K?til I: Small-Hour Sunrise

  The Twelfth Day of the Fifth Moon, 874 AD.

  The Great Warcamp, The Isanford, Scelopyrea.

  Bitterness.

  That's what everyone seemed to expect of him at the moment. Just bitterness.

  He supposed he couldn't blame them really, for he was indeed still extremely bitter over being denied his glory in the greatest battle the north had ever seen, but the sting wasn't quite as raw now as it had been back then.

  But time moved onwards, and overt anger had given way to a colder and more brooding form of discontent. Not enough to do anything about it, not yet at least, but still lingering in the back of his heart and his mind.

  Eh, who cared about that at the moment though? He was just one person in a sea of tens of thousands, ready and waiting for the preparations to be finished so that they could all move south across the mighty river Aenir to strike at the divided and decedent lands of the southerners.

  That was where he would earn his glory, he was sure of it. Their lands were rich and well-populated, so much so that he was certain he'd be able to take ten, no, a hundred-thousand thralls to serve his every want and desire. He would like in a grand hall of stone and dine each night on fat-fed beef, and a river of ale would flow from the lands outside to his table.

  The druids had foreseen it, not that it would have mattered if they hadn't; he'd known this was to be his future for months now. He would stake his claim to the lands of the southerners, and he would rend them should they choose to stand against him.

  If nothing else however, he knew that his three companions would always be by his side. They were as loyal and true as it was possible for people to be, a feat which had earned both him and them some level of admiration amongst others in the Great Warcamp given the old-guard's love of the old virtues that characterised their people.

  Loyalty, ferocity, and tenacity. K?til and his three companions had all of them in spades, but it seemed to him as though some could be applied more than others to his friends.

  Take Syren, for example. The bastard was good in a fight and tough to get off his feet for long, yes, but where he really started to stand out was in his loyalty; K?til had never once known the man to shirk tasks or even consider wandering astray, even back when the two of them had first met and became friends. Though all of them were loyal to each other, it would have been a disservice to the man to avoid acknowledging his devotion.

  Then there was Svaltha, who above all else embodied ferocity. She fought with the grace of a falcon on the wing, and with the strength of a bear starved to madness. The voice of their god rested within her mind, his visage also, driving her to greater and greater feats of bloodshed, which was something that had not gone amiss amongst her peers.

  None of them cared all that much for the opinions of her peers, however. She was their friend, K?til's lover, and they knew her far greater than those windbags ever would.

  As for Krai, well, that one was rather obvious, wasn't it?

  The big bastard just would not die. He got injured all the time, seriously injured at that, but he never stopped fighting. He was a constant reminder of what it meant to keep pushing forwards, to keep going on, to keep bloodying the foe no matter the pain you were in, and more than once had K?til personally watched the man take an injury that would have killed a lesser man on the spot and simply stand back up to carry on fighting. Krai was tenacity, was toughness, personified.

  As for K?til himself, he'd been unsure which of the three virtues described him best for quite some time. For a while he'd contented himself with the knowledge that he contained all three within his soul, more than doubly so now that he was carved with more runes than the average northern standing stone, but he knew that he couldn't be the only one who didn't embody a virtue.

  It had not been his friends or even the druids that had solved his conundrum, but his father and new 'mother'. There had once been more than three virtues extolled amongst the northmen after all, and the two of them saw in him the virtue of willpower, of all things.

  It had taken some time for him to come to terms with that, to understand that strength of presence was not a second-rate virtue, but when he realised what they had been saying it all sort of clicked in his head.

  His was a talent in leadership. It was a skill in adaptability. Most of all, it was the strength of character to look failure in the face and sneer, continuing on your way and trying again.

  How could one who embodied willpower allow something as trivial as a stolen succession, as stolen glory, to halt them in their tracks? How could it be allowed to dictate their life, their thoughts, their hatreds?

  It couldn't, and so the bitterness was forced down for now. Not forgotten, never forgotten, but forced down. He would wait, he would see what new opportunities prostrated themselves before him, and he would have his pick of futures to choose between.

  If he wanted to serve a boy who had not yet been born, then he would. If he wanted to strike out with an army of his own and carve out a new kingdom alongside that of the one his father would make, then he would.

  If he wanted to marry a fucking druid, then he would. Fate was dared to try and stop him.

  He embedded his sword into the abdomen of a straw dummy, pushing it through to the hilt, and left it there as he panted in exertion. For all his bravado and bluster about virtues, he still needed to let off steam now and again.

  "Long day, boss?"

  Krai's always-chipper voice called out to him from somewhere to the right, the fact that it was five in the morning and the sun was already blazing through the sky not seeming to bother him at all.

  He huffed out a half-amused and half-annoyed laugh. Wherever his trail of thought had been going, it was certainly beyond his recollection now.

