The sled turned, but not easily. Kern jammed his foot into the snow and ice even harder. They came within a few handbreadths of the racing warriors on Kern’s right before veering away.
Elsewhere, a sled of warriors was not so fortunate. They shouted as their sled began to wander, and Kern heard the first man bail off before there was any impact of wood against wood. But that came soon. A sick, crunching sound that reminded him of smashing into the woodpile back in Gaud. At least one more body hit the earth nearby. Several others yelled in anger and not a little fear, but Kern didn’t think any of the sleds overturned. At least, he hoped not.
There were other shouts in the deepening twilight. Calls of surprise and alarm in the Vanir tongue. Challenging roars from behind them, as Sláine Longtooth’s war host charged forward.
Squinting forward, Kern saw the watch fires behind the wall blaze up with new strength as raiders fed brittle evergreen boughs to the flames.
The first arrow shaft didn’t whistle past for another few heartbeats. It was another five or ten lengths before a broadhead thunked into the barkskin shield laid over their backs. Daol shouted an exclamation, then, “All right. I’m okay.”
The sled jostled them as it bounced over some uneven snow, then it leveled out over a long, rough slide leading up to the Vanir line. The blanket was worse there, chewed down to bare earth in a few places. The sleds skipped over these with grinding scrapes and violent shaking. Kern all but gave up trying to control the sled’s direction. They wavered over the field, bumping and grinding against the neighboring sleds. Slowing, finally, but still too fast to bail off without worries of breaking a bow, or a bone. Too late to think about . . .
Too fast!
Kern’s eyes widened as he saw the dark shadow of the wall approaching fast. Though barely more than chest high it looked very tall and very, very hard from the back of the fast-gliding sled. Kern saw a darker stain against the wall, not too far off to his right, which would be the piled logs and brush from earlier attacks. And around this was more iced-over slush and bare earth and the ditch—
“Hang on!” Kern had time to call out, and then the sled pitched nose down into the shallow trench that the Vanir raiders had dug across the slope.
The front edge dug into frozen ground and the entire sled stopped hard, throwing the warriors forward. Kern slid across the rough planking. He managed to get one arm in between his face and the bark shield before he smashed the tree skin in between his face and the icy wall. Splinters gouged deeply into his forearm, cutting long, shallow wounds. His head glanced off ice as strong as steel, but what lit off the sparks at the edges of his vision was when his shield slid up his back and cracked him behind the crown.
Kern didn’t stay down for more than a few pounding heartbeats.
Rolling to one side, he disentangled himself from Brig Tall-Wood and the two bows which, remarkably, still appeared to be in good shape. The blanket with their swords wrapped inside lay nearby. A grab for one corner and a quick yank spun the blades over the ground in a clatter and clash of metal.
Snatching up his arming sword, Kern then hunted for his shield as Daol and Brig scrambled for the handfuls of arrow shafts littering the ground around them. It wasn’t hard to find, resting on the front edge of the sled where his head had been a moment before, lying under a broken chunk of bark.
Bloodied, bruised but still whole, Kern staggered up to a crouch, staying low on the wall as warriors sprinted for his position near the makeshift ramp. Kern counted seven sleds scattered along the middle of the wall, most of them having crashed into the bulwark as he had. Another sled lay overturned about twenty paces back toward the slope, and a dark stain that might have been the last sat halfway up the slope, right about where Sláine and his war host came charging with their burning brush and charred logs and enough sharpened steel to put the fear of Crom into these northerners.
They had to hold long enough for the others to reach them. Had to keep the Vanir archers from turning the mass charge into a deadly gauntlet.
Picking themselves up from the wreckage, clansmen grabbed for weapons and shields and began to run toward Kern and the makeshift ramp. Some carried swords, and a branch or armload of brush picked up off the ground. Most of them carried bows in hand and arrows in their teeth, spitting out one shaft after another.
Nock-draw-loose!
A Vanir warrior shouted out in pain.
