The twelve who lived at Newfield Farm huddled quietly in the lightless root cellar and waited for the battle outside to end. They ate raw turnips and drank small beer casked last spring, and they relieved themselves in a hole they’d dug in the far corner and covered with an uncured cow hide. When the darkness that clawed at their eyeballs became intolerable they’d light a small tin lamp and stare into its glow as long as they dared; but after a while the fear of betrayal from the smell of burning fish oil would overwhelm them, and with a puffed sigh they’d descend into blackness again.
The dark of the cellar was timeless. They had only hunger or thirst or the complaints of the body to mark time by; six times they’d gathered around the lamp for their sparse meals, and all the while they’d listened to the sounds of the battle raging outside: horns and men howling, the skirl of pipes and the scream of steel, and the steady pounding of drums mustering more men for the slaughter. Muffled by the earthen walls and the thick planks of the floor overhead, the roar of the battle had been like the grinding of a great millstone, like the groaning of a forest in a gale, distant, uncanny, and vast.
Then, at last, there was only silence.
They lit the lamp.
“Is it over?” whispered the Mistress. Her finery was dirt-stained, lace and velvet lank and bedraggled, but she clutched her lockbox of jewelry fiercely.
“Quiet now, at least,” said the Master. His wideset piggish eyes had sunk into the deep folds of his face; the turnip and beer diet had been a particular hardship for him, used as he was to trout or pheasant or beef washed down with bright southern wines or warmed brandy.
“Could be a ruse, father,” said the Young Master, shivering. “What if they’re just trying to trick us into coming out?”
“We can’t stay down here in this filthy cellar forever!” moaned the Young Mistress. She’d been bitten by a rat when they’d first descended into the cellar and the wound was already festering.
“Turnip’ll run out afore much longer, Master,” said the Cook; even down in the dark she’d had her professional pride, keeping keen track of their stores over the past days, counting out the turnips after each meal. “Bare enough left, I calculate.” Behind her the two Maids murmured in support of their superior’s estimate of the situation.
“Beer is getting’ short too, Master,” said the Foreman, tugging his lock, a habit drilled into him by a lifetime spent in the labor hierarchy. Behind him the four seasonal hired hands muttered their alarm.
“It does sound as if it’s finished, doesn’t it?” said the Master. He shifted in the dark, his movement accompanied by the dull leaden clink of the coins in the flour sack he leaned against.
“But someone won, surely? They could still be out there,” groaned the Young Master. To each of them came visions of hulking armored figures, red dripping blades in their fists, wicked grins on their cruel faces, maddened by victory.
The Master swallowed hard and blew out the lamp.
“I can’t take it anymore, father!” said the Young Mistress in the dark around a mouthful of turnip. The scrabbling of the rats in the far corners of the cellar had been getting louder. “It must’ve been hours, and we still haven’t heard anything! Not even the scrape of furniture! Can’t we get out of here?”
“Mightn’t it be safe now, dear?” asked the Mistress, groping for her husband’s sleeve.
“Perhaps one of us could go out and take a look…” whispered the Master, patting his wife’s hand. “Bertrand!”
“Not me, father!” squeaked the Young Master. His teeth chattered in the darkness.
“Just a peek, son! Just to the door or, at most, out into the yard!”
“They were set up in the north field, across the hedge,” corrected the Foreman, gently.
“Just to the gate by the road then! Hardly anything! Take you no time at all!” said the Master.
“No, no!” sobbed the Young Master. “Mother! Tell him!”
“He is your heir, Sigmund,” said the Mistress, and the Master sighed.
“Who will go then?”
“You go, father!” said the Young Mistress.
“My duty is here, with my family,” he replied, matter-of-factly. His bag of coins rattled in the dark.
“Of course it is dear!” said the Mistress. “Send some of the help!”
“Gutrun?” ventured the Master.
“Argh, I doubt I could make the stairs Master, what with the damp that got into my old leg down here,” said the Cook, her usually strident voice suddenly weak and tremulous.
