by J. V. Jones
Vaylo frowned at Hammie across the ramparts of the hillfort, suspicious that this bout of poeticism might be his fault. The Faa man had just said the sunset reminded him of Burning River.
That legend was sacred to Bludd; it struck something close to its heart. Touched fear and pride, gave children images to bring to their nightmares, and grown clansmen a sense of what it meant to belong to Bludd. Ockish Bull had been the one who first told him the tale in full. Vaylo must have been about nine; Ockish about twenty-one. Ockish had led a two-day hunt into the Bluddwilds north of the roundhouse and they’d bivouacked in a chest-high snowdrift. Ockish was the eldest so he had them doing all the grunt work. Vaylo remembered one of his half-brothers had come along. Arno. It had been a good two days. There’d been the wonder of digging a shelter from the snow, followed by the second wonder of it not melting when they lit a fire. Deer had been caught, gods bless their overstruck, overkilled souls—no one except Ockish had exercised any restraint. Even Arno hadn’t been too bad, and there’d been a point when they’d mounted a water-bladder fight when he and Arno had been working together as a team, laughing, soaking and perfectly synchronizing the filling and the throwing of the missiles. For that one fine hour it had been “us” against “them.” Both of his half-brothers were easier to get along with when they weren’t together, Vaylo had realized later.
That second night Ockish had ordered the construction of a parley fire. No one but him knew what this was meant, yet seven boys all under the age of fifteen had moved sharp to his orders, building a six-feet-wide hollow sphere of logs. “It’s for light, not warmth,” he had told them once it was done. “That way we’ll be sure to see each other’s faces when we talk.”
Vaylo and Arno had agreed that it was a fine thing. Ockish had lit the primed sphere with ceremonial flourish, and then handed Vaylo a flask to pass around the circle. “One swig per man.” Whatever it was it had tasted like wood varnish and made everything Vaylo looked at that night seem sharp in the middle and blurred around the edges.
In his own good time, Ockish Bull had then told them about the legend of Burning River. “It was the time of the great Vor lord, Wardwir Crane, a thousand years deep in the past. Wardwir was a fearsome general and rode to battle wearing the black and winged cranehelm and wielding the sword named Beheader. His enemies shivered to see it. He wanted land and fancied HalfBludd and he took it on the Night of Wralls. It is told that Wardwir beheaded one hundred and thirty-one Halfmen in battle before he ordered his war scribes to cease the count. Wardwir judged that if a higher number was recorded his enemies might disbelieve the tale. And cease to fear him.” A pause had followed where Ockish Bull’s gaze had traveled around the parley fire, waiting for everyone present to register their agreement. Vaylo had nodded vigorously. A hundred and thirty-one was a good number.
Satisfied, Ockish had continued. Even at that young age he’d had a way with spinning tales. “The new Bludd chief Mannangler Bludd had no choice but to ride his armies south to meet Wardwir. When a Bluddsworn clan is invaded, he told his men, so is Bludd. Wardwir assembled his host on a field south of the Wolf and waited for Mannangler to make the crossing. Mannangler had been camped south of Broddic and arrived with many rafts and boats. The crossing was made in the dead of night. Five hundred Bluddsmen were on the river when it ignited. Wardwir had been waiting for him and had ordered naphtha floated on the water. When he gave the signal his crossbowmen loosed a thousand arrows primed with bone phosphor. The fire of hells erupted. Flames as tall as towers lit up the night as if it were day. Bluddsmen burned on the river. When they threw themselves in the water to douse the flames they still burned. Some made it to the other side and cooked within their armor as they fought. Mannangler himself boiled so intensely in his full plate he exploded. The Bluddsmen who were still awaiting crossing heard the terrible cries of the clansmen and many took to the water, knowing they too would be burned but unable to stand by and watch their brothers die. Hundreds of Bluddsmen lost their lives that night, their weapons and armor melted to their skin, their bodies crisped to husks.”
Even now, forty-five years later, Vaylo could remember the silence that had followed Ockish’s tale. It had weight and meaning. Many took to the water, those were the words Vaylo had cherished the most. That was what it meant to be Bludd.
Or so he had thought back then.
