He rode another dozen leagues along the Great Processional Road as it rose above the rolling, well-tilled land. At last he spotted that which his heart desired; crowding like a swarm of fat Magyars out of the grasslands, there they were! They sat mounted on their iron-horses in serried ranks! He slowed to permit their passage around him. Even as they roared past him and he began to ponder the runes upon their vest-backs—for the Young Tribes used a complex set of phonetic symbols—he felt saliva splash his sinewy arms and shoulders as each of the bold warriors, whose indigo and leather vests proclaimed them Pagan clansmen, spit upon him.

How fortunate that you came attired as an enemy of theirs’! Now this battle will make for a worthy song!

He calmly fell into their wake, dripping spittle from his scarred and matchless arms, and observing their ranks. There was a tall chieftain not yet in middle years. On the back of his steed rode a long-legged, hard-faced vixen of a wench. Behind him rode a long, lean killer with a small, likely, red-haired wench.

Only one other warrior, a short muscular man with leather pants and heavy boots, bore a woman; a rare young beauty with high plum-breasts and auburn-streaked amber hair with a purple wyrme painted upon her shoulder. This woman was neither cruel nor wanton like the others. She had the look of fear in her eyes, and regarded him with sorrow; for his being spit upon no less than for her being carried off into slavery.

So their principal men keep wives, and they have but one fresh slave-girl to be shared amongst the rest. This should be a nice set-piece affair with some still buckling up their pants at the first charge.

He slowed as he watched the rest pass him by, counting eighteen warriors including the chief. He admired the form of the slave-girl with the purple wyrme painted upon her arm.

Perhaps she was taken from a noble house—her body-art suggests royalty—perhaps of a seafaring lineage. Perhaps hers was a merchant family of some standing? She is beautiful and wears colorfully the body art that the Drunken Bride’s dark-skinned attendants had inked into their skin. She shall make a fitting battle-prize—the first to stock my train of concubines.

He followed at a distance, tracking them easily with his keen hearing. At last, at nearly noon—his favored hour for battle, when the weak become slack from thirst—the Pagan clansmen rallied in a high vale above a farmstead, on the ridge overlooking a secondary track. He pulled up slowly and eased his iron-horse up over the ridge to look down upon the wooded vale cleft by a babbling brook and dotted with haystacks and cords of firewood—a scene of idyllic beauty such as he had often sullied with his battle-ire in ages past.

He was beginning to swell with pride as he saw them circle their iron-horses about a ceremonial fire that had already been stoked by two advance men and a fourth—pleasingly fat—wench. Ale kegs were about—packed in ice as if for some scented sultan of the Middle Sea. Thinking these belligerent men, who had so righteously spat upon a rival, to be his worshippers, he waited like a proud father for them to begin their sword dancing and axe-throwing and wrestling. Regrettably such was not to be.

He realized his betrayal by the Pagan warriors when the slave-girl was stripped and tied between two iron-horses to be ravished by the lot. That this was her fate was just under Heaven, as she had been taken, was now owned, and would be used as her masters saw fit. But that this would be done before manly pursuits and games of war and chance and strength was an affront to War! His field of vision constricted like that of an eagle diving for its prey as the realization that his memory had been forsaken began to sink into his ages-old mind.

The slave-girl—no longer even an object of interest to Yule, as she was merely a sacrifice to his debauched sister—was being greased up by the chief’s wench while the chief pulled down his pants to begin the sacrament. However, there would be a different sacrifice on this day. All Yule’s planning for a set-piece battle evaporated in a tidal roar of rage as he unsheathed his battle-axe, coaxed his steed into action with the butt of the axe-haft on the throttle, and roared his battle-fury as he stood on the stirrups of this End-time Horse and bore down on his stunned foes as they turned and regarded him like women caught cleaning their clefts by a stream at dawn under the rising sun of the Raider Moon.

He did not know the words to the battle hymn he sung, as it was unthinkably ancient, but he sung it sure and loud as he closed in with his axe raised on high.

One of the twenty belching swine was gathering up his pants as he turned back along the track after relieving himself in the brook. The fat straggler turned and gawked wild-eyed as Yule drove by him and swung his axe, sending the bearded, long-haired head flying high into the air.

