The hunting trip had been my idea. Not because we needed the game, but because we were young and impetuous, chafing under chores and weary of having our elders looking over our shoulders. And they, for their part, were just as glad to have us out from underfoot.
“I don’t want to be a lord,” Guthdar said, gnawing at a bone. “I will be a warrior.”
“Ah, you will not,” said Fenbjorn. “You’ll be a blacksmith, like your uncle.”
“I’ll be a blacksmith and a warrior,” Guthdar said.
“You’ll make horseshoes and cooking pots,” Ingolf said. He made a rude noise and spat into the fire.
Guthdar bristled. “Swords and spear points, axes and mail coats!”
“For what?” Thorkild asked. “To bring battle to no one?”
We fell silent for a while at that, finishing our meal, handing around a skin of weak and watered ale.
What Thorkild said was true enough, we all knew. There were no kings here, no mighty war-lords to lead great armies or fleets of beast-prowed ships. We had no enemies.
Here, there were only us, and the skraelings.
I shivered, though I did not mean to, and had no reason. It was as if some strange foreboding passed over me, but I pushed it from my mind and ignored it.
“I’ll sail,” Guthdar said at last, as if pleased with himself for thinking of it. “I’ll sail back to the countries of our grandfathers. I’ll become a warrior there.”
“I wouldn’t mind having my own ship.” Ingolf stirred the embers with a stick, watching the sparks fly. “I’d go wherever I liked, trading and raiding.”
We had news sometimes, when men hungry for it—or hungry for the sea, old friends, fresh places and faces—took loads of lumber and furs to trade for other goods. We had visitors sometimes and new neighbors when more folk chose to follow and settle.
Only once, that I could recall, had a ship come to the river-mouth of our valley that, instead of spilling forth men eager to trade and talk, had spilled forth men eager to kill. I had been a lad of eight then, too young to do anything but go with my mother when she and the rest of the women took the children and fled up into the wooded hills.
I remember, though. I remember watching from that distance as the strangers came with their swords and spears. I remember my father in his bright helm, how fast he was, how agile, how shining a warrior when I had foolishly thought him a sedate old man with strands of silver in his beard.
I remember the fathers of my friends, likewise seeming young again, and gleeful. I remember their shields and their shouting, weapons jabbing and slashing, and how I had seen the red blood spurt high into the air, how I had heard the screams of the dying.
Later, when the work of men was done, our mothers led us back down and we helped with the stripping of the corpses and their ship. Fenthris had found her leaf-bladed knife then, and, though only a child, she’d used it with ruthless fury when one of the invaders proved to have some life left in him and clutched at her, begging for mercy.
I remember, too, my mother falling upon my father, her arms around his neck, sobbing. How he had held her, comforted her, even with the blood of battle still drying upon his hands. He’d given her a necklace of gold, and given me a bronze ring in the shape of a horse’s head.
We might never know that battle fervor, the joy and terror. We might never seize plunder from our dead foes, and win glory and be known.
“I will have my own hall,” said Fenthris, stretching out her legs to warm her feet by the fire. “I will command warriors, and reward them with treasure, and have feasts every night.”
“And be a mighty lord,” said her brother. “Lord Fenthris. Will your husband nurse the babies?”
“Who says I’ll have a husband?”
“Of course you’ll have a husband. Every woman has to have a husband.”
“The daughters of Odin don’t,” Thorkild said.
“She’s no Valkyrie,” said Ingolf, whooping and slapping his leg.
I looked at Fenthris and thought she could be a Valkyrie, or a war-queen, but that she would certainly be no man’s mild and gentle wife. It would be a waste of her.
“Well,” Fenbjorn said, “you can have your small dreams, but I, Fenbjorn Fenrulfsson, will do better than any of that. I will be a hero like from the old tales. I’ll fight giants and dragons, monsters and sorceresses. My name and reputation will live a thousand years after they bury me in a hall of pure gold.”
