Concerned, Kern touched the old man’s shoulder. One eye opened lazily, staring at him with the hard blue of deep, winter ice. “They here yet?”
He shook his head.
“Then lemme be.” His words were slurred, but only a bit. “Been a long day, and it’s gonna get longer.”
Reave looked back and shook his head, torn between amusement and worry for the band’s weapons master. Kern nodded, agreeing, but there was nothing to be done about Wallach’s condition just now. He slid forward and edged the large man aside, leaning into the wall. The wood was silver with age and rough-splintered. Carefully, he put an eye to the knothole, looking down a muddy path on the far side, between a pair of older shacks that had once been the home of . . . there!
Two of the Vanir, male and female, rounded a corner. They wore leather skirts, reinforced with bronzed strips and armored cuirasses. She had a buckler strapped to her left arm. Each wore a metal cap mounted with a set of horns. His boots looked of Cimmerian make, as did the cloak he wore trimmed in the silver-gray fur of a timber wolf. Her buckled-on shield had a face of blue iron with a triple-spiked boss in the center. Spoils of battle.
The woman led the way, hand on the hilt of her sword but the blade still sheathed. The only thing he carried in his hand was a horn, the kind Vanir used to call to each other over short distances. But it was their casual stance, and the way they walked unafraid into the village, as much as the horn he carried at the ready, that convinced Kern.
And Reave, apparently. “They are nay alone,” the big man whispered, tugging fingers into his thick, brushy beard.
He nodded. These two, at least, moved with the confidence of warriors with large numbers at their back. Too used to easy victories. Never far to run, should things turn sour.
Reave leaned to one side, picked up his Cimmerian greatsword. “Where, d’you think?”
Kern sat back from the aged planks, considered. “Not far. Coming down out of the north.” Though he couldn’t resist sidelong glances, finding the nearby edges of the forest, where spring green could hide an entire war host by the time they were twenty paces outside the first tree.
He also couldn’t take a great deal of time to decide. He’d raised the challenge. He’d set the field with his warriors. And the two Vanir raiders were coming closer, step by casual step.
He leaned away from the wall, looking at the rooftop of a nearby home where Ehmish had once again flattened himself out over the damp thatching on the back-side slope. He waved, and caught the young man’s attention. Shook two fingers at him, then poked one hand into the other as if running into a wall. A violent slash across his throat, then again across the thin, hard line of his mouth.
Find the second two. Kill them. Quietly. Ehmish would pass along the silent commands to whoever was closest to the other pair of raiders.
Leaving this pair to the three of them. Kern reached back down to shake Wallach alert. Rolling up onto his knees with only a slight wince of pain, keeping his capped wrist pinned tight to this side, he and Reave stationed themselves at either side of the lean-to’s single wall.
Kern swallowed dryly and pressed his eye back to the open hole. Close, now. Very close. She was still up front, keeping her eyes on nearby windows and doors. Looking for any sign of new life, other than the column of black smoke rising from the center of the dead village. She side-stepped out of some clinging mud, choosing a path around the lean-to shelter. Reave’s side.
Slowly, so any shadow against the thin cracks between planks would not betray him easily, Kern rotated into Reave’s back. He left his shield slung across his back. Short sword ready, he tapped it twice against the large man’s shoulder, letting Reave know that Kern would follow him. With a soft grunt of exertion, Reave heaved his bulk out and around the corner, greatsword flashing in a wide arc with plenty of muscle behind it. Strong enough to cleave through the thin facing on the woman’s cuirass and any boiled leather backing it. Ready to smash her aside, giving Kern a clear a path at the second raider while Wallach rushed around the far corner to take him from the side. A simple enough plan.
It should have been easy.
It should have been.
Mayhap that women were not always as strong as men, but they were no less skilled. And a female warrior, Cimmerian or northerner, who joined a raiding war host was not to be discounted. Reave should have known that, partnered to Desagrena with her viperish tongue and a blade just as quick and as deadly.
It could have been that he just didn’t put the extra weight of strength behind his blow, as he might have against a man.