The enemy ahead began girding for battle, picking up trimmed branches not yet fed to the fire and drawing knives and a few handguns. Oddly enough, the tall wench that belonged to the chieftain produced a fine handgun and thundered away at him.

As he neared their battle ranks a slug burst the front wheel of his iron-horse and he was thrown head first into the air. He had been bred and raised for war and naturally tucked his knees and completed this summersault by landing on his feet, axe-in-hand and drawing the goatherd chieftain’s fine weapon with his left. As a slug tore along the length of his left arm and exited his tricep near the shoulder, he leveled the goatherd chief’s weapon and squeezed the trigger. The top of the tall, handsome woman’s head flew from her face to splatter her husband’s brow even as he was readying a handgun for action.

Take that sister! Take my feast day in the name of those sniveling Christians’ Hanged God will you!

Yule then sunk a slug into the belly of the chieftain even as he advanced at a steady walk. He then sent a slug into the face of the tall first warrior who stood next to his red-haired wench. Then there fell a bald old warrior whose small handgun was barking away like a rat terrier. He then cut down a fleeing coward with a slug through the hips and exploded the head of the whimpering swine next to him. He would only entertain worthy foes as axe-food!

The fleeing and the firing foes had been cut down with the last shot of the goatherd chief’s fine weapon. He cast this thing aside and drew the Death’s Head Chief’s handgun and shot down a skinny youth brandishing a small sword. He was now walking into the midst as they gave way before the fire and the sacrificial wench and began forming a battle-crescent. The largest and eldest warriors were making fierce battle cries and swearing by his sister as they brandished their clubs and knives.

Now the advance woman attempted to pry the handgun from the fingers of the slain chief’s wench. Yule put a slug through each of her lungs from behind and she fell over the slain woman.

A young man with a chain dropped it and made to flee and Yule shot off both of his heels so that he fell in agony screaming.

The small red-haired wench was on her knees crying and biting her knuckles before the front rank, so he decided to build a battle-shrine around her as she cried tears for her tall, slain husband.

Somehow he knew that he had six slugs left so he put one each into the legs of the three men nearest the crying wench and then cast the handgun aside with a mighty battle-cry, “Sister, I scatter your worshippers like wheat-chaff on an autumn wind!”

The remaining warriors closed fearlessly now that he was armed with only his axe. But Yule had been renown for the use of other war tools in days of yore. He switched the axe to his left and drew the mason’s hammer, which he threw with such force into the face of the largest young warrior that the head penetrated the face, with the handle protruding as the man fell dead back to Auntie Earth. He then switched his axe to the right as he hefted the battle lamp in his left hand for parrying.

Now the battle took on a tantric quality that entranced him as he danced mindlessly among them, loping off arms, cleaving skulls in twain and sheering off legs below the knees. Within seconds only a single huge fat warrior stood before him, the red-haired wench whimpering at Yule’s feet as he had spattered her with gore and heaped her dead men about her worshipfully kneeling and shivering form.

The huge warrior with bristling beard and greased pony tail presented a strange heavy weapon that appeared to belong in some wizard’s workshop and then pulled a cord. The thing then roared like a hundred draw-bridges falling loose and Yule understood.

This is a soul-eating weapon used to slay the very gods. You have been tricked in coming here. These lesser foes were but the bait set out by this giant in disguise. He cannot hide his size. And here you stand fool, shin-deep in gore, bowels, blood and piss with intestines entangling your ankles—luck-tethered sword-food snared by some giant!

The giant advanced with his soul-eating siege-engine to take Yule’s head from his shoulders and the God of War parried the grinding steel teeth with his lantern club as he struck skyward from the ground with the head of Wyrme-Master Phillip’s fire axe. As the teeth of the soul-eating sword ruined the club and bit towards Yule’s breast he let loose his war-cry as the head of the axe buried itself in the groin of the giant who lurched forward in shocked agony.

Yule side-stepped the still roaring soul-eater as it fell toward the weeping girl. He cared not for the girl, but did admire her loyalty to her slain warrior. So Yule employed his god-strength in saving her, sacrificing a muscle that tore in his upper torso as he heaved the giant skyward in an arc over the whimpering girl, to fall face-first and dying into the mass of maimed and dying behind her, where the soul-eating sword chewed through the guts of the youth with no heels to send him in indescribable pain to the Underdark.