Because I am a bit bored tonight, I will post for your edification a snippet of my ongoing story of a dystopian Norway. I should appreciate your comments and criticisms. Background info: Ynglings are the ruling caste of the Norwegian Empire, which extends over the whole of Scandinavia, parts of the Baltic littoral, and considerable chunks of the Americas. A stril is anyone who is not an Yngling. At the moment, Norway is at war with the Kingdoms of Poland and Burgundy.
Dawn, March 18th, 1873 Outside Viipuri, on the Finnish front
The Poles had been bringing up reinforcements for the past month, wild tribesmen off their Siberian steppes. Matti had seen them for himself two days before, when the Ynglings had brought in prisoners; little yellow-brown men with savage eyes, recruited with a promise of vodka and loot. Not that I'm so different myself, he admitted; it was thin rations in Viipuri these days, if you weren't in the fighting services, and had been for as long as he could remember. The Army got potatoes every day, and meat sometimes - "whenever the Poles attack", as the bitter jest went. It had been a long time since the front moved in Finland. The rumour mill had it that there would be another attack soon, which was why Matti was out here in the chill, reinforcing the usual watch. He had asked one of the Ynglings about it the night before, after the prisoners had been - his mind shied from the word; it was better not to think too closely about what happened to prisoners. The Yngling had laughed, and told him that if he was so eager to use his rifle, he'd certainly get a chance. Then he'd grown serious, with that instant deadening of the face that was the hallmark of a veteran of this war, and nodded in the direction of the Polish trenches. "Hear that howling, lad?" he had said. "That's what happens when you give good vodka to Mongols. They'll be over here tomorrow, depend on it." At that moment, Matti was shaken out of his reverie by more howling from the Polish lines. He looked up quickly over the edge of his trench. Two hundred yards from where he stood, men were boiling out of the ground, throwing themselves into a death-or-glory dash across the beaten zone between the trenches. They screamed as they ran, an ululating, high-pitched howl that woke ancient instinct in anyone who heard it : Enemy tribe, raid, come out to fight! There was no need to raise the alarm, the Poles had done that quite effectively; Matti sprang instead to a firing-step and brought his rifle to bear. There was no need to aim at such a mass of men, just fire away, reload, fire again. Meanwhile, around him his comrades were coming out of their dugouts to take up their own firing positions; to his right a machine gun began to bang away, then others took it up, and the huge whizz-bang of 78-millimeter shells began to blow great holes in the onrushing host. The shoulder-to-shoulder rush of the attackers made them a perfect target; within half a minute Matti found that he had to take aim, then that he had to search for targets, then that there was nothing to shoot at except the wounded writhing on the ground. He refrained, not from any sense of mercy but because he knew well the Yngling view on strils who wasted ammunition; only snipers were to fire at wounded. Someone clapped him on the back, staggering him slightly; it was the Yngling he'd spoken to the night before. "All right, lad, not bad. Not everyone can shoot their first time, and then stop shooting when it's over. You'll do." Matti stared in awe at the unprecedented spectacle of an Yngling being friendly, then found the wits to smile weakly. Not quite knowing how to handle the situation, he turned to look down the slope at the remnants of the broken attack; for a hundred yards or more the ground was littered with shattered bodies, but none had come within ten meters of his own trench. Perhaps sensing his discomfort, the Yngling did the same, and nothing was said for a minute or so. At last Matti decided that the Yngling really was trying to be friendly, and he'd better make an effort himself. "Why do they do this?", he asked, gesturing at where the wounded were crawling back to the Polish lines. "It can't be doing them much good." The snap-snap-snap of the designated snipers doing their best to finish off the wounded underscored his words. "I don't think they've quite grasped what a machine gun really does, yet. Or maybe they just don't care what happens to Mongols? Every man we have to keep here is one who can't fight in Germany. If they never attacked us we'd thin out the lines and attack them somewhere else." There was silence for another minute or so, except for the crackling of the snipers and the moaning cries of the Polish wounded. Then the Yngling shook himself - an impressive sight to a war-starved boy like Matti; he felt sure the man could crush his head in one massive hand - and sighed. "Well, that's nothing for us to worry about. We go where we're told and shoot Poles when they attack, eh? And it looks like we'll have meat tonight. It's not a bad war, when you think about it."
