The feather runs between the fingers of a man called Håkan. He feels the light touch of the barbs as they brush against the grain of his skin. He rubs the tip of the feather between the end of his index and thumb and finds something hot and congealing there. Håkan allows himself a smile. He runs his fingers down the halved vane of the feather to the end of the fletching, where it sits glued to a shaft of hardwood. The hardwood passes through his palm until it is abruptly interrupted by the dense corpse at the end of it.
The countryman stares out at the sky with unblinking eyes, perhaps pleading with the ancestors that now look down upon him. Should have chosen better gods, thinks Håkan, as he wrenches the arrow free of the dead man’s chest.
They are full of passionate intensity, these invaders. They say they worship but a single god, who had his son sent to earth to be hung up and eaten alive by his disciples. Håkan thinks of his own gods and their nefarious deeds, but can’t find anything quite as callous as that. At least Odin had the courtesy to hang himself for greater knowledge, not his lad.
But they are not invaders, as such. Indeed, the corpse at his feet once spoke the same tongue as Håkan, lived by the same ideals, and observed the same traditions. He probably didn’t live far from here. But at some point in his miserable life, the dead man encountered something foreign and infectious. An idea from beyond the sea.
It touched their nobility first. They set about dusting their head with water and swearing allegiance to this son-killing god, to placate the foreign powers that they had failed, time and time again, to defeat on the battlefield. It didn’t bother man like Håkan that the dolts in their holds were renouncing the true gods and kneeling to some new one. What good had it ever done him to fret about the affairs of noble blood? But then came the priests, freely roaming the roads, intoning false prophecies and stories kept bound in sheets of parchment. All of Håkan’s stories are kept on his tongue.
After that came the mass baptisms. Hundreds of people, lined up to be dunked in ponds or rivers or whatever they had to hand. And those that wouldn’t be so easily turned? Well that’s when the burnings began. It didn’t take much, mind, to convince the undecided after that. A whole town could be flipped on a few good burnings. The screams and the ash spoke louder than any doddering monk could.
But further north, well… perhaps this new god doesn’t like the snow. They come, now armed and armoured with more than words, in increasing numbers. But always, they find the mountains and the forest and the hills unbending to their ideas and the people even less so. They come with familiar faces and familiar words and even familiar threats, but these countrymen are forever changed by the god in their heads.
Indeed, it is a war of ideas they fight now. Håkan looks around at the clearing, littered with corpses and the many feathered arrows that sit buried within them. A war of ideas to be sure, but - he looks at the bloodied arrowhead in his palm - an idea doesn’t pass through a dead man’s lips.
Paddy Dobson
8th September 2020