Saga - AU!AU triple drabble
Brokeback AU!AU drabble (300 words). Jack and Ennis in the time of the vikings. Rated PG. No warnings.
Disclaimer: Jack, Ennis and Brokeback Mountain do not belong to me, but to Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry and Focus Features. I make no profit of any kind except for the inspiration I find in thinking and writing of Jack and Ennis.
A/Ns:
"Kaupang" was the common name for a number of significant trade townships in viking era Scandinavia.
The Norns were the 3 Norse goddesses of fate who spun the life thread of every human being and decided when it was to be cut off.
Saga
When Einnis Elmarson first traveled west in Viking at 19 years of age, he grabbed at every chance to lose himself in berserker rage in the skirmishes along the foreign coast.
Looting and fighting gave him momentary release from a constant tension, an unease stemming from always being around other men in the cramped confines of their proud dragon-headed long-ship or in their temporary camps along the shores. The rush of combat made him forget his occasional strong and deeply shameful desires, despised by the gods and his brothers-in-arms alike.
It was late in the summer, and time had come to prepare for the return home over the North Sea. Theirs had been a successful campaign, fairly rich in loot, but with few fatalities among their own, and no ship lost.
During the last raid they pillaged a small up-river monastery. The place turned out to be disappointingly poor, but where gold and jewels wanted, humans were also a valuable commodity.
A captive Irish newly-made monk, Eoin of Telach Og, fell to Einnis’s part of the loot and was dragged onboard bleeding from the head and half unconscious. He was knocked out during the attack while fending off two warriors with a wooden pole, since he had no other weapon to hand.
Einnis needed gold for the bride price if he was to marry Arna Mjódsdottir before yule, the way he’d agreed it with her and her father. He planned on taking the captured monk home to sell him at the Kaupang’s thrall market. The man looked healthy enough. He would fetch a good price.
Little did either man know that the Norns were slowly spinning out different fates for them, - that their life threads would be forming strangely entwined patterns on the large loom of all men’s lives….
A/N II:
Writing this little piece brought home to me how taxing it would be, and how much research it would require, to write a fully-fledged historic fanfic. Deciding on the names alone can be a challenge. Does one go for names that mean the same as the original ones (ie. build on the Norse words for Island and Ocean), or use historical real names that look relatively similar to the original, or just make up norse-sounding names from the canon ones? Here, I've used all those options. Ennis's name is an invented norsification of canon, Eoin is midieval Irish for John/Jack, the place name Telach Og means"Hill of the youths" which I found rather fitting, Arna is a real Norse woman's name and Mjod is a wordplay on Alma's canon name "Beers". Whew!