The Wald (2 page)

“For the w
ald!” shouted his father, while waving his iron sword, an old Roman weapon which he stole from an Ubian trader two years earlier.  The man had it coming, Berengar remembered, since he had at first tried to tell his father that he ought to build a proper temple in which to worship the gods.  Adalbern had the man seized, flogged, and sent away empty-handed, carrying just the knowledge that proper gods wandered and wanted to be worshiped in sacred groves in the deepest depths of the wood.  Other than Berengar’s blade, Adalbern’s was the only sword in the whole army.  The rest of the men carried simple spears.  Only a few hundred had thought to construct a shield of some sort.

The entire force answered him with a surge forward, propelling Berengar into a full run.
  Some of the men called, “The wald!”  Others chanted, “Sugambria!”  Gundahar shrieked, “Adalbern!”

The
wide, little sword Berengar carried immediately glinted in the sunlight it caught when the army emerged from the trees.  The morning clouds and rain were gone, replaced by a clear, crisp autumn morning.  Berengar blinked trying to get his eyes used to the extra light.  The army was descending a hill across fields fully harvested.  Some of the men shouted curses at the mud left from the earlier shower as it slowed them down and sloshed onto their faces from the man in front of them.  Berengar found that he was light enough to glide over the mud, but was, unfortunately, at the perfect level to get a mouthful with each of Gundahar’s long strides.

The boy kept up with the
harelip and was proud of himself.  It was a pride that evaporated when other men he knew to be slower than Gundahar, began passing them both, giving Berengar a smirk or snide quip.  Gundahar had slowed his pace for the boy to keep up.

Berengar cursed while baring his teeth.  The
determined little man doubled his efforts and pulled alongside Gundahar.  For the first time he saw the village which was, by then, almost upon them.  He saw women carrying babies and dragging children in the opposite direction, trudging through the mud to the next town or some hiding place.  Berengar then noticed that the town was the largest village he’d ever seen – except his brief glance at Oppidum Ubiorum – with perhaps one hundred homes.  Closer still, between his position and the screaming women and their crying children, between his little sword and the rich town, came scores of men.  They advanced in a jumble of bodies, carrying spears or farm tools.  One of them, tan from working outside all year, laid eyes on Gundahar and the boy and pressed on to them.  Berengar felt his bladder release.

The bottom of the Gaul’s boot caught Berengar squarely in the chest, knocking out his wind while propelling him onto his back in the mud.  The boy gasped for air.  His bladder
somehow found more urine to send into his trousers.  Gundahar blocked a downward blow from the Gaul’s hoe with his spear, forcing the attacker back with a good shove.  In moments the Gaul lay dying, whimpering in the muck with blood spitting from his mouth.  Gundahar jerked Berengar up by his arm, slammed the hilt of his little sword back into his hand, and ordered him to follow.  He was ten paces away before the boy understood.

This must be the Muspelheim, thought Berengar, as he watched the chaos around him.  Men gritted their teeth and shouted.  Men cried, kneeling atop their own entrails.  Berengar threw up on himself, but still
he ran.

The Sugambrians were too many
for the defenders and very quickly the din of battle fell to a low level, with pockets of conflict.  Gundahar kicked in the heavy hardwood door to a house.  Inside a woman with gray frizzy hair lay nearby with her throat cut.  Two of Gundahar’s countrymen stood with their backs to him, a third was on the floor raping a woman who hadn’t made it out of the town in time.

“Finish your fun!” shouted Gundahar, “then loot this place.  You two, stop standing around and clean out this home.”

“We want our fun, too,” they complained.

“They’ll be others, and prettier too.  Now move.  If we all took time to
drop our trousers, we might as well invite the Romans to snip us off,” snorted Gundahar. Angrily the two men stalked off, mumbling about the ugly bastard, soon grabbing anything of any value in the home.  The third man finished his work on the young woman and stood bathed in sweat, quickly joining in the thievery.  The woman shook and crawled like a wounded animal into the farthest, darkest corner of the house.