Posted by dantesparadigm (Member # 8756) on :
Polish army?
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
It's an alternative history. Poland owns most of modern Russia, except for what they handed over to me in the last war.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
So far, I like it and would not mind reading more.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
A different part of the same war. It has been going on for a long time; even for a dystopian society, some of the consequences are less than pleasant. Note on vocabulary : The Hird is the regular army; it takes its name from the personal bodyguard of the old Norwegian kings, from which in this history it is directly descended.
Some time after midnight, August 23rd, 1873 Near Malmö, Sweden
The killer crouched among the bodies in the shell hole, waiting for the hour before dawn. That was his time, when the life-rhythm of his prey reached its lowest ebb, when even the most disciplined sentry felt his eyelids droop. A jump, a swift slash with a knife, and at dawn there would be one less watchman to sound the alarm when the Yngling infiltrators rose like ghosts from their hiding places just outside the quick-scratched trenches. At noon they would be a kilometer closer to Malmö, but the killer was not thinking of that. This was his best time, when he could let all thought go and merely drift, one with the night. Even the familiar distant crackle of a machine gun - some sentry shooting up shadows, no doubt - did not disturb the flow of his no-thought. He had drifted thus for perhaps two hours, dreamily watching the half-moon slide across the sky behind ragged clouds, when a low moaning broke him out of his reverie. Annoyed, he looked around; what the devil could be making that noise out here in no-man's land, in the middle of the night? He should have been able to sit in peace for another two hours, at least. His search was not long; one of the bodies in his shell-hole was moving, awakened perhaps from a fever dream of wounding. He had seen the hole made, earlier in the day, he remembered now; the Burgundians had chosen this spot to make a stand, where the little hillock overlooked the meadow, and some master gunner on their side had fired with malignant accuracy just as several of the Valkyries, following the lay of the land, had formed a clump. Another man might have been amazed that anyone should have survived, but the killer had seen too many of the accidents that ballistics and bodies could combine to make. Having found the source of the noise, he was able to ignore it, and for another long while he drifted in his no-thought, soothed by the wind and the myriad little sounds of a forest. In the night there was no need to feel the fear or frustration or anger that made up most of his life now, and he rejoiced in the lack of emotion. Only slowly did he become aware that the moaning had formed into words, heavy with pain : "Eirik? Is that you? Help me, please..." He snarled with the jangling annoyance of being spoken to and yanked back into the world, but nonetheless focused his attention on the speaker. The moon gave just enough light for his night-adjusted eyes to make out facial features; it was Synje, one of the Valkyries who had joined his unit after the attack on Göteborg. From the way she was sitting, hunched over in misery, a shell fragment had struck her somewhere in the abdomen. She is dying. He knew, abstractly, that there had been a time when he would have cared deeply about that; but the boy named Eirik who would have shed tears over the death of a pretty girl, was long dead, killed in the second winter on the Washington front. Now there was only the killer, for whom the thought was a mere statement of fact : The moon is out. Synje is dying. Still, the ghost of the boy sometimes danced in the head of the killer; and he treasured those moments, even more than his nightly hours of no-thought, for these were the only times when he felt something other than irritation or fear. Now a vague sympathy squelched the killer's momentary impulse to rape - why not, after all? She would be dead in a matter of hours, days at most - and he cast about for some help he could give. He did not think long. A stomach wound was deadly in the best of circumstances; this rapid, pell-mell advance had left the army doctors behind, and anyway she had been out in the cold and the dirt for hours - if the wound was not infected already, it was a miracle. The solution was in any case never far from the killer's mind. He pulled out his big Finn-knife, the Hird's tool of choice for silent killing, and showed it to the girl. A remnant of the boy Eirik made him reach out to touch her grubby cheek; the killer felt nothing, but knew abstractly that the comfort of a human touch was a final favour to grant. Synje's eyes widened in despair and fear, but at nineteen she too was a veteran, and