by Smith, Skye
And then the fourth came inside. He sent the youngster out to watch and pulled the other two away from her. "My turn" said the pig with menace in his voice.
All she could hope for was that if she were gentle, he would be gentle. She motioned for him to take of his clothes. He did so. He was truly a pig. He had dark hair on his back like an animal, and a paunch like a sow. She doused her scarf in ale and offered him the ale skin while she cleaned his cock off. Delay.
The pig spoke more English than the other two. He stroked her hair as she played with him, and then suddenly he grabbed it hard and pulled her head back and stared into her face. She wasn't so pretty anymore. Her clothes were soiled, and her face was grimy, and her hair needed a good brushing. "Where did your man take the treasure." He twisted her hair to make her wince, and then he asked again.
She told him the truth. "I don't know. They did not take me when they hid it."
"Ahh, so they hid it then? They didn't ship it away. You must know more than that. Did they bury it."
"I don't know," she said. And then again. And again, for she truly did not know.
The last time she spoke, he pulled her head towards him by her hair and roughly forced his cock into her mouth until she gagged. Without thinking of the consequences she went to bite down on it hard, but he was waiting for her to do exactly that and shoved it in deeper and pushed down on her lower jaw with his hand so she could not close her mouth. He held her like that until she almost passed out.
He pulled it out only when it was safe for him to take it from her mouth without loosing the end of it to her teeth. He shook her to wake her up, and then slapped her and twisted her breast hard. She was now screaming and sobbing and saying over and over, "I don't know."
At her screams of pain, the youngster came running into the hut and pulled the pig away from her, but the pig reacted to his honest concern by putting a fist through his nose, and then pushing him bodily back outside. The two other men had been watching, stunned, but after the violence to the lad, they moved closer to be between her and the pig, but he cursed them and threatened them and forced them out of the hut as well.
From outside they could hear him questioning her, and hear her sobbing answers, and hear her screams from his beatings and torture and rape.
* * * * *
Raynar slept from exhaustion, but not for long. There was still no sign of pre-dawn but the stars were bright so he left the camp and left his horse and walked down the cartway alone. He went foot by foot for an hour watching for hoof prints leaving the cartway, and then he heard something. Was it a scream, a faint scream on the night breeze?
He picked up his pace to a trot, and as he trotted along he pulled his Byzantine bow over his head and reached for a heavy arrow. With the bow and the arrow now held in place with his bow hand he increased his pace again to a run. He heard another scream. Closer this time. It came from the darkness up ahead and to the right. He kept running.
The darkness turned into a copse of young trees to the north of the cartway. He kept running. He ran on the grassy verge of the cartway so that there was no sound of footfall. He stopped and caught his breath while he waited for another scream to make sure he had not run too far. Each scream echoed through his very soul. It could only be Anske screaming. She needed him.
The next scream sent him off the cartway and overland through a field that should have been ploughed a month ago. The first light of the day was glowing in the east and he could just make out a hut at the other edge of the field. He kept running. The next scream was long and loud and changed pitch as though from some agony that he did not want to imagine.
The sound of it reminded him of the horrors he had witnessed on the battlefields of '66, and of the horror of the great fire at the bishop's house in Dun Holm that had burned so many alive. It tore his heart out knowing that it was Anske who was screaming.
The light was behind him so he was a silhouette against it. The men in front of the hut saw him before he saw them. The first he knew of their presence was when one of them called the alarm. He was still at long range so he kept running. These men had no bows.
Though he had ridden for miles, and walked for miles and had been running for a mile, he was not tired. He did not feel his legs or his feet. They seemed to float over the land. His eyes seemed to become brighter and he saw three men outside a hut yelling to someone inside. His first instinct was to kill one of the men, but that may cost Anske dearly, so he yelled a warning instead.
"I am Raynar of the Peaks and I have come for my woman. Let her go now, and you can all go in peace." He waited for his words to register. It was getting lighter but there still was no orange glow in the eastern sky that would mark where the sun would rise.
These three men did not understand the range of his bow. He could have killed any of them in a blink of an eye. They just stared out at him while yelling through the doorway. "Bring her out. Bring her out. She is our hostage too."
* * * * *
Anske could barely see or hear through the pain. The pig was pushing her in front of him through the doorway. She could barely stand never mind walk. Somehow she understood that Raynar had found her, but it was too late. The pig had beaten her and shoved things into her to make her scream. She could feel the blood dripping down her legs. She had lost the child. Raynar's child. It may be that she would never have another child, or another pooh ever again. She could not see through her bloody tears but she wanted to see him. She wanted to see Raynar.
The pig had a knife at her throat as he half carried her towards Raynar. "Go away else she dies."
"I'll swap you," bargained Raynar. "Let her go and take me in her place. Your abbot would pay you a hundred marks for my head. The sheriff of Nottingham would pay two hundred. She is just a peasant woman. A nobody."
Anske's eyes cleared. She could not understand the French words but she knew their meaning. Raynar was trading himself for her. He would give himself up, for what. They would keep her alive as part of his torture until he told them where to find the treasure. In the end they would both die and the pig would have the treasure.
