Below green cliffs, a lone brave in a canoe built for four paddles quickly and without care for his usual hunter’s silence. He knows the bearded men will not be far behind in their monstrous serpent ship. He is covered in the cooled blood of his kin, massacred by the bearded men’s iron axes. He hadn’t escaped the site of the trade unscathed. One of their arrows sticks out from his shoulder blade. He hasn’t had time to remove it. He must get back to camp and warn the others.
Half an hour behind, Thorvald scans the river ahead for any sign of the escaped painted man. The trade had been going smoothly enough - native furs exchanged for their nordic ales and amber trinkets, as always - until that brave made a grab for one of their axes. Thorvald knows that the painted men have always coveted the iron weapons carried by his warriors, but although they share no common language, Thorvald had always made it clear, through gestures and stern expression, that their iron axes and arrows were not for trading. They had only the weapons they carried with them and had not yet established the mines, forges, and smithies to craft new ones. Besides, he did not like the idea of the painted men wielding weapons as good as their own, even though they have avoided violence on the handful of encounters where the two peoples met. Until today.
If he cannot find that escaped brave before he reaches his camp, they will have a whole war party to deal with. Thorvald doesn’t like those odds, and he doesn’t like the idea of packing up and returning to the freezing wastes of Greenland either. The women and children in their small outpost have only just gotten settled, and it would be quite the embarrassment to have to go running back to the Erikson’s after making so many bold claims about conquest in the new world.
It took them long enough to get here after all, and the journey was arduous. One of his longships was lost to a storm in the first week. Another was lost to some creature with jaws the length of the ship itself near the coast of Greenland. Some of the men fell ill upon landing here and died coughing up their own blood.
This land is not like raiding the misty and lucrative coast of England with its fanatical inhabitants and crucified God. Nor is it like sailing up the rivers of the arid, Iberian coast where bickering emirates offered little in the way of resistance. This place is ancient beyond belief and untouched by men from his side of the world. The painted tribes here live alongside the wilds and do not cower behind palisades from it. The beasts that stalk in the ferns here are as unknown to him as the lay of the land beyond the proximity of the coast. He catches glimpses of their passing sometimes - scattered feathers, deep gouges in trees, and curious footprints left in forest mud - but neither he nor his men have encountered anything more unusual than the deer and rabbits that are much like the ones in their homeland. The deeper down the river they go, the more uneasy Thorvald becomes.
If the brave had not been in such a rush, perhaps he would have hidden his canoe better. As it is, Thorvald’s keen eyes spot the bent reeds and orders his men ashore. They pick up the bleeding trail of the brave and follow, maille jingling as they keep a jogging pace, axes readied in hand, and shields held tight to their chests.
Thorvald senses the growing discomfort in his men and it isn’t from the exertion of running - that, they are used to. Going this far inland is uncomfortable to a raider, moreso when you don’t know where you are going or what lies ahead. These massive, red-fleshed trees could conceal anything in here.
So Thorvald is partly relieved when he finds the brave and orders his men to halt. But it is immediately washed away by dread, given the condition in which they find the painted man. Bits of him are scattered over the forest. Rubies of blood speckle the ferns. An arm, savagely torn at the joint, dangles in the canopy above them, rhythmically dripping gore onto the deadwood below.
The men mutter curses and ask questions of their gods. Thorvald scans around, afraid yet oddly curious as to who, or what, would do this to a man. And why.
He finds his answer in the shrill cry of one of his men at the back of their party. Thorvald spins in time to see the man being dragged into the understory, ferns absorbing him into their waxy fronds. He reappears a moment later above the chest-high greenery, his lower body clamped in the jaws of something massive.
Its reptilian head is the length of a man, and it uses its powerful neck to toss what remains of the screaming man into the air before catching him again like a dog with a tossed bone. The man’s screaming ends with the clap of the immense jaws snapping shut and the wet crunch that follows. Blood seeps between the creature’s jaws as it turns its enormous head to regard the northmen with green, predatory eyes.
Thorvald can do nor say nothing, frozen as he is by terror. The beast stands on two muscular legs, each the size of pillars in a king’s hall, and its thick tail extends far back enough that from tip-to-tip, it measures the length of the longship Thorvald has left moored a crushingly long way away. He longs for the sureness of its timber now, to carry him far from this accursed place with its insane monsters.
His men are already scattering, screaming as they go crashing through the understory in unthinking retreat, crying out for gods who are not listening. Thorvald stands stock still, pale and teetering on the edge of a hysterical laugh, as he watches the creature bounds with apparent ease between the red trees and plucks the shrieking warriors as if they were berries on a bush. The crimson spray. The fibrous squelch. Thorvald watches as the tail of the creatures swishes above a rise before disappearing below it, pursuing what remains of his men. He listens to the screams of dying men, the crash of buckled trees, receding into the distance, until he is left alone in this forest of giants, far from home.
Paddy Dobson
9th August 2022