You Die When You Die

by Angus Watson

  “Bled out?” asked Freydis.

  “She died.”

  Everyone was silent. Slowly, all the older lot turned to look at Finnbogi, all looking patronisingly supportive. Bjarni put a hand on Finnbogi’s shoulder and squashed his lower lip into a sympathetic grimace. What the Hel was this about? Even Gurd was staring at him and nodding in a we’re both men and I feel manly compassion towards you way.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Was it Finnbogi the Boggy!” asked Freydis. “It was, wasn’t it! Finnbogi the Boggy is Erik the Angry and Astrid the Fair of Face and Hard of Heart’s son! You’ve got a dad, Finnbogi the Boggy! Is that right, Aunt Gunnhild Kristlover? I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” said Gunnhild.

  That night was the worst night, thought Finnbogi, that anyone had ever had, ever. Crammed into a sleeping sack with Bjarni instead of Thyri, he lay awake trying to deal with the idea of Erik being his dad, all the while horribly aware that Thyri and Garth were sharing a sleeping sack only paces away.

  He kept consoling himself with the fact that Thyri always went to sleep straight after getting into the sack, but, when he’d been awake for Tor knew how long, he heard them.

  It started with a giggle. Finnbogi tried to tell himself that it was a rabbit vomiting or something, but, no, it was Thyri. Giggling. Why wasn’t she asleep? She always went to sleep straight after getting in the sack. After the giggling came the breathing, from both of them. Finnbogi pushed the tips of his fingers into his ears so hard that he was worried they might pop through into his brain. When he took them out, the breathing was louder, harmonised and accompanied by a rhythmic rustling of leaves under sleeping sack.

  He pushed his fingers harder into his ears, actually trying this time to break through bone into his brain to silence it all for good.

  Chapter 15

  Fat Chance

  The seven remaining women of the Calnian Owsla and Calnia’s chief warlock Yoki Choppa skirted the edge of Goachica territory and arrived in Hardwork in the afternoon. The day was fine, the town was shabby but far from destroyed. A five-day-old aroma of burnt flesh and wood cut the air with a mildly eye-watering tang.

  The Calnians walked into the central clearing. An array of corpse-feasting mammals darted for cover. A flock of birds ranging in size from red-throated hummingbirds to red-faced turkey vultures buzzed off or flapped up and away. Swarms of flies lifted, hung in the air, then returned to feasting. One elderly black bear was reluctant to leave but Chogolisa Earthquake roared and it scarpered.

  Sofi Tornado stood and listened for a moment, then turned to the largest building on the edge of the square. “Come out of that big hut,” she shouted, “or we’ll come and get you.”

  A woman walked out from the dark doorway. She was as broad as Chogolisa Earthquake, but, rather than being made of muscle, this woman was a quivering colossus of fat. Her skin was pale to the degree of sickliness, but her robe and hat were a turmoil of colour, brighter than the outfits of the most vulgar Calnians.

  “So this is what happens when another tribe brings you all your food,” said Paloma Pronghorn.

  “You must be the Calnian Owsla!” called the woman. “I am so glad you’re here! I am a personal friend of Ayveranna!”

  Sofi Tornado waited as the roly-poly woman tottered towards them, then said: “You mean Ayanna.”

  “Oh, for the love of Oaden, yes, I’m sorry, I haven’t had much sleep since the battle and my brain is addled. Ayanna, empress of Calnia, is an old, personal friend of mine. And who do I have the honour of welcoming to Hardwork?”

  “I am Sofi Tornado.”

  “The captain of the Calnian Owsla! We have all heard of you here. Well, I say ‘we all’ but sadly I am the only one left so I cannot offer you much in the way of hospitality. And I say ‘we,’ but of course I’m not from here. I was visiting when your army came and meted out what I’m sure was justified punishment for something.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Frossanka, a warlock from the north.”

  “Which tribe?”

  “White Bear.”

  “I see. And what happened here?”

  “The Calnian Kimaman came with an army to kill the Hardworkers. When he told me of Ayanna’s prophecy about them destroying the world I tried to help him, but, alas, the Hardworkers prevailed.”

  “How many of them survived?”

