A mile from the besetting triad of coarse roughriders a congregation of enticing elk circumspectly drank water from a source by which the sheep herder had died. With large antlers poised, they listened to sound of footsteps from approaching men and horses. A forceful human figure poised in a tree over the small herd's backs. As a buck dropped his head for refreshment, the hidden individual plummeted from his perch among lofty branches.
A imperceptive, grayish brown, bull dropped with a defiant bellow. Landregal Waterhunter, the beast's muscular assailant, lanced a single penetrating incision across the unsuspecting animal's throat with a shiv from his belt. In an instant the muddled quadruped lay disabled on the ground. Vigorously, its predator worked to remove an epidermis covering consumable portions of the disposed elk's carcass. Quickly he removed the heart and liver, then intestines from the devitalized animal.
As the hunter worked intently, to separate meaty morsels from his inert kill into transportable portions, the three horsemen approached silently. The black tracker quietly stopped the other two members of the squad. The brutal Scandinavian motioned calmly for his Mongol compatriot to ride around one side of the trees, by which the hunter had hidden, to cover his escape.
"See that he does not flee into thick forest where we will be clumsy to follow on horseback," cautioned the bearded barbarian. Relentlessly, the Viking loosened his broadsword. As he made himself visible, the light skinned Caucasian, Forkbeard, gave verbal warning to the hunter from Aboregale. "Stay where you are!" The Scandinavian warned with emphatic insistence.
The forceful hunter turned. He thought to run then noticed the Mongol horseman, Chin Le Tang, not a hundred paces from where he stood. The huntsman lay down the skinning knife. He stood in cautious acknowledgment to the bearded Scandinavian's order. It was rare to find citizens of Aboregale in the healthy physical condition this man was in. Most of the population fit for fighting were dead or hiding in woods, close to starvation. "Have you a steed," asked the brutish archer?
"Not to relinquish to anything like your quarrelsome league," returned the stalwart hunter defiantly. He faced his tormentors with unrestrained insouciance to the Norseman's questioning.
Forkbeard, the barbarian, gave an order to Chin Le, the alert Mongol, who covered the man's escape. "Throw him your battle ax," he instructed. The Mongolian untethered his sharp, double sided weapon and threw it on the ground in front of the hunter. The sturdy elk stalker, Landregal, eyed the weapon with hopeful presumption. The insufferable Viking assailant set aside his bow. He approached menacingly with his broadsword and delivered a swift homicidal blow to the hapless vagrant's forefront.
In a flickering of an eye, Landregal picked up the Mongol's ax. The outcast hunter blocked the barbarian's death-dealing assault with proselytizing retribution and initiated an attack. The two men engaged in lethal combat. The wary black tracker and the intrepid Mongolian horseman excitedly closed in on their cruel-hearted leader as he tested the trapped inhabitant's propensity for battle.
Clash of cold metal on metal stung the morning air. Iron against iron rang out in a turbulent crashing discharge. In mortal conflict, the men rolled balefully on the wet muddy ground. Though the armored barbarian, Forkbeard, rose from battle victorious, the elk tracker, Landregal, put up creditable resistance to the attack. With a foot on the huntsman's neck, the Viking archer pointed his broadsword at the foe's vulnerable chest.
"You will show us your horses and pay tribute to Lord Volki," he demanded. Reluctantly, the defeated hunter leads the repulsive threesome to a haggard pair of gaunt old nags. The two malnourished horses had become tied to a protuberance of willow, some distance from the narrow stream. "Now we have a slave who will cook and carry our food for us," bragged Forkbeard, the adventuresome seafarer from Trome, to his two partners. "Secure this man's kill and see that he has no weapons. We will take him with us."
"I have hearkened to rumors of a torchbearer among these scum," mentioned the unflinching Viking to the watchful Mongolian. The apprehended game stalker, Landregal Waterhunter, lamentably untied his depleted horses and leads them to the elk's carcass. Utanba, the stalwart Negro animal tracker, who assessed the hunter's outgoing bravery, listened to his proteges with precise concentration but understood only limited portions of the Scandinavian's speech.
The Chinese soldier of fortune was courageously conscientious in adhering to the barbaric archer's dialogue. More so than the reconnoitering black man, he was well versed in the Caucasian's language. "There is hearsay of a leader among the mire of men remaining in the destitution of Aboregale," continued the bearded bowman. "He lives among those who still hunt the reindeer and elk. He endeavors to rejoin the despondent slag of Aboregale, left by the temper of our armies in Trome, into a cohesive contention against the South. It would make a fine trophy to capture this ne'er-do-well and take him back to Lord Volki as a slave."
Landregal Waterhunter, the men's disinclined servitor, helped attend to the quarry, affixing its esculent segments, with a leather girth, to one of the dispirited steeds. As the assemblage continued into forbidding woodland, their edgy mounts emitted a long, high-pitched cry. Neighing of horses moved with an invigoratingly zestful current of air through the ominous and nearby foliage. The men filed along an obscure game trail in an apprehensive pursuit of their Viking leader.
At night they stopped amid the rocky crags of a mountain. The captive hunter prepared a momentous portion of the elk for his liege, the authoritative Norseman. The Scandinavian, Saoel Forkbeard, ate conservatively and questioned his slave, the thwarted elk stalker.
