I was behind the bar hiding at the barkeep’s feet when the first of the men came in. I heard the barkeep begin to yell in indignation, his kind old voice angry and raw, but he was cut short. Literally. His blood splattered my upturned face. It was hot and salty on my lips. Slowly he collapsed, his knees driving hard into my chest, his severed head landing on my groin, pouring red and warm over my sleeping gown. I made no sound. I heard commands in rough voices. I heard chairs overturned. I heard men screaming outside. I couldn’t breathe. The barkeep’s blood filled my mouth and my eyes. I tried to move out from underneath his body, digging my fingernails into the wooden floor until they threatened to crack. I grabbed at anything, everything, trying to get him off of me. I was almost overcome with panic. I felt the scream beginning to rise in my throat, the scream that would get me killed, just like the sweet old man who’d done his best to hide a young woman from danger. The scream was so close to tearing itself out of my throat when, abruptly, my hand brushed an iron ring.
I grabbed hold of it and swallowed the scream. Footsteps thudded across the floor on the other side of the bar. Carefully, so carefully, I tugged on the ring. The barkeep’s body moved. Small, cold pieces of metal shifted beneath my fingers and I felt the thought stab me like a knife.
Keys.
The barkeep’s keys. They were clipped to his belt with a little spring loaded hook. The keys gave me hope. I knew what to do. I knew how I was going to survive. If... but I couldn’t think about uncertainty. Only the first step. I shimmied out from under the poor old man’s body, using his belt to pull him quietly to the side. The footsteps still made the floor groan only a few yards away. Wiping the blood from my face as best I could with my hands I studied the clip and released it. The keys were heavy in my hands. They felt like salvation. One of them, a terrible, damning key, would be my salvation. My weapon. I kept my breathing shallow despite the urge to suck air like a blacksmith’s bellows. Minutes passed. Eventually, the feet of the men who’d cut the barkeep down treaded upstairs. I peered over the bar with a clawing beast behind my breasts.
The room was empty. I ran for my life.
The door gave way to a night as cold as the grave, bursting with blinding, ice-filled wind. I couldn’t see more than ten feet in any direction and I thanked the stars for that. All around were the sounds of men dying. The smell of death, butchered meat and voided bowels, filled my head. The warm blood began to congeal on my face and in my hair. It made my gown stick to my naked body. Barefoot I ran through the calf-deep snow, stumbling and falling through drifts and cutting my feet on hidden stones. The granary was burning. I could see the glow through the frozen wind. I used that fel light as a guide to the center of town where the bear post stood.
I ran for what seemed like ages. I thought for sure I must have missed it in the storm. I could no longer feel my feet or my face and I was stumbling more often than I managed to run. I thought for sure I would die of cold when, finally, I spotted it. Off to the left stood the bear post, just as thick and imposing as it ever was during the day. Now, in the night with the moaning of the wind, it evoked images of the monstrous cave bears that were once chained there for sport. On this night, however, I hoped to find a different bear at the post. One who walked on two legs. One who knew me for what I was the moment he saw me. I prayed to every god I could that the barbarian was still alive.
I slogged the last six feet to the base of the post. The snow had been driven hard against it. It was thigh deep and freezing against my crotch before I could reach out and touch the post. Digging frantically with numb hands, I scraped my knuckles against heavy chains. I pulled them as hard as I could. Slowly an arm broke free of the drift. It was thick with muscle, a hand as large as a spade, but the skin was almost blue with cold. I thought my heart would stop. Refusing to believe I’d made it this far only to be defeated, I continued to dig until I’d uncovered a head and a pair of shoulders. His short beard was crystalled with ice. His lips were purple. I was sobbing like a child.
I saw torches through the storm and knew that I’d soon be found. Unwilling to give up on the frozen beast manacled to the post, I began searching for the little key that matched his bonds. My fingers fumbled over the clinking ring of metal. Voices began to come through the storm. They were close, their blades no doubt wet with the cooling gore of Root’s population. I continued to cry. When a tiny key sifted itself out from the others in my hand, I knew I’d found the one. None of the others were small enough to fit the lock. I couldn’t stop the shout of joy and disbelief that escaped me. I knew immediately that I’d been heard. Angry calls erupted all around me. They would see me in seconds. I plunged the key into the manacles and twisted, hard. It refused to budge. My fingers slipped and my thumb split across the pad, dripping red on the snow. The lock was frozen. A heavy hand grabbed my hair and pulled. Hard. The scream I had swallowed in the bar returned, flying from my mouth, fueled by fear and sorrow and defeat. I keened like a banshee.
I heard a deep voice remark on the novelty of finding a woman. There was laughter. I saw a beard, red lips, and someone was kissing my throat. I clawed at his eyes, trying to push him away and screamed again. Hotter blood blossomed at my finger tips. I had scored a wound. There was swearing and a fist found my left eye. Blackness feathered the corner of my vision. When it cleared seconds later, I found myself lying in the snow, face to face with the ice-wreathed barbarian.
Why! I wanted to shout at him. Why are you doing this to me! You were supposed to save me! Save Me!
More hands grabbed at my gown, lifting me out of the snow. Some clamped onto my wrists like iron while others took a moment to explore the softer parts of me. Someone expressed distaste at the size of my breasts. Someone else offered to take the first speaker’s turn in addition to his own. Tears filled my eyes as I looked into the dead face of my would-be savior. His eyes were like the ice surrounding him, but somehow even colder, less hospitable. More brutal. My heart stopped. In my frantic attempts to unlock the chains that tied him to the bear post, I hadn’t taken time to notice much, I did specifically remember one detail. His eyes. They had been closed. The silent pleas for help I’d fostered only moments before came to life.
“Save me! Barbarian, save me please!”