It could also have been that he had jumped early, taking her casual approach as an easy opening.
Or maybe she was just that good.
With hardly a heart’s beat to react, the female raider brought her arm up into the way of Reave’s powerful swing. The greatsword’s tip, slashing in at her chest, rang against the buckler’s blue-iron facing, skipped against the spiked boss, then slid off at a downward angle that bit the sword into her side. Catching against the cuirass as she howled in pain and anger.
And, worse, as she held her ground.
With Reave filling the narrow gap between the lean-to and a nearby hut, Kern tried to shoulder past. The taste of battle was already bitter on his tongue as his mouth dried. He ended up tangled against his friend, who was trying to force the raider back and to one side with only the leverage of his hands on the greatsword’s hilt. Even for Reave’s bearlike strength, no easy task. Especially when she wrapped a hand against the blade, trapping it against her side.
The sword had cleaved only partway through the cuirass, bending the thin, bronzed metal and cracking it open just enough for a measure of the blade to cut into her side. But the blood leaking out was no bright red fountain. And the snarl on her face promised the fight was nowhere near drained from her. When Reave shoved her aside, she stumbled back to keep herself between the Cimmerians and her companion, giving him time to draw blade even as she clawed with her free hand for her own arming sword.
The second Vanir would never free his war sword. But he did set his horn to lips, and blow three, long, mournful calls that echoed through the surrounding forest.
Warnings.
The third cry from the horn choked off short as Wallach ran up from the side and rammed three feet of steel through the raider’s gut. The broadsword’s wide blade stuck through and out the man’s back, stained and dripping with bright, red blood.
The Vanir dropped the horn, finishing the call himself as he bellowed in pain.
Wallach Graybeard didn’t both to pull his blade free, but instead stepped into the raider and with a short, chopping motion slashed the pike tip at the end of his left arm violently across the other warrior’s throat. The well-sharpened blade cut deep and fast.
Blood spurted out of the wound, spattering splashes and spots across Wallach’s arm, chest, face. And the raider fell back, silenced. Dead.
Meanwhile, the woman had clawed her own blade free, cursing and screaming a northern war cry as she lunged forward, wrenching Reave’s blade out of the cleft in her cuirass and slashing for the large man’s throat. Reave ducked aside, the tip of the arming sword barely missing his ear and instead cutting a shallow gash from his left shoulder down his upper arm. He hissed in pain, dropped beneath her next backhand stroke, and drew his greatsword back on guard.
Kern wasn’t about to wait and give the agile northerner a second chance at his friend. Ducking in low and fast, he slipped past Reave. Sword ready. Arm coiled back against his chest. His field of vision narrowed down to this one woman, this warrior from Vanaheim, who snarled her own pain and anger as she leaped forward to slash again, ringing her steel against the Cimmerian greatsword Reave held up for protection. A warm thrill raced through him as his first thrust was slapped aside by the iron-faced buckler she wore on her left arm, but his second found its target as it punched in for a swift, clean kill over her heart.
With a spasm that wracked her
entire body, the northern warrior tumbled to one side and fetched up against a wall of the nearest hut. Propped on her feet, her eyes already dead, she stood a moment longer, then slowly slid to her knees, then her side, as a new wind howled in sympathy.
Kern stood over her, breath coming in short, furious gasps. Burning with pent-up rage and the pain of what had been done to Gaud. Barely noticing when Wallach Graybeard stepped up next to him and laid a cold hand against the fever-flushed skin on his arm. He shivered.
“Nay done yet, Kern.”
Which was when he noticed that it was not the light wind howling in such a mournful dirge, but the distant call of a Vanir horn. And another. War hosts! A distant echo from the east. The other, much closer, sounded three long blasts from the north.
He felt a tiny spark at the back of his thoughts as the northern horn blasted again. “That one,” he decided.
“Yea?” Reave asked. He held a hand to his shoulder, putting pressure against the wound. His brushy beard did not hide the question in his face.
