Berserker Series, Book 1

by Emmy Laybourne

  Stieg and Knut sat across the aisle from them. Knut dozed heavily against the window, and Stieg was rereading Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.

  “Look, Stieg,” Hanne said. “Look at the cattle!”

  “Must be two thousand of them,” Stieg marveled. “Have you ever imagined so many cows in one place at a time?”

  Two young women Hanne’s age wandered back, likely from first class. It was common for people to roam the train. Such a long journey made for many dull hours. Stieg had walked the train many times, making friends all the way.

  These two girls might have been twins, with the same bright blue eyes and petite, pinched noses, except one was decidedly prettier. She wore a brown traveling dress with blue trim. The other wore a similar outfit in shades of gray and lavender.

  Hanne’s foot had strayed slightly into the aisle, and the first young lady stopped and stared pointedly at Hanne’s shoe with pursed lips.

  Hanne pulled it back, and the young lady stepped past. Hanne caught sight of her neat, buttoned-up boots under her swishing skirts.

  “Poor Swedes,” the girl said to her sister. “Can you imagine wearing shoes with wooden soles—”

  “Clomping around like a horse,” her sister finished the sentence.

  Hanne’s face burned. The mother with her children pretended not to hear the slight, and the girls swished by.

  “Sister,” Stieg said loudly in his measured English. “Have you heard what the British poet Samuel Butler said? ‘It is tact that is golden, not silence.’ Novel concept.”

  The girls turned, startled, looking back at Hanne and Stieg.

  “I wonder when it will take hold in America,” he added.

  “Not soon enough, I think,” Hanne said in return.

  The girls stared like iced fish, eyes round, mouths open. It was apparently difficult to believe that people dressed like the Hemstads might speak English so well.

  The tired mother stifled a little peep of delight.

  Stieg was grinning.

  “Beg pardon,” one of them had the manners to say. Red faced, they bundled back through the car toward the safety of first class.

  Stieg popped out of his seat.

  “I’m going to walk a bit,” he told his sister. “I’ll be back shortly.”

  She watched Stieg walk down the aisle, noticing how dark his blond hair appeared—purely from the dirt. Hanne’s pride at his witty comment leached away, leaving her feeling ashamed of her appearance, and that of her siblings. Their clothes were so sour and dirty and stiff they could stand up by themselves.

  Hanne looked at Sissel’s woolen wrap. It had been homespun gray to begin with, but was now sooty and soiled near to black in places. The hem was ragged. There would be no laundering the wrap. It was fit for rags and little else.

  With the balance of their first gold coin, could they each buy a new wardrobe? Could they buy American boots with buttons?

  Hanne knew it was wasteful thinking but she also imagined that having some new clothes, in an American style, might be a peace offering she could make to her sister. Sissel had said scarcely a word to Hanne since they’d left Norway, only speaking when necessary. It pained Hanne to have a rift between them. At home, there had not been great love between them, but they spoke, even if only to tease each other.

  A dove-gray traveling dress with lavender trim would likely ease the distance. At the least, it would bring them together because Sissel would need her to do up the buttons in the back.

  In a few minutes the train would come into a station at a town called Livingston. From what she could tell on the map, Livingston was a larger town than most they had passed, a hub of some kind. Hopefully there would be some food to buy at one of the train-station-side shops, or perhaps someone would board with bagged suppers for sale.

  The quality of the food they had experienced on the route ranged considerably, from rancid beef and oily beans to American delicacies like cold fried chicken, buttermilk biscuits, and pie. Oh, pie! Knut could eat a whole pie himself. The flaky crusts might hold any amount of ingredients, from sweet to savory. They’d had a chicken pie. And one with pecans and sugar. The sale of the pie included the pie tin. Now they had four pie tins that they used as plates or bowls from time to time. If pressed by her brothers, Hanne would admit to having some excitement about the thought of learning to make a real American pie. She felt she’d be good at it. The crust seemed not so very unlike tynnlefse dough.

  Stieg came back, much sooner than Hanne had expected, sliding into his seat without the bag supper she had hoped to see. He was worried about something.

