The First Heroes

by Harry Turtledove

  I give him a nod, turn, and continue to the hall, unheeding of anyone else. Memories are overwhelming my soul. Why? It is almost as if something beyond myself is calling them up, seeking to understand.

  Oh, we were young when we set forth, all of us except Herut, and he just a bit grizzled. However grim our goal might prove to be, for us the venture began joyously. New lands, high deeds, fame to win and maybe wealth to regain!

  But we were not callow. As the second son of Lord Cnuath, I was of course in command. Yet I meant to heed the counsels of Herut, a skipper who had thrice made the first part of this journey as well as plying our more usual trade routes. Besides, I’d already been on a few voyages myself. Mainly they were short, among the familiar islands or to Yutholand, but one went across the Sound and north along the coast yonder as far as anybody lived who shared our ways, while another went clear over the Eastern Sea to trade with the colonies.

  About half my followers had had some such experiences, being of well-to-do families. Most of the rest had paddled logboats as far as needful for fishing, sealing, or taking birds’ eggs. A few had not, Ernu among them; their sort had all it could do scratching out a bare living inland. I supposed—then—that none of them came along for anything more than the reward he was offered or gave the meaning of our emprise any more thought than would an ox. However, their backs were strong, and if we must fight, their flintheaded axes and spears should be almost as good as sharpened bronze.

  Sixty men in two ships of twenty-four paddles, we left behind cheers and wellwishings. The aftermath of yestereve’s farewell carousel buzzed in us like bees. The wind soon blew that out. It was not unduly high, nor were the seas ever violent. When anyone got sick, he suffered chiefly from the jokes of his comrades. Back in those years, the weather seldom turned truly evil. Old folk did say it had been worsening throughout their lifetimes. But more often than not it was still mild. The question that troubled us until it prompted this expedition was: What had gone wrong in the far South, and what must we look for in time to come? What should our kings do?

  I could not feel fearful now. The water sparkled, the wind bore salt and tang and enough cold to rouse the blood, the sky was full of wings, bird-cries and wave-whoosh mingled with the paddle-master’s chant, keel and sheer horns traced our path before and abaft our hull, curving up toward heaven, while withy-bound strakes slipped through the waves as lithe as a dancer.

  Thus we went onward, north along Yutholand until we rounded its tip and bore south again. At the end of each day, we’d beach our craft and make camp for the night, unless we came on a settlement. When we did, we were received gladly. A small gift or two from our stock of trade goods was enough for such villagers. Sometimes after the dining and drinking, some girls, low-born but pleasing, would wander off into the meadows hand in hand with some of us leaders. The nights of late spring were shortening and lightening toward summer, and the moon turned full just then.

  We did not linger. Before long the shore bent west. Shortly thereafter we reached the estuary of the River Ailavo and started up it.

  I have heard that it is a torrent in the mountains from which it rises. But that is far south—far indeed; somewhere beyond them, bordering seas warmer and gentler than ours, lie the lands of such peoples as the Hellenes, which to us in this shrunken age are almost fables. Once in the lowlands, the river runs broad, slow, often shallow, northwesterly through a distance that it might take an unhindered man half a month to walk, until it empties into the Western Sea. Paddling against that current wasn’t hard, but sometimes we had to jump overboard and manhandle our ships across sandbars.

  This is a land of vast and gloomy forests, dominated by the oak, but one finds much clearing and a few settlements along the stream. The dwellers are akin to us, though there is less wealth among them. Livestock are plentiful but small and scruffy. Men often wear no more than a leather cloak, and anything else is likely to be skin also; however, women usually have coarse linen undergarments and are always long-skirted, never bare-legged in warm weather. These people burn their dead like us, but still raise mounds over chieftains. Not even those men go clean-shaven in life, though all who are free do trim their beards and coil their hair up in a braid. Yes, chieftains; there is no king over any tribe, let alone over several, and each tribe is scattered in single farmsteads or tiny hamlets through a large territory. Maybe it is their backwardness that makes them so apt to wage war on each other.