It wasn’t as one-sided as the Cimmerians would have hoped, though. Right now, in fact, the swiftness of their arrival was all the advanced team had in their favor. The odds were stacked heavily against them. Arrows sliced through the twilight gloom, shattering against shields, searching for unprotected flesh and finding it.
Kern saw one archer pitch backward with a shaft through his throat, the broadhead tip sticking out near his spine.
Another man staggered forward with two shafts sprouting from his shoulder, and another in the meat of his calf muscle.
But as near as Kern could tell, in the building dark and the confusion of shouts and dying groans, Sláine’s plan was working. With nearly two dozen archers grouped together, able to claim some protection from the bulwark, a few men could do a lot of damage and keep the raiders from concentrating fire on the onrushing war host. A man would drop here and there, wounded more often than dead, and never in the numbers they would have lost with three or four more feints to build up piles of wood as siege ramps. A handful of lives, spent to breach the wall. Once the main body of Sláine’s host arrived, they would form the anvil.
And Gard’s reinforcements would be the hammer.
The second wave broke cover from above with hearty yells and the thunder of another hundred pair of feet rushing down the battered slope. These were fresh arms and sharpened blades, saved back for a moment to prevent such an easy stream of bodies that the raiders could not help but turn their full attention on the charging army.
Now there were three targets for the raiders to worry about, and pressure eased along the forward line. Kern waited, crouched with shield ready, for his chance to lend a hand. As a Vanir leaned up over the bulwark, almost right over his position, Kern rose up and thrust his sword through the man’s neck. A warm jet of blood gushed over his fingers, making the hilt slippery. The raider pitched back, gargling with a wet fury, drowning in his own blood.
“We have them,” Brig yelled over, bloodlust thick in his voice. A stream of blood washed down over his face from a cut scalp, but he didn’t seem to notice. His bowstring sang as he drew back and loosed again, and again. “By Crom,” he said, “we have them.”
It looked that way to Kern as well. But he had forgotten the Ymirish sorcerer.
And the snow serpent.
A high-pitched cry of pain lanced through the battle calls and shouts, dragging Kern around with his arming sword and shield held ready. Low to the ground and not a stone’s throw away, a large body coiled up and around, brushing aside a nearby archer, falling over another man and pinning him to the ground. Where the serpent’s head reared up, higher than the bulwark, the Vanir’s blazing fires on the far side threw red-and-orange glints into its faceted eyes and along its deadly icicle fangs.
And caught in those fangs, the long spikes digging painfully through his stomach, was the same man Kern had seen struggling forward earlier with three arrows already stuck in him. A swordsman. The swordsman, in fact. The one Sláine Longtooth had counted on to bring down the snow serpent.
Who, with one final throat-rattling scream, died in the jaws of the monster.
21
BRIG TALL-WOOD LOOSED his arrow with a casual release that belied the knot twisting up his guts. With every whisper of a Vanir shaft narrowly passing him, sparing his life for another few heartbeats, that knot dug deeper. Tensing for the moment when a broadhead slammed into him again.
Would knock him over, setting his body afire.
As it had in Taur.
He’d been thinking about that moment more and more, ever since steppi
ng forward when Sláine Longtooth began hand-selecting archers for the assault. The Cruaidhi chieftain hadn’t said a thing to him, but nodded to Kern instead. As if Wolf-Eye was anything to Brig other than the man he was supposed to kill. Under his chieftain’s orders.
But rather than think about Cul—or Tabbot or the others back in Gaud knuckling under this hard, harsh winter—and how he would accomplish his task, finally, he remembered the arrows that had knocked him to the snow-covered hillside, bleeding the life from him in droplets and dribbles. He remembered how Hydallan had come to his aid, the old man leaving himself vulnerable as the others formed a tight knot around Kern Wolf-Eye and the rest of the wounded. And how Wolf-Eye stood his ground, protecting Aodh and Maev—protecting him as well!—until the Taurin came to their aid in the battle.
This time would be different, Brig had promised himself. He put himself back into danger specifically to have his chance at the band’s outcast leader. The chaos of battle. An arrow just a little off its mark. That’s all it would take.
