Fargoer (23 page)

“Let her go!” Vierra’s commanding voice concealed the fear that was eating her insides.

Aure twirled around. On her face shame, anger, fear and sorrow took turns in a confusing flurry.

“Go away, please. Let me be in peace. This doesn’t concern you.” Aure didn’t get up, but spread her arms into a pleading gesture. They shook uncontrollably.

“This is madness, I can’t just stand and watch.”

Aure got up unsheathing her knife. She stepped toward Vierra in the dark of the night, and the blade flashed as she lifted it, ready to stab. Vierra grabbed her spear with both hands, and turned its head against Aure.

“Knife fights are done for us, cousin. Give up, or do you wish to try against a spear?”

The last sparkle of hope in Aure’s eyes died out. For a moment she just stayed there, immobile. Then, suddenly, a high-pitched and unnatural voice yelled.

“I do!”

Aure attacked, suddenly and blindly, and surprised Vierra completely. They were separated by the spear that Vierra was steadily holding, however, and it was directed at Aure’s stomach. Aure, ignoring the spear, lunged forward with inhuman strength. With a thunk, the spear impaled the attacker’s stomach but even so she came on, the spear-shaft sliding through her body, and attacked Vierra. The battling women reeled and fell into a quagmire, the very same which Aure had only minutes earlier planned to drown the little girl. The girl crawled away from the combatants, but was so stunned that she just watched the fight with enlarged eyes.

During the confusion, Aure’s knife fell to the water, and she grabbed Vierra by the throat with both hands. Her face was distorted into a grimace of pain and unnatural anger.

Vierra felt like death herself had gone for her throat. The grip was cold and hard as iron, and it froze the blood in the struggling woman’s veins. Any thoughts of overpowering Aure escaped her mind and were replaced by blind panic. Try as she might she could not break the grip around her neck. It would have been easier for a hare to get away from a wolf’s jaws. In the quagmire, the water only came half way up her thigh, but Vierra had the feeling that cold hands were grabbing at her feet too. Hands that dragged her deeper and deeper, into the murky embrace of the swamp. Soon they were up to their waists in water, then it was up to their necks. All the time there was the inhuman voice which sang and screamed.

You will see the soul of swampland
Feel the cold inside the earth
Touch of death is on your shoulder
End will bring to warrior’s worth

Vierra couldn’t fight anymore, and the water engulfed her completely. For a moment she felt great relief. How good it would be to take a lungful of swamp water and fall asleep. Leave all this pain behind and meet her late son and husband again. Vierra closed her eyes and got ready to die. The thought of dying didn’t make her sad at all. The fighting she-wolf inside her was silent for once, and didn’t fight back.

Her hand hit the necklace that was hanging about her neck. Always so cool to the touch, the bones now felt burning like hot iron. They woke her up from the slumber of horror that she had sank into.

The spirits flew into the world through the necklace like a river flooding through an ice dam. Vierra saw them only as gray, foggy figures in the black water, but she could feel their ancient strength. Like a tidal wave they went for Aure. The scream that left Aure’s lips didn’t carry underwater. Vierra, dazed and confused, was overcome with a strange anger.

“Don’t help me. I curse you, why do you help me? I want to go with my loved ones.” But not one listened to her pleas.

Vierra suddenly realized she was free. The she-wolf inside her woke up in an instance, and she swam to the surface, convulsing. She gagged and coughed out swamp water as she grabbed for a tussock at the edge of the quagmire.

After taking a few gasps of breath and gathering her strength, Vierra pulled herself out of the mire and looked around. Dawn of the new day was lighting up the region, but there were no sounds from the direction of the Kainu camp. She doubted that anyone had seen or heard, from so far away, what had happened in the quagmire. As she lay there amid the silence it was only the feeble sobbing of the girl that told her that she was still alive.

With a plop, the swamp gave back what it had taken. Vierra’s spear protruded from Aure’s stomach like a grotesque, crooked mast, and the early morning light made her look bloodied all over. And she was bloody; around her stomach the water was colored dark, and more gushed out of her mouth. Miraculously she was still alive, coughing blood and water from inside of her.

Vierra suddenly felt alive again, and she pulled her cousin up. She tried to staunch the bleeding, but the grievous wound was beyond all help. It would drip Aure’s life out, one surge after another, until she’d finally die. With a raspy voice she said:

“Vierra, I wish you’d let go of my hand all that time ago so my life wouldn’t have ended in shame like this.”

“Don’t speak, I’ll take you back to camp,” Vierra said helplessly.

“Flee! The fate of one who kills the chieftain is death, and Kirre is the next in line. She will kill someone, even though nobody is guilty. I have disgraced us all.” Aure sighed deeply, and fell silent. So died the high chieftain of the Kainu, in the arms of her cousin. Vierra and the little girl were left alone.

Finally Vierra got up and went to the girl, who was coiled upon the ground. She took the girl up into her arms and calmed her, fondling her dirty, brown hair. Aure’s blood spread from her hands to the hair of the girl, but neither one cared.

Vierra didn’t know if she was comforting the girl or the other way around. She had imagined Aure would rule the tribe until her elder years. For a moment she didn’t know what to do next.

