by Steve Curry
How could I turn away after a gift like that? I turned to the shadowed doorway and stepped through it over the space where the hound had lain. I found myself in a small barracks room with two or three squads of men. Each of us was armed in our preferred mix of leather, chainmail rings or plates, and studs. There were even a handful of the crazy bastards that run in all but naked. Maybe a dozen warriors carried bows. The bows ranged from sturdy longbows to the exotic composite recurves of laminated wood and horn. The latter bows some of us had picked up in Constantinople while others found them on later forays in places we didn’t rightly belong.
I felt a hand on my upper arm and turned to find Kara the stormy gazing at me possessively. She grinned sharp and hungry before giving me a kiss that fired my blood like no mead or ale ever could. “Yours is the Honor Chosen. Sound the call.”
I lifted my spear and slammed the hard ash shaft against the metal boss that centered my circular shield. “HONOR!”
Four score or more voices roared it back at me. “For HONOR!”
“Odin All-father!” I tried to outmatch all of their voices with my lone cry.
“For the All-father!” Oh, they were my brothers. Each ready and eager for the fray.
“KARA the Stormy!” Our Valkyrie lived up to her name. Stormy, tempestuous, unpredictable and fierce in her passions, Kara was our leader, our priestess and for more than a few of us our lover.
“For KARA!!” If Odin had heard the exuberance and devotion in that final cry he might have been wroth with jealousy. The one-eyed can be almost as unpredictable as Kara herself. But he was not there and we had to hope he was not watching from the high seat.
On the dying echoes of her name, Kara shouted a trio of runes in her eagerly sharp voice. The back wall of the room burst into rolling clouds that parted to reveal roars of artillery and the howls of men dying and being killed. Rifle fire thundered from one edge of a narrow valley to the other while a mass of men in Scottish plaid tried to maintain an orderly retreat despite the vastly larger army pursuing them. Into that maelstrom we poured.
For a change, we were not disguised as contemporaries in whichever engagement we fought. The forces below us all carried rifles and other fairly modern weapons. A few machine guns barked their incessant defiance before their team would uproot the guns and fall back to another position. Time and again the lines would fall back and then reorganize to fire withering fusillades at their enemies in stone grey woolen tunics and breeks.
We, on the other hand, were clad as many of us had for battle before ever being chosen to bide in Valhalla. I had a sturdy byrnie of rings and leather that left most of my arms bare but covered the rest from throat to mid-thigh. Around my neck, a twisted iron torc rested to help divert blades that might take my head. A heavy round shield backed with leather and strengthened with an iron boss rested on my left arm while my right arm bore the heavy boar spear I preferred. At my right hip, a short heavy ax hung. At my left, a lang-seax or longer sword-length seax was sheathed. It’s smaller cousin the seax rode horizontally from the belt across my backside.
From behind us Kara’s pearly steed thundered up. The valkyrie launched herself into the saddle without letting the horse break stride. She darted ahead and I could swear she bounded up and into the sky above us as my brothers poured forth.
Arrows hummed from all around me. They struck down and pierced the useless woolen cloth of our foes. Men fell by the dozens while others stood transfixed. I saw more rolling clouds to either side erupt and spew forth more of my brothers. We flooded onto that battlefield between the scots and the Danes on one side, and a quarter-million bewildered Germans on the other.
Had they kept their wits the Germans could easily have mown us down. True we were fierce and strong but we were even more outnumbered than those we came to save. Most of us were armored but what armor can turn away a hail of bullets? Finally, though we are hardy and preternaturally tough, every single one of. us had died at least once. Most of us had fallen in battle dozens of times. We knew we could be blown into pieces but we also knew that Kara would gather us back to her and we would rise in Valhalla to boast of our deeds on this battlefield.
That was perhaps the secret of our success that day on the banks of the Mons-Conde Canal. We knew no fear and we were not surprised by the foes we faced. The Germans were ill-equipped for our attack though. To them, we were a supernatural or even divine force that was possibly immune to their mortal weapons. They stood stunned as I led my own force explosively into their ranks. It was shield and spear against bayonet and firearms. Some few rounds were deflected by armor or shields.
