RobbieRand
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"A Viking's Tale"
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Eric of Elwick
5'10", 195, muscular, fit, and strong
Brunette hair, long and straight to midback
Hazel-brown eyes
A multitude of scars
Autumn 898 AD:
Eric stood atop a hillock looking down upon the village of SortVand. At least, that was what it had been called when his people, the Danes, had lived here long ago. The town was now populated by the English, numbering perhaps 120, and they called it Blackwater. The two names, essentially translations of one another, had resulted from the murky highland swamps that surrounded the town's farm and grazing land on three sides, waters that drained to the Char Beck, then Dalton Beck, and further, reaching the Greatham Creek, the River Tees, and finally the North Sea, east by southeast of Durham, the throne city of the Kingdom of Northumberland. (Map)
SortVand had come to be known as Blackwater three generations ago after peace was found between the Vikings who had been raiding the coast and inland villages for almost a century and then-King of Northumberland, William the Wise. William had tired of conflict, as had many of his Viking foes. He invited any and every Danish Earl willing to speak of peace to Durham, and after a week of discussion and subsequent celebration, Northumberland and The Danelaw were no longer at war.
The village would have been a problem, though, as it was situated north of the border upon which William and the Dane Earls agreed. The Danes weren't going to simply give it up with no where else to go, so William gave them a new place further south and west to live, highlands with great pasture lands and clean rivers.
A new town would be built there, the labor paid for by silver given from William's treasury, and that town would come to be known as Elwick ... Eric's birthplace and birthright.
William had only demanded two conditions of the Danes for peace.
The first had been that they found peace with one another as well as with Northumberland. The Vikings had for generations been killing almost as many fellow pagans as they had been Christians. William would normally have been fine with Danes killing Danes: after all, the only good Viking was a dead Viking, and if the forces of Northumberland were no longer going to be killing Danes, their own slaughter of one another was the next best thing.
But William was a pragmatist. The English Royals and Nobles tended to rise to greater power slowly over the decades, through political marriages and the birth of mutually claimed heirs; while the Danes tended to take the rushed approached, eliminating their royal or noble opposition by the use of the sword and forcing the conquered citizenry to become part of their own.
If William could prevent war amongst the Danes, he could possibly prevent or at least delay the consolidation of power in The Danelaw by one Viking Earl, a leader who would become King of The Danelaw and, undoubtedly, then turn his might against Northumberland.
The second condition William had placed on the Danes was that they find a peace with the English Kings of Mercia, Wessex, and their Dependencies. William had abandoned his fellow Christian Kings by finding his own peace with the Danes. The English Kingdoms to the south had felt slightly by this. Some who might have been willing to find peace with the Danes refused to do so simply on principal, simply to deny William that second part of his peace with the heathens.
But the roadblocks to peace with the west and south were far more numerous than just the lasting hatred between Christian and Pagan. Some of these western and southern English Kingdoms had been involved in conflicts against one another that were decades, even generations old; some predated the arrival of the first Vikings in the late 8th century. To find peace with the Danes meant finding peace with one another, and the latter in many cases was found to be more difficult than the former.
Because of this, the fighting between the Earls of The Danelaw and the Kings of English Mercia, Wessex, and the Dependencies of the latter persisted for another generation before a relative peace was found. And this peace could have persisted for generations, even centuries, if it hadn't been for the murderous betrayal of an Englishman.
William the Wise was on his deathbed and about to hand control off to his long ago orphaned grandson when William's brother -- Horace, the Lord of Bamburgh --murdered a dozen men and women from his sibling's bloodline in an attempt to seize the throne of Northumberland.
Civil war erupted. Half of the Kingdom's Lords threw their support behind the only living member of William's direct bloodline, his then-6 year old great-granddaughter, Victoria, who was hidden away and in the care of William's most trusted Lords and Swordsmen. The other half supported Lord Horace, though many did so not because they felt him the rightful ruler of Northumberland -- after all, he had killed the king and most of his family -- but instead because they felt that a grown man with military experience was more likely to protect the Kingdom from the Danes than was a little girl who still played with dolls.
