He'd hired space in a wagon that would convey him from the mountains back down into the city, now that travelers were once again welcome and trade was no longer stagnant. The going was slow, slower than normal with the cold setting in and the extra precautions that were inevitable now that the Fire Giants had been denied the sum that they'd demanded. Cormac sat with his elbow propped up on the window, with his cheek resting in the warm palm of his big hand. His eyes, the grey colour of a raging sea, stared out at the passing landmarks and at the shorn and cut walls of the merchants' passage. No-one rode with him and he had no-one to talk to, and truth be told he was bored - plain and simple. Bored into the deep parts of his mind.
And his mind wandered.
He thought back long and long ago, back to the bloodied shores where he'd killed a man - killed him, it seemed now, occurring to him like a thought out of nowhere, just because he'd wanted to. His lateral and reasonable mind told him to this day that he didn't 'need' to go to the beach, that he could've done as he'd told and the result would've been the same. The invader would've been pushed back and he would've lived his merry life just as surely as -- the wagon hit a bump in the road, he thought he heard the driver more than utter curse -- but they rolled on. He came in from the window and set his feet up along the length of the bench with his back propped up against the inside of the coach. He couldn't imagine being less comfortable, he wondered inwardly if they could possibly manufacture a smaller coach. Soon, behind his frown and in his head he went back to the beach. Things had washed up, occasionally the bones of a man would glisten in the stony sand. He found a helmet there and bore it away, hid it under his bed - that thought brought the hint of a smile to his lips.
He'd saved and he'd stolen, and he'd sold and he'd traded for a full season, and by the height of spring the next year he'd scraped enough together to buy a brigandine coat. By that summer it nearly fit him, too. It was retired from the jarl's armory he later learned. Unfit for purpose - and it was clear why, there were ragged patches that looked like mice had torn shreds off the cloth to build their nests. Other parts that might make a man wonder if the mice were yet nesting 'in' the coat. Leather patches had fallen away in other parts and the belt that would cinch around his waist had a broken buckle. But he was a skinny boy and a knot at the waist would suffice. The cloth, he remembered, was perhaps at one time white - but by the time it had made its long journey through time to reach his hands, had become the dim yellow of underwear that might've been worn a few days too many. Thankfully he could not remember if it smelled like that, too.
At any rate; furnished in armour with his (dented and rust-pocked) helmet that he'd pulled from the sand, and his axe - Biter - that he'd stolen from the hands of a dead man, he felt that he was ten feet tall and that he'd live forever. Back then he supposed he'd meant to.
The wagon rolled on, the sound of the metal wheels grinding on frost and stone, and dirt and the shit of every pack animal that was driven ahead of them - had been driven ahead of them... it was a noisy journey. He'd by now turned again to put his back against the thinly padded back-rest, his legs stretched out over the hollow between benches, with his heels planted on the seats in front of him where other passengers might've been staring back at him had there been other passengers. His arms were spread out crucifix-like along the back of the seats, his legs crossed at the ankles. Though his chin almost rested on his chest he was not sleeping. Simply bored, and lost in his thoughts still.
He thought on the words that the woman had spoken to him, he wondered what it was exactly that she had said to him but couldn't quite recall. The tone though. He remembered the tone of her voice, the way it sounded like something worse than disappointment. The disappointment of 'knowing', but also of 'hoping'. She did not try to stop him, nor did she wish him well from what he could remember. He groped for the memory, he thought the words might be important but those were lost now to time. It didn't matter.
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He remembered well enough what came after, how two dozen men, and two dozen more had filled the ships that had been left behind just a few short years ago. He had hair on his cheeks now, the older men teased him and called it duck feathers but he felt it made him look like a man. It wasn't thin, and had no shiny red look about it like most of the other men on the boat. His facial hair had come through black and already the wispy shadow of a fine moustache was growing under his nose. He basked even in the teasing words of his mates, in his young mind it was a fine thing just to be noticed. The wind, he recalled, did most of the work. When they took to oar it really only seemed to him to be when they were pulling out off the beach, or driving themselves up onto another.
It was dawn when they arrived and a slash of sunlight threatened to break over the horizon behind them. It was a symbolic contrast from the night raid that had come to their land. The tide was ebbing out, it wouldn't come back in for half a day he thought. Six hours at least, probably. The ship he was in made its way eerily up the beach, riding on a mere spit of wave it seemed, and was left grounded so high above the mark of the outward tide that it would not be kissed by the sea again until late afternoon. That was good. As far as options went the option of retreat could rob a man of his spine, the boy that he once was might've thought foolishly. Grandly. All the same it was good. The men he'd stand with spilled out of their boats, their roles reversed now as they faced off against the paltry defense that the offending village could muster -- the thought never occurred to him before that this village might have had nothing at all to do with the attempted raid in the past -- and they moved up the slope of the beach to meet those men and they found themselves fighting on uneven ground. Cormac struggled with his party to keep ground, not to lose an inch of beach, but it was for them an upward struggle. The defenders only had to stand and thrust their spears it seemed. They would not be moved. Shield battered shield, spear shafts rattled upon spear shaft. Men's voices blurted out wordless curses and gave voice to vile threats. The first real injury was dealt and it was no on his side's favor, and when another man closed in to fill the gap the sharp tip of a spear was thrust into him, too - Cormac had not looked away in time to not see an ocean of blood and what must've been the man's guts spill out and hit the sand a few seconds before the dead man himself.
