“Becoming king easy,” the dark-skinned man said absently, as if correcting him. Obviously he did understand the Cimmerian language. Though he still spoke Aquilonian. “What you do as king, this hard.” He saw everyone staring at him. “King Conan say that many years before your chieftain.”
Silence, marred only by the crackling of the fire, was absolute. The strange man had the look of the fabled Black Kingdoms of the far, far south, but his tattered clothes and his language resembled the nearer “civilized” kingdoms. He chewed slowly, staring into the flames, oblivious to the quiet.
“You heard Conan speak?” Kern finally asked for the others. “As king?” Despite the black words most Cimmerian clans had for Conan, everyone hung on the man’s answer.
“Aquilonia smaller than Shem,” he said, glancing to either side. The whites of his eyes looked unnaturally bright in his dark face. So did his large teeth when he smiled, skinning back thin lips. “But not that small. King Conan’s words, they written down in books I read.”
Desa snorted. “Now he can read, too.” Literacy was highly regarded among most clans, but not widely pursued. Hunting and tracking. Fighting and farming. Skills that kept you alive; those were the important ones.
“I can read,” the man said. “And write. King Conan has many books about him. One I saw, it was about his challenge to the wizard, Zathrus. He had to order many men to their deaths. He knows they cannot win, but was necessary to tie wizard down in one place.”
Clan before kin. Kern remembered the pair of Aquilonian soldiers who stopped to trade for meat last summer. What was it they had said? “You can take the barbarian out of Cimmeria, but you can’t get Cimmeria out of the barbarian.” They had laughed afterward. Around this fire, men and women nodded seriously.
Conan might have forgone his people, but not their ways. And Cul had forgone neither, in fact. He had done what he could for the clan. It didn’t matter if others agreed, or it eventually set him apart from his kin. That was his life now.
In a way, it was also now something of Kern’s life. For his part in touching off the discussion, Daol didn’t seem to care one way or another. “I still go with you.”
“Same,” Reave said.
Wallach Graybeard thought a moment, staring out in the dark, then nodded, tying his fate, for the moment, to Kern. Desagrena kept her own counsel but did not deny that she’d remain. When she had something to say, Kern had no doubt that she’d speak up. Silence was not among her faults.
Reave frowned, as if suddenly remembering something he’d forgotten to ask.
“So, where are we going?”
THERE HAD BEEN several ways Kern could respond to Reave’s question. Spreading his woolen blanket over a thick pad of felt Daol had stolen from the Vanir camp, Kern thought about how he had answered.
“To look for Ehmish and Aodh if they don’t show by morning.”
It was the easiest answer to give. It satisfied Reave, simply in need of direction. It put off the harder questions that Daol or Desa might have asked, comforting them with an important fact. They would care for their own first.
No one would be left behind. Ever.
And the simple truth of the matter was Kern hadn’t thought too much past that. There were several questions to answer regarding the northern man, and his appearance so similar to Kern’s.
Where had he come from?
Were there others like him? Like Kern?
Leaving first watch in Desagrena’s hands, with a rotation split among the four outcasts through the night, Kern decided to put off those questions till the next day, when he would be rested and thinking clearly.
Which might have been one reason he was shocked Maev had been thinking so much farther ahead. That, and her appearance at his bedside.
She wore his worn winter cloak, having never handed it back after Kern’s battle with the frost-man, the Ymirish, bundling it around her as if afraid to show herself to anyone still awake. He couldn’t say why, but she looked more vulnerable and yet more determined and strong than he had ever seen. She spread her own blanket next to his, then lay down with the cloak spread over her and slightly overlapping Kern’s woolen cover.
As she bedded at his side, he noticed that she had removed her tunic and wore little else than a thin cotton shift.
“You’ll freeze,” Kern whispered harshly, not wanting to draw attention to her.
Maev shook her head, bedraggled hair whispering over one bared shoulder. “No,” she said, slipping closer, tugging the hem of his blanket over her as well. “I won’t.”
