Rough and Ready Read online

  “I still don’t understand,” Cage said.

  “Look, suppose you were able to go back and eliminate Hitler before the death camps. Wouldn’t you try? Yeah, it’s rewriting history, but if there’s even a remote chance that I can stop him . . .” He paused with a shrug. “How can I not try?”

  More silence.

  Finally, Cage coughed and said, “So, do ya have a time machine or somethin’?”

  He had to laugh at the question and gave Cage a noogie on his long-haired fool head. “No, you dipwad!”

  “Do you expect to do it on the high seas . . . in a boat?” Geek asked. “Like before? And reverse the time travel?”

  “Logical conclusion, but no. I’ve tried that. Lots of time in a boat off the California coast. I even tried it in Iceland when we were there last year to train the IDF in Keflavik. But nothing happened. Now I’m going back to Norway. I’ll stand on the same spot where Norstead was once located. Hopefully, something will happen.”

  “Ya know you’ve gone bonkers, don’t ya?” Cage regarded him with amusement.

  He probably expected him to say something like, “Gotcha!” And admit he’d been joking. I wish! “Maybe. But I’ve gotta try.”

  “You honest-to-God believe in time travel?” Pretty Boy wanted to know.

  “Well, no. But I do believe in miracles. I figure God, or one of the gods . . . probably Loki, the jester . . . destined this for my family.”

  “Aaah, miracles! That I can understand.” JAM was nodding his head in acceptance, which was remarkable to Torolf. He didn’t think anyone would believe him.

  “This sounds really interesting. I’m in,” Geek said. “When do we leave for Norway?”

  “Me, too,” each of the others said.

  “No, no, no!” Torolf said as emphatically as he could.

  “All fer one and one fer all,” Cage reminded him. And he wasn’t teasing, either.

  “You can’t do this,” he tried one last time. “I know you have liberty for a couple weeks. We all do before we go OUTCONUS again. But, man, what if we can’t come back? What if we get stuck in the past? Do you want to have a UA on your record?”

  “Shiiit! If we’re lost in the eleventh century, I don’t think an unauthorized absence is gonna matter all that much,” Pretty Boy pointed out.

  Torolf decided to try a different argument. “Do you have any idea how primitive it was then? No electricity. No running water or flush toilets. No cars or planes. No computers. No condoms.”

  His four teammates looked at each other, then at him. They didn’t believe him. Still, Cage spoke for them all when he said, “We’re willing to risk that . . . for you. Do y’all agree?”

  The response was a resounding, “Hoo-yah!” And Pretty Boy added, “Make sure we buy a shitload of rubbers to take with us. Make mine supersize.”

  “The only supersize on you is yer big head,” Cage told Pretty Boy.

  So it was that a team of five Navy SEALs decided to go back in time to the eleventh-century Norselands. They would never be the same.

  You could say she was a Dark Ages feminist . . .

  Brunhilda Berdottir was the last living child of Styrr Hardhead and Bera the Weeper, a deceased high jarl of Hordaland and his lady wife. Though she would never be recognized as such in her present condition.

  She had a broken arm, a blackened eye, and bruises from head to toe. Still she trudged on, wearing only a rough gown under an over-tunic and thin, deerskin ankle boots, fur side inward, these two days and more along a remote, snow-covered mountain trail, hoping to find her great-grandsire’s hunting lodge.

  But then she slipped, her feet went out from under her, and her rump hit the ground with a resounding thump. Her stop caused those following behind her to fall as well in a rippling effect.

  At first, they all stared at each other. Then one of them giggled. Soon they were all laughing. Not that there was any humor to their predicament, but the old sages were right when they said that betimes ’twas better to laugh than cry.

  With her were five other females, ranging in age from twelve to thirty, all of them equally battered, some having been raped as well, repeatedly. The one thing they all had in common was the brutal, maggot-hearted Steinolf, who had invaded farmsteads and estates across the northwestern Norselands in a wave of bloody attacks these past three years. Her family’s own Amberstead—named for her father’s trading in the prized stones from the Baltic—had suffered the latest of his raids. Hilda could not bear to think of her last image of her father lying in a pool of blood outside the bailey, his body having been dealt the horrible Blood Eagle, a Viking punishment that involved hacking all the ribs away from the backbone down to loins, then pulling out the lungs as an offering to Odin.

