Northlanders, Book Four

The Plague Widow
written by Brian Wood
art by Leandro Fernandez

With a brutal abruptness plague comes along the river just before an equally brutal winter begins, afflicting an isolated Viking settlement along the Russian Volga with a gruesome disease, fatal to all infected.  The Plague Widow breaks with many of the historical conventions in earlier Northlanders arcs, the dependence on datable events, battles and migrations, in favor of apocalyptic horror.

The world is ending.  The Volga, once a thriving vein of trade from the rich south to the wild north, now brings only death and decay and the threat of desperate, plague-ridden marauders.  Faced with an outbreak they do not understand, the settlement is torn between the thuggish bigot Gunborg and educated foreigner Boris with his mysterious theories about contagion and disease.  Boris' solution to the pandemic is radical, demanding strict adherence and complete commitment:  the settlement will be sealed for the winter and all currently infected will be banished to prevent further contagion, a de facto self-quaratine to thwart its spread.  It's a proposition that passes the assembly only by a single vote, that of newly widowed Hilda, wife of a wealthy plague-dead merchant, who then finds herself the target of Gunborg's savage intimidation and terrorizing.

Despite the success of Boris' plan, as the winter lengthens, fear and hostility in the settlement continue to grow.  Gunborg mobilizes his band of warrior thugs to pillage his neighbors already enduring meager rations to stir discontent against the settlement's leader, a clever but feeble man ailing under age and the harsh winter, and Boris his man.  His is the rise of a tyrant in the wake of others' fear and cowardice, the opportunist among the carnage, the social infection that undoes the river town.  "We sealed these doors to keep the death out.  In doing so, we shut ourselves in with what proved to be the greater danger" (The Plague Widow: 165 [Northlanders #27: 21]).

Hilda is not only the arc's central figure, she's its strongest.  Women are often the most vulnerable, and Hilda's beauty, wealth and prominence in the decision to close the settlement make her particularly so.  But, despite Gunborg's intimidation and his nephew Jens' lustful possessiveness, Hilda manages to be far more than a victim of their brutishness.  Her defiance in bearing their humiliation, her savvy in turning it against them, and ultimately her willingness to take her daughter and flee into the winter wild elevate her courage without compromising the injustice she's subjected to. 

Wood's horror fable is in many respects absent of the narrative subtlety characteristic of earlier arcs.  There is little mystery about the town's tragic trajectory, and what suspense it generates is less a question of whether death will come than it is how death will come.  It is the slow descent into hell with eyes wide open.  But Hilda's particular plight is more ambiguously nuanced.  When she is first approached by Jens while hauling her tithe to the great hall, her coarse refusal of his ostensibly well-intentioned help seems rude and unprovoked.  Though his later actions would seem to justify her decision, Jens—like so many of the settlement's residents—might also be a casualty of Gunborg's hate-mongering.  When Thorir first brings food to her door at night, the threat of rape is tangible, though had he lived Hilda might have returned his affection.

Leandro Fernandez illustrates The Plague Widow with gruesome, apocalyptic fervor.  The plague-infected, like so many walking dead, made mad and desperate by their affliction, lay siege on settlement.  The entire world seems to be in decay:  starving wolves feeding on human corpses littering the frigid landscape, timber shattering into frozen shrapnel, boats of dead and dying stagnating in the icy river, the only color from warm flowing blood and the occasional life-preserving fire.

Collects Northlanders #21-28:  "Seven Hundred on the Volga," "Heads of Household," "The Death Ships," "Exposure," "Lives of Crime," "The Descent," "Splinter and Bleed," and "Of Mothers & Daughters"

ISBN:  978-1401228507