Elven Winter

by Bernhard Hennen

  When those whose courage had failed them disappeared into the morning mists, Alfadas raised his horn to his lips. Three short, blaring notes sounded as a challenge to the hidden enemy in the forest. In reply came the same long, drawn-out howl, this time accompanied by the sound of breaking branches. Something big was charging through the underbrush.

  “Pikes ready!” Ollowain ordered, his voice steady. Together with Ronardin, he stood in the frontmost row, while Lysilla oversaw Lambi and his men.

  “Archers ready!” cried Mag to his bowmen. The tension in his voice was clear.

  A thick band of fog lay between the forest and the shoreline. Suddenly, the ground began to quake. Gravel crunched beneath heavy feet, thundering just ahead of the men.

  The faces of the men close to him were ashen. Despite the cold, sweat beaded on their foreheads. Then a large, horned skull broke through the wall of fog. The snapping of pikes and the cries of falling men rang along the shore. Arrows flew toward the still-invisible enemies. Loud bellows sounded in reply.

  A massive black figure had crashed through the formation of pikemen. Men with poleaxes charged forward. Their heavy blades hacked into the steer’s withers and skull. Dark blood foamed across the gray stones, and wounds gaped in the beast’s flesh.

  The next bulls were already coming. Lambi’s men roared and charged in counterattack. A gust of wind split the fog, and suddenly only three steers were still standing, all with arrows in their backs. They shied away from the war cries of Lambi’s men.

  Seven steers lay impaled on pikes in the gravel. When the men realized what they were fighting against, they surged forward. The formation broke, and the last of the steers were ruthlessly dispatched.

  Alfadas was satisfied. His army had done better than he expected. None of the steers had made it through to the waters of the fjord, and all men had held their positions. Next, however, they would have to learn not to allow their battle lines to break so quickly when victory seemed assured.

  Silwyna waved from the edge of the forest. Alfadas set the horn to his lips and again let out three short, sharp blasts. The yells and laughter of the men died away.

  “Today, we will do as our future enemies do and eat our defeated foes,” he shouted to the men. “You have fought well! Now feast and enjoy. Tomorrow at sunrise, we march for Firnstayn.”

  HOME

  Orgrim peered into the haze. He heard the rumbling of the glaciers. Huge chunks of ice drifted past the hull of the Wraithwind. They had pushed far into Whale Bay, but his charts were not accurate. He could not say for certain where they were.

  Not much longer and the morning sun would break through the fog. They were very close to the coast. The Wraithwind made only slow headway. Orgrim had spent half the night listening to the song of the glaciers, the dull roar as the ice broke free and plunged into the water. No one on board had closed an eye that night. All his warriors and seamen had found a reason to be on deck. And just this once, he had let them. He felt no different than they did. Very close, beyond the fog, lay the land from which his people had been driven more than seven hundred years before. Mandrag was the only one on board who had ever actually seen their homeland. Even Birga, the shaman, had been born in the human world. And now they were the first to return! Branbeard had intended this assignment as punishment, but everyone aboard the Wraithwind saw themselves as the chosen. They would be the first to eat of the Normirga! Orgrim was certain that he could deal the elves some serious defeats if Branbeard was not held up too long at Reilimee.

  Loud shouts startled the pack leader out of his daydreams. Beside the ship, large black fins sliced through the gray water. Orcas! Hunters, like they themselves. Killers that could finish even a troll with a single bite. With their black-and-white markings, they were beautiful to look at as they gave the galleass a guard of honor. That was a good omen! Orgrim looked over at Birga, who stood off to one side, alone, as usual. The shaman supported herself heavily on her bone staff. She seemed to have been waiting for him to look in her direction, and she nodded as if she already knew what he wanted to ask.

  “A good sign! The spirits of our ancestors await us.” Birga had a smoky, pleasant voice. Like Skanga, she moved with a slight stoop. Orgrim did not know how old the shaman was, but she must have been much younger than her mistress. Among all the trolls, only a handful were as old as Mandrag. Only rarely, in fact, did one survive beyond a hundred winters. None at all were like Skanga; his folk whispered that she was as old as time and one of the first creations of the Alben.

