Joachim got off the train, and his day turned queer.
His vision dimmed, and then a wave of nausea slammed into him like a wrecking ball. He stumbled forwards a few steps and then fell to his knees, his stomach heaved and stars flew in front of his eyes.
He squeezed his eyelids shut, and when he opened them, the pain was gone. His body felt vacant…squeezed dry.
His memories came back to him. The 9:45am from Newcastle. The office two blocks from the station. Appointments to keep.
He got up, shook himself, and began to walk towards the ticket gate.
He was alone no longer. A man now walked beside him. Their footsteps beat a dual rhythm on the pavement.
This was strange. He had gotten off the carriage alone.
He stopped, and looked at the man as he walked past. He was of the same build and height of Joachim. His black hair formed a widow’s peak that made Joachim instinctively scratch his own.
Like Joachim, he wore a camel tweed blazer. With a white shirt underneath. And with black trousers with a tight cut at leg and hip.
And his walk…
Joachim had fractured his pelvis as a child, and had walked funny ever since. This man’s rolling sailor’s gait matched his perfectly.
Joachim’s interest escalated into astonishment…and then into alarm. He was looking at a man exactly like him. Himself. Every detail was on the money.
The stranger kept walking, looking neither left nor right, and passed through the ticket gate. As the machine spat out his ticket, Joachim saw the wedding band on the stranger’s hand.
Joachim looked at his own ring and felt sick inside. He was married to Michelle. Who then, was this strange lookalike married to?
The stranger vanished into a crowd, and Joachim felt the impulse to start screaming.
A hard, cold hand settled on his shoulder.
“OH SHI–” he whirled with his fists up, and saw a strangely-dressed woman in her late middle years at his side. “Oh…damn…I’m sorry, I just…who are you?”
The woman shrugged. “Not important.” Her guttural accent could have been Dutch. “You saw a man. A man who looked like you. I was watching.”
Her clothes were a crazy detonation of colours and designs, covered in arcane glyphs. Rosary beads were twined through her threadbare shawl. Pagan symbols hung form her bony wrists.
Joachim’s voice became a whimper that was most unlike him. “That man…his clothes…his walk…he was me. What’s going on? What…what in fuck’s name did I just see?” His voice recovered tone. “If this is some practical joke the two of are playing, some fucking clever double act, it ends here. I am not in the fucking mood.”
“Yes, I understand. Please be calm. I will explain what I know about this.”
The woman took in a breath, and words tumbled out. “Every man has a psychic double that exists at some point in the future. This is called a forerunner. A vardogr, as the Norwegians call it. Think of it as a psychic imprint of yourself that lives in the future instead of the present.
“The vardogr observes events in the future…and if you’re sensitive enough, it tells you about them. This is why we have premonitions. This is why people instinctively know that a plane will crash, and will cancel their tickets. The vardogr sees. It knows.
“Sometimes the vardogr will assume physical form, and meddle in events in the future. I have heard some strange stories. A woman will check in at a hotel, and will be dumbstruck when the receptionist says she has already checked in, an hour before. A man will visit a store that he’s never been to before, and the clerk will say “welcome back, sir.” You see, the vardogr is you, but it also has its own mind. Sometimes it can’t help but want to live your life for you. And if -”
Joachim raised a hand. “A question. What does any of this horseshit have to do with what I just saw?”
“You saw a man who looks exactly like you. Why ask me? Do not mistake the severity of this occurrence. It is very rare for a man to see his own vardogr. If this happens, it means one thing. The host is dead.”
The day seemed cold. So, so cold. It hadn’t been this cold when Joachim woke up.
“The vardogr lives in the future. But what if there is no future? Then the vardogr will go back in time to the present, and start coexisting alongside the host. Sometime, it even assumes physical form.
“The vardogr is stubborn, and wants to live with a ferocity I cannot make you believe. It will erase its memories. It will deceive itself. It will do anything to not learn the truth. Literally anything.”
Joachim didn’t believe it.
“You’re saying I just met a psychic version of myself…from the future…after I’ve died?”
“I don’t think so, sir. Look at your hand. You’re wearing a hospital wristband.”
– Ben, 30/4/12
Permalink
The river flowed into the tunnel, into the darkness.
It didn’t look like a tunnel. Tunnels went somewhere. One look at into that vacant blackness and it seemed unimaginable that this tunnel went anywhere. It looked like a horrible black gash gouged into the world. It looked like rape upon reality, a spiritual terminus.
It was an ugly, squat arch of black brickwork, swarming with moss and lichen. The river had eroded mortar over the years, giving it a slight recess at the waterline.
Bricks. Water. Mundane commonalities. Yet so few men were able to look into that dark tunnel.
***
The tunnel had upset Daimon Petridis for as long as he could remember.
At four years of age: “Pa, what’s at the end of the tunnel?”
“Uggh…uh….what?” Luke Petridis sat upright on the mossy ground, blinking in the torchlight. Some men sleep for eight hours a day. Luke seemed to do his sleeping in ten or twenty small naps.
“The tunnel, Pa. What’s at the end?”
“Nobody knows, Daim. That’s the truth.”
“How come nobody goes down there?”
“That just isn’t something we do.”
Daimon wrinkled his face in disappointment. Curiosity and nobody to satisfy it.
Footsteps approached, and Deacon Menderhall stood above him. “Excuse me, Luke, am I interrupting anything…?”
Luke woke all the way up. “No, Deacon, not at all.”
The Deacon governed both the spiritual life of the Men Who Survived and their physical lives, right down to as who collected waste, who maintained the hydroponics, who repaired the village’s one working electrical generator, and how many torches could be lit at once without depleting the caves’ air supply. His word was final on everything, and he could make life very hard for you.
“Your son has a very active mind. You should be proud of Daimon. A questing spirit is a gift from God, and not something to be squandered..”
Luke nodded, “uh, thank you. ..”
Deacon Menderhall turned to young Daimon. “Boy, beyond the tunnel lies the afterlife. Heaven and hell. Did you know we float the dead down there?”
“I saw them float momma down there.” Daimon said. “I was on daddy’s shoulders at the fu-ner-wal.”
“Yes, I remember your mother well. She was a good friend to me in life, and that her soul will find rest at the end I have no doubt.”
Deacon Menderhall’s face split into a smile. Daimon was frightened. Normally smiles were nice. But this smile looked…wrong. Vacant and disconnected from the words he was saying. “But it’s not always dead men who journey the tunnel. From time to time, we have occasion to send the living as well.”
Luke interrupted. “Deacon, er, with respect…Daim’s only four years old. Shouldn’t he be a bit older before we teach him about the Clean and Unclean Cross?”
Deacon Menderhall nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry, Luke. Well, enjoy your morning, friends, and I’ll see you at Mass at ten.”
Daimon wondered what the Clean and Unclean Cross was.
Soon he’d know more than he’d like.
***
Daimon grew quickly. He played and explored the caves with the twenty or so other children in the village. There wasn’t much to explore. The caves rose up in sheer walls all around them. The only way out seemed to be the tunnel and the dark river, a lancepoint into the supernatural.
He started school at seven, learning mechanics, electrical repair, English, mathematics, and history. Textbooks and paper were precious commodities among The Men Who Survived, and Daimon was mostly taught verbally. On the rare occasions when he had to write, he was reminded to make his letters as small as possible.
Daimon enjoyed history. He knew that their way of life was unnatural, like a bird instinctively knows that it doesn’t belong in an egg. It made sense to him that once mankind hadn’t lived in underground caves.
***
He was eight when he met his best friend Timothy.
It was fourth period in history, and the stuttering electric light cast shadows across twenty bored and yawning faces.
Mrs. Watson was teaching them. She was a prodigious woman. Her plunging neckline exposed the curvature of huge pale breasts that strained the lacings on her pinafore. Timothy looked at the breasts and felt uncomfortable and uneasy. He didn’t understand why.
“A question for the class, does anyone know why we’re so careful about disease in the village?”
Some mumbles. Lots of children knew, but nobody wanted to show off.
“For thousands of years, we lived on the surface, in the sunlight. We can’t any more. The reason for this is that disease has rendered the surface of the Earth uninhabitable.
“Sometime in the late twenty first century, which was about two hundred years ago, technology had advanced to the point where a planetwide extinction event could be brought about in a man’s basement. A man with a college education and some persistence could construct virulent, self-replicating disease. And eventually, someone did.”
The sandy-haired boy next to Daimon scribbled something on the side of his textbook, and passed it along. IM TIM
“Whether the man-made virus OB-690 escaped or was deliberately released is unknown. But it spread silently through the animal population, and by the time it started killing humans, it was too late. The world was engulfed in a pandemic. Billions died. Cities were abandoned. We have photos of OB-690 sufferers being piled into mass graves while still alive, because anyone who contracted the disease was the walking dead.”
Daimon furtively scribbled I’m Daimon, and the boy called Tim nodded.
“In the last days, news reports become fractured. Some men tried to hide in the mountains, but there was no escape. There was always a cat or dog or refugee that slipped past their quarantines. As time went on, the strongholds became fewer and fewer.
“At some point, a man observed that humans could no longer live anywhere where he might come in contact with the disease. So he took a few dozen followers and went underground, into the deep caves. And he sealed the tunnels behind him.”
A grin appeared on the sandy-haired boy’s face. He started drawing something on his textbook.
“This man was the first Deacon. He had prepared his people well. They had air purifiers and light and shelter and the means to grow food. With no contact with the outside world, there was no chance that OB-690 could enter the underground village. They began calling themselves The Men Who Survived.”
Daimon tried to look but Tim covered the book with his hand so that he couldn’t see the drawing.
“The village was constructed over an underground river. Some men followed the river, and found that it lead to a new, mysterious tunnel that was not found on any map. The first Deacon believed this to be a sign, and that the tunnel was God’s stamp of approval upon the Deacon’s plan for humankind. As a result, the Deacon took it upon himself to reconstruct society, reshaping it into the picture of morality and circumspection that we see before us today.”
Tim had finished his masterpiece. A crude caricature of Mrs Watson, her breasts exaggerated to colossal size. Underneath the drawing was the caption MRS TITSON.
Daimon giggled, partly at the drawing and mostly at Tim’s wanton misuse of paper. Tim shushed him, but Mrs Watson had heard.
“Do I not have your complete attention, Daimon and Timothy?”
Their teacher’s eyes were on them. Timothy snapped shut his schoolbook a little too quickly.
“Do you have something in there you’d like to show us, Timothy Childress?” Mrs Watson asked. This was bad. She was now taking determined strides towards the back of the class.
She loomed over them like a spectre. “Give that book to me, Timothy”. Tim tried to hide it under his desk. “I said give it to me!” She snatched the schoolbook out of his hands, and began thumbing through it.
Pages turned, and Tim and Daimon sat like soldiers waiting for a bouncing bombshell to land.
Finally, Mrs Watson stopped on a page. There was a small intake of breath.
“Mrs Watson” Timothy said, with an apologetic tone that damned his words as they left his mouth “I didn’t draw that, I just found it and…”
“Don’t say anything, Timothy. I don’t want to hear it. You are a disgusting little boy, and you will be punished. I will be speaking to your father about this, and suggest that he talk to Deacon Menderhall.”
Timothy started to blubber and stammer. His gaze met with Daimon’s for a second, and Daimon felt a stab of pity.
