He hears lapping water. He looks to the right, under the shadow of the bridge, and sees a geometrically perfect circle in the ice. A dense layer of wooden flotsam bobs up and down, trapped in the hole. A shanty, probably—and its occupants long gone.
Finally he arrives at the dangling rope. He loops the end of the thick towing rope, then uses the sailing rope to tie it fast, holding the loop. The knot is familiar: his hands move and loop and thread the rope without his even thinking about it.
As he ties the knot, he remembers.
He remembers how he raced to his home after hearing the news of the coup. He remembers finding it blackened and deserted; his farmland scarred, salted.
He remembers unearthing the fragile white bones lost in the moist ashes of his ruined, burned-out bedroom. He remembers digging the graves in the courtyard. The jumble of charred bones, random, incomplete, a tangled human jigsaw.
He could not recognize his wife and two daughters in them. But he separated the bones as best he could, buried them, and wept.
Enough. Stop.
Sigrud ties the remaining lengths of sailing rope to the loop, then ties their other ends to the fishing spears. He stabs the fishing spears down in the ice in a line, each fifty feet apart.
Sigrud sets the lantern down before the center spear and uses the point of the halberd’s blade to carve four deep, long lines in the ice, each converging on one point, just before the lantern: when he finishes, it looks like a giant star in the ice. Then he sits on the point, bare buttocks on the ice, halberd across his knees, and waits.
A duck honks disconsolately.
A spatter of screams from the east bank. The blasting wind.
Though he wishes to focus, the memories are merciless.
He remembers when he heard that a new nation had been formed, called the “Dreyling Republics,” but both that name and the title of “nation” were laughable: they were mere pirate states, sick with corruption and avarice.
Sigrud, grieving, raging, chose to fight, like many did. And, like many, he failed, and was thrown in Slondheim, the cliff-prison, a fate worse than death, they said.
And they spoke truth. He was not sure how many years he spent in solitary confinement, living off of gruel, ranting in the dark. Part of this was his own doing, of course: whenever they let him out, he tried to kill anyone who came close to him, and he often succeeded. Eventually they decided he would get no more chances: Sigrud was to live in the dark until he died.
But then one day the slot in his cell door opened, and he saw a face unlike any he’d seen before: a woman’s face, brown-skinned and long-nosed, with dark eyes and dark lips, and she had glass on her face—two little pieces of glass before each eye. Yet all his puzzlement vanished when the face said, “Your wife and children are alive, and safe. I have located them. I will be back tomorrow, if you wish to speak to me.”
The slot slammed shut. Her footsteps faded away.
This was how Sigrud first met Shara Komayd.
How many years has he spent with her now? Ten? Eleven? It does not matter, he finds. These new years have no meaning to him.
Sigrud blinks his eye; the lid sticks from the fat.
He thinks of the children he never knew, now grown, and the young woman who was once his wife. He wonders if she has a new husband, and his children a new father.
He looks down at his scarred, gleaming hands. He does not recognize them anymore.
On the horizon, a soft yellow light blinks below the ice.
Sigrud rubs fat from the palms of his hands, tests the grip on his halberd.
This is as it should be, he thinks. The cold, the dark, and the waiting death.
He waits.
*
The yellow light swims closer, closer, its movements smooth and graceful. Sigrud hears something tapping the ice, like a blind man with his cane. It listens, he thinks, to the reverberations, to see what lies atop it.
The ice creaks below him. The yellow glow is now twenty feet away; the light itself is nearly a foot wide. Like the eye of a giant squid, he thinks, and remembers, long ago, how he ate one that had been stewed in fish stock. And that one was quite a fighter. …
He cannot see through the ice, but he hears something popping fifteen, maybe ten feet away. He looks and sees a circle is being carved around him, and he also sees he estimated the thing’s breadth well: the edges of the circle all cross the four lines he carved in the ice; it begins to look like he is sitting in the middle of a big white pie with eight slices.
He slowly stands. The ice complains under his feet, weakened by so many carvings. He plucks up the fishing spear and stands in the center of the circle.
Something dark swirls underneath him. The yellow light is almost under his feet.
I wonder, thinks Sigrud, if I will find out how you taste. …
He readies the spear in his right hand. He takes a breath.
Then, well before the thing under the ice is done carving the circle, he raises the halberd in his left hand and swings the massive blade down.