The Dragon Lord

by David Drake

  The village priest screamed like a pig with a knife through its throat. He ran, caroming off the trunk of one of the birches without slowing, then splashing across the creek. The old Saxon reached the other side without one of his boots. There he sucked in enough air to continue his screaming. He disappeared into the drizzle, again at a run. The rest of the villagers had already melted away, making less noise but with real terror. It was not death that seared their hearts—they had come to view a death. It was not even the loss of their thegn, but rather the way of his killing. Mael's bluff had raised the shadows of superstitious fear which were never far from the minds of barbarian peasants. Starkad had capped the bluff with a blow that appeared inhuman. It would have been spectacular enough to shock even spirits prepared for it.

  For years after in that hamlet there would be no sacrifices save to Wotan and Thor, and the slaughter for those gods would keep the region poor.

  Starkad levered his axe free of the boggy soil. It had sunk helve-deep with his follow-through. Trying to halt the blow's inertia, even after its work was done, would have been useless and dangerous, likely to pop a cartilage in the Dane's back. Starkad grinned at Mael and began wiping the metal dry with the hem of the thegn's wool cloak. The air crawled with the stench of blood and the yellowish feces the Saxon had voided at the instant of his death.

  Mael walked to the edge of the stream and stuck his right foot into the water. The blood washed quickly from the sandal straps but clung to the wool wrappings. From the ditch behind him wriggled the head and shoulders of the intended sacrifice.

  "Get your feet soaked and it's going to be hell marching," Starkad said. "A little blood never hurt anybody."

  Mael ignored the comment. He stamped his foot twice on the ground to squeeze out some of the water. "What do we do about the girl?" he asked.

  "Uh? Leave her. Or do you need to get laid?"

  The Saxon girl looked about seventeen, perhaps younger. It was hard to tell from a face so muddy and hunger-pinched. Her hair was a dirty blonde—the dirt might have been an overlay rather than the natural color—double-braided and coiled on top of her head, the braids caught by a bone pin. The men walked toward her from opposite sides. She shrank back down in the muddy ditch. All she wore was a linen singlet and some sort of armband of woven leather. She had been held by a heavy staff laid across her shoulders and pinned at either side by forked branches. Her struggles had dislodged that, but her knees were still pinioned by deep-driven forks.

  Starkad tugged one stake free, then the other. The girl did not move. Her face was turned upward and her eyes stared at the two men.

  "Well, we can't leave her," Mael said. "Her people are just as apt as not to drown her when they come back again. Besides, she's seen us clearly; she knows we aren't gods. There're twenty men out there who'd be on us like flies on a turd if they got a notion of the truth. I don't fancy what they could do to us in this fog, even with sticks and manure forks."

  "Well . . ." Starkad muttered. He raised his axe for another blow.

  "MacLir take you, you butcher!" Mael shouted, reaching across the trench to grasp Starkad's wrist. "I didn't just save her so we could kill her ourselves!"

  "Shall we carry her with us, then?" the Dane queried softly.

  Mael grimaced and spat. "Yes, I guess we have to," he said.

  Starkad laughed. He reached down into the trench. The girl squirmed to avoid his fingers.

  They closed on her wrist anyway and the Dane hauled her upright. "Up we go, girlie," Starkad said. Beside his armored chest, she appeared a mud-stained wraith. She was thin except for her stomach which had been distended by long-term malnutrition. "What's your name, hey?" the Dane asked.

  In panic or the belief that Starkad's grip had loosened, the girl tried to bolt. Mael thrust out an arm. Starkad had already jerked his prisoner back, throwing her feet out from under her on the lip of earth. The Dane straightened her up by the wrist until her toes scrabbled on the ground and her arm pointed straight up. She looked as though she were manacled to a high wall.

  "Listen, girlie," the Dane said, without raising his voice or needing to add that emphasis. "We've saved your life, and if you're good it can stay saved. If you aren't—well, you won't get away and you won't be the first Saxon I've killed, will you?" He laughed. "Or the fifty-first. Now, what's your name?"