Without thinking, he jumped into the path of the grenade. “Mrs Watson” Daimon said.
“Yes?” A vein pulsed on Mrs Watson’s neck.
“Mrs Watson, he didn’t draw that picture. I was with him the whole time, and that picture was there when he picked up the book.”
Mrs Watson cocked a skeptical eyebrow.
Daimon was ready to further plead Timothy’s case, but then it dawned on him: he was going about this wrong. They were sitting together, so Mrs Watson thought they were friends. And friends stood up for each other.
Instead, he put a look of studied indifference on his face, and shrugged. “He’s a dumb kid, and I wish I wasn’t sitting with him. But I just thought I’d tell you that he didn’t draw the picture.”
There was thirty seconds of silence, and then Mrs Watson grunted something, and returned to the front of the class.
There would be detention, maybe, but nobody’s father would hear of this.
Timothy beamed at Daimon. His savior.
***
This unthinking, impulsive act won him a steady friend in Timothy. They could not have been better matched.
Timothy had a chaotic streak that was manna to Daimon in the dreary, all-days-the-same world of The Men Who Survived. He had read on a book once that all roads lead to Rome. He didn’t know where Rome was, but he did know that all stolen tools, all broken windows, and all overturned wheelbarrows led back to Timothy Childress.
Whenever Tim was caught at some new mischief, Daimon was in the point position, armed with alibis and explanations and excuses. It seemed there was no hole Daimon couldn’t pull his friend out of. The boys played and grew together, feeding each other in a kind of spiritual symbiosis.
One thing Daimon could never persuade Timothy to do was swim into the mouth of the tunnel. Daimon himself was afraid of the tunnel…but if his fear was the common cold, Tim’s fear was OB-690.
***
Daimon was fascinated by mankind’s graveyarded past.
The Men Who Survived kept a museum. Daimon went there as often as he was allowed. There were books and pictures and statues and tools and plaques. So much. Not nearly enough.
One day, he was deep in the thrall of an old newspaper article. A shot of a huge crowd at a political rally held his attention so firmly that he didn’t notice Tim leaning over his shoulder. “Woah, shit…look at all the people.”
Daimon stared at the crowd in the picture. Thousands! Tens of thousands!
“How come they didn’t suffocate?” Tim asked.
“There’s lots of air aboveground.” Daimon said. “They didn’t have to watch their oxygen like we do in the caves.”
“I just can’t believe it…how could there have been so many people?”
“I read in a book that there were seven billion people alive once. I don’t believe it. I think they made it up.”
“Yeah, I bet they did.” Timothy said. “Hey, Morris Fletcher wants us for a few hours. He says that if we help fix the water hoses to his hydroponic gardens we can have twelve strawberries each.”
“…And?”
“He’s got a ton of strawberries. I bet we could take fifteen and he wouldn’t notice.”
“Let’s go.”
***
The years marched on, and The Men Who Survived continued their subterranean existence. Bland, tasteless food was grown in artificial soil. Things broke down and were inexpertly repaired. It was hard to escape the feeling that the village was winding down, somehow.
“Son, there’s a reason we’ve never called ourselves The Men Who Thrived.” Luke Petridis told his son one day.
One year, on Daimon’s twelfth birthday, the last surviving power generator began to stutter and falter. Nobody was really sure what to do. There was talk of whether the village could sustain itself without electric lights and heating and oxygen filtration. Nobody had answers any more sophisticated than “maybe.”
That year, Deacon Menderhall announced that, to seek God’s favor, they would once again observe the Clean and Unclean Cross.
Daimon and Timothy were selected by the Deacon to perform the rite.
When Luke heard, his face turned ashen white. He walked out of the room, and went by the riverside to stare into the tunnel.
Daimon followed him. He asked what the Clean and Unclean Cross.
This time, he got an answer.
***
The Clean and Unclean Cross serves a twofold purpose. It gives worthy Survivors a chance to elevate themselves spiritually, and it allows the village to expunge collective sins and malaises.
A crucifix, made of two dovetailed posts of wood.
One person on each side, tied at hand and foot. These people are of equal weight, and, very importantly, they are friends.
A heavy but buoyant weight is attached to the base of the cross. Ballast.
The cross is tilted on its side, and then carefully placed into the flowing water of the river, with one of the cross-spars underwater.
The two crucified people would now be half submerged in the icy water, one on each side, staring away in opposite directions. The center of gravity would keep their heads far enough above water to breath. The stabilising ballast will keep the cross standing on its side in the water, but perhaps even now bad thoughts are occuring. What if it falls on me?
You’d be face down in the water with your hands and feet tied.
The current would take the sideways floating cross, and its two victims, on a journey down the tunnel. A slave ship with no slavers. You cannot not see where you’re going, and will not be able to move your arms and legs.
Then, the sound that changes eveything. clunk.
The stabilising weight is attached to the cross by a water-soluble adhesive. After a period of time, some minutes perhaps, the water will dissolve the glue and the weight will fall from the cross.
The cross is now wobbly, balancing unsteadily on its side.
A thought inevitably enters one person’s mind.
What if he decides to kill me?
Yes. A sudden twist of the torso and one person could tip the cross over on the other person. He’d lying safe on his back, breathing air. The other person would scream his life away underwater.
The cross starts to wobble more and more.
Each deviation in the cross’s equilibrium is a railspike of fear.
Is that your friend? Is he trying to gently save his life…and gently end yours?
Surely not. Surely not.
Soon, you realise something awful. The cross will fall one way or another no matter what you do.
The Clean and Unclean Cross always takes a victim. No matter how carefully the two of you balance the cross, it will eventually tip and drown somebody.
The wobbling intensifies still more. Ugly thoughts enter your head. Every hard word and every stab in the back will loom and magnify itself in your head. A friend? Some friend. Even now he’s trying to tip the cross over on to you, and he thinks you don’t notice
Perhaps you won’t think those thoughts about your friend. One hopes not. The two of you will part company within a couple of minutes. And he’s thinking the same things about you. Every wobble seems to be coming from your side.
The Clean and Unclean Cross hinges upon one question: who is the weaker man?
Who will be the first to snap, tip the cross over, and drown his friend on the other side?
This is the pivot upon which the fate of two souls are decided. The drowned man goes to heaven. The murderer goes to hell.
***
Sometimes, Daimon felt so disconnected from the world that he thought he was in a dream, wide awake. That was fine. Dreaming was not so bad.
Today was the opposite. He had never felt more awake in his life. Scores of incongruous things leaped out at things, forming a surreal collage of consciousness.
The texture of the rocky walls. The leaping and flickering flames of torches. The cross, angular and forbidding.
The greying Deacon Menderhall, speaking in a quavering voice that didn’t match at all with his spiritual authority.
“Daimon Petridis and Timothy Childress, please rise and present your hands.”
Daimon was lashed to one side, Tim to the other. Now all he could hear of his friend was terrified and uneven breathing. They had been allowed to spend one last morning together. They had spoken about ten words each.
The rough, untreated pine scraped at his skin, the hard cordage cut into his circulation.
He saw the Survivors ringing them. Their stares were strange. This was the last time he would see any of them.
His father Luke was not among them. He had not been able to face this strange parting. Daimon understood, and forgave.
Vertigo rocked him as the cross was picked up by twenty Survivors and then turned on its side. From his new horizontal view of the world he could see them carry him towards the river and the tunnel.
The tunnel. From his sideways view, Daimon could crane his neck and see those bricks approaching. He hated the bricks, but the knowledge that he would soon be in total darkness was even worse.
The shuffling Survivors reached the waters edge, and dropped the cross on its side into the water with a splash .
It swayed, lurched, and wobbled. Daimon heard Tim scream…and then the cross was stable. They were floating, Daimon with his right side underwater, Tim with his left.
God, the water was cold!
The Survivors pushed the cross into the river’s current, and then they were sailing down the tunnel.
Motion. The gentle rocking of the cross. Small wavelets lapped at Daimon’s face. They were leaving the light of the village forever.
Daimon twisted his neck out of the water and yelled. “Tim, can you hear me?!”
“Y-Yeah….”
“Don’t move! If you try to wriggle, you might unbalance the cross even with the weight attached!”
Tim said a number of incomprehensible half-sentences, and then lapsed into silence. Daimon was terrified, but Tim was simply not coping at all.
The tunnel swallowed them. In the dimming light, Daimon saw an all-enveloping sheath of mottled brickwork covering them on every side.
The light of the village receded and receded, and then they were in darkness.
Alone with the gently lapping water, the creaking of the cross, and their thundering heartbeats.
Soon there was another sound. Clunk.
***
The double-crucified children continued their blind, rudderless journey down the tunnel.
The cross was not being held upright by a weight any more, and now it was extremely wobbly. Each wave shook and juddered the cross, threatening to tip it out of this unnatural equilibrium.
Daimon could hear Tim hyperventilating ten inches away. He tried to steady his breath…and slow down his racing thoughts.
“Tim, we have to keep this cross steady. If you feel it tip your way, try to knock it back, but only a little! We can balance this. We can survive.”
Daimon uttered these words, and at the same time was struck by the idea that they had been spoken many, many times.
They were blind. There was simply no light at all in the tunnel. Water drenched every inch of their clothing.
A wavelet slapped the cross, and Daimon shrieked a bit as he felt the spar above his head tilt over him slightly. He jerked his body back, and the cross righted itself.
Timothy now seemed fully awake to the living nightmare they were in. “I won’t tip the cross over you, Daim, I’d never do that, I’d never…”
Daimon spat out a mouthful of cold, brackish water. “Yes! Shut up and just balance the cross!” Daimon was badly shaken by his narrow escape. Even worse, a thought had entered his head.
Timothy was lighter than him. Timothy wouldn’t have to deliberately tip the cross. Even if he did nothing, simple physics would drown Daimon in the end. He was the heavier load of the two and the cross would eventually fall on his side.
He groaned, and felt an expanding ball of panic begin to well up in his chest. “Shit…shit…shit…”
“Daim? Are you OK?”
“Yeah, yeah, just balance the fucking cross!”
“I am!”
Maybe Tim thought was telling the truth, but the wobbling was getting worse and worse. The cross was now highly unstable. Daimon did not think it would stay upright for much longer.
The tunnel seemed to be getting narrow. The water was flowing faster and current was becoming more violent. How long did they have left? A minute? Even that long?
Daimon blinked water out of his eyes. It might have been riverwater, sweat, tears, or all three. Icy torrents buffeted them from all directions. The cross leaped and bucked like an animal. Daimon was shaking, just shaking uncontrollably.
His death. His death.
He saw himself with apocalyptic clarity, lying face down in the water, thrashing against his bonds until the skin tore off his wrists and ankles, feeling crushing pressure below and unyielding wood above, having icy water flow into his lungs, going grey-blue-black under the cruel hand of suffocation.
His death.
“I’M SORRY! I…JUST…CAN’T…DO…IT!” Daimon screamed, his voice rebounding off the tunnel walls.
“What?”
“I’M SORRY, TIM! I CAN’T BE BRAVE! I…CAN’T…DO….IT!”
With a sudden jerk, Daimon torqued his body hard to the right. The cross absorbed his force…and then tipped.
Tim had time for a disbelieving squawk and then the cross slammed down on top of him in an explosion of spume.
