Kern took the weapon back, tried it out. Then took a hesitant cut. “It feels better to slash with it.”
“Yes, but you are going to jab. All day. You keep that in one hand or the other, and practice. No putting it in the sheath.” In fact, after a second’s thought, Wallach took the sheath and belt and rolled it into his own bedroll, keeping it from Kern.
Kern stared at the blade. A bare arm’s length of good, sharpened steel. So small and light next to what he remembered of Burok’s sword. He took another few pokes with it. Shrugged, then rolled his broadsword into the blankets and felt pad to give the roll some weight.
“Divide up the load,” he ordered. “Everyone shares the food. Everyone shares the weight.”
There was a solid pack load for each. Even without the butchered horseflesh, his small band and the escaping prisoners had carried away more than a fair share of stores from the Vanir. Enough for weeks, if properly rationed. Adding Hydallen and the other two barely scratched into the supplies, and both Daol and his father were master hunters. They could provide.
But an hour on the trail, when asked quietly about Kern’s parentage, Hydallan provided nothing more than a shrug and information most of which Kern already knew.
“Your ma came to us from another clan already with child. During a good summer, so Gaud accepted her. And she brought a gift of blue-iron weapons from the Broken Leg Lands. Cul’s war sword . . . that’s the only one left. The others were traded away over the years. Then she died somewhere near your ninth summer if’n I recall.”
Close enough. Kern didn’t remember for certain, but figured Hydallan had it within a year or two.
“If’n she told anyone, ’twasn’t me.” He shrugged. “Does it really matter at this point, pup?”
Kern didn’t answer right away, thinking it through. He slashed at some brush with the arming sword as he continued his exercise. Seeing Wallach’s baleful glare, he went back to stabbing with it instead. His wrist ached from holding the sword on a tight line, and he had blisters forming on his hand in the few places not callused hard from years of swinging an axe.
“It shouldn’t,” he finally admitted. “But right now it does.” By Crom, that sounded like something a Hyper-borean might say! Southlanders preferred to talk so much. Cimmerians acted. “I guess it feels like I should do something.”
“This ain’t enough for you?” Hydallan swept his gaze over the snowy hills. “Crom’s pike, Kern. What do you consider an active day?”
Whatever it might be, they began to see signs around midmorning. At the first burned-out settlement.
Sitting on a shallow river, overlooking a slice of cleared land where oats or turnips might grow over summer, the ruins were little more than a foundation of stacked river rock and a few charred timbers that had been used once for framework. The smell of wet charcoal hung in the air. The river’s quiet murmur was all that disturbed the silence.
Clearly the Vanir had been through here, though sometime before the last snowfall apparently. What fresh tracks they found were in singles and pairs, cutting through the woods, then—upon sight of the ruined home—quickly veering away again.
It wasn’t long after that Daol spotted the greasy smear of black smoke in the sky. The way it fanned out, rising in a blanket rather than a stream, had them fearing a forest fire. Except it did not spread. Hydallan watched it carefully while everyone else checked weapons. He measured the wind and waited to see if the fire marched along with the northerly breeze. It did not.
“What kind of fire ignores the play of the winds?” Daol asked. He wasn’t old enough to have seen this before.
Hydallan and Garret. Wallach Graybeard. They knew. Wallach curled fingers into his beard, giving it a quick tug. “A town fire,” he said.
“Taur is burning.”
Not all of it, as it turned out. Only a few huts and some lean-to sheds on the outskirts of the village proper. Enough to make the carnage visible for several leagues. A warning sign, and a draw to other raiders in the area.
Daol had found fresh sign of a large party of men, moving west by north, not long after spotting the distant smoke. Nahud’r, with eyes nearly as good as Daol’s, picked up on smaller sign near another burned-out farm they hurriedly passed. A quick inspection found two children, a boy and a girl no more than seven or eight summers, hiding in a dry well under a dark blanket. Their parents, charred flesh and bone, lay half-buried in the ash of the hut.
