Northstar Rising d-10

by James Axler

  "This is wasted time," Egil Skallagson protested. "The widow's scarf is wound too tight around the meeting place of land and water."

  "I can see well enough to shoot an apple from your head," Ryan said to Bjarni Earthmover, who had walked along with him and was still teasing him about the ax-throw that had so nearly missed.

  The Viking responded by pulling a small pippin from the pocket of his homespun breeches and offering it to him.

  "Here, outlander. But is your skill with the blaster to be measured against spear or ax? If the former, then shoot away. If the latter... I'd as lief fight at broadsword against the oldling there." He pointed at Doc.

  Jorund shook his head at the suggestion. "This cursed fog is too thick for skraelingtricks, Bjarni. I think we should return to the steading. These four outlanders have all shown they are sturdy warriors and worthy of joining us."

  "Let him fire," Erik Stonebiter called. "I would see it."

  There was a chorus of approval from the group of men, with not a single voice raised to support their leader.

  "We should return," Jorund insisted.

  Suddenly Ryan had a familiar feeling, the prickling of the short hairs at the back of his neck. He felt as though someone were standing behind him, but if he turned, that someone would turn with him so that he would never quite catch him.

  "I can blast the apple after noon," he offered. "Or tomorrow."

  Bjarni slapped him on the shoulders, nearly felling him in the sand. "Come, outlander! No man cuts himself a haunch of mutton then fails to devour it. Keep to your promise. Here's the apple."

  There was no way out. Jorund recognized it and so did Ryan.

  The fat Norseman walked forward and stood with his back to the water, close to the edge, facing Ryan. The others stood in a loose circle around them. Very carefully, Bjarni placed the golden apple on top of his blond hair.

  "Shoot away!" he shouted, making the fruit wobble from side to side.

  "Stand still," Ryan called. He unholstered the SIG-Sauer and steadied it. The Viking was only fifteen paces away, but the roiling banks of fog made it a slightly more difficult shot than usual. Ryan never had a moment's doubt that he could pull it off.

  "Ryan."

  "What, Jak?" He lowered the pistol, knowing that the teenager wouldn't have spoken unless he had a good reason.

  "Heard something."

  "What?"

  The boy shook his head, the white hair dew-frosted and lank. "Not sure. Someone."

  Erik grinned. "Probably some kitchen thrall sneaking off for a quick swiving with a stable thrall. They come out here, and get a sound thrashing if they're caught. And a branding if they do it again."

  The moment of tension eased, and Ryan again lifted his handgun, extending his right arm and sighting along the barrel at the small circle of the apple. The fog behind Bjarni was white and translucent, making the target easier to see.

  "Ready?" he called.

  "Blast away," Bjarni replied.

  The crack of a gun rent the air and the stout Norseman staggered back into the lake, the apple falling from his head, a mask of crimson spreading from the bullet hole above his left eye.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  "Not me!" Ryan yelled as he threw himself flat in the sand, his eye raking the fog for some sign of where the attackers were hiding.

  A ragged volley of shots barked out of the mist, and two more of the Norsemen fell, wounded. The volley dispelled the microsecond suspicion that Ryan had shot Bjarni, who was already rolling belly-up, his blood pinking the lake around him.

  The apple bobbed merrily in the ripples at the side of the corpse.

  "Eight, maybe ten. Cap and ball!" J.B. yelled. He was lying a dozen yards away from Ryan.

  "Ready, warriors? We will charge them!" the baron shouted, from where he crouched with most of his men, a short distance to the right.

  "They'll fucking chill you!" Ryan bellowed, angry at the stupidity that the Norsemen were showing. They'd been coldcocked from the dunes behind them, under the cover of the fog. To try to attack the unseen enemy was suicide.

  "We must stop them, outlander, or they'll get to the steading."

  That was a fair point. The thought of Krysty and Mildred being caught helpless and unawares was a goad toward some swift action. Then again, Ryan knew that his lover already suspected trouble and would certainly have heard the crackle of gunfire, even through the wall of mist.

  "Then we move back," Ryan called. "Together, and follow the waterline."

