by Steve Curry
In short order I had an ear dangling, at least one bone was broken in my left wrist, and one of his spear swings had done something painful and problematic to my eye socket. I hadn’t been able to focus well but I could see the splash of crimson all over his legs and groin. I’d hit something that was sending a fresh surge of blood down his front every time he lunged. On the other hand, it was increasingly hard to see where his spear would come from next.
With a death blow all but inevitable I decided to take a chance. This time I saw his spear darting at me. Instead of weaving aside or interjecting my shield between us, I rushed. The spear hit my mail and parted it to find meat at my shoulder. The pain was searing and all but stopped me. I’d expected it though. I swallowed the pained cry and pushed further into the spear, trapping it between my body and the heavy shield dangling uselessly from that arm.
With my eyesight fading, I fell onto the ugly giant and started ripping the blade into him like a sack of wheat or side of beef. We never did discuss which of us blacked out first that night. In fact, we never discussed anything at all except on a mission.
I didn’t know why we hated each other, but it had been a hot and violent hatred that didn’t end on the battlefield. Most such fights are forgotten by the time we wake for the next fight, or feast, or training session. Our hate never faded.
We were both trained enough not to let it affect a job though. At least we usually were. While I was still looking for another Cheyenne brave to use for my part of the job, Lorcan piped up in that guttural accented bestial Norse of his. I looked to where he was pointing at a particularly well built teenage Cheyenne girl. “Look at that fetching squaw, she reminds me of your little wife with the midnight hair.”
Just like that, the Indian in front of me didn’t matter. His age, his size, the mission, none of it mattered in that long breath of a moment. I didn’t think of my pretty little raven-haired Freja every hour of every day. But I missed her desperately when I did recall our life together. I also never recalled Lorcan meeting Frejarefn.
I found myself looking at Lorcan over my shoulder with the Indian kid locked in place by a hand as cold and hard as stone.“What about my wife? How do you know about her?”
Lorcan laughed at that. Oh, his eyes were filled with the hate we carried. But there was also cruel triumph there. “HA! You don’t remember, do you? Did old All-Father take those memories or was it smoldering dark Kara? I wonder why they took those memories eh hero? Well, let me give you some of it back. You know about the spear scar in your chest, but do you think about the smaller scar between your shoulder blades?”
I hated to admit it but he had a point. I rarely thought of the handful of scars I kept after taking the spear in my chest. There was a small one just inside my left shoulder blade though. I’d assumed it was a shallow knife wound or some accident. Kara liked running her fingers across it when we were alone together.
“Aye dwarfkin, that was my arrow that took you in the back. It found your heart even before the spear sundered it. I was always proud of that shot. Always figured that’s why you hated me as much as I hated you. I’d planned to give that little wife of yours some special attention too. We had her trapped in the house behind us when you came back home. My fellows took you while you were still outside. They kept you busy until I got my shot. Oh, it was sweet. You folded like a doll and just sat there on your knees as the spear came in to finish a job already done.”
His gloating became less smug and much angrier in a flash. “And then that little midnight bird of yours fileted me with my own seax. Oh, she was quick she was. Pulled it from my back and drove it to the hilt in my right kidney. Ripped it out sideways and took the other kidney. She was a fiery thing. Loved you to the last. I could see it in her eyes as my hands closed on her throat. You didn’t deserve a woman like that midget.”
The blowing snow and the sound of angry men around me faded to nothing under a new roaring that I barely knew was my own blood pounding within my head. In an instant, I recalled my death vividly. I saw it as if from another’s eyes. The two men fighting me outside my own home, the flash of a feathered shaft. I’d never remembered the arrow before but his words unlocked the entire scene. I knew that the reason I fought all but barehanded against two armed men was to protect the woman in the house behind me. And I knew that I failed.
