Chapter Nine

Harold followed the GPS instructions to get onto to Interstate 5 south and then moved into the HOV lane.  To the south the clouds had cleared and Harold was distracted for a moment by the sight of Mt. Rainier and wondered if he’d find time to climb it.  Josephine brought him back to the mission they shared.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Her tone was nonchalant, as if they were going for a drive in the country on a Sunday afternoon.  Harold thought it sounded a little forced.  Draugar had what earðkinar considered beautiful and almost musical voices, but to Harold’s ulfhednar ears their voices had a lot more complexity.  Josephine seemed to be trying to control that complexity and present a particular vocal image.   

Matching her nonchalant tone Harold answered, “No.  My information is no better than yours.  It may in fact be missing some information you have.  I do know the ulfhednar clan is supposed to be a native tribe, but not which one.  You said we need to head to the coast.  Do you know which tribe we are in search of?”   

Josephine looked at Harold and froze in what he now understood was her ‘thinking’ behaviour.  A couple of seconds passed and she started thumb tapping on her phone then looked up, “No.  Nothing other than tribes on the…Olympic Peninsula.  I’ve got a list of them here. We have the Quinault, Hoh, Quileute, Makah, Elwah, S’Klallam and the Skokomish.  I may have mis-pronounced some of those.”   

Harold changed lanes around a semi-truck and glanced over at her, “Well, we’ll soon learn how to pronounce them properly.  Where do we start?”   

Harold changed lanes again around a Prius he felt was going too slow.  Josephine involuntarily pushed her feet into the floorboards and her back further into the seat.  “Do you always drive like this?”

Harold couldn’t stop the smirk on his face, “You’re effectively immortal, nearly indestructible and you’re worried about having a car accident?” Just for effect he changed lanes again and sped up.  

“All of that doesn’t change the fact that being in an accident is scary and something to avoid.” Josephine looked at Harold with an expression that clearly communicated her opinion that Harold was an idiot.  Harold slowed down to 10 mph over the speed limit.  “Very well.”   

“Thank you. The list is in order from the coast going up and around the peninsula.  So we are heading to…” Josephine did a quick search, “… the town of Ocean Shores then north.” She entered in Ocean Shores on the SUV’s GPS and a few seconds later it announced, “Continue south on Interstate 5 to Highway 101 west.”   

Harold looked at the GPS, “We have a couple of hours to Ocean Shores.  You really want to hear about my people’s history?” He hoped she did, he enjoyed talking about it.  Although the sun was shining on Mt. Rainier, they had moved under a light grey sky and found themselves driving into drizzle then rain. Harold changed the wiper setting to constant.  

“Yes I do.” Her voice had that slightly too relaxed and nonchalant tone again.   

“Good, but let’s start with what you know.”  Harold guessed that draugar knowledge would be missing some things and would most likely be skewed in an unfavourable light against his people.  

Josephine reclined her seat back a little, “Well, you ulfhednar used to hunt and eat humans the same as vampires until about the 1500’s.   Around that time you broke the covenant you had with your heathen gods and re-wrote your holy books to purge them of any mention of that or eating humans.  Starting in the 1900’s your people started hunting my kind.  The reasons for that are to prevent us from fulfilling god’s plan for Lilith and Cain’s chosen and to establish your own dominance over humanity.”  

She leaned forward a little to look at Harold and saw him smiling in a blatantly condescending way.  Josephine scowled at him, “Or at least that’s what I was taught by my mentor, and read in the Beriyt.”  

“Sorry.  Remind me to ask you more about that later.”  Harold was curious, how did draugar pass knowledge along? Did they even have a formal education system and career paths like his people did?   

“So, to starting at the beginning.  We were created by Odin to fight in battles for his selected clans and tribes and by extension, consider ourselves chosen by Odin to fight for the human species in the present day.  This wasn’t always the case.  Until the Renaissance we considered humans an alternate food source in addition to the other sources of food like sheep, chicken and cows.  Unlike your people we have always considered other animals as a source of food.  Vegetables too.” Harold smiled at what he thought was a clever joke, but Josephine was back in her motionless state staring at Harold.  He was a little disappointed. Some reaction would have been better than her draug statue expression.   

“Some human tribes or clans we fought for, other human tribes or clans were a source of food like a herd of cattle or flock of sheep.”  No matter how many times he thought of that, it still felt personally shameful.  It was if the dishonor of his ancestors was something that cast a shadow over his life.  Inhaling sharply he glanced at Josephine, her face was still that of a perfect statue.  Exhaling quietly he continued, “With the change in western civilization’s philosophies a group of Ulfhednar renounced the taking of human life and adopted much of the tenants of the times, Humanist philosophy, science, egalitarianism, etc.  Starting with that small group, an on again, off again war of words and blood was fought for nearly a full century.  It finally ended when those holding to the old ways agreed that since the earðkin civilization they had been born to and created to fight for was changing, they too should change. There were a few that slipped back into the old ways.  We hunted them down.”  Harold stopped talking.  His mind went back to WWII and his first missions in Germany hunting other Ulfhednar.

Harold glanced at Josephine to see if her expression changed with that last revelation.  It hadn’t.  Looking back at the road Harold was surprised when Josephine suddenly said, “Hmmm…” He looked at her again but she had already reverted to her frozen face mode. Harold continued.

“Your people, the draugar, did not change your world view and continued to consider humans as a food source.  Initially this didn’t matter to us, it was what we had been like.   The world was sparsely populated which meant our two peoples rarely encountered each other.  With the dramatic increase in world population starting in the 1900’s this become more of a problem as we encountered each other more frequently.  The activities of draugar were more and more viewed by us as barbaric and a throwback to a darker time.  We began to see ourselves as continuing the tradition as warriors of Odin like our ancestors had done in olden days.  We feel we have a religious responsibility to protect earðkinar”.   

Harold realized he’d been talking for a while and stopped.  He felt a little uncomfortable but couldn’t figure out why.  He also found he didn’t want to look at Josephine, and didn’t understand the why of that either.  He changed lanes to give himself something to do.  After a few miles he heard Josephine move and forced himself to look at her.  She was looking out the side window.   

“We’ve never changed.  My people count their years in the hundreds and thousands of years.  We never change.  Our beliefs, our existence, how we see the world and live in it.  “Cain was asked by his creations, “For what purpose do the years not affect us, disease ignore us, and injuries not kill us?” Cain spoke saying, “The plans of Al-Hasib are not measured in years, decades or centuries but in eons.  For the purpose of mastering the world upon the decimation of mankind, the years do not affect us, disease ignores us and injuries do not kill us.”  We have a book that tells us what we are and why we are.  Our world exists within that book.  I hate it.” Josephine looked at Harold.  She seemed angry and tired at the same time, like someone that had been fighting and would never surrender, but had resigned themselves to defeat.  She turned to look out the window again.  

Harold wanted to say something to make her feel better, but caught himself.  Why would he want to make her feel better anyway?  To fill the silence he turned on the radio and found a station playing country and western and left it there as they drove.