And from behind one of the trees, Daol stepped out, war bow strung with a hunting arrow and already drawing a bead on the raiders chasing after Kern and Nahud’r. With an easy breath he loosed the taut string and sliced the long shaft barely a hand breadth over Kern’s head. A blood-choked scream turned Kern’s attention behind him for a quick glance. In time to see a tall, flame-haired Vanir clutch at the arrow that transfixed his throat before he tumbled to the ground with a dying gargle.
Kern smiled wolfishly, bidding the fallen raider to eternal darkness and cold flame. The thought warmed him, if only for a moment.
Daol stepped back behind the cedar as Kern and Nahud’r ducked beneath a low-slung branch and also swung into the tree’s protective shadow. Reave rested back against the red bark of the second tree, gulping down large breaths of air, greatsword resting tip forward into the earth as he rubbed at the raw wound in his shoulder. His upper lip was swollen and split, and blood stained his teeth. Pushing away from the cedar, he led the small group out from under the spreading branches and into the cleared land that led down into Gaud.
“Sure and you got their attention,” the large man said with a feral grin.
Ashul and Desagrena, the band’s two women, ran in from the tree line a stone’s throw around to the west. As a group they fell back between two mud-walled hovels. Found Ehmish and Garret Blackpatch already crouched by the stone foundation of one building. Ehmish shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Garret, with at least three times the younger man’s years, leaned back against the wall, conserving his strength.
“Yea,” Ashul said, agreeing with Reave’s earlier comment. “They’ll come quick.”
They would come quick. Faster than Kern had thought. Than he’d planned. The horns of the northern war host mingled closely—too closely—with answering blasts from the west, and a tentative call from the east now as well. The wailing echoes rarely ceased. And when they did, the long, pained howls of a wolf filled the silence. Frostpaw was close by, in the village it sounded like. Herded in among the quiet, cold homes, trying to escape the braying horns.
He glanced behind them, searching . . . There! He saw the flash of silver-gray near the corner of a larger home. The powerful dire wolf scampered around, onto a well-worn path, then danced back again as if unsure which way to run. Wailing horns in three directions. Smoke and drifting ash from the fired lodge hall swirling out from the other end of Gaud. The wolf’s instinct was to flee, but in which direction?
Kern understood completely. His instincts were now warning him away from Gaud as well. He felt equally trapped. His small band had come up from the southwest. And sparks of cold flame in the back of his mind warmed to the idea of Ymirish war leaders north and west.
Come after him.
Warriors? Sorcerers? Kern couldn’t say. He couldn’t even decide how he knew such a thing, felt it so certainly alongside the chill in his bones, but he was beginning to accept the idea that his rage had pushed him into a situation he no longer controlled and could not fight his way out of easily.
And if he sensed their arrival . . .
“Ymir-egh.” He looked northward. No raider had been foolish enough to venture out alone. They were massing. Readying themselves for the attack. Any moment. “Wasn’t that what they called out?”
Scratching carefully around the lower edge of his eye patch, Garret nodded. “Reviled of Ymir,” he said, understanding the northern tongue better than most. His smile was cold, and lopsided, lost among the cat claw scars on the right side of his face. “God-cursed.”
Reave glanced over. Horns blew again from the west. Long, mournful calls. An hour distant. Maybe less. “Did nay know you were so popular.”
Kern shrugged, but Nahud’r clapped him on the shoulder. The dark-skinned warrior brandished his wide-bladed scimitar. “Make feel welcome.”
They could certainly do that.
“We’ll try to bring them right through here,” Kern said, waving his short sword at the gap between the two wattle-and-daub huts. “Daol and Ehmish, up top. Garret and I will flank Reave along the front.”
It made sense. Kern and Garret both had newer, bronze-faced shields, and Reave had sliced the door from one hut from its leather hinges. It would make a full-body shield to protect him from arrows while the raiders closed. And from atop one of the huts, Daol would work incredible damage with the Vanir-style war bow he’d taken as spoils. Ehmish had a light hunting bow. Not as powerful, but deadly enough.
