pugbutter

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

"I'm afraid we won't have much time to whip you lots into fighting shape," Hralding said. Though he wore a stiff, bitter countenance, his voice bounced about with playful inflections. As he walked he seemed to lack a destination, loosely circling what remained of the mead-hall's congregation. "Which of you have fought before?"

Of course he expected the worst: of those who could fight in a proper shieldwall, all were cowards and liars who could not be trusted to use their abilities in disciplined command. Nay, his crew was filled with those who had the talents but lacked the goodwill, and vice-versa: those eager to serve, obey, sweat, and bleed, but who would fall like sickled rye at the blade of the first decent warrior they met over there. Still, Hralding kept any pessimism to himself, for he had been given a task and it was not in his style to fail those who depended on him. He nodded with hesitant approval at any raised hands.

"And you all know why you're here," he continued. "I'll tell you forthright: I don't care if it's for the community, for treasure, or for your own fractured ego. So long as we agree that we are now a team, and I'm the leader of this team, all of you are welcome here. Whatever you fight for, fight obediently and we shall have no quarrel."

---

Meanwhile ...

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As he walked, Hrífa gnawed his fingernails against each other, trimming them down without need for a knife or a scissor. He worried only as to what he would do when he had one long, sharp nail remaining, with no others to cut it. It had not snowed in some time, so what snow laid on the ground was much trampled down into hard, dirty roads leading through the village. As Adlif stopped him Hrífa turned antsy, feeling this dirt seeping through his shoes and into his woolen socks.

"Eh? Who?" He jogged his memory. "Oh; the girl! We spoke about trees."

𝕋ℍ𝔼 𝕊𝔸𝔾𝔸 𝕆𝔽 𝕍𝕀ℕ𝔻𝔼ℝ𝕍𝔸𝕃𝕃

@Fyre Unholy I see you reading this thread you fokkin loser tosspot. HMU on gmail

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

“All right. Looks like it’s time to go,” said the man, looking around as the people diffused away. He did not need her approval or her permission; he started walking to the exit even before she noticed and tried to catch up.

“Wait!” she said. “Didn’t you hear him? We’re supposed to stay, and—!”

Hrífa had swiveled on his heels, scanning the room once more. He shrugged. “I reckon we’ll get more than enough of him once we’re on a boat with him. Right?”

And so he appeared to vanish; of course. Because Ásdís fancied herself a good girl, now a loyal and obedient soldier, she knew she had to stay, whether she wanted to or not. Yet eagerness nonetheless continued to imbue her actions. So she stayed, and Hrífa was gone behind the doors of the mead-hall.

Outside there were parents waiting, women armed with hugs and kisses and men with their shirts of mail, their helmets polished to a mirror sheen. If they were wealthier men they offered their adventurous relatives swords, seaxes, and good axes; if poor, these children and undesirables could only afford to take their wood axes, their sickles, and their pitchforks.

Inside, meanwhile, the last man in the mead-hall who was not plagued by níþ or by old festered wounds had stayed behind, leaning cockily against the throne still warm with Fjalfar’s scent. Tall, strong, and beautifully blond, with his hair and beard done up in elaborate death-braids, he was Hralding, their new ship-captain.

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

“Once or twice,” the Rat-eater said. “There are lots of trees and rocks.” He appeared sincerely convinced that this detailed description would be of value to her.

He was peering over his shoulder now; if he was not already so drained of his colorful humors, he would have been seen to pale in his epiphany. He had realized, at last, that as he stood, in his current predicament, he was volunteering to become a raider, and to earn oníðingr status through blood, steel, and the salt of the crooning sea. Strangely this prospect did not excite him much—mayhap he had acclimated to hermeticism, and in fact had grown quite fond of all the privacy and silence he commanded all for himself—but as he tried to push back through the crowd, he found that he could not.

“Oh—oh, dear.”

The people behind him prevented his escape. Like a finger-trap toy, he could enter but not leave, not without great struggle. And suddenly it was already too late to leave, for Fjalfar had thrown out his arms in a great embrace for all his saviors.

“Today the ship is packed and loaded. Tomorrow she raises her sail, and embarks for the kingdom of the Franks!”

Probably too few people cheered, clapped, and otherwise celebrated for Ásdís’ tastes; for Hrífa it was far too many. The cruel reality had struck him that he just made an oath, and to break it might earn him a proper outlawry, ousted from his little home in the woods, driven away from all his animal friends! As most of the crowds left, the heroes were ordered to stay, and meet their new captain.

“Well, I was good with a spear once,” Hrífa said to his new friend. His smile was not very assuring, but he clearly seemed eager to take his situation in stride.

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

Hrífa needed a moment to realize the girl was talking to him; he’d seen her face, pretty and just slightly plump, in his sharp peripherals, and as he turned to face her, he blinked. It took much too long to blink, as he squinted his eyes and pried them open again in jagged motions, as if coercing them from his own body.

“That’s nice!” said the Rat-eater, and she sensed no sarcasm in his enthusiastic reply; nor did he intend any. “Is that what the crowd is about?” He tried to gesture sweepingly around him but found he lacked the room. He only ended up bumping someone in the back, which thankfully this person appeared not to notice; for indeed, they were smashing themselves all up toward the throne like a longship dashed on the rocks jutting from the sea.

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

Too far away to properly hear the chieftain—though it was something vaguely related to ships and sailing, Hrífa knew—he squinted, as if his hearing and his vision were somehow symbiotic; he leaned back and forth in his seat, trying to look past all the bare heads and skullcaps and bonnets, too. He decided he needed to get closer, and as he stood, he was the second person to do so, after a particular spunky farm-girl. But as there came a third, a fourth, a tenth, and beyond, it struck Hrífa as just mildly odd.

