by Norman Crane
GOBLINS & VIKINGS
IN AMERICA
Copyright 2014 Norman Crane
Season 1
Ep. 1
"Fatherland"
1
Framarr sliced through the thick vines with his sword and passed with a beggar's stoop beneath the cold, yellow growths that fell from the overhanging branches like remnants of hair from an imperfectly scalped skull. He was following the little green man. For weeks he'd been following him, but the green man was perpetually a hundred paces ahead, within sight though never moving, waiting until Framarr got near enough to raise his sword, then disappearing, only to reappear again, another hundred paces ahead and again within sight...
They'd not exchanged a word. Framarr had tried, of course, but the green man had always refused to answer. Perhaps he didn't hear. Perhaps he heard but didn't understand.
Framarr squinted. The fog in the air was making the pursuit, if that’s what it was, more difficult than usual. The green man's body was sometimes hard to discern against the milky backdrop of the forest. Thankfully, he was wearing his purple cloak and a matching hat which came to a perfect tip and radiated like a dull beacon. That's why Framarr followed. Men are meant to be guided by beacons. Besides, all the others were dead, and the ship had long ago been lost to the sea on the treacherous coast of this new world. So what else was there to do but eat, sleep and keep pursuing?
The fog clung as drops of water to Framarr's weather beaten face, gathered in his eyebrows, soaked his ragged beard, and flowed, salty, into his eyes and between the lips of his gasping mouth. His clothes, heavy with wet, stuck to his body. He was glad to have shattered his shield in the clearing while killing the ones with long black hair. Afterwards was when the green man in the purple hat had first appeared.
Framarr came within a few paces of him and the green man vanished into the air once more.
Only to materialize farther in the forest, whose trees were thinning and whose ground was becoming mud. Framarr's boots sunk into it. His pace slowed.
If he doesn't wish for me to keep going, Framarr thought, he would hide or make his escape in the night while I'm asleep. If he wanted me dead, he would have led me into a bear's den or within stalking range of one of the wolf packs that howl in the night. Because that hasn't happened, because I am still breathing, he must have a purpose for me. He must want to bring me somewhere.
Perhaps that meant they had communicated after all. "Come," the green man had said, "to the place to which I lead you."
And Framarr willingly obeyed.
He obeyed until the day the sun came up and burned the persistent fog away, turning the trees to shrubs, and their branches to wiry twigs loaded with crimson berries and brambles that scratched his face as he pushed through them, stumbling, crawling toward the green man whom he could no longer see but who he knew was on the other side...
The shrubs ended.
Framarr stepped onto the edge of a great circular plain.
The green man materialized behind his back.
Framarr's knees buckled and he collapsed to the ground, unable to stay upright, breathe or comprehend the brilliance of what now stood so nakedly before him.
The green man placed a small, four-fingered hand on his shoulder.
Framarr's heart pounded within his chest and through tear-stained eyes he saw—
2
Wisps of smoke escaping upward from the primitive chimney-holes of the nearby longhouses expanded as the ghosts of inverted cones and dissipated into the grey, windless sky that draped the entire length of the rocky flatness, stretching from the hill on which Dvalinn the Riverraider stood all the way to where the silhouettes of mountains guarded passage across the horizon. It was an expanse as empty and rough as it was indescribable, but treated honestly, without laziness, it had also become home. Dvalinn didn't think of it as Iceland anymore. That derisive name belonged to the easterners, coined in retreat by one of them who had arrived, failed and fled. Dvalinn hadn't failed. Dvalinn wasn't an easterner anymore.
He turned toward the west. That way, beyond the stillness of the sea, was Greenland.
"Are you ready, Riverraider?" The voice came from the foot of the hill, where the locals had gathered to help conduct the funeral rites for Dvalinn's wife.
Her shrouded body lay atop the prepared funeral pyre to which Dvalinn was supposedly now adding the gifts that she would take with her into the afterlife. In truth, it was a pitifully small pyre with few possessions: a comb, a dagger, several items of jewellery. He could hardly believe that the small body wrapped in cloth belonged to the same woman he'd loved, for whom he had lain down the sword and sailed here to start a new life. Faceless, she seemed anonymous. Spiritless, she was an anonymous thing. Besides, he reasoned, their life together had been a modest one. They had taken little from the land and brought into it only one son. Why should they take more out? "Ready," he said. His voice was hoarse from too much silence.
