The Turdravens are the most odd and outrageous mob of bloodthirsty rabble which can ever claim the title of a clan. In fact they are not relatives but a gang of stray vikings, adventurers, mercenaries, thugs and ragtag of all sorts. The ethnic origin of the clansmen is mixed, though mostly Slavonic and Scandinavian.
Gorvic
The founder of this so called 'clan', Gorvic, a common Danish warrior and seafarer that was forced out of his home, is not an ordinary person. Long seafarings and solitude are believed to have harmed his mental sanity, but the details of this rumour are mostly unknown. However, this combined with several cranial traumas eventually made him an eccentric and unpredictable person. Most of his decisions, both peacefull and tactical, are completely spontaneous.
Gorvic was the youngest of seven sons of a Danish farmer, and the most brawly and stubborn one. He despised all kinds of crafts and labors and, not being generally smart, often failed the simplest domestic tasks. He used to be an object of compulsion when his brothers struggled to force him being useful in the household, but everytime he managed to repulse, either fighting back or escaping. Having grown up in the atmosphere of constant beating and fighting, he never learned to read and even count farther than to 6. His incredible stubbornness, bad temper and, perhaps, decreased pain threshhold eventually made him a significant threat for his elder brothers while his bones grew stronger, fists bigger and the scull thicker. Despite the numeral superiority of his siblings in the family brawls, he could had been suppressed less and less, becoming an utter and unruly misfit in his family. This family drama ended when one night Gorvic was boundled in his sleep, dragged into a boat and launched into the open sea with a sack on his head.
For some reason, the Gods have had mercy on him, and he survived the journey. His wanderings were long and inconceivable. Not a brilliant navigator, he was washed through Austrvegr upon the shores of the river Dnepr to the koenigdom of Kiev. He was lucky enough to discover a great community of Scandinavian nobles and mercenaries inhabiting Kievan Rus. Joining a warband, which later occured to be the army of knyaz' Sviatoslav's I of Kiev, he followed his campaign against Byzantine Empire to the Thracian lands. During the march he made his friendship with Slavoslav, a Rus descendant of the first Scandinavian settlers and warlords. However, the two warriors failed to return home with the army as they got lost in the woods chasing a local peasant woman after the battle of Arcadiopolis.
The wanderings of the clan-to-come went forth and brought them across the Thracian lands and Bulgaria to the Holy Roman Empire. There they met Virgil, a strange and very young noble, stray for reasons yet unknown. Shaven in a Roman manner, Virgil never told anything about his past. Young, daring and adventurous, he often demonstrated yields of a sound military training, courage and fierceness. He also shared the passion for pillage and ganged up with Gorvic and Slavoslav eagerly.
Virgil
Virgil, a young man with noble and friendly appearance, has the look of the most sensible person among his bloodlusty and not entirely sane mates in the Turdraven clan. Being a bastard son of a major Italian noble and a whore, Virgil has inherited the noble looks and manners of his father and his mother's vicious and cynic intelligence. Virgil has received decent education and weapons training – as it is required for a young nobleman. However where his father saw this as an opportunity for his son to make way into politics, Virgil had a more down-to-earth approach to his future – he wanted to obtain glory and gold on the field of battle, and given his acquired, or, maybe simply developed taste for violence, this desire could not be considered ungrounded.
His first man Virgil killed out of sheer curiosity when he was 13, it was a poor homeless beggar, whom the inquisitive young man has stabbed to death with a sharpened wooden stick. The incident went unnoticed, and the pleasure of taking other being's live has sprout its roots deep in the Virgil's soul. His second murder was committed on his 18th birthday and that man was his father. During one of the family feuds, which were getting more frequent as Virgil was growing older, this old fart, his father, dared to call him a „spoiled semen“ and the „whore‘s spawn“. The young man slit his father's throat, and the flow of cursing into Virgil's address has suddenly turned into an incomprehensible gurgling which ceased very soon.
Virgil fled the city that very evening and soon joined a mercenary company. Young kinslayer‘s flexible code of honor and industrious mind allowed him to live through countless battles and accumulate enough experience to become a formidable opponent on the battlefield. However, being young, ambitious and untied by some unnecessary concepts of honor and loyalty rarely does anything good to anyone, and Virgil started to plot the mutiny against the captain of his company.
Unfortunately, his plan had failed, his fellow plotters had betrayed him to the captain, and Virgil had barely managed to escape. Wandering aimlessly through the countryside afterwards he met two weary and battlehardened travellers: the eccentric Dane named Gorvic with a look of an accomplished halfwit to him and a Slavic warrior Slavoslav. Having estimated the intelligence of his new acquaintances as „slightly below average“ very quickly, Virgil has decided that these two may become a good foundation for his future warband. He gladly joined them, becoming a part of what will later be referred to as the „Turdraven clan“ for the sake of his glorious future exploits. Later, when the clansname was indisputably chosen by Gorvic, Virgil decided to refrain from any appeal, for he has already learned the stubborn and brute temper of their formal leader well.
The joining of Virgil has provided some tactical insight and common sense in the decision making process of the Turdraven warband, directing it in a more or less productive way.
To be continued.
