Balefires

by David Drake

  Save for when von Arnheim hunted, Rausch's time was his own. If he chose to examine a hedgerow on his knees, snuffling like a gray-jowled hound, who was there to gainsay him? So Rausch listened and he watched, while as carefully as a cathedral mason his mind was constructing the hunt that would crown him and his master.

  When the first hound belled, Lena ignored it. She knew now from long experience that the dogs were not her enemies. She had been away from the family the past three days, spending the daylit hours in the Forest fringe and the nights deeper into the open lands than she had ever gone before. The castle sitting gray on a detached plateau had drawn her eyes months earlier, but anticipation itself had delayed her approach to it. Now at last she had slipped to the very edge of its straggling curtain walls, let her fingers caress the rough stone. It could easily be climbed, but its hidden interior made the act not a moment's but a thing for long pondering in the Forest depths. That in her mind, Lena had started back, her course across the fields more hasty than deliberate since she had let the dawn stride too nearby as she studied the wall.

  The second joyous bugling would have been a surface impression as well, except for the prompt echo of the hunting horn.

  Lena was already among the trees. Her first reaction was that of her foster father, to choose the highest and secrete herself in the upper branches. A premonition that this hunt was no chance crossing of her path drove her instead to headlong flight. Panic rode her, a brutal jockey whose violence spewed out the strength that might otherwise have carried her free.

  For a mile she sprinted, leaping obstacles and dreading at every instant that the hounds would give tongue again. They did not. She half turned, then, her nerves begging for the object of their fear, and her right shoulder brushed an oak sapling. It was no more than a glancing blow, but it sufficed to break her stride and allow reaction to her masterless effort throw her to the ground.

  And as she lay sobbing on the needle-strewn earth, the hounds and the horn sounded again. She had gained on her pursuers; but they knew, dogs and men, that a hunt was decided in its last moments, not the first. They suited their pace to that certainty. With proper governance, Lena could have run all day. In the darkness, when the men were blind and the dogs nervously unwilling to range ahead, she would have disappeared. A night of sleepless excitement and the disastrous sprint had gutted her. Fear drove Lena back to her feet, but she had lost the ability to force the pace.

  With leisure to choose the course, Lena might have led the hunt into empty stretches of the Forest where only squirrels would have been disturbed by its passage. Terror eliminated all chance of such forethought and she plunged straight as a plumb line for the distant cedar copse in which she had last huddled with the woods folk. Perhaps she would have done the same in any event: Lena had never before been hunted, and she lacked the instincts of the wild-born.

  The sun was well up before a bright goosequill signaled the nearest of the hunters to Lena's backward glance. The feather bobbed, visible when the green hat and man and charger beneath it were not. She turned as if unfeeling, her face an ivory cameo, her legs scissors of bronze. She did not pump her arms as she ran, avoiding a practice that could stitch a runner's torso with cramps while the great veins of his legs still balanced oxygen and poisons in the working muscles.

  The hounds were close behind her. The men may not have known how close, for except in that instant's flash down an aisle of trees they had been beyond sight. Rausch left little to chance, and two of the riders were horse handlers leading picked remudas. But time was lost changing from foundered mounts to fresh ones, and the strings could not follow with the ease of the unhindered riders through brush that clutched at leadropes. The dogs, loping with their muzzles high and quivering with the fresh scent, yelped madly but did not attempt to close the twenty yards separating them from their quarry. They were the fingers of Death, but not his jaws.

  In a noon-bright clearing deep in the Forest, Lena stumbled a second time. She rolled smoothly to her feet and collapsed, her reflexes whole but her body without the strength to effect them. The hounds were in a yapping, yelping circle around her. When she tried to rise again the foam-smeared breast of a great stallion slammed her down.

  Lena's lungs were balls of yellow fire. Above her bellowed the green-suited hunter, a little man who had unslung his cocked arbalest to wave it as a signal of triumph.

  The knobbed end of a ten-foot tree limb dashed his brains out with the effectiveness of a trebuchet.