Though it was still so hard to forget. And had grown harder every day, he found, as Wolf-Eye did his best by the people who had chosen to follow him into exile. There was no promise of easier times. Not much promise of anything except another battle, and another chance to strike back at the Vanir who gutted Cimmeria with their raids and their slave-taking.
On that, Wolf-Eye delivered.
Spitting out his last arrow from where he had gripped it between his teeth, Brig nocked it in the simple hunting bow most Cimmerians preferred and drew back with long-practiced ease. He shoved all distractions to the dark corners of his mind, as his father had taught him to do long ago.
The knot in his gut.
The crawling flush that spread over his scalp.
The bellowing war cries, the choked screams of wounded men; they coiled around the back of his mind like some kind of dark, Stygian serpent that Nahud’r could probably spin another tale about. But they did not cause him to so much as flinch when it came time to draw a bead and let fly.
His mouth and throat were painfully raw, tasting of blood from his bitten tongue. A sharp spasm twinged at the back of his neck. Both picked up in the wreck Wolf-Eye had made of the sled.
Pushed back. Set aside.
He couldn’t shank an arrow—he believed—any more than he could forget to breathe. His muscles simply wouldn’t forget. Maybe he was not quite as fast as Daol, who thrummed off shot after shot with the Vanir war bow he’d picked up, but smooth enough.
There!—he found a Vanir running along the other side of the wall. Like a dark ghost in the twilight’s gloom and frosted mist that clung to the mountains like a burial shroud. Nothing more than head and broad shoulders slipping along above the icy barricade. A good steady pace . . .
Lead him by half a stride. Both eyes open with one sighting over the arrow’s pointed tip.
Draw in a calm, steadying breath, and loose—without holding his breath in or exhaling in such a rush of anticipation that he jerked the shot.
The arrow flew true, taking the raider in the shoulder or the neck. He tumbled to one side, went down hard with a bellow of pain and rage. He did not rise again though Brig guessed the northerner was alive and still dangerous, just hurting and maybe a bit smarter about rising above the protection of the bulwark.
Bending down, Brig scavenged the ground for an unbroken shaft. He found a piece of the shattered bark skin they had worn for armor on the sled’s run. Sticking partly through it was a broadhead shaft. He pushed it through the bark and ripped it free, wincing as he remembered Maev pushing an arrow through his side in a similar fashion.
He also recalled Daol on the downslope run, saying that everything was all right. But even in the growing darkness, Brig saw the smear of blood over the broadhead’s tip.
Which was how he came to search out the other man just in time to see him limping for Wolf-Eye’s side.
Just in time to see the serpent rise up from the snow, with a clansman impaled on its fangs, turning those diamond-glittering eyes on Kern.
There were two waves of clan warriors bearing down on the wall now, the first rank carrying the brush and logs that would form a good pile to scale over the icy bulwark. But the leading rush of swordsmen was still too far away. They would overwhelm the demonic creature eventually. But not before it claimed Gaudic lives.
Brig acted. He slapped the broadhead-tipped shaft against his bow and fumbled the cord into the notch. Drew back with a hard yank that bent the simple hunting bow nearly in half. Then he waited. Waited for the monster to drop the body, and strike. Waited for its mouth to be exposed, and he might send the heavy shaft straight down its gullet.
Waited, holding his breath.
Daol’s first shaft skewered the serpent an arm’s length below its head, smashing in and through as if he’d shot nothing more substantial than a child’s snow sculpture. His second, fired so fast that Brig found it hard to believe they came from the same man, did the same. A puff of white crystalline snow showered out in a jet, like blood, but only the one quick burst each time.
The serpent shook the helpless warrior one last time in its jaws, as one of the Vanir’s mastiffs might terrorize a small rodent, and flung him aside to strike at Daol and Kern.
Brig loosed his arrow with a violent exhale and a jerk. Spoiling his draw. He felt the shaft scrape heavily along the side of his bow, kicking the point out too far. Knew he’d shanked it, even before the arrow wobbled out on a short erratic flight that missed the serpent’s throat and pierced its jaw instead. The shaft stuck fast, and the serpent hissed its fury like the howling winds of a blizzard—a long, cold banshee wail.