Northumberland's civil war deepened when the Earls of The Danelaw joined the fight. Many had had political, economic, and military associations with the English Lords of Northumberland, and they began taking sides and -- of course -- collecting silver and conquered lands in exchange for their service.
This, of course, began to pit Viking against Viking as their alliances with the battling Northern English put them to battle with one another.
Then the English Kingdoms to the west and south got involved. Most had not achieved full peace with the Danes, and some had continued to war with them outright. The war in the north was seen as an opportunity to push the Danes east away from the borders with Mercia or Wessex; and some English Kings and Lords went farther, even invading The Danelaw with the intention of expanding their own Kingdoms closer to or even all the way to the North Sea.
And last but not least, the English Kingdoms of the south and east that had never fully arrived at peace between themselves raised sword and spear against one another as well.
Within a year of William's death, the whole of the border between The Danelaw and the English Kingdoms was being reddened with blood, as were borders between English Kingdoms that had for so long yearned to join together as one and finally push the Danes out of England. English and Danes fought one another; English and English did the same; as did Danes against Danes. Across the whole of England villages, towns, and cities were raided and burned.
Eric was but 16 when this mayhem erupted. Despite having been raised to be a proper Viking warrior -- meaning with a sword and shield in his hands -- he had never known outright war and had only used his blades to protect himself, his family, and his village from the most common of criminals.
For the next six years, though, Eric's home of Elwick -- a walled town of 500 located near the frontiers of Northumberland and Strathclyde -- was on constant guard from enemies coming at them from every direction. Eric joined a patrol for a time, then -- after proving his worth in battle -- became leader of one. By the age of 22, he'd killed more than two dozen men, either in raids upon enemy forces or in the defense of the town during raids upon it.
Eric's father, Ulfred, yearned for peace, amongst the warring Danes and, in the long run, with the English to the north and south of Elwick. He was making inroads with his neighboring Dane Earls, but their loyalties were split between Ulfred and the Sven, the Earl of Lindenshire. A brutal Dane envious of Ulfred's power and influence, Sven was also worried that Ulfred's relationship with the House of William the Wise positioned Ulfred as a potential King of The Danelaw should William's house once again take and hold control of Northumberland.
Fearful of fighting for years against Danes and English, only to then become a servant to a King Ulfred, Sven gathered his allies and sent a massive force down upon the sleeping town of Elwick under the dark of the New Moon. Caught off guard and overwhelmed by the betrayal, Elwick was easily overrun. The town's structures were set ablaze, the majority of its warriors killed, and most of its women and children enslaved.
Eric, then 23, was injured early in the fight and withdrawn by other survivors to the safety of the nearby woods. He would spend the next seven months recuperating from his injuries while those who now supported him gathered survivors and supporters, arms and wealth, with the goal of seeking their revenge against Sven and, ultimately, returning Eric to Elwick as its rightful Earl.
And now, finally, it was time to seek revenge for the betrayal of Elwick. Sven's home town of Lindenshire was too far away and too well defended for Eric's force to attack. And after his betrayal against the otherwise well respected Ulfred, Sven had created a significant number of enemies who -- while not as powerful as he -- would have liked to see him killed and his army vanquished. For this reason, Sven kept himself surrounded by a loyal dedicated bodyguard and kept his town of Lindenshire on guard at all times.
If Eric was to seek any level of revenge against Sven, it was going to have to begin with smaller targets. And one of those targets was in the valley below Eric: SortVand. The English lord who now called his town Blackwater had provided troops to Sven in the latter's attack on Elwick; and over the last several months he had continued to work closely with the Dane to eliminate forces who opposed them.
If Eric couldn't get to Sven directly by attacking Lindenshire, he'd get to him by undermining his base of support, whether it be Dane or English, Pagan or Christian.
"There!"
The man who had been standing a bit left and back of Eric stepped forward now and pointed an outstretched hand down toward the village. A woman hanging laundry on a line did so with a specific arrangement of colors and movements such as to send a message to the men watching from the hillock.