SPLAAAAAAASSSSSHHHHH
Daimon was now lying on his back, spread-eagled on the cross, staring straight up into darkness, feeling his best friend kick and thrash and spasm on the other side. The cross shook under Tim’s underwater death throes.
A few seconds and it will all be over, a few more seconds and it will all be over. Daimon kept running this thought through his mind like a skipping record player for over a minute. And then Tim was quiet.
Quiet. No. Daimon didn’t want quiet. He wanted his friend back. He wanted to undo what he’d just done.
Daimon opened his mouth to lick his lips, and then found deafening screams coming out of his mouth instead. They burst from him like blood pouring from a wound.
“NO! NO!!! NNNOOOOOOOO!!!!!”
He yelled himself hoarse. He had failed, the cross had found him Unclean, and he was a murderer.
The cross sped down the tunnel like an arrow aimed at the hereafter. Daimon moaned and sobbed, tears streaming out his eyes like water from a hateful well. Murder, and an eternity of suffering in which to contemplate it. Out of cowardice he had drowned a boy who was closer than family.
“I don’t want to live. Please God, I don’t want to live. Take me instead.” Daimon cried.
Through tears, he realised something. He could see.
Dark brickwork was speeding past him above him. Murky water frothed and churned under him. He was getting closer to the light.
Daimon screamed one final time, the scream echoing senselessly in the tunnel, and then laid his head down. Black squirming stars were appearing in his vision, obscuring it. Hell had begun.
Waves of dizziness overwhelmed Daimon, and he felt himself slipping away.
Darkness.
Abrogation.
***
James Kilborn dry-swallowed another aspirin, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. Then, he picked up a heavy cardboard box, lifted it to chest height, and threw it on the flatbed trailer with enough force to rock it on its leaf springs. Some of the workers moved boxes. James waged war on them. Every box loaded onto the flatbed trailer took him closer to punch-out time.
“Say, Renwick, you and the missus still got that Thailand trip planned?”
His friend grinned, showing tobacco-yellowed teeth. “We’re flyin’ out tomorrow. Two weeks of spas and massages. You got any leave coming up?”
“I got death coming up too, and I think it might get there sooner.” James picked up another box. The fucking things got heavier all the time. “Why are you going to Thailand with your wife? Take it from me, buddy, you want to claim it’s a business trip and that the company is only puttin’ up accommodation for one person. Adventure awaits.”
“Women today are smarter than that, and you’d know that if you ever got your dick wet. Still, I like your spirit.”
Suddenly, James heard a funny sounding clunk form behind him. It came from the shore of the river that flowed out of the mountain.
He walked over to the riverbank, and stooped to investigate.
“Oh my…”
A child of about twelve. He was wearing old, frayed clothes, and there was foam on his lips. He was unconscious, and twitched and spasmed like a dying insect.
His movement was greatly restricted.
The boy was tied to a cross, bound at hand and foot. The cross floated in the water, and one of the spars had gotten caught on a sandbank.
James was struck by sense that his eyes were fooling him.
“Renwick, you gotta come over here.”
Renwick hunkered. A look of remembrance settled over his face. Not bafflement or surprise or confusion. Just the look of a man seeing the past return. “Shit…it’s happened again.”
James suddenly felt like screaming. “What’s happened, Renwick? What…what is this?”
Renwick spoke softly. “James, you haven’t been working here long. I have. I’ve seen this happen once before. Ten years ago, a cross floated out of the tunnel with a person tied to each side of it.”
“…Each side?”
“Yeah. And I bet you that if we turned this cross over, we’d find a dead body.”
Renwick continued. “I remember the last time. I was looking forward to an early punch-out, and then I saw the cross. There was a kid tied to it no older than this one. I fuckin’ panicked. I called emergency services, I called security, I called everyone.
“They untied the boy…and he was raving mad. Kept telling us that he’d killed his best friend, and that he was in hell. That was all he’d tell us…no, it all he really seemed to know.”
James shivered. “I’ll untie him. You call the EMTs.”
Renwick nodded, looking feeble and sad. He strode over to a concrete pylon holding up a section of the rock face they were working near.
Bolted to the pylon was a notice. A smiley-faced cartoon workman, and underneath were the words 99.83% OF THE POPULATION IS IMMUNE TO OB-690, BUT FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS AND AVOID UNNECESSARY BODILY CONTACT. THANKS!
James looked down the dark tunnel.
“I wonder what’s on the other side?”
Permalink
Short Story by Ben Sheffield
I
The symbol du-jour of freedom used to be the car. You put fuel in the tank and air in the tyres, and then the world was your oyster. You could do anything. Nobody told you where you had to be or when you had to be there. These fragile tin cans with wheels, massacring tens of thousands of people annually, were the status symbol of the age. I sort of understand the backlash when they made seatbelts mandatory. To lovers of freedom, it must have felt like Hitler instituting his first dress code rules inside the Reichstag.
But now it’s the internet.
The internet is my home . When I go out to buy beer or hotdogs from the corner store, I feel like I’m on a diplomatic mission in a foreign country. My waking life is dominated by ten, twelve, fourteen, and sixteen hour long marathon sessions at the computer. A man from the 1930s would look at me and conclude that I’m suffering from a mental illness. What can I say? Take joy where you find it, brother. The internet has been nothing but a mother’s teat to me.
The internet has all the advantages of the car, and none of its disadvantages. You can park your narrow ass behind the wheel of a Pontiac Bonneville and people will still see that you’re a pimply loser (and probably a carjacker). On the internet, it doesn’t matter who you are. And unlike cars, which are subject to entropy, the internet gets better with time. I’m proud to be part of the collective that improves it.
You might think that the internet isn’t real. You might think that the earth is flat. The thing is: you’re wrong. Wronger than sex in a crib. For millions of people, present company included, it’s as real as any world made of dirt, grease, and unpleasant smells. All through history, mankind has struggled to tame the earth. Here in the 21st century, we can just bail out and build a digital one to our specifications.
II
My friend Dwayne and I were sitting around the computer, shitfaced, watching Youtube videos and critiquing them in between uncontrollable laughing fits.
Naturally, we avoided anything that looked competently made. Where’s the fun in mocking something good?
“Holy crap” Dwayne breathed. On the screen, some nameless Youtuber screeched incoherently into a webcam. “What’s wrong with this douchebag?”
“I bet he made the video blurry and shitty so we wouldn’t see the crack pipe.”
Dwayne laughed and high-fived me. He was a skinny kid with acne and questionable hygiene. Girls were seldom found in his company, but other than that he was a well adjusted dude. He worked a landscaping job in the morning and flipped burgers in the evening. I haven’t met one of my bosses face to face in four years.
“You wanna do the honours, man?” he asked.
“Nah, I did the last one. This guy is yours.”
With the aplomb of a Roman emperor deciding a gladiator’s fate, he took control of the mouse and clicked the Thumbs Down icon.
We both roared with laughter. I accidentally knocked over the pile of empty beer cans on the computer desk. We froze, waiting to see if Lisa had been woken by the noise.
My older sister Lisa is proof that there is a God and that he cares about me. When I was 22, having dropped out of college and blown up two careers like landmines, she took me in. My rent is half of what a usual apartment in Redfern would go for. It’s strange, considering she couldn’t stand me when I was growing up. I guess families are like that. You might hate each other, but goddamn if you don’t bail each other out.
Still, she makes no secret of the fact that she does not like having me live with her. It is in my interests to keep her happy. One of her suggestions is that I be quiet.
The only sound coming from Lisa’s bedroom was the ticking of her alarm.
“Fuck, man, I’d better go.” Dwayne said. “Eayer’s been busting my balls about getting to work on time.”
“One more video?” I moused over to the Related Videos column. “We can still break our record of two hundred videos in a sitting.”
“It’s one in the morning. We’ve been doing this for hours. What’s wrong with you, man?”
I shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. See you Monday, Dwayne.”
“Yeah. Later, mate.”
He vanished out the front door, and soon I heard the roar of a car’s ignition. He had probably ingested enough beer to cause VB’s stock price to rise by a few cents, so he could look forward to an exciting night of travelling back streets and dodging police cars.
What’s wrong with you? Hell, that’s a question. I could give a philosophical answer and blame the universe. But if you want the truth, I don’t give a fuck. I just find the world easier to deal with when behind a computer screen. When you have a Livejournal, a Twitter, a Facebook, a Myspace, a Youtube, a Ustream, you don’t have much time for a real life. And so you cut out real life. Where’s the problem?
III
By half-past one I was coasting in a semi-vegetative state. My fingers tapped away at the keyboard while my mind was far elsewhere, thinking about the garbage that needed to be taken out and the SEO research client who needed to be pacified. Midnight was my most productive time.
Half aware of my actions, I clicked over to my Livejournal. At the head of the journal was a lengthy blog post bitching about my poor memory. I didn’t even remember typing it.
I saw that it had a comment, and I clicked to see what it was.
An anonymous user. His post consisted of the sentence “This website has all you need to know.” followed by an URL. I right-clicked and opened the URL, realised it was probably a spam post, went back to my Livejournal, and deleted the comment.
Out of sheer boredom, I went to look at the URL I had opened.
…and found myself on a website called The Information.
This was a website I had never seen before. Visually it looked like someone’s throwback to the early days of the world wide web, when finding information on an actor meant browsing six crappy GeoCities fan pages run by crazy people. The background was black, and the font was white Times New Roman. Nothing looked like an intentional design decision. It looked like the creator had simply never bothered to change the defaults of the template he was using.
The website was creepy. It looked like the internet’s equivalent of a house so dilapidated you know it must be haunted by ghosts.
On the front page, in all caps, was a (grammatically challenged) message
THIS WEBSITE IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. TYPE BELOW THE NAME OF ANY PERSON OR ORGANISATION TO RETRIEVE DATA. WE HOPE TO BRING THIS WEBSITE TO THE WIDER PUBLIC AT SOME FUTURE DATE.
Below, there was a search box.
Idly, I typed “Google” into the box and clicked Enter.
It brought up a chronological list of bullet points, each prefaced by a date.
January 11, 1996 – Search engine called Backrub conceptualised by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
March 18, 1997 – Backrub renamed to Google. Name is derived from the term “googol”, meaning a number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.
April 9 1998 – Google Technologies is incorporated
It went on for what seemed like hundreds of entries.
Oh, I thought. So this website is a crappier version of Wikipedia.
I typed in “Adolf Hitler.”
As before, I received a long list of places, names, and events.
April 20 1889 – Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria
I scrolled on, reading about the dictator’s rise to power. I paged on and on, my mind going blank, until I realised with a jolt that I was reading dates well into the 1950s.
December 27 1952 — Escorted past the Iron Curtain curtain by Nazi sympathisers
January 6 – 1953 – Flown into Argentina by ODESSA
…the fuck? Didn’t Hitler die in 1945?
I quickly scrolled to the bottom of the page, and saw the final entry.
October 21, 1972 – suffers brain embolism in Chile and dies. Secret funeral is attended by Pinochet and various cabinet members.
Hitler was still alive in the 70s? Who the hell is running this website?
I couldn’t see any footer at the bottom of the page. There was no swastika or neo-Nazi slogan. There was nothing at all. Not even a copyrighted message.
