Ironhelm knew that if he could make it to any of those villages he would be safe. In any one of them fifty men, shocked and angry at gruks so close to their homes, could assemble in minutes ready to fight. As word spread, men all along the Bachwy Bay would be roused.
Ironhelm started to make his way around the tower, looking for the old path that ran down to the Bay Road. He remembered seeing the old track running towards the distant tower the last time he was near Swordhaven. He was told it ran up to the old watchtower, so he knew there was a path somewhere nearby. He cursed the foolish neglect that left the tower abandoned a half century ago.
Were it still garrisoned, he would be safe. The men of the watchtower would take him in and raise the alarm, setting ablaze the signal fire on the roof. But the tower lay empty, a forgotten ruin. Once, it had been an important stronghold overlooking gruk-infested hills and keeping the foul creatures away from the shores of the bay. It took a century of fighting to finally clear the hills of the gruk scourge. In the end, the baymen and the Westmarkers combined to crush the remaining gruk raiders and slew every last one of them. Then, as the years passed, men began to question the usefulness and the expense of manning watchtowers over peaceful hills. And so the towers were abandoned and allowed to slowly crumble. Ironhelm knew of no better way to encourage gruks to return.
He found the track, a grown-over path ten feet wide. It turned sharply to one side and then doubled-back along a steep ridge as it descended towards the bay. In the darkness below, Ironhelm saw the flickering light of several torches on the path. Listening carefully, he heard the grumblings of gruk voices. They were a hundred feet in front of him, moving his way. They did not yet see the dwarf, but they would in a moment.
Ironhelm considered fighting his way through for a passing second, but he could not tell how many gruks there were. Three or perhaps four he felt confident he could handle. Anything more would be too many.
He glanced quickly to either side of the old track. To his left, the ground rose sharply in a sheer cliff and there was no place to find cover. To the right, however, there was a cluster of rocks and trees. He wasted no time, scrambling down the steep slope and dashing behind a convenient cluster of pines.
Crouching down low, he hoped he was out of sight. The voices grew clearer as they neared him. Ironhelm remained still, listening intently.
“The damned bosses will all be sore for certain,” a voice grumbled. It did not sound like a gruk, and the language was not gruk but some debased dialect of Linlundic. “Einar wants that stinkin’ dwarf dead.”
They were right above Ironhelm.
“Never mind that,” a second voice said. “That damned dog’s got to be somewhere near. They’ll flush ‘em out. Keep your eyes open.”
They passed on.
As the voices grew farther away, Ironhelm carefully made his way back to the path. Stepping onto the little track, he glanced back where the voices had passed. They were gone, disappeared around a bend in the road. Turning, he continued down the track.
The road turned again and descended along a narrow ridge. Out in the darkness in front of him, Ironhelm saw a dim, distant light flash for a brief moment. He waited, and a moment later it flashed again. He nodded, scanning the darkness. To the left of the first light Ironhelm spotted two more. They flickered on-and-off again and again with a steady rhythm.
Ironhelm knew exactly what they lights were. There was a lighthouse near the entrance to the bay and two more at Swordhaven. They were situated so a ship’s pilot could aim his vessel between the lights and be guided right into Swordhaven’s harbor even in pitch blackness. Too far to either side of the twin lights risked striking dangerous rocks. Straight between the lighthouses was the only safe route. Those same lights told him where he was in relation to Swordhaven. If he had to guess, he would have said he was within three miles of the city gates. Turning, he trotted on down the path.
Out there in the darkness below lay the vast expanse of the Kingdom of Linlund. Ironhelm always thought it only nominally deserved the moniker of “kingdom”. True, it had a king whom all the local thanes acknowledged as such. But they gave him little more than lip-service as opposed to genuine obedience.