  Kue-meh, bandy-legged and slight, had darted through the pack. If her strength was inferior to that of Kort, it was still beyond the standards of true men-and the female had the cold will to overcome panic and act in the face of catastrophe. The hounds gave back, snarling. The riderless horse lurched away from the dragging weight still caught in the reins. Two more men, Karl in red silk and cloth-of-gold and Rausch beside him, his grim face a fortress in the midst of chaos, burst into the clearing in which their victim lay: Kue-meh hissed at them and waggled her brain-spattered club.

  Rausch reined up and his left hand caught his master's bridle as well, preventing the youth from thrusting into the deadly circle of the club. Then he whistled and from behind his horse, stark as Furies, loped a pair of mastiffs.

  There was neither choice nor hope. Kue-meh strode forward as boldly as if her death were not certain. She swung at the nearer of the mastiffs, missing her aim as it reared back. Kort bellowed from the edge of the clearing, but his rage was too late. The second mastiff 's leap ended with its fangs grinding on the bones of Kue-meh's right shoulder. She cried out despairingly as the first dog's jaws closed on her head.

  Her neck popped loudly.

  The smack of a hunting crossbow was simultaneous.

  Halfway between the brush and the killer dogs, Kort's body jerked backwards. The fourth hunter had ridden into the clearing, having paused first to lay a square-headed quarrel in the launching groove of his weapon. The great iron bolt lifted Kort, carrying part of his breastbone with it through the back of his ribs.

  The mastiffs stalked away as the pack began to scuffle for its trophies. The archer slung his arbalest from the saddle of his blowing horse and dismounted to whip the dogs away from Kort. Rausch, too, slipped to the ground, a purposeful thumb on the edge of his blade as he walked toward Kue-meh.

  "No, these-creatures-are unclean," the Ritter said, triumph vibrant through the weariness of his voice. "We won't carry those back. Let the dogs eat." He lifted himself out of the saddle. His eyes remained fixed on Lena's, holding her firm as a snake would a rabbit. His breeches and tunic were shot with gold no brighter than his unbound hair. Froth from the succession of horses he had ridden to death blackened his calves and thighs, and his tunic was dark with his own sweat. Still his broad shoulders did not droop and there was laughter on his tongue after he splashed it with wine from the skin Rausch offered. "So… She gave us a run, did she not, my Rauschkin? But I think she was worth a few horses, no…? And even poor Hermann, he rode well, but it was his own fault if he let a troll brain him."

  In a more businesslike voice he added to Rausch, "Be ready to hold her arms."

  Lena's eyes were open, staring. But even if the fact registered on her mind, she would not at first have understood why von Arnheim was unlacing his breeches.

  ***

  Eventually, awareness returned. They had tied her for the ride back to the castle, her wrists to the saddlehorn and her ankles lashed to one another beneath the horse's belly. That pain she had escaped as during the grim, slow jogging she lay slumped over the corpse of Hermann who hung crosswise in front of her. Her blond hair was matted over a pair of transverse welts. Rausch had finally used the loaded end of his whip to quiet the girl for his master.

  Her thighs were sticky with blood, some of it from the brambles.

  She was in a tiny room when she awakened. Outside, a mastiff growled. It had a low rumble, penetrating without being loud, that could terrify in a way that the frenzied barking
of lesser beasts could not. The hour was long past sundown, but odor alone told Lena that she had been thrust into an empty kennel with the mastiffs on guard at the opening. Unlike Karl's human retainers, the great dogs could be depended on to keep all others away from what was, for now, the Ritter's property alone.

  Lena squirmed to the doorway. A horse-huge mastiff lay across it. The beast's head was raised and one of the dog handlers, well aware of the brute's capabilities, was scuttling away across the muddy courtyard. Only the casks of strong ale, broached for the Ritter's triumph, had given the man courage to approach as closely as he had.

  Awakened by the intruder, the brindled dog turned to lick its own flanks. Lena froze, but moonlight on her hair drew the broad muzzle into the opening. The eyes were calm and dark-pupiled, larger than a man's. The mastiff 's tongue flapped against Lena's temple like a soft rag, sponging at the blood caked there.