Suddenly there was too much going on in my head. A memory within a memory inside a dreamworld, it was too much. I lost control of my own actions and watched helplessly as my own hands twisted the rifle into the youngster’s hands and put his fingers through the trigger guard. I switched from the Norse we’d been speaking to a phrase I’d learned from Madoc years ago. “Mae chwarae’n troi’n chwerw wrth chwarae hefo tan.”
Lorcan understood. “Things can turn sour when you play with fire.”
Today they might say. “You mess with the bull, you get the horn.” or even more to the point, “Sucks to be you.”
I jerked the rifle inside the Indian youth’s hands with the barrel pointed at Lorcan’s lower belly. He had turned more towards me when I spoke. At the time he’d cornered a pair of Indians who kept telling him that one of them couldn’t understand what he was saying about giving up any weapons.
The shot caught him by surprise and I saw the agony in his face as the ugly .45 caliber lead ripped into his intestines and possibly tore up his groin in the process. I barely registered the Indian kid as my own revolver came up and took off part of his smooth brown jaw and dropped him like a puppet with cut strings. My eyes were locked on Lorcan as he dropped to his knees and tried to control the waves of pain, or at least control his gut. He wasn’t up to it. Blood and breakfast came spilling down his coat front at the same time his bowels emptied.
An indisputably masculine voice that belonged to no man bellowed out an order. “Kill them all!”
I hadn’t even known Kara was around. But when your own Valkyrie calls, it jerks your soul in whatever direction she wishes. I fired two more shots into the kid as I ripped the gun out of his hands. It took a second to thumb the next cartridge through the trapdoor. It wasn’t easy. Kara’s voice had twisted me into a near berserker frenzy. I wanted to club and chop my way with the heavy wooden stock and triangular bayonet. I got the cartridge in though. My job wasn’t done.
Well, part of the job wasn’t done. My part was clear. I had to start the fight with some level of deniability for the 7th cavalry. I knew Lorcan was supposed to kill someone in particular though. He obviously wasn’t going to do that from a puddle of his own entrails and the contents of said entrails. That meant I had to find his target and finish the job. After that, I could chop merrily away until we were done and all went to get a beer. That wasn’t very likely though. It was much more likely that I’d fall biting and clawing to the end.
I clubbed down a handful of warriors between me and the old man still dancing and yelling encouragement to his braves. Yellow Bird he was called. A Sioux medicine man should know better than to start dabbling with the God of the Cross. Yellow Bird and some of his Sioux brethren had begun what they called a ghost dance. They thought that if they kept the circle going and sang their songs right then the Indian way of life would be restored, the buffalo would return and there would come a time of plenty.
Old Yellow Bird never found out if he was right. I saw him dancing and yelling at the young braves who had managed to sneak a handful of rifles along. They flung aside their blankets as the soldiers inside their camp started firing blindly into the natives around them.
Old Yellow Bird got one lucky shot in. I saw his belt knife almost remove the nose of one of the soldiers nearest him. The medicine man grabbed a rifle from the ground. I don’t know if it was his hidden there or if the soldier had dropped one. It didn’t really matter. My .45-70 round took him before he could even get the thing shouldered.
After that, I was released from the mission. Once more Kara’s will had used me for a job as if I was no more than a marionette and her the puppet
eer. The job was over, but Kara’s bellowed orders still burned marrow-deep in my very bones. I clubbed down a blanket wrapped figure before me and stabbed into someone coming out of one of the shadowed tents. All around me there were shots and the sounds of battle as well as the confused and terrified cries of other natives. It lasted from seconds to minutes before the light artillery pieces on the hill opened up. Explosive shells hit amongst the tents and blew up into shrapnel. One whole teepee simply disintegrated into shreds of cloth riddled with fingertip-sized holes.
Behind that tent, I saw a Sioux warrior calmly drive a spike into the ground. The spike anchored one end of a long sash that he uncoiled from around him until a few feet were strung between him and the spike. I’d seen similar things in my own time. This was a warrior. A fighter of honor and conviction making a statement. And that statement was; This far and no further. I make my stand here.
