29

 

Nils never wanted to be a fighter. As a child, he had been small and slight, but intelligent. Despite academic pursuits not being highly sought after in this new world, after the Utslettelse, he had persisted in his interests, and Halvard had approached his parents, convincing them to let him train in the old ways of science.

As it had turned out, Nils had not been terribly good at science, but he had instantly been attracted to the texts in Halvard’s library. The man had deemed the books ‘dry histories.’ Dry to you, maybe, Nils had thought. He had been fascinated with the Old World and all of its lost knowledge.

Now as the lumpy black iron blade plunged down at his head, Nils, for the first time in his life, wished that he had worked harder to strengthen his body. He had really wanted to see Italy.

At the last second, instinct guided him, even with his eyes shut. He yanked his head to the side. The shckkk sound of a knife slicing into something, came from just left of his ear. When he opened his eyes, he saw the knife had stabbed into nothing more than soil and grass.

He tilted his head up in time to see the man dropping down over him, an arrow protruding from the middle of his forehead. But the arrow and the man’s face disappeared as he fell forward, his dead weight slamming down on top of the corpse already pinning Nils. The extra weight took Nils’s breath when it squeezed him, and he thought he would now suffocate.

Then the pressure lifted, as the newest corpse was tossed aside, rolling into the grass in front of Nils’s pinned head. Then the first body was dragged away. Strangely, his savior had not been Anders. A man was running away from him, toward the nearby battle. But Nils did not recognize the man. His legs were covered in forest camouflage patterned trousers, with large stuffed pockets on the sides of the legs. He wore black leather boots, and a black T-shirt, covered with a fur vest. A two foot long wooden club dangled from his hand. The weapon had bands of black iron around the tip. Each band sported several two-inch-long, metal spikes. Most dripping blood. Below the iron bands, some of the metal spikes jutted right out of the wood. A long metal spike rose from the end of the weapon.

Nils sat up with his shield and watched the stranger sprint across the field. He had short blond hair that had been cut in patchy bits, most likely by himself. As he came across a Long Knife, he dodged and evaded the blades, his spiked club bashing into head after head.

The stranger leapt over Anders, who was tussling with a Long Knife on the ground—each man unarmed. He kept running, past Stig’s fallen body, and past where Ulrik fought three men in a frantic, thrashing struggle. Nils had no doubt the men would fall before Ulrik’s fury. His long blond hair, soaked from mist and sweat, Ulrik punched, kicked and clubbed the three unarmed men. His shield was as much a weapon as a defensive tool. Nils decided to learn all he could about using a shield—if they survived this bloody battlefield.

Nils staggered to his feet as Morten and Oskar stabbed the last of their opponents. They saw him looking and Oskar rushed over, while Morten limped, his leg dripping blood.

“Where is Erlend?” Oskar demanded.

“I do not know,” Nils said. He pointed. “Who is that?”

The men turned to look at the stranger, who was just reaching the pile of bodies, under which was their leader.

He leaned down and pulled bodies away, flinging them with immense strength. They saw him drop his club and hold his hands out flat in front of him, then speak. A second passed, and he reached down to gently pull Val up off the ground.

Nils was shocked that she had taken his hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. Her left arm was bleeding, but she seemed otherwise unhurt. The stranger bent to collect his club, and kept his eyes scanning the trees at the edge of the field, while Val turned her back to the man and collected her weapons from the ground.

Closer to them, Ulrik drove his fist into the face of the last living Long Knife. The opponent tumbled backward like a folding blanket, landing on the ground on the top of his head, his neck shattering with an audible set of cracks similar to the machine gun.

Nils turned back to Morten. “Do you need help to walk?”

“I will be okay.”

The three of them approached Anders as he climbed to his feet. He looked a little dazed, but otherwise unhurt. Nils bent down to pick up one of the long knives, his own weapons temporarily lost. They joined Ulrik, who collected his ax, and then they all approached the stranger with caution.

Val saw them coming and shouted. “Find the weapon. This is not over if they can kill us from a distance.”

Ulrik ran toward the edge of the forest, and after Morten said “Go,” Oskar followed him. Anders went with him. Nils stayed with Morten, and he and the Laplander limped up to Val and the stranger.

“Who is this?” Morten asked.

Val and the stranger both turned to him. The man’s short, badly cut hair was unusual when the rest of them all had longer hair. But his eyes still looked Nordic, even if his cheekbones betrayed him as different from them. His clothes would have done that anyway.

“I am Heinrich,” he said in their tongue, though it was heavily accented.

Before he could say more, Val interrupted. “He was the one who left us the food. Where is Erlend?”

The men all shrugged. They might not fully trust Heinrich, but he had proven himself to not be an enemy.

Ulrik, Oskar and Anders came jogging back from the trees. “They have gone,” Ulrik called. “The weapon is broken.” He explained the look of the thing, with a piece sticking awkwardly up in the air, and the links of the ammunition belt on the ground with the spent shells. He had never seen a machine gun before, but a quick look at the device in the small foxhole surrounded by sandbags had been enough for him to puzzle out how it had worked.

As they searched the field for Erlend, they first came to Stig’s body, and Ulrik briefly recounted how the man had conquered his illness and his machine gun injuries to perform one last heroic, rage-fueled berserker attack. “He died well.”

Morten sat in the field suddenly, grabbing his leg, before he leaned back in the grass.

“I will stay with him,” Nils said. “Find Erlend.”

Nils sat on the ground and pushed the body of a Long Knife aside. He had no wish to sit near the dead. When he did, though, the moved body uncovered what had been beneath it. Another, smaller body, pierced and punctured in seven different places—among them the eye socket and the throat.

“Never mind. I have found him.”