The Rule
In Helvik, a single rule governs the people: ‘No person of Helvik may kill another person of Helvik. Any person who breaks this rule is no longer a person of Helvik.’Gunnarr remembers a time before the rule, when blood feuds and petty rivalries led to endless death. In the days since, an uneasy peace has fallen over the town, and Gunnarr has made himself the man to enforce it.When an innocent friend suffers from a breach of the rule, Gunnarr rushes to deal retribution. Too late, he discovers that what appeared a mindless act was actually something far more sinister. And now he has left his unborn child and family unprotected, just when they need him most.A vast host of warriors is at the gates of Helvik, and with Gunnarr gone, nothing and no one stands against them…
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The Rule
JACK COLMAN
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Jack Colman 2015
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com;
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015.
Jack Colman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007593057
Version: 2015-03-05
Table of Contents
For my wonderful mum, Mary, who never once doubted this would happen.
I
In the midst of the darkness, Gunnarr’s eyes snapped open.
The hairs along his forearms stood raised like the hackles of a snarling wolf. Muffled voices were hissing at each other from somewhere across the room. Quietly, Gunnarr reached a hand out from the covers and felt the warm absence that his parents had left in the furs at his side. The air felt chilled, and thick with disquiet. Something had happened. He could sense it.
Closing his eyes, he lay very still and tried to listen to his parents’ words, but their voices were low and rushed, and he could follow only snatches.
‘… now they’ve decided they …’
‘… and you think death will solve …’
Gunnarr jolted as if shaken awake from a dream. Death, he thought, and a gleam of a smile spread across his lips. Gunnarr Folkvarrsson and his warrior father were no strangers to death.
The first time he had still been a boy, not yet five. He’d stumbled across a nameless corpse floating in a swell by the shoreline, staring up at the clouds. Of that he remembered mostly the queerness of the dead man’s face, all swollen like a sow, front lip eaten away up to the nose.
A year later, on a spring day with a biting breeze, he met death for a second time. Again he’d been down by the near-black sea, the freezing-cold surf roaring with anger at his feet. His grandmother was leading him across the coastal rocks, looking for shellfish, when she made a strange sound and collapsed. Gunnarr had waited patiently for her until the tide was almost in before someone came and carried him away.
His parents had quietened their voices to breathy whispers, perhaps fearing they might wake him. For a moment, Gunnarr contemplated going to his father’s side and declaring that he could soon find the old kindling axe and be ready for whatever might be needed of him. But his father, he had learnt, was quick to temper whenever he addressed the topic directly. He would call Gunnarr a child and tell him he knew nothing, but he was wrong. True, those encounters from his early childhood had been tame affairs; the first he had come upon too late, long after death had done its work, and the second was but the quiet expiry of life from an old and wasted body. The third, though, had burnt its way deep into his mind. For that was when he had seen the strike of death’s hand; the vicious snatch that rips a life away with the eyelids still blinking.
It was the first time he had been taken on a hunt with his father and uncle. Winter had come early that year, bitter and fierce. The grass had turned brown, and his mother had wrapped him in thick furs to guard against the searching wind. A group of seals they had stalked for most of the morning had become spooked and scattered into the waves when just yards out of range, so the group was returning to town unsuccessful, and in a black mood because of it, when they heard shouts from over by the smoke house.
Gunnarr did not see what had caused it, but he had never forgotten what followed. His father and the rest broke immediately into a run, sweeping Gunnarr along with them. He remembered his uncle screaming curses in a voice louder than thunder, and glancing up into the distance to see a man some twenty yards away hacking his sword double-handed into the half-turned neck of Agni Alvisson. Gasps went up like startled birds, and a crowd of onlookers swamped in and smothered Gunnarr’s view.