knew what could and could not be done. She nodded, once, whispering "Make it" - but before she could utter 'quick', the killer had struck, with speed that any cobra might envy. An observer would have seen the knife flicker; one moment it was in his hand, the next through her eye and into the brain with a soft slup sound. The body did not even spasm, but simply relaxed with a sigh of air out of still-warm lungs. The killer sat back among the bodies, seeking his flow of no-thought again; the cooling meat across the shell hole was no longer a distraction, and - since she was also not a threat, or a terrain feature - therefore did not exist in the killer's mind. It was of no more or less consequence than the trees or the grass. In a few hours dawn would come. It would be a good day to kill.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
April 24th, 1875 Eindhoven, Burgundy
A sullen drizzle had banked the worst fires, but the grim rumble of distant guns showed that Brussels still stood against the invaders. The mood in the headquarters tent was downcast; the map showed the latest thrust, intended to outflank the Burgundian defenses and come at the city from the south, still bogged down in the outskirts of Etterbeek. Still, they were hard men, these Yngling officers; fifteen years of war had winnowed out the ones who expected attacks to succeed as planned. So it was not unexpected when Yngve, the commander, straightened up from his contemplation of the map with the air of a man who's had enough grimness, and wants things to get done. "All right, gentlemen. It's not so bad as all that. We took prisoners from their 1st Guards in this attack - their last uncommitted regular unit. They can't have anything left but city militia. One more attack, and we'll crack them." The officers had been expecting it, and sat up, ready to begin the planning. But before the general could begin outlining his new plan, his aide spoke up. "The question is, do our troops have one more attack in them?" There was unbelieving silence; heresy had been spoken. The general's reply was almost gentle, the tone of a man offering a really obvious observation that will settle the matter. "Are they not Ynglings?" "No, sir. With respect. They are not. They are strils, and women, and children. And they are very, very tired. We have twenty divisions in the line; and if you combed out the cadre, you might find enough adult Yngling males to man five. And of those, half would have been wounded at least once, and most would have been drafted at sixteen, before completing the full course of training." "Are you saying" - the general paused incredulously - "that Norwegian troops won't fight? And if so, why haven't I heard about it before?" "No, sir. They'll fight, right enough. They are as ready as any of us to die for Norway's freedom. But that's not the question, now. The Burgundians have offered us peace, and the troops know it. Now you're asking them to die for Norway's mere advantage, for a better border in Africa! And with respect, sir, even if they were Ynglings, they would be free men and citizens, and no toys of the General Staff." The silence was long, but no longer unbelieving; unpleasant facts were nothing new to these men. At length the general nodded slowly. "All right. It's a point. When you think about it, they were pretty sluggish in that last attack. But here's another point to consider - in fact, let's send it out as an Order of the Day. The troops won't fight for mere advantage in the peace negotiations, you say, and I think you're right. Well then, how about revenge? These Burgundians stabbed us in the back; they lost us half of Canada, and at least a million dead. Now they stand at bay in their last stronghold; we've fought them back from Grense Jakobselv to the suburbs of Brussels. Shall we let them off, then? Are they to have no more punishment than the loss of a few provinces? I say not. I say we take Brussels, and raze it to the ground, and sow it with salt! I say we take their government prisoners, and hang them up as a sacrifice to the Elder Gods! I say we show the world what it means to betray the Yngling Folk!" There was another silence; the aide nodded slow agreement. "Yes, sir. They'll fight for that. Not for advantage, but for vengeance - for that they'll give us one more attack."
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
I like the snippets quite a bit, although they almost feel like monologues. How do they flow together? Are these all separate vignettes?
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
They're all separate vignettes from the same war, yes. When your plot is 'this is what happened in our game', it's a bit hard to tie things together. I occasionally change voice into a history book, 'From Berserker to Battleship : Norway 1066-1920' to give an overview of what's going on.
Posted by TheGrimace (Member # 9178) on :