  "Something like that. You're up early."

  The man shrugged noncommittally.

  "Eh, I couldn't keep myself asleep any longer. Too many nightmares."

  K?til raised an eyebrow, and nodded towards the north.

  "Yep," came the response, "same as anyone else. I'll be glad when we move south, there's no mistaking that."

  K?til huffed out another laugh.

  "It'll come for the south as well, Krai. You know that as well as anyone else does."

  The man just scoffed.

  "Yeah, but not for a while yet. There'll be enough time to whet our blades and draw southern blood before the real war begins. Whatever the 'real war' is supposed to be anyway."

  The druids had told them all that something was coming from the north. They'd all already sort of known that, somehow, but it was one thing to suspect it and another for your religious and spiritual leaders to warn you of it. The druids had confirmed it, but no-one knew what it was that was chasing them.

  Well, almost no-one. They all knew something was coming, but of them all only Svaltha seemed to suspect that their god knew what it was but did not wish to speak of it.

  If that was the case, then he was looking forwards to moving further south too.

  "Still," his friend said whilst gesturing at the sky, "we've got some time yet. Can't remember the last time I saw the sun this clearly before we set up the Great Warcamp down here. Certainly struggled to see it while we were up north, that much I know."

  His friend spoke the truth, as ever; it was good to see the sun again so much. It was so often obscured by cloud and ash further north that it seemed as though it was almost gone forever. The skies were clearer this far south, as far south as Scelopyrea went.

  But he knew from his own scouting and riding that the clouds were moving south again. This place wouldn't know sunlight for much longer, but if the legends of their horse-lord cousins to the east were to be believed then the blanket of ash and cloud would find its advance halted at the Aenir river.

  K?til hoped the Skonisnomas were right; they believed the Aenir to hold some form of magic within its waters, and if they were right then it would at least buy them all some time to prepare for what was soon to come after they moved south.

  Krakevasil, he hoped that they were right.

  "Aye," he settled on saying when he realised his friend was still waiting for a response, "we have some time yet. Best not to waste it. You seen any of the jotun recently?"

  His friend nodded.

  "Saw one of them speaking about making a mace. Wouldn't want to be on the other side of that, personally."

  "Krai, I watched you get struck by a jotun's caber and live. If anyone could survive it then I'm sure it'd be you."

  His friend smiled at him.

  "Oh, I know that boss; I didn't say it'd be able to kill me. All I'm saying is that the caber hurt bad enough, and I don't want to be picking links from my heavy chain out of my ribcage anytime soon."

  That made K?til laugh. Properly, not a huffed laugh like the usual as of late. Krai was funny as fuck sometimes, especially where his own mortality was concerned. Yes, the man was more mortal than they all liked to believe sometimes, especially with how often he got injured, but he when he wasn't in danger his abnormally high chances of survival were always funny to joke about.

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  "Funny, Krai. Very funny. Here, you got a reason for standing around here? You got something you wanna ask, or do you wanna spar?"

  The man smiled wider, his face showing the signs of what seemed to be a very hastily surpressed grin.

  "What, I can't just come over to spend some time with my mate? Come on boss, you sound like you ain't appreciating my company."

  "But..."

  "But yeah," the man shrugged while still smiling, "it was both of them actually. Just wanted to ask you some shit and spar with you. Especially since the other two are both still asleep, so they'd be no fun to fuck with."

  That was another thing that had changed between the four of them; more often than not they slept in the same room or tent as each other now. They'd fallen asleep alongside each other plenty of times before now, but not usually when they were safe in their own camp. This was less about safety, survival, and being shitfaced, and more about simple comfort and familiarity.

  With so many people around that the four of them didn't know, and from a group they had been fighting not so long ago, they all felt as though a little familiarity was warrented in their lives at the moment.

  "Couldn't just wake one of them up?"

  Krai barked out another laugh.

  "Ha! Chief, you know full well that Syren would somehow know it was me trying to wake him up and stay sleeping, and if I tried to wake up Sval then I'm pretty sure I'd be having a little more than just a sparring match; she's bad enough when it's you that tries to wake her up when she's tired. Admittedly, she's still not as bad as when we try to wake you up. I think you threatened us in another language last time."

  He laughed at first, knowing that Krai's words about Syren and Svaltha were true, but his laughter trailed off into confusion at the end of his sentence.

  "Another language? What did I say?"

  Krai shrugged, seemingly just as confused.

  "I don't know, truth be told. Sounded all guttural and strange. A little bit like Skraeling, actually, just more guttural and throaty. Don't really know how else to describe it."

  K?til furrowed his brows a little in thought, but as soon as Krai said it sounded 'a little bit like Skraeling', he knew exactly what the man was talking about.

