[This is a prelude to my novel, which I've restarted, but I think it works as a small stand-alone story as well. I think I'll stick with this. It works. I like it. This is obviously a first draft.]
Germania, a couple of thousand years ago.
The forest is immense, stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction. For most of the people and the creatures who live in it, the forest is the world; there is no place that is not absolutely thick with trees. Much of it is completely impassable to anything larger than a mid-sized boar or an extremely nimble and clever deer.
Most of the people stick to the valleys and the riversides, where the forest thins out a bit and there are actually open spaces more than three or four feet on a side. This is where they build their villages, which usually consist of a couple dozen family units, some passably-constructed huts, and a hell of a lot of goats. Absolutely mad for goats, are the Germanians, and to a lesser degree, cows and pigs.
Sigrid Ulnuf has six goats of his own, but he makes his living by tending the goats of the others in his village, which does not have a name. Most people are concerned with the business of tending to their small gardens or grain fields, and so they entrust their goats to Sigrid, who takes them out to the marshes south of the village where they graze. In return, he receives portions of grain and vegetables and bread from everyone else.
Frankly, most of his tribesmen are quite happy to have Sigrid off somewhere else most of the time. He is a big man with an impressive blonde beard and handsome features, and under most circumstances he would be a respected member of the tribe with a thick-waisted wife and half a dozen children to worry him.
But since childhood Sigrid has had some sort of strange demon in him that causes him to screw up his face in hideous, contorted poses, and also to shout and swear for no apparent reason. In spite of this — or perhaps because of it — Sigrid is gentle as a lamb and possessed of a sweet, almost childlike disposition. But he’s still creepy, and so he spends his days in the marshes with the goats, who don’t take offense at his bizarre tics and extremely crude language. They’ve become accustomed to him.
Today, Sigrid is sitting on a rock, holding a tiny black and white kid in his huge arms and stroking its ears and horns. The poor thing made the mistake of sticking its nose into a badger’s hole while the owner was at home; its bleating cries drew Sigrid, who kicked the badger in the hindquarters and sent it grumbling back into its hole before it could give the kid more than a few scrapes and scratches. Now he’s calming the trembling animal. He does not notice that his tics have abated — not entirely, but they register as twitches, not spasms.
“Shhh,” he says to the goat. “You’re okay now. Umm. Uh. That old badger didn’t want you. You just — motherfucker! — you just surprised him.”
He continues soothing the goat, whispering quietly except for the occasional outburst. The creature’s tiny heart, which he can feel beating through its ribcage against his hand, begins to slow down, and its cries become more infrequent. Soon it is silent in the marshy field, save for the occasional low baa-a-a-a of a goat and Sigrid’s soft, erratic grunting.
And then something quite unexpected happens: three men come out of the dense underbrush, hacking their way through the tangles of branches and leaves with short, stubby swords. One of the men is small and chubby, fair-haired; another is big and dark-skinned; the third is somewhere in between, pale but with black hair cropped close to his skull. This third man has a wolfskin wrapped over his shoulders, held on with a thick wooden peg.
They wear gray cloaks with red tunics beneath, and sandals with heavy woolen socks beneath them. Each man, in addition to his sword, has a bundle over his shoulder and a short spear.
They’re not from his village, and they’re not from any village he’s ever been in (which would, roughly, be the village nine miles south, and the other village fifteen miles east, where he went once as a small boy with his father to trade goats). They don’t look like anyone he’s ever seen before, either. Hell, Sigrid isn’t sure they’re even Thuringians.
Sigrid stands up, still holding the goat. His entire attention is focused on the swords the men carry, and their spears.
After a moment, they notice him. The big one taps the pale one on the shoulder and they stop. The men and Sigrid regard one another across the field for what seems like an hour.
Finally, the pale one raises a hand. He says something in a strange, liquid tongue that is utterly unfamiliar to Sigrid.
Sigrid just stares at him, his face spasming. The pale man frowns at this and says something to his colleagues.
