[John T Mainer]

Some twelve hundred years ago in the Dane Mark  to Horsa and Gerd were born twin sons,  Halfdan and Ragnar.  Bold in  battle, strong in limb, the two were soon sword thanes and huscarls to  King Godefrid.  While Halfdan was grim and silent, Ragnar was laughing  and mirthfull.  In battle Halfdan was feared as the Battle-glad had  gifted him with the Berserking, and no man save Ragnar could stand  within reach of his sword and be safe.  Ragnar was given the  Victory-Father’s wit, and his eye could read the patterns of the shield  din as if pieces on a southerners game board.

In battle  against the Frankish Charlemagne and Obdurites the two brothers warded  the Kings own person when the Frankish heavy horse sought to force the  shield wall and fell the king, only to fall like wheat before Danish  great axes.  Had they fell in this battle, the sons of Horsa and Gerd  would not be named in the Coward’s saga, but the glories of the past are  nothing, as of light and dark both are all men made, and in every  battle must a man’s courage face the test. 

It was a time when  monks from Frankish lands sought to win folk from the old gods with  promises of freedom from oaths and obligations, where Charlemagne sought  with gold and favour to topple the small kingdoms bordering his empire,  pitting brother against brother in endless civil war.  Sword age, axe  age, wolf age; in a land where foreign gods and foreign gold bought  treachery into every royal house, it was easy for men to lose their way,  and even their courage.

In the huscarls of Godefrid was one Hermond  who was much taken with the southern Monk’s and their foreign ways.   Promised forgiveness and freedom from oaths, he took baptism and felt  himself no longer Godefrid’s man.  Believing that Charlemagne was sent  by the Christ to conquer the world, he took the Frankish lords gold as  he had taken his oath-lord King Godefrid’s, and rode into battle with a  psalm on his lips and treachery in his heart.
King Godefrid was a  great friend to the Saxon, and upheld them against the Franks and their  Obdurite puppets.  When the Frisians too made war on Saxony, Godefrid  sailed with his men and horse to meet them.  In the heart of battle,  when Ragnar and Halfdan warded their King from the front, the sword of  Hermond sought him from the rear.  On his own thane’s sword did the good  king fall.  While Halfdane raged and made slaughter against the  traitor, the courage of Ragnar broke. 

“The king is dead!  All is lost!” cried Ragnar

The battle hung in the balance, with both lines holding firm, but the  cry of Ragnar broke the will of the Danish line, and the shield wall  waivered.  Many fell upon the field before the Danes could win back the  body of their lord, held hard by the raging Haldan.  After the battle,  the golden arm ring,  fine sword and mail that were King-gifts of  Godefrid were found, but beside the war-gear of Ragnar was found no  body, no blood.

Halfdan looked at the body of his dead king, and  fallen comrades.  For his king he had exacted blood price, but the men  who fell when the line broke were a debt for the sons of Horsa, felled  by the cowardice of Ragnar.  Placing his own arm ring on the body of his  fallen lord as death-offering, he wiped the arm ring of his brother in  the fallen kings blood:

“By the Feeder of Ravens, on this  Godefrid’s gift, with Godefrid’s blood does the son of Horsa vow to  bathe this ring in the blood of the Coward, and cleanse the house of  Horsa of its shame.”

Thus was Ragnar stripped of his name before  his ancestors, named Coward before gods and men.  Far from the  battlefield, a weeping Ragnar felt the shame of his failure, felt the  judgement of his ancestors; knowing he could never face his dead  grandfather who taught him the sword, nor his mother Gerd, only two  years in the barrow who would surely bring the Disir’s wrath against a  coward born of her blessed womb.

“Coward I was,” Ragnar raged, “Coward I am!” he named himself, unconsciously echoing the curse of his twin brother.

