Ossian grunted, ran his hand back over the right side of his head kept smoothly shaven by the edge of a sharp knife. A custom his father, chieftain of Clan Taur, had followed. And, like father like son, Ossian also grew out a long goat’s beard, into which the warrior had braided four silver rings taken from the many Vanir dead he’d helped kill.
“Good to be having a head at all,” he finally said.
Then, with a nod of thanks to Desa and a strong clap against Kern’s shoulder, he left, already calling to Mogh and Danon to get their lazy carcasses back up the hill and drag down more of the Vanir dead.
Dour-faced Mogh and quiet, competent Danon were the other two remaining Taurin, having joined the outcasts after Kern’s warriors helped break a Vanir siege of Taur. He had noticed the men spending more time together since Ashul’s death, the fourth of their number, and after finding Ossian’s father among the ruin of Gaud. Both losses had hit Ossian hard.
Now Kern and Desa watched as the strong-willed Taurin took charge of the salvage duties. He doubted anyone worked harder under Ossian’s glare, but it was good to have the man back on his feet so quickly.
“Be fine,” Desa said. She pulled back her dark, oily locks and tied them in a knot at the back of her head. Desagrena had a thin face and wide, expressive eyes that showed her usual temper all too well. Just now, though, Kern swore her look held a touch of compassion that Desa would no doubt deny. And likely give him a sharp cuff for mentioning. “It’s a clean wound.”
Not all wounds fester on the outside, Kern did not say. He simply shrugged and nodded Desa along to their next patient. “Think he’s waited long enough?”
Reave was the only man in camp who appeared to be resting, stretched out his full, impressive length on a fold of clean woolen blankets. Lying on his belly, he cradled his head in massive hands as he watched the industry around him. Always hot-blooded, Reave wore no jerkin or vest. A traveling cloak of bearskin backed by simple wool was enough for him. And the thick kilt most Cimmerians favored. He was also one of the few who had not adopted the eastern practice of protecting his legs in a wrap of thick cloth.
Kern did not bother with leggings, because nothing—ever—kept him warm. Not with his northern blood so steeped with winter ice. Reave, he refused the extra garment for a likewise simple reason. He was as stubborn a man as any Kern had ever known.
And if Desagrena looked as if she were going to enjoy the next few moments, Kern would hardly fault her. She had to live with her man’s faults and put up with them more than most.
“If’n he carried a shield,” she said loudly enough for Reave to hear, “he’d have avoided the trouble altogether.”
Reave did not so much as glance back. “Can’t carry a shield with a greatsword,” he said. His deep voice rumbled out in a slow, calm thunder, speaking as if to a child.
“Mayhap it’s time to give up that great, hulking piece of steel you’re so fond of,” she snapped back. “Got something to prove? Always need to have the largest sword?”
Now he did look back over his shoulder, a mischievous grin peeking through his brushy, black beard. “Never heard you complain about my long blade afore.” And he laughed.
It wasn’t often that anyone got the best of Desagrena. The viperish woman held her own on and off the battlefield. And for slow-witted Reave to set her back so easily—truly it was a good match between them.
Not that he wouldn’t pay for the jest. Desa was not above revenge. Smiling to her man’s laughter, she bent down and grabbed the back hem of his kilt and yanked it up rudely to expose his bare ass and the stub of arrow sticking from one side. Kern couldn’t say for certain that she had twisted the woolen kilt in such a way as to catch the jagged end of the shaft. But he wouldn’t wager against it either.
Reave’s laughter choked off at once, and he beat one large fist against the ground. “Damn, woman.”
“A mere splinter for a big, strong man such as yourself.”
She reached down and tapped the blood-crusted shaft, testing its movement. A trickle of fresh blood oozed out of the wound, which had already begun to scab over. Reave hissed in pain.
“We’re going to fire the wound closed,” she told him, while Kern retrieved the dagger they had left to heat in the coals of a cooking fire. Hot metal against a wound to cauterize it was often the best remedy. Taking a piece of dry leather, she wrapped it about the broken arrow shaft with a careful grip. “Kern will do it. I might miss and singe shut the wrong opening. Then you would be shy of the hole matching the one in your head, you thick-witted slug.” And she yanked the arrow free in a quick, strong pull.