  In truth, there had been so much sword dew from him and his loyal retainers that it ran like a stream down to the fjord. Thank the gods, her mother and older brothers, Arnsten and Ketil, had passed to the otherworld many years ago.

  Actually, there were more than the five of them traveling this remote trail. There was also Bjorn, Dotta, Edla, and Stigandr. Bjorn was a huge ram; Dotta and Edla, his favorite ewes . . . all three brought along for this journey at the insistence of her maid, Inge. Hilda and the women had all cuddled up against the animals for warmth as they slept yestereve.

  Stig was, of course, her father’s hunting dog. A more contrary, lustsome beast there never was. He would obey no one, not even Hilda, now that her father was gone.

  Fortunately, once Stig understood that sheep would not stand still for his carnal efforts, all four animals had behaved well. And Inge—Bless her soul—had trailed behind with the animals, picking up their droppings with a wood paddle and sack so that their enemy would not be able to trace their path. Hilda had drawn the line when Frida, her cook, wanted to bring squawky chickens, but Hilda suspected the stubborn woman had breeding eggs nestled in the swath of wool wrapped around her waist.

  Over the years, her father had traveled to the far-flung trading towns of Birka, Hedeby, and Novgorod, bringing her finger and arm rings, gold and silver linked belts, silk samite fabrics from Byzantium, a polished brass looking mirror, and a red cloak lined with gray fox fur. All left behind.

  “Are we almost there, milady?” Inge asked as Hilda stood and dusted snowflakes off her gunna and wool mantle. They were near a bend in Freyjafjord that they had been following since midday. The others began to rise as well. Meanwhile, the sheep foraged in the snow to nibble at the undergrowth, and Stig licked her hands, seeking some morsel of food or bone.

  She ignored Stig, having nothing to offer, and pressed her lips together to stop their shivering. “I’ve not been here for a dozen years . . . since my eleventh winter . . . but my grandsire always said Deer Haven was only a half day’s journey from Freyja’s Elbow, a bend in the fjord near the ancient lintel tree.”

  Inge’s weary eyes followed Hilda’s gaze to the gnarled tree as wide as three mead barrels with bare branches resembling beastly arms.

  “Let us rest here a moment,” Hilda suggested.

  “A fire?” Inge inquired hopefully.

  Hilda shook her head. “Steinolf’s men may follow us . . . if not now, eventually. I doubt me there is any imminent danger, but we must be within the safety of Deer Haven’s walls, drawbridge up, when . . . if . . . they discover our whereabouts.”

  “What could they do to us that they have not already done?” Inge remarked with a shudder.

  “Skin us alive.” It was something Steinolf was rumored to practice on his captured enemies when they did not cooperate.

  “For the love of Thor! We can ill afford to linger then,” Inge said, and the others nodded in agreement, even twelve-year-old Dagne, whose bloody thighs had borne the seed of a dozen or more men afore they had rescued her that first night. She had not spoken since. Dagne carried a favorite lute clutched close to her chest. Hilda wondered if she would ever sing again.

  But they had all suffered.

  Steinolf ordered
the tip of Astrid’s tongue to be sliced off for refusing to take one warrior’s manpart into her mouth.

  Elise, only seventeen, and a thrall, had watched helplessly as her young mother had been dragged to one of the three longboats headed for the market stalls at Hedeby where she and twenty others would be sold as slaves. Their fate could be no worse than those left behind. Of course, Hilda would now release Elise from her thralldom, and she would no longer have to keep her hair close-cropped as a sign of servitude.

  Frida, the oldest of them at thirty, had lain nude and spread-legged on the high table of Amberstead’s great hall for a day and a half.