When we were all done laughing at that, Fenthris glanced at me. “And you, Wulfric? When Guthdar is a warrior, and Ingolf a ship-master, when I am a lord and Thorkild a skald, when Fenbjorn is fighting giants, what will you be?”
I ran my thumb over my horse’s head ring, which I used to wear around my neck on a leather cord but could now fit upon my finger. I wondered if I would be as fast as my father. He had trained me and said I moved with his same speed and grace. But there was considerable difference between practice and the truth of battle.
“I don’t know,” I said, which seemed to disappoint her, disappointed them all. I was supposed to be the clever one and I could think of nothing to say, so I added the first thought that came to mind. “Maybe I’ll make friends with the skraelings, and learn their ways, learn their wild spirit-magic.”
“Live among them?” she asked, teasing. “Have a black-haired skraeling for your woman and braid feathers into your hair?”
“They’ll kill you,” Ingolf said.
“They’re peaceful enough,” I said.
“They’re cowards,” said Fenbjorn.
“They trade with us.”
“Only because they know we’re stronger. They’re afraid.”
We did not often see the skraelings. When they did come, it was along the coast, paddling in their small and narrow boats, bringing fine furs, hides, and fish. They were broad-faced and brown-skinned, dark-eyed, with hair like ravens’ wings. They had some other name for themselves but we called them skraelings for the way their words sounded, like the screeching of birds.
The fire burned low and we bundled ourselves into our cloaks to sleep beneath the high pine boughs that waved and whispered in the night breeze. I was the last to succumb, uneasy and restless, twitching to full wakefulness at every sound until at last my weariness overcame me.
I dreamt I heard my mother singing to me, and my little sister weeping. I dreamt my father stood over me, solemn and grim, as he held out to me in both his bloodied hands his sword, Ice-Wind. I dreamt of silence, and stillness.
I woke to pale dawn and Fenbjorn’s snoring. My stomach felt sick, my mouth tasted sour. A nameless urgency beat within my breast, out-matching the pace of my heart, and I shook the others from their own slumber.
“We must get home,” I said.
“It’s early yet,” said Guthdar, rolling over and drawing his cloak over his head. I kicked him in the hip and he sprang up, indignant, ready to fight, but I turned from him and grabbed my spear from where it stuck in the ground.
“What?” yawned Thorkild, his hair standing out in crazed sleep-clumps. “What is it? A bear?”
“Wulfric?” Fenthris watched me, her blue eyes wary.
I shook my head because I did not have the words, but somehow she understood whatever mood had possessed me, for she nodded and helped me break the camp.
We all shook the pine needles from our clothes, fetched our game from where we’d hung it so no scavengers could steal it, and set out through the woods toward the green river valley of home. Guthdar grumbled, and Fenbjorn protested the quick march I set, but a glare from Fenthris shamed them and they followed with no further objections.
The woods grew thinner as we neared the coast, morning sunlight trickling through the trees like golden honey. Soon, I smelled the salt air of the sea, and heard the raucous cries of gulls.
Many gulls.
“A storm must be coming,” Ingolf said.
“The sky is clear.” I pointed eastward, where no clouds loomed.
Fenthris tipped her head to one side. “The sky is very clear. Where is the smoke?”
We looked, and saw no smoke rising from the valley. No smoke from cook-fires and the ovens where bread was baked. No smoke from the smithy. No smoke at all.
Then we came closer, and saw the cluster of huts and houses that had been our village was now a butcher’s yard, where the gulls feasted on the slaughtered corpses.
None of us moved. We just stared, the six of us in a line, eyes wide and mouths hung open, our spears dangling half-forgotten from our hands. There was a meaty thump as Fenbjorn let the hunt-carcasses fall.
And we stared.
Men and women. Children and animals. The grass and earth were dark with blood beneath their strewn bodies. Some were torn to pieces, some gutted so that flies buzzed thick over the heaps of their entrails.
There was another meaty thump, this one as Guthdar fainted. Thorkild whimpered like a child, and Ingolf spun away, heaving. I thought Fenthris might scream like a girl, but she only gripped my hand so tightly I felt the bones grind together.