Every five years the thanes gathered and took council with the king in his great hall at Vistinar, but the whole thing struck Ironhelm as a sham. The king held little sway over most of the thanes, especially those most distant from Vistinar. Several ignored his rule completely, not bothering to even attend the assembly. It was the thanes who were the real power in Linlund, making for a patchwork quilt of a country. Linlund was more like a hundred small states, of which The Westmark was merely the largest. The nation – if such it could be called – was only loosely bound together by ties of language and custom. The thanes governed whatever territory they had carved out of the vast forests and marshes of their frozen land and paid little attention to the distant and ineffectual king.
Ironhelm considered the Linlunders barely civilized, especially by dwarven standards. He remembered his grandfather telling him of a time when Linlund was completely wild.
“A land of wild, painted men running naked through the forest fighting one another,” was how the old dwarf described it.
It had changed since Ironhelm’s grandsire’s day, to be sure, but there were still vast areas of Linlund as lawless and barbaric as ever.
Then there were the men of Linlund, whom Ironhelm took for a particularly strange breed. They were a tall, fair-skinned people with an inflated opinion of their status all out-of-proportion to their surroundings. Mostly hard-scrabble farmers and herders barely surviving from winter to brutal winter, every man in Linlund was proud of his freeman status. There were no serfs or slaves in Linlund. They were a nation of free landowners, however modest their holdings usually were. Every Linlunder taught his son one of the few Linlundic proverbs, “A man without land is no man at all.”
These sons of Linlund were all taught to fight as soon as they could walk, and many of them would enter the employ of the local thane for a few years when they came of age. There was much in such service to appeal to a young man; he found camaraderie, he earned a few coins, he was fed and housed, and he got the chance to do some fighting. Most left formal soldiering behind after a few years to take a bride, buying a small plot of land or sometimes carving out a modest homestead at the edge of the wilderness. It was usually nothing more than a small cottage with a small garden plot and whatever swine or goats the young couple could manage to acquire. They supplemented their dinner of smoked goat shank hunting elk or wild boar, eking out a mean existence from year-to-year.
A Linlunder’s humble homestead was usually a sorry-looking thing, sometimes a mere stone hut or a cramped dugout, but it was his and he would fight to the death to keep it.
The Linlunders might have owed their thane loyalty and military service, but Ironhelm always got the sense they only went along with the system because it was in their own interest to do so. Banding together under a local chieftain provide more safety than an every-man-for-himself approach. Countless times over the years, individual thanes would try to oppress their people, leveling high taxes or imposing too many laws. Those thanes usually wound up slain by their own men or driven out into the snow to fend for themselves against the gigantic wolves and hulking trolls which still roamed the primeval northern forest. Wise thanes knew where they stood, and governed with restraint.
Ironhelm had known and fought both alongside and against various Linlunders for decades. He spoke their language and counted a few as friends. Yet he still did not fully understand them or their arrogant adherence to the notion that every Linlunder was a great lord in his own way. As a dwarf of Thunderforge, respect for established authority and the need for an orderly society were in his blood. There was an established order to things which had to be respected, above all else. Linlunders would have none of that. They were, at least to Ironhelm’s thinking, not unlike a bunch of overgrown children. They had potential, he adm
itted, but weren’t quite grown up yet.
_____
The track leveled off, turning again and then descending gently. As Ironhelm trotted along, he came to the end. A well-worn road cut across the path and in the darkness beyond Ironhelm could see the waves of the bay. He’d made it out of the hills.
Ironhelm heard movement from the far side of the road. From behind a group of trees, a pair of gruks stepped onto the road barely ten feet away. They looked surprised to see Ironhelm appearing out of the darkness and right in front of them and didn’t react right away.
Ironhelm sprang forward. He charged at the nearest one before it could react, felling it easily with an axe-blow to the chest. The second came at him, swinging widely with a crude-looking club. Ironhelm easily ducked the blow, countering with a perfectly placed attack of his own. The gruk fell, just as an arrow came flying in from the darkness. It struck Ironhelm’s shoulder but was stopped by his armor. He turned, spotting a third gruk standing in the trees off the road hurriedly reaching for another arrow from the quiver on its back.