Even now the silhouette that was Raynar was holding his bow low to the ground with the arrow loose on the string. "Raynar, don't do it," she began to call but her words were choked off. She had to save him, and there was only one way to do that.
She took her full weight onto her broken feet and winced at the pain that shot up through her body. She stood to her full height and she felt the blood pulsing out of her wounds. Then she raised her chin and yelled to the pig holding the knife to her throat, "Die Pig." and then she dropped to her knees.
The knife at her throat ripped through it and her blood spurted into the air. Her last thought was that she had beaten the pig and he would not have her lover. Raynar was not the best marksman in the kingdom but he was surely the fastest. The pig would be dead before she lost consciousness.
And he was. At such short range the heavy arrow went through the pig's brain and blew out the back of his skull. The second arrow was in the air before the first reached the pig and the man to the pig's left grasped at the shaft through his heart as he fell to the ground.
The other two men began to run away in blind panic, but Raynar did not care about them. He was running towards Anske. He did not know that Alan was now only steps behind him. Alan had been following Raynar's track all night on foot and he had finally caught up to him. He drew his bow and led one of the running men with his point, just like he had led a hundred deer on a hundred hunts.
The man ran into the arrow and pitched head first into the stubble of last years failed crop. Only the youngster was left and he made the worst mistake you can ever make when fighting an archer. He ran in a straight line away from him. Alan's arrow punched though his back and through his heart. It was such an easy shot that Alan did not even watch to make sure it hit. He was already running to join Raynar, who was already holding the violated corpse of his wife and sobbing.
* *
* * *
For hours Raynar would not move or let anyone touch Anske. The other men arrived with the horses and even the two men closest to him in this world, Hereward and John, could not console him. Eventually there was no sadness left in Raynar, just a furious rage. None of the men had seen him like this ever before. It was like watching a berserker on a battlefield.
Alan and John had been with Raynar, years ago on the high moors of the peaks when he had found his little sister, violated and lifeless in the same senseless evil way. Even they could not ever remember Raynar in a rage like this. After finding his sister they had been able to calm his rage, and it was replaced by grief and cold determination to seek justice through the courts. This time there was no calming the rage.
They could not stop him from mutilating the bodies of the four men. He carried the four corpses to the cartway and sat them up back to back and tied them in that position, and then he cut off their manhood and pushed them into their mouths. There would be no doubt to anyone using this cartway that these men were rapists. He did not allow Allan to remove the arrows. He left them in the bodies and blackened the fletches with charcoal from the hut's hearth.
Still no one was allowed to touch Anske. Only after he was done with the abbot's men, did he roll the broken body of his woman in his cloak and then mounted the grand white horse and then only John was allowed to touch her, and that only to pass her limp form up to him.
He and she on the white horse, led his nag Abbey all the way to her island village of Westerbur, between Burna and Spalding. He did not speak. He did not acknowledge the other men were even with him. It was as if the world did not exist. They followed him closely, not to protect Raynar, but to protect anyone who accidentally got in his way.
* * * * *
* * * * *
The Hoodsman - Ely Wakes by Skye Smith
Chapter 5 - The funeral pyre of a Valkyrie in the Fens in May 1070
Anske's village of Westerbur was on the western edge of the damp and marshy Fens forest near to the River Glen. It was actually a twinned village because it was at the edge of the Fens. The dry village was built near the fields and pastures, and was a pleasant place to live in the wet season. Whenever the men were in the village, or there was farming to be done, the women preferred living in the dry village.
The older village was the island village. Like Frisian villages around the North Sea, this village was built on a defendable island in the marshes. It was comfortable enough in the dry season. The original Frisians had settled here because it was rich in fish, and eels, and bog iron, and was easily defendable and had channels that connected it to the River Glen that was deep enough to float a small ship.
When the men were away on their ships, trading, or away on the streets of Lincolnshire selling their breeding stock, the women would live in the island village. It was very much the women's village, and the women of the village were very much like the Amazons of Greek legends. The men came and went, while the women ran the village.
It was to the north end of this island village, near where the midden and the latrines were, that there was a place for building funeral pyres. Young Raynar had carried the broken body of his lover and wife Anske to this place, and then he went off in a punt to collect dead wood for her pyre. He had shrugged off the help of the other bowmen who had helped him to search for Anske along Ermine street. This was something he wanted to do alone.
When he returned with the punt filled with wood, Inka, the village seer was waiting for him beside the corpse. He ignored her. He didn't want to speak to anyone. There was a punt to unload and a pyre to build.
"Hereward told me," Inka began, "that Anske killed at least three warriors with her bow at Huntingdon. That she saved his own life with her bow."
He just nodded. Perhaps if he didn't say anything she would get the message and leave him alone.
"I came to collect her crystal," said Inka, and waited until those words sank in before she reached over the corpse and gently cut the chord that held Anske's quartz pendant around her neck. "This crystal will contain Anske's visions which other seer's will use to help them in their own visions."
He nodded. Both he and Anske had worn healer's crystals. They both had the healing touch and knew the ways of herbs and potions and wounds. Anske had healed many children after the Great Harrowing. Her crystal would have been strongly charged by the constant use of her healer's touch.