  Birga wore a robe fashioned from overlapping strips of leather and fur, hundreds of them sewn into a dress. Every strip came from a different beast, some even made from the skin of trolls and humans. She wore a hood pulled forward over her head. Her hands were concealed beneath filthy bandages, and her countenance was hidden behind the facial skin of one of the king’s former favorite women—Birga had torn it off personally after the whore had tried to foist a bastard on Branbeard.

  The shaman, clothed entirely in the skins of others, showed not the slightest piece of her own skin. Countless rumors made the rounds: that she had thick fur like a dog, scales like a fish, or that she was tattooed from head to foot with magical runes that gave her the power to read thoughts as long as the runes could be kept out of anyone else’s sight. Orgrim knew with certainty that he would never attempt to get to the bottom of Birga’s secret. There was something about her that chilled him to the bone when he looked into her cold gray eyes. Birga took pleasure in torturing others. And she had a very special way of making others talk . . . even the king’s whore had admitted everything in the end.

  “There!” cried a lookout, and he pointed to the west. “I see mountains!”

  The pack leader turned abruptly as the veils of fog parted. In a moment, they were swept apart as if by a magical hand. Orgrim saw a blue-white glacier pushing out into Whale Bay across a broad face. The ice was lined with deep furrows, dark, horizontal bands dividing the cliff-like wall of ice, which loomed eighty or ninety paces high and was lost on both sides in the fog.

  As Orgrim watched, a piece of ice the size of a tower broke from the glacier and tumbled with a boom into the sea. The Wraithwind rose and fell, causing several crewmen to lose their footing and slide across the planking. The ship veered dangerously, and breakers crashed over the deck. Orgrim realized how foolish it had been to sail so close to the coastline. A calving glacier could sink their ship. He signaled to the helmsman to put more distance between them and the face of the glacier.

  “The Dragontongue,” Mandrag murmured. Then he pointed away into the mist. “The Bone Crags must be ahead. There used to be a village below them. The huts had been built from the jawbones of whales. From there, I went out on the ice with my father in winter to hunt polar bears. We found them close to the holes in the ice where the seals came up to breathe. The ice was red with blood wherever a bear had had a successful hunt. And the seals had no choice but to appear at the holes, even when they knew that a hunter was waiting for them. They would have suffocated beneath the ice otherwise.” Tears stood in the old troll’s eyes. “Fresh bear meat is delicious.”

  A large gray mountain appeared through the mist, jutting far out into the bay. There was a good anchorage on its lee side, where the Wraithwind would be protected from the winter storms.

  “Should we set up our camp here?” the pack leader asked.

  Mandrag chewed on his lip thoughtfully for a while. Finally, he shook his head. “No. We still have to sail a good way north; there are broad gravel beaches there. We need to pull the Wraithwind onto the beach for the winter. It can’t stay in the water, or the ice would crush its hull. My father told me about an elven ship that perished like that. In winter, they mount their ships on giant skids and can sail across the ice as fast as the wind.”

  Orgrim thought about whether it made sense to put the Wraithwind on skids. Perhaps, if one were to take the ship up to the high plateau, but they would need hundreds of trolls t
o transport the galleass over the coastal mountains. Maybe he ought to talk to Boltan about it. The artillery chief was a constant wellspring of unconventional ideas. He was the one who had come up with the cargo sleds securely tied in the ship’s hold, waiting to be put to use. With their help, they would give the elves a deadly surprise.

  “Bring the ship another fifty miles up the coast,” Mandrag advised. “We should make camp near the entrance to the Swelm Valley. From there, the Wolfpit is only a day’s march away. In the past, it was just a small mountain fortress. I don’t think there will be many elves living there. With a bit of luck, we’ll catch them unawares.”

  Orgrim’s eyes wandered over the coastline, which was showing more and more clearly as the fog melted away. It was a wonderfully wild landscape of rock. The distant homeland that for generations had lived on only in stories. A fresh breeze came off the sea and drove away the last drifts of fog. The pack leader rubbed his bare arms—he loved the bite of the wind on his skin.