  "We do not run, outlander!" someone shouted.

  "Then stay and die, you triple-stupe bastard! Me and my friends'll go and try to save your women, kids and homes."

  There was another burst of shooting, most of it aimed at Ryan's voice. Three rounds came close enough to kick sand over him.

  "Eight," J.B. said quietly. "Five got single-shot muskets. Homemades. Rest are old pistols."

  Behind them, in the direction of Markland, they all heard more shooting; the scream of a woman or a young child; a barking dog, suddenly silenced. It was enough to prompt the leader of the Vikings into more sensible action.

  "To the steading, brothers! Follow me close and slay any who stands against us."

  Ryan, followed by Jak, J.B. and Doc, scrambled from the sand and moved at a fast jog along the beach. A couple of wild shots pursued them, but they didn't even hear the buzzing of the bullets. Ahead of them, there were the more distinct sounds of a bitter fight.

  Ryan found himself alongside Erik. "Who are they?"

  "Enemy."

  It was always unnecessary to state the obvious — Ryan had already guessed that the attackers weren't likely to be friendly. But they were nearly at the edge of the ville and there wasn't time for any further conversation.

  One of the huts, roof ablaze, loomed from the mist to the left. Ryan caught a glimpse of a tall figure that carried a struggling, kicking pig, but it vanished into the center of the ville.

  "Split up! Man for man!" Jorund Thoraldson shouted. "Slay them all."

  Ryan had his pistol drawn and paused a moment to try to get his bearings. As he moved on, close to the longhouse, he tripped over something. It was the body of a young woman, her skirt hiked around her thighs as though the return of the Vikings had saved her from rape.

  But it hadn't saved her life.

  As he stooped over her body, Ryan could taste the scent of fresh-spilled blood, sweet and a little sickly. Once savored, it was a smell that was never forgotten.

  Someone had slit the woman's throat so savagely that the edge of the blade had scored a bright silver gouge from the iron thrall collar that circled her neck. As Ryan moved the corpse, he saw that the death had been a double one. A very young baby, covered with blood, lay beneath her.

  A shot was fired close by, and the odor of puddled blood was smothered for a moment by the tang of black powder. Ryan didn't know if the ball had been aimed at him.

  "Odin!" The Viking war cry was followed by the sound of metal cleaving through bone and solid flesh, and immediately on its heels came a gurgling, choking scream of pain and fear.

  "Fireblast!" Ryan muttered. It was the sort of muddled brawl that he hated. A man could be struck down and butchered in the fog and confusion and never even see the hand that slew him. For a few moments he stood and waited, his back against the mud and wattle walls of the building. Smoke, gunpowder and the scent of blood filled his nostrils.

  Ryan remembered that Trader said that a man who waited in a firefight would likely be chilled. The man who moved carefully would likely do the chilling.

  "Time to move," Ryan said to himself.

  He saw the first of the attackers as he dodged across the open space between two of the huts. One of the older Norsemen was hard-pressed, defending himself with an ax against the short, stabbing spear of his enemy, who was a skinny mutie dressed in a dancing assembly of rags and tatters.

  The mutie looked about six feet tall and had long hair that clung to a yellow
ed skull in greasy clumps. Its right arm was only slightly longer than normal, but its left hand protruded from near the shoulder on a tiny, paddlelike arm. As the fighter whirled about, Ryan glimpsed at least two more residual hands poking feebly through the mutie's clothes. One leg was inches shorter than the other and seemed to fork at the ankle into a bizarre, cloven foot.

  Ryan saw all of that in the first couple of seconds. He also saw that the Viking was tiring fast against the demonic energy of his attacker.

  Shifting a touch to his right, Ryan leveled the pistol and put a 9 mm round through the mutie's head. The silencer muffled the sound, and the Norseman looked around in amazement as his opponent's skull exploded in his face like a stamped melon.

  He spotted Ryan holding the pistol, and waved his ax in acknowledgment of his help.

  The next four or five minutes were a maelstrom of fog and death, screams and blood-slippery earth, hacked limbs and occasional gunfire.