Then it clamped down, and the arrow shattered between icy fangs.
Out of arrows, Daol had thrown aside the war bow for his broadsword, but it was Wolf-Eye who leaped in front of the jaws of the snow serpent, thrusting his shield forward. The monster’s head smashed at him, knocking him back and nearly knocking him over. Wolf-Eye stumbled into Daol, who slashed around in a sidelong arc and bit into the serpent’s neck.
The monster lashed back with its blunt-nosed head, snapping at him, but Daol was too quick, jumping back and pulling his arm out of reach. He circled right, Wolf-Eye left, dividing the monster’s attention.
Not enough to distract it from a third man, who vaulted up from behind and swung for the back of the creature’s neck. The serpent’s large body hunched up, knocking the man back with a coil like a hand swatting a summer fly. It dropped that coil over the prostrate man, gathering him into a deadly embrace. Squeezing the life from him as bones cracked and frothy blood jetted out his nose and mouth.
Scrambling around on hands and knees, Brig kept one eye on the fight as he searched for more arrows. He found a couple of flight-arrow shafts, smashed into kindling. And a Vanir broadhead missing two feathers.
Then he saw another broadhead, intact, stuck in the ground only a few arm’s lengths in front of him. He dived forward, snatched it out of the ground, and rolled up to his knees with the arrow sliding home. Raising the tip up the long, sinuous body. Searching for the head.
The monster already had Kern Wolf-Eye!
The serpent had shuffled its first victim farther back in its coils, still squeezing as the dying man flailed with sword and fist. A second coil wrapped around Wolf-Eye, lifting him clear of the ground. The outcast had lost his shield, and his sword arm was trapped in between his body and the serpent. He braced his free hand up between the demonic monster’s fangs, against the forward edge of its mouth, holding back those deadly icicles. Pressing and straining—holding off against inevitable death.
This was Brig’s chance!
Bringing the tip in line with the back of Wolf-Eye’s neck, the young Tall-Wood saw it in his mind. The poor lighting. The struggle between serpent and Cimmerians. In the haste of battle, who could blame him if an arrow went slightly off its mark?
It would be a mistake of a handbreadth. A few fingers, perhaps.
&
nbsp; Now or never. He couldn’t let the demonic creature solve the problem for him. Besides, Wolf-Eye had an arm wedged between life and death. Hydallan and two Cruaidhi archers ran up from behind, sticking the back of the monster’s body with arrows. Daol charged in at the fore, swinging short, careful swipes at the serpent’s lower neck, wary of Kern’s dangling feet.
There was still a chance that Wolf-Eye would free himself.
. . . and Cul had ordered . . .
It was right in front of him. Here. Now. Kern Wolf-Eye’s life, balanced on the tip of Brig’s arrow. Just a release away. The singing thrum of a released cord . . .
. . . shooting a man in the back . . .
He let slip one finger, his “safety,” drawing on the cord with the pads of only two fingers now. Breathing slow and easy.
. . . cowardly . . .
“Shoot!” Daol yelled, glancing back once to see Brig frozen in his spot, one knee down in the snow and bowstring drawn back to his cheek.
He was trying to, by Crom! Loose one fatal arrow and he could go home. Kill Kern Wolf-Eye. And Daol, who would fall under the serpent’s coils next, and perhaps Hydallan who ran up after his son . . .
“Be strong,” he whispered, gauging the depth of his commitment. Pushing himself toward the edge. “Be strong.”
Brig sighted along the shaft, both eyes open. Checked his target, waited . . . waited . . .
“Strong.”
Loose.
IT HAD TO be the head.
The head, or just behind it.
Before leaping in front of Daol, Kern remembered that Gard Foehammer said the first snow serpent had been killed after Alaric Chieftain’s-Son skewered its head with a pike. Sláine Longtooth’s warriors also discovered that the monster was vulnerable only in certain areas, or when a coil hardened enough to wrap about a man.
Blood of Wolves Page 20