You Die When You Die

by Angus Watson

  Bodil prattled on. Sassa pictured herself arriving at the farm and finding her mother sewing in the yard, her brother Vifil the Individual doing his own thing and her father tending to the fire that was causing all this worry. He had burnt things before. But not, she had to admit, at this time of the year. And, apart from their own hearth, which they never lit in the morning, Poppo and Gunnhild up at the church had never laid a fire. Two unusual fires at the same time was no coincidence and Sassa could not think of a reason for it. Fuck a duck, it was frustrating to have no idea what was happening. She ran on.

  Two red-winged blackbirds alighted on a nearby branch. Had they seen what was happening? She wished she could ask them. What if it was raiders? There had never been raiders before, but they were all aware of the concept … She wished she’d taken her bow to the dawn plotters’ meeting. She wished she hadn’t gone to the dawn meeting.

  She’d really thought that she wanted to leave. She wanted a baby more than anything, but no matter how many times she and Wulf made love—or shagged, as Wulf insisted on putting it—they had no luck. She thought that if she left—made a change, breathed different air, ate different food—then Fraya might see her need, respond to her offerings and answer her prayers.

  Now she knew that she could never leave her parents and her brother. It had taken this scare to realise it. She prayed to Fraya that it was only a scare.

  She emerged from the trees into the farm’s lower field, a good way behind the Hird. There was no need for a farm when the Scraylings gave them all the food they could eat, but the buildings and fields had been in her family since Olaf Worldfinder’s day, and they’d always kept a few animals and grown some crops. Her brother Vifil the Individual was too much of an individual to carry on the family work, so her father hoped that Sassa and Wulf would settle down into the agrarian life. The thought of it appalled her. It was another reason that she’d been planning to leave. Another selfish reason.

  They crested a rise and she saw the source of the smoke. The barn next to their longhouse was on fire.

  “Hold!” Wulf shouted up ahead.

  The first thing she took in when she ran through the gate into the farm’s yard was the five Hird facing outwards, weapons ready. Next she noticed that the small barn was almost burnt to the ground.

  The final major thing she was aware of, perhaps, she thought later, because her mind refused to accept it, was that her mother, father and brother were lying dead in front of the longhouse.

  Her brother and father’s throats were slit so deeply that they were all but decapitated. Her mother looked unharmed, but her eyes were open and staring milkily, like the eyes of a fish on a smoking rack.

  She ran and knelt by her mother. She couldn’t see an injury, but neither could she find a pulse. There was a trickle of blood from under her head. She felt for a wound and found one. The back of her mother’s head was a soggy mess. Sassa thought of that morning, when her mother had caught her nipping out, kissed her and told her to be careful. Her mother knew that Sassa didn’t want to farm, and she would never have stopped her from following her desires, including leaving for good. She felt the tears come. As long as she could remember her mother had listened while her father had commanded, and she’d never—

  “Yah!” Keef the Berserker shouted, startling Sassa. A Scrayling was charging him. Keef used the hook of the axe to pull his attacker off his feet and slammed the blade round into his chest—a manoeuvre that Sassa had seen him practise a thousand times. Despite her shock and horror, she found herself thinking that it was nice to see that Keef’s constant drilling seemed to have borne fruit.

  “My finest regards to your ancestors! Tell them Keef the Berserker sent you!” Keef wrenched the axe from the dying Scrayling’s chest and looked around for the next adversary.

  He had plenty of choice. A large gang of Scrayling warriors had burst from who knew where. They wore breechcloths and were armed with stone-headed spears, stone axes and flint knives.

  Bodil ran over to cower next to Sassa.

  Around them, the Hird fought.

  Thyri Treelegs leapt and spun, punching with her shield and slashing with her sax. She opened one raider’s throat and kicked another so hard in the groin that Sassa heard the crunch over the battle clamour. A Scrayling thrust his spear and Sassa was sure that Thyri was done for, but the girl melted aside, spun like a squirrel, whacked the spear aside with her shield, twisted around and struck low to chop off her attacker’s foot. Thyri had spent countless hours sharpening that sax.

