Blood of Wolves

by Loren Coleman

  Frostpaw made two appearances while the war party broke camp, hovering farther back now that light betrayed the wolf’s position. Mogh was the first to remark on it, though certainly not the first to notice.

  “That ain’t normal,” he said, with a glower in the wolf’s direction. As if startled by the glance, the wolf turned and bolted for the cover of some tall pine.

  “What is these days?” Kern asked. Settling his shield over one shoulder and his pack over another, he nodded Daol and Hydallan ahead of him, then struck out again for the long day’s hike.

  Midday found two more burned farmsteads, and another the raiders had somehow missed. It stood farther back from the trail, granted, and was partially hidden behind a stand of thorny acacia. No clansmen, though, and no livestock. There were signs of recent life, tracks in the snow and ashes on the hearth, but nothing else.

  “Dead or fled,” Desa said.

  Garret nodded. “Or hiding nearby. We could search for ’em.”

  “We move on,” Kern decided. “Where there are farms, there will be a village nearby.”

  He proved to be right. Just the other side of the next bluff, in fact, where a stream they chanced across splashed quickly down a narrow cut, then wound underside of a mammoth cliff overhang. The stone of the overhang was wet black streaked with rusts and yellows, and appeared alive with smoke. It dripped and splashed a constant light rain over ground suddenly devoid of snow, with several nearby fields sprouting enough greens that one might think for a second that spring had broken through in an eye blink.

  The air smelled of minerals and metal. Sulfurous. Not so bad as rotten eggs, but heavy enough to burn inside Kern’s sinuses.

  Ossian called it first. He recognized the scent. “Hot springs,” he said.

  Not smoke, then, but steam. Warming the air with a moist, mineral touch that lay over the village like a blanket. The stream pooled in several places before it bent wide around the first of the visible huts and the charred ruins where others had once stood. It continued past palisade walls, behind which more steam rose no doubt from more hidden hot springs.

  Because of their location or simply from what they had to protect, these people had been far more industrious in their defense. Digging enough rock out of the nearby bluff face to build a thick wall, on top of which they had planted sharpened timbers lashed together with bands of metal as well as leather ties. With the palisade joining on both ends to a steep rock face, it would take a large raiding party to even think of cracking such a defense.

  Clearly the local clansmen had learned a great deal, caught between marauding Picts from the lowlands and Vanir from the north.

  Kern pushed Daol ahead to find a good path down among the lower hills. Ehmish and Hydallan went with him. It was on a lower ridge where Ehmish discovered a funeral mound of dead bodies, half-buried in snow and left to rot. The aftermath of a large battle that had taken place the previous summer, certainly. They were Picts mostly. Swarthy skin gone slightly gray with death. Bodies painted in tribal patterns, and wearing little else but the loincloths favored by the lowland savages. A few heads had been set up on pikes, as trophies or as warnings. Or both.

  Kern saw that there were quite a few Vanir heads near the end of the line. In fact, one could see in the scattered death masks where the Picts had stopped their late-summer attacks and the Vanir raiders had stepped up their own. The freshest heads were all northerners, taken over the long winter as raiders pushed for food and shelter and the slaves they needed to work their northern mines.

  There was even a fairly recent Ymirish, with frost blond beard and hair. His yellow eyes stared blankly now, but Kern imagined he still saw a primal rage glinting in them.

  Down in the glen, an alarm bell rang as someone finally sighted Kern’s small band. Cimmerian clansfolk ran to front their wall, grabbing up whatever weapons were close by and waiting to see what manner of invader had come at them. They didn’t hide from the challenge as had the previous village. They seemed to welcome it, in fact.

  Kern did not rush into the situation. He circled his people around, letting them be seen, looking for a good path of approach while the clan chieftain no doubt summoned his elders and his best warriors. Give them time to feel safe, Kern hoped, and they would be less apt to strike out of fear or habit.

