Tales of the Old World

by Marc Gascoigne

  The opposing forces met where surf crashed upon the shore. Fedor stood at the edge of his world, and cast a last glance inland towards the village. The invaders were shouting orders at each other in a harsh, guttural tongue, their rough voices obliterating even the sounds of the waves. Tall figures dressed in dark, foul-smelling skins were advancing on him on three sides. Fedor picked a target at random, and attacked.

  As he ran towards the thick-set figure he had marked out, it struck Fedor Kumansky that he had not fought another being for more than six years. His opponent turned towards him almost in slow-motion, and he aimed his first blow. There was a moment that seemed to last forever as Fedor looked at the man; his milk-white face and fair hair poking out from beneath the rounded iron cap upon his head; the small scars pocking the baby-smooth skin on his face. The sly, hungry grin that spread over his features as he met Fedor’s eyes.

  Fedor swung his sword, and felt it judder as it struck home, cutting through leather, cloth, or bone—he couldn’t tell. His opponent tottered as though slightly drunk, but did not fall. Fedor saw the man’s sword arm swinging up towards him. All of a sudden, Fedor found himself possessed by a furious frenzy. He pulled back his sword, parried the blow aimed towards him then struck again and again, hacking at the other’s man’s body as he might cleave meat from a bone. Blood sprayed out of a deep cut through the man’s neck as, finally, he toppled into the shallow water lapping the beach.

  Fedor experienced a moment of pure horror, looking down upon a scene from the very pit of Morr. Then he felt something cut through the cloth of his shirt, cold metal grazing the skin below his ribs. He spun round to find a huge figure bearing down on him, knives in both of its hands, the same insane, blind bloodlust in its eyes. Fedor took his sword in both hands, stepped back and swung a blow directly into the Norse’s face, the blade paring flesh away from bone.

  He wasn’t seeing men, or even mutants, any longer. Fedor Kumansky’s existence had become distilled into one simple equation: kill or be killed. And he went about that business with every ounce of his being.

  But, even as he fought, Fedor was aware that they were being pushed back up the beach, on to the path that would lead eventually to the village. He saw Jacob Kolb on his knees, trying to fend off the blows raining down upon him from a Norscan wielding a fierce-looking, double-headed axe. Fedor cut a path through the battleground with his sword, his desperation to reach his friend endowing him with the strength of two men. He lunged with his sword, slicing through a Norse arm, severing it above the elbow.

  “Get up, old friend! Get up!” He lifted Jakob’s face towards his own and wiped away the filth crusting his friend’s face. But Jakob was already dead, he had seen the last light of this world. Fedor had barely a moment to mark his grief before something landed heavily upon his back, sending him sprawling face-down. Long fingers ending in sharpened talons fastened a grip around his neck. Fedor felt as though the very life was being squeezed from him. Then, just as suddenly, the pressure eased and the weight was lifted off his back. Fedor turned to see Andrei freeing his sword from the mutant’s body with the help of his boot. Andrei’s face was caked with blood. He stretched out a hand and helped Fedor to his feet.

  All around him Fedor saw the dead and the dying. Friends, brothers he had toiled with very working day of his life. Men who would not be beaten by anything had given their all, given their lives. And it was not enough.

  “We must re-group,” Fedor said, fighting for his breath. “Pull back to the village. They’ll destroy us out here.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Andrei. This is not glory. This is survival. Survival of our loved ones. Gather whoever you can. We pull back, to the village. We must defend our homes.”

  Stefan’s heart pounded hard inside his chest. Mikhal had either not heard, or not heeded him. By the time Stefan had reached the door of the house his brother had gone. Now he stood in the empty village square, calling Mikhal’s name. His breath came in short, tight bursts, frosting the cold night air. The surrounding houses were still wrapped in darkness, but in the distance street a house at the edge of the village was on fire. Orange flames licked the night sky, and thick coils of suffocating smoke rolled up the hill towards Stefan.