“That northern horn,” Kern said, “is on the lips of a Ymirish warrior.” One of the frost-haired war leaders who so often herded a Vanir host like a master with his hunting dogs. He had no real basis for such a decision. He simply knew.
Shaking his head, he threw aside such empty-headed thoughts. He guessed. That was all. And it was a fair-to-better chance he was right.
Ehmish dropped down nearby, sliding off the thatched roof of a larger home, crouching to all fours in the muck and stepping up as Daol and Gard Foehammer also approached from around a nearby corner. Daol and Ehmish carried bows and had left their swords in their sheaths. Gard held his pike loose across his body, like a staff, though its tip was stained with fresh blood.
“That did not go well,” Gard said with calm strength.
Then he turned suddenly, coming on his guard, relaxing only as Desagrena slipped out of some nearby shadows. The tight quarters between buildings became very crowded.
She carried her blade naked in one hand. Her oily hair hung in dark, damp clumps. Frowning at the blood crusting between Reave’s fingers, she slapped his hand away and studied the wound for herself. With a muttered curse, she thrust her broadsword into the ground and stooped over the fallen woman. Using her belt knife, Desa cut a wide swath of wool from the woman’s sash. Folded it into a long pad and used it to cover the wound.
The wail of the war horn blew its question again. Ehmish cocked his head to one side. “A league,” he decided.
“In this mist and a leaved woods?” Daol asked. “Half that.” Another long blast. “And getting closer.”
Kern looked at the Vanir horn lying in the nearby mud, its silvered gray stained with flecks of blood. He’d heard such horns echoing through winter’s stillness, and blasting across fields of battle. His own estimation had run closer to Ehmish’s, but when it came to such questions he implicitly trusted Daol to be closer on the mark. The damp. The spring budding that created a soft wall against sound. It could be as close as half a league. Hardly anything, at a good run. A Cimmerian could cover that kind of ground in hardly any time at all, and without breaking a sweat.
Whipped on by a Ymirish war leader, he didn’t expect the Vanir to take much longer.
“What do we do, Kern?” Ehmish, looking torn between battle lust and caution. There was still very much of the boy he had been just this last winter left in him.
But Kern had no doubt that if he sent Ehmish off to meet the raiders alone, the man he had grown into would do so, and would take more than one northern warrior to the grave with him. By Crom, he would at that.
“We ready ourselves,” Kern said, biting off each word. “We stand. Here. At Gaud.” They had come home to nothing more than death and loss, but if the ground was thirsty for more blood, then Kern would see that it drank its fill.
“With no count on the enemy host moving at us?” Reave asked. “What if they have two to our one? Or three?”
“What if they do?” Kern snapped back.
Though he knew what it was Reave truly asked. His friend wanted to hear Kern’s plan. Kern’s newest trick. Wasn’t that how they had stayed alive for so long? Moving from one victory to another, even when the odds were stacked against them? Kern had always found a way to turn the advantage toward his people. His pack.
But there was no trick this time. No plan. No way to tip the scales being weighted against the Cimmerians. The raiders were coming from two sides. At least one pack was almost on top of them, and Kern was tired of running. They had already been west of the mountains, and seen lands that no one in the village had ever known outside of the tales of travelers. Had even laid eyes on the terrible side of Ben Morgh, Crom’s throne. And now they’d come home to death and ruin.
“We’ve come home,” he repeated. “For better or worse.”
Most of the others shifted uncomfortably, but Daol and Reave merely took in their friend’s steady gaze. Then they looked at each other as the northern call changed, the Vanir horn blasting out one final, long wail. No longer the sharp, questioning blasts, unanswered by their scouts. This was one, long, angry peal. Their own warning, and challenge.
The two men looked at each other, and shrugged.
“Worse,” they both said at once. And then broke out savage grins.
With a sharp laugh, Daol balled up a fist and thumped Reave hard on the chest, shook his bow at Kern, and dodged back around a corner to begin spreading the word. Reave let his woman tie a binding strip of leather over his shoulder wound. Hissing between clenched teeth as she put a tight knot right over the wool bandage.