"The warriors have left," Garan interpreted the signal from the spy. She was Garan's woman but had lived in SortVand for almost three moons, gathering information on the traitors. Garan continued interpreting the signals from the woman he hoped to soon have wrapping her legs around his waist, "Forty men, left to the north. Twenty remain."
Garan stepped closer to Eric, his face filled with excitement. "My lord...?"
"Signal the attack," Eric said softly, his heart beginning to beat faster. He looked to his only true surviving childhood friend and smiled. "No mercy."
"No mercy," Garan repeated with a toothy smile before rushing off to spread the word.
Erik mounted his horse as, behind and to his right, a fiery arrow lifted high and fast into the sky. A moment later, nearly a mile away to the east, a second burning missile rose; a moment later, another from the west.
Eric raised his sword into the air over his head, rose as high as he could in his stirrups, and called out, "No mercy!"
The attack was brutal ... and short. With the majority of Blackwater's warriors absent, there simply hadn't been enough men of arms to protect the wall-less village, and within minutes Eric's men were off their horses and making their way between the not-yet-dead to make them so. The survivors -- almost exclusively women and children -- were gathered in the center of the village and forced to their knees in the dirt.
"I am Eric, Earl of Elwick!" he called out over the 40 or so survivors. He made clear to them the reason for their punishment with a recap of their Lord's troop support of Earl Sven of Lindenshire, then told them quite honestly, "You belong to me now, you are no longer free persons, and you will do as I command ... or die"
As if to ensure them that his threat was real, Eric nodded to Garan. The warrior put the end of his blade to the back of a village's protectors who'd been captured with only minor injuries. With a fierce shove, the blade fully penetrated the man's body and emerged from his chest in full view of the assembled hostages. The man fell to his knees and teetered ready to fall. But before he did, Garan jerked the sword loose, swung it back, and swung it forward again, lopping the man's head off. It rolled through the dirt toward the gathered women and children, who responded in screams and cries.
"Lash them!" he commanded the men surrounding the prisoners. To others, he ordered, "Send out scouts to watch for the village's warriors. They will return once they see the smoke rising from their homes."
In less than an hour, Eric and his men were leading their bound slaves away toward the coast as SortVand burned in fury behind them. Regardless of where the village's warriors were raiding, they would undoubtedly see the pillar of black smoke soon enough and would return in haste.
But they would find nothing waiting for them but death and destruction. And the fast moving trek of warriors and prisoners would pass through the wetlands, then across a shallow stream, and finally to awaiting boats that would take them to and down the coast to the small wooded island Eric now unfortunately called home. By the time SortVand's warriors reached the beach, there would be nothing but sand and the decapitated head on a stick there to reassure them that their women and children were gone.
As they made their way through the forest, Eric took notice of a particular female hostage. She was young, perhaps late teens or early twenties; and despite now being filthy with mud caused by a rain that had begun pelting the trail beneath them, he could see that she had a beauty to her.
"Who is she?" he asked down to one of the only male survivors, a man who had shown great concern over the others as the trek continued. The man identified the young woman as the daughter of the Lord of SortVand, now dead back at the village. "She has brothers...? Men who will attempt to avenge her capture and enslavement...? ...to avenge their father's death?"
"No, m'lord," the man said, explaining that she was the Lord's only still living child. He added, "She is now the Lady of Blackwater, m'lord."
Eric slowed his horse until he was riding beside the woman. He looked down upon her for a long moment, ensuring that she understood that she had his attention, whether desired or not. After a moment, he looked for Garan, and nodded him forward. After his Lord gestured his attention to the woman, Garan dismounted, cut the woman's binding free from the long rope connecting the others, and swept the woman easily up into his powerful arms. Eric shifted back a bit on his horse and Garan manhandled the woman upward to sit before Eric.
Eric wrapped one arm tightly around the woman's waist, his hand barely below the round of a young breast. She felt good against him, and Eric wondered how much better she was going to feel against him without all this studded leather armor between them.
"I am Eric," he said once he'd made it obvious that she had no choice but to get comfortable with her legs parted about his horse.
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