  The colors of the rocks were now clear to see in the morning light. They were the same shade of gray as his skin. He smiled to recall a story from his childhood, in which the most rebellious of the Alben, the greatest hero in the war against the Devanthar, had carved the first trolls out of the rocks of these mountains and breathed life into them.

  Orgrim ran his hands over his raw skin. The story was easy to believe when one saw this stretch of coast.

  They had come home!

  THE CURSED ARROW

  The king’s tent was brightly lit. The cold autumn wind tore at the red fabric, making the flames on the torches dance. It was the middle of the night, and Alfadas was in a rage—Horsa had torn him out of Asla’s arms and ordered him to come to his tent.

  The king, his courtiers, and the vast escort accompanying him had set up camp outside the village. Most of the army from Honnigsvald also had to spend the night outside. Firnstayn did not have nearly enough quarters to accommodate so many guests. Dozens of campfires were dotted along the fjord. Alfadas could well imagine how his men, huddled in their thin blankets, were waiting for the night to finally be over, how they stared into the coals of their fires and imagined what the following day would bring.

  A wide circle of guards surrounded the king’s tent. The sentries were just far enough away to be unable to hear what was said inside. Horsa had brought more than two hundred soldiers with him—far too many for an escort. He had announced that he had spared no pains to come to Firnstayn to say farewell to his bravest warriors when they departed for Albenmark. And his skald, Veleif, had found plenty of pretty words to lull any suspicions the men might harbor. It was the farmers and craftsmen—those men who owed their lost livelihoods to the injustices in Horsa’s realm—who were particularly moved by the king’s gesture. For one night, they could feel that they mattered. They truly believed that the king had come only for their sake. Rotten old fox, thought Alfadas. You still know your business too damn well. He had brought Ollowain with him because he feared he might not be a match for Horsa’s flattery and intrigues by himself.

  The sentries waved them through without asking questions. Inside his tent, Horsa was alone. He stood beside a pan of glowing coals, holding his hands over it, stretching them and balling them into fists. “I hate this cold, wet weather. Everything hurts on nights like this.” He nodded to them to take a place at the table that filled the middle of the tent. A plate of bread and cold chicken meat still lay on it, almost untouched.

  Opposite the entrance stood a heavy bed with a beautifully carved wooden frame and a mountain of pelts on top of the mattress.

  “Why did you send for me?” Alfadas asked, his tone chilly. He wanted to get this unwelcome discussion over with as quickly as possible.

  “Ragni told me about the training your men have been through.” It was not clear from Horsa’s voice if that was meant as praise or criticism.

  “They will hold their own,” the duke replied.

  “I could still give you some of my knights.”

  What was the old man up to? Alfadas had no time for these games, but he had to keep his impatience in check, if only for the sake of Asla and the children.

  “We won’t be able to feed your knights’ horses,” Ollowain spoke up. “We have to cross a wide ice plain. The animals would drop dead out there.”

  “But you can feed a herd of sheep?” The king curled his hands into fists again.

  “They will feed us,” Ollowain said, and smiled. “We don’t need to provide anything for them.”

  Horsa nodded. “I can see the campaign has been planned carefully. You will be a thorn in the trolls’ side, Alfadas.” The king rubbed his empty eye socket, then joined them at the table. Horsa’s breath stank of sour wine.

  The king studiously ignored Ollowain. Perhaps because he’s afraid of him, thought Alfadas. Was Horsa really so naive that he believed the swordmaster did not know what intrigues had already been spun? Or was he counting on the elf’s indifference, as long as he got his fighters for the battles ahead?

  “Although I admit, I am also worried,” Horsa continued. “Who is supposed to protect Emerelle? Who will look after her? There is no healer here in the village, only an old, fat priest.”

  “Your concern for Emerelle does you credit, King,” said Ollowain smoothly. “But in my friend Alfadas’s house, Emerelle enjoys all the help we can give. I see no reason to inflict the strains of a long trip to your court on her.”

  “Time to call things by their proper names!” Horsa suddenly blurted. “I know you plan to deceive me, Alfadas! If I were not here, you might not even go through that portal on top of the cliff. You’ve got your eye on my throne. And your army of have-nothings and traitors like Lambi is devoted to you. Even if you do leave tomorrow, who’s to say that you won’t come back the day after?”

