“We’ll meet you down below,” Daol shouted.
The others busied themselves gathering up coils of rope and blankets, leather sacks, and their bedroll slings. Everything went over the cliff, thrown down below where the warriors could pick it up without having to pack it down themselves. Several packs came close to hitting Ossian on the way down.
“Ho! Watch out!”
“If you come across Ossian’s body, make sure you drag it over where that wolf of yours won’t start gnawing at it.”
Another wave.
“What? What do you—Nay! Daol? Aodh?” Nothing. “Reave?”
After little sleep and a morning full of death, there was no raucous uproar. But Kern heard more than one person barking a few sharp laughs at Ossian’s expense. Reave alone could have hauled the fallen clansman back to the top of the cliff, but instead they left him twisting around at the end of the rope, craning his neck to stare back up the sheer climb.
“Reave!”
Kern watched the others head back down the ridge’s spine. Then shifted more weight to his shoulders as he relaxed the grip his feet had against the pine’s trunk. Sliding down, bending slender branches aside as he caught for the larger ones that might support some actual weight, he worked his way slowly, carefully, toward the ground.
Daol had the right of it. There was no hurry.
“REAVE!”
HUNDREDS OF GREEN needles matted Kern’s wild mane of frost blond hair. Stuck to his face and arms. Itching down his back, behind his greaves, and beneath his simple, brown kilt of rough wool.
Pine pitch coated his hands, staining his palms with yellow-brown patches and smelling of evergreen. He learned quickly not to pick the needles from his tangled strands unless he wanted a more painful mess. Instead, he scraped up some dry dirt from beneath a large stone and rubbed it over his hands and legs. The dry dirt soaked up the pitch. It made the stains worse, but stopped his skin from sticking to everything. Searching at a rough-faced rock the size of his fist, he went to work on each hand, grinding and scraping, wearing away the worst of the stains.
By then the others—except for Ossian—had made it down from the ridge.
Aodh and Reave came dragging in the fifth Vanir between them, the one Kern had knocked from the narrow path. They dropped him next to the battered bodies of the others.
“Not a bad catch,” Garret Blackpatch said. A rare compliment from the taciturn, older man.
“Three afore sun’s rise.” Aodh shook his head. “Crom’s stiff pike, would have been fine at that.”
A busy morning, any way one looked at it. The kind of hard-press fighting that made them all feel the loss of their missing friends, left behind in Callaugh Glen to heal or to help protect their wounded. And a couple to assist Ros-Crana in stirring up the western clans.
If that could be done at all.
Discussions best saved for later. With only the short handful of them present, everyone quickly settled into their routine. Daol had already scouted out a good site, where the spring sun peeked over a natural hedge of basket cedar to ease the morning chill from a small clearing. Then he ran off with his hunting bow, gray eyes alert for prey, and predators. Reave and Aodh found and stripped the bodies of the Vanir. They piled bedrolls, armor, and weapons, and a large amount of miscellaneous gear in front of Garret, who examined the pile for the best pieces to carry south. With Wallach Graybeard missing, still recovering from the loss of his hand in the recent fighting, Garret had the best eye for quality. His left, as it happened to be.
Garret Blackpatch was fortunate to have his remaining eye at all after tangling with Grimnir’s saber-toothed cats. Three weeks after the fact, the three angry stripes torn down the right side of his face were still crusted over with scabs and a bit red around the edges. The ruined socket hid behind a packing of boiled cloth and a wide, black, leather patch.
For his part, Kern staked small spears of beef next to a small pit ringed with blocky pieces of shale. It took him almost as much time to start the small campfire with flint and steel as it did for Ossian to find handholds, scale back up the cliff face, and run himself off the escarpment. The flames ate up soft tinder and crackled into a spread of dry, brown pine needles. They were licking along the first few sticks of deadwood when the Taurin warrior stomped into camp, brushing past Kern.
“No blades,” Kern warned.
Ossian grunted and pushed by after the others.