My own arms had been prepared with the help of a Lapland sorceror. Between his arcane arts and my own, admittedly inexpert, understanding of runes, my armor was far superior to anything made up to that day and time. I remember one bayonet catching my shield arm. But that man fell tripping over his own entrails that spilled from a lateral slash of my heavy bladed spear. I pinned a machine-gunner to a tree with a toss of that same spear and then went to shield and sword.
More than one skull cracked under the rim of my shield, and more than a few faces were crushed by that same shield’s iron boss. At the same time, my sword whipped out and around to remove hands at the wrist or legs at the knee. Once a wooden stock shattered under that masterwork of a bladesmith.
I lost the sword when a bullet took off two of my fingers. An explosion caught my shield and ripped it away but the Lapland sorcery stopped that same force from laying me low.
Missing fingers made the ax too heavy. I lifted it from my belt and tossed it to the shield hand while my maimed right swept the seax from its sheath behind me. Perhaps half of my brothers remained. We fought like wolves though. Crashing into pockets of germans in groups of two or three we circled and slashed until they fell or fled. Occasionally they simply overpowered us with their modern weapons. More often they fled before our fiendish battle-fever.
I stabbed a clean-cut looking youngster wielding a pistol and shouting orders. He must have been a freshly promoted officer or perhaps someone had purchased his commission. That mattered little as his lifeblood arced up from the severed vessels in his throat. When I spun around from that kill, I found myself surrounded by a tithe of our original force. Glimpses of mail and broken shields marked where some of them lay. Others were sunk in the bogs or too entangled with a foe to spot easily.
Kara’s horse walked towards us with an almost dainty step. The steed looked as fresh as a summer morning and bore no mark of fire or blade. Kara herself radiated a visible glow as her battle fervor fed the magic of the wolf-maidens. I felt my feet slide out from under me. The ground jarred into my butt and I had to grit my teeth against the unexpected pain radiating from my middle.
When I looked down, maybe that young officer hadn’t been as bewildered and frightened as I thought. It looked as if he’d emptied the pistol into my gut with the barrel pressed up against my armor. Cherry red links bore evidence of the contact fire while blood welled bright and heavy through those holes and streamed down my legs. I saw Kara coming closer. Her eyes were fever bright and she licked her lips as if hungry or aroused.
“Oh, what have you let happen?”(Magnus was not the name she used, but even in my dreamworld I dared not think the other name that might bring attention that could compel me back to Valhalla again.) I knew what was coming. It had happened before. Normally she did a better job of dulling our memories first. I recalled a couple of instances when she’d been sloppy or perhaps sadistic and let the memories remain. Next, she would find some bloodthirsty manner of ending my struggle, and I would awake in Valhalla.
Over Kara’s shoulder, I saw the Valkyrie Gondul riding away from her own troops. They too were resting. The Germans we’d faced were long gone but others were plainly moving against other troops of the British Expeditionary force. Gondul the Wand Bearer rode into a dense woods that sheltered a ragged looking bunch of brits from the quickly approaching germans. I saw her gesture to t
he weary men and then silently lead them into a narrow cleft that would circle away from the germans and allow the brits to escape.
Then there was a sharp pain at the base of my skull.
6
I “woke up” standing in a doorway facing an empty sod hut. Something like that’s enough to make you question your sanity. I mean it’s not every day you wake up and you’re still in a dream. Guillermo didn’t give me time to dwell on that though. His voice buzzed near my ear like an old crackly radio. “Boy, you gotta be more careful. Can’t say much this way. But you were in trouble there. Yank on my anchor if I need to drag ya back.”
The “radio” interference disappeared as quickly as it showed up. I found myself alone in a dark landscape again. Suddenly the buildings and their guards took on new significance. I wasn’t sure if the “guards” were some construct of my own psyche or a machination from Kara or the All-father. It was apparent that the buildings all held secreted memories. I couldn’t figure out what was in that last battle though that needed to be kept from me.