“Um…hello. Friend.” the pale man says haltingly. Sigrid can barely understand him — he’s speaking Thuringian, but it sounds the way Sigrid’s grandfather might speak it, and with an almost unintelligible accent.
“Friend,” the man says, pointing at himself. “Friend,” he repeats, pointing at the others. Then he points at Sigrid. “Friend. Er…merda. Friend?”
Sigrid nods. “Yes,” he says. “Friend. Umm. Ufff. Mmmm. Cunt! Cunt! Cuntlicker!”
The man blinks at this. “You…you angry. Not friend?”
Sigrid ponders this. Then he understands. “No. Friend. Not angry.” How could he explain his demon to this strange man?
But the chubby small stranger says something quietly. He pantomimes an eerily accurate impression of Sigrid’s affliction. The other men nod. Apparently the same demon curses these men’s tribe as well.
“We…many. We come here. You…not fight. We not fight. Yes?”
“I won’t fight you,” Sigrid says. “But you…mmm! Ummm! Uh! Uh! You probably want to talk to our chief. He’s in the village.” He points behind him, to the path that leads to the village.
The pale man frowns, perplexed. He and the others confer. Then he points at the path. “You…home? People?” he says.
Sigrid nods. “People. Yes.”
The pale man nods, smiling, as if he’s figured this out. He jabbers at the big man, who turns around and heads back into the forest. He turns back to Sigrid.
“You wait. Yes?”
Sigrid nods. He is completely mystified by all of this.
The pale man and the chubby man sheath their swords and approach Sigrid, who gently puts the kid down. It runs up to the strange men, bleats, drops a pellet of shit, and runs away.
The pale man points at the goats. “What this?”
“These? Um. Um. These are goats.”
The man nods and points at one of the goats. “Goats?”
“Goat,” Sigrid says, pointing at the goat. Then he waves his hand at the whole herd. “Goats.”
“Goats.” The man nods again. He repeats the word, and the chubby one does as well.
The chubby man reaches into his pocket and pulls out a fist-sized chunk of hardtack bread. He offers it to Sigrid, who politely takes a small piece. It’s roughly the consistency of granite, and he has trouble chewing it. But he finally swallows it down.
The men laugh. The pale man says “Good, not. Yes?”
Sigrid smiles. They know how bad their bread is.
The goatherder and the strange men sit in silence for about a half hour. Finally, there is more rustling in the trees, and the big man appears. He calls something out, and the other men rise. The pale one turns to Sigrid.
“Us. Many. You not fight,” he repeats. Sigrid nods.
The pale man nods. He calls to the big man, who disappears into the trees again.
Suddenly there is a much bigger sound from the forest, a great rustling, and Sigrid hears voices.
And men begin to pour out of the forest. Most of them are dressed identically to the men that Sigrid thinks of as his strangers. Others wear ragged, alien clothing that looks too cold for this place. Some of them have axes and begin to hack at the smaller trees, while the ragged men begin pulling the felled lumber down and piling it up at the edge of the trees.
Sigrid is getting nervous. There are a lot of men here — maybe sixty or more, at least as many as are in the village, and all of them armed. What is all of this?
But nobody’s made a threatening move at him, or done anything particularly malicious, other than chop down the trees, and Sigrid doesn’t especially care about the trees. So he sits back on his rock to watch. This is the strangest thing he’s ever seen, even more strange than the two-headed goat he saw when his father took him to the other village, all those years ago.
After about an hour, the men seem to have cleared some sort of pathway through the forest, which slopes down on the other side. One of them calls out to another one, who calls to another further back, who calls to another man further back down the new path.
The pale man nods at Sigrid and grins, slightly nervously. He says something in his liquid tongue.
More men appear. And then more. They walk in columns filling the path, five men abreast. These new men not only carry swords and spears, but shields. At the front of the column, two men carry large iron poles with some sort of statue of a bird at the top and some kind of geometric diagram beneath it. (Sigrid’s people have not yet quite figured out the whole written language thing, and he does not recognize that the diagram are in fact letters, four of them.)
They keep coming and coming and coming, filling the field. On the far side, behind where Sigrid stands, they’ve begun their trick with the axes on the trees that line the goatherder’s path back to his village, widening it to accommodate the column of men.