Reave and Aodh crouched down near Garret, their backs toward the building fire as they examined a shaggy, gray blanket of mountain ram fur. Oblivious. Discussing who had the better claim with a minimum of shoving. Reave had size between the two men, and with his black, brushy beard and coarse hair was a fairly shaggy beast himself. But Aodh, even with salt-and-pepper hair telling his age, was nobody’s victim. So they argued.
Garret, on the other side of the two, facing back toward Kern and Ossian, saw the other warrior coming. Kern noticed the exaggerated widening around his left eye and the hint of a mischievous gleam in their cold, blue depths. But Garret said nothing, dropping his gaze. Letting Ossian approach, tap Reave on the shoulder, and, when the large man looked around, slug him right in the jaw.
Leave it to Ossian to go right after the biggest opponent first.
With a shout Aodh rose from the ground, putting his shoulder into Ossian’s gut and driving the other man backward. Hard. They staggered through Kern’s fire pit, stuffing out the flames under Aodh’s leather boot.
Kern rocked back, away from the small explosion of acrid smoke and sparks, watching as the two wrestled back and forth, kicking apart his circle of stones, knocking over the spears of meat. Neither man with a clear advantage. Then Ossian doubled his hands together into one huge fist, and brought it down on the back of Aodh’s neck.
Aodh sagged to his knees, then splayed out over the ground on the next stunning blow.
But with a roar of savage delight, Reave waded back into the fight. He caught up Ossian from behind in a great bear hug, trapping the man’s arms at his side and lifting him bodily from the ground.
Ossian’s feet lashed back in mule kicks, beating at Reave’s muscular thighs, searching for the groin. But Reave was too canny a fighter. He turned his hips away, then, with a twisting throw, hurled Ossian in a spinning fall that smashed him into the ground and rolled him into a heap back near Garret Blackpatch.
He lay there a moment, too stunned to pick himself up, while Aodh shook his own head clear and Reave spit out some blood and rubbed at his bruised jaw. Then Ossian flopped himself onto his back and bellowed a great, full-chested laugh at the blue sky overhead.
Reave chuckled and Aodh, still on hands and knees, beat a fist at the ground, too dizzy to laugh but joining in as he could. Garret smiled thinly, then winced. His ruined eye pained him worse on bright days, for some reason. The shaman had said it would be because his left was now working twice as hard.
“Did I miss something?”
Daol strolled back into the clearing, his bow in one hand and a pair of pheasant held by the feet in the other. He dropped the scrawny birds on the ground next to Kern. Eighteen summers and still filling into his manhood, there was no better hunter Kern had ever met than Daol. And if there was ever a better tracker, it could only be Daol’s father, Hydallan.
The younger man also knew very well what had happened. His air of innocence was laid on just a bit too thick.
“An argument,” Kern said, encouraging the fire back to life. He nodded at the birds. “That was fast.”
“Hunting is good up here.”
It was. For all kinds of prey.
Spring’s return had been very late, the winter-of-no-end threatening Cimmerian clans with starvation as well as their facing the usual raids mounted by northern invaders. Kern recalled how close their home village of Gaud had come to ruin. Scraping the bottom of the food pits. Their new chieftain, Cul, encouraging the old and the weak to offer up their own lives so that the village, the clan, would endure.
Such a waste.
But with the sun’s return, and the snowmelt, game was plentiful and very active as animals made up for lost months. Some said it was the recent defeat of Grimnir’s army that finally ended the long freeze. Most scoffed, but Kern was not so certain anymore. Cimmerians were not usually so superstitious, but how could the question not be raised in the minds of those who had witnessed the unnatural powers of Grimnir’s sorcerers?
And for those who had seen Grimnir himself.
Kern had done both. He had stood in the great warrior’s shadow, wrestling atop the plateau that overlooked Clan Conarch. Giant-kin! Large and ferocious, with a thick hide the color of ancient, rotten snow. Thick muscles cording his body, and a toothy face twisted into a snarl of rage. So clear, the blood of frost giants, but still not a beast. Intelligence had warred with smoldering fury inside those great, golden eyes. Kern had seen them up close. Had looked into the eyes Grimnir shared with his Ymirish.
With Kern.
“Yea,” Reave said, agreeing with Daol. He wiped a spot of blood from his lip with the back of his hand. “Hunting good all over. Too good, by Crom.”