  The attackers, mostly men, with a few women, were among the most severely mutated that Ryan had ever seen in Deathlands. The faces were grotesquely distorted, with eyes or noses missing, noses where there should have been ears, a single eye, low on the cheek, near the twisted corner of a misplaced jaw. Arms, legs, hands and feet were present in varying numbers and proportions. One capering man had a length of leather bound across the top of his head. It had come loose in the fighting and flapped to and fro, revealing a hole in his skull as large as a man's fist.

  Because of the patchy mist it was impossible to make out the number of the attackers. Ryan's fighting instinct told him there were more than a dozen in the group that had circled around and come straight at the heart of the ville. And he accepted J.B.'s informed guess of eight in the other party that had ambushed them down at the beach.

  The Norsemen had overwhelming numbers on their side, but the muties had the surprise of their shock attack on theirs. Several huts had been set on fire, and Ryan himself had seen the hacked bodies of nine or ten of the Norse women and children. And several of the Viking warriors were either down or dead.

  But the arrival of the outlanders, with their superior weaponry, quickly tipped the balance in favor of the Markland people. Ryan heard the unmistakable boom of Doc's Le Mat, finding, moments later, the dying figure of a mutie with half its belly blown away by the huge scattergun round.

  He saw J. B., crouched like a gunfighter in an old vid, blasting from the hip at a trio of haggard women armed with cleavers. His Steyr handgun put all three down in the dirt in as many seconds.

  In combat like this, Jak Lauren was absolutely supreme, the best that Ryan had ever seen or ever expected to see. Wherever Ryan moved in the chaos of the ville, Jak's dancing, wild-haired dervish figure was there, a short-bladed knife in each hand, blood streaked to the elbows, like a maniac butcher on the run from the nearest abattoir. Crimson dappled his pale face and dripped from the steel points of his blades. Where he stepped, men and women died.

  Ryan paid his own entry charge to parade the killing floor.

  A totally bald, skeletal figure came lurching out of the fog toward him, holding a burning torch of resined wood. In the other hand it held a single-edged ax with a long handle. The mutie was naked apart from a belt of broad leather with an enormous brass buckle. A woman's severed head hung from the belt, its face dangling against the creature's groin.

  It saw Ryan and began to swing the ax. Its mouth opened, and its cry of rage and menace was absurdly thin and piping, like a trapped bird's.

  But the bloodied steel was coldly real.

  Ryan fired once as the axman charged him, but by one of life's viciously freakish accidents, the whirling blade of the ax caught the bullet and sent it howling into the fog-bound sky. The impact made the ax ring, and the mutie paused, fighting to keep hold of it. Had the creature carried on, Ryan would have been in serious difficulties. As it was he snatched the microsecond to snap off another round.

  The bullet hit the blond head hung at its belt, smashing it apart. The jagged splinters of bone tore into the mutie's naked abdomen and crotch, shredding its genitals to scarlet rags of torn flesh.

  The scream of agony and despair rose so high that it became inaudible to Ryan, though every dog in the ville began to howl in terror at the same moment.

  Ultimately it would have been a killing shot, but Ryan figured it might take too long. He quickly put a third round through the center of the mutely screaming mouth. The skull bounced once with the impact and then was still.

  It turned out to be the last death of the raid on Markland.

  * * *

  Jorund showed his generalship in the aftermath of the attack. There were fires to be extinguished; livestock to be retrieved; Viking wounded to be tended and their dead to be readied for burial; the corpses of the muties to be dragged away by the heels, hauled into shallow pits by teams of thralls.

  And the mutie wounded were to be dealt with.

  "Egil, take four of our wisest men and place a circle patrol about the steading. I think the enemy will not return, but..." He shook his head and looked around, seeing the devastation of Markland.

  A tiny, wizened woman pushed her way through the crowd of watchers, stopping, eyes bird-bright, in front of the karl. Behind her Ryan could see Krysty and Mildred, both smoke-stained but looking unharmed.

  "The bad that has come is from the outlanders and the black woman," the stooped crone croaked, "yet the good is from the outlanders and the white boy."

