by Dan Davis
Herkuhlos could not speak for a moment through his astonishment. “How is it that you live?”
Mardoc turned. “I attack him. He strike me and I fall. He stand a foot upon my chest and look down. I cannot breathe. I know I will die. I thrust my blade into the flesh of his leg.” Mardoc reached down and tapped his calf muscle below the knee. “I do this and he walk away.”
“I don’t understand. You wounded him?” Herkuhlos wondered with excitement whether the yotunan had some kind of weakness that could be exploited.
“Is the sting of a bee a wound to a man? No, I did not wound this god. He laughed. Then, he was gone.”
“He laughed?”
“Maybe he laughed. Maybe he roared. Whatever it was, I never wish to hear that sound again.”
Herkuhlos nodded and looked out of the door before glancing once more at the poles standing in a row beside it. If he was going to attack the yotunan, he should do so from afar lest he risk being crushed and broken by Thrima’s strength. If he was even half as strong as Leuhon had been then he should not risk that kind of fight. It might be prudent to use a spear or even many of them. Long, thick spears with large points, as sharp as these people could make them. From afar he could thrust the spears into Thrima before the yotunan got close to him, just like Amron had suggested.
His eyes drifted to the adze on the floor and he wondered if these people could make their flint blades large enough for what he had in mind. They would do their best to make him such spears, he knew, for they were desperate to be free from the greed of Thrima the Roarer.
Then a thought struck him like an arrow, sent straight into his mind by the hand of a god.
“Mardoc,” he said. “How powerful are your bows?”
“My bows, lord? They are strong, lord.”
“Strong enough to slay a god?”
3. Sacrifice
Mardoc agreed to make a powerful bow for Herkuhlos and asked other men to help him make the arrows that would be shot from it. The bow had to be longer than those used by the hunters of the village and so the arrows would have to be longer and thicker than ordinary arrows. Likewise he insisted that the arrowheads be made wider so that they would fit the shafts and would be heavy enough to pierce and damage the yotunan’s flesh and so the village’s best flintknapper set to work to shape them.
Chief Amron chose the men that would guide them and the false sacrifice along the track through the valley that ran parallel to the river. They were nine in total, a good number for a warband, but Herkuhlos had grown increasingly uneasy about them even before they left the village. Considering that they were mere Furun farmers they seemed competent enough yet there was a wariness and stiffness between the nine chosen men that Herkuhlos did not immediately understand until Pehur explained it to him.
“Mardoc is cursed, lord,” Pehur said as they sat on the ground watching the old bower in his doorway crafting the massive stave that would become the bow. “That is why he lives at the edge of the village.”
“I know that, Pehur. But the men of the village happily use his bows. They use his arrows. Why now do they fear his curse when I shall be the one using his weapons?”
Pehur shrugged. “These people are ignorant, lord. Who can say why fools do what they do?”
Herkuhlos looked down at his servant. “But the Furun are so similar to your people, Pehur.”
Pehur was outraged and did not hide it. “My people? How can you speak such a thing, lord? My people live by the hundreds and even by the thousands in great briya, mighty and high places surrounded by walls with fertile fields beyond. My people are blessed with the knowledge of the shining copper and bronze and serve the god Wolkanos. These people live like this.” He raised a thin arm and gestured at the handful of longhouses and smaller structures surrounded by animal pens and grain plots all crammed together within the village ditch. “They are a small people. Small in stature, small in wit, and their gods have abandoned them.”
Nodding slowly, Herkuhlos scratched his cheek. “Yet, you speak their language, do you not?”
Scoffing, Pehur looked around at the people busy with their daily tasks. “It is a twisted version of my own tongue perhaps but that signifies nothing. I speak your tongue and yet I am not Heryos.”
Herkuhlos was going to point out that on the whole these people were small, thin creatures, just like Pehur’s people but he decided against it. His servant was brave and obedient but he was easily offended. Pehur was only about fifteen years old and though he was still growing it was clear he would never be a tall man. Despite being born to an inferior people he had risen above his station to become a powerful bronze smith and perhaps it was this skill that gave him the confidence to speak his opinion so freely. Herkuhlos knew that he should keep his servant in his place by beating him or inflicting some other punishment such as taking a finger but he knew also that he would not do so. Whatever the vast distance between them as master and servant, Pehur had been Herkuhlos’ only companion since leaving Nemea far to the east two years ago.
“How much copper do we have, Pehur?”
His servant looked up. “Why do you ask, lord?”
Herkuhlos should have struck the boy for not replying immediately. It was what the men of his clan would have done but he could not bring himself to do it. Perhaps that made him weak and perhaps Pehur would grow ever more disobedient and then one day he would have to kill him. If that day comes, Herkuhlos thought, he would be sad indeed so he understood why it was better to be strict with servants and slaves.
“I merely wonder if there is enough spare copper for you to make arrowheads from it.”
Pehur rubbed his top lip. There was a growth of fine hairs there and in the spring sunlight Herkuhlos noticed they were turning darker. “Why waste good copper, lord? Surely their flint will do perfectly well.”