Now he wondered about other things in the tale. How could Wardwir have taken HalfBludd so easily? Both the Wolf and the Lonewater guarded its clanhold, and the HalfBludd roundhouse was not known for nothing as “the Siegebreaker.” And what was the Night of Wralls anyway? At first Vaylo had assumed Ockish meant to say “Walls” but he had heard variations on the tale many times since then and although several details changed from telling to telling that word remained the same. Wralls.
Vaylo shivered. “Hammie,” he said, “why did you have to go and get me thinking about Burning River?”
Hammie knew when an apology was called for even when he wasn’t exactly sure about the nature of his trespass. “Sorry, Chief.”
Vaylo wagged his head. “You should be. Keep watch.”
“Aye.” Hammie Faa stood to attention. He was dressed in his new maroon cloak, and Vaylo could see that at some point in the past few days it had been tailored to fit him more precisely. Nan Culldayis had been busy with a needle. That woman had a giant soft spot for anyone whose named ended in Faa.
Thinking about Nan made him want to see her, and he took the short walk along the western rampart that led to the stairs. The sunset was fading to purples and dried-blood reds and black. Thicker, more serious clouds were heading in from the northeast. Old compacted snow that had been around for several weeks felt like stone underfoot. Part of the rampart wall had collapsed decades earlier leaving an exposed gap where a man could simply walk off into thin air. Vaylo considered why he had been here for nearly thirty days and not given the order to have it timbered. Nan was busy fixing things. Why wasn’t he?
Waving a hand in farewell to Hammie, Vaylo took the stairs. Someone had thought to salt here and the steps were less treacherous than the rampart. The wind was beginning to pick up and he could hear it warping the sheet copper on the roof.
The blond swordsman Big Borro was heading up as Vaylo was heading down. “Snow?” Vaylo asked as Borro backed against the stairwell to make room for his chief to pass.
Borro had an apple pinned between his teeth and it made a sucking noise as he dislodged it. “Aye. Storm’s brewing to the east.”
Over Bludd. The Dog Lord nodded. He noticed Borro had a basic shortbow clipped to a brain hook on his shoulder belt. “Taking the watch from Hammie?”
“Joining him. Drybone says on the nights when the clouds cover the moon we need to mount a double guard.”
It was the first Vaylo had ever heard of such an order. But he did not let Barro know it. “Don’t stand still. You might freeze.”
“I know it,” Big Borro said, nodding toward the cloak, face mask, and overmitts he had rolled in a loose pile and tucked under his left arm. “Got some spare for Hammie. Some of . . . Der’s old stuff.”
Vaylo met Marcus Borro’s dark blue eyes. Der was Derek Blunt. And Derek Blunt was dead, attacked by only the gods knew what. If the Dog Lord remembered rightly Big Borro and Derek had married sisters. Pretty dark-haired girls who were waiting back at the Bluddhouse. “Derek was a fine warrior. One of the best men I ever saw wield a sword from the saddle.”
Muscles in Borro’s large fleshy face tightened. He was a big man, wide as well as tall, with some hard fat at his gut and the beginnings of a third chin. “Makes it harder to figure how he could have been taken while mounted.”
Few replies possible to that and Vaylo did not attempt any. The two parted in silence, exchanging blunt and knowing nods.
Vaylo found himself little warmed when he entered the hillfort. Fires were burning somewhere, but not here in the west ward, in the hall above the temporary stables. There was a fireplace—
a vast black cavity the size of a beer cellar topped with a stone mantle carved with thistles and fisher heads—but the cook irons had gone, and an ominous split in the flue wall, running from the mantel all the way to the roof, perhaps provided the reason why. At least the cold had killed off some of the molds. The green ones, if Vaylo wasn’t mistaken. The black ones could probably live on the moon.
Even without the warmth of the fire some men still bar-racked here, and untidy rows of makeshift stretcher-beds, rush mats, burlap sacking and weapons gear lined three of the five walls. A few men were sleeping. Some were engaged in a tense game of knucklebones. Little Aaron was sitting beside Mogo Salt, watching with keen interest as Mogo rubbed yellow tung oil into Cawdo’s peel-bladed Morning Star hammerhead. Aaron looked up as his grandfather passed, but the lure of such an exotic piece of weaponry was too great and he bared his bottom teeth in a hopeful grimace that meant something like, Sorry, Granda, don’t be mad, but this is better than spending time with you.