  Mael touched his friend's hand and guided it down so that the girl could stand comfortably. "We aren't going to hurt you," he said, half stooping to bring his face nearer a level with hers. "But we've got to get out of here. We're going to take you with us, as much for your sake as ours."

  The girl looked at Mael, then down at the ditch in which she had almost been drowned. "I am Thorhild," she said sullenly. "Why is it you want to murder my people?"

  "Look, we've got to get moving," Starkad said. He ignored the girl's question, but he did release her arm. The flesh was already starting to bruise.

  "Yes," Mael agreed. He bent over and raised the half-cloak the chieftain had worn. The upper part of it was blood-sprayed, but the wool was dyed nearly black so the stain was not evident. "She can wear this," Mael said. "It's not much, but it's what we've got at hand."

  Gingerly the girl wrapped the garment around her. It fell almost to her knees. Obeying Starkad's peremptory gesture, she followed the Dane. Mael brought up the rear of the file until they had again reached the beaten track. There was no sign of the other villagers or of anything at all human in the woods. As they stepped through the runaway privet which must once have been planted as a boundary hedge, Mael cursed. "Forgot to fill the damned water bottles," he explained.

  Starkad was using both arms to force the locked growth apart for his companions. He laughed. "Can't keep a thing in your head anymore, can you? Don't know what must be wrong with you."

  They marched stolidly along the trail, Mael leading again. When he judged they had come farther than any of Thorhild's kinsmen were likely to have fled, the Irishman dropped back as nearly alongside the girl as the track allowed. "We didn't murder your folk," he said earnestly. "Only the one fellow there—and him we had to kill to save you."

  The girl looked over at Mael with a blank expression. It slowly grew to distaste. "You ended the gift to Lady Nairthus," she said. "Now they'll all starve."

  "Manannan MacLir, girl!" Mael exploded. "Did you want to smother in that ditch? You were sure fighting hard enough about it from what I saw." In his anger, Mael brushed against a beech tree. It flung him back onto the trail, cursing and using his palms to dampen the clangor the trunk had raised from his shield boss. Starkad snorted.

  Thorhild ignored the Irishman's stumble. Her brow furrowed. "I thought I could give myself. But I didn't want to, not really, when the—time came. But that was me.

  "It was—" she paused to count on her fingers—"five years that we sold everything to buy a ship so that Borgar could bring us to this land. We would be rich, he said—Borgar, your man—" she jerked a nervous thumb back at Starkad, afraid to turn her head in the slightest to face him—"killed him. Borgar said a great king of the British had called us over to guard him. He would give us fine land. But the first year and the second there was blight. We harvested little. The third, our harvest was good, but we owed the seed to rich folk in the city. Their interest rate ate the corn as surely as the blight had before. Last year all was well, until the hail came just before the harvest. And if this Spring is so wet that the seed rots in the ground, we all . . ." Thorhild shrugged. "Lady Nairthus was angry with us. And now she'll kill all of them, all my family, my friends."

  Again the girl glared straight at Mael. "What business of yours was it?" she demanded. "Why did you want to murder us?"

  Mael shook his head and lengthened his stride instead of trying to answer. Behind him Starkad called, "Some day you'll learn, little brother. Stay away from any woman unless you want to screw her. And especially don't try to do one a favor."

  They ate, completely enveloped by the branches of a weeping p
each beside the ruins of a villa. The rain had finally ceased, but the tree's ground-touching tendrils were protection against eyes as well as rain. Within their cover, the earth was bare and fairly dry. The light that seeped through the foliage was pale green, insofar as there was any light at all. "We're going to need more food," said Starkad in Irish, popping the last of a cooked pork sausage into his mouth. Two of their bread loaves had been wetted through the Dane's pack. They had deliquesced into a gluey mass. Besides, the travelers had three mouths to feed now.

  Mael shrugged agreement. The girl was watching them, but with no sign that she understood the Celtic tongue. In the same language Mael answered, "We needed directions, anyway. We've come about as far as we can on the little that Arthur mentioned. What I figured we'd do is find a lone hut towards evening—we've passed a few already. That'll be British. They won't dare refuse us whatever we ask—and they'll be enough afraid of the local Saxons, if they're smart at least, that they won't go running off to report us when we've gone. Anyway, we can leave them enough money that they won't take a chance of losing it. They'll know that sure as sin the Saxons'll strip them bare if they learn there's anything to strip."