  They were a perverted, cruel bunch, Steinolf ’s men were, slaking their lust like savage animals. Although Hilda had been beaten, she had not been raped or mutilated . . . yet. Steinolf had been saving her, as the highborn daughter of the estate, for last in hopes of drawing fleeing troops and cotters back to Amberstead. She could not imagine what atrocity he had planned for her, in light of what he’d done to lesser females in the household. There had been mention of a randy stallion out in the stable. That had been when she’d planned her escape.

  Hilda looked at each of them in turn. “Heed me well. Keep heart a short while longer. This I vow: Steinolf will pay for his sins . . . someday. But for now, we must find safe harbor, restore our bodies and spirits, and grow strong.”

  The next morning they arrived at Deer Haven. Hilda surveyed it with an eye toward their defense against invaders.

  It was a motte and bailey-style structure built in the longhouse style of the Vikings. It sat on an immense, raised, flat hilltop, steep-sloped on three sides and set against an almost vertical mountain background. The rustic castle—and, yea, it was a castle to the Norsemen—was surrounded by a wide moat. The palisade of strong hewn logs was half rotted away. Many hides of land went with this estate, but most of it was untillable. That’s why her great-grandsire had abandoned it decades ago.

  Much work would be required to restore it to its former impregnable state. The only entrance was through the fjord, which could be made impassable by damming the stream a short distance back . . . something her great-grandsire had once done in the old days when this had been his first home, long before the establishment of Amberstead and the use of Deer Haven as a hunting lodge. The drawbridge was rusted into a permanent open position. The moat was filled with mud and fallen trees. The massive, timber-and-earthworks main longhouse with its wood shake roof was in disrepair but still intact, though the wattle-and-daub huts and outbuildings that surrounded it had long ago lost their thatched roofs.

  Despite the condition, Deer Haven was a welcome sight. “This will do as our new home,” Hilda pronounced. Astrid, Elise, and Frida dropped to their knees and said prayers of thanks. Dagne wept with relief. But Inge, ever the one to have a sense of humor, chuckled. “By your leave, milady,” she said, but without waiting for a response, picked up a sharp rock, which she used to carve runic symbols onto a short plank, which she propped against the edge of the drawbridge.

  It read: “Any man who dares enter here uninvited will leave with a shriveled manpart.”

  “Well said!” Hilda clapped her hands in appreciation.

  They all laughed then, even Dagne.

  We will be all right now, Hilda decided. If we can see mirth in the midst of our tragedy, we have the mettle to survive. This will be our sanctuary. In fact, she stepped forth and took the stone from Inge, adding two words. Later, the same plaque would be nailed into the restored fortress, and it would read:

  THE SANCTUARY

  Any man who dares enter here uninvited

  will leave with a shriveled manpart.

  Chapter 2

  Tsk, tsk, tsk! You couldn’t take them anywhere! . . .

  “A-Viking we will go, a-Viking we will go, heigh-ho the dairy-o, a-Viking we will go.”

  “I for one am in the mood for a little pillaging.”

  “Where are all those buxom, blonde-haired Scandinavian women we were promised? With names like Ingrid or Ursula?”

  “I want a battle-axe. Forget an AK-47, I want a big-ass, friggin’ battle-axe.”

  “Hot damn, it’s cold. Pass me my fur mantle. Ha, ha, ha!”

  “Where the hell’s my plunder? Did you take my plunder?”

  “I think I’ll do my hair in war braids today.”

  “Who says Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets? I really, really want a horned helmet.”

  “What’s the name of your sword?”

  “Johnson.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Mr. Big.”

  All this ribbing was being delivered to Torolf by his four teammates as they stood on a reproduction of a Viking dragonship on a godforsaken fjord in Norway. A tourist trap, to be sure.

  “No kidding, Max, let’s go get a mug of beer . . . uh, mead . . . and forget this time-travel crap.”

  I wish I could.

  “Yeah. You need to get your ashes hauled, if you ask me.”

  Nobody asked you. “Getting laid isn’t the answer to everything.”

  Four sets of eyes turned to look at him.

  He grinned and shook his head at the hopelessness of arguing with the blockheads. There were close to two hundred members of SEAL Team Thirteen, but these guys had gone through BUD/S training with him. When down range, these were the guys he wanted watching his six. But when they were inactive—as they were now after five days in western Norway—all that energy had to be directed somewhere. Unfortunately, he was the chosen target.