Vaylo glared at him. Keep the boy on his toes.
It had been sobering to see how quickly his grandson had been won over by Gangaric. The boy’s uncle had stayed at the hillfort for only three days, but by the second day Aaron was following Gangaric around like a puppy. “What’s it like at HalfBludd? Do they eat slugs? Is Quarro Bludd chief now? Which hammer did Da wield at the Crab Gate? If we hold Withy why can’t Granda be king? Where are you going? Can I come?” The questions had been relentless, and in fairness to Gangaric he had dealt with them with patience and some tact. He’d had twin boys himself, Ferrin and Yago, and he knew something about how to deal with bairns. He also knew, Vaylo was sure, what an impression he was making upon the boy. Aaron was seven, and easily swayed. Gangaric had wooed him with tales of the Bluddhouse, of Pengo’s brilliance on Ganmiddich Field, of the importance of wielding a hammer, not a sword.
“Why don’t you have a hammer, Granda?” the boy had actually asked yesterday.
“Because I lost it in a Dhoonesman’s chest,” he had replied, surprised by how sharply the question touched him. “And I never it got it back.” And it happened because your father, the supposed hero of Ganmiddich Pengo Bludd, deserted the Dhoonehouse leaving behind a crew of forty men. Forty. And you, my grandson, are one of the handful of people inside the house that night who escaped alive. He had come so close to saying those words that if Aaron had been older he could have read them on his granda’s face. As it was the boy had left him, his shoulders drooping, his skinny arms hugging his skinny chest.
Gangaric and his crew were well gone now. They had ridden south to Withy eight days back, but damage had been done. Little Aaron’s head was filled with tales of his father’s and his uncles’ bravery, and he had begun asking Nan when they were going back. Even Nan wasn’t sure where he meant by this. It could be Dhoone, Ganmiddich or Bludd. Certainly in the past year Aaron had seen more of Dhoone than any other clanhold. He’d been barely six when they left Bludd, and could hardly be expected to remember it.
Vaylo exited the west hall, plucked a rushlight from a wall sconce, and took the stair up to the highest floor in the hillfort. Nan had made herself a solar there, and it was the time of night when she’d be done with her kitchen chores, and hopefully would have left the cleanup to the men. With Nan you could never be sure. She might stay and talk with the young ones. She had a way with them, a calmness that settled them and made them want to do things for her. Just this morning she’d had them stuffing mattresses with dried sedge and straw. Vaylo had caught them all in the stables, laughing as they’d stuffed one particular mattress with scratchy burrs. “For Hammie,” young Midge Pool had declared, beaming. “We’re taking bets on how long it’ll take him to notice.”
Poor Hammie, Vaylo had thought, waving them on. It was good to see them doing something lighthearted, good to know also that his own lady, Nan Culldayis, had set them on the path toward it.
One of these days he was going to have to marry her. He was no fool. He knew that of the two of them she was the one with all the admirers. And the teeth.
The upper level of the hillfort was an oddly disjointed place, filled with tiny slant-ceilinged rooms that led from one another like jammed-in boxes. Corridors as such ceased to exist. To get to a room you had to walk through a room. The only spaces that were remotely private where those that abutted exterior walls—and most of them were running with damp. Vaylo sincerely hoped that the man who had designed this place had been forced to live in it. Between the deeply flawed roof and this dungeon-like maze it was about the most ill-planned, ill-formed lump of stone he’d ever had the misfortune to stay in. Made the Bluddhouse look like a palace.
Made it look very good indeed.
The Dog Lord made his way across the floor, walking from room to room. Most of them were empty, but if you weren’t careful you might surprise some poor sod on a chamber pot, or give someone who’d just fallen asleep the fright of his life. Vaylo made a lot of noise.