South rode Ragnar for many months.  With bow he hunted game, with his  axe warned off any bandits.  In the foreign lands with foreign gods he  thought he could outrun the wrath of the gods and scorn of his ancestors  for his broken oaths for as long as he clung to life.  Ragnar did not  know that for months Halfdan and those of the Huscarls who sought to  avoid the civil war that rocked the Dane Mark rode south after him,  seeking blood-price for the battle slain.
In the lowlands of the  River Spree, Coward came upon a burning wagon, gathered around the wagon  were men in matching gear, with a dozen of them having cut down four of  their number and a number of free men, and commencing to rape and loot  those they had been protecting.  When Coward rode into sight with his  great axe, two of the guards had confronted him.  In broken Latin they  spoke to him.

“Ho Northman!  This is none of your business.  The  ladies brother has decided that he should inherit their father’s land,  not her husband.  He paid us better to kill her than she did to guard,  and we get to have a little sport with her too!”

Coward saw his  future written in their deeds.  He had broken faith with his lord, had  taken salt and gold, shared fire and board with him, and let his courage  fail him and his Royal house when Godefrid died.  This was what he left  to happen to his own lands.  The shame of it burned in him like bile.

“What  is your name, Northman” asked the guard growing nervous at the huge  hard-eyed red beard whose hands were growing white-knuckled on his  horse-killing axe.

“My name is Coward” said the nameless son of Horsa

Not knowing the Latin word for Coward, the guard took it for a name.

“Well  Coward, would you like a turn?  The old chief won’t be having any when  we are done, so you can have his share!”  While the oath-broken guards  thought offering a chance to rape a noble-woman would be a gift, it was  the final shame that broke the coward’s heart a second time.

Of  light and dark both are men made, and in each battle must a man find the  courage to face his end, to stand true to his oaths, or break as a  coward.  Sometimes a man stands where no oath compels him, where only  the teachings of his ancestors and the wisdom of gods can guide them.   When alone, without armour against a dozen men in armour, in foreign  lands, in defense of a foreign noble, the Coward who ran spoke thus:

“. On the hillside drear | the fir-tree dies,
All bootless its needles and bark;
It is like a man | whom no one loves,--
Why should his life be long?

While the two guards held his bridle and looked confused, Cowards axe  carved Dagaz in the air, cleaving head from neck left and right.   Kicking free of his saddle, Coward raised the old cry, and gave himself  to the Battleglad.  Screaming Odin’s name, he raged among the rapists  and looters like a bear amidst snow-bound deer, making red slaughter.   No longer the precision of a trained axeman, his blows struck hip-deep  through mail, causing him to hurl the bodies of the slain from his axe,  plaing Koob with the dying.  Seeking only death and the cleansing of his  name, the gods would not grant it to him.  As he raged among them, the  Sorbs broke in terror, for the only tales they had of the Northmen were  those of the Greek Emperors guard against whom no man could stand.

Collapsing at last to the ground, having not only slain the living  guards, but hacked at the bodies  until he could lift his axe no more,  Coward lay mindless and panting like a spent beast.  Only one among the  surviving women dared approach him, the princess.  No young woman, she  was a mother herself, and had thought her last sight on earth to be her  own daughter being raped before her eyes.  Having seen this stranger’s  axe free her from the fate her kinsmen had paid for, and avenge her  husband who fell in her defense, she accepted responsibility for this  northman’s fate.   With wineskin and cloth she approached him.  First in  Greek, for she took him for a Varangian, then the Latin still spoken in  the west she asked his name.

“Coward” he replied.  Sitting in the  wreckage of his rage, it struck her as ironic that so fearless a warrior  should have a name that sounded like coward in the tongue of the fallen  Romans.  She asked if he would take service to her, as her own guards  had broken faith with her.  In a mix of broken latin and Dane, he tried  to tell his tale, but she caught only pieces of it.  While he swore he  was unfit to take oath, as he was a coward proven, she only understood  that he was reluctant to take service.

She begged of him his  protection, as she was miles from her home city, and with rich trade  wagons to protect from bandits.  Promising rich rewards, she offered him  fine armour, as the price of such was the province of Kings and  merchants, and coins of fine silver, rich food and board.  Coward swore  he would take no armour, nor bear a shield again, nor take coin or price  beyond food from her, but he would see her returned home, and the one  who bought treason laid dead at her feet.

