The Dual Meaning of "Mercenary"
By Katy Spindler

Too many people claim virtuous ancestors. Their people were patriots/rebels who saved/unseated noble/cruel kings, settled/defended new/native land, and presumably endowed these fine/virile traits to their descendants. These descendants brag about this over a beer glass after a tough day of pressing computer keys before they beg a ride because "they forgot their bus card." Indeed. How the stock has fallen!

It makes me smile, therefore, that I married into a family whose savior was a deserter, a murderer, and a thief. Why not? Times were hard, he adapted. Opportunity knocked and he cut its throat and took its lunch money. With those genes, it makes me think our children will stand a chance of kicking ass in the new tail-finned chrome-plated century.

My husband's ancestor was, in fact, a mercenary.

It was the time of the Napoleonic wars and many young Norwegian men found their way to the petty kingdoms of Germany. These penniless farmers accepted uniforms and with a minimum of training, risked their lives against an unknown enemy for an unseen king. Our mercenary found himself on the battlefield outside Holstein.

He was awakened by a distant crunching thud. The loamy German soil, much admired by a Norwegian farmer, was hard beneath his back. When he pried open his sweat encrusted eyes, the sky was blue and he was clearly alive and barely damaged. The same couldn't be said of many of the other soldiers. Men of both sides were strewn in the torn grass, either leaking and gasping or dead. The thud repeated.

The thud, what was it? From where had it come? Still too dazed to sit up, he turned his head to scan the field, making his movements small to minimize his glaring headache. He fixed on a stooping figure in the field. She was not a merciful angel or a radiant valkyrie come to claim the honored dead. She was a crone, a local woman dressed in undyed wool. The small ragged form used a large stick to steady her slow measured steps.

As he watched, she made her way through the bloody grass, stopping now and again at the men's bodies. She stooped near each of them, her coarse woolen skirts dragging in their spilled fluids. A man in a blue uniform, seeing her approach, feebly waved his arms at her, shooing her away as though she were a predatory raven. The crone leaned back on her staff for a moment, then raised it and delivered a skull shattering blow to the man's head. She knelt and pulled something away from the soldier's midsection. The sun flashed on silver.

The mercenary's dirty hand fumbled at his belt. Every man had been issued a single silver spoon. Silver, although costly, does not rust or corrode with use. He closed his eyes and heard the thud of her stick again and again. The crone was going from body to body selecting their only item of value. If the man was still alive, she crushed in his head and took the spoon. If he were dead, she looted the corpse. The thumps grew nearer. His hand shifted position slightly on his belt to another item he had recently been issued. His eyes opened the merest slit.

By the time the crone made her way to his corner of the field, she was fair jingling with the costly spoons. He lay as still as the slaughtered forms surrounding him. She was so close now he could smell the wet wool of her clothes. Adrenaline flooded his body, but he dared not move. He heard a wet crunch from the body closest to him. She was coming.

The old woman reached him at last. The stillness of his body reassured her and she laid aside the stick. Through his eyelashes he could now see her wrinkled face. Her breath smelled of meat and onions, delicious to a hungry soldier. Long gray hair touched his chest as she leaned over him to grasp the spoon at his waist. Abruptly her expression changed; her mouth opening to display surprisingly well shaped teeth. She had felt the knife in her stomach. The mercenary sprang up and grabbed the stick from the old woman's grasp. She fell back from him mouthing words he barely understood, her hands clawing the grass beside her. He snarled at her, raised the stick, and dealt her the same blow she had dealt the others. The meaty crunch of her skull did not echo.

The mercenary cast aside the bloody stick and fell to his knees. Instead of prayers, he collected the wealth of silver spoons the old woman had scattered in her fear. There were so many. It was more silver than he had ever seen at one time. He crammed them in his pouch and pockets and made for the forest on the edge of the battlefield. There he removed his coat and the most distinctive parts of his uniform, throwing them on the branches of a nearby tree.

Scarcely stopping to sleep, he moved swiftly though the small towns and fields of Northern Germany and caught the first passage to Norway. No one would search for a deserting Norwegian mercenary. Most likely the petty king he had served had already fallen to the powerful Napoleon. He was free and richer than he had ever imagined.

Once in Norway, though a Westerner himself, he bought land in the fertile region of East Norway. The now wealthy farmer married the daughter of a much respected religious leader and produced quite a number of children. Those children had yet more children, spreading back through the kingdom of Norway all the way to the Western lands from which he had originally come. From one of those Western families came my husband. The sole fortune of his family came from one dead German woman and the bloodshed she had caused in the battlefield.

My mother-in-law is very fond of pointing out one of the homesteads of her ancestors and proudly proclaiming their prowess and tenacity. I'm inclined to agree. There is one tiny niggle in my mind about this story, almost like a piece of it is missing. You see, my ancestors come from that very part of Germany. Could it be that murderous crone was one of my own ancestors? My own German grandmother grew up in the Depression and was a practical, unsentimental soul. It's surprisingly easy to imagine her knocking on the heads of men who were probably going to die anyhow. Could it be these two might be reunited through the lives of our future children? It is a fancy, I admit, but would be such an interestingly perverse sort of serendipity.

——

Katy Spindler probably wouldn’t knock your head in on the battlefield. But don’t test her, buddy. Read more accounts of her as yet murder-free life at http://thoughtfulrabbit.blogspot.com.

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