Fall Hard (22 page)

No one was standing by my desk staring at me with accusation in their eyes. I told myself I was just being an idiot. But the question still stood. Should I even read this? It was Sven’s work, not mine. But it wasn’t like he was ever going to publish it now, was it? If I found something I felt should be made known, I’d simply have to give him credit for it, that was all.

Conscience appeased, I settled down to read.

The book started out, I found, innocuously enough. In fact, it was a bit disappointing. What with all the secrecy, I’d expected something a bit more, well, groundbreaking. But the way it went on became more and more disquieting. Sven’s angle wasn’t, as Mags had thought, the shape-shifting legend. Had that just been a cover? Or had Sven originally intended that to be the subject of the book and become obsessed with his new viewpoint? The focus of the work as it now stood was what he termed the love triangle between Egil, his brother Thorolfr, and Asgerdr, the woman they both married.

A whole chapter was devoted to a single line in the saga, just before Thorolfr and Asgerdr’s betrothal, which states that the brothers had become cool to one another. Sven had taken that as evidence of Egil’s love for the girl his brother wished to marry. But the plain fact was that the previous summer Egil had played a “trick” on his brother—in fact, an act of petulant vandalism that almost lost Thorolfr a ship—and threatened more of the same. It had had nothing to do with Asgerdr. He’d just wanted to force his big brother to take Egil with him on his voyages, which Thorolfr had previously quite reasonably refused to do on account of Egil’s immaturity and temper. The end result, which would horrify authors of parenting manuals everywhere, was that Egil got his way.

If that wasn’t enough to cool Thorolfr’s love for his brother, when they stopped for the winter in Sogn, in Norway, Egil promptly chummed up with a local lad called Arinbjorn and dropped his much-put-upon brother’s company altogether. Evidence of Egil’s love for Asgerdr? No. To my mind, it just showed how much of a pain in the arse the young Egil had been. Although I’d have to admit to a grudging admiration for anyone so adept at wearing down the opposition. I stood, stretching, and limped over to the coffee machine, taking care not to meet anyone’s eyes. I took a few deep breaths before pouring myself a cup with hands that weren’t quite steady.

Had I found Sven’s book this troubling the first time I’d read it? I wondered if I should talk it over with Mags. But I shouldn’t base my judgement on a handful of chapters. I took a deep breath and carried my cup back to my desk.

The next chapter was worse. I’d expected Sven to find Egil’s illness at the time of his brother’s wedding significant—he wasn’t the first to draw parallels with Gunnlaugr’s saga, where the unsuccessful suitor in a love triangle declines to attend his more favoured friend’s wedding feast. But Sven went further. He posited that Thorolfr must have known all along that Egil loved Asgerdr. He even hinted that Thorolfr married her, at least in part, to spite his brother.

Then I got to the part where Thorolfr’s death in battle was suggested, by Sven, to have been the result of a botched attempt to kill his brother. Egil’s genuine grief at Thorolfr’s death was explained as him mourning his brother’s treachery.

I closed the file. My head was aching, and my stomach roiled. I felt unclean, somehow, as if I hadn’t washed for days. This was what my lover had believed? There was no evidence for these theories, none at all. Yes, many readers of Egil’s saga had suggested that he’d always loved Asgerdr—but for Thorolfr to plot his death because of it? Completely without foundation.

Sven’s polemic against the fairer of the two brothers had become increasingly vicious. He’d suggested brutality on Thorolfr’s part towards his wife and had ended the last chapter with the words,
Egil was doubly fortunate in Thorolfr’s mistakes. First, that he survived his brother’s betrayal. Secondly, because had Thorolfr not died that day, Egil would have been forced, much against his will, to kill him. One way or another, Thorolfr had to die.

Grabbing my stick, I rose and limped to the window. My shoulders were stiff, and the room had darkened, the skies outside grey and heavy with unshed rain. It wasn’t that I believed the saga, as written down, to be gospel truth. But to deviate so far from the story, with no evidence—and Sven had cited none, or at least none that I found even remotely sufficient for the conclusions drawn—that sickened me, as a scholar and as his former lover. Even if I still couldn’t remember him.

