The Dragon Hammer (Wulf's Saga Book 1)

by Tony Daniel

  At Fishbridge Ford, a group of fifty beaver people led by Bamber Esserholz had split off. It was a small force, but they were all that could be spared.

  They were the diversion.

  The idea was to fake an attack by river first. This would attract the Sandhavener’s attention, and at least confuse them. The main force would then attack from the east. The beavers were prepared. They had managed to collect a hundred boats, dinghies, skiffs, and barges at the ford. These they had tied together bow to stern in trains, and placed burlap bags filled with dirt and straw inside them. The bags were shaped to look like people, at least from a distance. They’d cut poles to look like spears and pikes.

  The fake flotilla should reach the Raukenrose riverfront very soon. They had timed it to arrive at sunrise over the Dragonback Mountains. This would also put the sun at the back of the main force when they came out of the woods.

  The troops were both Tier and human, and all from Bear Valley and the upper Shenandoah. There were surprisingly well armed. It turned out that there was an amazing amount of weapons left over from the Little War. There were swords and halberds taken down from attics. Almost everyone in the entire valley supplemented whatever else he did with hunting, and was skillful with a bow. There were shields and mail shirts. Almost everyone had found an old helmet that either he or a relative had worn in the battles of twelve years ago. There were spears, shields, and maces. There were even quite a few horses equipped with armor, tarnished with age but still strong and serviceable.

  For such a peaceful place, we have some very warlike citizens.

  Maybe having everyone and his brother (and his sister) capable of being armed on not much notice was one of the reasons Shenandoah had stayed such a peaceful place, Wulf considered. When you have a neighbor with a halberd over the fireplace and a sword in the attic, maybe your first thought was how to solve a problem while avoiding getting into a fight.

  At the intersection of Ford Road with the Great Valley Road, they’d taken to the Alerdalan Woods and moved northeast, skirting the eastern side of the township. Footmen, horsemen and even supply wagons had moved silently through the forest. The tree people had made clear paths. The paths were so obvious that, even though the moon had set, the band of nearly two thousand was able to move through the forest with barely a sound.

  Then they’d wheeled to the west toward the town. They’d reached the edge of the Alerdalan Woods just before dawn. There they waited.

  Please don’t let me be a coward.

  How could he be worried about this? He’d fought. He’d killed.

  Those had been forced on him in the heat of the moment. He could work himself up, but part of him knew he didn’t have to be here.

  He had chosen this.

  I chose this, Wulf thought. I’m finally doing something.

  Or about to, at least.

  Wulf sat on the black and white draft horse the buffalo people had given him to ride to Bear Hall. He’d been told that this horse had been the favorite horse of Tupakkalaatu, the buffalo-man war chief. Tupakkalaatu was sitting on a mare he claimed to like just as well.

  He patted the horse’s neck. “Won’t be long now, boy,” he whispered to it. The horse snorted and shook its head. It sensed the anticipation around it and was ready to go.

  Nagel soared down from a nearby tree. She flew over the heads of several bear men with upraised pikes, and landed neatly on Wulf’s shoulder.

  “Smell blood,” she said in his ear. “Like it.”

  “That’s funny,” he said in a low voice, “All I can smell is horse manure.”

  The tents nearby were a quarter league from the town wall. There were an awful lot of them. He hoped Washbear had not underestimated how many enemies they faced.

  He warned you not to take what he said as established fact, Wulf reminded himself. Please, please keep me from running, divine ones. I don’t have to fight like a madman. I just have to fight. You can help me do that, can’t you? Gods, God, Tretz, anyone listening?

  Earl Keiler moved up beside Wulf. He rode a horse even bigger than Wulf’s. The bear people bought their horses from buffalo-people breeders. Behind the earl were five bear men, two wolf men, and two humans. These were Bear Valley people Keiler knew well and trusted. He’d picked them to run orders. The bear men and humans rode large horses. The two wolf men rode purebred hunters, smaller than the draft horses. They were all black horses with gray dapples. These were the horses of wolf people. They used them for woodland hunting.

