Canvas!
“Tents! Grab the felt!”
He raced to the nearest fired tent. Using the long-handled brands, he dug them beneath the burning material and dragged them over into the lean-to. A sidelong thrust hurled the fire into the very middle, setting it over food wrapped in oilskin cloths and leather, belts and boots and plenty of furs. Weapons with wooden handles.
It could all burn.
Nahud’r dug out a larger pinch of the shaman’s fire powder, still being careful of what it might do, and threw it into the burning mess. The flames jumped up at once, bright and painful, and hot enough to quickly set the shelter’s roof afire as well. That was going to get some attention. Faster, even, than he thought.
“Kern! They’re coming!”
A glance downhill confirmed that. There were several Vanir racing back the way they’d come, yelling about the attack on their camp. The closest were archers, unfortunately. Which meant they were out of time.
As Nahud’r sprinted over to Reave, to throw some powder into that fire, Kern stepped in front of the lean-to shelter, his flaming brands raised high overhead. Backlit by the building fire, the torches snapping at the air, he was a clear challenge. The first arrow thwacked into the shelter’s burning support pole. A second dug into the earth right at Kern’s feet.
“Close enough,” he yelled, hurling his torches each into two unfired tents as he chased Reave and Nahud’r out of the campsite.
“Yea and you could not think to use the tents to kindle the big blaze earlier?” Reave shouted back.
“I’m nay Conan,” Kern yelled back. Then again, who was?
The three men stumble-ran down the hillside, taking a hard angle away from the oncoming Vanir. Most of the enemy were falling back now, but to their camp to save and defend what little they had left to worry over rather than after the three fleeing men. A few raiders down near the bottom of the hill, running back from their abandoned attempt to trap the fleeing archers, cut along at the bottom in an attempt to cut them off.
Two, Kern counted. And he watched them run right past the location where he and Reave and Nahud’r had hidden earlier.
Where Aodh and Ashul rose like vengeful spirits of the Cimmerians who once fought and died at Venarium. Their swords slashed out low and evil, hamstringing both men before they even knew they were attacked. Aodh made short work of his, running him through the heart to pin him to the ground. Ashul leaped onto hers, blade rising and falling, rising and falling.
And then there was no one left to challenge them. Nahud’r was all but lost in the darkness. Reave fell slightly behind Kern as they raced off the hill and into some light tree cover, but kept up. And if everyone else had come through all right, Aodh and Ashul would melt back to drag out the four archers hiding in their camouflage holes, and the others could abandon their places on the fallback position, having never been needed.
Not too many kills this night. But enough. Enough to trade against no one hurt or dead among Kern’s warriors. He hoped. And behind them, they had left chaos and a certain new chapter in the legends surrounding Venarium. New echoes, to chase through the years, of battle and death. A feeling that should have left Kern feeling satisfied.
Except that it remained to be found—what kind of echoes Grimnir had left for him inside Conall Valley.
10
THE HARDPAN FLATS left Kern feeling exposed, like an insect caught on a flat cake griddle as he stared across several leagues of open, vulnerable ground. His fast-moving pack had slipped east from Venarium, beneath the massive peak of Ben Morgh and the southern foothills, which eventually pushed up (not far to the north) as the valley’s western Teeth.
Mesa country, this. The lowlands rose in large steppes from nearby Gunderland up toward Crom’s dais, the Cimmerian high country. Hardscrabble paths cut around summer-baked mudflats gone soft with the winter melt. Flood-swept plateaus with standing pools of muddy, wind-stirred waters, lay scourged under hard, biting winds which blasted down off the valley’s western teeth.
Kern and his warriors scrambled up the steep sides of a low ridge to find another wide, flat plateau where anyone—clan or Vanir or southlander (Gundermen, likely)—could see them from the far side. See them. Dig in behind a shelf of loose rock or move in behind one of the low-rise battle mounds to wait them out. Prepare to attack.
The scuff of leather boots against rock sometimes sounded to him like the short, grinding rasps of sharpening blades.
“Death land,” Hydallan called it, squinting into the distance.