  However, traders have little to fear, unless that too has changed by now. They have always been traveling on the Ailavo, from both the North and the South and back again. The riverside folk have long since learned that leaving them in peace means more goods than their back-country cousins can hope for. I think that meeting strangers, hearing new tales, getting some ongoing knowledge of the world beyond these woods, enriches their lives still more. Certainly a visit delights them.

  I recall one especially, because it came to matter very much to me. We had been on the river for several days, the fog and tidewater of the coast lay well behind us, when, following Herut’s advice, we stopped at a village called Aurochsford. It was the biggest we had seen and the farthest he himself had ever reached: for it was a staging post. Few men have made the whole distance between North and South, none in living memory, and it is said that they went by sea, steering clear of mountains, wildernesses, robber tribes, and alien languages. By far the most wares have gone overland, year after year, from hand to hand, the exchanges usually occurring at time-honored meeting grounds such as this. Not everything passed all the way, of course; cattle, slaves, and the like began and finished their journeys at places in between. But amber, furs, train oil—and copper, bronze, brightly dyed cloth, finely wrought cauldrons—flowed from end to end of a network of routes across the whole known world.

  So had it been. So was it no longer.

  We drew our boats ashore where, I could see, traders were wont to. Townsfolk flocked eagerly around. Nevertheless we left a guard, our thirty-odd commoners, camped nearby. They would have been ill at ease anyway, unused to foreigners as they were. The tongue spoken here was so changed from ours that I myself, who had ranged abroad somewhat, could follow it only slightly and with difficulty and say almost nothing. I put my young kinsman Athalberh in charge. Somebody high-born must be. He sulked, but a duty is a duty.

  The headman, named Wihta, invited the rest of us to feast. There was barely room in his house for so many. Herut, I, the captain of our second craft, and two more sat benched with him and a few others at a trestle table which was brought in. Most were crowded wherever they could find a space, mainly on the floor. Come night, they would be quartered in humbler homes. Not that this one was any better than a fairly well-off farmer’s in Sealland—nothing like my father’s hall, where hangings decked the walls, gold and copper gleamed, the carven pillars seemed well-nigh alive. Nor were we served a meal to boast of—game, cheese, barley bread, with never an herb to season it. I can tell Athalberh that he’s missed very little, I thought with an inward grin.

  The trenchers had been cleared away and the women were going around with jugs of ale to refill horns when Wihta wondered aloud, “Few have come to us straight from their homelands; yet you tell us that you mean to go on. Never have I seen traders traveling in two boats at once, or ships so big, yet you have filled them much more with armed men than goods. What is your intent?”

  This is how I remember the talk. It really went slowly and awkwardly through Herut, the interpreter. He glanced at me. As commander, I ought to reply.

  “We seek to learn how it is that no more wares are coming from the South,” I said. “That’s a grave matter, especially the metal.”

  “Why, you’ve got to have heard. Wild tribes with terrible weapons have poured in from the Southeast, plundering, killing, taking the land for themselves. Who would be so mad as to try carrying riches through?”

  “Yes, we know. Tidings have reached us, piece by piece, year by year. And we know the weapons a
re iron. Somehow those folk have learned to smelt and work the stuff. Maybe renegade southerners taught them the art, maybe their gods did—who can say?” A shiver went through the company. I groped for workaday words. “First they’d have to find the ore, whatever it looks like. My father thinks it must be plentiful in their homeland, wherever that is. Be this as it may, suddenly they are as well-armed as Hellenes or Persians or, or any of the nations that live in . . . cities?” I knew only tales of huge and wonderful settlements where there were gleamed buildings of polished stone, and wasn’t sure whether I had the name right.

  Belike Wihta had never heard it. “We haven’t thought so deeply.” Well, they were simple tillers and woodsmen here. They had no ships trafficking from the Eastern Sea gulfs to the Tin Isles and the Island of Gold in the far West. They actually saw little of the merchandise that formerly went to and fro and sometimes was bartered at this very spot, because they could not afford it. His admiring tone harshened. “There’s begun to be talk of our tribes getting together to build earthworks, lest we too be overrun.” He gulped his hornful down and beckoned for another. The ale was soothing him a bit. “But they’re still far off, the wild men, and have more to gain by attacking countries ahead of them than struggling through our forests. Don’t they?”