  There were clouds to the south. Otherwise, the sky was clear. The last of the starlight was being washed away by the coming dawn.

  “Today is the day we take back Raukenrose, Lord Wulf,” the earl said to Wulf.

  Suddenly there was a murmur and stir among the outer ring of Sandhaven troops. Men ran from their breakfast to snatch weapons from tents and arms stands.

  “Do you think they’ve seen us?” Wulf asked. He heard a nervous quiver in his voice.

  Please let me fight well.

  “The skirmishers say no,” Keiler replied. “I believe the Sandhaveners have seen our riverboats. We may have fooled them. Be that as it may, they’re distracted. Now’s the time. M’lord?”

  “What? I mean . . .”

  “He wants you to order the attack, daft man,” Nagel whispered in his ear. It was the first time she’d called him “man.”

  What was he supposed to say? How did you start a war?

  “All right. Begin the attack, Earl Keiler,” Wulf said. “If that’s what you meant.”

  “I did.” Earl Keiler gave a set of rapid-fire orders to his couriers.

  The air inside Alerdalan Wood was still. No leaf trembled. The woods itself seemed to hold its breath.

  Earl Keiler drew his long sword and raised it high. Wulf did the same with his bear-man’s short sword. It was the size of a regular sword for him.

  Keiler nodded to a man who had a horn strung at his side.

  “Three blasts, Ernst,” Keiler said.

  The man raised the horn to his lips.

  “Bwaa, bwaa, bwaa!”

  The horn sounded. Three long notes.

  “Charge!” roared Earl Keiler. Then the earl immediately doubled over in his saddle, wracked with coughing. His horse went nowhere. Wulf stayed with Keiler for a moment. All around them, the woods were erupting.

  Time to go.

  He kicked his horse into a trot. There was no room for a canter, much less a gallop. As he moved forward, Wulf began to cry out. He had no control of it. It was an eerie sound made up anger, fear…and pure hatred.

  He hated the invaders in front of him. He wanted to kill them.

  He wanted to make them shriek and bleed and die.

  Screaming at the top of his lungs and holding his sword ready to draw blood, Wulf made for the Sandhavener tents.

  Chapter Forty-Two:

  The Battle

  The front line was made up of about a hundred mounted troops. Behind them came the foot soldiers.

  The horsemen lowered their swords, pikes, and halberds.

  When the leading horses crashed into the tents, it was not at great speed. But the jolt of the horses clustered together was massive.

  The river distraction seemed to have worked. The Sandhaveners were mostly facing away from the charging horses and were overrun from behind. Many were frantically trying to get into armor to join the charge northwest toward the river.

  Several of the horsemen had moved ahead of Wulf. They rode down men who did not realize what hit them.

  Wulf headed for a group of Sandhaveners standing in front of a tent. But then a big horse cut in front of him and slowed him down. He tried to ride around it to the left, but another moved to block his way. It was two of the bear-man guards. Wulf wheeled around. There were five of them. He was surrounded.

  “Blood and bones, get out of the way!” he shouted. But they would not.

  When he got to the outskirts of the Sandhaven tents, the enemy had already b
een cut down or trampled.

  They aren’t going to let me fight! Those fools aren’t going to let me fight!

  A man crawled out of a nearby tent and charged at them with a sword. One of the bear men neatly shoved Wulf’s horse to the side. Then the bear man met the Sandhavener. The soldier was frantically trying to draw his sword from a scabbard. He never had a chance. The bear man swung his own sword in a brutal arc. It sheared through the side of the man’s neck above his leather armor. Blood and gore spouted out like a geyser.

  Wulf felt weak. His head swam and his guts felt loose.

  Suddenly in front of Wulf, a man arose from the dust. He’d been trampled and, swaying on injured legs, he pulled himself up. He positioned himself to take a swing at Wulf. The man looked big, even if he was wobbly.