Reave boosted Daol up, the lithe warrior spreading his weight out on the thatched roof to prevent falling through. Ehmish took a cupped hand from Nahud’r, scrambled up toward the peaked edge, his bow ready, an arrow nocked.
None too soon. The dark blur of a large hawk swept out of the forest as shadows moved behind the thick cover, raiders surging forward with hardly more warning than twigs snapped underfoot or the rustle of a few long branches. Then the first warriors were out and charging across open ground, shields held up to protect them, a battle cry on their lips that froze all for an instant.
“Grimnir!”
It had every Cimmerian checking behind them for the great, giant-spawned devil. Kern felt a cold flare of pain deep inside, and one of the sparks in the back of his mind jumped up brighter for a heartbeat. But then his own anger and the pain of losing so many of his clan kin rolled forward and smothered any indecision there might have been. Grimnir wasn’t here. Kern knew.
But a Ymirish war leader was. He strode out of the forest among two dozen flame-haired Vanir. Half a head taller than most of his raiders, with hair and beard the color of a dead hoarfrost. And those golden, lupine eyes that promised he shared blood with Grimnir, and with Kern. A heavy broadsword still belted at his waist, he held a tall shield protectively before him as he raised the horn to his lips once again and blew out a long, questioning call.
To be immediately answered by three strident blasts from just inside the forest on the eastern edge of Gaud.
Kern’s grin was cold and without humor. “We hold,” he challenged his pack. “For Crom, for Cimmeria, and for Gaud!”
If there was a cry to shake his warriors out of their momentary stupor, Kern had found it. Daol loosed a broadleaf-head arrow an instant before Ehmish’s bow thrummed as well. Both shafts bit into flesh, as Daol skewered a rushing Vanir through the gut and the younger man stuck a second warrior high in the shoulder—not enough to put the second raider down, but staggering him at the least.
But from the edge of the forest, the singing of bow-strings warned Kern that the battle would not be as one-sided as the earlier skirmish. He barely had time to yell for “Shields” when the first of a dozen long-shafted arrows fell over their position. Thrusting his shield up, canted slightly overhead, he felt a broadhead shaft slam into the bronzed facing like a hammer stroke. Two more knocked on the door Reave had propped ahead of him. Most stuck into the mud-walled huts to either side.
Atop the hut, Daol cursed and shifted around.
The Vanir war host had not rushed blindly forward this time. A dozen warriors, most of them with shields, all of them wearing the banded cuirasses and long, leather-pleated skirts common among the northerners, charged forward as a group. Behind them, advancing in step, came another twelve men, bows raised, loosing one flight of arrows after another, providing cover for their brethren.
And from a second point in the forest, circled around to the west, another small band of a half dozen men raced in to try and flank Kern’s position, close to a lean-to and another couple of small huts.
“Trouble!” Daol again. Then a scuffling sound and a sharp, piercing hawk’s cry. “Crom-cursed bird! Away!”
But he’d already seen it. And more. The Ymirish was fighting his men as a team, not allowing them to get out of hand. Normally, the raiders attacked as a maddened host, worked into a frenzy, with no northerner thinking about the man standing next to him. And a Ymirish leader was so often right out front, living on the rage and bloodlust of battle.
Not here. This one knew how to get it done. Kern had a better position, but not the numbers it would take to hold off the raiders. Not without losing some of his own.
Not without help.
The first of which he received after fending off the next flight of arrows. Two more heavy hammer strokes into his shield. A third arrow nicked by the edge and cut into the side of his neck in passing, then shattered against Desa’s upraised buckler. More shouts. More warnings from his warriors. He could feel them straining against his control, wanting to rush forward to meet the enemy. By Crom, Kern wanted it badly as well. To stand under an archer’s sight, unable to answer, was hard, hard.
But leaving the cover of the buildings would be the end of them. He knew it. Beneath the rage and bloodlust, he knew.
Two dozen strides short of the advancing warriors, Kern risked a glance around the edge of his shield. At the small band running in at his left, making for the cover of a small hut with an attached lean-to. No door left to the dwelling. And the mounds of hay outside were damp and muddy.