  Fearfully-no present kindness would erase memory of Kue-meh's last moment of life-Lena brushed her fingers across the dog's forehead, then caressed the upthrust ears. Power burred again in the dog's thorax, but it now was rich with delight. The head gave back, directed by the girl's proddings where it could not have been forced, and let her worm out into the open.

  The courtyard was empty of all but the two dogs and a squalor which even the gentle moon limned clearly. The second, fawn-colored, mastiff whined and nuzzled Lena wetly. There was a faint murmuring from the other kennels, wattled domes little different in design from the huts of the peasants. No man or other dog appeared to try the wrath of the killer who now supported the girl on either side.

  Her hands absorbing strength from the skin folded over the dogs' withers, Lena made her way to the wall. Behind her, the tower of the keep climbed seventy feet from the ground. No lights gleamed through its arrow-slits. The drink that had enspirited one man had crumpled all his fellows. Even perfect success could only briefly have counteracted the exertion required to gain it, and the Ritter's ale-sodden feast had done for the stay-at-homes as well. Three crossbowmen snored away their guard on the tower, and the occasional sounds from beyond the low wall to the inner court came from the fowl arid pigs of the humans quartered there. The snorts of the horses sharing the outer courtyard with Lena and the dogs were muted. Seven had been ridden to death during the morning or had been swallowed in the Forest beyond later recall by the exhausted hunters.

  Lena touched the stones of the curtain wall, massive gray blocks more of nature than of man. She was beyond strength or weakness now, as inanimate as the limestone in which her hands found natural holds. The larger, brindled mastiff raised itself to its full height on the wall and licked the sole of her foot. Then she was over, sliding down the face of the wall and beginning to run the instant she touched the rocky soil below. This time there was no pursuit.

  She followed the trail broken by the day's long hunt, knowing the confused scents would hinder the dogs if they were loosed on her. As she passed them, her hands plucked off berries and the pale, tender shoots of budding spruce. Once, in splashing across a rill, she paused for three quick gulps and a mouthful that she absorbed over the next minutes rather than swallowing. Her pace was not particularly swift, but it was as regular as a machine's.

  The forest floor paid little mind to dawn or darkness, but the needles of sunlight piercing to the loam were nearly vertical when Lena reached the scene of death and capture. Kort lay huddled, flies black on the raw wounds which crows had already enlarged. Three of the birds croaked angrily from the limb to which Lena's intrusion had sent them, pacing from side to side and hunching their pinions.

  Kue-meh's face, undisturbed by the fangs of the pack, bore a look of peculiar kindliness and peace. It was the face with which she had greeted Lena seven years before, less resigned than willing to accept. Lena looked away. It was not that for which she had returned.

  "Coo-ee?" she called softly.

  The Forest grew very silent. Even the crows left off their grumblings.

  "Coo-ee?" the girl repeated. The bushes parted as she knew they must, and Chi, then Faal, stood timidly before her. Gurgling sounds that were partly tears and partly words of a language even older than that of the woods folk, Lena threw herself into their arms. She hugged their smooth, furred bodies like the shades of her lost innocence. At last she thrust them back to arm's length. Wiping her face free of the mingled tears, she said, "We must go now, very quickly. There are places in the Forest so far away from here that the Others will never come. They will never find us again."

  She spoke and led the way into the Forest without a glance behind her. Chi followed at once. Faal, a picture of his father now in all but the gray that had tinged Kort's fur, hesitated. As yet he lacked the consciousness of strength that would let him unconcernedly follow into the unknown. But in a moment he ran to catch the females and, as he shambled on at Lena's side, his fingers began caressing the tawny gold of her hair.

  The Barrow Troll

  When I was very young my family was given a run of a 1938 children's magazine called Jack and Jill. The last feature in each issue was a serial, and one of those serials was an adaptation of "Beowulf."

  I have no idea who did that version (I'm not even sure that I was able to read myself at the time; it may have been something my parents read to me), but it was really excellent. I didn't appreciate how good it was until much later. In the adaptation there's reference to the warriors' shields of yellow linden, a vividly realistic detail that I've remembered all my life since.

