The Dorset and Saqqaq came under cover of fog.
They moved like ghosts between the trees, their stone-tipped spears glinting faintly in the gray light, their skin daubed in war paint the color of ash and blood.
From the ridgeline, they descended toward the Vinlander village nestled by the river; huts of bark and thatch, faint trails of cooking smoke rising in lazy curls.
The fields beyond were bare. The longhouse door hung open.
Still, they crept forward.
The Dorset scout, short, lean, his braided hair knotted with bone adornments, raised a fist. The line halted. There were no signs of sentries. No barking dogs. No horns.
But they had seen this before. Villages abandoned. Terrified. Too easy.
They stepped forward again.
And the earth gave way.
A scream, short, sharp, then choked, as the lead warrior plunged into the ground, impaled on sharpened stakes hidden beneath branches and moss.
Blood sprayed upward. The raiders froze.
Then the arrows came.
Not the crude fire-hardened shafts they knew, but properly fletched with eagle feathers and tipped with steel, whistling with bone whistles carved into their shafts, a howling sound as they fell. Dozens of them.
The Dorset scattered, dragging the wounded free, but another pit opened. Two more fell; legs shattered, throats pierced.
"Fall back!" one shouted in his tongue.
From the thicket north of the treeline, Vetrúlfr and his wolf-cohort broke into the open, charging with raised swords, axes and iron-rimmed shields.
Their helms gleamed dully in the light;eyes shadowed, breath curling in the morning chill like the snarl of beasts.
They didn’t chase the Dorset.
Back through the narrow pass near the ridge; where Nokomis and her scouts waited above with their bows drawn. The trap was complete.
And now, the kill zone.
The Dorset turned to climb, to scatter and vanish into the brush, but the shieldwalls were already there, curved in a crescent, iron shields locking together like the teeth of a steel bear trap.
Vetrúlfr strode forward at the center. In his hands was a great Dane axe, its shaft carved from whalebone, its head forged of Damascus steel, skeletonized, and engraved with golden runes.
Magic staves, blessings of the gods. Omens for the slain.
A Valknut was seared into the top of the finely carved and polished bone shaft. Burnt with a brand. On both sides, the symbol of the slain was marked.
The wavy pattern of the unique steel, once known as a secret only to the far east, now forged anew in Northern hearths glistened under the moonlight as the man raised the two handed shaft into the air and collapsed the weight of its steel head into the dome of a Dorset raider.
His skull split in twain, and the blade cleaved even further. Vetrúlfr ’s smirk was as vicious as a cruel wolf’s. Kicking the fresh corpse aside as its blood sprayed into the Vinland permafrost.
The wolves descended.
Axes hacked. Swords thrust through flesh, bone, and sinew. The Dorset tried to push back, but their stone weapons shattered against hard-boiled leather lamellar, the iron mail, and the splint greaves.
Blood painted the pines. One chieftain tried to rally; a hulking man with a walrus-tusk charm around his neck.
But Vetrúlfr met him in single combat. He met the Dorset war club with his splinted vambrace before backhanding the warrior to the ground with a single slap.
He then hefted his ace in the air and drove it straight through the man’s torso. Freeing the man’s soul within, and the river of blood which accompanied its release.
Silence returned quickly.
Birds circled. The dead steamed.
Vetrúlfr stood over the last body, his boots soaked red. Behind him, his men pulled their wounded back and began stacking enemy corpses in a cairn of warning.
"They’ll learn now," she said softly.
Vetrúlfr didn’t turn.
"No," he said. "They’ll flee."
He looked westward, where the forests thickened, and the land of Vinland reached toward the horizon.
"And we will follow. This land.... I want to see just how far west it goes...."
Nokomis frowned upon hearing this, and felt she would not be doing her due diligence if she did not interrogate the man.
"My people have never seen its end. You would be the first to do so... And what? Will you conquer all that stands in your way?"
Vetrúlfr wiped the bloodied axe on to the fur coat of the slain chieftain he had damn near chopped in half. And knelt on the ground, ripping a trophy from the man’s neck. A bone charm of some kind.
He stashed it away in his pocket before turning back to Nokomis, and staring her fiercely in the eye. Then a brief chuckle, and the heaving of his axe onto his shoulder.
"If the land is as vast and great as you claim, then why are there no kingdoms to speak of? If all that exists are tribes and nomads like the ones I have slain here, then who will stop me?"
Nokomis could not disagree with Vetrúlfr’s words. When she first arrived in Europe, accompanying Brynhildr on her journey over the course of the last decade, she had been stunned by what she had seen there.
Now returning to her home after living across the great sea, she had understood something. If Vetrúlfr did not claim this land for himself, then another would come.
Sooner or later a greater force would arrive, and her people. They could not withstand the storm that would. It was inevitable.
Thus, she could only sigh and shake her head. While storming off in silence. This only caused Vetrúlfr to smirk as rallied his men to scavenge anything of worth before preparing to ambush the next Dorset raiding party that was on their list.
The conquest of Vinland had not yet truly begun. And while the Christian world braced for Pagan vengeance, they had instead set their eyes on a vast and uncivilized land worth forging their empire upon.
One that had only existed as a rumor. So far as Rome was concerned, it was no more valid than Hyperborea or Agartha.