“Well, how about Ethwin, or Cwen?”
“Master!” gasped the two maids.
“They’re young girls, Sigmund!” said the Mistress.
“Right, right, of course,” said the Master. “Nothing for it then, Ingild.”
“Ah, my eyes aren’t what they used to be, Master,” said the Foreman. “Mayhaps a younger man would be better suited for the job?”
In the darkness on the farthest edge of the circle, the newest hand, most recently hired for the season, felt them turning their gazes on him.
“Arnulf, my boy!” said the Foreman, his voice candied with false cheer. “Run out there and take a quick look about, there’s a good lad!”
“Aye, and there’ll be a shiny groat waiting for you when you get back,” added the Mistress, though the Master only grunted. Their faces were hungry, brittle masks, pale in the ruddy glow of the lamp. Arnulf sighed.
“Let me have your sword, Master,” Arnulf said.
“And leave the women defenseless down here?” he hissed, clutching the tarnished broadsword that, as a man owning more than four hides of land, was both his privilege and duty to own.
“A knife from the kitchen will do you just as well, lad,” said the Foreman, rising stiffly to help Arnulf up off the dirt floor of the cellar.
“Not one of my good knives!” shrieked the Cook.
“Well,” said the Foreman, shrugging. “Go out the back way and through the barn if you must, and take up your sickle – better for you anyway, if you run into anyone out there. Just off to the fields to do your work! I mean, imagine, a hired hand walking around with a sword!” They all chuckled.
The Master stayed at the foot of the stairs and held the lamp high so Arnulf could see his feet. The boards creaked under his boots, and the Master squeaked with fright.
“Quietly! Quietly!”
Arnulf undid the clumsy knot in the rope they’d used to lash the trapdoor shut and handed it to Ingild.
“Be quick now, boy,” said the Foreman, “and knock thrice when you’ve seen that everything is okay.” Arnulf nodded, pushed his shoulder against the heavy door, and heaved. Wood groaned, hinges popped, and then he was out and blinking in the dim scullery. He lowered the trap door, heard Ingild tightening the rope behind it, and then he pushed past the churn and the big copper washbasin towards the faint light shining around the heavy curtain in the doorway.
A golden evening poured through the diamond panes of the two kitchen windows, and his sun-starved eyes watered at the brightness of it. He crept forward, the hiss of the dried rushes under his heels as threatening as any adder, but he reached the nearest window and squinted through the wavy glass. He couldn’t make out much detail, but the only movement he saw was the dance and flicker of the fall garden through the window’s distortions; everything else seemed still enough. Cautiously, and with careful, slow movements, he undid the latch and gently pushed the kitchen window open, savoring a southerly breeze, the first fresh air he’d tasted in who knew how long.
It was not as purely quiet as the thick walls of the farmhouse had led him to believe, however – the outside world resounded with the harsh cackle of ravens and the high, shrill calls of kites. He shivered. How many times had he heard descriptions of just such birdly cacophonies following the great battles in the old songs?
At first, his plan had been to simply wait in the kitchen for a while; a quarter-hour, half-an-hour at most, and then he could knock the all-clear. Why face danger alone? But now, with the fresh air on his face and the field apparently held by carrion birds, his curiosity began to get the better of him.
It was possible that the survivors had moved on, after all; what had precipitated the whole household’s flight into the cellar had been the arrival of several armed bands, each under different banners, suddenly appearing at different points on the horizon, one coming west along the old ridgeline road, another hurrying aggressively out of the forested wilderness to the north, a third jogging doggedly up out of the river valley to south. The sun had glittered on mail and spear points, and when they’d spotted each other they’d immediately begun trumpeting, like rival bulls bellowing challenges across a pasture. The fight could’ve happened and the victor simply resumed their journey. Or maybe they’d all killed each other; it had, after all, sounded like a long, hard battle.