Berengar burst
through the door at that moment, locking eyes with the young woman.  Gundahar reacted out of instinct and almost decapitated the boy with a slash of his spear’s tip.  “Where have you . . . Oh!  You’ve upped all over yourself.”  The other three men laughed at the boy, but kept about their business.  “Let’s find a storehouse,” said Gundahar and he marched out the door, his arms full.  Berengar stupidly toddled behind him, looking over his shoulder at the shivering woman, not knowing what else to do.  He thought of his mother, much younger than his father.  The frightened woman in the corner reminded him of her.

Gundahar dumped his booty o
nto the dirty street where mountains of goods were quickly accumulating as other men in his father’s army did the same.  The Sugambrians worked efficiently marching in and out of homes and barns, dragging out hogs, chickens, cattle, and goats.  A few of the men were even honest enough to throw Roman coins with some man’s head stamped across it into the pile.  Most of the men, though, if they found such trinkets would simply place them in their own pouch.  Horses and carts, too, were taken.  They would carry much of the load as the army moved on to the next village and then, eventually, back home across the Rhenus.

Gundahar quickly found a small store house filled with
coarse fiber bags of dried wheat.  “Go tell some of the men to bring a horse and wagon here.  It’ll do you good to give some orders.”

“But my father told me to follow you,” answered the boy confused at when it was appropriate to disobey orders.

“That was for the attack, boy.  This is the plunder.  Now go.”  To make his point, Gundahar jabbed the tip of his spear into Berengar’s side, tearing his tunic and even drawing some blood.  The boy screeched and ran away to do the ugly man’s bidding, still clutching his small sword, dirtied only with mud.

As Berengar ran between two, small closely-set homes, ahead of him he saw the pretty young woman he had briefly seen curled into the corner of the first house he entered.  She ran
, crying, straight at him.  He froze, not knowing what to do.

Then, behind her, one of his countrymen came around the corner into the alley and tackled the girl so both of them tumbled down at Berengar’s feet.  The boy stared, mouth agape.  The man proceeded to claw up her dress, leaning his weight down on her neck with one hand.  Her struggling slowed and eventually stopped as the man entered the woman.

The young woman gazed upward, blinking occasionally, arms at her sides, while the Sugambrian rode her.  Berengar had seen his mother and father do something similar, but this was very different.  He was confused.

The soldier looked up from his work, scowling at Berengar, “Stop gawking, boy.”  Yet, the boy gawked.

“I said, stop your gaping!”  The warrior reached out his rock of a fist and smashed Berengar’s nose.  The boy had never had a broken nose before, but he knew he did then.  Blood spurt out through each nostril as he tipped backward onto his rear.  The brightest light he’d ever seen grew then faded in his eyes.

When he could see clearly again he
sat looking down at his chest.  Blood covered his vomit which covered his tunic.  At his side in the mud rested his small sword.  He heard the man’s thrusting and grunting.  Giving no thought to his actions, Berengar seized the weapon and stood to face his countryman.  Before the man could raise his head to look in his direction and offer another strike, Berengar used both hands to drive the blade into the back of the man’s neck.  It slid off his spine and down one side, but the damage was done and it was good enough.

The warrior flung his head back, withdrawing from the woman while rising to his knees.  The man’s head bobbed from side to side while the gaping wound exposed much of his neck musculature on his right side.  The Sugambrian man batted his hands at his waist searching for a weapon.  Berengar ran toward his kneeling prey shouting nonsense.  He tried to jump over the woman, but instead put a small boot on her belly.  The squish
y surface caused him to lose balance.  While he teetered, the angry, bleeding man grabbed him by the hair, shaking the boy violently.  Like a rat cornered in a storehouse, Berengar slashed his blade which caught his captor’s extended arm.

The man dropped Berengar who proceeded to slash at the big man until his
quarry slumped over, dead.  The boy’s heart raced, pounding so that his chest and neck hurt.  Berengar panted while his eyes and head darted around him to see if anyone had witnessed what he had just done.  The young woman was gone with no sign of her there in the muck except the imprint of her back.  He heard laughter and clanging coming from inside one of the houses.  No one had seen him kill one of his elders.

