by J. V. Jones
Deep down he reached, beyond the caverns of his fivechambered heart, deep into the blood that looked as red as any man’s but would burn like fuel when set alight, down into the muscle-meat where the memories of his giant ancestors waited to be sparked. A tremor of power charged the great saddles of muscle in his shoulder and lower back. His lungs pulled in enough air for six men. Tendons whitened. A dozen tiny capillaries forked like lightning in his eyes. He heaved the stang to him, hearing the creak of unstable timber as half a ton of wood moved like an oiled crankshaft in his hands. Men were quiet now, backing off into the dim smoky recesses of the tavern, their whips flaccid by their sides. Flakes of charred matter fell on Crope’s head as he yanked the stang free of the doorframe.
The stang dropped to the ground with a mighty crack. The entire building shivered. Timbers framing the door, badly weakened by fire and then rotted by water, groaned under the strain of masonry above. A strange whirring noise, like the sound of an arrow in flight, rose higher and higher, until something deep within the masonry snapped. And then the entire front wall of the tavern began to collapse.
Crope did not stay to watch the destruction. Turning on his heels, he retraced his steps out of town. The scrawny dog with the black eye caught up with him along the way, and after Crope tried many times to shoo it away, he gave up and named it Town Dog, and together they made their way east toward the shelter of the mountains and the trees.
THIRTEEN
Blue Dhoone Lake
Blue Dhoone Lake lay a quarter-league due south of the Dhoonehold, within sight of the chief’s chamber and the two gate towers known as the Horns. It was a large and glassy body of water; some said it had been artificially dug and filled by order of the first Dhoone King. Others said huge chunks of lodestone, rich with copper ore, had been dragged south from the Copper Hills and sunk into the lake’s depths so that the minerals bleeding from them would turn the lake water a vivid, unearthly blue. The Dog Lord didn’t know about that, though he had to admit the waters of Blue Dhoone Lake were passing queer. They never froze, glowed a strange and milky hue when the moonlight caught them just right, and nothing but albino eels and the prey they hunted swam there.
Disgusting things, those eels. Scunner Bone had netted one last month, before the deep frost. Pale as wax it was, and a full five foot in length. Old Scunner had thought to honor his chief by offering him the head. Vaylo could still see the monstrosity now; the pink eye, the half-circle of teeth, the wolfish band of muscle around the throat. Vaylo chuckled, remembering the look on his grandchildren’s faces as they inspected this oddity. “You’re not going to eat that, are you, granda?” his grandson had exclaimed. “Of course he is, stupid,” his granddaughter had contradicted with all the authority of someone eight years old speaking to someone just four. “It’s the food of the Dhoone Kings. And if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for our granda.”
Vaylo found he could not shrink in the face of such fierce pride, and he had eaten the eel, teeth and all.
He was sure it was still inside him, thirty days later, its teeth fastened to his gut wall like a leech on skin, as he rode a circuit of Blue Dhoone Lake at sunset with the wolf dog trotting at his heels.
The sun was red and engorged, its edges wavering in response to some faraway dust; a Blood Sun, Ockish Bull used to call it. Said it meant that change was coming, and swiftly at that. Watching it sink below the heathered slopes and thistle fields of eastern Dhoone, firing the lake surface in its descent, Vaylo reined in his mount. Would this land ever be home to him? Would the brittle satisfaction of acquisition ever give way to something deeper?
The Dog Lord sighed deeply, his breath whitening in the cracking air. He did not love this land, with its neatly tilled oatfields and walled-in grazes and tracts of cleared brush. Just yesterday he’d ridden out to the sloping plains north of the Flow. What had once been an old-growth forest, with ancient oaks, horse chestnuts and elms, was now a field of stumps, the timber felled for either fuel or defense. It looked like a grave-yard, and it made Vaylo hunger for Bludd. No forests in the clanholds could match Bludd’s. A man could ride north or south for a week and still find no end of them. And there was no telling what he might glimpse in the quiet glades: lynxes, ice wolves, ancient woodsmen long forsaken by their clans, deep fishing holes, Sull arrows still vibrating in tree trunks, spotted mushrooms as big as hammerheads and just as deadly, ancient ruins smothered by vines, and dim caves alive with bats, eyeless crickets, and ghosts. Bludd was a border clan. It shared edges with the Sull. Fear came with that, Vaylo could not deny it, but alongside fear lay wonder and excitement. No man could ride in the forests east of Bludd and not feel the thrill of being alive in such a place. Looking out across the vast expanse of the Dhoonehold, with its man-planted thorn beds and ploughed fields, Vaylo doubted he would ever feel such a thrill riding here.