The hands faltered. So did the arguing about who was going first. Questions were asked. A large, dark shape moved out of the group that held me and trudged through the snow toward the exposed torso of the buried man. The raider looked closely at the frozen face, the purple lips. The eyes were closed again. He turned back to his comrades and laughed about a man turned into ice. There were chuckles all around. Someone asked if the ice-man would break if struck. The inspecting raider lifted a hand axe out of a loop on his belt and took a wide stance. He lifted the axe high with one arm. The snow exploded.
Nothing could have prepared my attackers for the rage of the barbarian. Still chained, he rose naked from the snow like leviathan from the crushing depths. Wrapping his massive left hand around the raider’s uplifted wrist, he twisted and punched the backside of the raider’s elbow with unbelievable force. Blood and bone erupted through skin and the barbarian’s victim fell writhing to the ground where he would bleed to death in seconds. Stunned at the sudden, brutal display, none of the other villains could move. The barbarian’s presence seemed to hypnotize, holding the men hostage to their own fear. He glared at them with those eyes like spears. Ice cracked as he lifted frozen chains and stretched them to their limit.
A man beside me shouted for someone to shoot. He’s chained! He’s chained! he said. Another man stumbled to the front, pushing me aside, as desperate to nock an arrow as I had been to find a key only a minute ago. He never got the chance. The frozen chains were thick but brittle. With a grunt, muscles bulging for half a second, the monster of a man broke the chains that had bound him tight. The archer dropped his bow and tried to draw a sword but was too late. Fingers locked into a double fist, hands like hammers dropped and snuffed out a life like a candle. The barbarian roared his challenge. What happened next was chaos.
The raiders drew their weapons and charged. The barbarian lifted the hand axe and sword of the first men to fall and met them like a falling star meets the earth. There was an explosion of ice and blood and death the likes of which I had never seen except in nightmares. With a sweep of the sword, one man lost his head and another watched his entrails spill out onto the ground like a waterfall. The axe broke a horned helmet in two, severing the two halves of a brain. While the axe was stuck, a raider stepped in close and tried to hamstring the barbarian but the huge man was as fast as an elf. He kicked out and knocked the man down. Then, crouching low over the fallen man, the barbarian twisted and broke his enemy’s neck under his knee. With a flourish, he rose again and split a man’s face from cheek to cheek with the tip of the sword.
Fighting not so much with practiced skill as with unbridled joy and bloody instinct, the barbarian received several cuts and heavy blows, but none of the raiders could manage to get close enough for a killing wound without being slaughtered first. More men came running from nearby in the storm, leaving the looting of the village to see what the screaming was about. One was caught with a thrown sword through the chest before he got within twenty feet. The barbarian merely grabbed another one off the pile of bodies at his feet and continued to fight. He was laughing now. The light from the granary back-lit his bulk as he killed again and again and again, gales of laughter building inside him. Blood coated his naked form like a baby at birth. He fought with sword and axe and fist and even with teeth, actually biting the throat out of one man like an animal.
That gave the remaining men pause. They began to look at the bodies that littered the earth around the barbarian. They began to understand what I’d done. I’d doomed them all to die. None who stood against this massive man would survive. I watched them try to rally themselves against the evil I’d loosed against them. I watched them fail. One by one the barbarian killed them all. Not a single man survived in Root. All the villagers, visiting trappers and peddlers had been murdered by the troop of thirty or so raiders and every one of the raiders had in turn been destroyed by the barbarian. And to think I had objected when, captured by hunters, the people of Root had insisted on chaining the barbarian to the bear post until a slave trader came to buy him.
When the last man fell, the barbarian stopped laughing. Steam rolled off of his shoulders in clouds and blood dripped from his hair and his fingers, spotting the snow. Sighing deep in his chest, he dropped his weapons and began to scrounge among the bodies around him. He clothed himself in the fur cloaks of his enemies, wrapping them like a kilt around his hips to cover his nakedness and to keep warm. I tried to speak to him, but my voice was so small the wind blew it away. Even so, he seemed to suddenly remember that he was not alone. He approached me, stood over me, and watched me with those eyes. I could not stop myself from shaking. He knelt and scooped snow into his hands. When he reached toward me, I screamed. Like lightning he cupped the back of my neck and pulled my face close to his. He gazed into me and the scream cut off.
His eyes no longer held the vicious fury they had reveled in only moments ago. With a start, I realized how absolutely exhausted he was. He should have been dead in the cold, but he got up and killed thirty men. I was suddenly aware of just how close he was to collapsing. So, reassured by his changed demeanor that he was unlikely to kill me, I allowed him to rub snow across my face. It came away black with blood.
“You are bathing me,” I said almost delirious. Too exhausted to respond, he simply scooped up another handful of snow and smeared more blood off of me. He stood me up and lifted my sleeping gown over my head, throwing it into the snow. I didn’t even realize I was standing naked before him until he suddenly wrapped me in another large fur cloak and lifted me off the ground. The fur was gloriously warm and soft against my skin. Slowly, he carried me to the tavern. It was one of the only buildings that hadn’t been burned before the barbarian awoke. He laid me in front of the fire, threw a wooden chair into the flames, and collapsed next to me, curling around me and smothering me in the hot stink of his body. I gagged and nearly threw up, but my gorge held and I kept from losing what food I’d eaten earlier that day. The barbarian did not seem to notice. I tried to roll away from him, fear of rape rising once again in my chest.
“Please,” I gasped, “Don’t.”
He scooped me closer to him again with a quick, final motion. He grumbled at me in his thick dialect. He told me I was too cold and would probably die without the heat from his body. He promised not to touch me so long as I stayed between him and the fire. Relief filled me as the terror of the past hours took its toll on my body. I passed quickly into unconsciousness, feeling safe for the first time that night.
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