John Norman - Marauders of Gor

I observed the brand. She was now only another girl whose belly lay beneath the sword, a property-girl, a collar girl, a slave, a bond-maid.

The eyes of Svein Blue Tooth, and those of his men, glistened as they feasted upon her bared beauty.

"It seems," said Svein Blue Tooth, "that the wergild has been well met."

"Yes," said the Forkbeard, "it might seem so."

"In the morning I shall proclaim the lifting of your outlawry," said the Blue Tooth.

I relaxed. It seemed we would come alive, after all, out of the hall of the Blue Tooth. I had only feared some treachery, or trickery, upon his part, some northern trick. Yet he had now, before his men, spoken. And I knew him, by this time, to be one who stood with his word, and stood well with it, and proudly. His word was to him as his land, and his sword, as his honor and his ship; it would be kept; it would be neither demeaned nor broken.

"I think there is some mistake," said Ivar Forkbeard.

Inwardly I groaned.

"How is that?" asked the Blue Tooth.

"How is it that the wergild is met?" asked Ivar Forkbeard.

The Blue Tooth looked puzzled. He pointed to the jewels, the gold, the girl. "You have that here wherewith to meet the wergild," said he.

"That is true," said the Forkbeard. Then he drew himself up to a not inconsiderable full height. "But who has told you that I choose to meet it?"

Suddenly the men in the hall, both those of the Forkbeard and of Svein Blue Tooth, began to cheer. I, too, was on my feet among them. None of us had suspected it, and yet it was what one should have expected of such a man as the Forkbeard. Never in the north had there been such a coup of honor! Though it might mean the death of us all, those who followed the Forkbeard, and that of perhaps hundreds of the men of Svein Blue Tooth, we cheered. My heart bounded, my blood raced. I struck, again and again, my left shoulder with the palm of my right hand. I heard swords clashing against the sides of plates, spear blades clattering on shields, and ringing, one against the other.

Slowly Svein Blue Tooth rose to his feet. He was livid with rage.

There was not a man in the hall but knew that his kinsman, a distant cousin, Finn Broadbelt, whom the Forkbeard had slain, had fallen in fair duel, and that wergild should not have been levied; and there was not a man in that hall but knew that the Blue Tooth had decreed, even were such justified, a wergild to the deed of the Forkbeard whose conditions were outrageous, deliberately formulated to preclude their satisfaction, a wergild contrived to make impossible the meeting of its own terms, a wergild the intent of which was, in its spitefulness, to condemn the Forkbeard to perpetual outlawry. Then, to the astonishment of all Torvaldsland, and most to that of Svein Blue Tooth, the Forkbeard, redoubtable, after earning six talmits in the contests, delivered to his hall the very wergild no man had supposed it possible to pay, and had then, arrogantly, before the high seat of the Blue Tooth itself, refused to pay!

"In this land," said Ivar Forkbeard, "rather than accept pardon at the hands of such a Jarl, one such as you, Svein Blue Tooth, I make what choice a free man must. I choose the sleen, the forest and the sea!"

Svein Blue Tooth regarded him.

"I do not pay the wergild," said the Forkbeard. "I choose to remain outlaw."

Once again there was much cheering. I clapped the Forkbeard about the shoulders. Gorm, and Ottar, too, stood with him, and his other men. Hilda knelt at his feet, among the gold, the jewels, her lips pressed to his furred boots. "My Jarl! My Jarl!" she wept.

Then there was silence in that high-roofed hall.

All eyes turned to Svein Blue Tooth.

He stood before the high seat of his house, standing before the long table; behind him, on each side, were the high-seat pillars of his house.

He prepared to speak. Suddenly he lifted his head. I, too, and several of the others, at the same time, detected it. It was smoke. "The hall is afire!" cried one man. Flames, above and behind us, crept at the southeast corner of the interior roof, above and, as we faced it, to the right of the doors. Smoke, too, began to drift in from one of the side rooms. We saw something move within it.

"What is going on?" cried a man at one of the tables.

The doors behind us, both of them, great, carved doors, suddenly thrust open.

In the doorway, silhouetted against flames behind them, we saw great, black, shaggy figures.

Then one leapt within the hall. In one hand it carried a gigantic ax, whose handle was perhaps eight feet long, whose blade, from tip to tip, might have been better than two feet in length; on its other arm it carried a great, round, iron shield, double strapped; it lifted it, and the ax; its arms were incredibly long, perhaps some seven feet in length; about its left arm was a spiral band of gold; it was the Kur which had addressed the assembly.

It threw back its head and opened its jaws, eyes blazing, and uttered the blood roar of the aroused Kur; then it bent over, regarding us, shoulders hunched, its claws leaping from its soft, furred sheaths; it then laid its ears back flat against the sides of its great head.

No one could move.

Then, other Kurii behind it, crowding about it, past it, it shrieked, lips drawn back, with a hideous sound, which, somehow, from its lips and mien, and mostly from its eyes, I took to be a sign of pleasure, of anticipation; I would learn later that this sound is instinctively uttered by Kurii when they are preparing to take blood. This cry, like a stimulus, acted upon the others, as well; almost instantly, with the velocity that the stranger signal can course through a pack of urts, this shriek was picked up by those with it; then, the hall filled with their horrid howling, eyes blazing, led by the Kur with the golden band, frenzied by the blood shriek, they leaped forward, great axes flailing.

I saw half of the body of a man spinning crazily past.

Kurii leapt down the long sides of the hall, slashing, cutting men down as they fled to their weapons. The wooden shields of Torvaldsland no more stopped the great axes than dried skins of larma fruit, stretched on sewing frames, might have resisted the four-bladed dagger cestus of Anango or the hatchet gauntlet of eastern Skjern.

More than once the blades of the Kurii axes bit through the spines of men, reaching for their weapons, and splintered, gouging, in the beams of the hall.

I choked in the smoke. My eyes stung. Near me a man screamed. I was knocked from my feet, buffeted in the crowd. For an instant I was conscious only of the dirt floor, the reeds strewn upon it, the mad forest of running feet. My left hand slipped in the dirt, in blood. I was knocked again, but then managed to force my way to my feet. I was carried in the panic-stricken throng a dozen yards in one direction, then, meaninglessly, carried back in the other. I could not even draw my weapon.

The Kur axes fell again and again. The hall rang with their howling. I saw a man-at-arms lifted, back broken, in the black, furred, tentacled hand of one of the marauders. The thing roared, head back. The white fangs seemed scarlet in the light of the fires from the roof. Then it threw the man more than a hundred feet against the back of the hall. I saw another man-at-arms hanging from the jaws of a Kur. He was still alive. His eyes betrayed shock, staring blindly outward. I do not think he saw. I suspect he was in pain. He was alive, but I did not think he any longer felt. He doubtless understood what was occurring but, to him, somehow, it did not seem of concern. It was as though it were happening to someone else. Then the Kur's jaws closed. For the least instant there was a terrifying recognition in the eyes. Then he was bitten through.