Kern did not wait. While Reave was already reeling from the pulled shaft, he slapped the reddened tip of the dagger down into the wound, singeing the wound to prevent bleeding and infection. Then he jumped back, alongside Desa, clearing away from the large man while they waited to see how he handled it.
No worries. Reave’s howl was part relieved laughter, part pain. He beat his fist against the ground again, and again, fighting his way through it. Garret Blackpatch and Hydallan looked over from where they tended the cooking fires. Garret turned and gave Reave a shake of his own back end, mocking the larger man so long as he was safely down.
“Let that show ya, Kern. Women. A pain in the ass.
“Always get you in the end, they do.”
KERN SLIPPED AWAY not long after, leaving Desa fussing and fuming over Reave’s injury and Reave protesting all the attention, though not a man in the campsite believed him. Old Finn and Garret began to snipe at each other, loudly, pretending to be a bickering couple, which drew laughs from Reave and icy glares from Desagrena.
Daol’s father, Hydallan, refereed both matches, offering blunt and often lewd advice.
Kern grabbed up a hatchet and a leather carrying strap to go off after firewood, but he paused inside Murrogh Forest to spy and to listen, and smile in that rare moment without anyone watching and no need to pretend that he wasn’t an outsider, even among his warriors and friends.
Not so long ago, it seemed, there hadn’t been a need to pretend. When he had believed himself a Cimmerian, by birth if nothing else. Worried, as was everyone in the small village of Gaud (and likely all the clans of Conall Valley), about the unnaturally long winter and lack of food, the threat of Vanir raids, and tales of the great northern devil, Grimnir, who marauded through Cimmeria’s west and northern territories. Not as preoccupied with his odd appearance, or the cold touch of winter set deep, deep in his bones and blood, until Cul Chieftain used Kern’s strangeness to isolate him and then declare the golden-eyed man an outcast.
Kern remembered the next several weeks as disjointed fragments flashing through his mind. Running south. Striking a trail in the snow—raiders, after his clan and kin!—and chasing after them. Arriving too late.
Daol, taken prisoner. And Maev, Burok Bear-slayer’s daughter.
Four warriors and one youth splitting from Cul Chieftain and the clan, joining Kern in tracking the Vanir.
Rescuing their kin, he had seen for the first time another man, colored as he was. Frost-haired. Golden, wolflike eyes. And then another of these Ymirish not long after, when Kern’s bedraggled pack broke the siege at Taur. It was the first time Kern had been made to wonder about others like him, and who they might be, questions that plagued Kern as he and his warriors fought their way over the Pass of Blood. Through Cimmeria’s northwest lands.
Answered, or so he thought, when he pulled Grimnir after him over the edge of a cliff in the battle above Conarch. That his choice to stand against Grimnir and the northern war hosts was what counted. That he was not—
—one of them.
“Awfully hard to collect firewood with your back turned on the forest.”
Kern started, as if he’d been found in something more sinister than simply catching a private moment.
Turning, he found Daol leaning against a dead birch. Five years younger than Kern and looking at his nineteenth summer, Daol had
come into his full height but still had a young man’s easy grace. Putting weight back on after a close brush with death, his gray eyes still had a smudge of black beneath them, though he looked hale enough despite his recent tangle with the giant spiders of the Black Mountains.
The hunter had his bow and a nocked arrow gripped easily in a one-handed carry, ready to pull and loose at an instant’s beckoning. Sword sheathed at his side. Buckskin cloak thrown back off his shoulders, trailing behind him where it would not foul his arm.
“Also, a good way to get yourself killed,” his longtime friend said.
Kern shoved himself back, leaving the campsite behind him as he joined Daol near the old birch. The snag had the stubs of several branches left to it, which he worked at with the hatchet. “Has nay happened yet.”
“Not, some might say, for want of trying.”