  "Oh, that was definitely Skonis. The language of our cousins to the east sounds pretty guttural, and I know that they took a lot of their words from the old ruins that they claim were the hillforts and villages of some Skraeling people who lived there before their struck south and tore them down.

  "Weak people, the Skraelings. They never used to be, according to father, but some time around the Time of Woes their strength left them. They were subjugated and conquered piece by piece, until today when there's barely anything left of them."

  Krai hocked and spat on the floor.

  "Let them die, with all other worshippers of the traitor pantheon. I heard that those that are left still worship the other corvid gods, under new guises and forms. As if a new cloak and suit of mail could disguise the coward donning them."

  K?til laughed again, this time with more than a little derision in his voice.

  "My old man says the same. He knows a lot about the southerners, my father. He's studied their ways, their... I don't know, their everything, for years. He says we can learn from some of it; their halls of stone and the great stone-throwers that can tear them down as two examples.

  "But other parts of it will need to be left behind. Some of them even worship dragons alongside the traitor-gods. Dragons, Krai. The fuckers that burned Jotunheim, that enslaved both us and them for so long. Dragons."

  If Krai had shared his look of derision before now, he looked downright disgusted now.

  "I shouldn't be surprised, not really, but the fact that anyone would choose to give praise and offerings to the monsters that our forefathers put down like lame dogs is fucking awful. How can someone lower themselves that much?"

  He just shrugged again.

  "A lust for power? A subservient nature? I don't really know. My father is certain that, were we fighting the sons of Skraella, they'd cower and buckle before us as they once did so long ago."

  "I'm sensing a 'but' coming along now."

  "But," he continued, acknowledging his friend's interruption, "we won't be fighting the sons of Skraella. The people who rule there, as weak and soft as we may see them as being, are the sons of Kliran. Father claims they are a hardier people than most of us give them credit for, and ones with a long history of making war on a scale we never have before this gathering of all our folk

  "He claims that their horsemen are some of the finest save only the Skonisnomas, and that their men with bows can strike down a man before he gets within a hundred paces of him.

  "Of course we're still stronger than they are. Our lives, our people, revolve around killing. For all the inherent toughness of Kliran's sons, they've let themselves forget their martial roots. They've contented themselves with farming their fertile soil and mining their seams of ore, whilst their rulers are happy to sit by and watch whilst gorging themselves on the fruits of those born beneath them."

  Krai spat again.

  "Fucking layabouts. Fertile lands, good iron, plenty of space for living, and they waste it all by becoming weak-willed and feckless. I don't like that they're all we get to fight down there; no sport with those fucking... those..."

  The man threw his hands up in the air in frustration, apparently unable to think of a fitting derogatory term to use for them.

  "... I don't know, bastards or something. Why is it that when I get my hopes up for the people we're to fight it either never happens or they turn out to be weak and pathetic?"

  K?til snorted as his friend worked himself up into something akin to a sulk.

  "Well, they might well be more trouble than we think. If my father's words are to be believed anyway, and you know full well that I'd take his word on this."

  It was true; for all the disagreements he might have had with his father other issues both great and small, for all he thought the man lacked wisdom and knowledge in a few key areas, it would have been damned foolish not to accept that the man had what was probably the best knowledge any northmen had on the lives and ways of those folk south of the Aenir.

  Well, their lives and ways outside of how they acted during the raids that were often launched against their verdant lands. Every northman knew how to conduct themselves in those festivals of slaughter.

  "So what's the issue then? We're to fight a group of people that are, to hear you say it, has-beens. I don't see why we need to fear anything."

  "My father said it, not me, and we still don't need to fear. We just need to remember that, though they may have forgotten it now, they once were a people just as martial as we were. That fact is, according to both my father and the Valkyrie-Queen, something they seem to be slowly remembering. They're shaking the dust from their armour, cleaning the rust from their blades, and their leaders aren't content to just become pampered oafs like their fathers and forefathers were. Their leaders are becoming warriors once more, and are remembering the old traditions they cast off.

  "That's why my father is worried. He wants us to strike as soon as we can, before they remember what it means to sit atop the world with a fist of iron. We're being pressed for time, both from whatever it is to the north moving south towards us, and from the fact that the southerners might forge themselves into something we will struggle to defeat when the time comes."

  Krai was silent for a moment, a thoughtful smile on his face, and when he spoke his voice was strangely soft.

  "Is it wrong of me to hope we're too late? To hope they make themselves into an enemy worthy of our rivalry? It's one thing to slaughter farmers who've never held an axe save to cut wood, but to test myself against their trained fighters would be..."

  "A worthy endeavour."

  "Completing." His friend eventually settled on, seemingly ignoring the proffered assistance in finding his words. "To fight a foe like that would be something that made us. That proved to Krakevasil that we were worthy. Does that make me cruel, or foolish?"