Arnulf hurried out of the kitchen door and through the garden, pausing to peek around the house and through the yard towards the road. Nothing had changed except the hour since they’d all fled into the cellar, and the only sounds that came to his ears remained the steady, strident cawing of countless birds in the distance. Squaring his shoulders, he strode across the yard, through the apple orchard, hopped the fence, and then began climbing the tall, wide, grassy berm that bordered the north field. The way was steep, and he was breathing hard when he finally crested its top, but even so he found air enough in his lungs to gasp at the sight before him.
The north field was a quarter-hide in size and had been left fallow all season; they’d planned to drive the cows there later for forage before putting them in the barn, and Arnulf remembered the soft, fluffy green of the field rippling in the breeze the day before the battle had begun. Now, all the greenery was gone, broken and trampled to dark muddy earth, or drowned beneath a scarlet sea of blood and ruined bodies. The proud shining steel of hauberk and sword, of shield and spear, were now fouled with gore and grime, and those who had borne them lay broken and dismembered. And the birds! They wheeled in their thousands overhead, and just as many dotted the field, shaggy black shapes hopping from one gory heap to another, chuckling as they selected only the choicest of morsels, a rare pickiness afforded them by the surfeit of dishes at their charnel feast.
Arnulf gawped at the unimaginable slaughter in the north field. Hundreds upon hundreds dead, but he could with difficulty recognize five different groups of soldiers among them; at least, there were that many overthrown banners cast aside into the bloody mud, but he could also pick out differences in the armor and weapons and even broad appearances among the bodies – heavyset squat men with plumed helmets and banded iron cuirasses lay in one quarter of the field, while in another the dead were all of a long-limbed and willowy sort, bearing long kite-shaped shields and coats of fine steel scale. He saw other, more outlandish costumes among the dead too, horned helms, fluted plate, wicked axes and cruel curving swords; how many different peoples had come to die in the north field of Newfield Farm, he wondered?
His revery was suddenly interrupted – among the cackling, cawing birds, a new sound had risen, a steady, slaty rasping that Arnulf, good itinerant harvestman that he was, instantly recognized as the hiss of steel on stone. Someone down among the dead was sharpening a blade. How often had he himself made just such a sound, running his scythe every morning over the grooved hunk of flint he kept at the bottom of his travelling pack? But now the sound was a lonely one, each grinding sigh cutting through the noise of the birds, seemingly carried on the wind right to Arnulf’s ears.
He felt himself in the grip of something strange, something greater than himself and his fear – the sound of sharpening called to him, and he went to it, scrambling down the far slope of the berm, his boots splashing in the blood and muck as he picked his way through the dead. The smell of it made his head spin, and he’d soon vomited his last meal of raw turnip, but still he came on, scattering the birds as he went; they would rise like a thundercloud around him, wings harsh and thudding in the thick still air of the battlefield, only to croak their annoyance as they settled in behind him. But above all came the steady, stony gasp of a blade drawn against a whetstone, growing louder as he wandered dazedly across the battlefield.
He splashed through the remains of a company of crossbowmen, then waded through a pulpy morass that had been a shield wall of no doubt valiant soldiery before he finally found the source of the sound. There, in a hollow in the field behind a heap of dismembered dead, an old and dying warrior was propped against the twisted remains of his companions, and he was calmly running the blade of his sword against the smoothed surface of a whetstone.
The warrior paused as Arnulf stumbled into view, reeling as if under some kind of spell.
“Ah,” he said, his voice weary but still strong. “You’ve come at last. I knew the gods would not let me rest without telling the tale of the battle.”
In youth he must’ve been a mighty warrior, Arnulf thought, but even harrowed by age he was a formidable presence, his body corded with muscle, limbs straight, eyes clear, his hands steady as he drew the sword across the stone. Grimed with battle and grievously wounded he nonetheless still held himself with the proud bearing of a war chief. His armor had been of finest make – a silver-chased breastplate, gold-inlaid gauntlets and greaves, and a tall silver helmet with a proud plume of white horsehair – though now all were dented or rent. Arrows and darts had pricked him in a dozen places, and gashes on his arms and legs and face spoke to the ferocity of the fighting. But from under his armor a steady gout of blood poured from the fatal blow.