  “Sixteen. They headed west. One of them, a poor, sickly child, made up a story about a place to the west where they would find a new home, and they all believed it. I guess they needed something to cling to, the poor people.”

  “What is this place in the west called?” asked Yoki Choppa.

  “The Meadows.”

  The warlock nodded nonchalantly, but Sofi Tornado heard his breathing shorten.

  “What do you know about The Meadows?” she asked the woman who claimed to be a White Bear.

  “It’s a fantasy, nothing more. The child is a moron who makes up stories. Defective mind, don’t you know, should have been put out of his misery as soon as the parents realised it.”

  Sofi heard Sitsi Kestrel bristle and take an angry step towards the fat woman, but she held up a hand. “Do you know any more details about the direction they are taking?”

  “They took the west path out of Hardwork territory and they intend to carry on heading west. If you follow their trail, perhaps I could go to Calnia with your blessing and tell Ayanna where you’ve gone?”

  “You’re from the White Bear tribe?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tell me the White Bear tribe’s last three chiefs.”

  “I left a good while ago and—”

  “The last three chiefs, please.”

  “… Dogwok, Catapak and … Sofinda.”

  “Sitsi Kestrel?” Sofi Tornado asked.

  “She couldn’t be much further wrong,” announced the smallest of the Owsla in a crisply smug voice. “The last three chiefs of the White Bear tribe were Smanga Calla, Frozza Polk and a woman whose original name isn’t known, but she dressed as a white bear and changed her name to Oooooom!. Current White Bear chief is Gayajay. There was a Catpak, who was chief of the Corn Triangles from a hundred and five to eighty—or possibly eighty-one—years ago, although the Corn Triangles call them kings and queens, not chiefs, of course. There have never been any leaders, or anybody at all as far as I know, called Dogwok or Sofinda. I suspect that last name—”

  “That’ll do, Sitsi, thanks.”

  “I come from a lesser known White Bear tribe. It’s a small tribe, many hundreds of miles—”

  Sofi Tornado’s stone axe slammed into the fat woman’s temple. She fell.

  “One Mushroom down, sixteen to go,” said Paloma Pronghorn.

  There was no other sign of human life. Sofi Tornado told Talisa White-tail and Morningstar to check the surrounding countryside and the two small outlying homes that Calnia’s geographers had told them about. She sent Paloma Pronghorn to the Goachica town.

  Ayanna had told her to raze the settlement, to leave no trace that the Mushroom Men had ever lived on the shore of the Lake of the Retrieving Sturgeon. Sofi had imagined perhaps burning a few straw and plank longhouses and maybe folding up a few skin and pole tents and chucking them in the lake. She looked around and shook her head. These Mushroom Men had a god-offendingly wasteful building style. The lowliest storage hut was made of enough wood to build an entire Calnian neighbourhood.

  It would take days of dreary manual labour to erase all traces of this town. It was not a job for the prime fighters of the Calnian Owsla.

  Paloma Pronghorn sprinted into the town’s clearing.

  “There are a handful of survivors in the Goachica town. Old people and kids.”

  A moment later Talisa White-tail jogged up, beaming a bright smile.

  “I didn’t find any survivors, but I found the tracks of the sixteen. Interestingly,” she nodded at the large corpse, “it was seventeen. Fatty here he
aded off with them originally, then came back a day or so later. I guess she couldn’t keep up.”

  “Anything else from their tracks?” Sofi asked.

  “There are two children, an injured man and fourteen others. Some of them are very large men.”

  “Good, gather everyone and we’ll be off.”

  “We’re following them?”

  “We will, but first we’re going to pay a visit to the Goachica survivors who weren’t bright enough to flee.”

  Yoki Choppa looked at her. He knew her orders were to level the town and they hadn’t so much as kicked over a bucket.

  She winked at him. He shrugged.

  The surviving Goachica were too miserable a bunch to bother running away from the approaching kill squad. The children were wide-eyed, the elderly sullenly defiant. Sofi Tornado stood with her hands on her hips and surveyed them. The eldest child was perhaps ten, the youngest crone at least sixty.

