The Extremely Epic Viking Tale of Yondersaay (25 page)

Asgrim was winding down when a horn was heard by all. It was coming from outside the front of the castle.

“That is Jarl Scathe, our lord and master, returning from his morning activities. He will outline what is in store for you,” Asgrim’s cousin, Isdrab, said.

With that, the castle gates, fifty feet high and twenty feet across, crashed open. And in stepped Jarl Silas Scathe. He was clearly going for a grand effect of awe. Actually, the doors were so massive and he was so crooked and weedy that it made him look rather small. No one in the hallway would ever tell Jarl Scathe this, of course. The three men bowed down to the jarl as he approached. Ruairi watched as Jarl Scathe strode as majestically as he could toward him.

“So,” Scathe said in a voice he considered booming, “we finally meet, Red King of Denmark.” Scathe looked piercingly at Ruairi.

Ruairi glanced behind him to see if the jarl was perhaps addressing someone else. He wasn’t. “Me?” Ruairi asked.

Scathe nodded.

“Em, I think there has been a mistake,” Ruairi said.

“You do?” Scathe asked.

“I do, yes.”

“What mistake would that be?” Scathed asked.

“I am not a king—”

“Yes, you are,” Scathe interjected.

“—and I’ve never been to Denmark.”

“Immaterial,” Scathe said, swatting the air beside him in a limp gesture of nonchalance. “What is your name, Boy King?” he asked and started to walk around Ruairi as they spoke, looking him up and down.

“Ruairi. Ruairi Miller.”

Asgrim the Artistic leaned forward and whispered in Scathe’s ear.

“Ah,” Scathe said. “Ruairi. Do you know what your name means?”

“Yes. I mean,
no
!” Ruairi said.

“I think you do,” said Scathe playfully.

“It’s my mother’s grandfather’s name. That’s why it’s my name, not for any other reason,” Ruairi said.

Scathe came up behind Ruairi and put his mouth to Ruairi’s ear. Ruairi did not like the smell that wafted his way—part herbal toothpaste, part cheap aftershave. “And what does it mean?” Scathe whispered.

Ruairi hesitated. Scathe waited patiently.

“It means ‘red king,’” Ruairi said finally. Hamish grunted loudly, and the cousins whistled. Scathe clapped his hands together, walked back in front of Ruairi, and looked triumphantly at the men. All three smiled at their jarl.

“So, it’s really him? Your time has really come?” Asgrim said.

Scathe looked delighted with himself. “I do believe so,” he said. “We shall follow all the prescribed protocols to make one hundred and ten percent sure.”

“One hundred percent,” Isdrab Graylock the Scientific murmured.

“Sorry?” Scathe said.

“Nothing, nothing,” Isdrab said, shifting on his feet and avoiding eye contact. Scathe turned and glared at him.

“We shall perform all the recommended tests, and then,” he said, spinning back around to Ruairi, “once we have established your lineage beyond a hair’s breadth of doubt, I shall take my sword of death—” Scathe unsheathed a long and pointy sword and brought it close to Ruairi’s face. “Look here at my sword of iron and gold. What you see along the center of the blade—”

Asgrim coughed. Scathe glanced at him, and Asgrim opened his eyes wide and shook his head a little. He moved toward the jarl, and the jarl moved a bit to confer with him. They turned their backs on Ruairi and the other two men.

“Did you do my blood channel speech?” Scathe whispered to Asgrim. Asgrim hung his head. “Why did you do my blood channel speech? I always do the blood channel speech!”

“I apologize, my liege. I lost the run of myself in the excitement of having him here after all these years,” Asgrim explained. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“I’m feeling somewhat undermined, Asgrim, I have to tell you,” Scathe said. “He’s supposed to be terrified of
me
. What do you suggest I do now?”

Asgrim pondered a moment, then said brightly, “You could do your plundering speech.”

“You mean, ‘I’ll take to the waves, and no man shall equal my doggedness in war’?” Scathe said, considering this.

Asgrim nodded vigorously. “It is a wonderful speech, my lord.”