Suddenly, as the first warrior sprinted up toward the lean-to, the hay erupted in a storm of straw and dirt and wicked steel. Ossian and Old Finn had dug themselves down into the soiled fodder, waiting. Coming up on their guard and swords already stabbing out together, Ossian sliced his blade off a leather-faced buckler, while Finn managed to stab the man in the thigh.
The next closest raider veered for the front of the hut, mayhap thinking to run around from the other side. But Gard’s large frame suddenly filled the open doorway, and his pike stabbed out nearly its full length to jab beneath the man’s cuirass into an unprotected belly. Like a striking snake, Gard twisted the pike and hooked it back, cutting through soft leathers and opening up the raider’s belly so that his intestines fell out in a tangle around his feet.
“West, west, WEST!”
It was all Kern had time for, calling up Danon and Wallach Graybeard from behind. He had placed them at his back to reinforce any direction. Now he slid them around toward the sideline battle, where Ossian and Finn joined Gard just outside the small hut. Mogh charged out next, making it an even match.
Even matches were a good way to lose lives.
Uneven matches were worse, though, as the raider charge hammered in at the narrow gap, forcing back Reave and threatening to bury Garret and himself beneath a fast pile of bodies and steel. Kern gave back a stutter step, then another. Then set himself and shoved back with his shield, slamming the spiked boss into the face of a full-bearded warrior, tearing through hair and slicing the man’s cheek open to show the teeth behind.
Two quick jabs punched through the banded cuirass and dropped the man to the ground. Kern stomped on the raider’s sword arm, pinning it while he bled out, pink froth bubbling on his lips.
Garret had fallen back two paces and was set on by two raiders. Reave had used the door in his hands to swat aside the first warrior who had charged their line, then threw it at a second man rushing Kern, to foul his approach. Then, yanking his greatsword from the ground where he’d rammed it in, came overhead with a brutal, axe-chopping swing to cleave the next man from shoulder to hip.
Blood geysered, spattering a steaming gout over Reave’s massive forearms and across one side of his face as well.
If the narrow alley made it hard for the raiders to bring their full strength against Kern’s besieged band, so did it make it difficult for Kern to retaliate. It was a contest of push and shove. Then Garret went down, overwhelmed by the warriors coming at him, rolling back to avoid their stinging blades. Nahud’r danced forward, his scimitar striking out in quick, rock-scorpion stings, driving the raiders back away from the fallen man. Desa slipped up at his side, wedging between Reave and the Shemite, plugging the gap and making it all but impassable.
Reave had a new cut gashed across his forearm. Kern’s head wound had taken another shock when a raider hammered at him with the hilt of his broadsword. Blood matted his hair and flowed freely down his face.
“Kern!” Ehmish, scrabbling about atop one of the hovels. “Kern, they’re coming!”
The archers. Who had left off hammering at them with flights of arrows to get more selective. They marched forward with the Ymirish war leader. Most of them concentrated on Ehmish for some reason, keeping him pinned to the back side of the thatched roof. Only a few risked shots at Daol, though it didn’t make sense for all of the cursing and scrabbling taking place above. Until a wild, piercing shriek reminded him of the earlier appearance of a large, red-tailed hawk.
Daol, apparently, had his hands full.
A moment later, he had more than that. Tumbling backward off the roof with an arrow stuck through the meat on his upper arm. Landing hard next to Garret, who was picking himself up slowly. Too slowly.
Ashul raced up to them, then veered away as two raiders came around the far side of one hut, weapons ready and death in their eyes. She left Garret and Daol to take care of themselves.
A few heartbeats later Ehmish abandoned his own vantage point. With a wild, banshee yell, the young warrior threw his bow far behind Kern and the battle, then leaped out over the narrow path with his broadsword out and flashing down as he fell—
—right into the midst of the Vanir raiders.
Except for the early rush, Kern’s pack had been trading nicks and cuts and drop for drop of blood with the raiders. But Ehmish had hurled himself into what seemed certain death. Landing just behind the forward line, with a pair of fresh raiders ready to step up and run him through with bright, cold steel and a troop of archers moving up fast.