Maev had taken charge of them, coaxing them up with water and honeycomb. Taking each by a hand, pulling them along, the clansfolk moved quickly onward.
Now, hunkered down in the tall grasses and brush that topped a tree-barren hill, Kern watched the fires spread. Thatched roofs burned bright and deadly every time a new one touched off from the heat or drifting sparks. Woven slats, which made up the structure of the walls, burned down through the clay mixture so common to wattle-and-daub. The smell of scorched mud spread with the ash and smoke.
It was not all wanton destruction. The raiders obviously had purpose behind them as they dug beneath large sheds for dry pits and chased panicked cattle along the village paths. A broad-shouldered ox evaded the noose thrown at it by one Vanir. It plunged into a hut and crashed out the other side through a thin wall. Tiring of chasing the powerful creature, two raiders unlimbered bows and stuck the ox with arrows until it finally keeled over.
There didn’t seem to be more than a few dozen raiders storming around on the flats below, but then Taur was smaller than Gaud and a great deal more spread out. How many settlements and farms had the raiders burned out before laying siege to the main village?
“Too many,” Kern said, watching the raiders loot homes and round up cattle.
Another small team broke cover behind the village, chasing down a man trapped outside the lodge’s defenses. Blades rose and fell. The scream carried to the hillside as a far-off echo.
“They have the right idea, though.” Maev crowded between Desa and Kern, having left the children on the other side of the hill with another Gaudic villager. She pointed out the waist-high breastwork of earth around the lodge where most of the village had taken refuge. A palisade of sharpened trunks stuck out at sharp angles. “It must have taken them weeks. Months.”
On the other side of Kern, Reave squinted. “What’s that tangle around the palisade? In between the poles?”
Daol had the better eyes. “Spears. Stuck every which way. And I’ll bet they are all tied together with good leather.”
It wasn’t a fortress wall, but it worked much the same. Put six men inside with bows, and any Vanir trying to break through the barricade made an easy target.
Letting the Taurin clansfolk know they had help waiting outside their village would be just as hard. Kern’s people could not hope to take on the Vanir by themselves, but to coordinate an assault meant getting someone close enough to the lodge, without getting stuck full of arrow shafts, that the Taurin might recognize and let through. Trust between clans was not a strong commodity.
“There has to be a way in.”
Reave shook his head. “The raiders would have found it. They look like they want whatever’s inside pretty bad.”
“Food or prisoners,” Daol agreed. “Maybe they— Kern!” He pointed, spotting something through the smoke.
Somehow, Kern knew what he’d see, following Daol’s stabbing finger. Something in the other man’s voice. The way his entire body went rigid. Kern rubbed a knuckle into his smoke-stung eyes, massaging moisture back into them, and then he saw him.
Hard to miss, when you looked. The shock of white hair, which at a distance made the warrior look very old. But no aging warrior moved so spryly, or manhandled his own men like a bear pawing at cubs. This frost-man—another Ymirish—held a battle-axe very much like the one Kern had given up. Just as large and just as heavy. Only he pumped it overhead, exhorting his warriors, as if he were brushing away flies.
“Two of them?” Reave asked.
Kern suppo
sed he should be grateful his friend hadn’t said “Three?” the way Reave glanced over at him afterward.
“At least.” Kern shrank back away from the crest of the hill, careful not to disturb the tall grasses too much and draw attention from below. Bringing his warriors in around him, he brushed aside the coincidence of another frost-man. “Whatever these Vanir are, they are not common raiders. But they bleed.” Kern looked Maev in the eye. “They die.” His gaze traveled the line. “This one is no different.”
“But in order to make this work,” Daol said, “we still have to get a message into the lodge. And we have to be able to hold the Vanir off while the Taurin decide. How are you going to do that?”
Kern glanced back up the hill. “I might be able to manage the second part of that,” he said, playing it over in his head, hoping he had an idea worth chasing after.