Suddenly impatient with himself, he tossed his steel-gray braids behind him and dug his heels into horsemeat. Too much thinking would turn him soft. He had possession of Dhoone, that was enough. Childhood fantasies about ancient forests and mysterious glades had no business in the mind of a man who had lived out five decades and more.
As he turned the dog horse for home, he spied Cluff Drybannock on his big charcoal stallion, riding out from the Dhoonehouse to meet him. From this distance it was impossible to make out the expression on Drybone’s face, but Vaylo felt a stab of misgiving all the same. Unlike the seven sons of Vaylo’s blood, Cluff Drybannock was not a man to seek out his chief for idle gossip or self-advancement.
Speaking a word of command, Vaylo brought the wolf dog to heel and rode clear from the slushy banks of the lake. “Dry,” he called, his voice hoarse from the cold and lack of use. “What brings you?”
Ever since he had taken the Ganmiddich roundhouse with a troop of only two hundred swordsmen, Cluff Drybannock had taken to braiding his waist-length hair with rings of opal. It was a small thing, one of those countless little rituals that warriors used to mark their progress, yet it had not gone unnoticed. Some in the roundhouse whispered that he was showing his true nature at last, and that pride and ambition could be read in the hollow, pearly rings. Vaylo didn’t believe it for an instant. Yet seeing Dry now, watching as his blue-black braids lifted in the rising wind and the pieces of opal woven amongst them glimmered like slices of moon, he wondered if there wasn’t some truth to the whispers after all. Not the part about pride and ambition—Vaylo knew he had Dry’s loyalty for life—but rather the part about his true nature. Moon and night sky. Discreetly, perhaps unconsciously, Cluff Drybannock was taking on the colors of the Sull.
“Word’s arrived from the Bluddhouse.” Drybone reined his mount, and the two horses halted head-to-head, nostrils steaming. “Quarro sent Cuss Maddan. Dhoone raiders attacked the Bluddhouse fourteen days back. Torched the Chief’s Grove, and slew twenty men. They struck at night with no warning, and retreated as quickly as they came. Quarro mounted a pursuit, but the mist rose and they slipped away.”
“Stone Gods.” Vaylo touched the oxblood leather pouch containing his measure of powdered guidestone. His father’s bones lay in that grove, sealed in a skin of lead that had been poured like molten wax onto his still-warm corpse. It was the way all Bludd chiefs met their gods. One day Vaylo knew his own flesh would be cremated by the searing metal and then set to cool beneath the black and loamy earth. He shivered. “Who took loss?”
Drybone named the men. Some were old retainers, well past the age of bearing arms. One was a boy of eleven.
The Dog Lord dismounted. He could not hear such news and remain seated. “Did we take any of their number?”
Drybone swung down from his own mount. “Two men were unhorsed in the Chief’s Grove. Quarro spiked them both.”
It sounded right. Quarro was his eldest son, the fiercest swordsman of the seven, and the one Vaylo judged most likely to claim the chiefship when he was gone. Vaylo had ceded him command of the Bluddhold in his absence, and Quar
ro had doubtless acquired a liking for playing chief during the seven months his father had been at Dhoone. He’d had it easy until now. Vaylo reached for the cloth bag that held his chewing curd as he looked out upon the darkening glass of the lake. Behind him, he heard Dry squat to rub the wolf dog’s neck.
“Your sons ride forth to meet you,” Dry said, and Vaylo looked up to see three horsemen closing distance from the Horns.
Pengo Bludd, hammerman, bearer of the shrike lore, and second amongst Vaylo’s sons, was the first to reach his father. Unlike Drybone, he did not dismount when faced with his standing chief. Instead he pulled the bit deep into his stallion’s mouth and forced the great warhorse to stillness. The dog horse, who had been quietly nosing through thistle grass at the end of its tether, took offense at the stallion’s closeness, and spun to bite the creature’s neck. Pengo was flung back in his saddle as he battled his rearing mount.
“For gods’ sakes,” he cried to Vaylo. “Can’t you control that beast?”