  "And the girl?"

  Mael grimaced. "We'll figure out something. Maybe we'll let her go in the morning. She doesn't know what we're about, and she isn't too near her own people now. She'll be no real danger to us." He looked up at Starkad's smile, then added, "I do some stupid things, don't I?"

  The Dane's smile broadened. "Oh, well," he said, "we all do."

  By late evening the clouds had cleared and Mael could see the single finger of smoke etching the pale mauve sky. They had met several other travelers on the path by then. No one had spoken, letting a glance and a glower suffice to safeguard privacy. One old woman, alone save for the sow she drove in front of her, signed the Hammer at their backs. Starkad had turned and showed his teeth, thrusting the woman on like a blow.

  Now the big Dane pointed at the smoke. "It's a ways off the trail," he said, "and there's only one, so it's not a village. Looks to me like what we're after—and none too soon for my feet."

  A hundred yards farther on, another track joined the one they were following. Even the long twilight would be fading soon. There was little choice but to take the path to the dwelling. The building lay a quarter mile back from the main trail, surrounded by trees on one side and a small hand sown garden plot on the other. It was a rude hut, a dome like a huge beehive. There was a cupola on the top to shield the smokehole from the rain. The lowest two feet of the walls were of wattle and daub on a frame of bent saplings which provided the roof stingers as well. Down to the wattling, the dome was thatched. The low doorway was covered by a rush mat that leaked light through its interstices. As the travelers approached, the mat was flung open from the inside, silhouetting a bent figure in the opening against the dull glow of the fire inside the hut.

  To the rear, Starkad swore under his breath. Metal chimed as the Dane gripped his shield with a beringed left hand. The stooping figure called to them in British, "Welcome, travelers. I've waited for you." The voice was high and feminine, the words so reminiscent of Veleda's to Mael in the Laigin that the Irishman froze. But this was an old voice, a cracked one. As the travelers stepped closer, the firelight showed them that the woman in the doorway was as crabbed and sexless as an ancient fruit tree. Mael's memory stayed with him, though, bursting out of the scab laid over his longings by the chill and the days of heels thudding on the ground.

  The three of them ducked one at a time into the hut. Mael went first, darting his head to either side to be sure there was no one waiting flat against an inner wall with a bludgeon raised. There was only the woman. When Mael saw how the shawl of gray homespun bulked about her body, he realized she was even smaller than she had first seemed.

  The interior of the dwelling was a single room, dry and warm but thickened by the smoke that swirled from the draft through the door curtain. There was little furniture. To the left was a low bedstead with a rush mattress and a covering of cowhide. Surprisingly, it seemed clean. Across the hut from the bed were a half dozen large storage jars—the pantry, filled with grain and oil and beer, perhaps. A small ham, whittled far down on the shank, hung from a stringer above the jars. There were no chairs, but a three-legged stool stood near the tripod over the low fire. Suspended from the tripod was a covered bronze pot of something savory. There were no other furnishings or decorations in the hut, save the bundles of dried or drying herbs festooning the whole ceiling.

  Starkad grunted as he entered the room. A bundle of dried parsley brushed his hair when he straightened up; his hand batted the herbs away reflexively; then he moved a step out of the way. "What do you mean, expect us?" he demanded bluntly. "Are you another of them?"

  The woman smiled. It made her more attractive, though she was still neither young nor a beauty. Without pretending ignorance she said, "A wise woman? In a way. I'm not what the folk about here think I am, Saxon and Briton both . . . but I'm not the fraud they pretend to think when they talk in the daylight. 'Old Gwedda, too foolish to find her nose with both hands. For charity, we give her some bread and a flitch of bacon now and again.' I can't keep their lovers true to them, and I won't make their neighbor's cow go dry . . . but I can do more to cure them than anyone else in a day's ride, and I learn things from here and there. I learned that you—two of you, at least—would be coming, and that the world had need of your safety."