I—and other people—often joked about my obsession with Egil Skallagrimsson. But it was clear to me now that Sven had carried things a stage further. There was an unsettling, false logic to his theories that reminded me of reports I’d read in the papers of stalkers. I couldn’t say why it scared me so much—after all, the objects of his obsession were centuries dead, weren’t they?

My phone chimed softly, indicating that a text had arrived. It was from Viggo, suggesting he come over to the flat this evening. It brought me back to my problems of here and now with a sickening lurch. I was glad he’d texted, not phoned. If I spoke to him, he’d hear in my voice that something was wrong, and I didn’t want to discuss things in a stilted telephone conversation that could easily be overheard.

Did I want him to come to the flat? Home ground was supposed to make you feel more secure, wasn’t it? Or would it just make it easier for him to distract me with sex, like he had the last time he’d been there and I’d tried asking awkward questions?

There was one way of avoiding that. I’d have to meet him somewhere. Not at either of our flats—and not down by the riverjet, either. When I thought about it and how close he’d be already, the answer was obvious. At least, there was a macabre logic to it. I texted back,
Meet at 6. Gullfoss
.

Then I switched off my phone and grabbed my jacket. There was no point hanging around here any longer.

It would be a long drive to Gullfoss, and in any case, I felt stifled in my flat, so I set off early. I took the route that wound through Thingvellir National Park, the site of Iceland’s open-air Viking parliaments or
Things
in medieval times. In his bitter, blind old age, Egil had planned to attend the meeting one year and scatter chests of money into the crowds, simply for the schadenfreude of causing a riot.

Was this what I was doing too? Telling Viggo to meet me at a place that could only hold pain for us both rather than having a quiet word with him at home? Was I trying to make him suffer for keeping things from me? Or punishing myself for—for what? For believing in Viggo? Or for being happy, when Sven was dead?

This was madness. So far, all I had was Alex’s word on it all. And who the hell was he? Not a professor of early American history like he’d claimed, that was for damned sure. I was glad I hadn’t told him about this evening. Glad there was no chance he might turn up. I didn’t want him there when I spoke to Viggo.

When I accused him of lying to me.

Or not. I could just ask him about Sven. See what I’d told him about the book, about Sven’s mental state. The insane theories, the horse’s skull—I must surely have been unsettled by them back then, as now, and it was clear I hadn’t confided in Mags. Who else would I have turned to, if not Viggo? After all, we’d been friends.

Or lovers.

Gravel scattered as I turned into the Gullfoss car park. I’d been driving too fast, I realised, braking hard before I hurt someone. There were a couple of dozen cars there, maybe more, and people walking around, ambling over to the visitor centre. Tourists. We wouldn’t be alone this time—not like the winter’s evening of the accident.

The day was still warm, but I shivered anyway when I got out of my car.

There was a decking path leading to a viewing platform, which was where most of the visitors clustered to see the spectacular one-hundred-foot double falls with who knew how many hundred tons of water rushing over them every second. I didn’t turn that way. That hadn’t been where I’d fallen. Where Sven had gone to his death. Instead, I limped along the cliff by the side of the falls, swallowing hard against the vertigo that hit me every time I so much as looked at the roiling white waters below. The air was cloudy and damp with the spray rising like steam from the chasm, and there was a constant thundering roar I knew only too well from my dreams.

The surface of the path was fairly good as it went, but my leg was aching fiercely.

I wasn’t sure of the exact spot it had happened. I stopped a little way along the cliff and gazed down over the river. Far below, tourists in primary colours stood like miniscule toy figures—too small to play with properly, even—on a rocky shelf that bulged out into the river’s vast width at the head of the falls. The effect was jarring, as my brain woke up to the true scale of the torrent. The shelf looked unstable, unsafe, as if any moment the force of the water’s incessant flow could carry it over the edge where the river disappeared into the bowels of the earth. Was that where I’d fallen, when Sven had been less lucky? My vision seemed to tilt—and then strong arms grasped me from behind.

