* * *
There were horses waiting on the other side, along with provisions. I was happy to see both because I was hungry, and unwilling to walk an untold number of leagues just to satisfy my curiosity.
There was a time when Unfer and his tribe were considered the greatest warrior horsemen around. They rode into battle with boar’s-head helmets, swinging heavy iron swords atop armored mounts, and it was terrifying. (I saw this from the edge of a battle I wasn’t directly engaged in personally, and I went the other way immediately.) Even though the crested helms didn’t really look much like boars, the overall effect was to be witnessing something not human. Fear is an impressive weapon in a battle.
In recent years, though, their battles had taken place without a horse beneath them. This was one of the things Unfer and I discussed as we rode north.
“Too many wars and not enough horses,” he said. “It takes a lot to keep a horse healthy and strong in these climes, and a mount in heavy snow is not near as much an advantage as you might think. You end up on a slow-reacting beast with perpetually exposed flanks, ready to die with his rider’s leg pinned beneath. In a springtime battle on a southern field I would gladly ride. Otherwise, to keep my blood in my body where I like it, I’ll stand.”
I checked my horse, who was stubborn, and perpetually looking to graze. This didn’t escape my friend’s notice.
“I’d have thought a man who saw the first sunrise would hold better command of his mount,” he said.
“Some things take more than one lifetime to master. And horses this size haven’t been around as long as you would imagine.”
“This size?”
“They used to be smaller.”
He laughed.
“Is that so? Was this true of many things?”
“Some. Most were much larger.”
“And man?”
“Man has gotten smellier and smarter in equal measure.”
We camped on the side of the road—a path, really, not a proper road in the Roman sense—overnight and dined on salted meats. I was supplied with additional furs when it was clear the cold was only growing more intense, and we were heading in the wrong direction to escape it. I was also supplied with the sword I had been promised.
Swords in those days required tremendous upper body strength, because they weren’t terrible sharp or well-balanced. I didn’t have tremendous upper body strength, and in battle tended to rely upon my opponent’s clumsiness. You’d be surprised how effective this was. Also effective: not going to war in the first place. I was exceptionally good at that.
The sword was so I would be a better night watchman, as it was understood that I would be taking a turn so others could sleep without waking up eaten. This is probably the second-oldest task I have ever performed, after hunting. It’s the sort of thing people don’t have to do any more, although we also mostly gave up sleeping outdoors on the side of the road.
My shift was shared with the man who warned of the fylgjur. His name was Aescher.
“I would say,” he began, after an hour of silence, “you do not look to me like a great warrior.”
“Don’t I?”
“No, you look to me like a goat-farmer.”
“I am indeed a goat-farmer, and a farmer of other things as well. Do you imagine a world in which a man can be only one of these things?”
“I can imagine many things. Whether they match the world I see is another matter. Great warriors who retire to farm do not look as you look. Nor are they so young as you. And none are without scars.”
“Scars fade. What led you to call me a great warrior?”
“Such was the premise which informed our quest to retrieve you.”
“I understand. It is true, Aescher, that I can best most in combat, but that is not why I was sought. I am here for my wisdom.”
He huffed. “The land is full of wisdom. What we are short on are men who can win the day against a monster. You do not appear to be such a man.”
Aescher really wanted to challenge me on my first point, but that wasn’t how one was supposed to spend guard duty, so he didn’t. Also, oops, I killed the guy we went all that way for, was going to look bad, pretty much from every angle. He spent the remainder of our time together muttering unpleasantries under his breath.
We reached the hall the following evening.
I don’t know when the Scandinavians started building mead halls, but the halls never really made a lot of sense to me and they weren’t super good at building them.
The Greeks built similar structures, mostly for religious reasons, but the Greek versions were mostly open-air platforms with a roof and lots of Ionic columns. And they used stone. Those things lasted forever, but also had no walls, tables or chairs, so they were similar, but not precisely the same.
The Romans copied a lot of the Greek structural ideas, but aside from the bathhouses, didn’t have much use for a building with only one room in it. No Nords were going to be copying the Romans any time soon either.
A mead hall was literally just a standalone dining room. That was it. They were built out in fields and attributed the same sort of value a modern person might ascribe to a vacation house in a nice area. Kings had them, and they were about the only ones. In fairness, local kings had very little else. Everything in this territory was made of mud and wood.
Hroar’s hall looked like as stiff wind could collapse the entire thing. It was built out of wood slats in approximately the same oblong shape as their burial mounds, only with periodic angles, since the layered wood slats that constituted the walls were flat and not curved. The roof had semi-hidden vents to let smoke out, which was important in a building with no windows in a time when fire was the only source of illumination.
Speaking of fire, nobody with a healthy respect for it would ever go inside a building like this.
“So now we are here,” I said, “what’s the next part?”