There was one dreadful moment where their battle standard first dipped, seemed to shudder at an angle, and then fell away and hit the ground. There was a loud cheer, he recalled, from the grim sweat-streaked faces of the men that were trying to kill him, him and all the rest of the men that had come here. His side faltered, they were pushed back. Goosepimples flushed over his arms and the hair on the back of his neck bristled; the panic that rolled over them could be felt as surely as the sun beat upon their backs. This would be the end. He looked back at the meagre boats that had borne them all to this doom. Only two, what foolish, prideful thought had brought them here in just two boats. All would be lost, and he remembered thinking that maybe someone would pull his axe, Biter, from his hands - that maybe someone would watch the sea cover his face and pull him away into the black nothingness where the old maps said things like 'Here There Be Serpents'.
A voice rang out and called him a bastard, he thought that's what he heard anyway. But he hadn't run far - just back and out of the lines, back enough that he could run along the beach at the backs of these forty or so men that stood shoulder to shoulder with their great roundshields that were all held together like a great wall - a shield wall it was called - all the way to where the top end of their banner was. He fell on his backside, saliva wetting his lips and his chin with resolute excitement almost deification as he pulled the banner up at first by the decorated material and then in sweeping fist-over-fist pulls on the wooden shaft. As he rose to his feet it rose too, and so too the sun rose finally just enough so that the faces of the men who were by now so close to winning were bathed in the bright white light of morning, and the men who were by now so close to moving could take advantage of this single glorious moment -- and they did. A mad and reckless idea with the odds stacked against him had played out in his favor. There in the shadow of this deed was another hint of the man he'd become.
The banner waved over them and moved forward in the fist of young Cormac. No-one made a path, at least to his memory no-one had stepped aside or thrown down a red carpet for him. But he made his way to the fore, past sweat-stinking raiders and through the faltering spear-tips of the men who'd tried in vain to defend their beach, and their homes, from the invaders that had landed there. They followed him in stride. The defenders were pushed back and they began to trip and slip on ragged rolling dunes and slippery rocks. Spears and sword tips made short work of them, often before they'd realized they were falling. The massacre was a brief and noisy thing, and he thought to himself on the other side when no more men stood between them and the village, that on this day he had killed vengeance. That he had personally smothered any chance of rebuttal, any notion of revenge lay bleeding or had bled out upon the sand. He felt good about it too.
As the wagon rolled on he became aware that his eyes were cast down. His mouth was filled with cotton and he could not swallow the feeling. There it was, he supposed, the bitter truth of the bastard he'd become. The trundling wheels were barely a whisper over the sound of the bells that rang out over the one stone-walled structure in the village, a temple or shrine that was large enough to accommodate every soul in the village and have room left over. There was no cheer in those bells he recalled distantly. The sound was filled with alarm and it dulled everything else, must've been heard from miles around - it was awful, the memory was unsettling. More unsettling still was how he'd remembered vividly his weak attempt to not do the thing that would come next - must - come next. The part that would cause him pain for the rest of his days. He'd been alarmed and his voice had cracked when he grabbed the big man's arm before it could throw the lit torch onto the thatch roof of the great building.
"Won't you burn the treasure?" is all he'd asked. In his eyes, in the rolling wagon, the lights of every other torch that was thrown while the big man stared down at him blazed in his eyes. He knew the answer before the man could speak, he didn't speak, he shrugged Cormac off and threw his burning stick up onto the roof to meet the others.
He watched the thatch smolder and in places there were small, cool flames. The smoke was black in the midday light, black and evil. The building was not consumed in fire but smoke creeped out under the great ironwood doors, and people smashed out the stained glass windows from inside and begged to be let out. Their voices were drowned it seemed to him by the dirty smoke that seemed to ooze out of the windows. A cold shiver rolled down his spine and his arms he found were folded tightly against his body as the coach rolled on, and his mind was stolen away by the sound of what first started as beating on the doors from the inside, to soft thudding, and at the end - the part that made him feel cold inside - the scratching on the door. Feeble though it was it was there. The bells had stopped by then. He'd known as well as the big man and all the other men who'd thrown their torches had known, they'd be killed by the smoke before they'd ever feel the heat of the fire. There'd be plenty of treasure; and there was. Silver, and furs, and offerings that had been left at the altar. He watched a man cut the finger off a girl to take the silver ring she'd worn. A few survivors that were not at the shrine were lead back to the boats to be kept as slaves. One girl, he tried to remember and concluded that she must've been half-elven, was so beautiful that he'd flushed red with shame when she looked at him. He never saw her again after that day.
His part in the story, he recalled, was not told. The gods had summoned the sun, pushed it out of the water and blinded their foes. They raised tankards and horns and sang of how Erling Øystæinsson had held onto their screaming raven banner even in death, and how he held it still on the beach in his stone-like fist. How he'd forever hold the standard with the few others who'd been slain there - a draugr who'd never let another boat leave 'that' beach, not to come to their lands again, no way. And no-one spoke of how they'd killed a village by letting them run to the safety of the only building many of them had ever seen that had stone walls, how men and women and children and little babies all lay in heaps, and probably their bones still lay there, because these forty-some men wanted silver and treasure, and slaves.
Cormac learned a lot in those early days. He suspected that all men were false in their hearts, and this supposition would not leave him even after long years. And yet, these would not be his only adventures. Indeed the story of his name, the legends that would be denied would stir something inside him; a growing beast that would hunger for and devour his stories until it would become insatiable. A growling black beast that would start off as a mere murmur in the shadows, but would one day look into his eyes and feast upon his heart.
He could see it clearly before him. Night had fallen and the coaches cab was black, and in the black the eyes of the beast were staring at him from the passengers' bench opposite him. The golden wreathed eyes like burning suns, orange and gold -- blood red, black orbs. And just as it lunged forward at him he started awake. The driver was thumping on the door of the cab and calling for him to get out, telling him they'd arrived -- and they had. What little sleep he'd had didn't feel like nearly enough, and he lumbered his way through the city streets thinking no more of it.