  K?til couldn't stop himself from agreeing to that point. By the Raven-God, it would be a far more worthy battle. If the stories that father had shared with him were true, of their warrior-kings and armies of steel-clad huscarls numbering in the tens of thousands, then it would truly be a worthy battle.

  "I don't think that would make you wrong, cruel, or foolish. All told, I think it would make you one of us. It would make you Scelopyrene. To lust for battle, one where the worthy are pitted against an equally worthy opponent, to fight with someone that truly pushes you to the very limits of your endurance, your skills, your strength; all of that makes you like me, Krai. It makes you like all of us.

  "I don't think any man worth his salt up here could possibly disagree with you on that notion."

  Krai went to open his mouth in response, but was cut off by the deep voice of a much larger figure looming behind them both.

  "A little deep for five in the morning, son."

  The two of them immediately moved into a more respectful position upon realising who had come across them.

  "Great Jaerl."

  "Father."

  The large man nodded at them both in turn, then continued speaking.

  "You weren't wrong about wishing for a stronger opponent, young huscarl. It is the want of every good person from these lands to wish for a valued foe to prove themselves against.

  "But remember that something is coming. We will be conserving our strength here, by slaughtering the meek and the unworthy, but we will also be adding the strength of Kliran's sons to our own; the worthy warriors amongst them, their leaders who bear axe and mace and sword instead of sceptre and jewel, will make for fine equals to our own folk. Yes, I see your face my son. Equals.

  "They will need to be taught how to properly rule of course, and how to properly fight, but they are just as worthy of taking thralls as we are. Let them fight us in the field, and once they have been beaten we will extend our hand out to those who fought bravely and defiantly. We will accept those who showed that they had the strength and the fortitude to continue fighting even in the face of an army of berserkers and giants, for any men that can do so are worthy of being called 'brother' when the dust settles."

  K?til nodded at his father. He might not have entirely agreed, but he could also understand the logic in such a statement. It was, perhaps the more pragmatic way of looking at things; tomorrow's enemy could just as easily be overmorrow's brother.

  "How come you're up so early, father? I assumed you'd be sharing your bed with your new wife."

  There was something of a challenging tone in his voice, one that both his father and Krai must surely have noticed, but save a small measure of tenseness in the air it was not addressed.

  "Nightmares, as childish as it may seem. I had hoped that seeing the sun might settle my nerves somewhat.

  "I believe that you said much the same, Huscarl. I don't recall hearing you mention why you were up so early though, my son."

  K?til shrugged, and settled on the truth.

  "Sleep escapes me sometimes. I find I need precious little of it nowadays anyway. I just want to fight and kill, or drink and- well, you know that."

  His father actually laughed at that, though not without an underlying hint of worry beneath the bluster.

  "You and your druid like to fuck, yes, I know. It's a miracle you don't wake half of the warcamp some nights. Huscarl Krai, how do you sleep in the same room as the two of them?"

  His friend, the traitor, shrugged.

  "You get used to it after a while. Learned to tune it out like howling winds and snoring huscarls."

  Now his father was really laughing. It was mirthful and jovial, more suited to an evening feast than it was to the chilly air of an early morning in a small sparring grounds. It was nice to hear, even with the tension between his father and himself, and K?til found himself smiling as a result. His father soon got his laughter back under his control however, and continued speaking.

  "You are stressed. I understand that. Stress is what is keeping you from sleep, even if you don't believe it to be so. Keeps me up plenty of nights, that much I can tell you. I'm glad you're choosing to spend your time honing your skills instead of spending it fruitlessly trying to gain rest that won't come; I wasted so much time when I was younger and my father was trying to unite our people trying to sleep when none would come. Better to accept it as it is and get on with your day."

  K?til nodded, and Krai did likewise. It made little sense to waste precious time squeezing your eyes shut when you weren't going to be able to sleep, and even less sense when you'd had a nightmare and didn't really want to.

  "We were just planning on sparring, father. Care to join?"

  At that offer, that proverbial olive branch, his old man looked very relieved indeed.

  "Aye, I think I could make the time for that. The day is still young after all. Come on then, you as well huscarl. You two against me! Sound good?"

  "What do you think, boss?" Krai's voice came from behind him to his left, the tone resting somewhere around excited teasing. "You wanna stick it to your old man?"

  K?til grinned and just pulled his sword from where he had stuck it in the straw dummy, Dyfed tossing another to the excited huscarl.

  "I think we can show him what we've learned, Krai. Come on now dad, let's see if you've still got some fight in you."

  Krakevasil, for all that the man might have infuriated him at times, he loved his father so much.

  He was so lucky to have a man like that for a father.