“Holy shit,” Sigrid says, and for once it’s not his demon talking. He takes his crook and herds his goats out of the way of the men.
It occurs to him that he probably should run to the village and let everyone know that this river of men has begun to flow towards them, but it’s too late now; the men are already going down the newly-widened path to the village, filling it up, and he would have to squeeze past them. They’ll be there in a few minutes anyway.
And still the warriors — which these men obviously are — come. There must be hundreds of them, Sigrid thinks. (His people have also not created words for numbers larger than one hundred.) They are tall and short, thin and bulky (though none of them are actually fat), pale-skinned and dark-skinned and hairy and hairless, but all wear the near-identical red tunics, sandals and gray cloaks.
Occasionally, one of them will stare curiously at Sigrid, whose face has begun to twist and turn itself around quite badly. But most of them simply ignore him. They don’t speak. They just walk.
This goes on for a very long time — long enough that, after a while, Sigrid notices that the shadows are beginning to grow longer on the ground. It must be at least two hours after midday now, and these men showed up at — what, mid-morning?
Finally, the river of warriors trickles and dries up. Sigrid stands up to follow them…and then he sees more people coming into the field. These are not warriors, though — there are men with wagons that roll along unsteadily on the ground, and men with hand carts, and even women, though they look like no women Sigrid has ever seen.
He decides that this is his moment to return to the village, this narrow gap between the warriors and the people who follow them, and so he begins to walk slowly, maybe twenty yards behind the last warriors in the column and forty yards ahead of the new people. He keeps the distance up, and so he walks slowly; the warriors don’t seem to be particularly in any hurry. His goats trail along behind him, occasionally bleating.
As Sigrid gets closer to the village, he becomes aware of the smell of smoke.
Something begins rising in his stomach.
By the time he actually gets to the village, most of the huts are already just ashes on the ground. He sees his neighbor, Kredda, lying in the mud, his eyes staring up into the evening sky, a pool of blood congealing underneath him. A few of the other men lie scattered around the perimeter of the village.
The rest of his tribe are all sitting in a rough circle in the common area at the center of where the buildings used to stand. They are surrounded by soldiers.
Sigrid notices that a couple of the soldiers are eyeing him intently, their hands on their swords. He deliberately drops his crook on the ground and does not move.
He spies the pale soldier he’d spoken to earlier. The man sees him at the same time, and walks quickly towards him.
“What…uh! Uh! What the hell Um! did you do?” Sigrid asks him, his face twitching and roiling to the point where it looks as if his head is going to explode.
The man gestures to him to keep quiet. “They..they fight. You not fight. They fight. I tell friends you…” His own face screws up, as he tries to think of the word. Finally, he twirls his finger next to his temple, stick his tongue out, and rolls his eyes.
“Friends not fight you. Friends…say…not you. You stay.” He points at the ground.
Sigrid shakes his head, tears beginning to run down his face. “What’s going to…um! Um! What’s going um to uh happen hmmm cocksucker to them?” he says, pointing at the rest of his tribe. Some of them are also crying, and some of the children — the newly orphaned ones — are screaming and sobbing, but most of them simply sit stone-faced. None of them seem to have spied him.
The man shrugs. “They come us. You stay.”
“What?”
“You stay.” The man points. “They go. You stay.”
“Stay here?” Sigrid says. “What for? You’ve um you’ve destroyed my fucking village.”
The man shrugs. “You come, then. Not fight.”
Sigrid looks at his people. Most of them despise him, fear him. None of them are particularly friendly to him. They wouldn’t notice, he thinks, if he died; they certainly would not mourn him.
But they are his people. They are all he knows.
“I hope you um um ummmm rot in hell, motherfucker,” he says to the pale man, and goes to join his people in the circle.
The pale man watches him, shrugs, and walks away.
Sigrid steps between the soldiers, who regard him impassively, as do his tribesmen, who regard him with no surprise. He pulls his cloak around himself, sits down in the mud, and waits for something else to happen.