I’m a jaded guy when it comes to stuff on the web. But this website was really weirding me out. I had seen other sites claiming Hitler had survived World War II, but they were always jingoistic, slanted and obvious. This website seemed like a cold retelling of the facts, except it was describing facts that couldn’t possibly be right. Couldn’t they?
I remembered the message I had seen at the top of the page. TYPE BELOW THE NAME OF ANY PERSON…
Then I made the worst decision of my life. I typed my own name.
IV
It took longer for the page to load. I was aware of my heart beating in my chest. Why was I trying to do here?
The page loaded, and under the header TIMOTHY JONAS O’CAMPBELL there was another list.
My life.
October 30, 1986 – Born in Darlinghurst Hospital, Australia
January 2, 1987 – Parents divorce. No fault. Mother takes Tim and daughter Lisa to live with her in Blackheath.
November 12, 1987 – Learns to walk
I read on and on, my brain processing it all and refusing to make any logical extrapolations whatsoever. The details were sketchy and incomplete. But they right. They knew where I grew up, they knew what nursery school I had enrolled in. This random website had a file on me and every last detail was dead on the money.
“No way. Just…no way,” I heard myself muttering as I read bullet point after bullet point. I felt like specimen in a test tube.
…Wait, maybe there’s a mundane explanation for this. I found this link on my Livejournal, right? Maybe I’ve done more blabbing about my childhood on Livejournal than I remember. And maybe this is some new experimental search bot that harvests anecdotes and stories from online blogs and turns it into a biography of that person.
I seized this pat explanation. Yes, of course. Another stage in the internet’s evolution. A website that collects blog posts and writes that person’s life story for them. Technology.
My relief curdled in my stomach when I saw the next entry.
April 22 , 1992 – Mother discovers Tim and Lisa studying each other’s genitals while in the bathroom together. This incident is a long-time source of psychological trouble for the boy.
I did not write that in my Livejournal.
I wanted to stop reading. I was shivering and sweating at the same time, paralysed by horror. Everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever thought was private. It was all here. But I knew that if I looked away, I’d tear myself apart. I needed to see everything. My eyes continued scanning the page like prisoners cracking rocks over the sound of their own clanking manacles.
True, true, true. What the fuck? How did they know that? True. True.
I was now looking at today’s date. 30th of September, 2011.
…And what I saw next made me want to scream.
The dates did not stop.
V
I should have done something. I might have been able to change things. So why didn’t I? Maybe I’m just a failure. We see people who have nothing and call them losers. But what does that make people who have something but don’t do anything with it? I can’t answer that question. I spend enough time putting myself on trial already.
I can tell you what I did next. I closed the browser. I made The Information vanish from my computer screen. Then my shaking, clammy hands erased my browser cache, my viewing history, and my cookies. It was as if I thought the act of deleting the records on my computer’s memory would retroactively extend into the past, deleting what I’d seen from my actual memory as well. I had read far too much, and despite the late hour I could not sleep.
I can tell you something else. Two days later, when the phone rang, and I heard the gravelly voice of Rob Eayer on the other end, I knew exactly what he was going to tell me.
“Is this Timothy? Timothy O’Campbell?” The burly foreman who employed Dwayne had an unmistakable note in his voice. Not a scared note. A resigned note. Something terrible had happened. The train had come and gone and it was too late to fix things.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, Tim, I’m sorry, but shit’s fucked. Dwayne Richardson was just in an accident.”
“What? How?” It felt terrible that I had to fake surprise. He fell off a scaffold. A website told me this would happen.
“He fell off a scaffold and landed on a pile of bricks. Me and the boys were having a smoke break, and when I saw him…oh God, he was a mess. I called the ambulance and sat by him. He kept trying to talk. Eventually he said your name and phone number.”
The hot and cold parts of my body changed places. “How is he now?”
“It’s bad, mate. He’s at St Leonard’s hospital. On the critical list. They’re telling me his lower back is destroyed. Fuck…I don’t now…he breezed through his OH&S training…”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
VI
I was looking down at my friend’s face on the hospital bed, his breath raspy and irregular, his eyes glazed with painkillers. I was tearing myself apart on the inside. I listened to the orderly beside me explaining what had happened to his lower back in colourless medical terms and I felt like crying and laughing and screaming and saying it was okay all with the one breath.
The sheets were crisp and white, and the hospital gown looked horrible against his sunburned skin. Dwayne had been an athlete, but he would never play rugby or football again. He had life in a wheelchair to look forward to.
His eyelids fluttered. His mouth moved, although I doubt he was trying to speak so much as suffering from involuntary muscle spasms. I had spent my childhood playing with this kid. When we were 12 we had egg-bombed neighbouring houses and spray-painted trains. God, this couldn’t be happening. It was so surreal.
I started to think. Dwayne, this whole situation is fucked up to the sky, so would you mind if I added one more fucked up thing to the pile? Two days ago I found a website called The Information. Type the name of anyone into it and you get a complete record of their life. I looked up my name and it told me things I hardly even remember about myself. But that’s not all. It told me what I’d do in the future. It told me that you would have this accident, and that I’d take time out of my schedule to visit you in hospital.
So why didn’t I fucking say something?
“I’m sorry, Mr O’Campbell, but visiting hours end in five minutes,” the orderly said.
VII
On the freeway back from the hospital I almost wrecked Lisa’s car. My hands were shaking badly, and I couldn’t seem to focus on anything any more.
I felt like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. In one moment I had clicked a link to a website (and who the goddamned hell had posted that comment on my LiveJournal?) and my life was changed.
…And thanks to my own stupidity in erasing my computer’s records, I might never be able to find that website again.
I got home, and fired up the computer. After three hours of Googling “The Information” and fruitlessly trying to remember what the URL had been, I upgraded “might never” to “will never”.
VIII
That all happened two weeks ago, and I’ve adjusted. But all crazy people say that, don’t they? On one of Lisa’s “suggestions” I talk to a specialist two times a week, and I think I’ve convinced him that I’m okay.
Maybe it’s for the best that I never found The Information website again. It has stopped me from typing in “Jesus Christ” and finding out if God exists. Or from typing in “Earth” and learning the exact date that humanity will become extinct.
Yes, I believe I could have found those things, if only I’d been willing to search.
I’ve told you so much already. Should I tell you more?
When I looked up my name, there were a few dates in the future. But not too many. The final date was the 10th of October. The day I will die.
The website didn’t specify exactly how I’ll exit stage. Suicide can mean so many things. But I’ve been researching it.
I feel like an expert on the subject already.
– Timothy O’Campbell
Permalink
There were two cities, called Enduia and Zaloss. They were connected by two roads, one of which went through the mountains in the north while the other went through the plains in the south. In the hills above the cities lived a wizard.
He lived alone, because people bewildered him. People, although they had endless diversity when it came to clothing and language and pleasure, were all fundamentally the same. Arrogant and thoughtless. Close-minded. Children were told to listen to their elders, when most of the time those elders were stupider than the children they presumed to teach.
As the wizard grew older, his cynicism ossified into hate. He felt superior to his fellow man, but as his hair became white and his joints became frail he realised that no amount of superiority would save him from dying.
Was there nothing in the world that lasted forever? Nothing that was not reduceable to atoms and ether?
An idea entered his head that was so revolting he could not get it out. A test of morality and goodness. After some thought, he decided to go ahead with it. He was a scientific man, and does a scientist do except test things?
***
A merchant and his son departed from Enduia to broker a trade agreement in Zaloss. They took the south road. Midway through their journey, they found themselves attacked and taken captive by a gang of robbers led by the wizard. They were tied and dragged into a thicket of trees so no other travellers would interrupt the proceedings. A gag was put on the son.
“I do not want your goods, or your coin.” The wizard told the terrified captives. “I merely want you to take part in a test.”
He took a knife from out of his ragged coat, and extended it hilt-first to the father. “I want you to kill your son with this knife. If do you, I will let you go free. If you do not, I will kill both of you myself. You have ten minutes to decide.”
The father laughed. Surely this was a joke. The wizard’s expression did not change, and a counterpoint of terror entered the man’s laughter. He raved and screamed. He shouted for help. The wizard took it all calmly, and said “you have five minutes.”
Sweat beaded on the man’s balding scalp. He was a fearful man. He could check his bed three times for spiders and still be convinced they were there. And the thought of dying at the hands of this lunatic was more he could bear…More than he could be expected to bear.
“God help me, I’ll do it.” He choked out. “Give me the knife.”
Two robbers untied his hands, and his son’s head was lowered into his lap. The boy was 12 years old, and would grow no older. He did not struggle. Gently, trying to keep his thoughts on the beautiful trees, the father cut his son’s throat. He could not look at his eyes.
“Well done.” The wizard looked at the father’s tear-streaked face. “…Or not. Either way, you are free to go.”
The father took off down the road, leaving his wares behind, still thinking about trees. He did not know how long he could keep doing it.
***
Some days later, a merchant and his son departed from Zaloss on a journey to Enduia. They took the mountain path, and soon found themselves the prisoners of a gang of robbers led by the wizard. They were tied and the son was gagged, and the wizard posed the same choice he had given to the father from Enduia. “Kill your son, so that you may go free.
The father’s initial reaction was the same. Disbelief, then forced disbelief, then horror. But he was a brave man, and refused to commit the apalling act.
“Think carefully,” said the wizard. “Your son will die no matter what happens. But you have a chance to save your own life.”
“Then I’ll die like a man. I won’t do it, damn you.”
“I accept your choice.” The wizard drew the knife and plunged it into the boy’s heart. The young lad spasmed, and the light faded from his eyes. The father cried out and collapsed. As he did, one of his ropes snapped on a rock. He scrambled to his feet and ran, leaving the severed rope behind.
The robbers tried to catch him, but he was too fast. He outdistanced them and then fled down the road back to Zaloss.
The robbers swore and cursed, but the wizard took all of this calmly. It had been his intention, after all, that the man escape. Who else would carry the tale?
***
The killings along the two roads soon came to the attention of the authorities, and search parties were dispatched to apprehend the murderers. Some of the robbers were captured, and under interrogation the full extent of the atrocities came to light, including the part the fathers had played.
The wizard watched everything. He wasn’t interested in the possibility that he himself could be arrested. That was all immaterial now. All we wanted to do was to observe the fathers, and find the answer to his riddle.
The Zalosian merchant became a small hero in his community. He had placed his son’s life above his own, had refused to take a knife to his own flesh and blood even if it had meant saving his own life. He was lauded. He became a sought-after party guest. He was awarded a medal.
But for the Enduian merchant, life had ended. His family disowned him, and his friends spoke to him no more. Wherever he went, whispering voices followed. He was the coward who had killed his son. No charges were brought against him, for what could he be accused of? Expediency? But now he was a pariah, shunned and abandoned.. One year after the tragedy on the road, he took his own life, hanging himself a rafter in his house.
The wizard had seen enough. The day after the Enduian merchant killed himself, he turned himself in to the authorities. His trial was short and tidy. His punishment was death.
But it was worth it, he reflected in his cell, the day before he was to be consigned to the flames. Now I know the truth about good and evil. Some say it comes from the gods, carried down from a mountain on stone tablets. Some say it’s a natural force in the universe, as intangible as light but just as real. But now I know differently. It exists in our minds.