Truth. From the northwest territories, Kern’s warriors had fought their way back across Cimmeria, traveling the lower trails this time beneath Mount Crom and back up into Conall Valley. To Gaud. Grimnir’s hordes had beaten them back, however. There weren’t many of their kin left except the ones who needed to be laid to rest. And after another of Kern’s “wolves” died defending the ruined village there hadn’t been a reason to stay any longer.
Ashul’s death still hounded Kern, in fact. Had chased after him when he struck out over the Black Mountains for the clans of eastern Cimmeria, looking for fresh strength to rally against Grimnir. And that much, at least, they had started to find.
Mayhap.
Kern chopped a branch off the old snag. Then a second. He stacked them on the carrying strap, which wasn’t anything more than a pair of wide leather belts fastened between a pair of wooden handles. He raised his hatchet, ready to attack a third branch.
Daol was still there, leaning against the other side of the tree. Still waiting.
“I thought you were hunting.”
He knew better than to try and evade the confrontation. Once Daol set something in his mind, it was like trying to pull a fresh bone away from a camp dog.
“Was. Ehmish took a rabbit in midrun. At sixty paces. Crom’s golden shaft, it was a shot to see.”
“And?”
“Tumbled it headlong into a briar patch, which I had to fetch it out of thanks to the wager we’d made . . . only it wasn’t there. Just a skid of blood and a few clumps of hair. And a great-sized print. Wolf.”
Kern glanced over at mention of a wolf. Of course, Daol could mean only one. “Frostpaw?”
A nod. “You should have seen Ehmish. Madder than old Bear-slayer the time we planted a dead fish in his bed.”
A sobering thought, now that their village was as dead as their former chieftain. The clan barely survived as was, with a few dozen kin and kind having also escaped here, to the eastern side of the Black Mountains. That had been a reunion. Coming across Cul Chieftain leading a mixed raiding party of Gaudic and local Murroghan warriors, he and Kern striking paths again in the middle of midnight attacks against a Vanir campsite. Sizing each other up, after so many months.
Cul had only shaken his head and laughed. Unbelieving. “Wolf-Eye. It had to be you.”
Kern, reeling, already struggling with more than he’d ever thought to face, had not known what to say. Or do. Not then. He waited Cul out, as the others gathered around.
“You’d best come back with us,” Cul had finally offered. “Pay respects to Morag Chieftain, the least. And you’ve kin will want to see you. Not you, so much,” he’d said to Kern. Voice flat. “But the others, yea.”
In a way, finding more survivors had brought Kern’s warriors a measure of hope. But it couldn’t last.
Once outside the clan, always outside. The Men of the Wolves would never be welcomed home fully.
“What did Ehmish do?” Kern asked. He felt shadows stirring in the recesses of his mind, that terrible purpose he’d barely reined in during the recent fighting. Memories of that night weren’t helping.
“About what you’d expect. Waded into the briars hisself to make certain I was nay fooling him. Growled and snarled a bit. Then readied another arrow and swore he’d get the next one as well. And he might. The boy has good instincts.”
It wasn’t fair calling Ehmish a boy. Not anymore. Fifteen summers and not into his full growth he might be. But he’d killed, and nearly been killed, too many times. If lads with twelve summers were taking on a man’s responsibility these days, Ehmish was nearly a veteran.
Still, “You left him alone?” There might be Vanir about. Kern doubted it—didn’t feel it—but it could be.
Daol gave Kern a look. “Aodh found us. I convinced him to take Ehmish a new direction while I went on alone. They circled off to the west, away from the animal’s trail sign. Good thing. Weren’t gone more than a moment when Frostpaw came skulking by with a bloody muzzle. Gave me a start. You forget how big he is. I swear that Crom-cursed wolf of yours gets bolder by the day. Ever since . . .”
Ever since it crept up on their midnight assault against the Vanir, and Cul Chieftain saw it fight alongside Kern, then leap to defend him? Was that what Daol had been about to say? Cul had not been shy, telling that story.
Kern fell back to hacking at the birch. Chips flew, and the smell of old wood rose in the air.
