Simon stepped to Erlend’s side.
“You killed my cousin without cause, Simon Andress?n,” said Vidar of Klaufastad, who was standing in front of the others in the doorway.
“It was not entirely without cause that he fell. But you know, Vidar, that I won’t refuse to pay the penance for this misfortune I’ve brought upon you. All of you know where you can find me at home.”
Erlend talked a little more to the farmers. “Alf, how did it happen?” He went indoors with the other men.
Simon stayed where he was, feeling strangely numb. Erlend came back after a moment. “Let’s go now,” he said as he headed for the stable.
“Is he dead?” asked Simon.
“Yes. And Alf and Toralde and Vidar all have wounds, but none is serious. Holmgeir’s hair was singed off the back of his head.” Erlend had spoken in a somber voice, but now he abruptly burst out laughing. “Now it certainly smells like a damn roasted thrush in there, you’d better believe me! How the Devil could all of you get into such a quarrel in such a short time?” he asked in astonishment.
A half-grown boy was holding their horses. Neither of the men had brought his own servant along on this journey.
Both were still carrying their swords. Erlend picked up a handful of hay and wiped the blood from his. Simon did the same. When he had rubbed off the worst of it, he stuck his sword back in its sheath. Erlend cleaned his sword very thoroughly and then polished it with the hem of his cape. Then he made several playful little thrusts into the air and smiled, fleetingly, as if at a memory. He tossed the sword high up, caught it by the hilt, and stuck it back in its sheath.
“Your wounds . . . We should go up to the house, and I’ll bandage them for you.”
Simon said they were nothing. “But you’re bleeding too, Erlend!”
“It’s nothing dangerous, and my skin heals fast. I’ve noticed that heavyset people always take longer to heal. And with this cold . . . and we have such a long way to ride.”
Erlend got some salve and cloths from the tenant farmer and carefully tended to the other man’s wounds. Simon had two flesh wounds right next to each other on the left side of his chest; they bled a great deal at first, but they weren’t serious. Erlend had been slashed on the thigh by Bj?rn’s spear. That would make it painful to ride, said Simon, but his brother-in-law laughed. It had barely made a scratch through his leather hose. He dabbed at it a bit and then wrapped it tightly against the frost.
It was bitterly cold. Before they reached the bottom of the hill on which the farm stood, their horses were covered with rime and the fur trim on the men’s hoods had turned white.
“Brrr.” Erlend shivered. “If only we were home! We’ll have to ride over to the manor down here and report the slaying.”
“Is that necessary?” asked Simon. “I spoke to Vidar and the others after all . . .”
“It would be better if you did so,” said Erlend. “You should report the news yourself. Don’t let them have anything to hold against you.”
The sun had slipped behind the ridge now; the evening was a pale grayish blue but still light. They rode along a creek, beneath the branches of birch trees that were even more shaggy with frost than the rest of the forest. There was a stink of raw, icy fog in the air, which could make a man’s breath stick in his throat. Erlend grumbled impatiently about the long period of cold they had had and about the chill ride that lay before them.
“You’re not getting frostbite on your face, are you, brother-in-law?” He peered anxiously under Simon’s hood. Simon rubbed his hand over his face; it wasn’t frostbitten, but he had grown quite pale as he rode. It didn’t suit him, because his large, portly face was weather-beaten and ruddy, and the paleness appeared in gray blotches, which made his complexion look unclean.
“Have you ever seen a man spreading manure with his sword the way Alf did?” asked Erlend. He burst out laughing at the memory and leaned forward in his saddle to imitate the gesture. “What a splendid envoy he is! You should have seen Ulf playing with his sword, Simon—Jesus, Maria!”
Playing . . . Well, now he’d seen Erlend Nikulauss?n playing at that game. Over and over again he saw himself and the other men tumbling around the hearth, the way farmers chop wood or toss hay. And Erlend’s slender, lightning-swift figure among them, his gaze alert and his wrist steady as he danced with them, quick-witted and an expert swordsman.
More than twenty years ago he himself had been considered one of the foremost swordsmen among the youth of the royal retainers, when they practiced out on the green. But since then he hadn’t had much opportunity to use his knightly skills.
And here he was now, riding along and feeling sick at heart because he had killed a man. He kept seeing Holmgeir’s body as it fell from his sword and sank into the fire; he heard the man’s abrupt, strangled death cry in his ears and saw, again and again, images of the brief, furious battle that followed. He felt dejected, pained, and confused; they had turned on him suddenly, all those men with whom he had sat and felt a sense of belonging. And then Erlend had come to his aid.
He had never thought himself a coward. He had hunted down six bears during the years he had lived at Formo, and twice he had put his life at risk in the most reckless manner. With only the thin trunk of a pine tree between him and a raging, wounded female, with no other weapon than his spearpoint on a shaft a scant hand’s breadth long . . . The tenseness of the game had not disturbed his steadiness of thought, action, or instinct. But now, in that outbuilding . . . he didn’t know if he had been afraid, but he certainly had been confused, unable to think clearly.
When he was back home after the bear hunt, with his clothes thrown on haphazardly, with his arm in a sling, feverish, his shoulder stiff and torn, he had merely felt an overwhelming joy. Things might have gone worse; how much worse, he didn’t dwell on. But now he kept thinking about it, ceaselessly: how everything might have ended if Erlend hadn’t come to his aid just in time. He hadn’t been afraid, but he had such a peculiar feeling. It was the expressions on the faces of the other men . . . and Holmgeir’s dying body.
He had never killed a man before.
Except for the Swedish horseman he had felled . . . It was during the year when King Haakon led an incursion into Sweden to avenge the murder of the dukes.4 Simon had been sent out on a scouting mission; he had taken along three men, and he was to be their chieftain. How bold and cocky he was. Simon remembered that his sword had gotten stuck in the steel helmet of the horseman so that he had to pry and wriggle it loose. There was a nick in the blade when he looked at it the next morning. He had always thought about that incident with pride, and there had been eight Swedes. He had gotten a taste of war at any rate, and that wasn’t the lot of everyone who joined the king’s men that year. When daylight came, he saw that blood and brains had splattered over his coat of mail; he tried to look modest and not boastful as he washed it off.
But it did no good to think about that poor devil of a horseman now. No, that was not the same thing. He couldn’t get rid of a terrible feeling of remorse about Holmgeir Moisess?n.
There was also the fact that he owed Erlend his life. He didn’t yet know what import this would have, but he felt as if everything would be different, now that he and Erlend were even.
In that way they were even at least.
The brothers-in-law had been riding in near silence. Once Erlend said, “It was foolish of you, Simon, not to think of getting out right from the start.”