  Moments later a figure emerged from the smoke, staggering wildly from one side of the road to the other. The man was clutching the side of his stomach with one hand and cradling his head in the other. His face looked wet, and red.

  Stefan felt his body tense. His hand was inside the pocket of his jerkin, clutching the handle of the short knife as though his life depended upon it. The man slowed his pace as he got closer to the centre of the village and looked up at Stefan.

  Stefan recognised him. It was Jan Scherensky, one of the men who worked the nets on his father’s boats. His son was a friend of Stefan’s; they had played together only a day or so ago. It all seemed a lifetime away now.

  Stefan stared at the man in shock. As well as his face, one side of his body seemed to be have been drenched in blood. Something thick and dark oozed from a hole that had opened up beneath Jan’s ribs. Scherensky noticed Stefan standing by the side of the road and limped towards him.

  “In the name of the gods, Stefan,” he shouted, “save yourself.”

  Stefan was stunned. It was a while before he could reply.

  “I can’t,” he said at last. “I have to find Mikhal.”

  Jan Scherensky knelt upon the ground as though he had been overcome by tiredness. He held out a hand towards Stefan and Stefan took it in his own. He didn’t know what else to do.

  “Jan,” Stefan said, “what’s happened to my father?”

  Other figures were starting to emerge from the smoke and flames at the end of the village. Men carrying torches, marching towards them. Scherensky looked back down the street then turned back to Stefan, his eyes bright with fear.

  “Save yourself,” he repeated. “Save yourself.”

  He slipped forward, his forehead cracking hard against the cobblestones. Stefan shook Scherensky’s body in desperation, trying to stir him back to life. He hadn’t said anything about his father. He needed to be told that his father was safe.

  But Scherensky wasn’t going to tell him anything now, and eventually Stefan let go, and left him lying in the road. The marching men hadn’t yet reached as far as the village square. They were stopping at every house along the way, Stefan realised. The air was filled with the sounds of wooden doors being broken down, glass being smashed. And the sound of the screaming.

  The sky flared orange as more and more homes were lit by the flames that danced along the wood-slatted sides of the houses and across their straw-thatched roofs. Soon the whole village would be engulfed.

  Stefan saw something move in the shadows on the far side of the square. A tiny figure, huddled in fear by the side of the road. Stefan ran towards him, calling his brother’s name above the rising crescendo of destruction all around them. As he reached the centre of the square, he saw the men coming. Two men, taller than any he had seen before, rushed towards him. One was carrying a blazing torch and a heavy axe, the other had something swinging from his hand, a ball or a bundle of some kind.

  Stefan froze. He looked into the faces of the men. They were laughing. Their soldiers’ clothes were matted with filth and blood. Stefan saw now what it was that the second man was carrying. His fist was clenched around the hair of a severed head.

  Stefan found he was paralysed, rooted to the spot. He wanted to reach Mikhal and the safety of the shadows, but could not move. The men kept running. For a moment it seemed that they would run straight past him. Their eyes seemed to look through Stefan as though he wasn’t there. Then, at the last moment, the second man pulled up short. The dead villager’s head swung from side to side in his bloody hand. Stefan recognised a face. Sickness forced its way up from the pit of his stomach into his mouth.

  The Norse tossed his trophy to the ground and turned towards Stefan. He was young, probabl
y little more than a boy himself. His features looked human but his eyes were the colour of blood, set like dark red stones in his smooth, white face. His face broke into an leering grin, exposing a row of sharpened teeth like those of a wild dog or a wolf. He said something to Stefan that Stefan didn’t understand, and reached out to touch him. Stefan flinched away in terror and a voice called out: “Leave him alone!”

  Both Norse turned at the sound of the small, frightened voice. Mikhal tried to scramble away out of sight but it was too late. The white-faced monster laughed evilly, and pulled a short knife from his belt. The first man moved round behind Mikhal to cut off his escape. He was whistling.

  Stefan heard his father’s voice in his head. His fear dissolved, and with it the ice that had frozen his limbs. Suddenly he was running, desperately running to put himself between Mikhal and the Norse. The knife lying in his pocket chafed against his skin as he ran.