Wallach used his one hand and teeth to tighten the leather straps on his cuff. Gard and Ehmish checked the fallen warriors for plunder. Neither had carried a food pack or bedroll. Their armor was too confining for Cimmerians to enjoy it. Ehmish already carried a silver-chased broadsword, taken in another battle, and Gard preferred his long pike to a blade.
Ehmish did scavenge the woman’s buckler. Faced with blue iron, it had obviously come down with them out of the northwest lands and was a valuable piece of gear. Knowing his place, he did offer it first to Kern, then the others. Desa was the only one who hesitated, but then shook her head as well.
Kern approved. They would all use whatever they could, whatever worked best for each; but in the end, they had to remain a close-knit band. That was their greatest strength, and one he would not abandon even in the face of a Vanir onslaught. A strength that rivaled even Crom’s gift to the Cimmerian people, that they were born with . . .
... Cimmerians!
A tight-lipped smile edged over Kern’s lips. He did have one last idea. A resource he had not yet used at Gaud, with the fighting hand to hand along the village paths. But if he could get them close in, against an unprepared enemy ...
An idea sparked in the dark corners of his mind. They did not have much time, but perhaps just enough.
Kern found Gard waiting nearby, squinting into the nearby forest. The pale welt scars on his face were the only reminder left of what the Cruaidhi protector had come through. His eyes were clear and bright, and a calm, cold blue.
“Gard,” Kern said, getting the man’s attention.
“Find me Strom and Valerus.”
15
SWORD IN HAND, bronze-faced shield tucked in tight against his left side, Kern splashed through a stream of muddy runoff right behind Nahud’r as the two men fought their way through the forest, back toward Gaud. His breath loud in his own ears. The taste of blood in the back of his throat.
Splashes of cold water soaked into the fur lining of his boots, his kilt, and dribbled icy touches over his bared legs. A warm sweat mixed with the blood trickling down from a gash near his hairline, stinging at the corner of his right eye, staining his upper lip with a salty taste. All around him he heard the crashing of bodies shoving through heavy brush, bodies that might have been his friends, and might not.
The shouts and curses in the nasal, Nordheimir language th
at chased after them suggested not.
They had not waited in Gaud. Kern hadn’t wanted to surrender the advantage that being the aggressor provided. Instead, his pack had ghosted through the forest that most of them grew up in, knew so well that every tree, every stack of thorny brush, was as familiar as the cold and lifeless homes, which were all that was left of their village. They pressed north to meet the nearest band of Vanir raiders, laying an ambush alongside a sunken streambed with new-flowering bellberry brush to cloak them and charging out like vengeful spirits to cut down the first half dozen raiders, who had run ahead of their own war host.
With two warriors to their one the slaughter was bloody, and brief.
That advantage hadn’t lasted long as more raiders charged forward under the call of their leader’s blasting horn, shouts of “Ymir-egh” on their lips. Yells and curses turned into the desperate grunts of pitched battle, torn apart by the occasional shout of pain. Kern, Nahud’r, and Reave held the center of the Cimmerian line for another desperate moment, while Ehmish was sent scurrying, to pass the order to fall back on Gaud. Then they, too, turned and fled, falling back toward the village, and a second line of defense.
For his size and bulk, Reave was as fleet-footed as a mountain ram, bounding over fallen logs and pounding up hillsides as if nothing could stand in his way. Kern and Nahud’r had kept up with him, until the dark-skinned Shemite slipped in a muddy patch and sprawled across the forest floor in a graceless slide.
Kern recovered the man’s dropped scimitar.
Nahud’r scrambled back to his feet.
Both men ran.
The call of Vanir horns, of raiders on the hunt, rolled and echoed all around them now, answered from at least two different directions by horns and by the maddened howling of a wolf. Kern’s wolf. Finally, he caught fresh glimpses of wattle-and-daub walls barely showing through the tangled branches of a pair of ancient cedar.
Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2 Page 16