The Wald (20 page)

Segimer already had his bow drawn to his cheek, but just as he loosed the missile, Adalbern struck his back arm, sending the projectile flying off harmlessly into the wood.  “What are you doing?” the Cheruscan yelled.  But in the next moment he saw the answer for himself.

Ermin was jumping off the top of the rock behind the quickly fading Berengar.  The spear which his father had entrusted to him was gripped so tightly his knuckles showed white.  With all the weight the insubstantial boy could muster, he drove that long narrow spear tip into the back of the raving beast.  It fell on its side and pinned Ermin’s leg underneath its massive weight.

Segimer had his knife drawn and took a long stride to save the boys, but again Adalbern reached out.  This time he gripped the smaller man on the shoulder with his great paw.  “Let them be.”

“I’ll not have my fragile son killed when I can stop it,” shouted an angry Segimer.

“They’ve got the beast.  Let them finish it.  That way, live or die, your boy will no longer be
considered fragile by any man.”

The Cheruscan sloughed the giant hand from his shoulder and turned to save the boys.  He halted in his steps
, understanding the wisdom of Adalbern’s words when he saw what happened next.  The youths worked together.  Would it be a sign of what was to come with their peoples?

Berengar had placed his battered body between
the trapped Ermin and the hog’s mad, spitting head.  His knife drawn, he stabbed at the thin skin covering the animal’s skull, striking bone again and again but doing no real damage.  Ermin toiled to free his leg by clawing at the muddy pebbles in the ravine bed with his thin fingers.

Instantly, the boar tired of his struggle and rolled toward the boys to
right itself.  The handle of Ermin’s spear, stuck as it was in the beast’s back, snapped off while the Cheruscan boy himself was flattened by the spinning animal.  Berengar was able to skip out of the way in time.

Adalbern’s boy crouched low with the knife when the boar, violently angry and bleeding from multiple wounds, again stood on all four
s.  The creature lunged toward him, but with less energy than before.  Berengar was able to puncture one of its eyes with the knife while striking the other with the palm of his hand.  The animal screeched and struggled, teetering about madly as it bit the air.

Erm
in gathered himself to his feet, appearing to be in better condition than the grime and filth that now covered him would indicate.  He drew his own knife, narrow and sharp, and drove it into the boar’s soft belly from behind.  It spun to bite at the boy, but lost control of its legs instead and fell into the quickly reddening water that gurgled through the base of the ravine.

All three combatants panted intensely, sensing their mythical time together in battle was about to end.  Berengar rested his hands on his knees while sweat dripped from his hair onto his feet. 
Ermin lay down on his side, leaving his knife jutting from the animal’s belly.  The beast itself appeared almost peaceful after several wheezing breaths.  Soon it rested its head to one side and the men and boys watched quietly while the rhythmic rise and fall of its chest slowed with each exhalation.  At last it stopped altogether.

But that seemed ages ago to the boys.  Since then they had chatted incessantly about their victory.  A victory,
as they frequently reminded their fathers, that many men – even their fathers – had not achieved.  While the hog floated pierced above the coals, the dignitaries that had been invited from surrounding Cheruscan villages were bedazzled by the boys telling and acting out their story again and again.  Berengar liked to lift his jerkin and show where the beast had gored his chest.  The wounds were still sore and not yet scabbed over.  Ermin exclaimed again and again how the valiant Sugambrian had placed his body in harm’s way to preserve Ermin’s life.

Berengar lowered his voice and then let it chirp and crack as he told of how Ermin the Cheruscan boy leapt off the massive rock, driving his spear into the hog.  Upon hearing this part of the story, Thusnelda, Kolman’s pretty young daughter, allowed her
deep blue eyes to follow after Ermin as if he were the biggest hero she had ever seen.  Heretofore, the pair, Ermin and Thusnelda, had been playmates.  The boy, three years her senior, would often play chieftain to her part of being a faithful warrior.  They spent time in the wald surrounding their homes building walls of rocks and attacking one another.  Now, however, Thusnelda, in the way only a child can reason, leaned over to another young girl and said, “I’ll marry that man one day.  I’ll support in battle and he’ll be a mighty chief like his father.”