Shouting for the young man, Kern barreled forward, shoving one raider back, spinning another away with an arm sliced down to the bone. Stupid, brash child! It took Crom’s own stones to believe he’d live through such a stunt.
Or a glimpse of the counterattack about to hit the raiders from behind.
They were coming. Ehmish just hadn’t been very specific about who they were.
Crashing brush and the drum of heavy feet against the earth was all the warning the Vanir received. That and one last shrill blast from the horn Kern had salvaged from the ground earlier and entrusted to Brig Tall-Wood. Three horses thundered out of the forest slightly east of the Vanir advance, with Aquilonian cavalrymen hunched low over the animals’ necks, shields tucked in tight on their left sides, lances thrust forward on their right as they controlled their mounts with pressure from their knees alone. And a Cimmerian warrior tucked in behind each holding on with one arm for their lives. Aodh and Daol’s father Hydallan held their bows to their side, and an arrow or two gripped in the same fist. Brig had slung his war bow over his shoulder, using his free hand to hold the Vanir horn to his mouth, blowing that final, strident alarm.
This time, the northerners had trusted too much to their own devices, and the hunting calls they used to communicate while on a hunt. They hadn’t bothered to send men around to their left, thinking that another war party had moved up on Gaud from the east. Kern was also willing to wager that their belief at having a second troop close by helped edge them forward, rather than wait for the second war host moving in from the west.
Regardless, it was the results that mattered. The Vanir were undone, with their archers caught in the open, barely a handful of heartbeats to realize their danger and react. Shouts of alarm and surprise turned a few of the advancing warriors around, buying Ehmish another precious moment of life. Several archers simply threw their bows aside and clawed for their blades. One or two loosed a hasty arrow at the Aquilonians.
A handful of them scattered, opening up their formation rather than be run down like a herd of stunned cattle.
One strong-hearted raider leaped in front of the Ymirish, holding his shot for an extra heartbeat before loosing it point-blank at Strom. That arrow glanced off the horseman’s vambrace. Then Strom’s lance skewered him through the chest, knocking the Vanir to one side with a brutal shove. A quick and brutal death, though likely saving the life of the frost-
bearded leader.
Then the three riders were past, leaving a scattered, shattered formation in their wake. A Vanir with more forethought than his fellows had moved aside and held his arrow ready, now turned and drew, loosed it at the vulnerable back side of the nearest horse and riders.
Kern did not see if the shaft struck true. With Reave and Nahud’r and Desa, they had shoved back the raider line several important paces. Crouching at Ehmish’s side, he hauled the young man up by one shoulder. A dark, purplish bruise swelled along one side of Ehmish’s face, and blood trickled down from a gash across his ear, but otherwise he seemed hale and hearty.
Mostly. The lad wobbled, but held his feet. Was even able to raise his heavy broadsword in some semblance of a threat.
Kern chopped aside a thrust made by one nearby raider and used his shield to turn the blow of a second. Stepping forward, he elbowed Ehmish behind him.
“Do that again,” he said through clenched teeth, “and I will kill you myself.”
Bucking up, Ehmish stagger-stepped forward and laid open the back of a raider’s hand with a quick, awkward swipe. The man lost his sword, and stumbled back.
“You can try.”
Regaining the head of the alleyway, Kern moved out and aside to give Reave more room to lay about with his massive, Cimmerian greatsword. He also saw Gard and Ossian off to his far left, fighting side by side while standing over Mogh’s fallen body. Of Old Finn there was no sign, though a glimpse of Wallach Graybeard at the side of the dilapidated lean-to and shouts from around that side of the battle lent him hope that they held their own.
And ahead, Strom had wheeled his mount around, leading the other two horsemen in a quick turn that brought them to a brief halt. Hydallan made it look easy, kicking back as Niuss made his turn, sliding back from the large animal, landing in a ready crouch. Nock an arrow and loose in the space of a single breath.
A Vanir screamed, taking half of the shaft through his belly.
Brig and Aodh landed with less grace. Aodh looked as if he might be favoring his left leg. But both men dropped a scatter of arrows at their feet, and began a rapid grabnock-loose pattern to keep the Vanir off-balance and unsure which way to turn.
Cimmerian Rage Page 17