He glanced around. Having chosen a place farthest from the campfire, to give one of the rescued prisoners a warmer place, Kern and Maev were half-cloaked in the night with barely a lick of flames from the dying fire to show against her bared skin, or glowing in his eyes. Only Desa remained obviously awake, perched on a nearby log with her back blatantly turned toward the couple.
Maev’s hands closed on the large brass buckle that fastened the belt around Kern’s heavy kilt. He had stripped off his poncho, never too worried about catching his death of a cold. He never suffered from exposure except in the most extreme circumstance. Now, here, Kern felt the chill touch of the night air very, very close. Just as he felt the heat Maev radiated, spilling into him where her fingers brushed against bare skin.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Kern whispered, fastening his hands around her wrists. She froze, terrified, and he remembered that she had spent the last night and a day bound against her will. He released her.
“I know very well. You look like him. Same eyes. Similar coloring. No one would ever know the difference. I’ll never know.”
“Maev, you’re going back to Gaud. Cul will be there. I will not.”
But he hadn’t understood. Not fully. “You think my place in the village will be any more comfortable if I end up carrying a Vanir’s get? That would be the only thing worse than what he did to me. I wouldn’t want to live through it.”
And by comparison, Kern read into it, lying with him would be a much easier fate to bear.
“I don’t know . . .”
Maev found his hands, seized them in hers. “I do.” She huddled close, and he could smell the sweat in her hair, the sweet taste of dried apple on her breath. Her mouth worked, but no sound came out for a moment as she fought for the right words. “Kern. I need this. Something to hedge against fate. The village knew you. You came back for us. They’d understand.”
“No. They wouldn’t.”
“They’d accept. It’s close enough.”
Was it? Kern could see the logic behind her mad request, her need. A woman pressed into a corner by desperate circumstance. Worried about giving birth to a child with amber yellow eyes and white hair among a people that tended toward blue-gray and dark. If Kern’s mother had been equally careful . . .
Vanir bastard or an outcast’s son. The choices weren’t in Maev’s favor, or in favor for any child she might catch. But that was not exactly his decision to make. She was there. She knew what it would take to go on living among Clan Gaud. And so did he.
Maev seemed to sense his acceptance, moving in, pressing against him. Her hands opened the buckle, then pressed into the washboard muscles along his abdomen with urgent need.
She recoiled suddenly, as if struck. Kern thought it was the crusted scars across his body, his arms. Trophies from the tangle with the dire wolf, and a few sword cuts as well. But Maev had been a chieftain’s daughter. Scars, even fresh ones, were no large matter to her. It was something else.
“You’re . . . you’re cold,” she stammered. Not afraid. Not repulsed. She sounded only concerned, as if she might be the cause.
Kern nodded silently in the dark. “All my life,” he said. Then reached for her and gathered her under his blanket.
11
TAKING THE LAST watch, Kern left Maev sleeping fitfully inside her own bedroll, his cloak draped over her. If Wallach had anything to say about Burok’s daughter bedde
d down so close to Kern, if he noticed her bared shoulder peeking from beneath her cover, he said nothing. Just rolled himself into his own blanket for another hour’s rest.
Kern fed the lingering embers a few more sticks, keeping flames burning under meat still staked over the fire pit. Then he took a turn around the campsite, walking with the same care he’d taken when hunting deer alongside Daol. He saw many drawn and haggard faces, looking tired even in sleep. Looking too thin.
He also saw tracks in the snow on the outskirts of camp, where the dire wolf had finally come during the night for the tripe tossed out to him. A blood trail dragged away, back into the safety of some nearby brush. There was no sign of the animal now, but Kern supposed it would be back.
Another mouth to feed.
Finding a good resting spot, leaning up against the silvery bark of a tall alder, Kern watched the skies lighten over the eastern mountain range. Gray cloud cover piled up over the valley again, threatening snow or sleet. A drenching rain would have pinned the small camp in place, but it would have been a welcome sign of spring’s return. The clouds were too high, though. It looked to Kern as if the day would stay cold and dry.
But not uneventful.