“And the first part?” Daol asked, obviously not liking the sudden gleam in Kern’s yellow eyes. He shifted uncomfortably. “How about getting a message to the Taurin?”
“That,” Kern said, “will be your job.”
12
DAOL LAY IN the snow at the trailing slope of a small hillock, tucked beneath the branches of a small evergreen bush. Trying his damnedest to present small as Vanir raiders ran past him, intent on their siege of Taur.
Snowmelt soaked Daol’s heavy tunic a dark, wet brown. The skin on his forearms felt as if it were all but blistering under the cold burn that came with crawling several hundred paces over frozen ground, moving so slowly his blood began to thicken. He breathed shallowly, tasting the scent of burning thatch, worried about even the smallest cloud of frosted vapor drawing attention to his position.
“What was I thinking?” he whispered to himself, drawing a small measure of courage from the sound of his own voice.
He knew what he’d been thinking, though. The same as Kern, and the same as the others. That every minute spent working up a better plan, or even putting this one into effect, cost lives. Cimmerian lives. Kern had given Daol an hour to work his way down the side of the hill and a quarter of the way around the besieged village to get as close as he could to the lodge. Daol’s father and three others had remained on-site, watching, ready to cover his retreat if the Vanir noticed him. The others, Daol hoped, had gotten their part ready during that time.
He’d find out very soon.
It was no consolation that if the plan failed, his friends would be just as dead. Which was why he had taken so much care in his trek down to the village border, using every trick he had learned in eight years of hunting and tracking. How to divide his weight evenly across his entire body and snap not one twig beneath him. How to breathe properly while moving, and choosing the right line of attack, which kept him hidden from casual eyes.
Daol had chosen to come at the lodge across from the wind, so any raiders near him would be staring into smoke whipped off the burning homes. If their eyes stung half as bad as his, it was a good choice.
“Far as I can go. Come on, Kern.”
Moving with exquisite care, Daol slipped the bow off his shoulder and stashed it under the nearby brush. Then his short quiver of arrows. He felt naked without them, armed only with a long knife. But he couldn’t take the chance that the Taurin would think him a threat. He gauged the distance to the front of the lodge. He might make it back in time, if he had to.
If he wasn’t filled full of Taurin arrows on sight.
Daol never pulled his gaze away from the hilltop for too long, waiting for the signal. He saw some of the tall grasses moving up there from time to time, waving against the chill breeze or waving when there was no breeze at all. Every time, he checked the Vanir, to see if one of them had noticed.
Nothing. None of them expected an assault from behind. Cimmerians had spent the last several years fleeing before the raiders, who rarely attacked in the open unless they had an advantage in numbers.
The sign was not meant to be subtle. And in fact, it wasn’t. Two dark shadows suddenly rose over the white-blanketed hillside, silhouetted against the light gray sky behind them. Extremely exposed. Among fifteen men and women, there were exactly two hunting bows other than Daol’s. Hydallan and Brig Tall-Wood carried them. Now the two men drew back, sighted, and released.
Daol thought he could hear the healthy thrum of bowstrings even over the crackling noise of the village’s burning huts and the shouts of the raiders. Might have been wishful thinking.
He knew he heard the sudden shout of pain as a raider fell with a long shaft stuck in his shoulder. The Vanir bounced back to his feet quickly enough, though, facing right back along the arrow’s flight.
Four more shadows on the hillside, all waving swords overhead. There was some distant shouting in broken Nordheimir, none of it complimentary.
The two archers drew and released. Drew back again. Released.
Another shout of pain as an arrow in the third flight found its mark, stuck through a raider’s leg. Others of Kern’s small band showed themselves on the hilltop. From a distance, if Daol hadn’t known better, it looked like a small group all straggling up in singles and pairs.
Easy meat for the raider band.
And there he was. The frost-haired Ymirish Daol had spotted from the hilltop, striding through a small knot of raiders. He stabbed the magnificent head of his war axe at the hillside.