  “Come to finish us off?” said that youngest crone, waddling forward with the aid of a sturdy stick. She had long, hefty breasts like half-filled buffalo bladders, an arse that looked like two children hidden under her dress and the tone of someone who was used to being obeyed.

  “What’s your name and who are you?”

  “I am Cannakoko, leader of the surviving Goachica.”

  “I am—”

  “You are Sofi Tornado, captain of the Calnian Owsla, and that’s Yoki Choppa, Calnia’s chief warlock. Where are the rest of your Owsla?” Cannakoko waggled her stick at the other women. “You’re missing three. I do hope something horrible happened to them.” She jutted her chin at Sofi Tornado, as if daring her to punish her disrespect.

  “Would you like to live?” asked Sofi.

  “No, I’d much rather you tortured us to death. Of course I’d like to live, you strumpet-dressed freak. And I’d rather you didn’t kill these poor orphaned children and these defenceless old people, but you’re going to, aren’t you, you abhorrence?”

  “You know I was going to, but you’re so charming that I’m going to spare you.”

  “You’d better get on with it. But you’re to slay the children first, and quickly. They’ve been through terrible times and they will not suffer more than they have to.”

  “Are you listening? I said I was going to spare you.”

  “Leave me till last and torture me for all I care. I will return as an avenging spirit and I will make you wish it was you who’d died here today.”

  “I’m sure you’d enjoy that. But try to listen, I have a proposal for you.”

  “Just get on with it and kill us.”

  “I Am Not Going To Kill You.”

  “Oh?“ Finally the woman heard her. “What are you going to do then?”

  “All of you are to move to Mushroom Man territory and spend every waking hour destroying their town and the outlying buildings. Burn it all. If anything can’t be burnt, throw it into the lake.”

  “Who are the Mushroom Men?”

  Sofi explained.

  “Ah, the Hardworkers. I never liked them,” said Cannakoko.

  “I’m sure that will help you in your task. When I return, there will be no trace that the Mushroom Men ever lived on the shore of the Lake of the Retrieving Sturgeon.”

  “And if there is?”

  “I’ll kill you and eat you all.”

  “You’ll eat us?” Cannakoko looked more outraged than scared.

  “Yes. You’re dreadful enough in this life. I don’t want your spirit haunting me or you coming back as some irritating animal.”

  “I see. But we are the very old and the very young. Have you seen their town? We are not suited to such work.”

  “Are we more suited to dying?” Sofi waggled her axe.

  Cannakoko snorted like a frustrated buffalo. “We’ll do it for the children.”

  “Noble of you.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Soon, so you’d better do it as quickly as you can.”

  Sofi Tornado could feel the disappointment of her Owsla behind her. They’d expected killing and they’d been denied. She was a little surprised herself that she’d been able to hold back from slaying people who she had every right to slay, but the Hardworker town wasn’t going to level itself, she couldn’t be arsed to do it and they could always kill this lot when they got back from slaying the Mushroom Men.

  Chapter 16

  Shelter

  Wulf the Fat was a good guy. Finnbogi the Boggy asked him if he could be rearguard again and Wulf agreed, putting him on with Keef the Berserker.

  If Keef knew about Finnbogi’s woes, it wasn’t obvious. He certainly didn’t mention them or offer any consoling words. He darted around with Arse Splitter, menacing every squirrel and chipmunk. When he did walk next to Finnbogi, he walked backwards or circled crabwise, scanning the trees for imaginary foes.

  Finnbogi tramped along. He didn’t mind if the Lakchans caught up and killed him, not when the two worst things that had ever happened to anyone had happened to him the day before.

  He was coming to terms with losing Thyri, in the same way you might be coming to terms with losing an arm, the day after you lost that arm. It was painful and raw, he felt unbalanced and sick but, not one for self-pity, he could see that life was going to be possible. It was just going to be very different from the life he’d planned. Although it didn’t help, to carry on his arm analogy, that someone else was waving his detached arm around as if to say, ‘look, I’ve got your arm and you haven’t,’ especially when that someone would be the chief twat of the tribe made up of chief twats from all the twattiest tribes.

  And then the discovery that he had a living father, and that father was some weird outcast whose only friend was a bear, and that father was coming with them to The Meadows? Had anyone ever had worse news?