Two men emerged from the crowd of locals. They carried a pair of lit torches. Dvalinn closed his eyes, but the flickering flames persisted.
When he opened his eyes, the two men were standing on opposite sides of the pyre, ready to touch their torches to it.
A horseman appeared in the distance below.
The torchbearers knelt, awaiting Dvalinn's instructions. "Riverraider..."
Dvalinn nodded.
The torches touched the pyre.
The horseman sped toward the funeral hill, his horse's hooves beating ever more audibly against the ground.
The pyre began to smoke. The torchbearers backed away.
Dvalinn, unable to watch the kindling take, watched the incoming horseman instead. The smell of burning trickled into his nostrils. The crackling of sticks mixed with the rhythm of riding. At the foot of the hill, the crowd parted and the horseman yanked his horse's reins to come to an abrupt stop. A horse was a marker of wealth, which was an attribute of power. The horseman dismounted, bowed his head and began the hike up the hill.
The torchbearers moved to block his way, but Dvalinn motioned for them stay back. He smoothed the ends of his moustache.
"I come in the name of," the horseman began, even before reaching level ground. He was young and handsome and out of breath. "In the name of Young Chieftain Halfdan, the Revered, son of Chieftain Likvidr." Glancing back, he slid his right hand over the hilt of the sword that hung from a scabbard on his belt. Several in the crowd were petting the horseman's horse. Someone had grabbed the reins.
"Understood," Dvalinn said. "What is your purpose?"
The funeral pyre spat its first orange flames. The horseman noted them nervously. "For the tithe," he said, quickly adding, "sir," as the torchbearers took steps toward him.
"Ain't ever heard of that," one of them said.
"Me, neither," said the other.
"The tithe, Young Chieftain Halfdan says..."
"This is a funeral," Dvalinn said. "What right have you to interrupt it looking to take a tenth?"
The horseman smiled. "Oh, yes, yes. Exactly, yes. A tenth." He was slurring his words. Something in the pyre cracked. "You must pay a tenth. Such is the tithe."
"We believe in the old ways," Dvalinn said.
"Being the traditional and right ways," added the first torchbearer.
"But Young Chieftain Halfdan, he says all must pay the tithe on all religious services, true or pagan, sirs."
"Pagan?" The second torchbearer spat. "We are Norsemen."
The horseman's horse neighed.
The flames travelled up the pyre and begin nipping at the shrouded body lying atop.
The torchbearers' eyes clouded over with the po
ssibility of violence. The horseman's hands shook. Sweat sprouted from the pores on his forehead. "Sirs, the orders of the Chieftain..."
Dvalinn stepped back.
The torchbearers stepped forward.
The horseman unsheathed his sword and did a full rotation, taking in his enemies and their surroundings. He might have been preparing a battle plan, but he was still a boy.
"Stand down," Dvalinn said to the torchbearers.
When they didn't, he repeated the command louder. This time they did as instructed. "Riverraider," one of them whined.
Dvalinn ignored him. "Step forward," he told the horseman, "and do as the Chieftain commands. If he commands you take a tenth, take a tenth. Reach into the fire and retrieve for him what is rightfully his. But, first, tell me what is one tenth of a blunt dagger, an old comb, a few pieces of worthless jewellery and an old woman's dead body?"
The horseman stared at Dvalinn; the torchbearers; and the pyre, which was now almost in full flame.
Dvalinn turned toward the pyre, too. He let its hissing fill his ears and its heat warm his cheeks. He also could reach inside. He could walk into it. He could lie down on it, beside the burning body that last week was still his sickly, beloved wife but that by the morning would be nothing but a mound of ash...
"I... I was," the horseman stammered out.
Then he slid his sword back into his scabbard, backed away several paces and spun, before marching the rest of the way down the hill with his red face forced upward. The grey sky was unmoved. The crowd gave him back the reins to