Camp stirred awake slowly, with Wallach and Reave among the earliest to rise. Wallach found a camp skillet, and worked to make fresh flat cakes with meal and water, frying them in horse fat. Reave finished shaving any last meat off the hanging carcass. Without being asked, he left the guts that would not keep in a careful pile where the wolf would find them later.
The ebony-skinned man rose not long after. Stretched, and did some sitting-up exercises to warm his blood. Kern had finally learned his name. Nahud’r. Difficult to say, coming out something like Nahudra or Nahuderr from most of the Cimmerians. The man readily answered to either.
Finished with his stretches, he tore himself off a small piece of horseflesh while waiting for the flat cakes, then staggered outside of camp to relieve himself in the snow. A golden stream, just like any other man. Kern shook his head. What had he expected from a Shemite? Something dark and dry, like stories of the desert land?
Nahud’r took an extra moment, wandering around the southern edge of camp as if searching for something. He took some time facing east, offering some kind of prayer to the lightening gray sky, then turned abruptly and crossed back through camp near Kern’s perch.
“Someone out there,” he said softly, moving to a few nearby bedrolls and lightly shaking others awake. Desagrena came up with her knife in hand, but stopped short of plunging it into the black man’s throat.
Kern snapped alert at once, embarrassed that he’d not seen or heard an approach. He strode out to the edge of camp, peering into the gray and not bothering to hide his knowledge of the company. If they were raiders, they would attack. No amount of guile would prevent that now.
Instead, a trio of shadows detached themselves from the hillside that sloped down into the small vale. One waved an arm overhead, signaling an “all clear” sign that Kern recognized all too well. A quick, efficient slash. And a peaked cap on his head.
“Daol,” Kern called, bringing the hunter to him. He gestured up the hill with a casual nod. “Run up there and bring your da down to camp, if you would.”
Thrusting his bow and a pair of arrows into Kern’s arms, the younger man set off with a sprint and a shout of happiness.
It was, Kern thought, one of the best sounds he’d heard in a long while.
OF COURSE, HYDALLAN was not prone to joyous reunions. Kern heard the elder tracker complaining all the way into camp. Chastising his son as if he were a youth of ten summers, and not nearly twice that age, for even thinking about leaving his weapon behind. For being captured to begin with. For dragging him away and tormenting his old bones with the cold and the long, forced march from Gaud.
Kern swore he saw Daol stifle a smile.
Hydallan stopped just long enough to brace Kern with a hand on each shoulder, and a nod of thanks. Then he walked over and kicked a spray of dirt over the smoldering fire. “Smelled that an hour away, we did.”
Kern doubted it, but wasn’t about to argue. “Fair enough,” he said, accepting the light rebuke. “Have a bite?”
“Don’t mind if’n we do.”
With his long knife, Hydallan hacked off three chunks of meat and threw two of them to the clansmen who followed. Garret wasn’t a surprise to see. A man nearly as old as Hydallan, and an old friend of the tracker. But the third man, looking sullen and trapped, was a shock.
Brig Tall-Wood.
The young warrior carried a pheasant by the feet, neck broken and flopping limply against his leg. He tossed it to Daol, refusing to meet the other man’s eyes.
Kern wasn’t going to let it go so easily. As everyone began to break their fast, he asked, “I thought you were watching the village?”
The young man shrugged. “Tabbot can handle that. Cul wanted to know if Maev’d been found.”
“He sent you? Sent all of you?”
Hydallan snorted, having overheard. “Sent Brig, here, when Garret and I walked out on him. He can carry his own stubborn ass up to the northern ranges. Or he can plant himself until spring, like you said.” He chewed silently for a moment. “Don’t matter to me now, neither way.”
Apparently, Cul and Morne had both returned to the village, ready to draft as many men as would be necessary to make the pass and continue with Burok Bear-slayer to the Field of the Chiefs. The story came out about the raiders, and Kern’s return. And how Kern had gone against the clan to lead away more good men on a fool’s mission.
