. Einarr stopped his fists and looked around confusedly, like a man who did not know where he has woken up. He saw that Bragi was at the longhouse’s entrance with Svanhildr but could go no further, stopped by a barrier of flames.

  He bolted to them and kicked open the burning door. He grabbed Bragi and threw him out, but he could not do the same with Svanhildr—her unconscious deadweight made that impossible—so he lifted her over his shoulder and put his head down. The only way out was through; they might get burned, but they would live.

  Sigurðr, lying shattered on the floor, saw Einarr and Svanhildr disappear through the curtain of flames and knew that he would never be able to follow. He could not imagine moving a few feet, much less the distance needed to escape, and thought: So this is how it ends. In flames.

  The fire crackled around him like laughter, and he expected this would be the last sound that he ever heard. Then he heard the baby crying.

  The edges of Sigurðr’s tunic were ablaze and his skin felt as if it was starting to bubble. With a handful of broken fingers, he put out those flames; he might have burned his hands while doing so, but he couldn’t feel them and it didn’t matter anyway. Blood seeped out of the corners of his eyes and into his beard, but he wiped it away and began to crawl towards Friðleifr’s cries.

  Outside, in the glow of the longhouse, Svanhildr had regained consciousness and grabbed hysterically at Bragi. When she realized that Friðleifr was not with them, she threw her arms out and broke into screams. She began lurching towards the longhouse, and then it was Bragi who held her; he would not allow his mother to enter an inferno it was obvious she could not escape.

  Einarr, his wits regained, also heaved his body towards the burning building. His heart urged him to burst inside, but his most basic instincts would not allow it. Unable to do anything else, incapable of moving towards the fire or away from it, he fell to his knees and buried his face in his hands. Svanhildr continued screaming at the burning house and Bragi continued to hold her back, until it was apparent that her rage was no longer directed at the building. The boy released his mother and she ran to Einarr, punching and kicking him until she dropped exhausted at his side.

  Einarr never once lifted a hand to Svanhildr until she collapsed, and then he raised it only to reach out to her. The moment his open palm touched her, she jerked away, and he knew not to try again.

  The following morning, the longhouse was little more than a blight of glowing embers strewn among the foundation stones. Others had arrived—farmers, Vikings, tradespeople—and had begun to comb the ruins. Einarr wanted to do anything but this, but knew he must.

  He headed to the spot where the dragon cradle had last sat, but it was no more: there was only a pile of burnt sticks, and one smoldering dragonhead post that had not been incinerated with the rest.

  A cry went up from one of the searchers: Sigurðr’s body had been found. It was not where the beating had occurred
, but perhaps a dozen body lengths away. The corpse was so badly charred that Einarr could not even recognize it as his friend; it was the shape of a human body, but melted to the bones.

  The sight sickened Einarr, but the location puzzled him. Rather than heading for the door, Sigurðr had pulled himself into the corner of the house where the water trench ran. This might have made sense if the opening was large enough to escape through—but it was far too small. Sigurðr hadn’t even opened the floorboards; he lay on top of them.

  There was a noise.

  Einarr and the men standing around the scorched body looked from face to face, as if to confirm that they were not mad, that there was indeed sound coming from a dead man.

  Soft. A whimpering.

  Underneath. The noise was coming from below the floorboards.

  Two men pulled Sigurðr’s remains to one side, the skull puffing out a breath of ashes, and Einarr began ripping up the planks. They were scorched but not burned through; it was clear that Sigurðr’s body had acted as a buffer against the flames. When the boards were removed, Einarr saw that there in the flowing water, wrapped in his swaddling blanket and tied securely with Sigurðr’s arrowhead necklace, was the newborn. The child Friðleifr was shivering and half submerged, but alive.

  Einarr scooped his son out and held him tighter than he ever had before.

  In the days that followed, Einarr and Bragi spent all their time at Sigurðr’s favorite fjord, digging a massive hole. When it was large enough, they enlisted the help of the Viking crew to carry Bragi’s boat—the one that Sigurðr had painted so brilliantly—to the gravesite. While it was being lowered, some of the Vikings grumbled that Sigurðr was not so important a warrior as to deserve such a fine boat grave, but no one dared speak such a thought aloud. They simply left Einarr and his family to bid farewell to the man who had saved their child.

  Beside Sigurðr’s body in the boat, they laid a number of items: his favorite frost-cup and the household’s ale-goose, both pulled from the ashes; his paintbrushes and pigments; Sigurðrsnautr; and the single unburned dragonhead from Friðleifr’s cradle. Then Svanhildr removed her treasure necklace and placed it gently across Sigurðr’s withered chest, keeping only the healing rune that he had given her.