Permalink
A long time ago, two men made a partnership. They were different men with different ways of viewing the world. They did not agree on many things. But they were desperate, and that made all of the rest unimportant.
***
“Are you certain, Haakon?”
“Heya.”
“You didn’t just see a funny cloud?”
“No.” Haakon Ordsson leaped down from his precarious perch on the longboat’s mast. His faced was as lined and creased as old parchment, and his eyes were fixed in a permanent squint from a lifetime spent staring off into rhimy horizons. “I saw land. Only for a second before it vanished behind a wave, but I swear on Freya’s name I saw it. With any luck, we will be making landfall tonight.”
“I trust your eyes, Haakon.” Erik the Red turned to face the rows of faces on the oarbenches, looking expectantly his way. “Land, men! The Gottlander’s map led us true!”
A raucous cheer. Erik smiled. Everything was falling into place.
He was a short, intense man. A shaggy mane of red-gold hair fell from his shoulders, only slightly tidier than the matted fur of his bearskin cloak. At 36, 21 years since his first battle, he was approaching what most Vikings would consider old age.
The gods had gifted him with a smile that spoke different truths to different people. Friends were encouraged and enboldened by his smile. Enemies took a step back.
“Haakon, spread the word to the ships behind us. Make sure the captains second a few of their oarsmen to landing preparations.”
Haakon dipped his head respectfully, walked to the stern of the longboat, and began hollering orders to the ships riding in their foam wake. There were twelve longboats and 240 men in total, a fleet assembled from Erik and Haakon’s shared resources. They had been brought out here with the promise of new land and wealth. It seemed that the first part of that contract was already being fulfilled.
***
Haakon was vindicated by late afternoon. A frigid, white landmass was approaching, and soon ice-covered sandbars and cliff faces were visible. The cliffs didn’t look like rocks. They looked like convex and concave bone structures.
It was as forbidding a place as any of the men had seen.
Here it is at last. Erik thought, stroking his mustache. A continent that lies but a few days’ sailing from Iceland, and yet no man has ever colonized it. Sailors avoid it. Fishermen do not cast their nets in its waters. There are rumors of a Norseman called Gunnbjörn who tried to settle here. He and his entire crew were never heard of again. It is said to be cursed, although no-one can ever why or how or who found out. I think it’s time to put the old superstitions to the test.
By nightfall, the ships were within a stone’s throw of the coast. They traveled further north by the stars, and the rocky cliffs and ice shelfs became smooth sand beaches and softly flowing hills. After enough sailing, the crew observed birch trees growing in straggly clumps.
There was no sign of habitation.
“Why aren’t we making land, sir?” A young warrior called Ulfsson asked.
Erik gestured at the water along the coast. “Notice how flat it is? How the waves seem to be breaking underneath the water? There’s a reef there. We’ll sail on, and try to find a better place to land. If we don’t…well, that’s tomorrow’s worry.”
They did not make landfall that night. In a way, the men did not mind this so much. There was something unsettling about this mysterious continent they had found by following the directions of a vague map.
***
The next morning, they continued to follow the coast north. After sailing for some hours and finding no break in the reef, Erik decided to take a calculated risk.
“We’ll go across the reef. Tell the men to furl the sails and take it at half oarpower. If there are hidden rocks we should strike them with our oars before they damage the ships.”
It was a dangerous stunt, and with an ordinary ship would have been suicide. But the highly maneuverable dragon-prowed longboats, or drakkar, of the Vikings did not fit any man’s definition of ordinary.
The longboats were the best-designed ships of the day. With them and sheer pig-headed stubbornness, the Vikings ruled the waves.
Before the age of the longboats, sea warfare was unheard of in northern Europe. There were no ship designs that could carry large numbers of troops, weather rough seas, and not bankrupt the small landholders building them. If a king launched an invasion, he did it by land.
The drakkar longboats changed all that. With their stout hulls and shallow drafts they were cheap and versatile. They could undertake journeys of hundreds of kilometers on open waters, be rowed upriver and over shallows, and even be carried across land for short distances.
In summer and winter alike, the devastating longboats sailed. A village could no more anticipate Viking raids than it could lightning strikes. “God, save us from the wrath of the Norsemen” was a prayer spoken all across Europe.
Erik the Red’s filthy arms were adorned with jewellery that did not belong to him. He wore a stolen torc around his neck. His cloak had originally belonged to a monk in Gaul. All up, he guessed that he and his crew owned possessions from twelve different countries.
And all because of the longboats. Now, Erik hoped that they would prevail against the reefs of this new land.
“Tell the men to take it slowly. And if they strike anything at all with their oars, they must stop immediately. The reef out there could claw out hulls out from under us.”
***
The maneuverable longboats were slowly rowed towards the beach. As Erik had suspected, rocks lurked underneath the waves.
They had covered half the distance when a cry came up from the boat straight ahead of Erik’s. An oarsman had scraped something solid, and the crew were frantically back-rowing, their oars clashing.
It was not enough. Even at half oar-power, the ship’s momentum carried it onto a hidden reef. There was a terrifyingly loud crunching sound, and the rest of the fleet look to see a stricken ship pinioned against the submerged rocks.
“We’s shipping water!” A warrior yelled across the waves.
The slate-grey sea rose and fell on the stricken vessel, battering it against the submerged rocks. The two rear longboats rowed to the scene, attempting a rescue of the crew.
Erik the Red whirled on his men of his ship. “Get your eyes back on your tasks, or we could join them! Go across the rocks at one-quarter speed.”
The rocks were impossible to detect by sight, and only with the greatest care could they be avoided. Nine longboats attempted to probe the water for clear access-ways, while two more were busy saving the crew of the damaged longboat. The landmass ahead was tantalisingly close.
“Come on, we’re nearly there!”
Sweat was running into Erik’s eyes as they slowly crossed the treacherous waters. Occasionally a reef would be found, and the men would pole their ships away with their oars. The din of shouted orders filled the air like the buzzing of a hornet nest.
Erik looked down into the opaque ocean, and in a trough following a large wave saw a craggy pinnacle of rock directly in their longboat’s path.
“Hard left! There’s a reef ahead!”
The left bank of oarsmen relaxed their oars while the right bank put on full power. The ship turned like a graceless swan, and they bypassed the reef.
From there, it was clear sailing. The other ships were able to follow in Erik’s path, and there were no more losses. The entire crew of the sunken ship was saved, and only the supplies were lost.
The curved keels struck sand with a wet slap.
Erik jumped down off the longboat’s prow, the first crewman to set foot on this new continent.
He looked around. Ice, snow and frost covered everything. A few patches of weeds and straggly trees grew from the ground, looking almost ashamed to be there. There were a few half-starved gulls that looked as pathetic as the beggars outside King Haraldr’s palace. A savage wind howled and hooted across the rocky outcrops.
It was apocalyptically huge, a vast expanse of nature’s wrath. It was a land impossible to look upon without feeling small.
“I think I will call it Greenland” Erik said to the men behind him with a tooth-baring grin, as they disembarked from their ships.
***
The Norsemen spent the whole day without having cause to suspect Greenland had any redeeming qualities whatsoever.
They beached the ships, threw linen flax canvas over them to protect them from the worst of the weather (“A stopgap measure” explained Haakon. “Soon we’ll have to drag them out of the water and under shelter somewhere, but that’s another day’s worry.”) and then moved inland. They walked for some hours, and then fanned out to the sides. No matter where they went, the landscape stayed the same. Rock, ice, and weeds. No good timber, no gold and ore deposits, and seemingly nothing to eat.
It was as if the land was mocking them. Think you can settle here, mortals? Give it your best.
“What are we doing here, battle-master?” Asked Eirik, and inveterate complainer. “We may as well build a settlement on an iceberg.”
Erik turned his withering stare on the young man. “We are forging history, dolt. One day in Greenland and you want to return home already? Stop flapping your gums and keep looking, all we need is one prosperous valley and we’ll build a kingdom to make Haraldr envious.”
Eirik shivered unhappily. “It’s cold. What if there is no shelter? We could freeze to death overnight.”
“You call yourself a man? When the god Odin cut out his right eye to receive all the wisdom of the world, do you think he was worrying about the pain? This is our chance at riches and glory, and all you can think about is the cold?”
An awkward silence settled across the crew. They all knew that Erik the Red was not sailing to Greenland for riches and glory.
Back in Iceland, his family had been wealthy livestock owners of high repute. They had journeyed from Visby to Norway when Erik was but a boy. Erik had participated in three raids under King Haraldr Fairhair and had acquitted himself well. He and was marked as a man who might eventually become a jarl.
All of that had ended one day three years ago when Erik was chopping firewood with Thorgest, the son of a powerful landowner. Thorgest had made some joking remark not worth remembering. The jest had gone sour, and soon a quarrel was raging between the two men. The argument had turned into a fight, and that fight had ended with Erik’s hatchet buried in Thorgest’s skull.
Erik had thought they were alone, but the killing had been witnessed in secret by Thorgest’s manservant, who ran back to the village longhouse and informed Thorgest’s father. That night, Erik’s family home was set on fire and their livestock stolen.
Erik had realised his life was in danger. He had fled to Iceland, met Haakon, and together cobbled together a small fleet with the promise of a new land away from despots like Haraldr. He had tried to keep them from knowing the truth, but there was not a man on board who did not know the truth.
This charismatic, powerful man, who promised them the Viking dream of glory and discovery, was nothing more than a fugitive on the run for murder.
This late in the game, none of them cared. In this empty, forbidding land, events in Norway seemed as unimportant as any fact on earth.
***
They wandered the new land with a sense of wonder and disquiet, like men who had been scooped up and dropped on the moon at the hand of some playful god.
The terrain was monotonous, unvarying.
Erik had more to worry about than just the land. The men are growing unhappy. If we do not find inhabitable land, I may soon face a mutiny.
He found himself sweating in the deathless cold.
No-one was more happy than Erik when, with the sun beginning to dip down over the horizon, they found a stream of fresh water.
***
The crew rushed towards it and began filling their waterskins. The brackish water they had brought on their long journey was poison next to this. Haakon’s eyes lit up when he spotted the bones of a deer…a very promising sign.
They made camp on a ridge from where they could see their ships beached on the coast. None of them had the stamina to light a fire. As was his custom, Erik lay down to sleep with a short-bladed stabbing sword in his hand…it was not unheard of for disgruntled warriors to kill their battlechiefs as they slept.
Thus ends our first day in Greenland, he thought. Soon he was drifting off, his ears full of unfamiliar sounds and his nose full of unfamiliar smells.
***
The next day was filled with more of the same. Half the crew went back to the ships to unload supplies, while the others continued exploring the continent.
They spread out and ranged over dozens of square miles, following the contours of the river. Groves of alder and spruce were found further upriver, and oak trees towered off into the distance. Dried animal dung dotted the increasingly grassy plains, another good sign.
Erik busied himself with the minutiae of organising the crew, while internalising facts about the continent of Greenland that would help him build a colony.
By their third day in Greenland, they had still not seen another human being.
***
At the start of the third week, a disquietening discovery was made.
Jaarni was a stout veteren of many battles. He led a party of foragers east on to the land next to the huge ice shelf that met the ocean. Greenland’s hunting options were unreliable at best, so berries were proving to be the colony’s mainstay.
A yell of alarm pierced the air.