The nearest gulls kept their oily black gazes upon us but continued feasting. I grimaced as they dipped their skinny, hooked beaks to pluck eyes from sockets, or plunged into opened bellies to pull out long strings of gristle. They threw back their heads, and their throats worked as they swallowed their gruesome morsels down their fat, insolent gullets.
“We have to help them,” Thorkild said. “There might be survivors, wounded—”
“Oh, don’t be a fool!” Fenbjorn shouted. “Survivors? Look around you. They’re dead, every one, all of them, dead!”
He was right, but we did not want to believe him. We rushed into the village, running from house to house, calling the names of our parents, our family, our neighbors, our friends. The gulls flapped away shrieking and settled again in our wake, too greedy to leave even when we hurled stones at them. Theirs were the only answering voices, theirs the only movements besides our own.
A madness fell over us, one of anguish and grief and terror and rage. I cared nothing for what the rest did, conscious only of my own house and what I found there. The door had been wrenched loose, the furnishings thrown asunder in a terrible violence. The bodies of my mother and little sister were crumpled in the corner, broken like eggs. My father lay by the cold hearth, his head crushed, his limbs twisted at strange angles. He had died in his loose linen sleep-shift, bare-footed, and had not even had time to don his helm or seize his shield. His stiff dead fist held Ice-Wind’s hilt and the sword’s fine blade was stained with blood.
He had died defending his home. He had died a warrior.
I knelt and reached out, seeing the horse’s head ring on my finger, and took Ice-Wind from his grasp. A numbing calm replaced my panic.
They had come in the night, those who did this. Come in the night while the folk slept. Come and killed them. Not raided, not raped, not robbed. I saw untouched valuables, and undisturbed food-stores. I saw livestock that had been killed in their pens and byres. Even our faithful hounds had not escaped the carnage, but nothing had been plundered nor burned. Our two ships were as they had been, drawn up on logs on the shore of the sandy cove, where we kept them when not planning a voyage.
Eventually, one by one, the others came to join me at the flat-topped stone the men had used for their witan-meetings. They looked as I felt: their eyes bleak and hollow, their faces stunned, their color ashen.
“All dead?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“All dead,” Fenthris said.
“Murdered,” said Ingolf.
“It was the skraelings,” said Fenbjorn, his voice ragged. “The cowardly bastard skraelings did this!”
“Then where are their dead?” demanded Fenthris. “Our fathers were warriors. Our fathers would have cut them down like stalks of grain.”
“My father injured one,” I said, showing them Ice-Wind’s blade.
“They must have taken the bodies of their own with them,” Ingolf said.
“You told us they were peaceful,” Guthdar said to me.
“They were,” I said.
“They murdered our folk!” He clutched a silver bracelet I recognized as one his mother wore. There was blood crusted upon it. His lower lip trembled. Despite his size, he was close to crying.
“Why?” asked Thorkild, plaintive. “Why attack us? Why attack us and take nothing?”
“And how?” That was Fenthris again. “With their stone-flake knives and arrowheads?”
“By treachery,” Fenbjorn said with a snarl. “They came slinking in the night like curs and vipers to destroy us all.”
I said, “But they reckoned without us. We lived. We live!”
“So…” Thorkild looked up at me, his cheeks wet from tears, holding the pieces of his harp. “What do we do?”
They all looked at me, expectant.
In the end, we realized we could not bury our folk and kin. There had been more than fifty men in our village, and their women and children, as well as some slaves. We could not dig so many graves nor could we build a big enough pyre. It would have to be one of the ships.
We spent the rest of that day, the longest and hardest day we had ever known, gathering corpses. It was grisly work, and terrible. We carried them. We dragged them on sledges. We placed them in the belly of the larger ship, which was called Sea Thunder for the great cracking sound her oars made when they struck the rough water. We put staves and cudgels with each man so he would not go weaponless, but we saved back their swords, their axes, their bronze-tipped spears. We put tools, toys and other grave-goods into the ship as well.