"Tell me what you know of the man called Thorvald," insisted the Viking. "Little is known," replied the hunter submissively. "His existence is only legend. People of Aboregale grasp to the fables of a revenging redeemer amid a outlawed band of men who escaped to the North Sea. Citizens say when the armies of Trome laid final siege to Aboregale, Thorvald broke away from defenders committed to the emperor's protection and escaped into the Ocean. His alliance was one consolidated by the emperor, Nicholas Torymorton, with forces from Glassel, another realm. Once laid in his crypt, the emperor's symbol of authority, a staff bearing a magician's oracle became carried away by his daughter. His staff, it had become said, was a giver of life. Thorvald's forces came to our country in long ships. It became rumored the daughter of Emperor Torymorton, Liana, left Aboregale with Thorvald when he escaped to the North. Thorvald now holds Liana and the emperor's esoteric oracle, in route to his home across the North Sea. Legend says she will return with the Emperor Torymorton's staff to rule the people of Aboregale."
"That is peasant babble," maintained the Nordic liegeman. "Trome will rule Aboregale until the overthrown Emperor Torymorton's bones have turned to dust. Who is this magician who commands the emperor's oracle?"
"Most of the court knew magic," confessed Landregal. "All of the court died with the emperor. An impression reflector in his prophetic standard, activated by the rod's possessor, resounded thoughts of the ruler's nemesis and warned him of peril. The pentacle of the staff projected a luminary, prophetical, sphere. It predicted the future and viewed distant events that threatened its owner."
With his final statements the mercenary leader, Forkbeard, transiently ignored the defenseless hunter and stood to speak with the Mongolian horseman, Chin Le Tang. "Watch our slave," he advised. "Trade shifts with Utanba, the tracker, and wake me at first light." The hardy Viking fell into a perceptive half slumber. Even while he drowsed, he cast menacing glances at his compatriots as they attended the slave and horses.
Invoking supernatural events: sorcery, magic, necromancy and alchemy held important significance with leaders in Aboregale, in days of its resplendence. Each court became assigned a sorcerer. The trenchant Scandinavian, Saoel Forkbeard, felt an inducing summons from the pentacle of Emperor Nicholas Torymorton as he lay close to sleep, in early morning's twilight. Wizardry lured magnetized energy from his slumbering soul. He fought the sensation. Only in sleep did its spell intertwine with the Nordic adventurer's undefended deliberation. He apprehended his own observance from a sequestered position far away. In sleep, the Viking perceived a distinct emanation from sedentary examination of the fascinating spheroid. Imploring magic dispatched from connecting vertices in the pentacle of the emperor's staff, faraway, attracted conception from the indolent mariner as he restlessly slumbered on the ground before daybreak.
In the North Sea on a turbulent ocean the men of Thorvald Barbidal and Princess Liana Torymorton fought a callous wind. It heaved to their backs in unbridled gusts that emphatically filled the sails of their long ship, threatening and tugging at its stunted mast. Petulant sailors rested at their oars while Thorvald expertly guided his ship through glistening whitecap waves that tossed the vessel about like a detached cork in a churning bucket. At the boat's bow a nimble, weather-beaten, man sat in retrograded thought. The party's unhappy imperilment by wind, atmospheric conditions and darkness secluded an unresponsive sorcerer, proprietor to Emperor Nicholas Torymorton's symbol of authority. He glowered at profusion of the deep as it pitched the humble craft, imprudently slapping aside water with each headlong movement. Clutched tautly in his lithesome hand was the emperor of Aboregale's prescient staff. Its prophetical sphere projected forewarning. To the holders of the scepter become endowed life giving power, that through knowledge contained in a book on occult wisdom. The emperor's magic cane gave health to the sick. It could create living beings from inanimate objects.
Only three men, familiar with the powers of wizardry, were capable of propagating livestock and good crops associated with the emperor's magic scepter. The walking stick, a mechanism used to channel Freyr's life giving energy, effected healing on fallen warriors; in suitable hands, it could return men from the dead. When controlled by one of three men, Emperor Torymorton's staff evoked a persisting animation and health into those suffering from physical illness. All things originated from the sun's radiation, a seemingly limitless source of energy, became effected by Freyr, one of Odin's many offspring, and magic in the pentacle of Nicholas Torymorton's staff.
One of the toil worn oarsman communicated with steadfast concern to an associate rower about the towering waves that threatened to swamp their hapless craft. "We made our crossing from Glassel to Aboregale in the setting of four suns. We have been at sea for eight days. I fear Thorvald has become lost. The squadrons of ships that followed us from Aboregale have vanished. There is no moon to guide us and the sun hides behind the clouds like a veiled and timid maiden. Look at the old wizard. He sits there as though that bulkheads were speaking to him. The ascetic old boon, I do not know what he sees in the emperor's pentacle but I fear for the safety of our ship."
"Liana Torymorton sleeps," lauded the shipmate above the cry of the wind. "Through the tempestuous raging of the ground swell she has rested in the stern, at Thorvald's feet, beneath his cape. Thorvald stands the helm like a daring and impervious giant. He has not given up the steering oar in half a fortnight."
Thorvald studied inconsistent lumbering waves as they lurched from the darkness. Across the open hull of the wooden ship each trough, in an illogical pitching on the turbulent surface, tousled his men with wet drizzling mist.