Jaarni and three others came running, hands on weapons. Middle-aged Brodir stood over what appeared to be a pile of frost-covered sticks, looking horrified.
Jaarni jerked to a stop, his buskins kicking up a flurry of snow. “What in Fenrir’s name is happening?”
Ashen-faced, Brodir shifted the pile of sticks with his moccasin. The men all took a step back when it was revealed to be a pile of human bones.
They had bleached and cracked with age, but the shape of a femur and a pair of ribs was unmistakable. The men looked across the frost and saw other bones scattered across the snow, as if some giant had mistaken them for gambling dice. Under the shadow of a birch a human skill grinned up at them, half-buried under a tangle of tree roots.
“Hel’s teeth. What happened here?” Jaarni was apoplectic.
“A battle?”
“I do not think so.”
“How many people?”
“Six. Maybe a dozen. And that’s only what we can see from the surface. We can’t possibly know how many bones are buried under snow.”
“A gravesite?”
“Why weren’t they buried?”
A metallic glitter caught Jaarni’s hawkish eyes. He strode over and pulled a rusty iron sword out of the snow.
It was ancient, but no man failed to recognise the design of the fuller and crossguard. Many of them possessed identical weapons.
“This belonged to a Viking” breathed Brodir. “We’re not the first of our people to set foot on Greenland.”
The other men were scrounging around the site. One of them let up a cry and pulled a battered helm out of the ground. It had rusted to a dark maroon color. Another man found a shattered spear haft, so weakened by rain and snow it crumbled in his hands.
A horrified silence settled over the men. They were all thinking what didn’t need to be spoken aloud. So this is what became of Gunnbjörn.
Jaarni’s voice cut through the quiet like an axe blade. “Swordbrothers, there is nothing to see here. Let us return to camp and inform Erik and Haakon about this. They may be able to offer us some insight.”
***
Erik politely sat through the scouts’ report, but his mind was elsewhere. There was so much to be done that he did not possess much interest in an old explorer’s bones lying miles away.
We’ve found the ideal spot for a settlement, he thought, Jaarni’s voice fading into the back of his mind. Not far away from the river and the ice shelf, there is a grassy plain bordered by forest. Not too much clay, and it’s high enough to be safe from frost. Growing food in Greenland will be like picking a beggar’s pockets, but a determined group of men could survive here. It will never become a kingdom; but by the gods, we’ll be better off than we were in Iceland! In fact…
Haakon spoke up, cutting through Erik’s thought train like an axe blade. “Thank you for your report, Jaarni. We will make preparations to leave as soon as possible.”
Erik jerked upright, outraged that his partner could suggest any such thing. “Leaving? Who said anything about leaving?”
”Gunnbjörn and his men did not just lie down and die. They were killed. What if there is a hostile tribe here? We should go, and not endanger the lives of our menlives.”
“Are you crazy? Leave in spite all that we have done? Leave in spite of all that we have yet to do? This is nonsense. Gunnbjörn’s party was killed years ago. Maybe decades ago. And we haven’t seen any living native since we arrived here.”
Haakon pursed his lips. “Open graves, unburied bodies…the omens are all bad.”
“Too much time away from a woman is turning your brains to porridge. Gods, you were always a cautious one, but now you’ve become a coward!”
Furious rage settled over Haakon’s face. Seeking to keep the peace, Erik backpedaled. “I retract what I said, brother. It was spoken in haste. You are no coward. We’ll stay until the settlement is complete, and then reassess our position. I don’t know what you’re afraid of, but if anything goes wrong we still have the ships.”
“Be glad you apologized, brother” Haakon said slowly. Erik couldn’t tell how satisfied he was, but the murderous look had gone out of his eyes. “I was about to challenge you to a duel.”
***
The Norsemen, a hardy race who had spread their tentacles from the Northern Baltic to Gaul and Iberia in the south, took to the challenge of the new land. The remaining stores on the ships were unloaded, and work in earnest began on the settlement.
Men scoured the perimeter of the forest, hacking off fir and spruce branches and wrapping them in bundles for thatch roofing. Other men worked at felling oak and pine.
Over the next three weeks, they managed to frame twenty two cottages and one open hall. Sawpits were dug, and logs were cut into servicable lengths for planking. The thatch was dusted in fire soot, and woven into wooden batons on the roof to provide protection against the rain. The tools the Norsemen had were rudimentary, but they made up for it in persistance and stubbornness.
It’s the way we are, thought Haakon as he watched the proceedings with something like pride in his heart. We don’t tame the land. We wrestle it under control with sheer force of will.
Winter in Greenland came far earlier than the Norsemen had anticipated. The weak, anaemic sun was soon buried under rolling black clouds, and the area was soon engulfed in blizzards. Soon, daylight was reduced to just a few short hours of sunlight.
Further work on the settlement became impossible. The men sat huddled around fires, eating fish and caribou meat. The river froze and they needed to crack the ice every time they collected water.
From time to time, far in the distance, there came a long, ghoulish wolf howl, a sound that has struck fear into the hearts of shepherds throughout the ages. The Vikings only laughed. “Like being at home, heya?”
***
Cold, miserable days continued like a procession of drab, gray beggars outside a church. Whole days would pass when they did not see the sun. The bay had transformed into a small ice shelf, and the ships out in the bay were trapped.
The days progressed so slowly that the men resorted to anything to stave off boredom. Exhibitions of strength and stamina were held, and wagers were carried out using coin that had become worthless.
In the evening after the onset of a fresh blizzard, the men sat gathered in the half built mead hall, listening to a jolly warrior called Harold Vigsson play a barely recognisable song on a set of wooden pipes. Wind whistled through cracks in the building and set them shivering.
Suddenly, one of the men threw a tankard to the ground in disgust. “How long does this song go for? Between your pipes and this wind my teeth are tingling like crazy.”
Haakon put the pipe down, and his half-formed chords stopped. “You don’t like my playing?”
“By the gods, let me die on an enemy spear instead!”
Harold feigned hurt dignity. “Would a story be to you lads’ satisfaction?”
The response was less than enthusiastic, but Harold nevertheless launched into an old, old tale that each of the men present had heard perhaps twenty times. It was only after the men starting throwing their mead-cups at him that he shut up and lapsed into despondency, his head resting on his breastbone.
Bored of the spectacle, Haakon stood and walked over to the doorway, massaging life back into his cold limbs.
“Where are you going?” Asked Erik waspishly. Following their standoff over Jaarni’s report, the relationship between the two men had turned black. They fought constantly, and countermanded each other’s orders.
“To take a piss. I’d sooner saddle and ride a wild boar than have to listen to this crew. What’s wrong? Would you like me to ask for your permission?”
“I don’t care what you do. Go and die out there.” A sharp, poisonous barb. Not at all like the playful banter they had exchanged in more peaceful days. It had hate in it.
***
It was so cold outside the building that Haakon forgot his irritation with Erik immediately.
Cold was almost the wrong word. The blizzard sucked heat out of him like a sponge. It bit into his bones like a fire, even though he was wearing the heaviest clothing they had. His fingers started to go numb, and he knew that if he spent more than a few minutes out in this devilish cold he would suffer frostbite.
With shaking hands he undid the drawstring on his trousers and emptied his bladder on to the ground as fast as he could. His urine froze immediately. He re-tied his trousers and was about go back to the relative warmth of the hall when his he saw…something…out of the corner of his eye.
Visibility was restricted to a few yards in each direction, and vague shapes could be discerned for a couple yards more. The snow was whipping along almost horizontally.
In a small break in the white flurry Haakon could make out a shape standing on the crest of a hill. A man, who was either extremely bulky or was wrapped up in impossible amounts of clothing. He was a stone’s throw from the building, but Haakon could only catch brief glimpses of him behind the screen of snow.
He stood there for perhaps ten seconds, and then turned and started jogging away from the building. Haakon caught a brief glimpse of his backside before he vanished forever.
A single thought echoed in Haakon’s head. There are men in Greenland! He was so transfixed he did not notice the frightening numbness in his extremities. He finally pulled himself away and walked back inside.
“I saw a man out there.” Were his first breathless words.
***
The debate raged for three days.
Haakon, who had felt nothing but disquiet in this knew land, took it as a sign that he was right and they had overstayed their welcome. “He was watching us! He knows we are here. And do you think one man lives alone? Once the winter ends, we’ll be attacked, mark my words. We’ll end up by ”
Erik the Red opposed him, loathe to leave all of their work behind. The rest of the men were polarised in their opinions, supporting one leader or the other.
But it was Erik who had led them here, Erik who had financed and supplied most of the ships. Haakon had his supporters, but Erik could over-rule any decision he made.
“We are staying. Accept it” he snapped, after a heated row with his old friend.
Haakon ground his teeth together like tombstones, saying nothing.
***
One blustery day, when the storms were becoming weaker than weaker and the ice was beginning to melt, everything came to a head.
Fifteen men, all of them known supporters of Haakon, were found down by the beach, working on the longships. They claimed to be checking for damage, but it was obvious they were doing nothing of the sort.
The men were carrying supplies out to the ships, and making the ships seaworthy. Extra planks were being nailed to the ships in a lapstrake design to reinforce the hull, and new sailcloth and oars were being fitted.
The most damning fact was that they were breaking the ships out of the ice. If they hadn’t been caught, they may well have left then and there.
Erik was so furious he was unapproachable for days. The would-be deserters were flogged and reduced to menial servants. And his attitude towards Haakon turned from dislike to loathing. He could prove nothing, but it seemed very likely that Haakon himself was indirectly involved in the events down on the beach.
Concerned about direct retribution from Erik, Haakon left the hall and began building a small hut for himself up on the ridge, far away from his fellow Vikings.
***
Spring, or some pathetic mockery of it, returned to the land. Animals awoke from hibernation, birds’ young began to leave the nest, and the river melted and began to flow. The days lengthened and the sun actually shined for most of the time.
The land was transformed, but the conflict and strife that was tearing the colony apart continued.
Erik the Red became ever more vengeful, and Haakon became ever more paranoid. He posted regular guards up on the hills to watch out for invaders. He suggested that a picket fence be built around the settlement, but Erik vetoed him, saying their timber could be better used elsewhere.
The men had almost run through their winter stores, and Erik began leading hunting parties out to search for reindeer, mallard ducks and other animals.
***
One fine day that he did not feel, Erik and his hunting party were traversing a thin forest just north of the settlement. They carried snares and and traps in their hands, and their eyes were watchful for the signs of edible wildlife. Dried dung. Disturbed leaf piles. Scratches on trees.
Erik gave orders. “We’ll take one more look through this glade for good trap locations, and then we’ll spread out. There has to be something around here.”
They moved forward, their eyes fixed on the ground.
Erik dimly heard a hsss-thwock sound somewhere to his left. Strange, he thought. That almost sounds like…
A man fell to the ground, gasping and writhing, an arrow buried in his eye socket.
“Attack!”
Erik looked up and saw a line of perhaps thirty men charging towards them, screaming and yelling in some foreign tongue that was nonsense to him. They carried no metal weapons, but had fire-hardened spears and arrows.
They looked like no men Erik had ever seen. They were short, barely up to his shoulders, and squat and round. They had no facial hair, and their clothing was a mystery. Rage contorted their faces. They brandished their weapons with deadly intent.