Valerus had been rubbing down his horse with a ragged piece of cloth. Now he paused. “Why?”
The small band had stopped at midday for a meal of dried beef and stale flat cakes that tasted more of old grease than the original oat and meal paste. The old tracker tore his food into small bites with fingers that trembled slightly, Kern saw, as age and hard travel wore on him. But there was still good steel in his spine, and strength in his legs as he kept to the pace Kern set from Venarium toward the southern reach of Conall Valley.
“Open ground and poor hunting. Worse for crops. Too much blood’s soaked in here.”
The horseman wore his mailed hood back over his shoulders. He scrubbed strong fingers through the tight, sandy-blond ringlets matted to his head. “Blood?” Valerus was more curious than the other two Aquilonians, often joining in conversations.
“Blood,” said Wallach Graybeard. He had his leather cuff off the stump of his left arm, and Brig Tall-Wood helped to peel away the stained cloth wrapped over the scabbed wound. “Many clansman a-died here. And Gunderman. Pict. Westermark. Aquilonian.”
Wallach had never fully trusted the horsemen, and made a point to jab his suspicions home whenever possible.
“When King Conan invaded Cimmeria, he built the first forts on the Hardpan.”
Valerus shifted from one foot to the other. “Aquilonia did not invade. We settled the border to help keep the peace and protect the trade routes. It was good for all.”
Kern wolfed down the last of his food, swallowing without tasting. “And pulled the soldiers back when the Vanir came? Left the southern flats open?”
“There were . . . problems, back home.”
Problems. Kern licked his fingers for a few last crumbs and worried a piece of gristle between his teeth. The Cimmerians knew problems as well. And they knew that when King Conan’s help might have been welcomed, the distant leader of Aquilonia had turned his back on his people. Again. Or so it looked to most.
He stood, faced northeast where the western teeth and Snowy River mountains would begin to close on Conall Valley. A gust of wind stirred his frost blond hair, and carried with it the scent of old mud and new grasses. A chill tightened his muscles as he measured the leagues ahead. Another day. Perhaps two. In his twenty-three summers, Kern had never traveled so far south. Until this desperate winter he had never been farther than a week’s travel from Gaud.
Cimmerians did not seek change. But they knew how to deal with it.
Usually with a large blade.
There was no need to call an end to the midday rest. No order given. Already his warriors tightened down cinch straps and buckles. Slung bedrolls over their shoulders. Daol and Ehmish had already drifted forward. Getting an early jump on the next leg of their run. Bows ready in case some scarce game crossed their path. The others began to shake themselves into a ragged, long line.
Reave, Desagrena, and Gard Foehammer shuffled off.
Old Finn and Mogh limped away together. The one suffering from gout swelling in his left knee, the other from the arrow that had taken him in the hip at Venarium.
Nahud’r waited nearby for Kern. The dark skin on his face exposed to the winds with his normal wraps pulled down around his neck, he looked to be tasting the air. The whites of his eyes were bright and alive.
Ashul, the other woman in Kern’s small band, offered a hand up to Aodh. Her hair hung in a knotted ponytail down to the small of her back. It swayed and danced l
ike a snake as she kicked off in an easy jog. Kern saw a glimmer of red in the dark, long tresses. Some Vanir blood from far back in her past, showing through.
“How do you do this?”
Valerus again. Walking his horse up next to Kern while Strom and Niuss mounted and let their destriers take up an easy, ambling pace. Moving ahead.
Niuss’s leg was still bandaged from the cut he had taken at Venarium, but fortunately it wasn’t deep or festering. Yet. His horse had a long burn scar down its barrel, where the cavalrymen had cauterized the bleeding. Valerus studied the animal’s gait, then patted the thick neck on his own beast, as if thankful it hadn’t been his own mount, held down while a hot knife was slapped against the wound.
The animal was huge taken up close, easily seventeen hands to the muscular shoulders—what Valerus had called “the withers.” Thick-barreled and roped in thick muscle, it could have fed the warriors band for a week, easily. It smelled of dry grasses and fresh sweat. A musty scent. And fear. Though Frostpaw was nowhere to be seen or smelled. Kern wondered if the animal also did not care for the wide-open flats. A natural flight instinct.
