Chapter 107: West of the Known world
It was the morning of the departure. Vetrúlfr had kissed his wife goodbye and said his farewells to his young child.
They both knew the time that the fearsome King had at home was limited. Summer was a time when the sea was at its calmest.
And that meant the world would open up to those who lived in lands of northern frost and steel. And they would bring it to those who could not withstand its tide.
The gulls screamed overhead, but the docks were near-silent.
Only the clink of chain mail, the thump of boots on timber, and the groan of loaded hulls filled the air.
No cheers. No chants. Just the steady rhythm of readiness.
Vetrúlfr stood upon the ridge overlooking the fjord. The sea mist parted like a curtain, revealing the full host below.
He had not summoned them.
Gunnar’s men, already loading crates of dried fish, mead, and steel-tipped arrows. Gormr’s shieldwall, cloaked in wolf-pelts, drilling in formation even as they waited to board.
Bjǫrn’s rowdy bastards tightened sail-ropes and joked in grim tones about the ghosts they’d meet on the far shore.
Two thousand five hundred warriors.
Every holdfast had emptied.
He walked slowly down the worn path toward the docks. Each step echoed with disbelief not at their courage; but at their certainty.
He did not need to ask.
They followed not because of command, but because of conviction. Because in a cold world ruled by hunger, ambition, and fading gods, he had given them something eternal.
He had led them through storm, through fire, through blood.
And now; into the unknown.
A young thegn looked up as he passed, clutching a helmet beneath his arm. “The wind favors west, lord,” he said.
Vetrúlfr nodded once.
“The gods do not favor cowards,” he replied.
He stepped onto the lead ship, his brown and ochre sail already unfurled above him like the banner of a coming age.
Behind him, the men raised oars. Horns sounded low and deep, echoing off the fjord cliffs like thunder behind the clouds.
None asked where they were going.
Only that he would be at the helm.
And so they sailed; not for plunder, not for revenge, but because their king had made a promise.
And a promise made before gods, and landvættir was not lightly broken.
Westward, toward Vinland.
Toward blood, frost, and fire.
On the other side of the world, within the forests of Vinland. Fog rose like a miasma around the trees. Suffocating and blinding to those who did not know its layout.
The wind carried no birdsong.
Only the soft rustle of birch leaves and the faint scuff of leather on moss.
Nokomis crouched beneath the brush, hand raised, fingers outstretched in silent signal.
Five beside her. All from her mother’s line; hunters, not warriors. Painted in ash and ochre. Their faces hard. Silent. Eyes sharp.
The Dorset raiding party below trudged along the worn game trail. Fifteen, maybe more. Skin chapped from the Greenland ice, wrapped in hides and carrying stone axes and bone spears.
They were lean with hunger.
Desperate men fought harder than proud ones.
The pine boughs above swayed as a Norse arrow sank silently into one of the Dorset scouts at the rear. He fell without a cry, throat pierced.
Nokomis gave the second signal.
From the undergrowth, the Norsemen rose like wolves from snowdrifts.
Iron helms caught the filtered sun. Shields rimmed in steel slammed forward like a wall of black ice. Spears jabbed from the shieldline, not to kill; but to corral.
The Dorset broke formation, snarling, swinging stone and antler-blade weapons against splint-braced forearms and hardened lamellar. Sparks flew. But the Norse wall held.
The Dorset pushed inward; and found the kill zone.
A clearing, shallow and muddy from spring melt.
On the far ridge, Nokomis’s archers rose from bark-blind hides.
“Now,” she whispered.
Barbed tips, flint and steel alike, rained down.
The trapped Dorset howled and turned; only to meet shields again.
A warrior lunged toward the treeline. His foot struck a snare when his attention was elsewhere. He fell hard, ribs crushed by the release of a counterweight log.
Another was pulled into a hidden spike pit; screaming short and sharp as he vanished.
The rest began to falter. Too many dead. Too little ground.
Nokomis drew her bow and fired.
The lead raider dropped with her arrow through his cheekbone.
Another arrow from the Norse cohort finished the last man standing.
From the hidden village beyond the trees, a child’s cry rang out; fearful, then relieved.
Nokomis exhaled and lowered her bow. Her warriors emerged from the ferns, stepping over corpses and blood-slick grass.
A Norseman, his beard flecked with soot, mail split but standing, nodded to her.
“Your traps are crude; it would be wiser to conceal them beneath moss and leaves, then laving them out in the open to stumble upon” he said in an accented tongue.
“It worked didn’t it?” she answered. A sharp glint in her gaze signalled her discontent with being scolded.
Yet the warrior did not take offense; instead he grinned.
Together, they looked down at the broken raider.
“This was only one pack,” she murmured. “The ice is melting. The others are coming.”
The Norseman adjusted his helmet. “Then it’s good you sent word home… Our King should be arriving any day now….”
She looked to the horizon where, faint and distant, smoke curled not from ruin… but from signal fire.
And her heart steadied.
It would appear that the Son of Winter had arrived earlier than she expected.
And though she knew that whatever consequences that came from her bargain with the White Wolf would most certainly cost a pound of flesh in return.
Nokomis also knew it was the only way her people could truly survive. And she had long since come to terms with that act.