  It worked. When Kern’s men stayed out of bowshot, the local chieftain sent out a small band of warriors to challenge them directly. Faces carried the same deep-lined, craggy look that Reave had gotten from his mother, a native of Clan Conarch. Any one of them might be a distant relation of the tall Gaudic warrior. Kern saw more than one of his warriors frown in Reave’s direction, but they were quick glances, with eyes snapping back to the fore right quick and hands never far from the grasp of weapons. These did not look the part of beaten men and women. They carried their heads up and their eyes blazed a fierce challenge.

  The single woman in the group was as tall and strapping as any of the men, and she wore a feral snarl on her lips that reminded Kern, in a way, of the smaller but no less fierce Desagrena.

  “Valleymen,” the tall woman said, in about the same way one would spit out a piece of gristly meat.

  She had blue eyes the dark, shaded color of an autumn twilight, and her raven-glistening hair was tied up in a knot on top of her head. She carried a spear in one hand and a war sword across her back. Her frown built up in slow measure, wrinkling in the corners of her eyes first, and then in the thin, flat line of her mouth.

  “But not more Cruaidhi,” she said. “Not Clan Maugh either.”

  Which gave Kern some idea of the warriors loosed in the Broken Leg Lands who had already passed this direction.

  “You are the wolf-eyed one,” she said at last, and the tip of her spear dropped a fraction. “I am Ros-Crana. I thought the story hard to believe, a Ymirish who is not of Nordheim and Grimnir’s personal worshippers. You are of Gaud?”

  “We are,” Kern admitted, slightly taken aback by what this woman already knew. And also that the men obviously deferred to her. Crom’s ancient blessing on Cimmeria gave many women as great a strength as the men, but few followed the warrior’s path intentionally. “Of Gaud and of Taur, and lands to the south,” he said, giving Nahud’r a nod.

  Ros-Crana dropped the spear to her side, holding it loosely now. Kern had no doubt that she could whip it back to a guarded position in less than a heartbeat. “Then you may approach and speak with Narach Chieftain, who has also heard of you.”

  Kern eyed the well-manned defenses with a wary glance. “Strong walls and many tall warriors,” he said by way of compliment. “I would ask your chieftain to meet me outside of his keep.” Well outside of those walls, in fact.

  But she bridled at this, obviously taking a measure of offense. “My word is your safety, Wolf-Eye. If it is not good enough for you, turn around and go back to your valley. Otherwise, you may advance as far as the gate.” She held her spear up across her body in a warding gesture. “But you will not be allowed inside the walls.”

  There was something important in that distinction, to her at least. Kern thought to ask why, but there was no need. She told him in her next breath.

  “If Grimnir comes for you here, we will not stand between you.”

  24

  THE SUN WAS setting into the Pictish wilderness in the near west when Kern brought Sláine Longtooth back to the village. There were no shadows stretched over the ground, not with winter clouds filtering the sun’s light to a stark overhead gray, but there was no mistaking the cold touch of coming twilight.

  Clansfolk continued their work in and around the glen. If anything, their pace seemed to increase as dark approached. Animals were brought in from a day of sparse forage, and always there were homes to rebuild. A few women continued to tend fields of early greens that survived under the steaming rain falling off the cliff overhang. A line of tall youths packed carrying straps of sharp, head-sized rocks through the palisade, adding to a large pile that could be glimpse
d through the narrow gate, and smaller children used flat-edged stones to scrape the outline of new pitfalls into the ground.

  Longtooth nodded his approval at the industrious work. “What was its name again?” he asked.

  “Callaugh,” Kern reminded the elder man. Kern had also learned that it was the area’s strongpoint. “Much as Cruaidh is the stopgap for any force coming into Conall’s Valley through the Pass of Blood, any large war host moving north must pass within a half day’s travel of here.”

  Its location, and its hot springs steaming against the bluff, made it an important village to Clan Conarch. Important enough for the Vanir to test its walls regularly. The funeral mounds (there had been more than just the one) and several dozen Vanir heads on pikes proved to Kern that the raiders had had no easy time of it.

  Also, that these Callaughnan warriors were not to be taken lightly.

  Sláine Longtooth agreed. But he’d also had no choice but to follow behind Kern as he led the core of his small army north.