Vaylo looked coolly at his son. Pengo was past thirty years of age, big and powerful, with the flushed skin of an ale drinker and his mother’s striking eyes. As usual he had taken little care with his appearance, and his braids were plastered with horse-hair and congealed grease. He was not dressed for war, though his spiked and lead-weighted hammer was cradled and chained at his back. Forced to retreat to a safe distance from Vaylo’s horse, he scowled at his father. “I suppose he—” a dismissive snap of his head indicated Cluff Drybannock “—has told you the news from Bludd.”
“Some of it.” Vaylo pushed a cube of black curd between his lips. He did not love his sons, and wondered what kind of father that made him. Other men, he knew, looked at their sons with pride and affection. Vaylo looked, but saw nothing other than seven men who had taken from him all his life. And still wanted more. He waited until Gangaric and Thrago rode abreast of their elder brother before adding, “Dry has told me enough to ice my blood. Is Cuss sure the raiders were Dhoone?”
Gangaric, Vaylo’s third son and the sole axman of the seven, brought his gelding to a banking halt, sending clumps of soft mud flying through the air. “They were Dhoone for a certainty. Faces inked like savages and the blue steel upon them.”
Pengo, already growing restless, waved a gloved fist toward the Dhoonehouse. “It’s retaliation for this. If Skinner Dhoone thinks—”
“It wasn’t Skinner,” Drybone said quietly. “It was his nephew Robbie Dhoone.”
Pengo glared at Drybone, furious at being contradicted. He looked to his two brothers to gainsay Cluff Drybannock, but both men held their tongues. Drybone watched Pengo dispassionately, infuriating him more. Finally, Pengo exploded, “Go back to the roundhouse, bastard. This is Bludd business, not yours.”
“Son,” Vaylo said, deceptively calm. “If it’s bastards we’re sending back to the roundhouse then mayhap I should ride right along with Dry and leave you and your brothers to fight amongst yourselves.”
Pengo’s face reddened. Not with shame, Vaylo knew, but with anger he didn’t dare let out. Gangaric, who had styled himself a HalfBludd in memory of his great-grandfather and had taken to wearing a collar of woodrat skins in the manner of HalfBludd axmen, regarded his father with open dislike. Only Thrago, Vaylo’s fifth son, the one who was the mirror image of Gullit Bludd, had the decency to look ashamed. Yes, Thrago. Your father is a bastard. So what does that make you?
Vaylo spat out the wad of chewing curd, its bitter burned-cheese taste suddenly sickening in his mouth. Usually he knew better than to dwell upon the failings of his sons—it gained him nothing but a stabbing tightness in his chest—but tonight his feelings were harder to set aside. He turned his back on the company while he mastered his thoughts. Someone was lighting torches inside the Dhoonehouse, and windows set deep into the sandstone began to glow with orange light. The sun had gone, and a full moon was pulling at the waters of the lake, raising ripples that traveled west. Vaylo let the moon breeze cool his skin, and after a time he said, “Is there anything else I need to know about this raid?”
Leather creaked behind his back as his sons shifted in their saddles. Cluff Drybannock moved alongside him and murmured, “They brought draft horses to tear down the blue shanty.”
Vaylo closed his eyes. So this was it. This raid hadn’t been some daring spur-of-the-moment strike. Robbie Dhoone had ridden to Bludd with one purpose: to destroy the building erected from the remains of the stolen Dhoonestone. No matter that what he pulled down was nothing more than quarry-bought rubble, and that the real Dhoonestone lay at the bottom of this very lake. No one knew that except the fifty Bludd warriors who had stolen it—and half of them were dead. No. Robbie Dun Dhoone had struck a blow for Dhoonish pride. He didn’t have the manpower yet for all-out battle, but that would change soon enough. Skinner would lose ground when word of Robbie’s feat got out. Few clansmen could resist the lure of such reckless and prideful bravado. Vaylo knew that. It was the reason he’d stolen the cursed Dhoonestone in the first place. Clansmen loved jaw. Robbie Dhoone had it, and Skinner Dhoone did not.
It was just as Angus Lok had said. The golden boy was puffing himself up to be a king. He warned me about Robbie Dhoone, and I did not heed him. Vaylo was suddenly overcome with a deep possessiveness for the very land he had earlier dismissed. He might not love Dhoone, but he would not relinquish it. He was the Dog Lord, and once he had fastened his jaws upon an object he’d never let it go. They’d have to kill him first.
Turning to face his sons, he said, “We must not be caught unawares again.”