“We go inside, find the monster and with your help, slay him,” Unfer said. “And then people will write poems about our bravery and we will live forever.”
“I already live forever. Is that really the entirety of your plan?”
“You have other suggestions?”
“Not without seeing your monster first, no. Why do we not just burn down the place?”
“The beast resists fire,” Aescher said. “And destroying that which we are here to save is a poor solution.”
“Kill the monster, and build a new hall on the same spot,” I said. “If you do it fast enough…”
“You are delaying intentionally. Are you coward?”
“You will show respect, Aescher,” Unfer said.
“How do you know about the tolerance for fire?” I asked.
“He is the only man to walk away from the last party to attempt to slay the monster,” Unfer said.
“I thought you said none survived an encounter?”
“It made for a better story.”
“I dined with the king the night it attacked, and many from that night lived,” Aescher said. “And on that night we tried to set it afire, but it shook off the flame like water.”
“Interesting.”
Unfer raised an eyebrow in my direction. “Do you now know what it is?”
“No. It’s interesting only for being information I didn’t have before. I still need to see it to know.”
I was thinking it was a demon. They had skin so thick they could hold their hand in an open flame for a good minute before complaining about the heat. A demon didn’t really match the description I’d been provided, but nothing else did either. Plus, demons weren’t all that uncommon in this part of the world at this time in history. It was likely, though, that at least one of the men of Hroar’s kingdom had seen a demon in their lifetime and could recognize one, because it’s not something you forget.
Dragon was another possibility, but the odds were much worse in that regard. Dragons were really just big dumb animals that mostly stuck to wooded areas. A
dragon wouldn’t attack a large party of men armed with swords any more than a wolf or large cat would, which was to say they wouldn’t as long as the numbers weren’t in their favor. They also wouldn’t camp out inside the hall unless they were wounded and couldn’t move.
Dragons might have had tough enough skin to be considered fireproof. I’d never tried to set one afire, so I couldn’t know for sure. If they actually breathed fire, that’d give me the answer to the question, but they didn’t.
“If you need to see it to tell us how to slay it, we shall have to make sure you see it,” Unfer said. “Take a torch, everyone. Search the floor after we’ve got the braziers lit, or we’ll be grappling it in the darkness. For all we know the damn thing can see in the dark.”
Unfer and Aescher led the way, both with a lit torch in one hand and a sword in the other. A third man pulled open the main double-doors to the hall to allow them entry, given they only had two hands apiece.
In they went. I followed, with four men at my back.
* * *
I don’t know of any other species that is quite as good at finding stupid ways to die as humans. I say that despite being an actual human. If you look at my history you’ll find I may be more directly responsible for the current nature of humankind than anyone else around, but all the same I don’t recall promoting this kind of stupidity.
Not that I’m really complaining. Taking advantage of stupidity is one of the things keeping me alive.
But okay, to use my favorite example, have a look at the Crusades. Basically, a large number of wealthy people with their own castles and land decided one day that despite living better than all but an extremely small handful of people on the planet, what they really wanted was the land in a different country a thousand miles away. This was weird enough, but it got worse because that land already had other people living on it, and those people had done the sorts of things one does on one’s own land, such as assembling large defensive apparatuses.
If you’re ever hanging out with a bunch of people, and one day that bunch decides it would be fun to travel a vast distance in order to attack a settled army behind fixed battlements because they think the land that army is standing on is super important, what you’re going to do—if you’re smart—is go find a different bunch of people to hang out with.
Wars are started for reasons that seem stupid in hindsight but make sense at the time. I get that, but there are also occasions when it seems like human tribes put a little bit extra effort in finding ways to die in large numbers for small reasons.
The assault on the mead hall was a smaller version of the same lack of thought, which was particularly galling considering I was in the middle of this one.
We were heading into a dark building fully aware there was something inside that could kill us with its bare hands and had an apparent active interest in doing exactly that. We were holding the only light sources—I really cannot stress enough how important this was in the days before electricity—which meant we could be seen but weren’t going to be able to see much of anything until our eyes adjusted. On top of all of that, our source of light was fire, and we were walking into a wood building.
The second most rational thing to do—after just burning the place to the ground—would have been to tear down the walls to expose the creature, and fight in an open space where there was plenty of room for other assault options, like a hundred archers.
Instead, since the pride of the king and the integrity of the building were more important than the lives of the people sent in to deal with the problem, we willingly charged into a potential ambush.
Sometimes I wonder how mankind made it this far.
* * *
We weren’t attacked and eaten as soon as we entered the hall, which was a little unfortunate, as an early demise would have saved us from the smell.
If you took someone from today and dropped them to just about any point in the past, I’m pretty sure the first thing they would say is dear god, what is that smell? It wouldn’t be any one thing, either; the whole world was a stew of body odor and dung and rot.