“No,” Scathe said, after a moment. “It’s not personal enough to him to really instill fear. It’s more a rallying rhetorical than a terror instiller. I need a terror instiller.”

“Mmm,” Asgrim said, agreeing. They both thought for a moment. “Ooh, ooh,” Asgrim said, “I always liked the ‘using-your-bones-for-cooking-with’ speech.”

“Really? You like that one. You’re sure?” Scathe asked.

“Oh, definitely!” Asgrim said, nodding vigorously again.

Scathe spun around to face Ruairi once more. Isdrab and Hamish had both been leaning forward and listening intently to Scathe and Asgrim’s conversation. They stood straight and looked around at the floor and the ceiling to disguise the fact that they had been listening in.

Scathe took big, striding steps as he spoke and frequently raised his arms slowly and closed his hands into fists, for effect. “You are in my command and in my control,” he said, raising his arms and opening his hands. “You are literally at my mercy.” He closed his hands into fists. “Indeed, I am a most merciful ruler. However,” Scathe narrowed his eyes and lowered his gaze to meet Ruairi’s, “if you are impertinent to me, I shall not hesitate to extract the bones from your body, one by one, while you are still alive and screaming in unending agony. I shall cook the torn-out bones in front of you in a cauldron, with you awake and watching and I shall feed them to my hounds. Is that understood?”

Ruairi felt the blood draining from his face, “Yes,” he said.

“Good,” Scathe said. “We shall perform all the recommended tests, and once we have established your lineage beyond a hair’s breadth of doubt—”

Isdrab whispered to his cousin, “He already said that bit.”

“He knows!” Asgrim whispered back. Isdrab let go of Ruairi and came to stand beside Asgrim. “A judicious use of repetition is one of the most important tools of terror-instilling oratory. He lent me the book
How to Terrify Friends and Petrify People.
”

Scathe cleared his throat and continued. “Once we have established your lineage beyond a hair’s breadth of doubt, you shall be sacrificed to the Viking gods at the Great Yuletide Sacrificial Festival tonight at sundown. And I shall finally become lord and master, literally, once and for all, of all Yondersaay.”

Scathe paused for effect. Hamish and the cousins bowed before him. One of the cousins started to clap but stopped immediately when no one else joined in.

Ruairi was getting very worried now. “When you say sacrificed …” he said, gulping hard.

“Yes?” Scathe asked, raising an eyebrow.

“What do you mean exactly?” Ruairi asked.

“You know, sacrificed. We donate the gifts of your body to the gods in a gesture of thanks,” Scathe said.

Ruairi looked blankly at Scathe.

“You’re not getting it,” Scathe said.

Ruairi shook his head.

“We kill you,” Scathe said matter-of-factly.

Ruairi acted instantly, impulsively. His entire being sprung into action. He lifted his left foot and brought his heel down sharp into the soft part on the top of Hamish’s foot. Hamish bellowed and bent double in pain. The cousins, who had wandered closer to the jarl while he was giving his speeches, no longer had hold of Ruairi. Ruairi turned and ran as fast as he could away from the men.

Scathe sighed and motioned for the cousins to bring him back.

The cousins caught up with him easily enough. They were fast. Besides, all the doors to the Great Hall were bolted shut, and Ruairi’s hands were still tied behind his back.

The cousins, tall and thin though they were, were also impressively strong. They each took Ruairi under an arm and carried him back in front of the jarl.

“Can I kill him now?” Hamish asked Scathe quietly. Scathe shook his head.

“Torture him a little?” Hamish said.

“Look, Hjorvarth. There will be plenty of time for combat and torture later.”

“You promise?” Hamish said.

“I promise,” Scathe responded.

Scathe laughed as Ruairi was brought back to him, “By all means,” he said, “You have my permission to try one ineffectual escape without suffering at the hands of my wrath. One only. Do not try anything like that again.” He gave Ruairi a menacing smile then turned sharply to his men. “Take him away and perform the ritual testing to establish that his is the blue blood of the Red King of Denmark!” Scathe strode to the end of the hall. The massive wooden doors at the far end of the grand room opened at the jarl’s approach, and he disappeared deep into the recesses of the castle.