  “What is it?” Hanne said.

  Sissel’s eyes flitted open.

  Stieg had a copy of Morgenbladet, the newspaper from home.

  “Where did you get that?” Hanne whispered.

  “A Norwegian woman sold it to me. She bought it in St. Paul, two days ago.”

  On the cover page there was a drawing and the headline COUNTRY BOY WANTED FOR TRIPLE MURDER.

  Hanne knelt beside Stieg, reading in horror.

  There was a second headline: WAS IT THE WOODWORKER’S SON?

  The sketch was of Knut. It was a decent likeness, but the eyes were all wrong. They had given him cross, menacing eyebrows and the squinty eyes of a killer.

  After what some say was a botched investigation, the police of Øystese in the Søndre Bergenhus municipality are officially seeking the arrest of farm boy Knut Amundsson. It is believed that the boy aided his father in killing three men who had come to collect a debt. The father was shot and killed during the fight.

  These grisly barn slayings have shocked our proud and peaceful nation. Though the details of the murders have been suppressed by the police, rumors say that the killings were brutal and callous beyond measure, including multiple stabbings and a dismemberment with an ax. Since the devastating murders were discovered at the farm of Amund Thorson, much speculation has occurred as to the whereabouts of Knut, as well as Thorson’s other three children. The police have come under stern criticism from many for not immediately locating them.

  Though rumors had pointed to possible kidnapping, the police have ruled it out now, and are searching for the siblings. Knut Amundsson is described as standing six feet six inches tall and weighing three hundred pounds. Who but a brute of such size could have the physical strength to slaughter with such rank force and violence? The police will come under strict scrutiny, indeed, if it is discovered that the children have fled the country, as is suspected.

  Hanne felt like all the blood in her body had drained away.

  The train began to slow as it drew into the station, and her stomach lurched along with it.

  “What’s that?” Knut said, waking up. He yawned. His yellow hair was sticking up where his head had lain against the window. He looked, sleeping and waking, like the fourteen-year-old boy he was, and not like a young man at all.

  “Nothing,” Stieg said, and he folded the newspaper and tucked it away.

  Hanne was seized by fear. Suddenly she could not breathe. Anyone on the train might know who they were.

  She shot out of her seat.

  “Hanne,” Stieg said. “What’s wrong with you? Sit down!”

  * * *

  KETIL WAS SLEEPING off a drunk, and Rolf was enjoying the quiet. Ketil had wanted to sit in the same car as the Nytteson, but Rolf had said no. He knew that Ketil could not resist provoking the children during the six-day journey to Montana. Rolf had had a much better idea. They were riding in the coach and baggage car, at the end of the train. Three cars back from the Berserker and his siblings. Rolf could see their fine, old trunk through the bars of the cage the luggage was stored inside. To his practiced eye, it was obvious that the trunk had been carved by a Shipwright. This was a family of Nytteson, no doubt about it.

  Only the conductors and the baggage handlers had access to the luggage cage. Rolf and Ketil would simply disembark when the baggage men came and removed that trunk.

 
Ketil had taunted Rolf regularly about the likelihood of losing track of the Nytteson. Rolf bore the idle abuse for the first leg of the trip—New York to Chicago. But then he’d bought Ketil a bottle of whiskey at a rail-side saloon. That had been a very fine idea.

  Ketil turned inward when drunk. He’d stopped flirting shamelessly with the girls and ladies passing through the cabin on their promenades. He’d stopped his continual boasting and was content to sit and stare out the window, and eventually he’d fallen asleep.

  Rolf had his rune stone in his hand. He liked to roll it over in his palm. It helped him to relax. The train ride made him think of poems about ships crossing the oceans. He thought of his favorite:

  The hero’s hand skimmed the foam

  As he pondered Ymir’s skull.

  The sea-steed rode the eternal waves.

  The train did seem to ride the waves of prairie grass like a ship cutting through the sea.

  Rolf closed his eyes for a moment, vaguely aware that the train was about to start moving, when he felt suddenly and keenly that something was wrong. It was akin to the sensation he’d had back at the immigration depot. It traveled from the stone in his hand up to his heart, like the wave of a current. Something was wrong with the Berserker. Rolf could sense the Berserker’s distress, as if a line connected them.