Then we stacked the Sea Thunder with firewood and roof-thatching, and pushed it down the rolled ramp of logs until it floated in the cove. The sun had nearly set by then, making the whole of the western sky blaze with its own flames of crimson, orange and gold. We brought torches, lit the pyre, and said nothing as the tide swept the burning ship out into the vastness of the sea.
“If they see it,” said Fenthris, “they will know they missed some of us, and return to finish it.”
“Let them come,” Fenbjorn said. He hefted an axe. “Let them come and die.”
“You want to fight them?” Thorkild squeaked the words like a mouse.
“Vengeance,” said Guthdar, who now wore his mother’s bracelet on his own wrist. “We must have vengeance.”
“Or die ourselves in pursuit of it,” Ingolf said. “We’ll die anyway left alone, the six of us.”
“We won’t… will we? Wulfric?” Thorkild looked to me again.
“We could survive a while,” I said, sweeping an arm to encompass the empty village. “We have the food-stores, the shelter of our houses. We could even become farmers and fishermen.” They made faces at that, and I did not blame them, for the words were sour on my tongue. “But we have no livestock, and Fenthris is right. Sooner or later, they’ll return.”
“Even if they don’t,” added Ingolf, “there’s not much future for us here with one girl to share among the five of us.”
Fenthris hit him.
“The four of us, I mean,” he said, rubbing his arm where her fist had struck. “Since she is Fenbjorn’s sister—”
Fenthris hit him again, splitting his lip against his teeth and knocking him down.
“That’s enough!” I stepped between them, giving each a harsh glare. “We’re not here forever. Traders have visited before, and other ships—”
“Yes!” Thorkild nearly danced in his excitement. “Other ships, or… we have the Wolf’s Jaw! We can go away from here—”
“The Wolf’s Jaw needs a crew of a dozen at least,” I said. “If we set out in her, we will drift until we starve or sink.”
“And if we must die,” said Ingolf, wiping at the blood that had run into his sparse beard, “better to die in battle as our fathers did.”
No one could disagree with him.
“We will not die tonight,” I told them. “We will arm ourselves,
and bring food, and hide in the woods again so we won’t be found. Tomorrow, in daylight, we’ll decide what to do next.”
They did as I said. I found my father’s mail coat, but it was large enough for two of me and heavy, so I did not wear it. His bright helm, I did take, and the belt and scabbard that went with Ice-Wind.
Soon, we were ready. We had food and weapons, and we buried a hoard of the most valuable items—gold and silver, amber and ivory, jewelry adorned with precious gems—deep beside the witan-stone. Then we went into the woods to hide, with no fire and with each of us taking watches in turn while the rest slept.
While the others slept.
I did not. There seemed no sleep in me, even after all the day’s grief and hard labors.
Fenthris sat with me when her own watch was done, and we listened to the wind in the trees, and to Fenbjorn’s snoring. Finally, she spoke and asked me if I did think it had been the skraelings who’d done the slaughter.
I shrugged. “You were right about their stone knives, and our fathers. How could they have done it?”
“Spirit-magic?” she said.
I loosed a breath, and my shoulders slumped.
“You don’t want it to be,” she said. “You like them, the skraelings.”
“I like them,” I said, “but if they did this, I will finish what my father started, and kill as many of them as I can before I fall.”
“You won’t fall. You have us.” She leaned over to press a quick kiss against my mouth, astonishing me so I could not put two words together. Then she was gone, back to her sleeping-place.
Thorkild, whose turn it was at watch, saw the kiss and grinned at me so widely I thought he’d pop like a pine knot in the fire. I made a show of scrubbing my hand across my lips, but in my secret heart, I was delighted.
Morning did come, though the sky was hazed and the sea was sullen. We returned to the edge of the woods to look out into the valley, finding it a still-dismal sight with the corpses of our animals being fed upon by the gulls and more scavengers. There was no indication that anyone had gone back there during the night.
The Raven's Table Page 8