Around him, a couple of soldiers charged. One of them fired his revolver as fast as he could thumb back the trigger. Either he was a helluva bad shot or that was one tough Indian. The other trooper executed a textbook butt-smash with his rifle followed by a downward sweep of the bayonet and another textbook stab with the same weapon. The warrior rode the buttsmash as if it was a gentle pat. He twisted so that the slash missed him by inches and then twisted the other direction so that the triangular bayonet barely hooked meat along his ribs.
The rifleman took a crudely made handaxe to the face. The same ax took away the pistolero’s revolver as well as the hand holding it. With an absolute lack of expression, the warrior shattered his disarmed opponent’s breastbone with the same ax. That was my kind of fight. I barked a grunting challenge that caught his attention and then scooped up a fallen spear to engage this brother warrior. He didn’t deserve to die at the guns of these berserk cavalrymen. His would-be a clean death at the hands of another warrior.
He seemed to smile and gestured for me to join him in a dance only one of us would finish. My spear thrust wasn’t textbook. When I learned to use a spear we didn’t have text, or books, or even much in the way of written words. What we did have was generations of justifiably feared warriors who almost all used a spear for most of our fighting. When he weaved aside from my thrust I was ready, I drove the shaft of the spear at him horizontally. There was no way to twist aside from the strike. Maybe a limbo champion could duck under it but that was about the only escape.
I say about the only escape because he showed me a new one. My two-handed smashing blow met his raised palm with a meaty splat. Without any sign of major effort, he redirected the attack so that I found myself stumbling past. Out of the corner of an eye, I saw his ax raised again. About then I decided I was on my way back to Valhalla.
Instead of the skull-crushing blow I expected, I received an almost gentle tap of the oddly adorned stick he held in his off-hand. “ That means something. Something about touching a live foe without harming him.”
A genuine if completely incongruous smile split his face beneath a headdress stylized as an owl. It took a second to truly realize that the grinning idiot had just counted coup on one of Odin’s own chosen warriors. I was pretty glad Lorcan was too dead to notice. I just had to hope Kara was oblivious as well. Dropping flat I swung at his legs with the spear but he hopped over as lightly as if we were playing some rope-skipping game.
This time I didn’t give him time to embarrass me with the damned coup-stick again. I kicked at a point behind and through his ankle, then rolled to my own feet expecting him to be down nursing a broken leg or at least a severely sprained ankle. Instead, he was weaving back and forth in a shuffling gait as a low chant started to rumble out of his deep chest. What the Hel? I knew I felt that ankle twist and snap under my kick but there he was moving as if he was at a pavilion dance.
This time I was a little more careful, thrust, sweep, counter his ax, head strike with the butt of the spear and another brutal stab that hit him in the gut and lifted him from his feet. I pulled the spear out and let him fall to the ground. Except the lunatic didn’t. With a shiny purple-gray loop of something hanging out of his shirt, he danced his little shuffle step and then broke my spear with his ax and kicked me several steps backward without even a grimace.
I landed on my back and looked up to see Kara smiling down at me. Before I could even begin to be embarrassed, she smiled and gave me a hand up. “You think we’re a monopoly? That’s a Mandan. Sacred warrior. He’s just about as special as any of your brothers and a great deal more holy. Let me take him.”
I saw her turn to face the Mandan warrior and then a giant hand reached down and lifted me from the ground. I flew a dozen yards with bits of metal ripping into me in mid-air. The thunder of the exploding cannon shell was incredibly painful but only for a second. After that second I heard nothing.
The ground was iron hard and colder than the depths of Hel. I’d have gotten up if I could but something inside me was broken. As a matter of fact, I imagine lots of things inside me were broken. I saw the blood spreading around my shoulders where I lay almost nose to nose with one of the Sioux women. Her eyes never moved, even when a snowflake landed on one and a piece of shrapnel tore a furrow in her cheek.
