The Rule. Jack Colman

Egil sighed, turning back to Torleik, ‘what of Steingarth and the other hill settlements?’

      ‘Fallen, I suppose,’ Torleik answered, still breathless from the ride. ‘Of prisoners I saw no sign, but there is smoke to the north-east, and I think I saw some to the west as well, where Blendal sits.’

      Egil sucked on his lip and spat on the ground. Only a fool could have expected different. That black part of the night before dawn had brought wails and clangs and rumbling footsteps tumbling down off the slopes, as if all the barrows had opened and the ghouls were running riot in the darkness. Now he knew that something far more threatening awaited them beyond the horizon.

      It was approaching mid-morning already, the sunlight still pale with immaturity. Egil stood just below the summit of the first of the foothills, at the elbow of a sharp twist in the road where a weary old hawthorn tree grew so stooped that the children would run up and down its trunk in summer. At his back were his most trusted men. They had dug out their shields and tough leather armour, the swords and spears of their fathers, and now they were waiting, tense and restless. In number, they were no more than ten: his sons, old friends, wise heads. As he turned around to face them they pressed inwards with anticipation, but Egil looked off beyond their eager eyes and instead gazed down at the paltry town some five hundred yards in the distance below.

      Helvik. His town. He’d become an old man quickly during the years of his rule, and his sons were pushing for him to name a successor and step aside, but Helvik was still his town. She sat miserably on a scrap of bleak coastline, hunched around a wind-battered bay that bordered the green seas of the north. From a distance, her surrounding pasture looked bleached and poxed, her wooden stockade all sunken and damp and mouldy. So few buildings sat within her walls that outsiders might call her a village or an outpost rather than a town. To Egil, she resembled a tired old grandmother clutching a gaggle of children within her feeble arms. And as he looked down upon her, it was as if he could see her dying quietly before his eyes.

      ‘Father, we cannot just stand here. We must act!’

      It was Hákon, eldest of Egil’s sons and growing more assertive by the day. He wore the rusted coat of ringmail that had belonged to Egil’s own father, though it looked to be too broad for his shoulders. The other men, Egil could see, were becoming just as restive, but he was now sufficiently old that his silence ought to have been able to hold an audience as well as his words could. He rolled an admonishing look in Hákon’s direction, and resumed his contemplation.

      For years his town had been dogged by sickness. It was mid-autumn. The women should have been in the barn winnowing the barley, the boys and girls out in the fields pulling turnips amid the gentle warmth of a benevolent sun. Instead, the sky was choked with rain clouds, as it had been for the past three harvest seasons. Any crops that had scavenged enough sunlight to grow now lay rotting in the fields. Once, Egil’s people might have relied on the fruits of the sea to sustain them, but the fish that once had teemed in the cold clean waters were gone, hunted to exhaustion or tempted away by some enticing current, so that the longboat beached on their shore might as well have been driftwood. The scrawny beasts that sniffed around the fields did not have the meat on their bones to make them worth killing, though killed they would have to be once winter came, or else lost to the cold or starved out on the frozen grass. It was set to be the worst famine of all those that Egil could remember. And now this.

      ‘They could be here at any moment,’ Hákon pressed. ‘We must at least tell the men to arm themselves.’

      Egil gave a weary smile. ‘Hákon, if they heard the sounds that you and I did last night and they still haven’t thought to arm themselves, then they’re not the sort of men we need.’ He sighed, and his feet crunched in the gravel as he turned once again to gaze up into the barren hills. ‘Bjọrn,’ he said, without turning around. ‘Go down and fetch Meili.’

      Wordlessly, his youngest son detached himself from the group and started back down the rutted road towards town. Egil could hear the other men muttering under their breaths, and waited for Hákon to speak. In fact, it was Fafrir who responded.

      ‘Father,’ he queried gently, ‘one man against what some say is the largest army ever to have marched?’

      Egil crunched around to face them, and opened his hands. ‘One man against thousands is a poor contest,’ he agreed. ‘But sending a hundred against the same number would gain us little, and lose us much.’

      While they waited, Egil studied their faces. Uncertainty lingered in some of their eyes, but they were all loyal men who trusted his experience and remembered how he’d served them in the past. Yet in truth, he thought, what do I know? This was as new to him as to any of them. No invading force ever bothered with Helvik, even if they did find a waystone that acknowledged it. Theirs was a realm that had not needed to raise an army in living memory. And yet Helvik had seen no shortage of blood.

      Egil ran his eyes along the group standing before him, remembering then that most of the good men, the truly good men who he would want by his side at a time such as this, were already dead. They may not have had food for their children, but the soldiers of Helvik had always had their pride. A history of feuding clans had savaged the population, until it became ingrained within the culture of the town. Year upon year, the slightest of insults against family honour were ruthlessly punished. Blood paid for blood. Brother avenged brother, cousin avenged cousin. There was always someone owed vengeance. Helvik had seemed intent on becoming a town of widows.

      Thoughts of those days, of the decimation of his generation, brought the same memory they always did to Egil’s mind. He glanced to his right and found where Gunnarr Folkvarrsson stood nearby, keeping a respectful silence. So tall he was now, white-blond hair and a broad face of wind-weathered skin. Folkvarr’s sword was under his arm, and Egil looked at it and remembered the night when blood ties had forced him to watch his truest friend slain before the eyes of his wife and only son. It had been the last that Egil could tolerate; as soon as he was named ruler of Helvik, he made one desperate bid to preserve his people.

      As an isolated realm, raging sea on one side and towering mountains the other, Helvik had developed a society far different from the other kingdoms occupying the same sprawling continent. Its inhabitants had always been free to live as they chose. If they wanted to steal from each other, they could steal. If they wanted to fight each other, they could fight. Men chose their own culprits and their own punishments, and any attempts by the people to live in harmony had no other basis than the unfortunate need for coexistence. Rulers like Egil were followed purely because they had proven themselves most fit to lead. There were no noblemen, no peasants, no slaves. No restraining principles determined by any power that claimed to have greater authority than that of the ordinary autonomous man. No rules. That was, until Egil imposed one upon them.

      It was a single rule, known by the townsfolk simply as ‘the rule’, and every inhabitant had agreed to either leave or submit to its governance. It was simple, self-implementing, requiring no detail, no interpretation, no single enforcer. Its wording was plain: ‘No person of Helvik may kill another person of Helvik. Any person who breaks this rule is no longer a person of Helvik.’

      From that day forward, a line was drawn under the events of the past. When old grievances surfaced and the call of the sword was too strong, the rule stopped the blight of vengeance from spreading. Those who broke the rule lost their place in society, and so became liable to be struck down in retribution by any person wishing to claim it; for the rule said nothing against taking the lives of those who were not persons of Helvik. Thus, such punishers were protected from recrimination, for in the eyes of the rule they had done nothing wrong, and any who wished to retaliate against them would have to break the rule themselves in order to do so.

      It was Egil’s proudest achievement. The years that had passed since that day had not been enough to rebuild a broken population, especially when that time had seen only a handful of decent harvests, but nevertheless Egil had felt that, since the inception of the rule, Helvik had finally begun to pull together. It had started to fight back against the curse that had gripped it for so long.

      Yet now it was faced with complete extinction.

      The