“At them!” he shouted in Nordheimir. Daol knew enough of the language to recognize that. “Bring me heads!”
Fully a dozen northerners peeled away from the siege to storm the hillside. As two more shadows popped up on the ridgeline, the Ymirish sent another handful of warriors, keeping a two-for-one edge while leaving about a dozen or more in the village proper to watch for any movement from the lodge.
No one watching the brush though. It was Daol’s chance.
Exhaling sharply, Daol committed himself by rolling out from under the brush and jumping up quickly into a half-crouch run. His legs glided forward with the loping stride he could keep up for a day and a half. Easy. Smooth. He waited for the inevitable call of discovery.
He actually made it halfway, getting well between the lodge and the nearest raiders. It was the Taurin who gave him away, as an eager bowman inside the lodge defenses swiveled around to loose an arrow at him. The shaft dug into the ground barely half a step in front of Daol, and the young hunter sidestepped quickly to throw off any follow-up shot, waving his arms frantically overhead.
Several raiders had followed the shot as well, and now saw Daol running for the barricade. As they moved at him, roaring for his death, he burst into a sprint and shouted on his own behalf, “Friends! Taur! Help!” Everything Kern had told him to shout.
No further bowshots came from within the compound, but there was no movement at the front of the barricade either to open a break in the defenses. Daol checked over his shoulder, saw the Vanir just now struggling up the hillside, shields held up against the Gaudic archery . . . and several of the nearby raiders drawing down on him with heavy bows of their own.
The first long shaft whistled by his ear to thunk deep into one of the sharpened poles stuck out from the lodge bulwark.
“Crom’s hairy left orb,” he shouted, “open up!”
The wind shifted slightly, blowing more of the ash and smoke directly over the lodge compound. That was all right. Daol saw the gate now. A drop-down door held on a pivot bar with a counterweight on the far side. It rose in and up, and was spiked with sharpened stakes easily the length of a man’s arm. The Taurin let him approach it, but still it did not open.
Daol ran right up to the gate. He saw the outlines of people moving on the other side of the artificial bramble of spears and spikes and sharpened stakes, within the haze of smoke that lay over the compound. Upset lowing, from cattle the Taurin had managed to pull into the lodge defenses with them, was all that answered him.
Continuing to shout for their aid, he pulled his knife and turned back toward the Vanir who had braved Taurin archers to come after hi
m. One raider had a greatsword, swinging it overhead in wide deadly arcs. The others favored broadswords and shields.
He could have used a shield. Another arrow bit into the door, barely missing his right leg. He jumped back and forth erratically, spoiling the Vanir’s aim, keeping a wary eye on the door, the advancing raiders, and the hillside where half of the frost-man’s men had nearly gained the hilltop, ready to join blades against Kern’s small group.
No longer so small, though, as another five silhouettes popped above the hilltop. Half of the line bent down now, digging at the earth, lifting one of the heavy logs they’d carried up earlier while Daol crept into position. Kern and Reave had led that work party on a short run away from the village, so the chopping would not be noticed. Rolling it over the hilltop, into place, had caused the waving grasses Daol had spotted.
“A sled defense,” Kern had called it. But Daol hadn’t picked up on the reference then.
Now, watching five of his clansfolk start down the hill, then heaving the log into the face of the raider charge, he got it. He was reminded of that last good day, before Burok’s death and all that followed. When he and Kern had pulled the wood sled into Gaud.
The sharp, downhill slope that had sent the sled smashing into the end of the lodge woodpile.
The split-rounds tumbling off the end of the stack Three raiders actually caught the thrown log right in the face, bowled back like pins in a stonethrow contest. The long trunk hit the ground unevenly and bounced back up, clipping another Vanir in the leg and sending him tumbling forward. It slowed everyone behind him, who had to wait and gauge the rolling log so they could swerve around or jump over it.
On the hilltop, six warriors bent down and wrestled up a second thick trunk. They began running down the hill with it as well.
Blood of Wolves Page 11