  He put his hand on Ketil’s shoulder to wake him, then thought twice of it. If he was wrong, and everything was fine with Amund’s children, then Ketil would mock him. If he was right, and something was happening, did he really want Ketil’s interference? Rolf left him to sleep.

  The train was still stopped, people disembarking, others coming aboard. A sign near a large depot read: LIVINGSTON. Rolf walked briskly up through the two compartments. He pulled open the door to the car where the young Nytteson were.

  He entered the cabin, keeping his head ducked, lest one of the Nytteson pay attention to his features. But when he looked up, the elder girl was standing in the aisle, hands in fists. She turned and stared right at him, eyes keen and furious.

  * * *

  THE MAN WHO had entered the cabin behind them, the one with the pocked face, he was a threat. Hanne felt it with certainty.

  “Get up!” she told Stieg. “We must leave.”

  “What?”

  “We must leave, now!” she said. The train was beginning to move.

  “Up!”

  Stieg and Knut hopped up.

  “Is there a problem, dear?” the tired mother asked out of politeness. “Is everything all right?”

  Hanne ignored her, grabbing Sissel and shoving her down the aisle. “Out the door! Onto the platform. All of you, go!”

  “What are you doing?” Sissel cried.

  Hanne pushed her siblings ahead of her toward the door that led outside to the platform. It was set in the side of the cabin, toward the front.

  The train began to gather speed.

  “The train’s moving!” Stieg yelled.

  Hanne’s wide eyes sought weapons. There was a chain hanging from the window blinds. She could pull it off—But no. No! She wasn’t going to kill him. She wouldn’t.

  “We can’t get off now—” Sissel protested. “What about our things?”

  “They don’t matter,” Hanne said. “We must get off this train now.”

  “Wait,” the stranger said in Norwegian. “I’m a friend.” He was stalking down the aisle toward them.

  The door to the platform was locked, but Hanne grabbed it and wrenched and the handle gave. She threw it open. Gravel and dried weeds trackside flew past in a blur.

  “Hanne, have you lost your mind?” Stieg shouted.

  “He is a bad man! He is after us.”

  “We can’t jump off the train!”

  The train wasn’t yet at full speed. They would be fine. She knew it.

  “Yes, we can!” she shouted. Then she shoved her brother out the door onto the rushing ground. Stieg hit the ground tumbling.

  Several passengers screamed, protesting.

  “Knut, jump!” she said. He stood staring in the aisle, his mouth open.

  The stranger approached, hands out. “Please, young miss, hear me out! I know who you are—what you are—”

  The Nytte flared. Overtook her instantly. There was no greater danger than someone who knew what she was.

  Hanne grabbed the man by the collar, opened the door that led to the next train car, and threw the man into the shifting space between the cars.

  The old man banged on the glass panel of the door. “I’m a friend,” he shouted in Norwegian.

  SNAP! She kicked off the handle to the door, locking the man out. He was stuck out there between the cars, hemmed in on either side by safety cables.

  BANG! The man stuck between the cars rammed on the glass with his fist.

  “This is a mistake,” he shouted. “Listen to me!”

  A concerned conductor came up behind him.

  Now the train was moving faster.

  “Jump, Knut!” Hanne yelled. He squeezed his eyes shut and leaped off.

  “Come, Sissel, we’ll hold hands.” She grabbed for Sissel’s hand just as the conductor kicked the passageway door in. It hit her squarely on the back, and she fell, tumbling down the stairs.

  She flew out the open door, into the wind and the dust. Her body hit gravel. She rolled away, away from the moving train in a cloud of grit and chipped stone.

  “Hanne!” Sissel screamed from the gaping door of the train. Hanne looked up—Sissel was poised to leap, but was afraid.

  “Jump!” Hanne screamed.

  Then the scarred man had his hand on Sissel’s arm, pulling her inside, as the train sped away.

  “Sissel!” Hanne shrieked.

