Bjarni Earthmover and two of the other warriors were ready to begin the journey to Valhalla, and the three wounded mutie prisoners were to accompany them.
One of the boats, fallen into some disrepair, was to be used for the funeral ceremony. Ryan and his companions passed the afternoon in their hut, resting, eating and cleaning and reloading their weapons. Erik Stonebiter had come by and explained what was to happen and to invite them, on behalf of the karl, to join the ritual of death.
"It will all take place as the fire-sun touches our sister earth, and the water and night close the eyes of the world."
Now, dusk had come.
Other than the men who stood watch around the perimeter of the ville, everyone was there, including the women and children, free-born as well as thralls. Krysty and Mildred, like the rest of the nonmen, had their heads covered with shawls of dyed wool, a mark of respect for the passing of Bjarni and the others.
Ryan guessed that the slaves and the women and children who'd been butchered would be buried somewhere quietly. This funeral was only for the warriors of Markland.
Ryan led Doc, J.B. and Jak out into the calm gentle evening. The main fire of the steading had been built up and blazed so brightly that no one could stand within twenty feet of it. A number of smaller fires had been lit, some on the beach, some on a low headland where the trees grew close to the shingle.
Jorund beckoned the four to stand near him. "This will not take long. We do not grieve much over one of our brothers fallen in battle."
It crossed Ryan's mind to ask whether being shot through the temple while carrying an apple on your head really counted as falling in battle, but he decided to keep silent.
"What about the prisoners?" J.B. asked. "You question them?"
"You mean did we torture them, outlander? Of course we did. But we spared them life."
"But did you discover why they were attacking you?" Doc pressed, wiping a dab of mud from the ferrule of his ebony cane. "Did you find out if they planned to attack again?"
The baron looked puzzled. "Talk to the evil ones? How?"
Ryan sighed. "Course. Muties like them... they won't likely talk much of anything close to what you speak."
"No."
"So, what happens to them?" Ryan asked.
"There." Jorund pointed toward the headland.
At first, Ryan thought that three large men stood there, but the shapes were too big to be people, and he could make out something odd. The outlines were fuzzy, as if the men were built from branches and sheaves of grass.
"What are they?" he asked.
It was Doc who replied. "I believe they are called wicker men, my dear Ryan."
"What?"
Jorund nodded. "The old one answers truly. I have heard them called that. Wicker men. Straw men. Basket men. All the same."
"But I don't get it."
"You will get it soon enough," Doc replied. "Then you will quite possibly wish that you had not. It is damned barbaric."
The prisoners were to die before the funeral began so that their souls could accompany Bjarni and the other Vikings on their last dark journey.
They were led out, naked and bound tightly. As they stumbled past Ryan he noticed that the thongs around their wrists and ankles were thick strips of rawhide that had been soaked.
He glanced at Doc. "Why have they wet the cords on them?"
"Fire doesn't burn water, my dear fellow," Doc replied grimly.
The bodies of the muties showed clear evidence that they had been tortured, but not in the fiendish way that Ryan and the others had witnessed in the rancheriaof the Apaches. This seemed to have been more in the nature of a prolonged and brutal beating.
There was a woman and two men, one much older than the other. As with the rest of the attackers, the three were severely deformed. The woman had at least five pendulous breasts, and her nose was a ragged hole above a gaping, slobbering mouth. The younger man was unbelievably skinny, his ribs sticking through pale bruised flesh. He was clearly a deaf-mute, the sides of his shaved skull not showing a trace of ears. The oldest of the trio had only one eye, and his legs were unnaturally short for his body.
As well as bearing the marks of fists, boots and whips, each captive was wounded. The woman limped, and could stand only because a warrior supported her on each side. The deep cut from a sword had severed a hamstring. The old man had a gunshot in his right shoulder, and the third mutie had two deep stab marks under his ribs.
The people of the ville moved in behind the prisoners, walking in relative silence toward the low bluff. As they drew near it, Ryan caught the smell of lamp oil. And then he guessed what the wicker men were for and why the ropes were sodden with water.
"Fireblast," he whispered.
The wisewoman was there, carrying a small brass bowl with holes drilled into it in an ornate pattern. It held some scented herbs that were smoldering and giving off a light blue smoke. The setting sun flooded her malevolent little face as she capered around the tethered prisoners.
"Freya take thee and may thy passing be slow and hard," she croaked.
"Night comes fast," Egil said to the karl. "We must dispatch them."
"Aye." Thoraldson made a gesture with his right hand for the prisoners to be taken the last few yards to the three wicker men.
Then both Jak and J. B. Dix realized what was going down.
"Why not slit throats?" the albino boy asked.
"Because this makes a finer sight for everyone, Jak," J.B. replied.
Once they caught the sickly taint of the oil that drenched the three enormous straw figures, the muties also realized their fate and began to struggle. They were subdued with such speed and efficiency that Ryan wondered to himself how often this ritual had been performed in Markland.