  They were speaking in British. Thorhild looked from one face to another without comprehension. The girl was first sullen, then restive as her eyes took in the variety of gathered herbs and the paraphernalia half hidden at the head of the bed. The Saxon girl edged toward the door. Starkad's arm stopped her and walked her quickly back. The Dane's index finger curled beneath her shift, plucking one breast out to view. "Not so soon, little one," he said in German. "The party hasn't even started yet."

  "You must be hungry," said Gwedda in a businesslike tone. "Sit down and we'll eat."

  The two men stripped off their wet cloaks and formed them over their shields to dry a little in the warmth. Starkad leaned his axe against the corner of bed and wall, then hung his dagger belt over the upraised haft. Mael took off his body armor. This time the Dane continued to wear his mail shirt without commenting on his reasons.

  Gwedda began dishing a stew of game and vegetables out of the hanging pot. She paused suddenly, realizing that she had only three plates.

  "The girl and I'll share," said Starkad. His hand guided Thorhild to the bed where he sat down beside her. The three travelers set to work hungrily on the stew, round loaves of barley bread to sop the juices, and a handful of leeks. Gwedda ate also, with good appetite though she kept an eye out for her guests.

  "Oh," she said. "Would you like some beer to drink? Or I even have a skin of mead. A Saxon gave it to me for setting his son's leg straight after a tree had broken it."

  Mael grimaced. "Mead's too sweet to drink and too thick to piss," he said. "I leave the muck to Germans. Their tongues all froze in the cold so they don't taste it. But I'll take beer, indeed, and thank you for it."

  "Never knew an Irishman with any sense about liquor or women," Starkad chortled happily. He reached for the tied-off goatskin Gwedda was handing him. "Come along, girlie, this'll put a little fire back in your guts." Thorhild twitched her head away from the Dane's caressing hand. Starkad appeared undisturbed by her attitude—unaware, in fact.

  "Do you know whereabouts there's a village of Saxons under a thegn named Biargram?" Mael asked Gwedda. The Irishman leaned back against the wall with a pottery mug of cool ale in his hand. The room felt safe, cozy in a way that went far beyond its warmth and dryness. The smoke and dimness of the fire provided a curtain of sorts, dulling the images of Starkad and Thorhild across the room. It even seemed to mute the sound of the Dane's clumsy endearments.

  "The village isn't that near," the old woman was answering with a frown, "though you can walk the distance in a da
y, I think. Now let me see. . . ." she closed her eyes and continued, "There are three, no, four forks in the road between here and where you want to go. You'll have to go around another village about a mile from here where two brothers rule together. First . . ."

  The room and its sounds faded as Mael listened to Gwedda's words. The Irishman found a picture of the intended route forming in his mind. It could have been just careful description coupled with images formed from Mael's own years of travel; it could have been something more. Mael was never certain. But as the witch spoke, Mael seemed to walk the trails step by step. He saw the groves and the pattern of chalk cropping out on a hillside, the stream near a crossroad and even the fallen tree a hundred yards downstream from it where men could cross without wetting their feet.

  Starkad lay back on the bed, continuing to swig the thick mead and trying to force some on Thorhild. The Dane was still drunkenly good-natured. Underlying his pleasantries, however, was the assurance that he was a stronger man than any other he knew, strong enough to take almost anything when he decided he had waited long enough for it to be offered freely. Thorhild had been edged against the wall. By turns she had been petulant, then taut and sullen. None of her moods made any useful impression on the big Dane, any more than her clenched hands could keep his fingers from prodding and fondling her at will.

  Starkad leaned toward the girl to nuzzle her hair. Her singlet had been pawed free of her bosom. A fold of the Dane's chain mail caught her right nipple and pinched it. Thorhild shrieked and leaped away. Starkad shot his arm out to grab her, but the girl was already stumbling over the pile of his equipment. Metal crashed as Starkad threw himself to his feet. Then the girl's small hands were thrusting the point of his own dagger straight in the Dane's face.