  This is it, Wulf thought.

  Please, please, let me—

  Wulf lowered his sword, raised his buckler, and prepared to go at him. But before he could do it, two bear-man guards charged past him. They stabbed the man from either side with the razor-sharp points of halberds.

  They weren’t going to let him fight.

  “Nagel, do you see this?” he screamed. The owl squawked her anger back at him. She wanted to be in the fight, too.

  “Curse it to cold hell, you will let me!” he shouted. It had no effect. There were shouts, screams of rage and pain, the clang of steel, the clatter of blades hitting wooden shields, and the pounding of horse hoofs on the soft ground.

  The smell of human feces from the latrine had been replaced. Now the air was filled with the tangy odor of fresh blood.

  I was going to do it! I was!

  They weren’t going to let him. He felt irritated by it, even though he ought to have known.

  He could get away with not pushing himself further. He was in the battle. Nobody would call him a coward now.

  Why not leave it at this? He’d shown he was ready and willing. He’d charged with all the others.

  He could barely see flashing swords and raised bucklers through the surrounding horses of his guards.

  Why not ride back to the woods and get out of this craziness? People were getting their heads split, their arms lopped. Arrows were starting to fall.

  He glimpsed a human, a woodsman in green, stagger back toward the woods with a battleax in his back. He collapsed onto the dusty ground near the latrines.

  He saw another man walking slowly away, holding onto the wrist of an arm where there used to be a hand.

  People were dying in a whirlwind of blades and arrows. It would be all right. He could back up. Watch how the situation developed.

  Nobody would blame him.

  It made sense, didn’t it?

  No. It did not.

  Because the dragon would know.

  The land would know.

  He turned his horse and started back toward the edge of the forest.

  “Boy, what are you doing—” squawked Nagel.

  “Shut up,” Wulf said.

  “Boy, you must try to fight, you must—”

  “Shut up, I said,” Wulf yelled at Nagel.

  Nagel reluctantly did what he asked, but he was afraid she might bite him on the ear out of sheer malice.

  Have to convince them I’ve retreated. One or two more eyeblinks, and—

  Wulf yanked on the reins and swung his horse around. A less spirited horse would have thrown him at that moment. A less skilled horseman would have fallen off. But his black and white neatly made the turn and Wulf stayed on.

  Wulf kicked his mount in the flanks, and the horse seemed to almost heave a sigh of relief. It broke into a trot back toward the battle. Wulf spurred the horse into a full-on gallop. He would only need to keep the gallop going until he could get away from the guards and—

  Wulf burst through the ring of startled bear-man guards. He charged back toward the fight. He saw that there was no way he was going to get the horse through the line, though. The foot soldiers were jammed too tightly together. If he wanted to fight, it would have to be on foot.

  Hardly missing a beat, Wulf swung himself down from the horse. He squeezed his sword hilt into the scar on his right hand.

  Then he ran for the lines. He shoved his way between men, moved forward.

  Finally he was facing Sandhaven shields. He’d reached what there was of a front line.

  Wulf raised his sword.

  Once again, he began to scream.

  Chapter Forty-Three:

  The Buttress

  The Nestie’s tabard with its gray goose on blue and black was a little large for Rainer and blood-soaked in the back. He belted it on anyway. Grer looked like what he was, a common smith with a bag of tools. If they ran into any Sandhaven soldiers, Rainer planned to walk fast and pretend he was carrying out an order.

  This was maybe not the best of plans, but it was all Rainer could think of.

  I’m wearing their cursed badge now, he thought. I’m officially a spy.

  He could be burned, crucified, or beheaded. Maybe he’d get lucky and it would be a clean hanging. Were there rules for executing a spy?

  Wulf would know, Rainer thought. He felt loneliness and misery try to settle into his mind. As he had done many times before in the past days, he shoved them away.

  “I’ll ask him when I see him,” he muttered.