  Twenty-odd years ago while I was plotting what became my first novel, I did a close reading of "Beowulf" in a literal translation. The shields of yellow linden weren't there. They must have been added by the adaptor to anchor the story in physical reality-which doesn't mean familiar reality, but rather something concrete that the reader can put his mental hands around even if he doesn't precisely understand its purpose. That was an important lesson for me.

  And for those of you who wonder (as I did), "linden" is the common continental name for trees Americans call basswood. They're generally called lime trees in Britain.

  Besides "Beowulf" I read and reread The Age of Fable, Bulfinch's retelling of Norse myth in a series of connected stories. (I had no idea how hard it would be to do that until I tried the same thing many years later in the Northworld trilogy.) Then I read translations of the "Eddas," the Icelandic originals from which Bulfinch had worked And finally I came to the Icelandic sagas themselves. I found their style and outlook very similar to my own. The narration is terse. Although the tales are fiction or at least fictionalized, there's a real attempt to keep the action realistic: even supernatural events are described in a realistic fashion.

  Also the sagas contain a great deal of humor, but it's understated and frequently black beyond modern imagination. (For example, the posse hunting Gunnar arrives at his house. One of their number goes to the door to scout the situation. Gunnar stabs him with a spear. The scout walks back to his fellows who ask, "Is Gunnar home?" "I don't know," the scout replies, "but his spear is." And drops dead.)

  Incidentally, my taste for that sort of joke is one of the reasons folks often think there's no humor at all in my fiction. They're wrong, but they're probably happier people for not understanding.

  "The Barrow Troll" was an attempt to turn the elements I found in saga narration into a modern fantasy short story. Michel Parry bought it for a British collection titled Savage Heroes, but Stu Schiff brought the story out in Whispers magazine before its British publication.

  I think "The Barrow Troll" succeeds at what it attempts about as well as anything that I've written.

  Playfully, Ulf Womanslayer twitched the cord bound to his saddlehorn."Awake, priest? Soon you can get to work." "My work is saving souls, not being dragged into the wilderness by madmen," Johann muttered under his breath. The other end of the cord was around his neck, not that of his horse. A trickle of blood oozed into his cassock from the reopened scab, but he was afraid to loosen the knot. Ulf m
ight look back. Johann had already seen his captor go into a berserk rage. Over the Northerner's right shoulder rode his axe, a heavy hooked blade on a four-foot shaft. Ulf had swung it like a willow-wand when three Christian traders in Schleswig had seen the priest and tried to free him. The memory of the last man in three pieces as head and sword arm sprang from his spouting torso was still enough to roil Johann's stomach.

  "We'll have a clear night with a moon, priest; a good night for our business." Ulf stretched and laughed aloud, setting a raven on a fir knot to squawking back at him. The berserker was following a ridge line that divided wooded slopes with a spine too thin-soiled to bear trees. The flanking forests still loomed above the riders. In three days, now, Johann had seen no man but his captor, nor even a tendril of smoke from a lone cabin. Even the route they were taking to Parmavale was no mantrack but an accident of nature.

  "So lonely," the priest said aloud.

  Ulf hunched hugely in his bearskin and replied, "You soft folk in the south, you live too close anyway. Is it your Christ-god, do you think?"

  "Hedeby's a city," the German priest protested, his fingers toying with his torn robe, "and my brother trades to Uppsala… But why bring me to this manless waste?"

  "Oh, there were men once, so the tale goes," Ulf said. Here in the empty forest he was more willing for conversation than he had been the first few days of their ride north. "Few enough, and long enough ago. But there were farms in Parmavale, and a lordling of sorts who went a-viking against the Irish. But then the troll came and the men went, and there was nothing left to draw others. So they thought."

  "You Northerners believe in trolls, so my brother tells me," said the priest.

  "Aye, long before the gold I'd heard of the Parma troll," the berserker agreed. "Ox broad and stronger than ten men, shaggy as a denned bear."