  He was no longer thinking. Every movement of his body was driven by instinct alone. The younger of the two men appeared not to notice him. His attention was fixed upon Mikhal now, like a snake mesmerising its prey. The Norse crouched down and beckoned Mikhal towards him. His companion was laughing a cruel, hoarse laugh.

  At the last moment the Norseman saw Stefan. As he turned towards him, Stefan lashed out with his feet, kicking the man in the guts. Mikhal darted forward, escaping the clumsy lunge of the other man.

  “Run!” Stefan yelled at his brother. The younger man uttered a curse and grabbed wildly at Stefan. Stefan fended him off, hardly realising he had the knife in his hand. He heard the Norse scream. He caught a brief glimpse of the man’s face; saw the socket running red with blood where the ruby eye had been gouged out. The Norseman screamed with pain and rage, and struck out blindly. Stefan felt a cold spike of pain shoot up through his arm.

  Then he was running, running with his brother, away from the square, towards their home, the heat of the flames scorching the skin at the back of his neck, the voices of the pursuing Norsemen rising above the screams from the village. A sweet smell of burning wood mixed with the stench of the butcher’s slab.

  Mikhal dashed ahead of Stefan, towards the door of the house that still lay open to the night. Stefan clutched his younger brother by the hand and hauled him along in his wake.

  “Our house,” Mikhal shouted. “Our house is over there!”

  “No,” he said, fighting for breath. “Not there. They’re burning the houses.”

  “But I want to go back,” Mikhal protested. “I want to go home, Stefan.”

  Stefan charged on past the house, dragging Mikhal behind him. He knew that their lives depended on them keeping going. “We can’t go there again,” he repeated. “We can’t go back.”

  “But father—”

  “Father will know where we’ve gone.”

  His mind was racing, trying to sift the sounds rushing through his ears. He could no longer hear the voices of the Norse behind them. He begun to hope that, for the moment at least, they had lost their pursuers. The dark outline of the salting house loomed up in front of them; the oddly comforting scents of the sea mingled with the smell of smoke and carnage.

  “In here,” he gasped, tugging his brother’s arm. “Hurry, Mikhal!”

  The air inside the thick stone walls of the salting house felt still and cool. Moonlight creeping through the narrow slats across the window was mirrored in the silver scales of the gutted fish that lay motionless in their hundreds, row upon row spread out to dry upon the shelves.

  Stefan stopped still and held Mikhal to him. He placed a hand across his brother’s mouth.

  “Quiet.”

  Some way in the distance they heard the sound of footsteps approaching the shed. Stefan looked around in desperation for somewhere to hide themselves. Stefan walked between the salting trays to the large open vat at the end of the room where the guts from the cleaned fish were collected, and lifted himself up onto the lip of the vessel. A familiar stench of rotting entrails filled his nostrils. The vat was almost full.

  Stefan swallowed hard and called Mikhal over. There was no other choice if they wanted to stay alive. “I can’t,” Mikhal said, horrified.

  Secretly, Stefan agreed. “Yes, you can,” he told him. He took a firm grip on his brother and lifted him up onto the edge of the vat.

  “Take a deep breath,” he told Mikhal. “Take a deep breath and pray.”

  Stefan lifted a leg over the edge of the vat so that he was balanced over the mass of stinking entrails. Part of him could not believe he was about to do this. The other part of him told him that he had to.

  Mikhal looked at him in horror and disgust. “I know,” Stefan said. “But I promised. I promised father.”

  He pushed Mikhal backwards into the slippery mass, then followed on, trying not to crush Mikhal beneath him. His eyes, nose and mouth filled with a cold oily pulp that stank beyond belief. Stefan choked and gagged, fighting to draw breath. The darkness enveloping them was total. After a while Stefan pushed an arm upwards until it broke through the surface of the vat. A little light and air leaked in.

  Stefan spat out the vile tasting scraps that had forced their way into his mouth. He whispered Mikhal’s name quietly and heard his brother sob a muted reply.