“Waste? How is it a waste if it kills a yotunan? Especially as we will retrieve the metal from its body once it is dead.” If I kill it before it kills me, he thought.
Sighing, Pehur stared off at the tree line beyond the pasture around the village. “But it is not one of the yotunan you are sworn to kill, lord. There are eleven of those left out there lord. This is some other lesser one and so perhaps it would be better to keep our copper for those yotunan, lord.”
Herkuhlos felt a surge of irritation at his servant’s words but he knew they were the truth. “All yotunan are worth slaying. And slaying this Thrima the Roarer and bringing glory to myself will only increase my fame. Besides, we know that the Boar and the Stag came this way after passing your lands. Even more than those two, perhaps, are travelling west across the earth and so we are going in the right direction, are we not?”
“Would it not be better, lord, for us to go after the Boar and the Stag instead of this one?”
“Us?”
“You, lord.”
“Before I can kill the Boar or the Stag, Pehur, I must find them and while I am searching I must eat and have shelter.” He shrugged. “And performing great feats continues to grow my fame.”
Pehur tilted his head. “You wish to battle this yotunan for fame, lord?”
“And because it should be killed, Pehur. It should die for taking so much from the Furun without granting them good fortune in return.”
Pehur grunted.
Looking down, Herkuhlos raised an eyebrow. “You do not approve?”
“I do not understand why you would risk your life for fame, lord.”
That made Herkuhlos laugh aloud and he slapped Pehur on his back. “That is because you are an ignorant Kalekka slave, Pehur!” The women working nearby looked up in surprise and then smiled at him, at each other, and then continued with their work. “My fame puts food in your belly, does it not? Have we ever been hungry, Pehur? Tell me that, have we ever been hungry since leaving Pelbriya?”
“You’re always hungry, lord.”
Herkuhlos laughed but the conversation had left him uneasy and he could not stop wondering if Pehur’s fe
ars were justified. The oath Herkuhlos had sworn to the Wolf God was to slay the twelve demons that had escaped from Tartaros and he had killed one so far and it had almost been the end of him. There was little enough chance that he would ever be able to slay the others and so he should be spending all his days in pursuit of that alone but what he had said was true. Tracking the yotunan was far more difficult than he had expected. Unlike Leuhon, most of them had abandoned wagons and vast numbers of prisoners and had raced away with little more than horses and warbands and had disappeared into the vast wildernesses. There were tales, of course. Almost everywhere they had gone they heard tales of yotunan and raiders and the problem was not that there were no trails to pursue but there were too many.
Many, however, said that a great warband led by a new and terrible demon called the Boar had come crashing through their territory and Herkuhlos had seen the results of the devastation with his own eyes. Villages burned and men killed and left to rot. Even the women and children had been slain in some places though in others they had been allowed to flee into the forests without being pursued. The route had been clear enough as it led through the vale of a vast river but when winter had come Herkuhlos had sheltered with a Heryos warrior at his camp and by spring there was little sign of where the Boar and his men had gone. Still, they followed the river, moving from place to place and at times hearing stories of the Boar or another they called the Stag.
While both seemed to be travelling a similar route across the land, soon it was only the Boar they heard of ahead of them and he seemed to have turned north. Then Amron’s men had found him and begged for help with their own yotunan. A certain enemy, in a specific place, had been like a gift from the gods and so he had set himself on this path. Now he was walking it he had to see it to the end but he wondered if it was the right one.
When the bow was made and tested and refined and the arrows tested, Herkuhlos was happy and had felt certain the weapon had the power to kill a god. Mardoc erected a section of wicker fence at the edge of the woodland beyond the village and covered it with hides. It was the height and width of a man and Mardoc propped it against the trunk of a tree.
“When the arrows hit it, lord, they stick in the hides and the willow wands and you can shoot the arrows again and again until they break.”
Herkuhlos was impressed. “We practiced against tussocks of grass when I was a boy. I have never seen this method anywhere in my travels.”
The weapon worked and Herkuhlos’ praise pleased the old man and that was fitting, for his bow pleased Herkuhlos. It was heavy and broad and no mortal man could bend it back but Herkuhlos could and when he tried the new arrows against the wicker targets the warriors of the village cheered to see them slamming deep into it with awesome power.
“You will slay this demon, lord,” Mardoc had said beside him. “With my bow, you will slay him. This pleases me greatly.”
“It is a powerful bow. The finest I have ever seen. I did not know your people possessed such skill. I will use it to slay the demon.”
Despite his words, Herkuhlos had thought about the attack on the demon throughout the journey north to the demon’s lair. At night when they rested before sleeping he imagined himself hiding in the shadows until seeing the demon, placing one of the thick arrows on the cord, bending the mighty bow and sending it flying into the enemy’s heart. All the men thought it would work and perhaps they were right but still it made Herkuhlos uneasy. A bow was a weapon of war and there was no shame in using it. Nor was there shame in using a javelin to pierce an enemy from afar. To use such weapons required strength and skill. Likewise to ambush an enemy was no shameful thing and all men would use whatever advantage they could when fighting for victory against an enemy and when facing an enemy as terrible and dangerous as a yotunan he had to use cunning to stand a chance of victory.