  Alfadas looked at Horsa incredulously. The old man had truly gone mad! “Forgive me, but it was your idea to put together an army of malcontents and to send me to Albenmark with them to fight the trolls.”

  “It was not!” the king rumbled. “You and your elf friends, you took advantage of my good nature and inveigled me into it. But now I see through your plan. There is no war with the trolls in Albenmark! What proof do I have, apart from your word? You knew that I would offer my help as soon as I heard about the elven queen driven out of her own land. You made me give you the army that you will use to steal the throne from my son.”

  “That’s not how it is at all!” Alfadas insisted. “Listen to your heart. You will see you have nothing to fear from me.”

  “Oh, I know, I really don’t, not if you go to Albenmark. And just to make sure you don’t come back, I’ll take Asla and your children with me to Gonthabu. And that sleeping elf woman, too. I can see very clearly that she is someone important. I recognize a princess when I see one. If I never hear from you again, Alfadas, then you can be sure they will come to no harm.”

  Alfadas’s hand dropped to the grip of his sword. “You don’t think it was unwise to call we traitors into your tent?”

  Horsa glowered at him. “If one expects treason, one prepares. Your house is surrounded, Alfadas. If anything happens to me, your family dies. And your farmer soldiers will die in their sleep tonight.” Then the king’s wrath vanished as abruptly as it had appeared, and he seemed suddenly tired. “Go, Alfadas. Go and don’t come back. That is all I want from you. And don’t think I don’t know that I am the villain in this piece. You know as well as I that the sagas of our heroes always end in blood and tragedy. That is how things are in the Fjordlands. And that is why you should not hope I would hesitate to have your family murdered if you oppose me.”

  “Do you know the story of Nazirluma and Aileen?” asked Ollowain in the kind of voice a storyteller would use with children.

  Alfadas looked at his friend. Did he not understand how serious their situation was?

  Horsa gestured dismissively. “This is neither the time nor the place for childishness. I will take your famil
y with me tomorrow, Alfadas. Make sure no one here in the village puts up any resistance. I would not like to see a bloodbath here.” He turned to Ollowain. “And you. Make it clear to your queen’s bodyguard that against two hundred soldiers, even the most skillful sword fighter can only lose.”

  “If you are interested in your son’s life, Horsa, then you would do well to listen to my story.” The swordmaster spoke politely, but firmly. “Is there anything worse than to stand at the grave of your own child?”

  “My son is not even here!” Horsa puffed. “And I will not tell you and your mob where he is. He is beyond your reach!” Despite his words, the old man seemed unsettled. Alfadas would have bet that the king was lying and that Egil was somewhere very close by.

  “Are you sure of that? Can you afford to be mistaken, Horsa?” Ollowain asked. “As far as I know, you have only one son.”

  From the corner of his eye, Alfadas saw something move beneath the pelts covering the king’s bed. He was about to draw his sword when he realized that it was Dalla, the healer, who lay there. She seemed to have rolled in her sleep.

  Ollowain’s calm frightened the king more than did the anger of his duke. “Then tell your blasted story, elf! But don’t think it will change a thing. I’ve thought of everything!”

  “Of course!” The swordmaster leaned back in his chair. “Nazirluma was one of the greatest wizards of his day. He was the king of that secretive race the lamassu, and the stories that are told about him are beyond counting. His powerful wings were said to have carried him across the white sea in a single night, although even the fastest ships took three weeks for the journey. He was famous for his cryptic riddles, and some of the spells he cast continue to work to this day, although Nazirluma has been dead more than two thousand years. No doubt people would still talk about that extraordinary, wise man in the highest of terms today if, in his old age, he had not met the elf Aileen, who was one of the Maurawan. She traveled to his royal court in Kandastan to take part in a great archery tournament. Although Aileen did not win the competition, she did attract the attention of the old king because she was exceptionally beautiful. When Nazirluma saw her, he was blinded with love for her. He devised marvelous metaphors for her beauty, and even wrote a poem of over one hundred cantos that he personally presented to her. He courted her like a raw youth who has fallen in love for the very first time.