Kata'nu: The Promising Hunter Of Skeld's Keep
Kata'nu, son of Esch'ande, was a recently Blooded Yautja hunter in S. D. Perry's short story "Skeld's Keep," published in the 2017 anthology Predator: If It Bleeds. In 820 he traveled to Earth's Norse north as one of three students under the retired elite Tli'uukop, whom the students called One Eye. One Eye judged him the most promising of the group because he looked before he thought, and thought before he spoke. At Skeld's Keep he was wounded among plague-mad defenders, refused to use a pulse-beam failsafe on the last standing Vikings, and left his mask with Jarl the Sword's Son's sworn brother Stelgar before staggering out the gate.
Biography
Student Of One Eye
Kata'nu came from a prestigious line, as did his fellow students, tall and quick-to-charge Shriek and the fixed-blade prodigy Ta'roga. All three were already Blooded and free to pursue their own Hunts. One Eye had come from a long line of great Hunters, elites, and clan leaders, and after an honorable retirement he taught selected students the finer points of tracking and wrist blades. He found Unblooded first outings tiresome, and this voyage was meant to teach already Blooded hunters how to hunt thinking men. Kata'nu was slighter and quieter than the other two, which is why One Eye still rated him first among the three.
After days of watching farmers and fishermen, the students grew impatient, and One Eye nearly took them to hunt great white animals of teeth and talon instead. Then the ship detected forged metals on a coastal vessel: Jarl the Sword's Son and sixteen fighters sailing north to take Skeld's Keep. One Eye was pleased, and even Kata'nu's measured gaze turned eager. He warned the students that the humans looked small and simple but reasoned and adapted, and that Hunters had been bested by them. When Ta'roga boasted of a dozen trophies, One Eye repeated that trophies are the result, not the reason, and that the Hunt is practice and experience.
Watching The Norse Voyage
When the Vikings left the knorr to cross the land, the students were to track them, study them, choose a target, and engage at their own discretion. Tech was forbidden against primitives except a small pulse-beam failsafe each student carried. Kata'nu did not take part in the first clash at the inland camp. Cloaked Ta'roga waited a hundred paces out, planning to take Jarl at dawn with his fixed blade, until bowman Helta put an arrow into his inner thigh. Shriek split Helta's head and cut Thrain's throat, Ta'roga gutted Sten, and then both hunters fled with a broken forearm and a lodged arrow.
One Eye treated the pair in the medical bay and shared their shame. Early mistakes were tolerated, but running was not. Killing them for dishonor was within his rights, yet he offered redemption instead: shed armor, cloak, and weapons, face the prey with bare claws, and stay out of Kata'nu's Hunt, or he would carry their heads to their fathers. He had already decided he would not bring more students to hunt men. He also moved the ship closer to Kata'nu's position, both to clean up afterward and to keep the disgraced pair from charging in too soon.
Approach To The Keep
While the others were still aboard, Kata'nu was already south of Jarl's band, close to the Keep wall, accessing sensory information from the field. He counted the people behind the barrier and checked for forged metals, work One Eye read as patience and a lack of arrogance, the traits of a Hunter. The travelers crossed an open field toward an opening in the wall, past empty farms, siege dead, and burned bone-heaps, with the heavy gate standing open and no one on watch. Mass screaming rose from inside. Jarl's band charged, and Kata'nu, disguised by the falling ice, closed the distance and followed them through the gate.
Heat signatures poured from a large northern structure, most of them unarmed and unsteady. Kata'nu veered toward heaps of dead herd animals with dead men piled on top, then saw that more than half of the charging people wore little or no clothing and shook as if from fever. He checked his mask's filter read and found a high airborne fungal alkaloid spore. The fields outside were heavy with cereal grasses, and he wondered whether the crops or the meat had been infected, or whether the spore was carried on the air. Weaponless sick men attacked the travelers, and then a number of them turned and ran at Kata'nu himself.
Fighting In The Yard
People of both Skeld's and Asger's companies were mixed among the villagers, fevered and unflinching. Kata'nu killed ten men in a few heartbeats, but by then he was visible, dripping with man's blood, and the skilled travelers began to edge toward him. Snow and falling ice had outlined him, and he blamed himself for not brushing the ice from his suit. He felt an odd kinship with the men he had followed here, who kept slaying the howling villagers, as committed as any Hunter to victory or death. Watching from the ship, One Eye released Shriek and Ta'roga unmasked and unarmed rather than lose his only promising student.