Thusnelda’s
little friend huffed, “Ermin?  The boy everyone calls a runt?”  But Thusnelda didn’t even hear the retort.  She watched her playmate slowly turning into a man before her large eyes.

Apart from the conversation of the tiny women, n
obles and commoners alike laughed and drank with the boys, cheering and toasting their success.  Young and old joined in a raucous feast.  The entire reason for the celebration, that is the negotiations for a possible alliance, was seemingly forgotten.

Adalbern remembered
, though.  He sat on an overturned wooden bucket with his back against a smooth-barked tree, completely satisfied with the day.  The bear of a man had made nice with the most powerful man in the Cheruscan tribe.  He had watched their two sons work together and kill a wild beast – a good omen that would not be lost on either Segimer or his priestess.  Finally, he had enough mugs of ale that he had lost count, a feat that was rare for him.  His head felt thick but mellow while he waited for his forthcoming share of the hog and for his answer.

Not far from where the great Sugambrian
chieftain rested sat Kolman, who did his level best at talking with Gundahar.  Adalbern chuckled as he watched the two.  Though he couldn’t hear what they said, he knew that Gundahar would be saying something with his nasally lisp.  For the first few moments of the exchange, Kolman would ask him to repeat what he said.  After that, though, Kolman would do what most men did with Gundahar.  He would just smile and nod with an occasional, “Yes, I agree,” added in to prove that he listened.

Gundahar had been with Adalbern’s family for as long as the old noble could recall.  Maybe that was why he and his own never had difficulty understanding the ugly man’s talk.  In any event
, he appreciated Gundahar.  He was unsightly and sounded dull, but his mind was sharp.  These facts allowed many men to underestimate him and the chief he served, which was one of the few things in life that truly satisfied Adalbern.  To be underestimated and then dazzle all men’s expectations was to triumph.

At last, when the clouds had long ago blown to cover the moon and stars, the meat was sliced off the beast and served.  It was tough and gristly, but everyone lied and said it was delicious, happy to convince themselves of a fitting end to the yarn the boys
had spun all evening.

After the group of young strong Cheruscan men had removed the beast from its place above the coals, dry wood was piled high to replace it.  The glowing orange and black coals were so hot that limbs as wide as a man’s waist burst into flame after smoking for mere moments.  The fire seemed to consume the wood as fast as the men could add it.  The heat given off felt good on Adalbern’s face on that cold spring night.
  He turned his head from side to side so that each cheek could feel the blaze on its own.  Adalbern imagined that each reddened from the warmth.  He downed more of his ale.

It was then that he noticed a figure, two figures actually, each unique, almost opposite.  The first was short and crooked.  Brittle white-black hair poked from beneath a wide, deep hood that was pulled up from a woolen cloak.  Deeply furrowed hands covered in the patches he had only seen in the very aged extended out from the coat.  One hand tightly gripped a cane that was little more than
a gnarled branch that may have fallen to the forest floor that very day.  The cane was not worn smooth like it had seen years of use.  The other wrinkled mitt clutched a leather satchel that had clearly been used for many years.  Bulges in its side told the chieftain that the sack held something.  This old woman would be Segimer’s priestess.  Adalbern took another tug of the ale.

The second figure followed behind
and wore the same brown woolen cloak cinched about her shoulders, but that was the end of the similarities.  Her hood was pulled down, hanging against her back, to reveal a beautiful young woman with curly red hair.  Her nose and cheeks were sprinkled with the type of delicate freckles that would make her appear young for many more years.  The woman’s face was low and round, but narrowed to a strong chin.  Any of the features when viewed individually may actually be considered coarse, but when they were viewed on the whole, they made Adalbern think the thoughts of a young man.