“All day I have waited,” said the warrior, punctuating the statement with another long draw of his blade against the whetstone. “Here among the dead of friend and foe alike, knowing that one would come eventually. You are from these parts?” Arnulf nodded, watching the long shining sword as it slid across the stone – there was something strange in its steel, a terrible brightness that seemed to grow fiercer and fiercer with every sharpening stroke.
“I’m a harvestman, yer Lordship,” said Arnulf, finally. “I go about the countryside, taking work at the farms, cutting hay, reaping grain, whatever work is needed.”
“What is your name, boy?” The steady rasp of the sword thrummed in Arnulf’s ears.
“Arnulf, yer Lordship.”
“A humble name,” muttered the warrior. A spasm wracked his body and pain flashed through his pale blue eyes, but he seemed to draw strength from the repetitive motion of sharpening the sword. “And a humble man, but it is the gods’ will. Listen well, Arnulf Harvestman – I am Halstein of Hómsvík. Know you that name?” Arnulf gasped.
“Redhand!”
“Aye,” said Halstein, grinning grimly. “I am he they call the Redhand – slayer of the Barrow Trow, hero of the Knytfjord, first over the wall at the siege of Rathscarl. I cut the horn from the head of the Dragon of Jømscrag; I scaled the Tyrborg and warred with the Hairy Ones that live on its peak. Many warriors have I fed to the crows; now it is my turn to feed them.” Halstein coughed, and a trickle of blood ran from his lips. He spat. “But not until I have told you the tale of this battle, that you may spread word of my great deeds here today and the skalds may make great songs of the Last Battle of Halstein of Hómsvík.” The long evening light shone on his face, and the steady hiss of the sword against the whetstone kept time as the old hero chanted his tale to Arnulf, who crouched at his feet, wide-eyed.
“To my meadhall at Hralfsburg came the messengers of King Eirik Eiriksson: war, slaughter, raiding across his borders, his people slain, his farms burned! He called on ancient treaties; he summoned old allies. Steel-girt and with bright swords held aloft we left, one hundred of my men and myself, across the Iron Hills and the Falconwood singing the song of war! But,” he paused, seemed to listen to some change in the tone of the steel scraping on stone, and frowned. “We were betrayed. False Eiriksson had sent a lie to draw us out of our strong place and into the open, where he could fall upon us and slay me. Look you Arnulf Harvestman!” The hero lifted the sword and thrust its point towards one of the fallen banners. “The Blue Bear of the Eiriksson, and around it lay his hundred Housecarls, mighty men with great axes, renowned slayers all! And he came not alone! Look there!” Another thrust of the sword, this time to the left, where masses of dead in blackened chain armor lay butchered. “That is the Honor Guard of Queen Hrissth herself, the Serpent of the South! I slew her twelve sons at the battle of Läambok, and she swore her vengeance! And there!” He jabbed to the right, towards the squat copper-helmed men Arnulf had seen before. “Behold! The Legion of Balbulus! In their galleys they crossed the Strait of Byrnbryth, the lust of slaughter and pillage in the heart of their cruel Praetor!”
Arnulf stood, turning about, his hand over his eyes as he scanned the slaughter. The legionnaires had been cut to pieces, heads and limbs lopped off, and as he looked Halstein pointed out one figure, a richly armored man in a scarlet cloak, the Praetor Balbulus, who had been speared on the point of his own eagle standard. Halstein chuckled at the memory.
“And behind us,” the hero continued, “lie the cream of the Forestjarl’s nobility, lords of leaf and bough, elf-kin from western wood – see how I, Halstein Redhand, butchered them when they came to kill me and claim for themselves the great treasure, the great secret of the Redhand? See my work!”