Arrows slashed into the Norse hunting party, felling two. Erik saw a tribesman bending a bow in his direction. White-hot panic flushed through his stomach and he rolled to the left, shielding himself behind a tree. Unperturbed, the tribesman adjusted his aim and sent the arrow thudding into the neck of the Norseman who had been behind him.
The remaining warriors formed ranks around Erik, dodging shafts and giving ground. Jaarni hurled his spear at the attackers and turned to Erik. “Battlechief! Your orders?”
Erik drew his short sword and waved in the direction of the smoke plume over the hill. “Retreat! Back to the settlement!”
Within seconds the entire party of hunters was in full flight, running from their pursuers like deer from wolves. Arrows hissed and thudded around them. Brodir took a shaft to the leg and fell. No-one looked to see what became of him.
Haakon was right. Damn him. Haakon was right. It shamed Erik that he should feel resentment in circumstances such as this.
They hurdled fallen trees, jumped over rocks. One man tripped, and two swordbrothers helped him up. They were all big, long-legged men and extremely fit. Their short-legged pursuers were slowly falling behind, and eventually stopped firing arrows. Erik felt confident that they would reach the safety of the settlement. With the sounds behind them receding, they waded across the river and began ascending the hill at a run.
Smoke. Was that smoke they could smell in the air? Surely not.
***
“Hell’s teeth.” Breathed Jaarni. His swarthy face was white as a ghost. “We’re all dead men.” They all stood at the top of the hill, looking down at the settlement.
…There was no settlement any more. All but three of the buildings were ablaze. The mead hall was a burning ruin. Flames leaped and danced and crackled. Bodies littered the ground, dozens upon dozens of them of them. Hundreds of tribesmen were surging across the destroyed in a roaring mass, killing surviving Vikings and throwing lit firebrands into the buildings. The scene was a roiling, chaotic mass of blood, and fire, and screaming men.
A Norseman – it could only be Haakon – had succeeded in rallying a few score warriors to his side and was fighting a gallant battle over near the shore. The tribesmen wore no armor, and were easily slain by the battle-hardened Norsemen and their iron weapons. But they were ferocious and almost animal in their attacks, and they had nearly a three to one advantage.
Swarms of tribesmens hurled themselves in waves at the disciplined Norse warriors, hacking and stabbing at them with fire-hardened spears and flint axes. There was no resisting them. Strong men broke down and wept as their saw their friends and swordbrothers cut down and killed.
Battle-lust descended over Erik the Red and his men. They ran down the slope, arming themselves with weapons from the dead as they went, and charged at the huge mass of tribesmen. There was not a single thought in their heads. Not strategy. Not tactics. Not survival.
***
Haakon fought desperately against the sea of freakish, beardless men. They just kept coming, climbing over piles of their own dead. One by one, his stalwarts were being dragged down and slain.
One of the Norse took an arrow in the eye. His head snapped back under the impact and he fell. Three men swarmed into the breach immediately and Haakon charged them. He smashed one man in the mouth with an axe, causing his lower jaw to break away from his skull in a foul explosion of blood and bone. The second man stabbed at Haakon’s chain-mail overcoat with a bone knife, and looked surprised when his blow failed to penentrate. Haakon half-decapitated him with a backhand stroke.
The third barbarian was about to strike at Haakon’s unprotected flank, but a warrior stepped in and plunged a swordblade into his side. “Erik’s coming!” He shouted in Haakon’s ear. “We’re saved!”
Haakon took a glance at the hill that had bordered their once-safe settlement and saw fifteen odd men running to their defence. He spat into the ground. There would be no salvation for them. They would all die here, unremembered and unmourned.
“Odin, you who sees all! Watch me this day!” Haakon roared into the faces of the tribesmen. “Count my deeds! Decide if I deserve a seat with you in Valhalla!” His axe-arm rose and fell like a tireless engine of death, killing and maiming.
***
Erik’s red hair and beard bounced in their braids like a firebrand. He and his men let loose a terrible battle-cry, a defeaning roar designed to rattle nerves and loosen bowels. And then they struck.
They collided with the tribesmen army like death dealing tornadoes, cutting, hacking and slashing, cleaving through them like a hot knife through butter. Jaarni killed two, ducked, and ripped out a third man’s tendons with an ankle-heigh slash of his broadsword. Ulfsson drove a captured spear into the man’s neck as he fell. Most of the Norsemen had quickly buckled on armor before joining battle, and enemy spears and arrows clattered off their breastplates and helms harmlessly.
Erik waded into the thick of the battle, his strikes and parries dazzlingly fast. A meaty hand clamped down on his shoulder, seeking to pull him off his feet. With a cry, Jaarni charged forward and slashed down. The hand was chopped clean off and fell to the ground in a spray of gore. Hot blood splashed across Jaarni’s face from the tribesman’s spurting forarm.
Erik pushed and shoved through the battle, ignoring the risk. He shouldered men aside, using his short sword to stab at them only when there was enough room. Eventually he broke through and threw himself to the ground at the embattled defenders’ feet.
Haakon looked down at him, and smiled. “I was wondering where you were.”
Erik stood up and joined the battle-line, hacking and cutting at the wall of flesh in front of him. “I suppose I should offer an apology.”
“It does not matter now.” Sweat shone on Haakon’s brow, highlighted by the fires that blazed all across the settlement.
The battle raged like a caged beast. Men fell to the ground and were trampled under the feet of their friends. Arrows and spears flew like a hailstorm of pain. Despite the overwhelming odds, the Vikings fought magnificently. Scores of tribesmen died. But even so, the battle could only go one way.
A war club smashed Jaarni from his feet and hurled him to the ground. Three tribesmen jumped on him, stabbing him relentlessly. He screamed as a flint spearhead tore through his eye and into his brain.
Harold Vigsson chopped his sword two-handed through an enemy’s breastbone. The sword wedged there and was pulled from his hands as his opponant fell. He let loose one final wolf howel and threw himself at the clot of savages racing towards him, kicking and punching furiously before being overwhelmed.
Ulfsson fought with the energy of the young. He did not see a wounded tribesman reaching out a hand and grasping his ankle. Before he could react, he was on his back and it was all over for him. Tribesmen piled on top of him, knives and spearpoints ready.
The exhausted Erik and Haakon fought back to back, labouring on with the reserves of their strength and stamina. All around them friends were dying. There was no fancy swordplay, just a raw endurance contest against the enemy.
A spear punctured Erik’s chain mail, grazing the flesh. Haakon bled from six or seven small wounds. Their lungs burned from the blistering heat of the fire and the suffocating smoke that filled the whole world. Both of their weapon arms were about to seize up.
Perhaps this was not so bad. They would die here surrounded by brothers.
But unknown to them, it wouldn’t be all of their brothers.
Because some of the Norsemen had plans other than fighting.
***
When the attack on the settlement occurred, the fifteen men who had attempted to desert were roped up within the confines of the mead hall. From midday to noon they had their freedom, but for the rest of the time they were no better than the slaves the Norsemen had captured in Ireland and Gaul for hundreds of years. Such was their punishment. At the moment, no-one had need of them.
“What’s going on?” A blonde giant called Svarni asked, craning his neck out of the window. “I can’t see.”
“Screaming…yelling…something’s happening, and I doubt it’s a Season of New Life festival.”
The men waited in ghastly anticipation as the noises came closer, and soon armored warriors were observed racing past their vantage point by the window. Clashes. Clangs. More screams.
“The settlement is being attacked.” Svarni observed helpfully.
“By whom?”
An old, disgruntled warrior tethered to a oak support sighed in resignation. “Have a look through that solid timber wall and tell us, idiot.”
The battle-noies swelled until they filled the prisoners’ ears. Orders were being shouted. Battle-horns sounded. There came the hiss and thwock of arrows.
Without warning, an ugly, beardless face appeared at the window and hurled a flaming torch through the window. The men cried out as it bounced to the ground, hissing furiously, before finally landing on a bundle of dried straw.
“Hell’s teeth!” Svarni swore. They struggled to kick it away, but their bounds only allowed them a yard’s worth of movement and none of them could get at it.
For a glorious moment it seemed that the torch would die out without catching, but with a soft flump sound the straw ignited, spreading fast and burning bright.
Long minutes passed in the tense and sweat-stinking room as the fire spread. The bearskin rugs laid down on the floor caught. Flames started licking at the slender wooden supports. The pine resin in the walls began to burn. Bitter acrid smoke filled the room, and the men began coughing.
“AAARGH!’ A slender black-haired man called Vigrid roared, straining at his bonds. They were secured with roped ankles and leather thongs holding their hands together. He kicked out, lashing around in a panic. A table was knocked down.
***
The door burst open, and two figures tumbled in.
They wrestled and grappled on the floor, as smoke was sucked out of the building. The prisoners gasped in lungfuls of air, hacking and coughing like poison victims.
One of the combatants on the ground kicked his adversary in the face. The man reeled back, giving the first man – they could recognise him as a Norse warrior – enough space to free a dagger in his belt and slash open the tribesman’s jugular.
He shakily got to his feet, look around at the prisoners, and walked over to Svarni. Working quickly, he began untying the man’s bonds.
“Aren’t we supposed to be prisoners?” Svarni pretended nonchalance.
“Gods’ teeth, man, can’t you hear what’s happening out there? We’re being attacked. Hundreds of men. We need as many swords out there as possible. Master Haakon has instructed me to free you.”
The knots came off Svarni’s feet and he shook them free, moving over to untie his friends.
“Go to the smith and arm yourselves.” Their rescuer said. One by one, the men were being freed. “…and then join the main party of warriors.”
Svarni nodded reasonably, and then reached over and picked up a wooden club. The man’s mouth moved, about to frame a question of what he was doing, but he never got the chance. With no warning, Svarni brought the club down across the man’s head. There was a frighteningly loud thud, and the man fell, his eyes pointing in different directions.
Svarni turned to face his friends’ shocked faces. “If there are hundreds of men out there, Haakon and the rest will be killed, and so will anyone who tries to help them. Let’s grab some supplies and make a break for the ships. If they’re still in good order, we can escape and leave this piss-ache land behind.”
The men let up a cheer, emboldened by Svarni’s iniative. He allowed himself a small moment of satisfaction.
***
Erik had fallen.
His foot had struck rock, jarring his hip, and he went down on his back, watching the bloodthirsty savages rushing towards him with a kind of dazed detachement.
Three Norsemen ran to save him. One of them blocked a downward axe strike aimed at the fallen leader, while the other two drove the tribesmen back with their battleaxes. Erik was pulled back behind the thinning line of Norsemen, where he lay trying to regain his strength.
He chanced a glance over his shoulder, and saw something that he could scarcely credit.
A line of human figures, burdened down with sacks and crates, marching towards the ships down on the beach. They were distant specks, and neither the Norsemen nor the tribesmen seemed to notice.
His mind joined the dots. The prisoners. They, of course, were escaping in the confusion.
As he lay there in the mud, clangings and screams corkscrewing through his ears, a small seed of doubt was planted in his mind.
It went against his training and instincts. He had called men cowards in the past for less. And yet…
…there was no desire in his heart to die a warrior’s death.