The child half underneath her moved though. I saw coal-black eyes looking at me questioningly as the babe tried to find some nourishment or at least warmth from the cold, still mother he suckled. A spasm jerked my whole body and font of blood erupted from my mouth. A bare instant later I felt the life jerked from me to leave just the image of that mother and babe burned into my memory. I doubt even the All-father himself could ever take it away again.
The ground was still hard but at least it wasn’t cold when I opened my eyes. I saw eyes as dark and deep as night again and could almost feel that chill wind ripping through me. But the eyes resolved not into an infant Sioux or Cheyenne child but those of old Tio Bill. I tried to talk but my tongue was too large for my mouth and seemed to want to stick to anything it touched in there. The old Yaqi lifted my head and started to pour a cup full of something into my mouth. I was all but helpless to stop him.
I tried though. A hand waved weakly at his in front of my face before he frowned down and brushed my hand aside to offer the cup again. “It’s just water. You been down too long boy. Dehydrated and probably half crazy.”
I relented and let the most delicious delightful and refreshing thing ever pour down my throat. It was easily a match for Odin’s own mead. At least it felt like it. With the old man’s help, I struggled to a sitting position and took another cup in hands that barely worked. I drained that one too before looking around. We were back in his little tent on top of a desert mountain. “Where’s Maureen?”
He shook his head and shoved a bundle of clothes under my head when he lowered me back down. “Later. You gotta sleep now. You been gone too far and too long. You rest and make sure your whole soul makes it back. We’ll talk when ya wake up.”
I wanted to protest, but the words died on my lips as the strain of my “journey” overpowered even the vaunted stamina of a chosen warrior. Fortunately, there weren’t any dreams to interrupt that deep drained sleep. I’m not sure I could take another view of the kid I’d shot or babies and children brutally slain as they ran. Maybe I was just doing a job. Somehow that seemed like a weak excuse. Even for someone brought up in a harsher time with a less social conscience, that day in the snow seemed needlessly cruel and merciless.
It was the first thing I remembered when I woke up. The bile rose in my throat as guilt came pouring forth from my gut and my newly restored memory. Did all of those rooms in that longhouse contain such grim reminders of something I can’t believe I’d ever been? Or rather reminders of something I didn’t want to believe? Maybe I’d been around modern morals and standards too long but the very thought of what had happened, of what I had done, left me retching into the dirt floor of the tent.
I gasped and vomited and tried to catch my breath for an interminable time. Finally, there was nothing left to toss an
d no strength to toss it anyway. I lay back away from the stink and the mess and let other thoughts slowly creep in. I remembered my wife.
My little blackbird had meant the world to me. It had always been her great regret that we didn’t have children. Of course, we’d only been married a few years and I’d spent a good part of that away from her for one reason or another. Still, most couples in our village welcomed little ones every couple of years. Her belly had never quickened with a new life. A quick calculation made me even sadder. She would have been in her early twenties when I died. When we died.
But why had Lorcan and his allies chosen to ambush me at my own home? I never recognized any of them that I could recall. Or was that another convenient slip of my mind? Had Kara or her secretive old boss taken that from me along with the entirety of my life with Frejarefn?
Well, I had some of that back now. The few memories broken through had opened others. I didn’t recall everything. But at least I remembered the broad strokes around our life together. That was something else to think about. Were there other friends and family I did not remember?
From scared and confused I found myself getting angry. Is that why so many of the Einherjar were mindless zombies? Had they been scrambled too often until there was nothing of the man left inside the soldier? God or something else, what gave one the right to take away a man’s memories? to erase whole sections of his life and use him for their own purposes?
Again, why had I been targeted? Was Lorcan already one of the Chosen when I met my untimely end? If so, what was the purpose? I was no king or jarl to lead men. I had no money or political power. Everything I could recall indicated I was an uncommonly strong and tough young Northman. I had a small bit of land and a boat for fishing. I had a few weapons gained through fighting for my people and our leaders. But no such power or acclaim to attract what was essentially a pre-gangland “hit”.