The large man reached up and ran a finger along his left ear, against the half dozen earrings he had taken off men he’d killed. His right ear held only a single gold hoop—his first trophy, taken from a Vanir raider the year before. Winter, and now spring, had made for busy months.
Aodh shrugged, rising onto unsteady feet. “What can we do? The snowmelt makes for easier travel down out of the Eiglophians. Opens up the passes between the Nordheim lands and Cimmeria.” In the last few weeks, especially, raiders had swept across the northern border in a renewed plague. A renewed threat. “The Breaknecks nay so remote anymore.”
And if the rest of Kern’s small band—his pack of wolves—were going to have made any progress with the local clans, it would be done now. He poked at the budding fire with a thin stick, stirring it, then held his hand down near the flames. As usual he felt the touch of heat on his skin, but not down deep. Not even spring could thaw the touch of winter permanently settled into Kern’s bones. A reminder, as if he needed another, that he was not fully of Cimmeria. That he did not belong.
A spark of anger stirred inside him again. He was stalling again. He knew it. Picking up the fallen meat, he brushed away bits of grass and dirt, then adjusted the spears over the fire. This day had been coming, and it was both too soon and not late enough.
“We move south,” he said at last. They had all talked around the subject for too many days, trying to draw Kern out. His silence was at an end. “To Conarch. And Callaugh. We find the others, and we do what needs doing.”
“Back home?” Ossian asked. He still lay flat on his back, a trickle of blood leaking along his chin from a split lip.
“Along the way.” Kern nodded warily. His people were all outcasts, and once outside the clan, always outside. It was custom that carried the weight of law in Cimmeria. There would be those not happy to see them. “But we also swore to take the bloody spear to other clans. Other parts of Cimmeria.”
That had been his pledge at the end of the battle, discovering himself and his warriors still alive, and Grimnir fled with the core of the northern war host. But that was also before.
Before Sláine Longtooth and T’hule Chieftain of Clan Conarch began a new feud.
Before Kern learned also that several of his warriors needed weeks to recover from their injuries.
Before Ros-Crana of Clan Callaugh asked him to wait, and to disappear for a time. To give her a chance to forge alliances without Kern’s presence to disturb other chieftains. But enough was enough.
“We move south,” Kern said again. The spark of anger flared into a small flame, his mind set. “Anyone have something they want to say?”
No one spoke for a moment. Crouched or standing under the cool, spring sun. Listening to the fire crackle at fresh wood. Measuring themselves for what was about to come. Something harder, in a way, than facing death at the hands of Vanir raiders.
“Yea,” Ossian finally said. He rolled over into a crouch, looked to Kern, the others, then snagged the nearby blanket of shaggy fur, which had been left in a pile next to Garret Blackpatch. “This,” he said, “is mine.” And dabbed the corner of the blanket against his mouth, against his split lip.
No one argued.
2
KERN SCENTED CALLAUGH Glen long before they reached it. A warm, slightly spoiled smell. Sulfurous, but not quite so bad as rotten eggs. Not even the early-spring wildflowers, blooming low to the ground, disguised the stench.
“Another league,” he guessed aloud, thinking he’d picked up on it before Daol. A first.
Daol walked with his bow ready. An arrow nocked but not drawn as he watched the trees and brush around them for sign of game. “Half.” He said it with the same tone he might have used to poke fun at Reave for his oversized feet or slow wit.
Reave, walking nearby and shouldering both his pack and Daol’s, laughed.
Although younger than Kern’s twenty-three summers or Reave’s twenty-five, Daol held his own.
In fact the three of them had known each other—been friends—for most of their lives. Reave because he had barely an ounce of guile and, as a youth, no real care for his own position with the clan. He hadn’t cared his friend was so different from the others, and continued to stand by Kern when the youth was made an outcast within the Gaud before reaching even his twelfth year. Already people had begun to whisper about the boy with “winter in his bones and the blood of wolves.”
Reave had been the first man to ever call Kern “Wolf-Eye” as one friend often nicknamed another. It stuck. But not always in the best sense.