"Alan told me that she took her own life."
Raynar looked at her with a sudden fear. Was Anske to be forbidden a funeral pyre because she had taken her own life. He had heard that there were temples that forbid suicides from the after life. He was forced to speak. "She did not commit suicide. She murdered her tormentor by my hand, and died to save me."
"That is what Alan said. You cannot make here pyre here. The seers of all the Fens villages will forbid it."
He howled in anguish. What more could life do to his poor Anske. This was so unfair. She was such an angel. He began to weep.
Inka came close to the weeping man and threw her arms around him to comfort him and whispered. "The seers will want her pyre at the other village, the dry village, where many folk can gather to pay homage, and where a larger pyre can be built."
"So she is to be allowed a pyre," he sniffed, now relieved that he would not be forced to bury her in the ground and risk robbing her of any afterlife.
"Oh yes. It will be a huge pyre, and folk will come for miles around. We must delay the pyre for a few days so that the news of it has a chance to reach all of the Fens villages."
"But why? I, I, I wanted to do this for her."
"Fool," Inka called him, but gently, "She is a healer and a comely woman not yet a mother, who has slain men in battle and has died while protecting her brothers-in-arms. Freyja will choose her as a Valkyrie.
We have not had a Valkyrie chosen from the Fens in my lifetime. The worshippers of the moon goddess will journey here to see her pyre. The warriors who fear death in battle, they too will all come. The folk who have lost loved ones to violence, they will all come. The throng will be enormous, too large for this small place."
He nodded, and wiped away his tears. But then pulled back because Inka had grabbed his Syrian dagger, the dagger he had won in a battle against some Norse scouts back in '66. When he tried to take it back she pushed him away, and then she reached over to Anske's things. The things that Raynar was going to burn with her. Her white tunic, her best cloak, her Yew bow, her bodkin arrows, the small, thin, sharp, eel filleting knife that all Fens women carried.
She replaced the woman's knife with the Syrian dagger, and then handed the woman's knife to Raynar. "From now on, you must carry her knife in battle," she told him. "Have it with you when you die, and any Valkyrie who finds you will know that you have already been chosen for Woden's Hall."
* * * * *
Inka was right to move the pyre to the dry village. Anske's pyre was delayed for three days, and each day more folk arrived. Each of them brought their own wood for the pyre, and the pyre was growing tall out of the meadow behind the dry village. It was a great meeting of the folk of the Fens, perhaps the greatest since the Normans began plaguing the land.
But the folk that came were just not the Frisian's of the Fens. In truth, most of the throng were the Daneglish who had been dispossessed by the harrowing of the Danelaw. They came to add their votive offerings to the pyre. Their remembrances of the loved ones that were now dead or missing because last year the Normans had destroyed their villages, and their food, only weeks before the winter storms.
Half of the axemen that now held Huntingdon were there, with their weapons, as were the bowmen and the hoodsmen. Warriors had come to stand dressed in their armour and weapons in front of the Valkyrie's pyre so that when they were killed in battle, Anske would know them and choose them for Woden's hall.
The Seer's and Healer's and Ealderwomen of the villages all around came dressed in their white robes and wearing their crystals, and c
arrying their tiny silver surgery knives and their bog iron cauterizing wands. While more folk gathered, they would spend their time exchanging knowledge, and praying to the great green goddess.
On the day of the funeral, the moon was half and rose above the horizon at noon, and Inka told Raynar to light the pyre. At first a thousand folk crowded in towards the flames to throw on their remembrances of their loved ones. A lock of hair, a favorite toy, a model of a ship, anything to send a wish and a hope to the heavens with the smoke of the Valkyrie's pyre.
There were other bodies burned as well. Bodies that had temporarily been buried until someone could afford a large pyre. The wise women in white danced around the fire, chanting. The axemen created a wide ring around the dancing women and banged their shields with their axes in time with the chanting. The children ran and played and wound themselves in and out of the grownups.
Eventually the flames from the giant pyre were so high and so hot that everyone had to pull back and away from the heat, and when they did, they left behind one handsome young man. He was kneeling low to escape the heat in front of the fire and singing a song to the Valkyrie. A song of her heroism, a song of her angelic goodness, a song to praise her to her goddess.
The pyre burned all afternoon. Thorold was there with an inconsolable Beatrice. Klaes and Gerke were with him, with their Frisian crews. They had escorted a dozen carts filled with seed corn and farm tools, and herded behind them breeding pairs of every kind of farm animal. This mass gathering was a godsend for Thorold.
He was running out of time in planting season to get the farms of Lincolnshire working again. With so many ealders from so many villages attending this funeral, he no longer need ask his carters and herdsmen to visit all these villages to distribute the seed, nor provide guards for them while they did so.
The ealders queue up to receive gifts of corn and animals to take with them back to their villages. The roads to their villages would be crowded with folk returning from this event, so they would not need guards. Even the dispossessed folk who attended, were being offered room and board and the chance of making a new home in the villages that no longer had the number of strong backs required to do the farming.