She was tall
, with a straight back, and glided where the old priestess plodded.  Adalbern expected the women to halt in front of Segimer and the fire, but instead they moved past both, eventually leaving the circle created by the firelight by way of a narrow path that curved into the dark wald.  Segimer jumped to his feet. “It is time.  Come, men.”  He called to his young warriors, “Torches.”

The
trail wound its way up and down terrain that was remarkably dry given the spring thaw.  Eventually it began descending along a switchbacked track down to a flat boggy land with heavy soil.  To the east, a small ditch had been dug to drain away the water, but much of it remained behind.  Its gurgling and sucking could be heard between the sputters of the torches.

Flat stones had been set in a circle around the outside edge of the veiled glen
. All the men with them that night spread themselves around on the stones and faced inward to watch the priestess and her assistant.  The two women removed their leather boots and walked into the boggy soil barefoot, their feet turning black with the first steps.

In the center of the bog were two worship poles.  They each were cut from
great trees and had their bark stripped off.  They were set into the ground upside down.  Adalbern could tell they were upside down because the bough of the forked poles faced the ground, with the two branches of the bough buried into the earth like the legs of a man.  Each reached to the sky to the height of three grown men.

Adalbern’s own priestess had his men bury similar poles
back in his villages.  She told him that they represented both man and woman.  He did not know the reason for having two in this case, since they looked identical to him.  The ale made him not care what that reason was.  His mighty belly wished that he had brought a pot of the brew with him to the glen.  He was in a mood to hallucinate.

The young woman took her cloak off and spread it wide on the wet ground so that it was directly between the two poles.  She gave a single pull to a leather thong knotted at her neck and her simple garment slipped to her feet, revealing her young naked body.  Adalbern had seen naked women before.  Dorthe, Berengar’s mother, was his third wife after he had outlived the previous two.  But seeing her young unblemished skin and nipples held erect from the cold stirred
him, warming him more than the ale.  He looked at his son, who, to Adalbern’s surprise, seemed transfixed by the old seer and ignored the beauty presented before them.

Adalbern shook the sluggishness of the ale away so that he could do what must be done to secure a Cheruscan commitment.  He banished his
thoughts of the young woman for a time, to be resurrected later as he rode home.  But he stole one last, lingering look at the way her still-round breasts swayed as she moved to lay down on the cloak.

The old priestess used what strength she had to push the cane down into the soft earth so that it stood straight up on its own.  She used her now free hand to jerk her hood back to reveal a face covered in profound wrinkles.  This woman was the oldest person Adalbern had ever seen, or at least she appeared as such.
  At least six stray white hairs grew from her pointed chin.

She reached into the satchel and rattled around its contents while beginning some type of incantation.  Her eyes rolled back in her head so that Adalbern could only see the whites of her eyes in the torchlight.  He was unsettled.  The young woman had her eyes closed and seemed to be a
t peace in the cold as her thin belly rose and fell gently.  Her slow breaths showed as a mist as they met the frosty air.

The old woman spoke words that Adalbern did not understand.  They were not any dialect spoken by the tribes.  His father had told him that the priestesses learned a language sep
arate and apart from the tongues of the peoples.  It was the same in every village, in every clan, in every tribe.  The priestess talked to the gods in their mystical language.  The rest of the tribesmen could not, therefore, hope to divine the will of the gods without having a priestess there to intercede.

The chanting went on for some time until the old woman withdrew her hand from the sack
, revealing the thin bones of rabbits.  Ribs and miniature femurs stuck out from between her fingers which were held in a mangled fist.  The clutching hand moved back and forth over the naked assistant until the priestess opened it and the bones toppled onto the woman’s bare chest.  Some fell to her sides, sticking between the skin of her arms and ribcage.  Others sat at an angle, propped up against her plump breasts.  One sat long-ways in the little depression between her neck and chest.