***
Haakon had become distanced from Erik by the ebb and flow of the melee, but he could see that the battle only had minutes to go. Only about twenty Norse still stood, the best of the best, kept alive by their fighting skills and sheer luck. The tribesmen packed in like a roiling mass of rodents, pushing them relentlessly back. Soon the wavering Norse line would crack, and that would be that.
But the savages had paid a dear price of their victory. The battlefield was heaped with their bodies.
His weariness was bone deep. He wanted nothing more than to rip off his encumbering armor and lie down and sleep. The muscles in his axe arm were screaming.
Instead, he spat into his palm, rubbed it in, and picked up his axe, resolving to sell his life and dearly.
A question entered his mind. Where’s Erik?
There was no sign of him in the battle. Had he been killed or tripped up? Or was he…?
Haakon turned his head to the beach, and his gaze hardened like water freezing.
***
Erik saw a sight he hated. A man had broken away from the battlefield and was running towards him. He was fairly sure of the man’s identity.
“Get ready to leave.” He whispered at Svarni and the escapees. “I’ll deal with this.”
***
“Bastard! You’re leaving us!”
The man’s voice was Haakon’s. Erik could not have identified him any other way. Mud and blood splattered every exposed inch of skin, and his beard was a bedraggled clump. His eyes burned with rage from under a dented and battered helm. “Explain yourself. I’ve a mind to snap your neck with my bare hands.”
Erik remained calm. He spread his hands before him, two men discussing a business deal. “We’ve lost, friend. We should have listened to you from the beginning. This land isn’t worth living in, much less dying for. Come and join us.”
“Look at those men!” Haakon gestured out at the remnants of the colony, fighting vainly in the ruined village. “They followed you, and you’re abandoning them!”
“I can see you’re distraught.” Erik’s face was unreadable. “Get on the boat and we’ll talk about it later.”
“You’re scum, Erik. May you die on that ocean.”
“This is fascinating. You’re protesting at my leaving when that is what you wanted to do from the beginning. All the men who stay will die, surely you can see that. Now get on the damned boat.”
With an impotent roar, Haakon swept up his axe and charged the unarmed Erik. Instead of trying to avoid, the smiling Erik stepped forward into Haakon’s path, giving him no room to swing his axe. Erik kneed Haakon in the balls, and then smashed his fist into the bridge of the man’s nose, dumping him to the half-frozen sand.
Haakon had no more strength to resist. He lay there, gaping like a fish, as Erik bore down on top of him. “I regret doing this, brother. But you’ve chosen your path, so walk it like a man.”
With that, he brought his booted foot crunching down on his old friend’s neck. With his windpipe crushed, Haakon could do nothing but stare as stars swarmed in front of his vision, multiplying and speeding up, before blackness swamped his vision.
A small, buried part of Erik conscience twinged at the action. But did not wolves fight their packmates when food was scarce? He turned and saw all fifteen of his pathetic little crew staring at him in horror.
Svarni finally spoke. “What have you done, Erik?” His voice was soft. Awed.
Erik rounded on Svarni. “I offed him because I didn’t feel like sharing a boat with him, that’s what. Do any of you lads have any opinions to express about my methods of running things?”
The crew looked perturbed.
Erik pressed on. “Look, I’ll make this short. I know many of you were friends of Haakon, but that is all elementary now. There are sixteen of us, and we need all the oarsmen we have. More to the point, I am the only capable navigator amongst us. You lads can sail away without me if you want, but consider yourself lucky if you even get past those rocks.”
His crew looked unhappy, but seeing no options they assembled and began breaking the longboat out. Erik joined in, trying to mollify them with loud praise and compliments of their skill and efficiency.
Fifteen short minutes later, they were gone. Leaving the burning shell of their settlement and dozens of dead comrades behind them. They tried to persuade themselves that the bitter taste in their mouths was sea air. More than one pair of hands were shaking as they sent their oars dipping and sweeping into the briny waves.
But not Erik. He seemed to be coping quite well.
***
Erik the Red’s hair was no longer red, but he still spoke with conviction, and his smile was yet dangerously relative. His grandson looked up in rapt attention, believing every word. Who could deny this man had led hundreds to their doom in a strange land?
“What happened next, grandfather?”
“The journey back was slow and unpleasant. I was in an agony of anticipation. These were men whose favorite leader I had killed. I was ever expecting a knife between my ribs.
“My mind joined in the torment. Would I be barred from the Hall of Heroes for my crime? Haakon was a miserable bastard, true, but had he really deserved…that?”
“To cut a long story short, I arrived back in this very port in a leaky ship with a half-starved crew. But I was in one piece, and for that I thank the gods. My story soon spread throughout the colony of Reykjavic and I was invited to a personal audience with King Haraldr to discuss my findings. I told him of the hostilities with a tribe of natives and my lucky escape. I also told him that my beloved friend Haakon had died at there hands.” He shrugged. “I’m sure my crew were going around spreading the true story, but I was under the king’s protection by that point, so it didn’t matter.”
The grandson sat in silence for a few seconds. Then: “but why did you do it?”
“What? Lie to the king?”
“No, why did you…kill your friend Haakon?”
“Why didn’t I just leave him there on the beach, you mean? He would have caused trouble for me if I had brought him back to Iceland. I never intended to let him on the ship. And he would have perished in Greenland.” Erik spoke hesitantly. A man who fully knows that his explanation is inadequate.
Seemingly eager to change the subject, Erik cast an eye out of the castle window over the Bay of Reykjavic. Huge ships could be seen entering and leaving. He sighed. “Haraldr Fairhair is long dead, and his son is much more of an explorer. I have heard he is financing a new expedition to Greenland. I have sent him several letters urging him to reconsider.
“Well, what comes will come. I now have business to attend to. Enjoy your holiday, lad.”
He ran a friendly hand through the boy’s hair and departed, closing the door against the incessant drafts that plagued the castle.
The young boy sat thinking. Erik was a god among men. But could a god be so cruel as to crush a friend’s neck and callously leave him to die? And for so little reason?
Would my friends ever do that to me?
The lad shivered. It wasn’t from the cold.
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The cat didn’t know herself as Sunny. She didn’t know herself as anything. Names were not a part of her mental makeup.
She lay sprawled on the fine weave of the living room carpet, her eyes closed in a dozing half-sleep. This was not unusual. For about eighteen hours each day you could find her in various locations in the house, in varying stages of rest. She knew only two gods, and their names were Sleep and Food.
She shared the house with two humans. Master was a middle-aged human male whose hair was thinning out on the top of his head like cat suffering from mange. Mistress was responsible for feeding the cat. Master and mistress were more along the lines of hired staff, it was the cat that owned the house. She knew it, they knew it, everyone knew it.
It was an easy life. Food was reverently served to her in small plastic bowels. She could sleep in any part of the house except the bedrooms and master’s office (he spent a good deal of time in there). In the times when she desired affection, master and mistress were ever ready with a scratch, pat, or rub.
***
One evening, when the sun had retracted its gaze completely from indoors and the cat needed to curl up tightly to stay warm, she saw master pacing his office. She walked in to investigate. On his face she saw an expression she could dimly identify as worry.
It struck her as strange that he was not immediately throwing her out of his office. He seemed distracted.
He walked over to the door, shut it, then walk back to a stack of filing cabinets from which he pulled a manila folder. He then walked back to his desk where a large chrome machine sat beside the computer. The cat watched as master turned the machine on and, one by one, fed the contents of the manila folder into the machine’s gaping maw. What emerged at the other end was thin strips of shredded paper.
After all the papers had been shredded, master turned the machine off, shut down the computer, gave the cat a scratch, turned off the lights, and exited the office.
As he had bent down, the cat had seen beads of sweat on his brow.
***
The next few days passed in a dreamy, somnolent blur of sleep, eating, and small tours of the house that were the cat’s daily exercise regime. She saw master and mistress making a lot of phone calls. Some sounded pleasant, others sounded tense.
I don’t understand it, she thought during her brief moments of lucidity. What are those snakelike things they hold to their ears? Are they alive? Master and mistress talk to them, so they must be. And with a sudden surge of jealousy. I don’t get talked to that much.
***
A day came when guests arrived at the cat’s domain…a human male and female with two small children. The adult humans sat down for a meal while the children played in a corner. The cat made a point of not joining them.
From the table drifted snatches of conversation.
“…Stewart says you’re the primary trustee, Bill. Are you absolutely sure that you haven’t misplaced those files?
The cat saw master nod his head, avoiding his guest’s gaze.
The meal was finished but the conversation continued well into the night. Some time into it the bored children approached the cat, and she grudgingly allowed herself to be petted and fondled and picked up, enduring their attentions like a businessman enduring a dull conference. She was glad when the guests left, and master and mistress seemed to feel the same way.
***
Some time near midnight, the cat was awoken by a crashing sound coming from the kitchen. With instinctive stealth no amount of pampering could rob her of, she padded into the kitchen to investigate. She saw mistress hunched over the kitchen sink, a glass filled with water in her shaking hand. Beside the sink was a small bottle with meaningless markings on it: VALIUM.
The cat walked up and began rubbing herself against mistress’s leg. Mistress spun, gave an unearthly shriek and dropped the glass. It shattered like a gunshot. The cat to fled under the table, wide-eyed with shock.
Mistress was gasping and clutching her chest. “Oh…Sunny, I didn’t mean to scare you…I just…Christ…” She was mumbling and slurring her words like she normally never did. “Come here, puss. I’m….sorry…”
The cat was doubtful, but finally allowed herself to coaxed out from under the table for a scratch from mistress. They both went to bed, and by the next morning the cat had no recollection of the previous night’s events.
***
The cat dreamed her way through the days. Summer was shortening and the leaves were browning and dying on the trees. Master and mistress paid a schoolboy to rake their lawn every couple of weeks. Meanwhile, the cat was noticing disconcerting changes in her property’s caretakers. Mistress was becoming distant and vague. Master’s temper was growing shorter and shorter and the cat often found him bent over his desk, yelling at the snake-thing held to his ear.
Did it do something to upset you? the cat wondered. Good. Perhaps you’ll start spending time with me instead.
But by and large, life continued to be good, life continued to be pleasant. The water kept flowing and the sun kept shining and food was served in never-ending platefuls. The cat was beginning to find it difficult to curl up in a ball, her belly kept getting in the way as it hadn’t before.
Then…
***
The cat watched through the window as a car pulled up on master and mistress’s driveway. Out of it came the man that had eaten dinner at the cat’s house not long ago. He had a ugly, bone-chilling frown and a purposeful, aggressive walk. The cat decided to stay out of his way.
He pounded on the door, and master opened it. Angry words were spoken. The man was red in the face. Mistress was standing behind master and seemed on the verge of fainting. Master gave a cool, calculated answer that seemed to infuriate the red-faced man. More hot words, and then the man’s balled fist collided with master’s jaw.
Mistress screamed. The cat got one look at master, down on his knees, red fluid pouring from his chin, and then ran away. She skipped over the sofa and hid under the coffee table, ears flat against her head like a skullcap and her tail in bushy bristles.
The cat stayed there a long time, not daring to move. She heard a siren noise in the distance that came closer and closer. She wondered what was happening, and whether it would stop her from having regular naps. Did it have anything to do with the snake creatures? Or the monster that had eaten master’s papers?
It will be fine. Master and mistress will take care of it, she thought as the sirens came closer and closer…closer and closer.
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