  Keef the Berserker roared and chased after two Scraylings, his axe Arse Splitter held aloft.

  Two men attacked Bjarni with hand axes and he defended desperately with his lovely sword Lion Slayer.

  Ogmund the Miller, already drunk or perhaps still drunk from the night before, swayed and lurched, but somehow managed to not only keep two Scraylings at bay with his long, flanged spear, Alarmed Calf, but also to wound them. One of his attackers had a gushing gash in his thigh and surely wouldn’t last long, and the other was clutching his arm.

  Wulf felled a third with his hammer Thunderbolt then ran over to help Bjarni. Two Scraylings armed with flint knives took after Wulf. He hadn’t spotted them.

  “Behind you, Wulf!” Sassa shouted. He leapt round and dispatched one with a backhanded hammer blow. The second was cannier, leaping from foot to foot, eyes sly. He circled Wulf, blood-stained knife alive in his hands. Wulf swung, the Scrayling dodged and lunged.

  Seeing the threat to her man finally jolted Sassa into action. She jumped up and ran into the longhouse to fetch her bow.

  Frossa the Deep Minded followed the Hird and their tagalongs a little way down the road from Hardwork towards the two pillars of smoke. She reached the top of a dune in time to see Ottar and Freydis join Finnbogi and head after the Hird into the trees.

  Good, she thought. Somehow the children had avoided Garth thus far, but with everyone panicked and spread through the woods it would be easy for two little children to become separated and torn apart by a bear. Possibly Garth wasn’t bright enough to work out that this was the perfect opportunity—Frossa had been let down many times by overestimating others’ intellects—but he’d been carrying the bear paw under his mail shirt as a reminder, so surely he’d seize the day?

  Frossa practised the face she’d make when she was told about the children’s deaths. If she remembered all the injustices she’d suffered, she might be able to squeeze out a genuine tear or two. The people looked to her as a mother figure as well as a spiritual leader, so it would help them heal if she could lead the grieving.

  She turned to return to town and tell Jarl Brodir that the deed was all but done.

  Her mouth fell open.

  Out on Olaf’s Fresh Sea was a fleet of canoes, bigger canoes than she’d seen before, with bizarrely high prows and sterns. They were slicing silently through the dawn-lit, puddle-calm water towards Hardwork. There were well over a dozen boats, each carrying more than a dozen warriors.

  She felt her breakfast sink to the pit of her stomach. Suddenly she knew that it didn’t matter whether it was Ottar or Freydis who had prophesied Hardwork’s destruction. What mattered was that he or she had been right. Hardwork, with its broken walls and the few defenders it did have off in the woods—lured by decoys as Wulf had suspected and Brodir had pooh-poohed—wouldn’t stand for a moment against so many attackers. They were doomed.

  She tried to persuade herself that maybe, just maybe, there was a peaceful explanation. Perhaps these were merchants? However, as if to make the raiders’ intentions clear, a warrior stood up in the nearest boat, pulled back on a bow and loosed an arrow at her. It missed by about ten feet, but he’d definitely been trying to hit her.

  “Scraylings!” she screamed, waddling down the slope to town as fast as she could. “Scraylings!”

  Freydis and Ottar were aggravatingly slow, so Finnbogi ran ahead. He soon caught up with the Wolf section of the Hird, who weren’t going nearly as
quickly as you’d expect given the urgency of the situation, and sprinted past them.

  “Wait, Boggy!” shouted Garth.

  Bugger off, thought Finnbogi, you have no authority over me.

  He ran on through the trees. He’d nearly reached the church when a horrible, throaty yell brought him to a shocked standstill. It had sounded like his Aunt Gunnhild. What by Loakie was happening up there? He looked round for the Hird, but he’d turned a corner a hundred paces back and they hadn’t even got that far yet. They were in no hurry, the buggers.

  He stepped one way and then the other, then thought screw it, put his head down and ran as fast as he could towards the church.

  Thumps and whacks and a Scrayling-sounding scream sounded out ahead. He stopped, pulled his sax from its scabbard with a shaking hand, and ran on. Lying in bed, he had often fantasised about dispatching hordes of enemies with the little sword. Now that he might really have to use it, he felt weak and sick.