With a shrug, I moved deeper into the circle of huts while my eyes kept straying to the larger building on the other side of the bonfire. Somehow it seemed even larger now than when I first saw it. Was it possible that the buildings themselves were mutable and morphing as I understood more about whatever this quest was?
On the other hand, I was just guessing. Who knew whether I was right about any of this. I thought I’d been volunteered into this whole damned mess with a supposed shaman guide. The fact that I suspected he was a charlatan didn’t matter. What mattered was, I was stuck in this crazy situation without even the dubious support of said shaman.
Okay then. I’d been in worse situations. Not many this outright nuts, but plenty of corners just as tight. Maybe I’d died in most of those corners but...Nevermind. Focus on the quest Mags.
The ratio was about one dog to every three other figures. Maybe the doorways without dogs weren’t as important. Then again maybe I had no idea what the Hel was going on. There was only one way to tell.
I deliberately chose a doorway that only had a small snow-covered hump in the doorway. Edging forward I could see into that shadowed interior no better than I could any of the others. With a shrug, I parted the worn rags covering the door. Under my fingers, the material was both coarse and oily. It felt like a burlap bag soaked in motor oil, or a wool cloth treated with linseed to make it waterproof.
Memories of pushing aside just such a weatherproofed door came to my mind. I tried to recall. It had been my fourteenth or fifteenth year. We counted our years differently then. It was close to the same as modern calendars. Instead of twelve months though we had thirteen moons or the days that it took our lunar neighbor to go through all of its changes of appearance. This had been late in the lean cold months.
With spring about to return, there was talk of crewing a few ships and heading out to gather some goods to make life easier during the next long winter. The decisions were two-fold. Would our money be better spent on trading ships or raiders? And which direction would they sail? The memory was clear enough that I felt the crispness in the morning air. Icicles shot a rainbow of beams out to dance along the lattice of frozen snow coating the smokehouse with the waterproof cloth over its door. I could even smell the smoke and the rich welcome scents of a few hams left with the fish and other meats hanging in the shed.
As I stood transfixed by the clarity of a memory from a thousand years ago, the hump of snow at my feet stirred. I looked down in surprise. There was no fear. My mind was too bemused by other things at that moment. When the waist-high little girl writhed her way out of the snow though, there was a brief spike of confusion and maybe just a touch of fear. I didn’t feel concerned until she locked her rigid fingers into a chunk of firewood as large as her entire torso.
She stared at me through cold dead eyes of blue almost pale enough to be white. They were set in a face that was a mottled mixture of greys, blues, and mauve or purple. The ease with which she swung the log at me told me that this was a veritable nightmare again. She opened a mouth to scream. Instead of a scream though, the blackened ruins of her mouth exhaled a putrid stench of decay and vileness that made me want to drop to my knees and heave away whatever spirit food might be in this phantom gut of mine.
The weakness from the previous fight coupled with my nausea probably saved my...umm, life? My knees buckled and as a result the chunk of lumber barely glanced off the top of my head before splintering against a stone standing nearby. If she’d caught me squarely, it would have popped my head like an overripe grape between stone and wooden cudgel. Even the near-miss left me reeling. Which was time enough time for her to kick my legs out from under me.
I was terrified that to hit the stone-hard frozen ground would stun me worse or give her another opportunity to use that inhuman strength to crush something near and dear to me, like a limb or head, or my nethers. I simply knew, I did not guess or surmise, I KNEW that if I hit the ground at full force I was done.
For some reason though, that never happened. Maybe it was all of the adrenaline. I’ve heard people in wrecks discuss a similar phenomenon. Time quite suddenly slowed to a snail’s pace. My fall became leisurely and not at all frightening. In fact, I had time to brace and shift my weight all while considering my diminutive but powerful attacker. I obviously couldn’t meet her strength for strength. She swung that log sized bit of firewood like a wand or an orchestra baton. Somehow I didn’t want to play her tune though.