Arnulf paled – the warrior nearest him had been a fearsome sight in life, a tall and mighty lord, but now he lay neatly bisected, his kite shield split clean through, his fine green-tinted mail shorn apart, his flesh and bones and body split in half, as if by –
“A single strike!” growled Halstein, the glow of battle briefly driving the deathly whiteness from his face. “Aye, that is the work of the Redhand! Look about you, Arnulf Harvestman! What do you see? What sign have I left on my enemies?”
Arnulf looked, his gaze flitting from one ruined body to another – a severed stump of an arm, a cleanly sliced neck, an iron-mailed chest ripped open, a steel-wrapped belly carved wide, a helmeted head split like a summer melon – all cut clean through, hewed by single strokes from a fell hand.
“Aye, you see it, don’t you? Where the blow of the Redhand falls, there parts steel, flesh, bone, as if butter, as if mist!” Halstein laughed, bloody froth foaming at the corners of his mouth.
“The strength to do such things – ” whispered Arnulf, awed.
“Nay, Harvestman,” said the hero, shaking his head. “Though I am accounted uncommonly strong, not even my arms carry such power.” A wily look came into his old eyes. “Guess again?”
Arnulf looked to the sword in Halstein’s hand, the blade that he had been sharpening endlessly while they talked. It shone, it glittered, its edge was like the dawn, its point like a cold, bright star high in the midnight sky.
“Your sword,” he whispered. “It is magic?”
“My sword?” scorned Halstein. He lifted it and examined its impossibly fine edge. “This sword? Tis fine enough work, I suppose; from the forges of Járnhryg, in Øsklund. But you may find a dozen such among my own men, a hundred of its brothers scattered across this field. No, it is not the sword that is my secret. Tis this.” And the dying hero held up the whetstone.
Arnulf leaned close and saw the beauty of the stone, the perfection of its form – a long flat lozenge with a clean surface and a fine, even grit.
“Tis a tool of the gods, boy,” said the hero, his voice growing thick. “In my youth I delved into one of the Lost Barrows in the high country, where the Old Gods are buried, and in one of them I found this whetstone. It sharpens steel to a fineness unimaginable – it will cut a feather on the breeze, a leaf floating in a stream, and the heart out of a man.” He stroked the blade on its surface, and Arnulf could hear the perfect ringing resonance between rock and metal. “It whispers to me, sometimes, of the lore of iron, of the wonder of the sharpened blade! It is the greatest treasure of the world – any sword, any axe, any knife sharpened against it becomes a blade of destiny, sharp enough to cut down a god! This is what my enemies wanted, this is what they tried to take from me in the ambush.” The hero leaned back, his face suddenly gray, his voice weak. “Bury me with my treasure, Arnulf Harvestman. Raise a mound over my bones and the whetstone, that men may sing of my glory and the glory of my final battle unto the end of the world! There must be a song…they must…sing…”
The red light of the setting sun blazed one final time in the eyes of Halstein Redhand, and as he died all the ravens called out, saluting he who had given them so much.
***
In the years and decades and centuries to come the skalds sang songs of deeds unimaginable, feats heroic and prodigious and impossible. Around festival fires they sang, around great roaring hearths in noble halls and in the small, smoky hovels of humble men, the same song was sung.
They sang of great reaping.
They sang of Arnulf Harvestman, the greatest reaper the world had ever known, a man who could harvest a whole hide of land in a single day all on his own, a man who alone reaped the same as ten men!
His scythe, they sang, cut through grain stalks like they were mist, sheared the hay from the earth like it was soft butter. With such ease did Arnulf perform these great feats that he needed no break; indeed, so they sang, the only pause he would take in a day’s work was to, occasionally, take a moment to run the blade of his scythe against his very fine whetstone, once or twice or at most three times, and its edge would shine like the dawn, its curve bright as the sickle moon in the night sky.
— Eric Williams is a writer living on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway in Austin, TX. He has published a collection of weird fiction, Toadstones (Malarkey Press, 2022), and selected, edited, and wrote the introduction for Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation (Paradise Editions, 2023), a collection of the translated fiction that appeared in Weird Tales magazine in the 1920s-40s.