  He almost collapsed when he reached the churchyard. It looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Uncle Poppo, Alvilda and Brenna were on the ground, looking dead, alongside perhaps eight Scrayling warriors. The life- or death-sized cross of Krist had been knocked over and there was a dead Scrayling pinned beneath it.

  He heard a shout from the side of the church and ran there.

  Two Scraylings with stone axes were advancing on Gunnhild. She was dressed in her cotton nightgown, swinging her heavy clothes beater at them. Family legend said that the jewel-encrusted clothes beater had once been a warlock’s sceptre in the old world. Judging by the Scrayling with his head caved in at Finnbogi’s feet, it was now a Scrayling beater.

  A Scrayling lunged. Gunnhild whacked his axe away. None of them had spotted Finnbogi. He raised his sax high and tiptoed up behind the rightmost attacker. The other swung his weapon at Gunnhild. She stepped back, tripped over the tree stump that Finnbogi had put there a couple of weeks before and never got round to carving, and fell. She yelled as she went down, her head cracked onto a stone, and she was silent.

  Finnbogi closed his eyes and slashed his sax.

  The blade struck, and stuck. He opened his eyes. His sax was deep in the Scrayling’s shoulder. Finnbogi wrenched it free and took a step back. The man turned, eyes mad, a hand flailing at his horrible, blood-pulsing wound.

  “Sorry,” Finnbogi heard himself begin to say, but the word caught in his throat as the other warrior jumped round and raised his axe. Finnbogi lifted his sax. His opponent was short, but all sinew and muscle. He had blood smeared over his face and chest. Behind him, Gunnhild lay still.

  Finnbogi lunged with his blade. The Scrayling caught his wrist and squeezed. The Hardworker yelped, dropped the blade and stepped back. His attacker smiled and bent to pick up the sax. Straightening, he licked blood off his lips, jutted his head forwards and made a very alarming noise—something like a large, angry, cornered lizard might make. Finnbogi guessed it was a war cry, meant to terrify him.

  It worked.

  He turned and ran into the woods. Something tangled between his calves and he went down. He heaved his face off the ground and spat out a mouthful of soil. He was face to petal with yellow, purple and white flowers, their prettiness jarring with his situation.

  “Thank you for the blade, Mushroom Man,” came a voice from behind him, speaking the universal Scrayling tongue in a strange accent. “You have earned a slow, coward’s death, and it begins now. It will last a while.”

  Finnbogi tried to get up but the Scrayling kicked his feet away and he collapsed onto his face. He turned over. On a bush’s slim branch to his left was a large silk caterpillar nest, full of black eggs and crawling with black, white and brown caterpillars. He grabbed the branch and thrust the seething mass at the Scrayling. The man chopped the top off the branch and the nest fell onto Finnbogi’s face. He spluttered and clawed at it, pulling silk, eggs and hairy caterpillars out of his mouth.

  He stopped when he felt a blade—his own blade—press into his neck.

  Chapter 13

  All Old Friends

  “Good morning,” said Erik, looking round at the archers, and nodding hello. They were all old friends. He’d slept with one of them—Sittiwa—several times, and had thought that they might even marry, but her parents had got involved. For some reason they hadn’t wanted their daughter to hook up with a large shaggy alien who lived on his own in the forest. He’d seen their point and actually been a little relieved. He’d liked Sittiwa but, honestly, he liked solitude more.

  Neither Sittiwa nor the other archers responded to his cheery greeting. They kept their arrows trained on him, looking deadly serious, or at least as serious as a group of Scraylings dressed in rabbit-ear headbands and spider-leg skirts could look. Twenty years he’d been with the Lakchans, and still he found their rabbit/spider outfit somewhere between gently amusing and thigh-slappingly hilarious, depending on his mood. This was one of those more gently amusing times.

  “I came to ask why you sent people to kill me,” he said.

  “I thought you would,” said Chief Kobosh, breathing out a cloud of smoke. His words bubbled hoarsely in his throat; a result, Erik reckoned, of his constant pipe use. Couple that with the swearing, and he did not have the most delightful speaking voice. “You didn’t kill any of the fuckers I sent, did you?” he rasped.