  Having no parents was what Finnbogi was all about. He was the solo hero, the maverick, the romantic loner, his own man formed by his own choices. You could look at others and say, “oh he’s just like his father,” or even “he’s totally unlike his father,” but not Finnbogi. He was a man without a reference point.

  And now they said that this thick-looking, Scrayling-dressed lunk was his father?

  He didn’t know what to do about it. Avoiding him seemed the best tactic. He couldn’t work out why Erik was avoiding him, though. Was he biding his time before wandering over and having a manly father-to-son chat? Finnbogi dreaded that almost as much as he dreaded hearing Thyri and Garth shagging again.

  Up ahead of Finnbogi, Chnob the White walked along on his own. Chnob’s betrayal of their leaving plans to Jarl Brodir and his subsequent pariah status was the only good thing that had happened recently.

  “You’re a dirty traitor, Chnob!” Finnbogi shouted at the loser’s back. Chnob carried on walking, but his shoulders sagged a little. It made Finnbogi feel a lot better, for about three seconds, until he found himself feeling sorry for Chnob and he wished he hadn’t shouted at him.

  Sassa Lipchewer strode along with Bodil, not listening to her. Bodil had said all she had to say about the arrival of Erik and the other events of the previous day in the first thirty seconds and was now repeating herself in a variety of lengthy ways. Sassa had had a go at turning it into a conversation, but Bodil carried right on saying what she wanted to say without deviation or hesitation or any reference to Sassa’s points, so Sassa stopped making them.

  The going was a lot less soggy that it had been. From Hardwork well into Lakchan territory there’d been as much lake as there was land, perhaps more. Now it was a great deal dryer, which meant they could follow a straight path. The patches of grassland were similar, but the trees in the woods and copses were larger and less tightly packed. If anything, there were even more animals than before, filling the woods with their calls.

  Sassa’s arm, where she’d been hit by the Scrayling arrow, was surprisingly painless and mobile. Erik had rubbed a gunky salve onto it and wrapped it in leaves and a cotton cloth. �
�Lakchan healing is better than Hardworker,” he’d said. It seemed he was right.

  Up ahead, Wulf walked next to Erik, asking questions, then nodding and saying the odd “By Tor!” during the answers. It was endearing to see how much her husband enjoyed talking to the man. Erik was the adventurer and traveller that Wulf had always wanted to be. Sassa had plenty of questions for him herself—she wanted to know how far west he had gone and what lay ahead—but her husband could have his fun first.

  The only cloud on the horizon was literally that. The sky to the north was an ominous blue-black.

  Shortly after lunch, the first large raindrop fell. It heralded the sort of rainstorm that had inspired humans of old to create waterproof dwellings. They were soaked within seconds. The path became a stream. It was raining so hard that they could hardly see. Sassa had never known anything like it. It was impossible to go on.

  Erik suspended a long branch between two trees and supported it in the middle with a forked stick. Under his instruction, everyone gathered shorter branches, leaves and twigs and built a sloping roof onto the long branch. He sent the children and Bodil to gather dry kindling from sheltered spots while he and Wulf dragged a fallen tree up the hill.

  In no time at all they had a shelter with a log fire running the length of its open side. The Hardworkers crammed under their waterproof roof, joking and jostling for space. Sassa ended up between Gurd Girlchaser and Wulf.

  Ottar’s racoons Hugin and Munin seemed the most put out by the wet weather. Again and again they sprinted out of the shelter, squeaked their rage at the clouds, then tore back and burrowed under a giggling Ottar.

  Sassa laughed at the cubs. It was the happiest she’d been since leaving Hardwork. Chnob the White and Finnbogi the Boggy were miserable, of course, but Chnob deserved to be and Finnbogi’s anguish would pass soon enough. Besides, it was nice to have miserable people around to remind the rest of them how happy they were.

  Chnob had cut more of his beard off, in, Sassa guessed, some weird attempt to show that he was penitent. He was going to have to do more than that before she forgave him. He’d told Brodir they were planning to leave. They could have been executed for that. Why, for the love of Fraya, had he done it?