“Do?” he finally asked.
Valerus nodded at the broken meal site. The few warriors who straggled out ahead of them. A quick glance back at Ossian, Hydallan, and Garret, who would bring up the rear. “You travel harder and faster than most mounted companies. Up before light. Hardly a rest till sun’s set. And we’re pushing our mounts to keep up.”
The man’s Cimmerian was getting much better. Very clear, if spoken with an Aquilonian’s lilting accent.
Kern reined in his own pace to walk with Valerus for the moment. Nahud’r stalked forward not too far away, and Ossian moved up from behind.
“We run hard because we must,” he finally said. “Often that is the way of things here. Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Behind, Ossian grunted his agreement to the Cimmerian adage. “We stop running, we die. You ask how we do this.” He stopped, caught the horseman in his cold, wolf-eyed gaze. “I ask why you do not.”
“I don’t know,” Valerus admitted.
The Aquilonian stepped back to the side of his charger and swung up into his saddle, careful of the lance tied to the side of the horse.
“But I’m learning,” he said. “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” He considered the words, as if tasting them for the first time, nodded, then kicked his horse forward to catch up with his countrymen.
“My question,” Ossian said, moving up on Kern’s shoulder the other side from Nahud’r. “We heads north. Why the horsemen still with us?”
Kern wondered the same thing. Had wondered since the Aquilonians joined them back in Callaugh. Nahud’r, though, had an idea.
“They search,” he said in halting Aquilonian. The dark-skinned Shemite understood Cimmerian, but rarely spoke it.
“For what?” Ossian asked.
The Shemite shrugged. “Whatever is, not find yet.” Then he tugged up the folds of his scarf, shielding the lower half of his face from the biting winds. When he finished, only his eyes showed out of the headdress wrap. His voice was only slightly muffled when he added, “We not find yet either.”
Kern nodded. That was certainly true.
Though it would have helped if he could put a name to what it was he was personally looking for. His angers and frustrations would serve him much better. He might even know, then, when he had reached his end.
Unless it, too, came with a large blade.
THEY FOUND THE massacred settlement not long before sunset, as shadows stretched out toward the east, and the small pack moved north along the foot of a steep rise, hoping to find a horse path before night fell like an anvil over the Hardpan.
Dark clouds massed in the north and to the west. Kern watched them with an uneasy gaze. Black piles in the north, heavy with rain or possibly a late-spring snow ready to roll down over the Eiglophians and into Conall Valley. The western overhang looked more like thunderheads, dark and sooty but lacking the full, pregnant look of truly wet weather. The clouds bunched up with clear skies south and north, as if Venarium burned (still), and the smoke gathered into a solid mass.
Bad weather coming, from one direction or another, and they all knew it. The air felt brittle and cold, tensing for a new storm. It set teeth on edge and flushed out game both small and large as creatures stirred before twilight. Brig Tall-Wood bagged a pair of marmot with his bow, and Daol two braces of the large, lean rabbits fairly common on the flats. Frostpaw hunted as well. Twice, Kern walked through a killing ground of blood and fur surrounding a half-eaten carcass. Twice more he actually saw the dire wolf, which did not stray so far on the open flats that it could not be found loping to one side or the other.
Ehmish (under Hydallan’s eye and training) had actually discovered and tracked an elk stag. It took half the pack to corral the animal, driving it up against the escarpment, putting three arrows in it and finally tracking its blood trail along a rain-swollen stream of ice-fresh water as it twisted and splashed its way among a rocky bed. His blood up from the chase, Ehmish ran ahead with Daol while Kern and Gard Foehammer and a few others trotted forward at an energy-conserving pace. They knew no reason to hurry. Kern did not want to lose the rest of his band, trailing behind.
Which was why he was still around a few sharp bends when he heard Ehmish’s yell of excitement or fear. And Daol’s voice raised in a call to the others.
