Perhaps she would have let the entire subject drop then. Burying it, since she had extracted at least a small measure of honor from T’hule Chieftain. What more could she be expected to do for a man who was outcast from his own clan and kin? Allowing herself to be encouraged by the memory of Kern Wolf-Eye would not do well by her, or by her own clan. Especially as Kern was no longer around to stand in the way of any reprisal. Nor was he likely to return. The rogues were gone. And with them, possibly the only chance to unite in the face of the Vanir threat.
She should have offered Kern more support.
By Crom’s watchful eye, she would at least admit that to herself now.
Yet still, she would have let matters lie. If only Tahmat, the merchant, had been able to remain quiet as well.
“So this Kern Wolf-Eye I meet. He was also in large battle above Conarch?” Tahmat asked, his grasp of the Cimmerian tongue rough but usable.
Waiting to see how T’hule would answer, Ros-Crana speared a chunk of venison off the nearby platter. The crust of skin was blackened, cracking as she bit through, but the meat inside tender and red and warming. Mead, even slightly soured, was perfect for washing down the smoky taste.
“He came over the Pass of Blood with his outcast band,” T’hule finally said. “Stirring up the Vanir and taunting Grimnir to battle.”
“He helped lead a war host from Cruaidh across,” Ros-Crana added to the short shrift, speaking in short, tight sentences. “He fought a demon snow serpent. And slew a sorcerer. Sláine Longtooth seemed to think well of him for it.” A pause. “I know that my brother did.”
It was one of the few confidences from Narach she had left. She wondered if she spent it foolishly here.
“Why so?” Tahmat asked her directly.
“While we thought to weather the storm”—she glanced around the table—“all of us, Kern Wolf-Eye took the fight to our enemy. The Vanir—even some of the Ymirish, we believe—feared him. As they did not fear any clan.” Turning a scolding gaze across the table, she anticipated an outburst and held it off with a quick, “Not even your clan, T’hule Chieftain. From the front door of your lodge hall, I can look down the hill and count dozens of fired homes from the day when Grimnir fell.”
T’hule held his eating knife in a tight grip. His knuckles whitened with the strain. “Be very careful, Ros-Crana,” he warned her.
The menace in his voice was clear. And this time, she was having none of it. Ros-Crana shoved herself away from T’hule’s table, hard. Standing over her overturned stool, she glared back with a temper.
“Do not think to threaten me for speaking truth, Conarch.” She spat the name, as earlier one of the warriors at table had cursed the name of Vanir. “The lot of you, you know it, too, because none of you came to his aid against Grimnir. We were all content to let Conarch burn.” There were a great many startled looks, and accusing glares from T’hule and his nearby kin.
“Narach would not have come, nor Sláine Longtooth, if Kern had not shamed them into it. He did more with a handful of warriors than any of us had done with war hosts at our command. What does that say about us now?”
She was raging. She was speaking with her heart and not her head, as a chieftain must be careful not to do. As her brother had always warned. Narach had forever looked out for her, as a chieftain should temper his war leader. But now she was both. And she was finished with the threat always prickling at her back. She swiped the invisible blade away with a sidehand gesture, dismissing it and T’hule Chieftain at once.
The lodge hall had turned deadly silent. A few grousing voices rose from the far end of the long room, too drunk or too distant to hear what had happened. But for the most part, the clansfolk watched, and listened. And waited on the balls of their feet for some order from the various chieftains to call them to violence.
In this sudden calm, Ros-Crana lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Conarch, Callaughnan, and Cruaidhi took the field that day,” she reminded T’hule Chieftain, “and we were not enough. Grimnir very nearly destroyed us, and all of Cimmeria would have lain open to him then. That small band of outcasts made the difference. Kern Wolf-Eye made the difference, when he took Grimnir over the cliff with him.”
“And he failed.” T’hule’s voice spoke in a deep roar. He remained seated, facing Ros-Crana down without any need to tower over her.
“Kern lived. Grimnir lived. And now the Great Devil is loosed upon the valley. Good riddance, I say. We have borne up under the invader’s press long enough. What else would you have us do, woman?”