“I think he was just angry for not going after you hisself,” Hydallan said, speaking to Maev. “Which is why he unbent enough to throw Brig, here, in with us.” He chewed. Swallowed. “We moved all day and most of last night. Figured you all for the Snowy River country. Then we struck a few trails, all heading the same direction, and thought we’d follow up. That dark fella, he threw me for a turn. But still weren’t sure you weren’t no Vanir camp until Kern showed that stark mane o’ his.”
“Don’t take that for certain, next time,” Daol warned his father. Though he held off mentioning anything more about the frost-man—the Ymirish—until they had a moment alone.
“Not going to be much left to return home to, at this pace.” Reave glanced at Maev.
Kern shrugged aside Reave’s comment. “Doesn’t matter. We still need to get the others back, and we need to find Aodh and Ehmish.” The entire camp had assembled around him like a hunting pack around its leader. As good a time as any. “Our fallback was always Taur. The village can’t be more than half a day at a good run.” Hydallan looked up in the sky, considering, then nodded. Kern continued, singling out the five former prisoners, excluding Daol, who had made his choice to stay. “We can break up now, with the five of you heading southwest, along Hydallan’s back track . . .”
Maev hesitated. Then, “I’d like to know the boy is all right. We can head home through Taur.” Her voice grew stronger, more certain, as she mapped out a plan for herself at least. “Refugees who came through over the winter said they were well prepared for any raiders. Maybe we can learn something.”
Nodding, Kern continued. “And maybe we can pick up some trail sign on the Vanir we ran across, or the second raiding party they were going to meet. If they are in the area, Clan Taur is a good target. It’ll draw them like metal shavings to a lodestone.”
It was Brig who looked at him sidelong. “What are you thinking, Wolf-Eye?”
“That we might track them. Hunt them. Catch the northerners with another nighttime attack.” More gazes looked to Kern, and several had a hungry gleam in their eyes that he recognized. “After two years of their preying on Cimmeria, I wouldn’t mind taking some back for ourselves.”
To that, there was a chorus of answering nods. No matter what else separated Kern from the others, there was still a great deal of common ground. Which reminded him of his second reason.
“And I .
. .” Kern almost didn’t say, but they had the right to know. “I have a personal stake in this now.”
And no one save perhaps Hydallan—either there or at the village—was likely to confirm what Kern suspected after last night. He doubted anyone knew for certain, if his own mother had half the brains and determination that Maev possessed. So his answers, if there were any to be had, lay elsewhere.
“Break camp,” he ordered after an awkward silence, feeling uneasy at having to direct such a large and growing group.
They fell to work without complaint.
Wallach found Kern rolling up his own bedroll, using a short length of rope to make the sling that he’d use to carry it. “Lost your war axe back there, didn’t you?” he asked, motioning Kern toward a small collection of salvaged gear.
No need to mention the how or why of it. Wallach had been there.
“It wasn’t as comfortable in my hands as I thought it might be,” Kern admitted. “Too large and awkward.”
“Because you aren’t trying to chop wood. It’s meant to kill a man. Fast. Brutal.” The veteran warrior might have a lot of gray shooting through his beard and what was left of his hair, but he had seen enough fighting over his four decades to know what he was talking about. “It’s also meant for a bigger man. Like Reave.”
Kern nodded. “My hand wasn’t much more comfortable around the hilt of a broadsword. Maybe I should stick to throwing rocks.” As humor, it fell very flat. Kern hadn’t really meant to be funny. His lack in the previous night’s battle worried him.
“Comfort comes with time. For now, work on muscle.”
He bent to a small stack of weapons, all the extras after the others had taken their preferences. It was a short arming sword. Hardly better than a knife. The kind of weapon you gave one of the village youths when you knew he wasn’t in danger of cutting off a finger through stupidity.
Holding it in one large hand, Kern thought the blade might snap just by staring at it. “You want me to use this?”
“If you hope to stand against a seasoned Vanir, you’ll learn to use it fast. Skill will have to make up for brawn right now. Now listen.” Wallach took the blade away from Kern. In his hand, it looked like a natural extension of his arm. “You don’t slash with a short sword. You stab. Like this.” He took a few sharp jabs at the air.
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