I suppose the chieftain needs to speak louder, he thought; look at how many people couldn’t hear his speech! Even a few from the front!

The chatter of the crowd did not grant the chieftain any boons in that regard, naturally.

Hrífa was going to slip along the wall and catch the chieftain’s words from a sideline vantage, but as these children and ne’er-do-wells gathered in the center of the mead-hall, near the hearth, he realized he probably ought to fit in. Further, he feared the hound-like bloodthirst of that huskarl, who would suspect him perhaps of trying to get too close.

As he joined the crowd he pushed along its side, hoping to be close enough, or else getting up at all was a damned waste, he knew. By happenstance Ásdís acknowledged his presence before he hers, and without having to turn around…

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

Fjalfar searched the crowd desperately for this outburst. As the whispers and mumbles around her grow bolder, they worked to obfuscate her voice; but he saw her, and he smiled. Amidst his sharp and manly features the warmth of his smiling cheeks could strike some off balance.

“’Who,’ indeed,” he murmured, quietly enough that he may have said it only to himself. “Yet no matter who we send, we may find salvation or doom. Only the gods can know. I am blind to the ways of fate, and so I must throw my lot, and make my gamble. I will pray; I will make my sacrifices to Óðinn; and then I will send them forth.”

He knew she was right, even if she wasn’t; that wary old mother, who cared far too much for the welfare of her child (as all mothers ought). But so was he. It was a risk, but so was sending the raiders, or sending no one whatever. When night set upon this story, only the valkyries could judge his soul’s worth; only the nornir could say whether his choice was wise.

Abruptly, through the tumultuous resistance of the mead-hall’s naysayers, his hand lashed viper-like from his bosom. “Rise up, heroes! I want to see who among you seek the glories of other lands.”

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

Fjalfar heard the minute mumblings, and to a degree had expected them. He let his eyes, like spring saplings shooting up from the melting snow, roll up toward the ceiling, the noises wearing on his patience which always was so threadbare. Of course, he had not gained a reputation as a ferocious raider just for calm, collected airs; for mercy and patience!

“The prevailing argument amongst you hushed whisperers—who once again, I see, lack the courage to come up here and say these things to my face, for all to behold—is that we should send our best soldiers, our seasoned víkingar! But now I ask you of cowardly whispers: should the winter thaw, who then will till and tend our fields, while our young, strong men are in Bretwalda or Frankia? Who shall push the plow and tame the aurochs? That’s right: the very people who you have set out to decry today. Whatever fate the nornir have spun for us, they have called for us to place our faith in these, the forsaken of our people.”

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

As he stood, suddenly Fjalfar towered over his wife who sat beside him, a fragile little thing with a face much too kind and homely; not at all matching the ferocity of the man who had deflowered and claimed her as his own. And on the other side, the chieftain loomed too over the huskarl, his bodyguard, who propped between his knees a massive axe on a handle nearly as tall as he. Underneath his peaked helmet they could see only the soldier’s wispy black beard dangling from his chin; they knew it was Úða, but they could not see his short jet hair, nor his eyes which seemed infinitely deep in their darkness like a malevolent nighttime sea.

Fjalfar’s eyes like a predator’s scanned the crowd in vain for those rebels, those irreverent toads, who dared defy his authority, and on such a drastic day. If authority alone did not quell them, he thought, then sheer power must; he shall scream til his voice has inundated theirs and drowned them!

“The ship’s hull has been scrubbed of barnacles,” he roared, “and its deck flooded of rats. It has been painted anew, and given a new sail, free of holes and patches.”

He had pressed his hand, weighed down with silver rings, augustly to his breast. Only if the crowds’ volume subsided did his in turn.

“She’s as fine a ship as we ever have seen in this place! But now she needs a crew, equally fine, to sail her.”

At this announcement arrived a scoffing laughter from the rear of the crowd; issued forth by someone obscured from view, who this false invisibility bequeathed too great a confidence. Fjalfar positively scowled, flashing his age-yellowed teeth, fury forming in his brow and the corners of his thick lips.

“It is true that our greatest warriors shall not embark in this week,” he growled. “It is true that some of the men in this room are—disgraced.” He had paused, choosing the word diplomatically. “But among them shall be our own kin, our own blood and honor! Do not be so quick to besmirch the entire crew, for the sake of the few whose names you find ‘unsavory.’ And further, when this ship embarks, no longer shall they be criminals and children, witches and traitors; no, they will be our salvation, and warriors, united all under a single sail. So I say again: do not meddle lightly with their honor, which may yet be restored, so that you’re rendered a talkative fool!”

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

The chieftain was not a particularly powerful man except by the measure of this peasants and freemen; though a þegn, most of his lands were empty, with few inhabitants paying few taxes. Maybe this was the root cause of his ostentatious nature; for he wore the best clothes he could, in the finest green dyes afforded from faraway lands; and he sat in the nearest thing they had to a throne, a tall wooden chair, cushioned in stuffed linen, carved at its facets with runes and snaking dragons. When he had quaffed the very last of his beer, of which the village possessed a startling abundance, he turned the cup over, and smacked its lip repeatedly into the table, pretending at being a sort of gavel.

He was tall and burly, as befitting this people; he was measured the strongest warrior in the tribe, and one of the wiser. His wavy grey hair, stained by the last few flecks of black which in his youth had filled his mane, draped luxuriously like ivy off these hulking shoulders. And in his acrid green eyes, he peered across his room of subjects, waiting patiently, if with a certain smoldering angst.