Her breath came in hot gasps as she fought for control. She tasted blood at the back of her throat, and knew how close the Berserker fury was to claiming her. Instead, she swallowed back the dry, metallic taste and bit at T’hule with daggers in her eyes.
“Kern carried a bloody spear to you, to me, to all of us. We each turned him away because he had no standing. Once cast out, always cast out. But what we refused to acknowledge is that he carried it for us, and that has been eating away at me for a fortnight. No longer!”
Leaning over the table, she held T’hule’s gaze as she reached down and yanked the bond-cord free of her blade. She cast it back, throwing the leather tie into the live coals of the nearby cooking fire. A brief spark of flame jumped up at once.
“There is no peace,” she said calmly, as if explaining it to a child. “I am at war with Vanir. We all are. And I say that if you do not claim that Kern carries forth the bloody spear for you, then he does so for Clan Callaugh and any who will join me under that banner. And if you stand in my way, I will count you as my enemy, too.”
With that, she turned her back on the table and stomped away. Hand on her sword’s hilt. Ready to defend herself against anyone who stood in her path.
None did. T’hule Chieftain allowed her to withdraw, salvaging the last of any peace that existed within the lodge hall. Behind her, a few stools scraped against the flagstone stage as others took the moment to abandon the table. For her, or against her, it no longer mattered. Only that she would no longer do nothing. The heat of her rage had finally melted away whatever thin armor of caution she had ever held. And perhaps Kern had been right at that, too.
Perhaps rage was all they had left.
THE RAIN LIGHTENED to a gray drizzle. Trickling through Kern’s hair and running icy fingers down the back of his neck. Soaking into the leather jerkin he wore until it was heavy and stiff with the swelling. But not enough to bathe under. Not even where it ran in a fat drops off the eaves of the lodge hall.
Instead, he found a wide turn in the muddy creek running through Gaud, where the water sluiced alongside the collapsed foundation of a burned-out hovel and pooled behind several of the larger stones. Deep enough to dip his hand in, and come up with a splash of cold rainwater. Gritty to the taste, but mostly clear, and a lot better than wearing a crust of dried blood. Scrubbing each handful over his arms, his face, and into his mane of frost blond hair, Kern washed away the blood of the men, women, and children he had helped lay out in rest. The memories attached to each face, each body, were strong.
After Talbot Tall-Wood, he and Brig had cut down Jocund, the clan’s healer. And then Morne, one of Cul Chieftain’s most stalwart warriors. Not the brightest or most even-tempered man Kern had known, but there was something to be said for blind loyalty. This, he had discovered in the past few months.
By then others had braved the darkness of the lodge, and more bodies slumped to the floor. Ehmish recognized Willem and Gart—two Gaudic youths he had grown up with and Kern remembered for their constant racing around. Always running, those two. Daol found Arland Green-Stalk. The clan’s best farmer. He knew when to plant, how much, and constantly outguessed everyone else on the coming weather.
Cobh. Marta and Kilian. Ruhk.
More names. More memories.
“Nay here,” Reave said from behind him, interrupting his train of thought. The large man splashed through the muddy creek to join Kern. Daol and Hydallan
and a few others trailed after, silent, their eyes smoldering. Aodh. Garret.
“Went through the village, we all did. Carried another dozen to the lodge.”
Including Reave’s sister. Ros. And her youngest child. And more than a few strangers, from the word that filtered back to Kern. Taurin. Part of the effort to combine the strength of the two clans in the face of the Vanir attacks. Ossian and Mogh had recognized and put names to several of them.
Reave crouched next to Kern. Thick hair matted down by the rain. A smear of blood crusted on the cheek beneath his left eye. His first splash of water washed it away.
“Kohlitt and the boys aren’t here.” His sister’s husband. And their oldest boys. “Or Cul or Maev. Might be good. Might be bad.”
Very bad. The Vanir often took slaves. When they had the time for sport, or it was worth their trouble to march new bodies north. But that wasn’t part of this.
“This wasn’t about plunder,” he said. “There were no slaves taken. This was punishment. Like it was with Cruaidh.” Another cold, shocking splash over his face. “This is my fault.”