Each wicker man stood about twelve feet high and was only a crude representation of a human being. The stout legs and the main trunk were made from thick twigs and slender branches, which formed a tight cage for the prisoner.
The bound muties were shoved into the wicker bodies, and more branches were hastily tied and woven into place to prevent their escape.
"We have to watch this through?" J.B. whispered to Ryan.
"Yeah. Don't like it any more'n you, but I guess we stay till it's done." He looked to the west. "Sun's down, so it won't be long."
"Figure more of the muties'll be back? These could have been a recce outfit."
"Depends on the size of their ville. They were a triple-poor lot. Poor armed. If we set our minds to it, I guess we could clear out the nest for these people."
The Armorer nodded. "Want to?"
Ryan glanced sideways at him, ignoring the old woman, who was now kneeling before the three wicker men and droning an incantation. "Guess not. You?" J.B. shook his head. Ryan sighed. "Stay down. Wait and watch. Try and get word with Krysty and Mildred tomorrow."
He was interrupted by Jak's exclamation of disgust. "Fucking triple-hard. Kill 'em, yeah. But kill them fast."
Three iron-collared women had been assigned the task of lighting the wicker men. At the karl's signal they touched their smoking torches to the lowest branches. The oil caught quickly, and yellow flames licked eagerly at the dry grass that covered the framework.
The screams began immediately.
The oil was crudely processed and gave off vast quantities of choking smoke, which quickly handed a kind of mercy to the condemned muties. There was little wind, and the column of boiling darkness rose straight into the evening air, like an accusing finger.
The wicker men were transfigured into giant men of fire.
Most of the Vikings watched the hideous passing of their captives with a stoic silence, the flames staining their cheeks a bloody scarlet. Within a bare minute the piercing screams had ceased.
"Suffocated," Doc pronounced. "The best that one could hope for the poor wretches. Murderous they might have been, but that is a damnably wicked passing."
Jorund realized that the ritual of revenge was too quickly done, and he lifted his sword, shouting to his people. "So they perish, and their soured spirits shall tread the path of tears for our brother, Bjarni, and for the other warriors. Let us now go to them!"
Ryan trailed along with the Norsemen, hoping to be able to get close to Krysty for a word, to sound her out about making a run from the archaic ville within the next forty-eight hours. But the press of moving men stopped them.
The long ship was pushed out into the still waters of the lake, with Bjarni and his companions laid out on its deck. Ryan saw for the first time that the corpses of three of the young women — thralls — were also lying on the doomed vessel.
Erik Stonebiter was next to him, watching the ceremony. "The girls? How did they get chilled?" Ryan asked.
"Strangled by three women, free-born, to accompany their masters on the road to Asgard."
Ryan didn't say anything. One of the first lessons he'd learned in life was that there was a time for speech and a time for silence. Knowing the difference was real important.
The warriors chanted a paean of death to the lost men, as the ship floated away, its sail furled on the high mast, the dragon's head on the bow nodding at the wavelets. Ryan couldn't catch many of the words, but it sounded like it was all about honor, valor and brotherhood.
He caught the odor of lamp oil again. At first he thought it was still filling his nostrils from the fiery slaughter of the muties, but he soon realized that the woodwork of the long ship was also soaked with it.
Jorund threw the first flaming torch. The fire caught immediately, tongues of smoky red and orange dancing along the deck and creeping up the mast, lapping their way toward the snarl-toothed figurehead.
The next senior warrior threw his torch, followed by Egil Skallagson and Sigurd Harefoot, then all the others. The lights whirled through the dusk, then flames exploded in roaring streaks. In less than a minute, the ship was ablaze from end to end, the smoke beginning to obscure the small group of corpses.
"It's the way for a warrior to leave this life for the next," Erik said with an almost religious awe.
"What's the next life like?" J.B. asked interestedly.
"You carouse with a multitude of available women," the young man replied.
J.B. turned to Ryan and lowered his voice. "Sounds like living forever in a frontier pesthole gaudy house."
"Yeah. Look. Boat's near burned down to the water already."
"With the evil offered through the wicker men, there will be no need of further gifts," Erik told them.
"Gifts?" Doc asked. "What kind of gifts, young fellow?"
The Viking turned to face him, his mouth working uncertainly. "Gifts? I had not meant that. It is that our warriors need company on their sky-road, once taken and never retraced. The sluts and evil ones are enough, and they will keep off more dark days."
There was a roar of noise from the throng of watching Norsemen. Fire hissed as the lake swallowed the flaming remains of the long ship. The fierce dragon's head was the last part to be consumed and disappear beneath the water.
The sun had gone, the last sliver of scarlet vanishing over the hills. Darkness had come to the ville of Markland.
Ryan led the other friends back to their hut, feeling tired from the fight, the killing and the brutality of the executions. And he still hadn't been able to snatch a private moment with Krysty.
The night would call for a lot of thinking and talking with the others.
And the development of some kind of plan.