The Yngling

5.

Outside, dim moonlight filtered through the overcast, but in the hut it was very dark. His senses strained for something, something he could not hear but faintly sensed. His scalp crawled. Dogs began to bark. And then there was a sound, a hooting that repeated-deep, toneless, directionless-and repeated again nearer. The barking became more shrill, then cut off, and a mindless terror that was not his but that he felt, a paralyzing terror, made them cower in their bed and pull the covers up so that they would not see what was coming for them. And the hooting was very near, in the lane outside, and he saw the door burst from the frame. Something huge and stooped filled the doorway, lurched toward the bed, and he yelled at the figures humped beneath the blankets and yelled…

"Nils, wake up, wake up!" And Nils, trembling, clawed upright in bed, his heart pounding, eyes wild. "Wake up, you fool. You were roaring like a bear."

It was Kuusta, and other men-at-arms stood near, looking shocked and angry in their nightclothes.

"My blood, what a dream," Nils whispered. "What a dream." He sat clutching a twist of blanket in one huge fist, his breath deep and irregular. "What a terrible dream."

And for the rest of the night his sleep was troubled.

Surprisingly, when he awoke next morning, he could remember it clearly, although the terror was only an after-image, a shadow, remembered but no longer felt. Under Kuusta's coaxing he described it in the barracks, but by daylight it was not especially frightening. Peder paa Kverno suggested that the fish at supper had seemed more overripe than usual.

Nils and Kuusta sat alone on a bench outside the barracks, digesting their breakfast of porridge and cheese. They talked in Anglic so far as Nils was able, which was considerable, for he grasped syntax almost instinctively, learned readily from context, and never forgot a word he had learned. And when he had trouble, Kuusta helped him. It was known that Jorgen Stennaeve planned to attack Slesvig, Denmark's southern province. Forces would be mustered from all his fiefs as soon as the harvest was over. If he forced the Greve of Slesvig to acknowledge his suzerainty, the Greve of Sjaelland would have to follow, and there would be a king again in Denmark.

"They don't prepare very seriously for war," Nils remarked. "At home each warrior has to make his living himself, yet he spends a lot more time practicing with weapons than most knights do. Sword apprentices in their sixteenth summer are more skilled than most knights. No wonder it was easy for me to beat one of their best. At home even freeholders have weapons and practice with birch swords, though more from tradition and in sport than from need. Almost everyone races and wrestles and shoots at marks, and everyone hunts. Children act out famous raids or make up their own. But here the knights and men-at-arms would rather drink or throw dice, and they don't practice with weapons nearly enough, most of them. Danes may be bold fighters, but they are not skilled fighters."

"They're as skilled as those I've seen in other lands," Kuusta replied. "I believe the big differences between these people and ours come partly from the land itself and partly from the laws. At home a man is his own master, to make a living or starve. In Suomi we do not even have thralls. There is all the land and all the game and a man can come and go as he pleases. He is free, and takes pleasure in contests. But in Suomi we don't have sword apprenticeship or a warrior class as your tribes do, and we make much less of raids and war."

"But there's another difference between the tribes and the Danes," Nils pointed out. "Here men can have only one wife, and the sons of knights become knights, while a thrall's son can only be a thrall unless he runs away to the free towns. At home a warrior can have three wives and many sons if he lives long enough. But his sons aren't necessarily chosen to become warriors, while the sons of thralls are chosen fairly often. Our tradition calls it the law of positive selection. And our people increase; they have spread northward below the mountains as far as… "

Galloping hooves sounded from the drawbridge, and a constable on a lathered horse pounded through the gate and across the courtyard. Every eye followed him. He dropped from the saddle and ran up the stone steps of the great hold, speaking hurriedly to the guards, one of whom went in with him.

"I wonder what that's all about," Kuusta said, rising. They walked toward the hold in case anything might be overheard there.

"My dream," said Nils.

"Your dream? What do you mean?"

"It has to do with my dream."

"How could your…? I don't understand."

"I dreamed of something that happened last night, kilometers away," Nils explained. "That one just brought the report of it."

Before the sun approached midday the troop of mounted men-at-arms were well away from the castle, under the command of a knight, with Nils as his second. They had been told only that a large and dangerous beast had killed some peasants in a village and that they were to destroy it.

They found the villagers in a state of shock. A family of four had been killed. It wasn't possible to determine how completely they had been eaten; remains had been scattered about with sickening ferocity, inside and out. But the fear among the villagers was out of proportion even to such savagery. Some were fitting stout bars on their doors; a few had fled to a nearby woods; still others only sat and waited for another night to come. The tracks of the beast had been obliterated in the lane through the village, but Nils and Kuusta were experienced trackers and found where the beast had struck the lane. They followed the trail on foot, leading their mounts, the troop following on horseback. Where the tracks crossed the soft ground of potato field, they got a clearer idea of what the animal was like. It walked upright on two oblong feet that were as long as Kuusta's forearm from elbow to knuckles. The toes were somewhat like a man's, but clawed.

"A troll!" said one of the men in an awed voice.

The knight spurred his horse up to the man and almost knocked him from the saddle with a fist blow. "There are no trolls," he snapped, "except in the stories grandfathers tell." The men sat sullenly. "Who has seen a troll?" he demanded. There was no answer. "Who has even heard of a troll except in fairy tales?"

One of the men laughed. "A troll! My grandmother used to tell me troll stories to make me mind." Other men began to smile or laugh.

But when they began to follow the trail again and saw the tracks pressed deeply into the hoed earth, they did not laugh anymore, or even talk.

"What do you think, Nils?" Kuusta asked quietly. "I haven't believed in trolls since I was a little boy. And in all my travels I have never seen or heard evidence of such a thing. But those!" He gestured toward the ground.

