Red ‘Eric’ and His Fate
“No, you won’t.”
‘Eric’ smiled nastily at Emil, his eyes bright with an insanity eerily reminiscent of the dead woman’s. “It takes more than you all have combined to kill me: the Cleansers staked me out, half-dead from the beating already, so that a giant could feast on me, and I survived it! They knew I was alive after it was long dead, but still they left me there, and so they all deserved to die! That’s why I’ve been killing them off, one by one, here on this island. Why else do you think I egged our dear girl into bringing you here, Emil, if not to get my revenge on you?”
Emil was so tremendously angry that he had trouble speaking for a moment. “All those good Cleansers you slew are dead only because you hunted them down as a Vätte would; are you man enough to face this Cleanser as he stands ready to fight you, or have you lived like a troll for so long that you’ve become one, a coward crouching in the dark until its prey has turned away from it?”
*
‘Eric’ lay dead on the floor, his face twisted into an expression of disbelief. From the center of his chest sprouted Emil’s knife, surrounded by a slowly spreading stain of scarlet.
Emil was sweaty and shivering, and had obviously lost his breakfast over in one corner, but he bore not a cut nor a scrape nor even a bruise from the fight. The look on his face spoke of scars within, though, so Lalli simply went over to his messy Swede friend and gave him a shoulder bump.
*
There was much to be said in favor of razing the path behind you: it forced you to forge ahead; it denied your enemies their former playgrounds, the chance to strike at you from behind, or the ability to backtrack you to your home; it heartened your friends and demoralized your enemies; and many other things. All told, Sigrun was confident that letting Emil burn this place to the ground would fall in the positive column, rather than the negative.
“I was going to let you go as thanks for ridding me of ‘Eric’, but I can’t countenance the burning of my home, so you have to die.”
Razing the path behind you was also a good way to draw your enemies out of cover, whether you intended to or not. The crazy woman had seemed to go down a bit too easily for Sigrun to be comfortable about it, but she hadn’t wanted to risk checking to see if the nut was playing possum until now.
Emil had heard tales handed down from his forebears about things from the Old Times called “action movies” starring demigods like Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jet Li, Wesley Snipes, and many others that featured fights that moved so fiercely and swiftly as to be beyond human capabilities. The fight he now witnessed would have put any of them to shame, he was quite certain. He and Lalli were standing well back and watching carefully, just in case, though Emil doubted his own ability to succeed if Sigrun failed.
Sigrun’s shall we say capability at fighting had obviously surprised the crazy old woman; whether that surprise and Sigrun’s advantages of youth and stamina would be decisive remained to be seen, as the two seemed quite evenly matched otherwise. Each woman was obviously fully versed in how their bodies could best be used to strike or to evade a blow, and each woman was as quick as the other to take advantage of any perceived slip of their opponent’s. Consequently, the fight swiftly transformed into a fast paced and energetic dance of sorts.
Flesh and blood can only keep going for so long, and eventually, the crazy old oman’s endurance gave out enough for her to be fatally slow to dodge one of Sigrun’s blows, and from there, the vicious cycle of more pain/less speed/more hits taken/more pain etc brought the fight to an inevitable end. Trembling with near-exhaustion herself, Sigrun stood proudly over the corpse of her vanquished foe.
*
After they dealt with the crazy old woman, everything just seemed to fall into place. They found their way back to the surface fairly easily; a boat was waiting for them at the quay; and no other surprises jumped out at them on their way to Björköfjärden.
Once at Björköfjärden, they each went their separate ways again: with goodbyes effusive and taciturn, long and short; with promises of correspondence and visits; with laughter, tears and sad smiles; and with a few particularly poignant echoes of their first encounters, now distant enough to seem a lifetime ago.
Emil, Tuuri and Lalli were the last to depart. Trying to keep a manful composure, Emil stuck out his hand to Lalli, only to be surprised when his Finn friend nearly knocked him over in a Tuuri-esque hug, Tuuri joining them after a moment.
Then the boarding call for the ship to Finland sounded, and the Hotakainens hurried away. Emil sighed sadly and began the long walk to his train. Duty called.