  With Ros-Crana and Narach Chieftain already aware of their presence, Kern had seen immediately that the Cruaidhi chieftain must strike a bargain with Callaugh or risk an attack from behind even as he hunted the Vanir. At his suggestion the two chieftains agreed to a meeting under the walls of Callaugh’s keep. Longtooth was allowed a guard of no more than two fists of men. Ten in all. All weapons would be truce-bonded. Sword and dagger hilts tied to sheaths or belts with a strong leather cord. Bows unstrung. Spearpoints wrapped in a leather sheath.

  Kern cinched his arming sword in place with a strong knot. He’d already been under those walls once. He knew it would not do to anger Callaugh further in the face of what Sláine Longtooth was likely to demand.

  A few clansmen hauling in armfuls of wood looked over at their arrival, faces dark, craggy, and glowering. Gard Foehammer glanced left then right as he rode at his chieftain’s side, carrying a bearing spear with Clan Cruaidh’s fox-tail totem on it.

  “Sure and this is a good idea?” he asked out of the side of his mouth.

  Kern hoped, but couldn’t say for certain.

  The sulfurous steam that wafted over the village made most clansfolk into shadows and could hide any number of plans to ambush the small envoy. But it simply wasn’t in the nature of most Cimmerians to strike against their word. If they had to kill, they killed openly. And why lie at all? Crom had gifted them the strength to face the truth.

  Still it was just good precaution that Longtooth directed Gard to carry the bearing spear. Kern knew from testing the other man’s ability with a war pike, Gard could strip the sheath of his spear tip (or simply thrust through it) in less than a heartbeat. If things went badly, Clan Cruaidh would not fall without drawing blood.

  Ros-Crana met them at the lower slope with a trio of warriors also carrying sheathed long spears and bonded broadswords. Longtooth and Foehammer studied her with something approaching cautious respect. After only a few minutes in her company, Kern had not been so surprised to learn that she was war leader for the village. Narach Chieftain, as it turned out, was her younger brother.

  This was information he had passed along, of course.

  Ros-Crana did not waste time, gesturing the small party, which included Kern as well as Daol, Reave, Desa, and Ossian, ahead of her. Sláine Chieftain had brought four of his own strongest warriors. It made for a good-sized force.

  Coming under the shadow of the fortified walls, Kern saw their construction make an impression on Sláine Longtooth equal to the one it had first made on him. Not only was the rock base a good three arm’s lengths thick, it was cemented together with “mud and mill-crushed stone, and resists even the best battering ram our own warriors could test against it.” Ros-Crana hadn’t bothered hiding her savage grin. Rising through the middle of the wall, the timber palisade was held together with sharp spikes as well as being banded in metal at two different heights. The sharpened top of every fifth pole was missing, leaving a murder-hole where an archer could lean out for a quick bowshot, or for a strong man to pitch a rock down on the heads of any attackers.

  The wall sealed off the glen’s two gentle slopes, relying on the steep bluff face to prevent a massed attack otherwise. There was room enough for the local cattle herd and fowl to shelter inside the keep, and lean-tos for fodder and emergency shelter. Not every home could be squeezed into such a space, however, and leave room. There were several dozen wattle-and-daub huts and a few timber-constructed great homes clustered together outside the palisade in small, isolated neighborhoods with clear, open space in between them.

  Grouped by family or friendships was Kern’s guess. With the wide spaces in between to form a stretch of murder ground—any raiders who took one section of the village would have to cross through that open area to reach a second neighborhood.

  Clearly, this idea had been of concern in the past. The evidence of Vanir raids was clear. Newly raised shacks and huts sat next to the burned-out husks of older construction. Stone walls with fresh mud cement replaced portions of walls torn down under duress. Burned and brittle twigs cracked underfoot.

  The valley clansfolk marched past a round-walled hut made of quarried stone. Three men were busy rethatching its roof, tying bundles of rushes and hay in place with bark-weave rope. A simple enough task to bother three grown men. Kern saw at once how these warriors could form a bottleneck behind him, trapping the small delegation. Each man, he noticed, had a sword tied to his belt. Though they didn’t look too nervous or too worried, yet, with the valley clansfolk accompanied by Ros-Crana.