A man who had picked up a spear from a fallen traveler rushed at him, and Kata'nu dropped to one knee and slashed the attacker's gut with his wrist blades. Another man used that opening to cut deeply across Kata'nu's shoulder with a sword. Kata'nu pivoted and drove his blades into the swordsman's chest, but the blades stuck, dragging the dying man in close. Voices then drew his attention to the open gate, where Shriek and Ta'roga were striding in, weaponless, their camouflage turned off. Distracted, he did not see the man with the axe until it was too late, and the blade went into his guts.
The Mask And The Withdrawal
Jarl hamstrung a path to Shriek, buried a sword deep in the tall student's neck, and died when Shriek's fist shattered his sternum. Ta'roga was chopped apart. Stelgar, Thoralf, Rangvald the Hammer, Therin, and about a dozen unarmed Keep people by the stables were left alive. Kata'nu woke to One Eye clattering in his ear, telling him he was not dead, to pressure-patch the suit, inject a stim, get up, and use the pulse-beam only to ensure a safe return. The Hunt, One Eye said, was over.
The axe had gone deep, and Kata'nu knelt in a puddle of his own blood. He saw that his trophy, the leader, had fallen with his sword in Shriek's throat. He crawled to his feet and staggered toward Stelgar, holding his guts in, unable to imagine cutting the last standing Vikings down with the failsafe, because he had failed and they had not. He unlatched his mask and held it out as an offering and a trophy, wanting to show that he, Kata'nu, son of Esch'ande, had learned from this Hunt. Stelgar took it, and Kata'nu staggered for the gate as parts of him seemed to disappear into the snow.
Appearance And Code
One Eye describes Kata'nu as slight, nimble, and quiet, a youth whose physical skills were not yet a match for Shriek or Ta'roga. He looked before he thought, and thought before he spoke. In the Keep yard he moved with measured grace until blood and falling ice gave him away. He hunted with a cloak, a mask that could read airborne material, wrist blades, a suit that could take a pressure patch, and the pulse-beam failsafe issued to each student. After the axe went in, he held his guts in with one arm and still refused to use that failsafe on men who had not failed.
The mask he handed to Stelgar was both an offering and a trophy, and he did not need the man to understand his language for the gesture to matter. Stelgar placed the helmet on Jarl's chest, then had the survivors burn Skeld's Keep. Kata'nu's own name never reached the Vikings, who saw only a blood-covered giant leaving the gate. One Eye stayed off the field, ended the Hunt from the ship, and left Earth with his remaining, badly wounded student. The lesson Kata'nu wanted to mark was that he had learned, not that he had won.
Behind The Scenes
S. D. Perry wrote "Skeld's Keep" for Predator: If It Bleeds, which Bryan Thomas Schmidt edited and Titan Books published on 17 October 2017. The story opens dated 820 and splits viewpoint between Jarl's Vikings and the Yautja ship. Kata'nu is named in the hunters' scenes, but the humans never learn that name and only meet him at the end, when he offers the mask to Stelgar. The same Keep battle turns up on Predators vs Vikings and the Viking Predator among Norse-era hunts, alongside later material such as Predator: Killer Of Killers. Perry's piece stands with Correia's Three Sparks among the anthology's historical Earth stories.
Conclusion
Kata'nu was the recently Blooded student One Eye judged most promising when the teaching party came to Skeld's Keep in 820. He followed Jarl's band to the plague-struck yard, killed quickly, and then became visible through blood and ice. A sword cut his shoulder, an axe opened his guts, and he still refused to finish the last Vikings with the failsafe. He left his mask with Stelgar, staggered out the gate, and returned toward the ship as the only one of the three students still alive. The Vikings burned the Keep, and the hunter's name stayed with his own people.
Appearances
- Predator: If It Bleeds, "Skeld's Keep" by S. D. Perry (2017)
Tag Categories: Individual Predators | Predators From The Novels | Predators Who Survived | Historical Predator Hunts | Predator Lore