  “Do what?” said Grer. He was walking alongside Rainer as fast as his limp would let him.

  “Nothing,” Rainer replied. “We’ve only got a couple of blocks left.”

  “I always get lost in town. You’d think I wouldn’t since I’ve lived here all my life.”

  “I could find my way through Raukenrose in the moonless dark,” Rainer said.

  “And you have,” chuckled Grer.

  They were about to get to Allfather Square. Rainer put a hand in front of Grer to hold him back. They both carefully peeped around the wall of the alley.

  The square was full of soldiers. Sandhaveners. Several details of five or six men carrying buckets were in line to get water at the fountain.

  Across the square, a group of guards stood at attention near the entrance to the cathedral. Rainer counted eight.

  “Curse it to cold hell,” Grer said. “How are we going to get past that?”

  Rainer considered. “We don’t. We circle around and come out on the side of the cathedral.”

  “But there’re no doors on the side,” grumbled Grer. “You come in through the front.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Rainer said.

  Whack, whack, whack.

  Metal on wood. A huge splintering, cracking sound drowned out everything else for a moment.

  What was that? Then he saw.

  A detail of soldiers was cutting down the Olden Oak. They had almost finished. It was already leaning. One side was notched so the tree would fall along the north side of the square, parallel to the cathedral. The upper notch was well into the heartwood.

  The tree shuddered. It swayed.

  Hundreds of years growing, to die like this.

  He wondered if they would cut out Wulf’s dagger. Maybe someone already had.

  Curse them.

  He and Grer backed into the alley again and worked their way around to the other side of the square. From the side streets Rainer watched the belltower of the cathedral come in and out of view above the roofs of the buildings.

  They came out near the east wall of the cathedral. The wall was rimmed at the ground by an evergreen hedge. There were two flying buttresses on this side bracing the main structure. Rainer and Grer were across a cobblestone street from the front spanner.

  Rainer examined the buttress, and then the wall. He turned to Grer and smiled.

  “They didn’t do it,” he said. “I mean, why would they?”

  “Do what?”

  “Tuck mortar in the joints,” Rainer replied. “The masons did it on the castle wall. That’s why it’s smooth.”

  “All right,” Grer said. “Are we going to try to pull the thing down
with our bare hands?”

  “It means that I can climb it,” Rainer said.

  “Up there?”

  “The bell’s not coming down to us.”

  Rainer squirmed out of his hauberk. He’d been wearing the mail shirt for days. He instantly felt much lighter. Then he took off the padded arming shirt underneath.

  Now he was wearing a fustian shirt and a pair of britches stuffed into his boots.

  He thought for a minute. They were heavy, with the hobnails hammered through the soles.

  “Switch boots with me,” he said to Grer.

  Grer’s feet were bigger than Rainer’s, but the shoes were made of soft leather. Rainer used the straps to pull it tight enough to fit him. The toe was nearly a finger length too long for him, though. After fiddling around a moment, Rainer saw how to fix the problem. He curled the boot toe over itself so it fit under the front bootstrap. When he was done, his toes pressed up against the front of the boot.

  He could climb in these.

  He wouldn’t be needing the battle-ax anymore, so he hid it in the alley. Grer secured Rainer’s dagger in its scabbard with two leather ties he pulled from his tool bag.

  “Good rule. Always carry a piece string,” the smith said.

  Rainer then ran the belt through the frog loop in the knife’s scabbard and put the belt back on, the knife turned behind him.

  “I’m ready,” Rainer said. “Let’s walk to the cathedral wall. Slow and easy.”

  They would be exposed for a few eyeblinks. It was a moment of danger. If enough of the soldiers saw them, they would be dead. The front staircase of the cathedral spread out to either side of the main building, however. If they got to the wall without being noticed, the staircase would hide them from the soldiers in the square.

  Whack, whack, whack.

  These must be the final blows to the Olden Oak. Rainer risked a glimpse around the corner.