All these thoughts were true and yet he could not help feeling that it would be wrong.
There was another cause of his uneasiness and that was the nature of the sacrifice itself. The sacrifice was one of the chief’s daughters, the girl named Amra.
“Why would Amron give up his own daughter?” Herkuhlos asked Mardoc, astonished, when he heard what they would be taking.
“He has many daughters,” Mardoc said, “and this one is weak. Even if he can spare her, it is still a valuable sacrifice and a few moons ago the acolytes came here immediately after the sacrifice had been left for the demon, angry with what had been offered.”
“What was it?”
“A slave that Amron had bought from his kinsman in the south. The slave was old and her death approached.” Mardoc shrugged. “The demon was displeased, so the acolytes said. They took away half a dozen sheep and Amron was angry and afraid. Soon after, he sent his men to find you.”
“You always send a person to the demon?”
Mardoc’s eyes stared through him. “Whenever we can. Sometimes it is one who is old or lame or one who has committed a crime but mostly Amron buys slaves from further away. If there is no one, an animal is sent in its place.”
“Let us take a sheep, then. Better yet, one of the dogs. There is no need to take a girl when I will slay the demon when he approaches.”
“The chief has spoken.”
“She is lame, she will slow us.”
“Her leg is bad but she is not slow, as you will see. The chief has spoken.”
Finally they had set off from the village so that they would reach the place of sacrifice three nights later when the moon was full. The Furun all turned out to watch them leave and Herkuhlos decided to wear his bronze armour and lionskin and to bear his weapons including his new bow as if he were going at once into combat. He shrugged on the leather tunic with the bronze plates sewn on the breast and back that protected him from chest to loins. He strapped on the bronze pieces that protected his forearms and his shins and finally pulled on the leather cap sewn with shining bronze strips that protected his skull and the lionskin sat over it all, resting on his head and his shoulders. It was heavy but when he wore it he felt invincible and the sight of him in it had awed people in countless villages.
His solid bronze war club was such a weight to carry that Pehur had fashioned a leather strap for it so that Herkuhlos could hang it over his shoulder and across his body when travelling. This also meant his hands were free to hold his spear or ride his horse and Herkuhlos was grateful indeed for the skill of his servant now that he also had a bow and a bag of arrows to carry.
The chief sacrificed a sow in honour of their departure and they passed about a great wooden bowl filled with beer, each taking a sip of it and the men and women and children all cried out again and again as they set off.
They made good time travelling that first day along the track and the men’s spirits were not so dour as they had been. While they walked beside the river along the track, Herkuhlos imagined the battle to come over and over. He saw himself shooting his enemy, filling him with arrows from afar and standing over the body while the Furun cheered. Then he thought of all that could go wrong. A cloudy night that would obscure sight of the yotunan. A heavy rain that would soak his bowstring. The bow breaking or the arrows failing. He cursed himself for not forcing Pehur to make arrowheads from metal.
And as they walked he also glanced again and again at the young woman limping along with them. How could the chief send his own daughter into such danger?
Herkuhlos did not understand it but Pehur offered an explanation on the first night before they went to sleep in their furs on the cold ground.
“Amron believes you may die or you may run away or some god may interfere and stop you from slaying the demon. If that happens, he wishes there to be a true sacrifice to offer and so save himself from retaliation by the acolytes.”
“He thinks me a coward?”
“No one could see your stature and think such a thing, lord, but he is a cunning man.”
“And a heartless father,” Herkuhlos said inwardly as he looked at the shadow
of the girl curled up on the ground.
She had indeed kept up with them despite her strange rolling gait but she had seemed tired by the day’s end and throughout had walked with her head bowed and her shoulders rounded. Perhaps she feared that Herkuhlos would fail and she would be offered up and the next day he sought to allay her fears, falling into step beside her and smiling down with what he hoped was a reassuring look upon his face.
“I hope you are not afraid.”
She glanced up only briefly but he caught her scowl.
“Mardoc, will you tell her not to be afraid.”
“Lord, she will not wish to hear words from me.”
“Because of your curse? Surely that will not concern her, for the words are not your own but mine. Tell her that she must not concern herself for I shall certainly slay the demon and she shall be unharmed and able to return to her father’s longhouse.”
Mardoc spoke at length but before he had finished the girl scoffed and hurried ahead, away from them both, her limp more pronounced than ever as she sped up.
“What did you say to her?”
“As you said to me, lord.”
“You must have said something wrong,” Herkuhlos said. “Well, let her be afraid, then. It is no concern of mine.”
He meant the words when he spoke them but as they continued following the course of the river, Herkuhlos found himself thinking more about the girl. She would certainly be afraid to be leaving her home, likely for the first time in her life, and leaving her mother and her sisters and everyone else she knew except for the handful of warriors escorting her north. She was also growing ever more distant from the protection of her father and that would make any girl nervous.
“She thinks I will fail to kill the demon,” Herkuhlos said to Pehur as they neared their destination shortly before night fell. “Look, see how she shakes with terror.”
“It is exhaustion,” Pehur said. “And she is cold. No one can doubt the strength of your arm, lord, not even a lame, witless girl.”