Daol’s father hawked and spat off to one side. “You don’t know that, pup. Don’t go a-borrowing trouble that ain’t yours.” His gray eyes were distant and his face pinched shut against the day’s horror. But his voice was sharp and strong. “You don’t know that,” he said again.
“I do, Hydallan.” Kern straightened, standing in the shallow creek, staring up into the gray skies. “Don’t ask me how, but I know. Grimnir.” He spat the name out like a rancid piece of meat. “The demon did not come to Gaud specifically, mayhap, but he is here, in the valley, because of us.” He paused, and considered. “If they knew for certain about Gaud, not as many would have escaped.” They would have found the bodies of every one they had known and cared for if that were the case.
Daol exchanged glances with Aodh, who shook his head. “Might as well say it was Sláine Longtooth and the Cruaidh war host. Or could just as easily be that the demon’s defeat at Conarch drove him into new hunting grounds.”
Reave finished washing away the worst of the blood and gore from his hands, his arms, then stood abruptly. “You think they escaped?” he asked, going back to Kern’s earlier comment. Not giving up hope that some of their kin had survived.
“I do. To the north. Maybe the east.” He looked out over the ruined village, where a few of his warriors still wandered. Still waited. “Scattered through the valley. Mayhap a few might push for Cruaidh.”
Garret scratched a finger beneath his black eye patch. “But where would Cul Chieftain lead them? Or Maev?” Neither of their bodies had been discovered. Yet. Cul’s sword being found in the possession of Vanir, though, did not argue well for the chieftain’s survival.
Maev . . . Had she challenged Cul? Or risen in his place to lead? Or had she become a captive once again, enslaved to a northern warlord?
Kern did not want to think on that. Not now.
“Or Ossian’s father,” Aodh reminded them. “The Taurin would follow their own chieftain first.”
But Hydallan shook his head. “Ossian found his father. Near the slaughter pens. ’S laying him out in the lodge.” He hedged, then, “The rest of us, we did what you said, Kern. Gathered all the dry thatch we could from the underside of different homes. Piled in the winter wood and brought bales of tinder from the dry pits.”
He nodded and stepped away from the flowing creek. There was one last thing to take care of. “We had better get to it.”
Gaud was dead. All that was left was the funeral pyre.
It had been the work of a few hours only with so many hands, to load up the lodge hall with the wood Kern had spent most of the winter stacking in long cords. And the valleymen were expert at scavenging dry brush and wood, even with the land so thoroughly soaked. Carved from the bottom of old, fallen logs. Sheltered areas beneath thick forest overhangs. And evergreen branches would burn quick enough once a fire baked them dry. Wallach Graybeard led a small work party that did nothing but bring armloads of pine and cedar, piling the branches into the lodge until nothing could be seen of the several dozen bodies laid out in respectful rows.
It was to this that Kern took a bright-burning torch, the flames leaping high and hot with the granules sprinkled on by Nahud’r steady hand. He walked into the lodge by himself, stepping carefully through the piled evergreen and over mounds of split cordwood. He touched off fires in all four corners of the massive room.
Green smoke smothered the air quickly, unable to escape fast enough through the small smoke holes or the larger area broken through the thatching. It stung at his eyes, and burned down into his lungs. The pain was sharp and welcome.
Breathing shallow, Kern escaped to the door, then stood just inside its open frame to watch the fire catch and run. When he was certain that it would gather and grow, and eventually take the entire lodge with it, he stepped back. Out into the rain. Still carrying his torch as he joined his band of warriors, who waited to see what he would do next.
Ossian stood near the front of the silent pack. His face was a mask set in stone. His hand bled where he had cut his palm earlier, then smeared the lodge door with a sign of his mourning. Everyone had done so, in fact. Even Nahud’r and the three Aquilonian soldiers. In the face of so much death, there were no divisions.
“My thanks, Wolf-Eye,” was all Ossian said at first.
Kern understood him. Every body had been laid out on a small pile of deadwood and evergreen except for Ossian’s father. Liam Chieftain of Clan Taur. He had been raised up on a table, dressed respectfully, and left with his hands crossing against the sword laid out over his body. With Cul missing, his was the honor of a leader’s rite.