“Paul! Come back. Come away from the edge.” Viggo’s face, as I twisted in his grasp to see him, was more serious than I’d ever seen it. His eyes were wide and haunted. I let him drag me over to the far side of the path, where the ubiquitous cairns stood on the damp, rocky ground like misshapen goblins caught by the dawn, their stony gaze indifferent to human lives and deaths. “What are you doing?”

“We need to talk,” I said, my voice sounding rougher than I’d intended. I cleared my throat. “I heard some things about you. About the accident.”

He didn’t look baffled. Didn’t reply,
What things?
Or even
Who told you?
His gaze sliding away from mine was answer enough. My stomach falling, my chest tight, I wrenched myself out of his grip.

“So it’s true?” I asked harshly. “You were here?
Did
you have anything to do with the accident?”

The gap between us was a solid barrier, uncrossable from my side. It was Viggo who had to breach it. I stood there, the breeze chilling me, and willed him to shatter it.

He didn’t. “Yes,” he whispered, and it was I who shattered.

“No. No, I don’t believe it. Why would you…? No.” I was shaking my head, gripping my stick so hard my hand hurt. I felt sick to my stomach, the acrid taste of bile in my mouth. This wasn’t what he was supposed to say.

“I didn’t mean to. But it was my fault. I got a text. I thought it was from you. It said you wanted to meet me here. We used to meet here often. You said you could think, so far away from your work.” His mouth twisted. “Away from him. But it must have been Sven who sent the message this time. I don’t know how. Maybe you left your phone at home? I didn’t get a chance to ask. I should have known it wasn’t you who answered.

“But I wanted to believe it was you. You told me, only the day before, you’d read the book he was writing, and it disturbed you. You said you’d been wasting your time, staying with him. You were angry. I thought maybe this was it—that you would tell me you’d left him, and we could be together at last.” He paused, breathing hard for a moment. “It was getting dark. I thought he was you. He was wearing your clothes—my favourite jeans, the jacket you bought in Reykjavik… You—he was standing at the edge of the cliff, staring into the falls. I’m sorry, Paul.”

“What happened?”

Viggo’s voice, when it came, was barely audible. “I put my arms around him.”

My chest hurt. “I saw you,” I said, my voice breaking on the words. I had seen him. That flash of memory, Viggo smiling as he embraced Sven—it had been real. I’d thought… I didn’t know what I’d thought.

Memories trickled through my parched mind. My phone had been missing from my jacket pocket—by accident or by Sven’s design? It had made me uneasy, and I’d gone home early, picked up my phone and read the texts. Known I needed to be here.

“What happened?” I knew what had happened. I could see it now. Sven turning, his face ugly.

“He said he knew we were lovers.”

“But we weren’t.” I was sure of it now. I could remember wanting Viggo but not having him. Resenting the ties that bound me to Sven—ties of duty, of practicality. Ties of guilt.

Not of love.

“He didn’t believe us. I think… I think his mind wasn’t right. He called me his brother, said he would kill me. Again. As if he’d killed me once already, in his head.” Viggo paused, breathing hard. “He was so strong, I couldn’t believe it.”

I remembered that too. It was as if the evening had brought him strength, like a true reincarnation of Skallagrim’s line. Suddenly, the trickle was a torrent—tumultuous, unstoppable. Crushing. I could hardly breathe. Images flooded past me. Sven, his face darkened with rage; a moment later, alight with feverish intensity.

The horse’s skull, set so it faced Hvita River.

I staggered, was barely aware of Viggo’s arms holding me up. “I don’t want… Make it stop. I don’t want to remember.” The sickening vertigo was back. I was falling again, plummeting endlessly into the earth. There was cold dampness under my knees, the hardness of rocks, and I clung to the warmth of Viggo’s touch as if it alone could save me.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Viggo said. “You came after him. I think you were worried. And when you saw us, you tried to pull him off me.”

I flinched at the memory of a blow to the face, the ringing pain it caused in my cheekbone, my teeth, overshadowed by shock. The way fear had turned to anger. “He hit me.”