Running forward, splashing through the cold shallows of the burbling stream, he heard the spray and hammer of water before ever seeing the small, dropping torrent. A white-water falls, crashing down the side of the scarp, brushing the air with a cold, silver-gray mist. It fell into a large pool among soft-edged boulders and red clay, feeding a muddied stream.
The stream trailed off, running the escarpment’s edge as it bent south toward Gunderland, twisting through the settlement that was less than a village but obviously not any kind of nomadic camp. Small huts, hardly as tall as Ehmish, who stood over the first of many bodies, lost to his revulsion and grief. Each dwelling was just large enough for one or two people to crawl inside for shelter, thatched with thick grasses and patched with mud up the walls. Some of the huts had walls broken down, easy work with a heavy sword or battle-axe. Most simply had their door coverings—wool blankets, felt pads—torn away.
Kern brushed past Ehmish and checked the first hut, one of the smashed ones, and saw the hacked and bloodied body of a warrior inside. Coal black hair. Red-dyed kilt trimmed in the mottled fur of a mountain panther.
Craggy brows and deep blue eyes, he had to guess at. The man’s face had been cleaved away.
Cimmerian.
“Crom’s blood,” Hydallan said. He spat to one side.
“Was not Crom, did this.”
The others fanned around the outskirts of the village-camp. Gard Foehammer stepped forward to turn Ehmish away from the woman splayed out in shame and death at his feet. The young man’s eyes were wide and wild, and his mouth set in a hard, angry line. Hands bunched into fists at his side.
Reluctantly, it seemed, Gard pulled him over toward the stream, where the elk they’d chased had collapsed halfway across, forming a small dam. Water spilled out over the sides of the stream, creating a muddy pool before finding the lower bed. Between the two, they slowly dragged the large animal forward, into the shadow of the cliffs, pulling it by an impressive rack of antlers. Six points—a three-year stag.
Good meat. A better distraction.
By the time the rest of his pack had caught up, horsemen leading in another ten warriors on foot, Kern had walked through and inspected the tiny settlement. Counted twelve dead. All handily killed. Beheaded, at times. Usually hacked up and left to bleed out over the barren ground.
Reave had hung back from the hunt and was one of the last to arrive. The large man lumbered up with greatsword in hand and eyes kindled with rage. Some news had apparently run back with Gard or Daol. Kern was not certain who had stayed and who had left to gu
ide in the others.
What Reave thought he could do for these people now was beyond Kern. And Reave as well, who hung the blade back over his shoulder again. He walked up to Kern, at a loss for what to say apparently.
“Fresh water,” Kern said, nodding at the waterfall. And the entire settlement was tucked back into the scarp, as protected as it could get on the Hardpan Flats. “Some cover. A good retreat back up the cliff face, if they’d had time for it.”
Cimmerians would have thought nothing of the climb. Water-slick rock or no, with the kinds of handholds Kern spotted, even the slightest youth would swarm up the cliff face like a spider.
“They didn’t. Vanir must have come on them at night. It may be they had someone on top of the cliff.” There were a few loose rocks lying at the foot of the cliff, and a body. Easy enough to scrape them off the side.
Twelve bodies. Men and women. Two thin youths. A child no more than five summers. The hard living. The condition of their settlement. Daol saw where Kern was going with this.
“Refugees. Outcasts, or simply running.” His eyes were tight slits. His voice hoarse with raw anger. “They did not run far enough. Did not want to leave Cimmeria. By Crom, they could have picked few places more desolate than this!”
“All dead?” Strom asked.
The cavalryman had not dismounted. Valerus had, and was helping Gard Foehammer and Ehmish skin the stag, pitching in to strip away meat and fat and a few good pieces of hide.
He nodded. “I would say so. Found one young girl hiding behind the waterfall. She hid from the Vanir. From being shamed by them. But it must have been cold back there. Too cold, too long.” No one looked at the falls. No one wanted to see.
“They fought. I found one dead Vanir. But they did not fight well, or together.” He rebuilt the fight in his head again, and again. Trying to understand it. To learn from it.
“Most of the warriors who did not die in the open made it to a hut. It gave them a chance to work their blades against one enemy at a time. But the raiders tore into the huts from behind as well.”
Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2 Page 11