A lot of the reason mankind spread out and settled down across vast territories was just to get away from the smell of each other, something that was forgotten by the time we got around to building real cities. Then, the solution was to put flowers in our breast pockets to give us something to smell other than the world. When that didn’t work, people—the rich ones—started manufacturing their own soaps. This wasn’t to keep themselves clean; it was so their whole body smelled the way the flowers in their pockets were supposed to. Perfumes were the same deal. We didn’t create these things so other people thought we smelled nice, we did it so we couldn’t smell the other people.
Somehow, this never comes up in period dramas, which is another reason I can’t take any of them seriously.
The smell that hit us when we walked in was worse than any I’d encountered before. I anticipated a stench from rotting bodies, as I was told there were multiple dead in the hall, on top of which there was all the food from the banquet the monster interrupted. But that wasn’t what hit us at all. This was pure body odor.
Unfer gagged, while Aescher spat and cursed and nearly lost his torch flame for all the waving he was doing to try and eradicate the smell in the air.
“Spread out,” Unfer ordered in a harsh whisper, over his shoulder. “Light the braziers and try not to vomit.”
We spread out. I was at a tiny disadvantage because I’d never been in the hall before, but as I said, architecturally this was not a terribly complex building. Big long table in the middle, chairs around the table, an entrance on either end of the room, and that was about all. If Hroar was extra-fancy about it, the far end had a raised platform for him to stand atop so he looked more important, and there was the possibility of a side table or two for food and libations, but that was about it. The food would have been cooked elsewhere and brought over by wagon, carried in through the back of the hall.
Oh, and there were the braziers, which were torches on tall, free-standing staffs embedded in a wide base that one hoped was difficult to topple. Quality varied region-to-region. The best could withstand an unintentional assault from a drunken swordsman. The worst fell over with a sneeze.
As I stumbled across my first upright brazier, I was happy to discover the thing looked decently sturdy, and my hope to not die in a fire while fighting for my life against an outrageously smelly monster increased somewhat. I lit it.
The others performed the same task, slowly bringing illumination to the modest interior.
In the improving lighting, the tabletop was the first thing I took note of. The remains of the interrupted banquet sat where it was, looking a little like how one might imagine a frat house kitchen after a party, if everyone in the house died overnight and nobody found the place for a month.
All right, the analogy is a stretch. The point is, there was a lot of half-eaten food, dirty plates and goblets, upturned mead pitchers, and so on, and the entire mess was alive with the irritated motion of flies. It was a testament to the severity of the extant body odor that we couldn’t smell the rotting food over it.
Because of the size of the room, I’m not entirely sure what happened next. One of the men on the hall’s far side—more or less as far from me as they could be—either stumbled on and awoke the creature, or was surprised by him. Either way, there was suddenly lots of shouting and sword-clanging, a torch bounced along the ground, and other men began running toward the scene.
And, there was a deep, eardrum-rending roar. It was the kind of enraged bellow that hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of evolution trained humans to run away from. It might be the cry of a herd of mastodons, or the low thrum of a large cat standing right behind you. It was a warning that the creature coming your way was bigger, and you’d best turn around and head the other way as fast as you can.
But, since bravery often means acting contrary to instinct and basic common sense, we all got our
swords out and headed toward the noise. This was particularly stupid of me, because once I heard that howl I was pretty sure I knew what was on the other side of the room. If I was right the sword wasn’t going to do all that much good.
The ensuing melee lasted no more than forty seconds, but amounted to a master-class in how not to fight in close quarters. The hall’s dimensions were decently large and the actual fight took place away from the table and the chairs and near the back corner of the room, but there were eight of us, all wearing some sort of battle armor and wielding swords that required vast backswings in order to be truly effective, and seven of us were unusually large examples of our species. (In terms of height, these Norsemen and I were about the same, but where I was skinny and built for running and hunting, they were wide-shouldered and thick, built for rowing and fighting.) And the thing we faced was nearly twice our size.
I could understand why it had been described has having five arms. It didn’t stay still long enough for anyone to count them, and the darkness made it seem as if it were moving much faster than it probably was; it seemed like there were arms everywhere.
Anyhow, I’m doing a terrible job describing the melee because I couldn’t follow it. I saw Unfer get in a powerful attack, which involved leaping in the air and swinging his sword down with a two-handed overhand blow, as if with an axe, and I heard the attack land true on what (I’m assuming) was the creature’s shoulder or head. I heard the monster roar in pain, and then there was a thud, and Unfer flew past me and onto the table. I saw another man have his head caved in with a heavy fist, and I saw Aescher crumble from what looked like a lethal blow to the ribcage. And I would love to say I got in a few good swings of my own, parried the creature’s attacks, and retreated to safety to regroup and reconsider, but that’s only half-true. I only offered token engagement, just enough to get a closer look, and maybe so nobody would give me a hard time about not trying. I did, however, retreat exceptionally well.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 13