As easy as they’d all gotten with the huge dire wolf tracking them, accepting the band of warriors as something close to its “pack,” it still rankled from time to time that the animal acted more of a loyal guardian than any kind of wild beast. Kern had first come against it, alone, in the depths of the recent winter. A long, nightmarish season of unending cold, with no sign of spring’s return and Vanir raiding growing worse with every passing month. Then, Cimmeria had seemed ready to freeze itself into a solid block of ice, if the clans didn’t starve first or fall victim to the raiders.
The rogue wolf attacked out of desperate hunger, and fear. In its weakened state, Kern managed to get the better of it . . . and then let it go. He never could say why, except as a recent outcast himself, he’d taken pity on the animal. Since then, the wolf had trailed him over two mountain passes and across many battlefields. Eating well, no doubt, off the trail of corpses left in Kern’s wake.
It was there at the battle where Grimnir and Kern went over the side of the cliff above Clan Conarch.
It followed him over the broken rock flow to Venarium, then to what was left of Gaud after the raiders gutted away everything Kern and others remembered of their home.
It chased alongside him over the Black Mountains, where Kern and Daol had been taken prisoner by Clan Galla. And, once they’d been returned to their friends, it had trailed behind them into eastern Cimmeria, where Kern had come to rally any strength left that could possibly stand against Grimnir’s war hosts. Against Grimnir himself. Before the giant-kin terror broke the back of so many clans that there would be nothing left to stop Nordheim’s hordes from pouring across the border unchecked.
“Kern?” The voice was distant, muffled, like a fist pounding against thick gates. “Kern. KERN!”
Without realizing it, Kern had attacked the birch tree with his hatchet, swinging wildly. Another of the branch stubs lay at his feet, broken away from the pale, bone-gray trunk. Now he railed against the tree itself, hacking large wood chips out of the old snag, barely flinching when splinters and chips bounced against his face.
A voice, yelling in his ear.
A hand reaching out, grabbing his shoulder.
He wheeled, hand axe raised and readied.
Daol leaped back. Cautious. Confused. “What is wrong with you? There’s been something different about you ever since that night with Cul Chieftain. Since he took us back to Clan Murrogh, and we found—”
“I know what we found in Murrogh,” Kern said. He forced a calm on himself, stilling the rage that boiled so near the surface.
“And I saw that raider you landed on today.” Daol’s voice was calm. Nearly flat. But it carried the weight of a good slap. “You broke bot
h of his shoulders, Kern. Nearly tore one arm away from his body. Not possible you could have done that to him from where you jumped.” His gray eyes held a trace of uncertainty now. Like any Cimmerian, he trusted only what he saw with his eyes, could hold in his own hands.
As Kern had once believed.
“You tell me there was nothing more to it, and I’ll believe you. By Crom, Kern, after what you did for me, after what you’ve led us through, I’d believe you if you said I could fly. I’d throw myself off the nearest cliff for you to prove it. You know that.”
He did. Daol’s loyalty had never once been in question no matter what the younger man believed of himself. And Kern had already been forced to ask so much of him. Of them all.
Kern bent down. He picked up the stub branches and added them to the others already set on the leather carrying strap. Then, shouldering the light load and grabbing up the hatchet, he stood to face his friend. “If you head back into camp, pass the word. We will stay for this evening, and the Gorram’s songs for their newest warrior. But we break early for Murrogh, no matter what the village decides.”
He pushed past Daol, leaving the hunter in the shadow of the birch. Daol did not try to follow. He did, however, call after Kern.
“Tell me that, Kern. Tell me that there is nothing more going on.”
He paused, considered for a moment, and finally shook his head. He refused to look back. “There is nothing more going on,” Kern said carefully, “that you can do anything about.” Then he turned for the forest to gather more wood. Alone.
There were some burdens not meant to be shared.
3
THE HORSE LODUR sat astride staggered its way down the snow-covered ridgeline, pushed forward past any hope its life could be saved. Blood caked about its flaring nostrils like blackened scabs, with a fresh trickle of bright scarlet seeping out to stain the animal’s lips and mat the coarse brown hair surrounding its muzzle. Each steaming breath came in a sharp, hitching gasp, as if it might be the animal’s last.
Age of Conan: Songs of Victory: Legends of Kern, Volume IIl Page 3