"These tracks and whatever made them are real," Nils answered. "If anyone wants to call it a troll, it's all the same to me."

The tracks entered a heath and became slow to follow, but they seemed to lead straight toward the sea. So Nils left Kuusta to trail through the low, dense shrubs, and mounting, he rode toward the sea with the knight. In less than three kilometers they came to the beach, and quickly found where the tracks crossed it and went into the water. Not twenty meters away they found where they had come out.

"There," said Nils, raising a thick sinewy arm. "That is its home." His big callused forefinger pointed to a small island somewhat more than a kilometer offshore.

"How do you know?" asked the knight.

Nils shrugged.

The knight scowled across the quiet water. "You're probably right," he said. "And before we can get boats enough and go there, it'll be dark."

"If we start across, he might see us and escape anyway," Nils said. "Or it may be that he's good enough in the water to attack the boats from below. But he seems to like this place to leave and enter the water. Maybe we could lay behind the dune and ambush him."

The knight divided his troop. Half lay wrapped in their blankets back of the seaward dune, trying to sleep, while sentinels watched out to sea from behind clumps of dune grass that dotted the top. The other half, with the horses, took cover behind the next dune inland, ready to come in support if needed, or move parallel to the beach if the monster flanked the ambush.

With the ambush plans, the men began to feel more sure of themselves. The beast was big, no question of that, and savage. But most of them had been seasoned in combat and had confidence in themselves. And with bows, pikes and swords, they assured each other, they would make short work of it.

The moon was at the end of the third quarter and wouldn't rise until midnight. When the last light of dusk faded, the watchers could see little by the starlight. And the gentle washing of waves on the beach could cover the sound of anything emerging from the water.

"I don't like this darkness," the knight muttered softly.

"I don't think he'll come until after the moon rises," Nils answered in a whisper. "Last night the moon was well up before he entered the village. He probably likes more light than this himself."

"How do you know the moon was well up?"

"Because, looking through the window, I could see the moonlight."

"Oh yes, I heard about your dream," the knight said. "The story has gone around the castle." He turned to Nils, staring at him in the darkness, then looked back out to sea. Dimly he could distinguish the dark water from the lighter beach. "I don't believe in dreams," he added.

In spite of themselves they dozed now and then. Suddenly Nils jerked wide awake, startling the knight beside him. The half-moon stood above the rim of the sea and the night was light, but it wasn't that that had wakened him. The beast was coming, in the water, with a hunger for flesh and for more than flesh, for the current of life, spiced with terror, was nourishment as necessary to it as food. And Nils was in its avid mind, feeling with its senses. It felt the buoyancy and resistance and coolness of the water as it watched the dunes not far ahead. And it sensed that among the dunes was what it sought.

Nils shook his head and looked about him with his own eyes again. "He's coming," he whispered softly. "And he knows we're here."

The knight said nothing, but rose to one elbow and stared out to sea.

"It's not in sight yet," Nils told him, "but it will be soon." He slid down the back side of the dune and began waking the sleepers one-by-one with a touch and a whisper. They rolled out of their blankets, awake and taut, and followed Nils to the crest.

Nils sensed the knight's rigidity and looked seaward. The beast could be seen now, twenty or thirty meters from the shore, wading slowly in the shallow water. It looked immense, perhaps two-and-a-half meters tall, its proportions resembling those of an overgrown gorilla except that it was longer legged. But its hide, wet and moonlit, looked like chain mail.

It stopped for a moment where the waves washed onto the beach, turned briefly to look over its shoulder at the moon, then scanned the dune as if it could see them. An overanxious bowman loosed an arrow, and a hail of others hissed after it to fall from the beast's hide onto the sand. For just an instant it stood, shielding its face with a massive forearm. Then a line of shouting men charged from the crest, brandishing pikes and swords.

A hoarse hoot came from the beast, and something else. A great wave of something. Men staggered, dropped their weapons, and war cries changed to howls and shrieks of mindless terror.

Some ran, stumbling, rising, back up the dune or along the beach or into the sea. Others simply fell, wrapping their arms around their heads in catatonic helplessness.

Nils felt the waves of terror as on the night before, terror that was not his own but that shook him momentarily. The few arrows that had stuck in the beast dangled as if only the points had penetrated. He picked up a pike and charged down the dune again, the only one now, bulging arms cocked, and at three meters lunged with all his strength at the towering monster, his hands near the butt of the pike, and felt the head strike and break through. His follow-through carried him rolling onto the sand, diagonally and almost into the legs of the beast, the hilt of his scabbarded sword striking him painfully below the ribs. He rolled to his feet, stumbling as the beast rushed at him, bulky but quick, the pike shaft sticking out of its belly. There was only time to grab the shaft before the beast was on him.

The charge threw Nils backward, off his feet, sliding on his back across the sand, his grip like iron on the shaft, his arms and shoulders tensed with all their strength. Great clawed fingers clutched short of him, and the hoot changed to a roar of rage and pain as the beast dropped to its knees. When the pike had pierced its entrails it had been like fire bursting into it. But the collision, with the man grabbing the shaft, and the shock as he had hit the ground, transmitted through two-and-a-half meters of strong ash, did terrible damage.

Nils let go and rolled sideways to his feet, drawing his sword as the beast rose again. It wrenched the pike from its own guts, eyes raging, and charged once more. The sword struck once, into the rib cage, and they crashed to the ground together. One great forearm pressed down on Nils's throat and he grabbed desperately at the scaly neck, straining to keep its fangs from him. His last thought, fading but distinct, was that its blood smelled like any other.