  “How long?” his brother whimpered.

  “Hush…” Stefan felt for Mikhal’s hand in the oily mess and tried to take a grip upon it. “We must wait,” he said.

  At first there was only the silence, and the distant sounds of fighting in the village. Then Stefan thought he heard another sound, closer at hand. The sound of the door being opened. Not kicked apart, like the other houses in the village, but eased open gently, as though someone were playing a game of hide and seek.

  He listened carefully, tracking the muffled footsteps around the interior of the salting shed. Stefan felt his body begin to tremble. The footsteps completed a half-circuit of the room and then stopped. For a full minute the silence was absolute.

  Stefan held his breath. The urge to look outside and see what was happening was overwhelming.

  Then a voice spoke somewhere in the darkness. It was the voice of the white-faced Norseman, the man that he had wounded, speaking in Stefan’s mother tongue.

  “Boys,” he drawled, slowly, slurring his speech around the foreign words. “You come out now, be good. You be safe with us. You see.”

  Stefan clamped a hand tight over Mikhal’s mouth. His heart was pounding so hard in his chest he was sure it could be heard all round the room.

  “Boys! You do a bad thing with knife. You got to say sorry now!”

  Then a second voice. Stefan couldn’t tell what the second man was saying, but his tone sounded harsh, impatient. Outside there was a sudden explosion, and light flashed through the window-slats. Shouts rang out, some in Norse, some in Kislevite.

  The first voice cursed in Norse, then shouted out again Stefan’s own language: “I find you, one day. I find you, I promise.” Then Stefan heard the sound of the door being thrown open, and footsteps retreating into the distance.

  More than anything else, Stefan wanted to climb out from the vat. His body was chilled through and soaked in cloying, stinking oil that covered him from head to foot. His wrist throbbed savagely from the encounter with the norse. Yet he understood that the only possibly safe place for the two of them was right there. Somehow he did not think the norse would be back.

  He tried his best to hug Mikhal and give him some reassurance. He did his best to find some way of getting comfortable and the confines of the cold, filthy tank.

  And he waited, waited for he knew not what.

  The faint messages from the world outside changed as the night wore on. At first the sounds of battle had intensified; the clash of steel and inhuman screams of triumph or pain seemed at one point to be ringing the building itself. It was impossible to tell which way the battle was going. He could only hope that, somehow, his father had prevailed and the invaders had been destroyed.

  Gra
dually the sounds receded, fading into the background as the fighting either drew farther away, or simply ended. Perhaps, Stefan thought, the Norsemen had given up. Or perhaps there was no one left to fight. He pushed the thought away, and waited. Miraculously, Mikhal had fallen into an uneasy sleep, punctuated by moans and, sometimes, yelps of pain. But Stefan had not the heart to wake him. Who knew what the new day was to bring for either of them?

  Stefan came to with a jolt, shocked by the realisation that he, too, had fallen asleep. He had no idea how long now they lad lain hidden, but faint grey light had begun to creep through the windows of the salting house. Dawn had come.

  He listened. Now there was no sound at all, above the steady whisper of Mikhal’s breathing. Nothing. Even the birds were silent.

  His body ached with stiffness and cold, and his wrist throbbed with incessant pain. Stefan raised his left hand and looked at it. A broad red gash had been carved across the palm. The salty slurry had served to staunch the flow of blood, but the wound was deep, and would take a long time to heal.

  He found he had lost most of his sense of taste and smell, which was probably just as well, for he surely stank. Stefan stood up slowly until he was able to rest his arms on the lip of the vat and look out across the salting house floor.

  Sooner or later, he knew, they would have to find the courage to venture out. And it might as well be now. He doubted anyhow that he could bear hiding in the stinking vat of entrails any longer.

  Everything was exactly as it was the day before, or a thousand days before that. And it was quiet, peaceful even. Just for a moment Stefan allowed himself the childish hope that, somehow, all of that dark night had been just a dream. He stifled the thought quickly and stirred his brother.

  “We can get out now. Go and find father.”