Her own lands being filled  with Christ-monks, she had seen holy men who forgo the pleasures of  women and the material world for their god, and had heard from these  same monks how the heathens of the north lived only for slaughter and  their own gods.  She recalled dim tales of the berserkyr, the  bare-shirts, or holy warriors of the hanged god of the north and thought  Coward was some sort of Heathen warrior monk.  Far from the truth, he  was not a man sure of the blessings of the Victory-Father, but one who  feared himself forever nithling in his sight.

A single  guard was not enough to keep off the bandits of the Sorb lands, yet the  one blood soaked northman with  a dozen severed heads hanging from his  saddle rode unchallenged through the lands, with ravens circling about  his steed, even as the flies covered its grisly cargo.

Riding to the  her citidel amidst the growing crowd of whispering townmen, the  noblewoman raised her voice to challenge her brother.

“It is your  sister Slavna who calls you, traitor.  From the steed of my champion  Coward hang the heads of the men you paid to murder my husband, your  chieftain, and your own niece.”

The guards at the gate had  opened to her approach, but now they milled in confusion to see their  comrades’ heads hanging from the Northman’s saddle and to hear her  brother accused of hiring the death of their lord.  Her brother and his  bought men, knew they must end this now, for he was accused openly.   Screaming
“Kill her now” he grabbed a bow from a guardsman and tried  to slay her himself.  With a roar Coward drove his horse before hers,  taking the arrow meant for her into his own side.  Seeing him strike out  at her himself, many of the guards drew against the traitor, and  through the confusion charged the Coward.  All his rage at bought  treason filled him, and heedless of the blows struck against him, he  waded through, finally cornering the fleeing noble against a horse pen  in the courtyard.  With a single blow he severed the traitor’s knee, and  when he fell, picked him up by the hair.  Filled with rage and shame,  he gripped his great axe near the head, and stove in the traitors ribs  at the back.  Casting aside his axe, he ripped the traitor’s lungs from  his body, throwing them over his chest to desperately flap as he  breathed his last in the Blood Eagle.

“Thus perish all traitors!   I cut the Blood-Eagle on this oathbreaker, and any man of his that  still holds steel will fly the Blood Eagle”

Coward could not  hear the sound of the traitor guards weapons hitting the ground, he  could hear only the sound of his own heart pumping out the last of his  life-blood upon the stones, and the call of the ravens at the bounty of  the feast.  He sunk down across the traitor’s body, and thought that  this time he got it right.

Halfdan Horsa’s son rode into town  with a company of Godefrid’s huscarls.  Seeking a Coward run from the  north they were treated to tale after tale of a fearless giant, of a  bare-sark Northman who brought justice for their slain chieftain, and  secured the throne for his widow.   Halfdan could not believe his  brother the coward had found such an end.  Seeking the citadel himself,  he gained entry when he said he sought his brother the Coward.

Met by Lady Slavna herself, he was brought to the pyre.  While  disapproving monks muttered in the background, the surviving loyal  guards had made a pyre under Cowards corpse.  Dressed in fine tunic,  with his axe in his hand, loaves of fine bread, flask of wine, and a  ring of good gold bent onto his sword arm, he lay on a pyre with twelve  fly blown heads, with a thirteenth standing atop a pole at his feet.   Hearing the tale from Lady Slavna and her breathless daughter, Haldan  came to believe the coward he had come to kill was not the Coward that  fell.

Redeeming his oath to his slain comrades, he bent Ragnar’s  arm ring closed around one of his many wounds.  He had sought a coward  that shamed his family, but found only Coward that didn’t.  The Lady  Slavna asked if there were any Heathen prayers that should be offered  before they lit his pyre, and Halfdan struggled to find the words that  came so swift to his fallen brother.

“Cattle die, | and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one's self;
One thing now | that never dies,
The fame of a dead man's deeds”

So was lit the pyre that burned the body of Coward, even as his  deeds would see the name burn bright long after the pyre’s ashes were  forgotten.