Yule stood above a still heaving battle pile, the girl at its center bawling hysterically in a swamp of gore, and the three leg-shot warriors and a gutted one besides, all in their last hour. Yule used his fine axe to fashion stakes and hammered the ankles and wrists of the four maimed men into the now soaked earth, each beat of the hammering axe sung to by an agonized warrior.
He roared his victory oath, “See me Hanged God! See your fate should you step from behind the numberless ranks of your enchanters to face me in battle! Not to a sacred tree shall I stake you, but to All-drinking Auntie Earth!”
What followed was a sacral act with Yule acting the priest as he pinned their splitting limbs to Earth amid their chorus of groans. He dedicated their righteous suffering with a pious song as he hammered them to All-drinking Auntie Earth,
“Come Battle Crow,
Beat your wings of night.
Upon this fair axe-food,
Come and light.
Before we row…”
…The next line is?
Oh, it’s been ages now!
It ends in flight.
Yes, but food did not rhyme with Crow and row.
I’ve botched—and he’s dead now besides.
Where is my cultivated Brother when I need him? What am I to do?
Oh, that sounded quite good enough really. Repeat it on this skinny fellow.
…and on he sang as he staked out the next three.
He then tied the girl by her wrists and ankles to his downed foemen and stripped her naked. The swamp of battle gore was not deep enough for her to drown in so long as she faced him. If she turned her head away she would drown in the seeping essence of her clansmen.
Yule now lighted torches and staked them around the battle-pile. He then found a coward that he had shot through the hips early on and dragged him over to the foot of the pile and staked him out face-first with his head toward the quarter of the North Wind where Uncle Hoar resided on his gray cloudbank.
Yule now stripped naked before his God Mother, and slashed his chest with the great and still keen axe as his foes had failed to strike him with honorable weapons. He placed his helmet and battle-jacket over a cross that he erected above the girl’s head, on the other side of the piled bodies that constituted the headboard of their wedding bed.
He now turned to Heaven naked and unarmed and roared, “Sister I thus take from you. Mother, Uncle Soul-eater, Eldest Sister Sun, Uncle Hoar, All-drinking Auntie Earth, I thus give.”
He knelt tenderly over the sobbing wench, propped her wide hips up on the relatively whole corpse of the old man with the little barking hand-gun, and then mounted her, taking her again and again throughout the afternoon, for long enough for Sister Sun to stand at his bedside holding the hand of his fresh-fetched bride with her rays of gold.
At last, satiated and avenged, Yule rose and took up his axe. He saluted the now complaisant wench and turned toward the staked-out coward, still breathing the gasping breaths of those who most feared Mother’s fangs.
Yule stood astride the spread-eagle back of the man and raised his axe, “Mother, by this axe I rule!”
He bent with the delicate precision of a fish-monger and filleted the coward beneath his ribs on either side, trying hard to remember precisely how the giants had done this to Father’s enemies in olden times. Then, having carved the blood eagle, Yule set aside the axe and reached into the coward, beneath the ribs, and drew forth his lungs, which fluttered with one last breath, giving the effect of an eagle spreading its wings. As he held the wings fluttering with the man’s last ragged breath, he looked heavenward, “Father, I give this life to you in return for the giant bastard of yours I have slain this day. Be warned, Father, I am on the war-trail, a trail that leads ultimately to your ice-gated hall!”
Yule felt elated and pleased, finally at peace as he heard the tied-down wench behind him whimpering for his mercy. He turned and noticed that the rising tide of gore seeping from the still-draining carcasses around her was threatening to drown her. He bent and untied her gently, then cradled her in his arms and walked her over toward the fire to warm her. She held on thankfully, even patting his cheek as he laid her down to rest with her blood-soaked little head propped up on the boots of her chief, who had, by now, died of his belly-wound.
He patted her on the cheek, “Now now, wench. The battle is over. I have forgiven you the sins committed against me by your men and have planted your womb with child. You are the wife, and soon to be mother, of a god. Rest and I shall have the slave-girl bring you something to drink.”
A Well of Heroes