“He should have been taken to the Field of the Chiefs,” Mogh complained, but softly, softly. Ashul and Danon, the other Taurs in Kern’s band, nodded.
But Ossian merely stared straight ahead as the first flames licked up through the drying thatch. “This will do,” he promised. The next best to delivering his father’s body to the burial field for all Cimmerian chieftains was to offer it up over the battlefield on which he had fallen.
The scent of damp ashes and singed greenwood mixed with a greasy, scorched-meat smell that could only be burning flesh. Thick, black smoke roiled up into the rain, malting a tall, dark smudge against the gray sky.
“This weather, this long since the slaughter.” Daol shook his head. “Any raider will know it was nay an accident. This is deliberate. Maybe we should have done this closer to twilight, or at night.”
Ossian grinned, baring his teeth in a humorless smile. Feral and wild. “If we had done this at night, then the raiders would not know where to look for us,” he said. “Would they?”
Daol, Aodh, and others answered with grinning snarls of their own. And somewhere inside the nearby forest, a wolf’s howl rose up long and mournful and savage. As if in its own answer.
Kern slung the torch forward through the open door, then followed the tall column of smoke with his golden gaze.
“Here we are,” he challenged.
“Come get us.”
14
KERN PROWLED THE edge of Gaud. Short sword naked in his hand. Crouched low to the ground, and moving from hut to hovel as directed by silent hand signals flashed his way by Brig, Ashul, Aodh, and a few false birdcalls whistled by Hydallan and Daol.
The scent of scorched flesh clung to his hair, his tunic. It burned with a rancid taste at the back of his throat. A haze of gray smoke—greasy and acrid—hung over the dead village, stinging his eyes like some kind of infernal fog raised by a Ymirish sorcerer.
But it wasn’t.
This was his own handiwork. The leavings of battle between the rains, having tapered off to little better than a persistent mist, and the fired lodge that raised bright tongues of flame into the sky as fresh twilight rolled over Conall Valley. Logs cracked and split as the fire’s heat continued to bake water from the heart of the wood. Steam roiled from the wat
er-drenched ground, mixing with sooty wisps and binding those to the earth, twisting sinister runners along the muddy paths between the abandoned homes.
A tall column of black smoke waved overhead like Crom’s own war banner.
Like a challenge.
By setting the lodge hall aflame, Kern had waved a flag that every Vanir raider for several leagues had seen. Seen, and come on the run, looking for prey. In pairs and small handfuls they converged on Gaud. Most had crept in, attempting to be stealthy though Kern had eyes in every direction. Hands reached out from darkened doorways to pull one of the flame-haired Vanir inside for a quick and silent dispatch. Another met his end when Ehmish came off a roof, riding a spear down through the man’s chest and pinning him to the ground.
A trio of raiders chasing up from the south met quick deaths under the arrows of Brig Tall-Wood and Daol. Desagrena and Nahud’r had claimed a kill between them. And Reave’s greatsword had let the life blood out of two others.
The end of Kern’s blade was smeared with blood where he’d punched the tip through a Vanir’s kidney—arm snaked around the man’s throat, choking down on his windpipe to keep him silenced as the raider bled out over the muddy ground.
But these four who had slipped down out of the northern woods, Kern recognized something different in their manner. They walked in brazenly, unconcerned, as if they owned all under the sky. Which was why he slipped around them, to a partially enclosed lean-to where Reave and Wallach Graybeard waited behind a shoddy plank wall.
Reave crouched on his knees, greatsword laid carefully aside while he stared through a knothole in the wood to observe the raiders’ approach without being seen himself. Wallach rested, lying back in some damp straw, his injured arm across his chest. His broadsword waited, stabbed into the ground at his feet, but he was not without a weapon. He had taken the tip of a pike and run it through the leather cap that protected the end of his amputated wrist, adding a sharpened blade tip where his hand had once been. Practical, if not sensible. The wound was still not fully healed, and could not stand up to much stress without reopening. Wallach’s face was pale and drawn, with dark circles under his eyes.
Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2 Page 15