Viking Log — YesterEve

I came upon the hall of White Finch and laid hands upon the treasures of his so-called barn, though by Odin’s beard, no barn of honest timber ever held so many soft comforts, trinkets, cushions, and suspicious luxuries. This was no barn. This was a jarl’s pleasure-hall wearing the skin of a shed.

There beneath its roof I claimed a bed and slept as a conquering king.

Yet when dawn split the darkness, I rose not alone.

An army of tiny blood-drinking fiends had feasted upon me through the night. Bedbugs! Crawling bastards of Hel! They had taken me as kin without oath, invitation, or ale. I left White Finch’s hall richer in stolen goods, poorer in blood, and sworn never again to trust a mattress beneath another man’s roof.

Thereafter I turned my hand to the noble craft of slaughter.

Thirty-two necks met the judgment of my blade.

Thirty-two heads fell from thirty-two shoulders and rolled upon the earth like cabbages cast from a farmer’s cart. I carved no tally upon stone, for the ground itself remembered, and the ravens had counted well enough. Let lesser men make monuments to their deeds. Mine were measured in silence, steel, and severed heads.

Then strange tales reached my ears.

Men whispered of shameless exhibition, indecent exposure, and deeds committed without tunic, trouser, or proper fear of the gods. Rumor spoke of a maiden wandering unclothed through fern-gilded forest floors, blissfully unaware that every pine tree, deer, troll, and wandering warrior had been granted a spectacle for which none had paid admission.

Whether maiden, forest spirit, or ale-born hallucination, I cannot say.

But the tale grew mightier with every tongue that carried it.

So too came stories of distant islands, spoken of as though the gods themselves had dropped jewels upon the sea. Men praised them as lands of wonder, treasure, glory, and mysteries beyond mortal imagining.

Bah.

I sailed forth and found mostly rocks, trees, miserable shores, and enough disappointment to sink a longship.

Such is the work of tongues. A man tells of a hill, and by the tenth telling it has become a mountain upon which Thor himself wrestled a serpent.

The islands were worth little.

The stories about them were magnificent.

Then came the wood.

I chopped.

And chopped.

And chopped.

I felled enough forest that the squirrels began speaking my name as a curse. Trees trembled when they heard my footsteps. Axes grew dull in my hands. Stumps covered the earth behind me like the grave markers of a wooden army.

And when I had finally murdered half the forest, I did what every sensible Viking does after achieving total dominion over nature.

I began building a house.

Timber is a stubborn servant. It twists. It complains. It refuses to stand where commanded. Yet with axe, hammer, profanity, and sufficient violence, even wood eventually remembers its place.

Thus my hall began to rise.

Beam upon beam.

Wall upon wall.

A fortress against rain, wind, darkness, wandering beasts, poorly designed barns, and above all else...

BEDBUGS.

For a warrior may endure hunger.

A warrior may endure cold.

A warrior may endure battle, blood, and the shrieking of doomed men.

But by all the gods of Asgard, a warrior shall sleep beneath a roof whose mattress does not bite him back.