  “Jump, Sissel,” shouted Stieg, from somewhere behind Hanne.

  “Let her go!” Hanne screamed at the man on the train.

  And then there was a blur. A blur of animal, moving toward Hanne.

  It was a man on a gray horse. And there was a dog, at the heels of the horse.

  The man thundered past Hanne, galloped up alongside the train, and snatched Sissel off it. Simple as that.

  The train roared away.

  The man trotted the gray horse in a wide circle, letting the horse slow on its own. Hanne rose to her feet, her back aching from where she’d been hit with the door. Her brothers walked toward her through the weeds and dry grass. She cleared grit from her eyes, nose, and mouth. She had cuts and scrapes on her hands and legs.

  Stieg grabbed her by the forearms.

  “Hanne, what in the heavens possessed you?”

  “That man,” she panted, “was a threat to us.”

  “He wanted to talk to us!”

  “He knew all about us, Stieg! He was Norwegian! He knew what I did!”

  By then the man on the horse had circled back with their sister.

  There was lather from the horse. Everyone was heaving—the horse, the dog, the man. His face was covered in dust. He wore a blanket on his shoulders. Hanne noticed this. The blanket, too, was covered in dust.

  The man bore Sissel lightly in his arms, as if she were a bunch of laundry he’d taken off a line. Sissel was weeping, pressing her face into his collarbone. Hanne could see dark spots on the dirt of his neck made by her sister’s tears.

  While he had the look of a ruffian, with a fading black eye and a wicked bruise along his jaw, there was an openness to his expression.

  The way he sat his horse, Hanne had thought him to be fully grown, but now she saw he was not much older than Stieg. He had lines near his eyes from squinting in the sun, and stubble on his jaw. Hanne realized he was a cowboy. She had seen pictures of cowboys in the newspapers. And here was one in the flesh.

  She caught herself staring at him and found he was staring at her, too. She looked away.

  It was a strange spell that had been cast. Disaster had been so narrowly averted, and by such sudden heroics. No one could think of quite what to do next.

  The cowboy still
held Sissel in his arms. He was breathing hard and looking off at the disappearing train.

  Sissel moved to be released. Knut stepped forward, and the cowboy passed Sissel into her brother’s large arms.

  “Thank you, sir! Many thanks!” Stieg was finally able to say.

  The dog wove between their legs, barking with excitement, wagging her tail. She was a white dog with large black patches on her face, and black ears.

  Sissel clung to Knut, whimpering as the dog came near. She had never gotten over her fear of dogs after the bite.

  “Down, stay,” the cowboy said to the dog. The dog stopped barking and lay down, just like that. The cowboy dismounted in one fluid movement.

  “Where did you come from?” Hanne said in English, just as Stieg said, “Sissel, are you all right?” in Norwegian.

  “I was at the depot, asking about a job, when I saw you jump from the train.”

  He took off his hat and scratched at his hair. It was very dark, and matted down from the hat brim.

  “Round here it’s custom to depart the train when it’s stopped.”

  “The fault is mine,” Hanne said. “I was afraid of a man on the train, and I said we must leave.”

  From the corner of her eye, she knew Stieg was staring at her. It was hardly characteristic of her to speak to a strange man, let alone speak the truth.

  The cowboy nodded.

  Knut had set Sissel down on her feet. She clung to her brother, pressing her face into Knut’s arm.

  “You’re all right, little miss?” he asked.

  Sissel sniffled and gave a shy shrug.

  “I guess that man from the train won’t be bothering you. Next stop’s not until Bozeman. At least twenty-five miles away.”

  “If you please,” Hanne said. “What is your name?”

  “Owen Bennett, ma’am. Pleased to meet you.”

  He reached for her hand, and she extended it. His hand was warm and large, a bit sweaty from the reins. He was careful with her hand, like it was something important.

  “I’m Hanne Hemstad,” she said. The new surname felt odd in her mouth. Like she was playacting. “These are my brothers, Stieg and Knut. And my sister, Sissel.”

  Stieg and the cowboy shook hands as well.

  “We cannot thank you enough,” Stieg said.