Ironhelm dropped his shield and pulled his throwing axe from his belt and hurled it at the archer. It struck the gruk in the shoulder, sending it lurching forward in pain. Ironhelm lunged at him, finishing him off with a final blow to the neck. He reached down to retrieve his weapon and looked around carefully as he wiped off the blood on his cloak. All was silent and there did not appear to be any more attackers.
The dwarf felt his shoulder, examining the arrow. It had struck with enough force to penetrate his armor but barely enough to break his skin. Ironhelm pulled the arrow out and tossed it aside. He stepped back onto the road, surprised the enemy had the nerve to post any gruks there. He’d have to be careful until he reached the nearest village.
Ironhelm hurried down the road toward Swordhaven. He was no longer in the wilderness, but he wasn’t out of danger yet.
_____
Brundig knelt down next to the patch of snow, studying it carefully. He could see the boot prints running across it. Nodding, he stood and turned towards the small group of human warriors standing next to him. They stood before the abandoned watchtower, dozens of gruks in the clearing as the sky grew lighter with the coming of day.
“Those are his tracks all right,” he said, shaking his head in annoyance. “And they’re hours old by the look of ‘em. Damn!”
“By now the dwarf will have alerted the whole stinkin’ bay,” one of the other warriors said.
Brundig glanced at him. His name was Grimwald. He was a tall man, with dark blue eyes, a long black beard, and a deep voice. A massive, two-handed axe was slung over his back.
“Men from the bay will be coming,” Grimwald said.
Brundig nodded, turning and looking back at the towering pines.
“We’ll withdraw deeper into the hills,” he said. “We can hide there.”
“Hide?” Grimwald said, scowling.
“For a day or two,” Brundig said. “Then we move north. We’ll travel by night and hole-up during the day.”
“What? You can’t mean to catch up to the dwarf.”
“No,” Brundig said. “But we still might be able to redeem ourselves in Faxon’s eyes. That stinkin’ dwarf is going to get to Falneth before our assassins. He’s going to find Einar’s cousin, and then he’ll be coming back down the road with the little bastard in tow. And we’ll be waiting for him when he does.”
Four
The assembled warriors glared at one another from across the ice of the narrow river, regarding the men standing opposite themselves with silent hostility.
Thane Llud stood by the icy water’s edge, surrounded by a dozen of his fighters. A large man with a wild red beard and a face covered in bright blue war paint stood bare-chested to his left, brandishing a gigantic battle axe.
An equal number of warriors stood upon the opposite bank of the frozen river glaring back at them. Yet no one moved an inch. None would dare shed blood upon the ground on which they stood.
To the right of Llud rose a massive boulder straddling the edge of a small waterfall. It jutted out from the ground at least twenty feet, tall and pointed like a giant spearhead straining upwards towards the winter sky. The gigantic rock sat perched on a trio of smaller rocks, balancing precariously upon its stony tripod. It was as if some god had reached down from the heavens and placed the boulder gently down atop the smaller rocks next to the river.
A pair of young men, both aged barely twenty summers by the looks of them, appeared on the far side of the river from Llud. The two youths worked their way down the winding trail to the meeting place at the river’s edge. They paused and took in the scene for a moment.
“So there’s the old dog,” Jorn said, shaking his head and smirking. “Arrived to beg for his life, I hope.”
Jorn was the taller of the two, easily the height of any man in the service of either Thane Orbadrin or Thane Llud. With his long unkempt hair, clean shaven chin, and blazing blue eyes, he looked as young as he was.
Despite his age, however, he already had the solid frame of a man years older, with broad shoulders and strongly-formed limbs. He wore a shirt of chain mail, a thick cloak of elkskin. A two-handed sword was strapped to his back and he looked every inch the barbarian swashbuckler. He reveled in it, striding about with a conscious swagger.
“Let’s wait and see, brother,” the other youth said.
Thulgin was a year older than Jorn, not quite as tall but broader across the shoulders. He had dark gray eyes and wore a serious expression on his face.