  They were pissing him off big-time, and they knew it. So, he saluted them with his middle finger.

  They just laughed. No surprise there.

  The wind had died down about a half hour ago, and the longboat had pretty much stopped moving. So, the red and white striped sails had been lowered.

  “Out oars!” Svein Olafsson, the pretend captain of this tourist longship, yelled out. Picking up their oars, twelve sets of pretend Viking sailors came to attention. They looked like idiots, probably college students, in their pseudo-Viking duds, designed by some dingbat Calvin Klinesson, no doubt. Sitting on sea chests, they began to row in unison. They may have been dressed like no Vikings he’d ever known, with belt buckles that would rival a rodeo rider’s and tunics and braies made of ultrasuede, but the rhythmic sound of oars creaking in oarlocks was not unfamiliar to Torolf.

  As the longship plied easily through Freyjafjord, Torolf looked for familiar landmarks, to no avail, even though he’d traveled here with his father and brother Ragnor when they were youthlings. Everything looked different now. Even worse, two days past, Torolf had stood on the very spot where Norstead, his family estates, had once been located. There was a shopping mall there now. Even so, Torolf had dropped to his knees in the parking lot, praying for deliverance back to the past, much to the amusement of passersby. JAM had helped by sprinkling some holy water on the concrete. Who knew that JAM carried holy water around, just in case there was an emergency!

  “Pssst,” Cage whispered, elbowing him to draw his attention back to the present. “The good captain, he is throwin’ eye daggers our way.”

  Hah! Everyone was looking at them funny, Cage most of all, with his shoulder-length hair, little gold loop ear-ring, and stupid cowboy hat and cowboy boots. You’d think he was from Texas . . . or Forty-second Street . . . not Louisiana. On the other hand, maybe it was JAM in cammies and an olive-drab T-shirt with the logo “Navy SEAL” on it who was drawing all the looks; that logo was always a chick magnet, not that the good captain would care about that. Pretty Boy wore his NASCAR jacket, also a chick magnet. He and Geek were dressed normally in jeans.

  Captain Svein, as he’d told them to call him, even though his real job was a professor at an Oslo university, frowned at him and his SEAL buddies for standing apart from the rest of the tourist group. “The Norsemen were masters of the seas during the Viking age. With good cause, they were called sea wolves.”

  Pretty Boy made a wolf howling
noise.

  A mug of mead was beginning to sound good to Torolf, too.

  “With fair winds on the open seas, the high-riding longships could travel at incredible speeds with sails, called ‘cloaks of the wind,’ unfurled. But, when the wind went down, as it has now, the Viking sailors needed to start rowing the vessels, which were so light they were able to travel easily on shallow fjords.”

  On and on Olafsson droned, and Torolf scanned the passing fjord shoreline, searching for clues. The landscape and geographical boundaries had been different long ago. In fact, ancient Norway had been twice as large as it was today. And, yet, they were the same. His heart and his memory told him so.

  “Norway is a land of snow-capped mountains and great, barren plateaus,” the tour guide pointed out. “Its coastline is broken by hundreds of fjords, each with its own personality. They were carved out by glaciers in prehistoric times. Despite its bleakness, there are picturesque bays and moor-lands. Some contend the most beauty is in the forbidding terrain.”

  Torolf nodded in agreement.

  “Although the Scandinavians all spoke different dialects, they could apparently understand each other,” Olafsson explained, after a question from one of the visitors. “And, actually, Old Norse, which in no way resembles modern Norwegian, was very similar to the English of that time.”

  Blah, blah, blah. Let’s go back to port. I might as well accept that reverse time travel just isn’t going to happen.

  “Were they really vicious rapers and pillagers?” one elderly gentleman asked.

  “The early histories were written by clerics who had a prejudiced view of the non-Christian invaders. In fact, Vikings were adventurers, settlers, artisans, and traders. Their law codes were the basis for our modern judicial system. Their sagas bespoke a great love of storytelling and humor.”