As I hit, I rolled. The chunk of wood was down to about the length of my forearm. That was still enough to ruin my day if she managed to connect. Apparently, she expected my roll because she lunged forward to hit me as I rolled to avoid her attack. Which means it was a good thing that I rolled towards her rather than away. With the supernaturally strong arm stretched over me to strike down, I was in a perfect position to use my greater mass and a little leverage.
The terrifying but relatively tiny figure arced over my hip with a little assistance from a judo style maneuver we’d learned long ago. I jerked on that extended arm to give a little more momentum to the Draugr as she left the ground. After that, it was just a matter of shielding my eyes from sparks when she hit the bonfire a few feet away.
Hey, when I was a youngling everybody knew that fire was the best cure for a number of undead and fey creatures that might come calling. Zombies like Draugr were definitely at the top of the flammable foes list. She went up like her clothes were soaked in kerosene.
This time I hadn’t taken any serious wounds, but for some reason, I felt just as weak and even more insubstantial than when I finished the hound. That was something to worry about. Guillermo had said I was in danger. He hadn’t mentioned the fight necessarily though. Was the danger less “physical” than I’d been assuming? For that matter, what would happen even if I did get wounded or die in a place that only existed in my own mind?
Would the shock kill me? I’d heard that tale hundreds of times. To die in a dream was to die for real. I’d also heard that we have more control over our dreams than that. Some analysts claim that the dream will shut down before we witness our own deaths even symbolically. But did any of this apply to the work of what I had to admit was a pretty convincing shaman?
I wanted to wake up. If I went on with this, would I wake up in the desert, or in Valhalla though? Finally, I decided it didn’t really matter. If you learn one thing in a life as long as mine, it’s that you can’t start giving up. Once you start something, you finish it. Maybe you have to regroup and plan some more, but you don’t stop just because you’re scared or confused.
One of our frequent martial arts instructors quoted Confucius at us. The one that really stuck was, “It does not matter how slow you go, as long as you do not stop.” So I didn’t stop.
When I flipped the cloth out of the doorway this time I found myself standing outside that smokehouse in my youth. A fat goose hanging from my fist was a rare and lucky find for the time
of year. After I hung it beside the hams and rows upon rows of salted fish in the smoke, I walked back out into the cold morning air, and saw her for the first time.
Her name was Frejarefn. She must have been born already showing the lustrous black tresses she’d grown into by the time we met. That was the first thing I noticed. Dark brown and red hair was not uncommon in our village. But hair as black as midnight with a shine as if the moon and sun always followed her, that was rare. She was of an age with me, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, perhaps a year or two older. Already her young figure was developing the shape that would draw men to her. I saw almost every young man and more than a few of the older ones pause to give her an appreciative glance or a slight smile.
I fell on my face rather than go with a smile. It wasn’t necessarily an intentional display, however once committed I fell with gusto. It started with one foot catching on the other and ended several stumbling steps later. Of course, by then I’d managed to find a fairly expansive puddle of muck and mud to land in. That was how I met Frejarefn. I knew she would be mine sometime after that first meeting. There standing alone in the chill village of my mind though, I stared at the darkened doorway and yearned to see her again. Perhaps the worst part was not remembering her well at all. I just knew we were important to each other.
It might have all been a mental construct, but I was glad to be alone. I couldn’t explain my tears to myself. It would have been even more difficult to try and explain to Maureen or that pearly smiled old Indian.
With a roll of the shoulders, I pushed the melancholy away. So far I’d learned that many of my memories were clouded and guarded. I still didn’t know who was responsible or why it had happened. But it seemed like a good time to get to the bottom of it all.
Disregarding the other buildings for the moment, I centered my attention on the carved doorway of the longhouse. It seemed even more massive and more forbidding than ever. However, it surprised me that there seemed to be no guards at the door. That took some thinking. Then again I wasn’t sure how much time I had for thinking. Hadn’t I been in this place for a long time already? The battle at Mons alone had lasted several hours. So how long could one spend on a spiritual journey without doing some kind of psychic or even physical damage?