The testing began before noon, and upon its completion, a lab coat-wearing Isdrab the Scientific took Ruairi outside.

Ruairi was led all the way through the castle to the back boundary, a glass wall which curved inward and gave upon an expansive terrace and an incredible vista beyond. Ruairi was stunned by the beauty of what he saw.

The jarl’s backyard was, in fact, the mouth of Volcano Mount Violaceous. The upper-most crags of the mountain stretched skyward around a frozen pool of ice—the plugging glacier. Between the ice and the stretching crags was the most striking garden. No, not a garden. A forest. Ruairi, who was always the first to notice there were no trees when the family arrived at Yondersaay airport, and only two or three sprinkled about the Crimson Forest, could not believe what he was seeing now. For all along the sides of the pool of ice, lining the inner edges of the peaks of Volcano Mount Violaceous, were trees. Not just any trees, but majestic, towering trees, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.

The sun, quite high in the sky now, broke upon the remaining winter leaves and splayed their colors across this most spectacular of courtyards. Ruairi watched flocks of birds dance up to the sky and return en masse to the shelter of the forest. He had not been aware of it before, but an absence of trees had meant an absence of the sounds that go along with trees: the birdsong, the animal noises, the groaning of tree trunks, the cracking and sighing of branches and twigs bending and breaking in the wintry breeze. The sun’s afternoon light refracted within the solid layers of ice and became a carpet of icy purples and whites which spread forward to where Ruairi now stood, hands bound, guarded on all sides, on the back patio of Violaceous Hall.

Ruairi turned around to face Scathe. The jarl was no longer in hunting attire but adorned in robes of thick furs and velvets. Ruairi wondered if Scathe had a crown hidden somewhere that he was just dying to put on.

Scathe turned to Isdrab the Scientific. “Your results please, my good man.”

“Your lordship,” Isdrab began, “it appears highly probable that the boy is in some way connected to a family that may or may not be linked to the throne of Denmark and therefore of Yondersaay.”

Scathe nodded along with Isdrab as he spoke but looked a bit confused at the end of the verdict. “So, he is the Red King of Denmark?”

“Well—” Isdrab began.

“Well?” Scathe asked.

“The results do point to that conclusion.” Isdrab smiled. “But they are not verifiable.” He stopped smiling.

“Not verifiable?” Scathe asked.

“We conducted the prescribed tests and are pleased with the results,” Isdrab said, smiling brightly again. “However,” he said, no longer smiling, “we’ve had to throw the whole lot out.”

“Because they’re not verifiable?” Scathe said.

“Precisely,” Isdrab said.

“You’d better have a good explanation for this failure,” Scathe began. “You’ve been testing for hours now, and it’ll be sundown before you know it. I have to organize the pyre construction, the longship burning, and I have to make sure the sacrificial rites are performed in the right way—”

“There was no control group,” Isdrab interjected.

“No control group?” Scathe said.

“No, I’m afraid not,” Isdrab said. “And without a control group, it’s not verifiable. We had to throw it all out.”

Scathe turned on his heel and shouted into the castle, “
Bring me the oracle
!”

Footsteps approached from inside, and within seconds, Asgrim the Artistic and Hamish Hjorvarth the Big-Boned were standing in front of Scathe. A handful of other people came running up behind to offer assistance. They were all eerily alike. Ruairi recognized them as the five twins who worked at the airport.

“Em, sir?” Isdrab the Scientific said.

“Yes?” Scathe snapped.

“The oracle?
Really
?” Isdrab said, approaching Scathe.

“Yes. Why not?” Scathe asked.

“Sorry to be a stickler, my lord,” Isdrab said, “but do you really have faith in a person who lives in a hovel, talks in rhyming couplets, is physically incapable of giving a yes/no answer, and makes decisions based on how the bile-infested innards of a torn-apart rat splat on a rock?”

Scathe wheeled on Isdrab. He cast his gaze languidly down from Isdrab’s head to his feet and slowly back up again. He wheeled back around. “Yes,” he said.

“Her results are not
verifiable
,” Isdrab said, the pitch of his voice getting higher and higher. “She moves bloody guts—”