As for Daol, it was friendship by association. Kern all but lived with Hydallan, Daol’s father, after his own mother died. Learning from the veteran hunter until Hydallan’s own son came of age and Kern was shuffled off by Clan Gaud to be one of the village foragers—a wood axe and basic trap-setting skills his only needs. But his only two friends in the entire village had never let him down, no matter what they personally thought.
“Half a league?” Kern asked, doubting. His frown weighed heavily, far more comfortable on his face than a smile had ever been.
“Smelled it a ways back,” Daol admitted with a slow smile. His gray eyes had a hawk’s look to them, hooded and calm. “Your wolf has a real nose. He’s already faded around behind us.”
Kern turned to look, knowing he would be unlikely to spot Frostpaw unless the animal was either hungry or maddened. Still, he’d gotten used to the dire wolf’s company. Even come to appreciate the infrequent sightings. They all had, as the animal dogged their tracks from Conall Valley, over the western Teeth and the Pass of Blood, and had even run down its fair share of Vanir.
Daol grabbed Kern’s arm and turned him nearly halfway around, then used the tip of his bow to point between a pair of leaf-budding apple trees. “Wait for him.”
There. A stealthy shadow passing between the trees, all strength and grace. Nothing like a timber dog, the dire wolf was a large brute, eight hands across the shoulders and nearly twelve-stone weight these days after a winter feasting on the trail of warm corpses left behind Kern’s ragged band. Silver-gray fur except for a dark band around the eyes, like a mask, and the white front forepaw that had given him his name. A rogue without a pack.
No. Not without a pack. Frostpaw had Kern and the others as much as any of them could claim each other.
The wolf dodged behind some bramble, and was lost.
“Still back there,” Kern said to no one in particular. Still amazed.
It had made more sense in the deprivation of the long winter. Where Kern’s small band traveled, they left behind a ready source of food for any scavenger. Also, at one point Kern had wrestled the animal—driven at him by hunger—to the ground, dominating the animal in a way that all wolves and most men understood. But with spring arrived at last, and the return of plentiful game . . .
H
e readjusted his bedroll sling, easing where the rope bit into his shoulder. “Why does he still follow?” he asked no one in particular.
Aodh marched along beneath the shade of some spreading red cedar, fingers pressed to his temples. For days on the march south he’d complained of severe headaches. He blamed them on the beating Ossian had handed him in the Breaknecks. An accusation Ossian shouldered with great pleasure. “Might as well ask that about any of us,” he groused.
Kern did not need to ask it of the other warriors. He knew, or suspected, what lay behind most reasons of the men and women who had turned outcast to follow him.
And these five in particular?
Daol and Reave, beyond their friendship, also felt responsible for allowing Cul Chieftain to cast Kern out of the clan, abandoning him to the wilderness in the harsh depths of winter. That had happened on the journey to take the body of Burok Bear-Slayer to his final rest at the Field of the Chiefs. Burok had been a man Kern respected, and, he felt, one of the few in Gaud to show him any measure of respect in return. But Cul, seizing the chieftain’s role by traditional challenge, had never trusted Kern. Not his odd appearance or the strangeness that followed him.
His casting Kern away from the clan had come as no real surprise, and Kern himself had kept Reave in check, preventing the large man from coming to the outcast’s defense and ruining his own position with the clan. But both Reave and Daol had anguished over that decision.
Then the Vanir had attacked, killing several of Cul’s men and taking Daol as a slave. Also Maev, Burok’s daughter. Kern, having tracked the Vanir pack, helped run off the final attackers, then set himself to go after the captured kin. Refusing to abandon them, no matter his own standing within the clan.
Aodh was one of those who split from both clan and kin then, at his own choice. He’d felt he owed it to his old chieftain to help rescue Maev. And Garret Blackpatch had followed later, alongside Hydallan, accompanying Daol’s father on the hard march north. Eventually, all had regrouped at Taur—another clan under attack by Vanir raiders, led by one of their Ymirish masters. Breaking the siege, running off the Ymirish warrior and the remnants of his war host, had brought Ossian and three more Taurin warriors to Kern’s small band. Out of gratitude for their village’s rescue.
Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2 Page 2