  Sigurd Harefoot clapped his hands in approval. "Well said, wisewoman. Without the blasters of the outlanders the evil ones could have harried us toward destruction."

  She shook her head and waved a warning hand at the Norseman, a sapphire ring flashing on her wrinkled first finger. "More than the tools of Odin, Sigurd Harefoot. I tell you that it is the balance brought by the outlanders. The wrong of the black and the right of the white. Cherish the one and remove the other. Or the steading is doomed."

  Ryan looked at her, holding her veiled eyes, steady, until she broke and turned away. "Anyone harms any one of us, the shit breaks the air lock. Y'all better remember that." He glanced at Jorund.

  "You are with us, One-Eye, and we have agreed the women can live here, with the others. The evil ones have attacked us before, from up the coast. They have not come in the day behind the cloak of the fog before. But we turned them, and they have paid a heavy blood price."

  As he finished speaking, Jorund stared at the wise-woman, who spit on the ground in front of him and turned away. She threw her last words over her hunched shoulder. "The day will come when you will search your heart for a way to change what has happened. And Freya herself will not aid you. Nor will any man, Jorund Thoraldson, Karl of Markland."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Bjarni Earthmover and two of the other warriors were ready to begin the journey to Valhalla, and the three wounded mutie prisoners were to accompany them.

  One of the boats, fallen into some disrepair, was to be used for the funeral ceremony. Ryan and his companions passed the afternoon in their hut, resting, eating and cleaning and reloading their weapons. Erik Stonebiter had come by and explained what was to happen and to invite them, on behalf of the karl, to join the ritual of death.

  "It will all take place as the fire-sun touches our sister earth, and the water and night close the eyes of the world."

  Now, dusk had come.

  Other than the men who stood watch around the perimeter of the ville, everyone was there, including the women and children, free-born as well as thralls. Krysty and Mildred, like the rest of the nonmen, had their heads covered with shawls of dyed wool, a mark of respect for the passing of Bjarni and the others.

  Ryan guessed that the slaves and the women and children who'd been butchered would be buried somewhere quietly. This funeral was only for the warriors of Markland.

  Ryan led Doc, J.B. and Jak out into the calm gentle evening. The main fire of the steading had been built up and blazed so brightly that no one c
ould stand within twenty feet of it. A number of smaller fires had been lit, some on the beach, some on a low headland where the trees grew close to the shingle.

  Jorund beckoned the four to stand near him. "This will not take long. We do not grieve much over one of our brothers fallen in battle."

  It crossed Ryan's mind to ask whether being shot through the temple while carrying an apple on your head really counted as falling in battle, but he decided to keep silent.

  "What about the prisoners?" J.B. asked. "You question them?"

  "You mean did we torture them, outlander? Of course we did. But we spared them life."

  "But did you discover why they were attacking you?" Doc pressed, wiping a dab of mud from the ferrule of his ebony cane. "Did you find out if they planned to attack again?"

  The baron looked puzzled. "Talk to the evil ones? How?"

  Ryan sighed. "Course. Muties like them... they won't likely talk much of anything close to what you speak."

  "No."

  "So, what happens to them?" Ryan asked.

  "There." Jorund pointed toward the headland.

  At first, Ryan thought that three large men stood there, but the shapes were too big to be people, and he could make out something odd. The outlines were fuzzy, as if the men were built from branches and sheaves of grass.

  "What are they?" he asked.

  It was Doc who replied. "I believe they are called wicker men, my dear Ryan."

  "What?"

  Jorund nodded. "The old one answers truly. I have heard them called that. Wicker men. Straw men. Basket men. All the same."

  "But I don't get it."

  "You will get it soon enough," Doc replied. "Then you will quite possibly wish that you had not. It is damned barbaric."

  * * *

  The prisoners were to die before the funeral began so that their souls could accompany Bjarni and the other Vikings on their last dark journey.

  They were led out, naked and bound tightly. As they stumbled past Ryan he noticed that the thongs around their wrists and ankles were thick strips of rawhide that had been soaked.