  The six warriors guarding Narach Chieftain glared back with a great deal more suspicion.

  The small Callaughnan party waited within bowshot of the palisade walls, within a circle of flame-bearing torches. Two camp stools had been set out at the center of the arena. Next to one a bearing spear had been planted in the ground, decorated with strips of blue and gray cloth and the skull of a mountain lion, which was Clan Conarch’s totem. An elderly man with a white cast smearing one eye and white hairs coming in thick over his temples walked around the cleared circle, sprinkling powder from a muslin sack over every torch. The flames burned blue for a moment, then green. Then settled into a tinted yellow that burned away more of the lingering wisps of steam and cast a cleaner, brighter light than any normal brand. His task accomplished, the shaman stepped to his chieftain’s side.

  If a person hadn’t known better, or hadn’t seen the elder man set at a task rather than calmly waiting, that person might have assumed the elder man was chieftain over Callaugh rather than Narach’s shaman. In fact, Narach Chieftain was much younger than any of his warriors. Younger than Daol or very close of an age. But he obviously commanded the respect of the older and larger warriors, which was not to say the younger man was small. Not of Reave’s height and oxlike shoulders, but easily several fingers taller than Kern and built for his stature. He had a young man’s casual grace and the lean muscles of a veteran warrior. His face held deep lines, his features craggy as were so many clansmen of Clan Conarch and the northwest region.

  It made him look older than his years, though his eyes were as clear and bright as any Kern had ever seen.

  “So you are the one they speak of,” Narach had said at their first meeting, crossing arms over a thick chest bared to the cold. A cape of spotted mountain lion fur richly trimmed in white fox had hung from his neck and over both shoulders, as it did again.

  “That would depend on what they say,” Kern had answered carefully. Assuming nothing but the tallest tales had made it there ahead of them.

  It was the shaman who responded. “The wolf-eyed outcast from Gaud, who hunts the Ymirish and challenges Grimnir himself. They say you have already defeated a snow serpent and one of the yellow-eyed sorcerers of the north.”

  “Mostly,” Kern admitted. Modesty had not prevented him from agreeing to the basic truths. “Though the details are exaggerated I am certain.”

  Narach shrugged. “I would agree, if our tales had
come from others among the valleymen who have stopped by here and traded Vanir weapons for food. But we first had these stories from captured Vanir.” The chieftain nodded to one of his other men. “Ask Colin.”

  “Is true,” a horse-faced warrior agreed with his chieftain. “We ambushed a small band coming back over the Pass of Blood a week ago. The Ymirish, he escaped us in a blizzard that quickly rolled eastward. We traded quick deaths to the raiders we captured in exchange for news out of the valley.”

  Meaning they tortured the Vanir, in repayment for several years of cruelty and murder, and finally cut their throats when they had heard enough.

  Cimmerian justice wasn’t easy, but it could be merciful. After a fashion.

  Sláine Longtooth heard all of this as well, while he sat in one of two camp chairs brought out for the chieftains. Nothing more than a thick flat of leather stretched over the spread limbs of a tripod, it allowed the two men to sit while their warriors and advisors stood behind. Gard Foehammer stood closest, bearing spear holding the fox’s tail over Longtooth’s shoulder. Sláine traded what sounded to Kern like mostly accurate information concerning the destruction of Cruaidh.

  Kern and his people sat through the retelling of both stories, quiet and concerned for where the talks might lead.

  Narach nodded Colin back into line. “We learned that several raiding parties were ambushed this side of the Snowy River country, and that this Ymirish saw defeat at the village of Taur. We did not believe half of what he said, claiming that several dozen villages all rallied against them. But to admit defeat was enough.”

  It was Longtooth who first looked to Kern.

  “So the Ymirish you fought against at Taur still lives. And he did not join in the assault on Cruaidh.”

  Kern had come to the same conclusion. “Though he must have passed Grimnir’s war party on his path back to the Broken Leg Lands.”