  “You’ll find them tied up by my place. They’ll have headaches, but no permanent damage.” (He hoped; he had hit one of them pretty hard in the heat of things, and if a lion, wolf or any number of other animals found them, they might be in trouble …)

  “Good. I didn’t think you’d hurt them.”

  “I see. But you did send them to kill me?”

  “Yeah. And now I’m going to kill you. Someone pass me a bow.” Sittiwa gave him hers, which upset Erik a little, given all that he and Sittiwa had been through.

  Kobosh pulled back the string and aimed the arrow at Erik’s heart. Then he lowered the bow.

  “Doesn’t feel fucking right, killing you in front of these cunts like this, you being an old friend and all.” He waved at his archers dismissively. “Fuck off the rest of you, I want to do this in private. Go and collect those useless cunts from up at Erik’s place.

  “Right,” said Kobosh when they’d gone, putting the bow on the ground next to the Spider Throne. “You’re in fucking trouble.”

  “I’d guessed.” This was proving to be one of his more confusing mornings. “Why?”

  “Runner came from the Calnians. They want you dead.”

  “What did I do to them?”

  “It’s what you will do. You and those Hardworker fuckers you came from are going to destroy the world.”

  “Are we?”

  “Yes. Dunno how. To be frank, I can’t see you managing it. But the cunt empress of Calnia had some vision. So that’s it. We’ve got to kill you or they’ll send a fucking army to do you, and us while they’re at it. They’re not bad as overlords go, the Calnians, they leave us alone most of the time. But they are no fucking fans of direct disobedience.”

  “I see. So you’d better kill me.”

  “Don’t be a cunt. You’ve been a good friend. An odd fucking friend, but a good one. So, here’s the deal. You have to fuck off.”

  Banished, again! What was it with him and groups of people? Everything seemed fine, then after twenty years they told him to leave. “Where to?”

  “A long fucking way. You’ve got to go west, across the Water Mother.” First the voice in his head, now Kobosh—everyone wanted him to go west. “The Water Mother is a big fuck-off river that the Calnians don’t cross. Head towards the setting sun and you’ll come to a river that you’ll think is the Water Mother. That’ll be the Rock River. There should be boats around, but if there aren’t, find one. Do not try to swim the cunt. It’s full of fucking fish that’ll fucking eat you. Then you’ll get to another river and say: ‘fuck me, that’s a big fucking river, that Rock River was a fucking streak of piss in comparison.�
� That’ll be the Water Mother.”

  Erik had in fact journeyed across the Rock River and to the bank of the Water Mother the previous summer, but he understood that all men love giving directions, so let Kobosh continue.

  “Cross that. You’ll be safe from the Calnians there and, once you’re across the Water Mother, they won’t know I spared you.”

  “How come?”

  “I said. Calnians don’t cross the Water Mother.”

  “Why not?”

  “Everyone knows the Calnians don’t cross the Water Mother. I don’t know why, they just fucking don’t. It’s probably because of the fucking Badlanders. You’re safe from the Calnians on the other side of the Water Mother, but you’re a long fucking way from safe. Do not fucking dally. Go as fast as you can, west, west and west some more until you’re through Badlander territory. To the west of the Badlanders, the Black Mountains are safe. I suggest you settle there. Do not, whatever you fucking do, go beyond the Black Mountains and into the Shining Mountains.

  “It’ll be dangerous. Fucking dangerous. And it’s a fuck of a long way across Badlander territory, not far shy of a thousand miles, and you’ve got to keep clear of the Badlanders the whole way. Don’t even try to talk to them. If they see you, hide. If you can’t hide, run. You think the Calnians are cunts? The Badlanders make them look like pussies. Do not go near them.”

  “Okay. Can I have a few days to pack up?”

  “You’ve got until noon.”

  “Noon tomorrow?”

  “Today, you silly cunt!” Kobosh chuckled wetly. “Go back the way you came and don’t let anyone see you. And don’t think about going back east to warn your tribe. They’re already dead. You’re the last of them left alive.”