“He is full of pride,” Thulgin went on. “He may have some fight in him still.”
“Good,” Jorn said, smirking “We’ll have him finished in a week, and then we’ll add his lands to our own.”
“Remember father’s instructions,” Thulgin cautioned. “We are better off with him as a buffer against the trolls to the west, if for nothing else. Take care not to insult him without need.”
“Politics,” Jorn mumbled, snorting derisively. “Let’s just finish him off.”
“You just follow my lead,” Thulgin said firmly. “And don’t fuck it all up.”
“I promise nothing.”
Thulgin shot him a serious glance as they reached the bottom of the slope and stood at the river’s edge.
Llud was the first to speak up. His voice bore a tone of arrogant contempt.
“What is this?” he asked with a sneer. “Where is Orbadrin?”
Thulgin and Jorn stepped out onto one of the broad, flat boulders in the river.
“Thane Llud,” Thulgin said. He spoke clearly and firmly. “Our father is ill, as you well know. We speak for him and come with the full power to make peace or to make war, as you would choose.”
“What?” Llud said. “We are met here at the sacred throne of Wönda the River-Spirit to discuss terms, and Orbadrin sends his two whelps!”
“Whelps, he calls us!” Jorn growled, stepping forward. “Grang’s teeth! Either of these whelps can thrash any shit-smelling whoreson you care to send against us, Llud.”
“Foul boy,” Llud yelled back. “Battle is forbidden here in this sacred place of council, as well you know! To even suggest it is impious.”
“Then let’s go down stream a bit…out of Wönda’s view,” Jorn said, glancing at the great rock.
“This war goes bad for you Thane Llud,” Thulgin said. “It is one month since you began raiding the herds of Orbadrin and carrying away his cattle. It is one month since you made war upon us, and now you hang by a thread.”
Thulgin paused, letting his words sink-in.
“Do recall it was you called for this council,” he went on. “You can hurl insults across the river and we can go back to fighting. Or we can discuss terms.”
“There is plenty of fight still left in us,” Llud said.
“Unbelievable,” Jorn muttered loud enough for all to hear.
“We have a thousand men,” Thulgin said, casting an annoyed glare at Jorn. “Our al
ly to the North, Thane Halgaad, has a thousand more. You are down to two or three hundred starving men. You have proven your bravery, Thane Llud, but if you wish to keep fighting I don’t know why you would ask for this council. For my part I stand here ready to talk peace, or to make war. It matters not to me. Choose what it shall be and stop wasting our time. Now.”
Llud took a deep breath.
“State your terms,” he muttered.
“You and your men go in peace,” Thulgin said. “And we take the seven hills from Elkhead to Fangun’s Mound to divide with Thane Halgaad as we see fit.”
“That’s your peace? To rob half my lands!”
“Grang’s teeth!” Jorn swore. “We offer the dog mercy and he snaps at us!”
“Always has our father been a friend to you,” Thulgin said. “When the blight struck down the best of your herds five winters past, he gave you steers from his own. When the trolls from the Mungin Fens raided your lands only last year, my brother and I led men to help you drive them back. Now it is we who are hard-pressed with enemies all about us. The blue-painted berserkers from the hills beyond the forest raid our frontiers and eat the flesh of the slain right on the battlefield. Trolls and gruks to the south appear in ever greater numbers. Our father is ill, even as these threats mount. And how did you act? Did you offer aid and assistance, as a friend ought? No, instead you attacked us. You thought you saw weakness and believed you would overwhelm us. You stand now, instead, on the brink of ruin. Yet you balk at our mercy?”
“Go ahead,” Jorn muttered. “Refuse.”
“The seven hills, from Elkhead to Fangun’s Mound,” Thulgin said firmly. “What is your answer?”
“You leave us little choice, Thulgin son of Orbadrin,” Llud growled. “We accept your terms.”
“Swear to it on the river spirit,” Thulgin said, pointing towards the towering rock.
Child Of Storms (Volume 1) Page 6