In another heartbeat he remembered the mission on which Gundahar had sent him.  He ran to find someone to bring a horse and wagon
, trying to forget what had just happened.

After bursting out into the main, muddy street, he saw that what earlier had been the site of a battle was now a raucous celebration.  The villagers’ carts were loaded with goods.  The villagers’ horses pulled th
ose same carts. Men sat atop the goods and carts and horses, happy to be relieved of the long walk to the next attack.  The warriors rested and carried on with jokes and song.

“You there!” he shouted at the nearest man who did not hear him above all the noise.

Berengar marched up behind the man and smacked his leg with the flat of his sword, smearing wet blood all over the man’s trousers.  “You there, I said!”

The man and his friends looked down at Berengar, eyes wide.  Their chattering stopped.

“Now listen to me,” the boy pointed and waved his small sword.  “You men get a cart and a horse and move it to the other side of those houses.  Load up the sacks of wheat from a small storehouse back there.  Gundahar will help.”

The Sugambrians stood still a moment before guffawing simultaneously.

“You heard the man!” shouted a familiar voice behind him.  “Get off your asses, pack up that wheat, and prepare to leave!”  Without any hesitation, the men’s initial mirth fled, replaced by the respect due a nobleman.  They scurried away to do Adalbern’s bidding.

“Well, well, my young man,” said his father, smiling broadly as he dropped one knee into the wet earth
while staring at his blood-soaked son.  “It looks like you’ve learned a thing or two about battle today.”

And he had.

. . .

And he did.

Over the next three weeks his army sacked town after town.  Berengar did not have the opportunity to bloody his sword in any of those other battles, but he observed, he listened, he learned.

After looting those
villages it was an altogether different, brief encounter that would set the stage for all that was to come, in Berengar’s life and beyond.  The boy’s army accidentally fell across the lead elements of Rome’s Fifth Legion, commanded by a General Lollius.

Given the trouble Berengar was causing in the region, the Romans were
searching for him and his men.  The legionary scouts had missed them, but the full army had stumbled on the booty-laden tribesmen.  During a fleeting skirmish, Adalbern’s now-mounted force cut down one hundred Roman soldiers, including their standard bearer.  It was a rapid, stunning victory over the professional Roman soldiers.  When the old Sugambrian saw that a sea of enemy men dressed in full battle regalia approached the battlefield from the main highway, he wisely called a retreat after losing only a handful of his own warriors.

Berengar had watched the scene unfold, obeying his father as he sat on his nag on a nearby hillside.  When he saw the
eagle standard of Rome fall to the ground the temptation was too great and he kicked his horse in her belly.  She began at first a trot, then with further encouragement, rolled into a full gallop.  Berengar was moving toward the Romans while his father and men were fleeing.

It all happened very quickly.  His horse’s hooves plunged down atop the scattered dead or dying enemy bodies.  Berengar grabbed a fistful of the animal’s mane while simultaneously lurching back on her reins.  Before she came to a complete stop Berengar had leapt atop the standard bearer’s back.  The man’s face was buried in the dirt.  Blood came from a wound under his hide-covered helmet.  Berengar drew his small, flat sword and hacked at the pole upon which sat the eagle.  His horse had the sense to whinny, knowing danger drew closer.  The boy didn’t stop his chopping.

Just as the pole broke and Berengar snatched the eagle, stuffing it into a sack he carried with him, the old nag reared, making a frightful sound.  He turned just in time to leap out of the beast’s way as she toppled over onto her back, two Roman javelins jutting from her neck.  Berengar’s eyes locked on the approaching mass of men and metal.  At such close range they did not look like the women Gundahar and his father had said they would.  He was proud that he did not wet himself as he stood planted in place.

A javelin, hurled from an angry soldier bent on killing Berengar, rammed into the standard bearer’s back a mere half-step away.  The boy turned and ran toward his people.  The eagle very quickly seemed extraordinarily heavy as it bounced in the sack, pulling at his neck with every step.