Trouble with Gangaric’s visit was that it hadn’t just unsettled the boy. It had unsettled him as well. Bludd was being run into the ground, its defenses neglected. Gangaric had said that Quarro had grown lazy and distracted—claims Vaylo found easy to believe. Out of the seven of them Quarro had always been the one with the greatest sense of entitlement. First born, first sworn, first to get his own roundhouse—none of it through any effort of his own. The only reason why he’d ended up with the Bluddhouse was because his fool of a father had decided to head west and conquer Dhoone. Quarro had never had to fight or struggle for anything in his entire life. And what was beginning to make less and less sense was why he, Vaylo Bludd, was stuck in this godforsaken mold heap in the middle of nowhere while Quarro was sleeping with whores and digging bear pits at Bludd.
It had been different when he thought all was well there. The Bluddhouse secure in the hands of his eldest son was something he could live with. For a certainty he would not set Bluddsmen against Bluddsmen for the sake of claiming a house. Yet what if he was needed? What if all Gangaric’s words were true and Bludd was vulnerable and known to be vulnerable? Quarro Bludd was not the Bludd chief.
The Dog Lord was.
Big Borro’s wife was there. Mogo Salt’s mother and his two sisters. All sorts of Faas and HalfFaas, Nan’s older sister with the beautiful name, Irilana, Scunner Bone, Odwin Two Bears’ large and sprawling family, who always made a point of having two of something in their names, the fine and ancient family of Bulls . . . the list went on. Clan was there, in the Bluddhouse, and if Quarro was not watching over it then something had to be done.
So what was keeping him here?
Vaylo took the door to Nan’s solar, and as he passed into the light and the warmth he knew the answer was his fostered son.
“Granda, where’s the wolf dog? You said you were going to bring him.” Pasha Bludd, nine years old and bossy as a general, scrambled from the sheepskin rug by the hearth to accost him, arms folded. “The others are waiting.”
It was true enough. He did remember telling his granddaughter a few hours ago that he was going to fetch the wolf dog, but then he’d had men to see and Hammie to check on, and between the sun setting and Hammie’s remark about Burning River he’d clean forgot about the dog. “He’ll be with Dry, in the tower.” The wolf dog and Cluff Drybannock had always been close.
Pasha marched toward him. “I’ll go and fetch him then.”
“No you won’t.”
People remarked that Pasha Bludd looked like her granda when she frowned. He certainly hoped it wasn’t true. He didn’t think it would be becoming for a chief to look so delightful. “Sit. Play with the other dogs. Rub my feet.”
She tried to hold the frown, but it crumpled on her at the mention of his feet and she barked out a laugh. “Rather rub pickled eggs.”
This statement left him speechless. The three dogs lying by the fire did not bestir themselves. The big black-and-orange bitch was on her back, all four legs splayed like sticks in a jar. The o
ther two were more decently arranged, but one of them was smelling bad. “Where’s Nan?”
Pasha shrugged. “She came and went.”
Vaylo unhooked his cloak and headed toward the fire. Somehow Nan had managed to turn this damp room with its single south-facing window, its hole-in-the-wall fireplace and its uneven floor into the brightest place in the hillfort. As the room was small the fire had some real effect; green mold had been banished entirely and the black mold, while not gone, was at least dry. Nan had scattered the floor with hay and laid sheepskins on top. A simple but graceful table made from sheet copper hammered over fox pine had been set beneath the window. When it turned up out of the blue ten days back, Vaylo had asked Nan about it and received a surprising reply. “Cluff made it for me. He remembered me telling him how I didn’t like to leave things on the floor overnight.” Nan was the only person who ever called Drybone “Cluff.”
Vaylo pushed one of the dogs out of the way and squatted close to the hearth. Heat made blood rush to his face. Pasha brought him a cup of water and a thumb cup of malt. The liquor had been a gift from Gangaric, carried all the way from Bludd. It was such a treasure that Vaylo thought he’d be quite happy never to drink it; just uncork the flask once a day and inhale.
“Why you being so good to me?” he said, his eyes narrowing at his granddaughter. “You think I’m going to forget about the foot rub?”
It was then as he rolled onto the rug and made a great show of pulling off his left boot that all three dogs stood. Ears moving, they tracked a noise the Dog Lord could not hear. Immediately Vaylo pulled himself to his feet. Fear jumped so quickly in his heart it must have been there all along.