Gangaric nodded his large and part-shaved head. He was all axman now, sure and powerful in his heavy crimson cloak, the weight of his broadax straining the leather harness at his breast. Thrago, named for his great-grandfather yet the least self-willed of the three, followed Gangaric’s lead and sat ready on his mount. Pengo met Vaylo’s gaze, his ungloved hand smoothing his horse’s mane. “So, Father. What would you have us do?”
Vaylo chose to ignore the arrogance in his second son’s voice. He shifted his position slightly to include Cluff Drybannock in the circle. “We must increase our watch. Success at the Bluddhouse will leave Dhoone thirsting for more. They’ll strike again. And soon. Robbie Dhoone’s eager to make a name for himself. He’s after his uncle’s sworn men.”
“The Bluddhouse, more like,” contested Pengo. “We’ve claimed his clanhold, now he’s after claiming ours.”
Vaylo shook his head, growing impatient. “Robbie Dhoone had no intention of taking the Bluddhouse. He didn’t have the men for it. Aye, it was doubtless pleasing to see the Sacred Grove go up in flames, but this raid was more about Dhoone than Bludd. The young pretender’s sending a message to the Dhoone warriors at Gnash. Come, join me. Leave Skinner. He’s an old man with an old man’s ways, and he doesn’t have the jaw to retake Dhoone.”
Pengo’s face twisted. The scar on his cheek, caused when he’d fallen through a trapdoor at Withy, stretched to an ugly white line. “If you’re such an expert on what the Dhoonesman thinks, how come you didn’t think to guard our roundhouse against him?”
The wolf dog, perceiving an insult to his master, began to growl very softly from behind a screen of withered bulrushes. Vaylo, seeing something familiar and disturbing in the hard lines of his son’s face, lashed out. “Get off your horse. I am your chief. Don’t you dare speak down to me from the high comfort of your saddle like some grand city lord. I’ve led this clan for thirty-five years—and I can’t remember one of them when you’ve performed any service to earn your keep.”
Pengo’s nostrils flared. His eyes burned with a force that made him shake. Vaylo saw him look to his brothers for support, but both Thrago and Gangaric managed to stay occupied with stilling their jittery mounts. Pengo snatched up his reins and pulled back his horse’s head.
“Ride away now,” Vaylo warned, “and you forfeit your say in this clan.” As he spoke he knew it was a mistake—give a man no way to back down and you either lose
or humiliate him—but the unsettling vision of seeing his dead wife’s features living beneath Pengo’s own made him angry, not wise.
Pengo turned the great gray warhorse, forcing a path between his brothers. As he put spurs to his mount, his gaze alighted on Cluff Drybannock, who stood tall and unmoving by the water’s edge. With a sudden heft of his weight, Pengo swung his horse to charge him. The two men, one mounted and one afoot, stared at each other for the scant seconds it took the horse to cross the distance between them. The Dog Lord held his breath. There was a moment, when something ancient and fearless sparked in Drybone’s eyes, when Vaylo realized how little he knew of his fostered son. Cluff Drybannock was not his real name. He had been called it by Molo Bean, who had laughed as the young and starving orphan had stuffed himself with dry bread at Molo’s table. Who Dry was, what he’d seen and done before coming to Clan Bludd, was unknown. The one and only time he’d spoken of his father was that first day, when he claimed the man was a Bluddsman so Bludd must take him in. His mother was a Trenchlander . . . and Trenchlanders were Sull. Vaylo saw that Sull in him now, and was overcome with the sudden certainty that if Dry chose to, he had ways within his power to halt the horse.
Yet he did not. At the final instant, Cluff Drybannock moved aside. Lake water seeped around his boots as he stepped onto a floating bed of mallow grass at the lake’s edge. Pengo’s horse entered the water with a great splash, quickly rearing back at the shock of its coldness. Pengo easily gained control of the beast and turned it back onto the shore.
“Aye,” he said to Drybone. “It’d suit you well enough if I rode away.” Abruptly, he dismounted. “But I don’t think I’ll give you the satisfaction of taking my place just yet.”
Drybone did not speak. After a moment he turned his back on Pengo and bent to collect water from the lake. Vaylo watched as Dry released cupped hands above his forehead and let the dark, oily water run down his scalp. He stopped Pengo from losing face, yet he needn’t have. Why? When the answer came it made Vaylo feel old. For me, just for me.