  “That’s one thing we want to make more certain of than you are,” I said.

  He blinked. His friends gaped. “You’re bound yonder—to them?”

  “Yes. As scouts, if nothing else.”

  “They’ll kill you!”

  “We trust not. We may even be able to talk with them, if we can get an interpreter.”

  “Or two or three, each translating for the next,” remarked Herut wryly.

  “What would you talk about?” protested Wihta.

  “They may number some who can see farther than a bowshot,” I explained. “They may come to agree it will pay them to let the traders pass through for a toll. Not that we suppose our party can by itself make such an understanding firm, but—”

  The door darkened. Athalberh stumbled through. “Quickly, come quickly!” he shouted across the crowd. “A fight’s broken out. A brawl—They don’t heed me!”

  He was hardly more than a boy, who needed the razor maybe once a month. I sprang to my feet and pushed through the sudden uproar. “Stay behind me,” I ordered. A battle between the high and the low would be ruinous. I stopped only to grab my sword, leaned against the front wall with other weapons, and unsheathed it as I ran out. My heart galloped, my mouth dried, sweat trickled cold down my ribs. I too had never dealt with this sort of thing before. I must not let it show, I told myself over and over, a drumbeat in my skull.

  The sun had slipped behind the trees on the opposite bank, but the sky was still blue and the river shimmered. A nestbound flight of birds crossed overhead, gilded by the unseen radiance. Air lay cool and quiet. Outrageous amidst this, snarls and curses ripped from among the men at the campfire. Most stayed aside, unhappy, but two had seized arms and squared off. Four or five behind either stood tensed, glaring, fingers knotted into fists, about to fly into the fray.

  I didn’t immediately ken the two. They were from the second boat, burly, shaggy, coarsely clad, the poorest of the poor. One held a flint ax, the other a spear.

  Even as I plunged toward them, the spearman yelled and jabbed. More skillful than I would have expected, the axman parried the thrust. He jumped past the shaft, swinging his great weapon aloft.

  I arrived barely in time. “Hold!” I roared. My blade whirred between them. They checked, gasping. Their partisans milled back. Someone among the onlookers uttered a faint cheer.

  “What is this?” I demanded. “Has the Ghost Raven snatched your wits?” By then my followers were on hand and I knew the trouble was quelled. A wave of weakness swept through me. I hid that also, as best I could. “So help me Father Tiu, whoever started it will rue the day.”

  “He did,” growled the axman.

  “No, he did, that scum-eater,” said the spearman. Sullen mutterings chorused from their friends.

  “Do you hear, master?” cried the axman. “He called me worse than that, the son of a maggot, and did me worse at home. Kill him!”

  “Be still, both of you,” was all I could find to say.

  Herut stepped forward. “I think, young lord, if you feel the same, we should straightaway hold a meeting, ask witnesses what they saw, and get to the truth,” he proposed.

  I nodded. “Yes,” I answered. “Of course. At once.” When I thought nobody was looking, I threw him a smile. We understood that he had rescued me.

  Dusk fell over us, the earliest stars blinked forth, an owl began to hoot, while I sat in judgment. Herut’s shrewd questions helped move things along. Nevertheless the wrangling and the tiresome stories tangled together, dragging on and on. That was for the better, though. Tempers cooled, men wearied, they grew glad to have an end of the business.

  It came out that the quarrelsome pair and their abettors—kinsmen—were from the marshlands around Vedru Mire. Few though the dwellers and scattered though their huts be in that outback, they are often at odds. Lives so wretched and narrow must make it easy for dislike to fester generation after generation, now and then bursting into murderous clashes. When my father’s messengers bore word of the venture everywhere around the Skerning country, these descendants of two different, otherwise forgotten men had offered their services as much to get equal gains as for the rewards themselves. It was a mistake to put them in the same hull, but who of my kind and Herut’s knew that much about them? They had kept a surly peace until this eventide. Then a lickerish wish uttered by one as a woman of the village walked by, and a sneer at his manhood by the second, turned swiftly into a slanging match, and then they went for their weapons.