The sun rose above the horizon, and Vierra got up. The words of the First Mother had now come true, and there was no going back to her tribe for her, unless she found a good explanation for what had happened. She decided fast and acted accordingly.

“Girl, can you find your way out of this swamp on your own, to your mother?”

“I-I think so.”

“Then go. But tell my people that I killed Aure and escaped, and they’ll let you back, to be with your own.”

“Where will you go then?”

“I don’t know. But you haven’t seen the last of me yet.”

***

Bjorn’s tribe had gone to sleep after a hard day of work. A light summer wind blew silently, and the birds that had returned to the land of the Kainu chirped in chorus at the joy of a new, sunny season. The summer’s hut-camp had been built near the swidden, away from their log houses which they would return to again for the winter in the struggle against the cold.

The slaves slept in a large, roughly made lean-to. The women were tied up - a precaution for as long as they were entertaining hopes of escape and freedom. The children were free and slept close to the sides of their mothers, looking for at least a moment’s comfort from the cold world. The Kainu didn’t guard the slaves as their dogs would foil any attempt at escape.

Yet, in the dead of night, a figure, silent as a shadow emerged from the forest. It was as if the forest had conjured it out of its depths, for it moved so quietly that even the dogs didn’t wake to bark at the intruder. One by one she went to every sleeping dog, and left behind a carcass. So skillfully she did her work of death that neither the camp’s inhabitants, nor those dogs that were still alive, woke to it. When even those dogs lay dead, the figure sneaked into the slaves’ lean-to. Once again a knife flashed in the night, and the leather leashes that held the women were severed. They didn’t need any words, and in complete silence the group sneaked out of the camp and into the dark forest, carrying their children with them.

The shadowy figure led the group on through the forest to where she had stashed food for their journey home.

“This will be enough to get you south, back to your homeland.”

“Aren’t you coming with us?” one of the women asked.

“No, I still have to go back north.” The stranger touched a necklace on her neck, which was made of countless different bones.

“Who are you, and why do you help us?”

The stranger stroked her black hair, which was tied back, smiled sternly and replied:

“I am someone who knows the curse of slavery. Keep going and do not stop, for the night is waning.”

Pathfinders

The red-haired prisoner

The early autumn’s sweltering day was the summer’s last breath against the cold face of the approaching winter. The leaves, already bitten by a few freezing nights, had started to change their color, and there was a damp whiff of the cool night dew lingering in the air. An exceptionally warm southern wind smiled together with the sun, making the travelers walking between great pines sweat.

The rugged men didn’t fit to the surrounding scenery. Their clothes, gait and movement told of clumsiness and foreignness. One could see from their faces that they felt the same hatred and rejection toward the forest that it seemed to emanate toward them.

The first one was a large, fat man. His bald head shined with sweat, and the strain made him pant. His limbs were like tree trunks and it was apparently arduous to move them. His thin beard proved that hair, long gone from his crown didn’t grow much better under his chin either. The forest, growing with large trees, was easy to traverse, but still he stumbled over roots and branches now and then. None of the others made fun about his clumsiness, though.

If one of the men was at home in the forest, it was the young man who walked behind the first. He was a head taller than the man ahead of him, although he was also slighter in all ways possible. His sand-colored hair had been combed back and his beard, even lighter in color, was groomed and cut.

“Starkhand, when will we reach the shore?” he asked the bald man before him.

“Tomorrow morning. We’d be there already if they hadn’t broken the boat,” the fat man snorted and pointed to the brothers that walked behind them. They denied the act as if with one voice.

They could have been twins as they were almost indistinguishable. Both had slouched shoulders and sand-brown hair that was an untidy mess of curls. They wore leather clothes that had seen better days and spoke to each other quietly, without pause.

Between them walked a bound woman, who was different from them like a fox from a pack of rabid dogs. Her rich red hair was knotted and smeared with soot and her pretty, round face was covered in streaks of dirt and tears. There was a dirty piece of cloth rammed in her mouth and held in place by a leather strap that was tightly tied around her head. Her leather clothes, which were decorated with elaborate patterns and hung with pieces of bone and small stones, suffered tears and rips from her having been manhandled and dragged through the forest.

“Shall we eat for a change?” yelled one of the brothers to the duo that walked before them.

The large man stopped and turned.

“We won’t get to the shore by eating,” he snorted, but sat on the ground anyway and leaned back onto a sturdy pine. “Take the rag off its mouth and give it food. They don’t pay us for dead ones in the slave market.”

The large man directed his words toward the young man, who walked cautiously over to the red-haired woman.

“Try to bewitch me, and I’ll cut off your tongue,” the young man hissed. He removed the leather strap and the woman immediately spat the rag out of her mouth. She twisted her jaws, which had numbed under the squeeze of the gag.

Pitiful scraps of dried food were eaten in silence, except for the brothers who continued with their meaningless babble. A raven croaked somewhere high above, in the tall pines.

The group continued their journey. When the afternoon started to turn into evening, the pine forest started to give room to other trees. At first the pine trees just grew smaller, but soon thin birches and other leaved trees pushed themselves amid them. Ahead of them the terrain grew higher and formed a hill, the slopes of which were completely covered in birches. The croaking of the raven was continuous now, and made the men stare into the trees, searching for the bird.