  “That you were full of the beer our hosts handed out earns you no pardon,” I declared at last, after a short, whispered consultation with Herut. “To make such a showing before them was as bad as trying to spill blood when we may need every man to keep all of us alive upstream. You would-be warriors have forfeited the bronze tools and good clothes promised you when we return. You who were about to fight have forfeited half. Maybe you can redeem yourselves as we go. Maybe. We’ll see. Meanwhile, the two lots of you will serve apart.”

  The spearman hight Kleggu, the axman Ernu. Because Ernu had not truly pleaded but grumbled his case somewhat less badly, I chose him and his cousins for my ship. In the morning we departed with our slightly rearranged crews. We had meant to stay a day or two, less for rest than in hopes of learning more. A dwindled and impoverished trade did still move along the lower Ailavo, bringing news with it. But the incident had shamed us—I think more in our own eyes, the eyes of Skerning gentlemen, than in Aurochsford. We would try elsewhere.

  I have kept no tally of time, but we were always aware of it, the summer slipping away from us at home. Let us learn whatever we could, do whatever we could, turn around, and paddle back out of this darkling land. Nobody threatened us in the next several days, but we lost two of them when weather forced us to ground our ships and huddle ashore beneath the rain and lightning, amidst the thunder. Therefore we pushed on without stopping until we reached a thorp called Suwebburh—I suppose from the tribe in whose territory it lay. Wihta had told us that it was the last of its kind. Beyond it were only some isolated steadings, and then the country held by the Celts.

  Again folk received us hospitably, although less gladly. I marked at once that trouble weighed on them. When we sat in the headman’s house, much as we had done before, I heard bit by awkward bit what it was. And yet at first it seemed as if some god bestowed luck on us.

  Fewer men were on hand, for this house was smaller. I can’t quite remember the headman’s name—something like Hlodoweg. All our heed was soon on another of his guests.

  Gairwarth lived here, a man of standing and, what mattered, a man with the knowledge we needed. It began with his being able to speak the language as it was spoken farther north,
yes, as far as the estuary. That enabled me as well as Herut to talk with him fairly readily and, through him, with the Suwebi. Stocky, a bit paunchy, his brown hair braided, Gairwarth from the first slipped shrewd questions of his own into the interpreting. At length he said slowly, “Then you’re bound for Celtic country, eh?” He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “I’d rede otherwise. You’ve chosen an ill time.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded.

  “Why, you’d have heard much the same from anyone, but I can tell you the most. The Boii are lately on the move again, and all wildfire is breaking loose.”

  The headman and his fellows frowned. Gairwarth made haste to bring them into the conversation. Did he want to head off suspicions that we might be plotting against them? I could well-nigh feel the uneasiness everywhere around us. They added their warnings to his. But I need not recall such breaks in discourse.

  “Do you know the—the Celtics so well?” asked Herut.

  “As well as is good for a man, if not more,” replied Gairwarth. “I’m a trader, taking my boat along the river, sometimes clear down to the sea, sometimes clear up to the Boian marches. I’ve dealt with them if and when they were in the mood for it. Sometimes I’ve been a go-between on behalf of some of my own folk, as it might be there’d been a fight and we hoped to settle things before the trouble got worse. The Celts aren’t always raving mad. Not always.”

  “So you speak their tongue?” I blurted. “How did you learn?”

  His small eyes probed at me before he explained: “From my mother. Her kin lived not far from the Boii. A gang of them came raiding when she was a little girl and carried her off together with two or three siblings. She was raised among them, a slave, though not too badly treated. Years afterward, when she was turning into a woman and my father was a young man, he came that way trading. Like I said, it’s not been unbroken war. We’ve stuff to offer, like honey, fine pelts, or amber when it’s reached us from the North. They get wares from the South and East—kettles, jewelry, little metal discs stamped with pictures, and what all else. Once a chieftain’s taken you in, you’re under his protection till you’ve left his domain. And some men on either side know some scraps of the other tongue.