The Tempering of Men (14 page)

They were alert. As they came abreast of the clearing, they slowed—still in unison, the foreign jarl calling out some phrase in an incomprehensible, barbarian yammering. He reined his horse back as well, dropping from a casual trot to a walk.

Whatever he had said, his soldiers responded to the order without the conversation or quarreling common to a raiding party. Those on the right side fell out of formation, still spaced evenly but spread out, and moved into the clearing. Those on the left turned to face the trees behind which Randulfr, Frithulf, and Freyvithr waited. The soldiers slipped their shields onto their arms, simultaneously locking the edges and lowering their spears. Birds fell silent all around.

Discipline,
Skjaldwulf mouthed to Adalbrikt. Adalbrikt, pallid, nodded.

Well then. This, and elk, was why wolfcarls carried bows.

As smoothly as old bones would let him, Skjaldwulf stood behind the bole of a tree, leaned his axe against it, and unlimbered his bow. He set an arrow to the string and nocked it, then nudged one foot forward, conscious of twigs and the rustle of dry leaves. Here also the dew was a friend: wet leaves were more silent.

On the ground an armspan away, Adalbrikt gathered himself to lunge. Skjaldwulf drew the bow open around his body and felt the fletching brush his lip.

He was not the best archer in the werthreat, and arrows were next to useless against wyverns and trolls, but he could reliably hit a rabbit at a distance greater than the one stretching between his position and the foreign jarl. The searchers were closer, but they could wait to die.

The breastplate might be proof against arrows, and Skjaldwulf's hunting bow was no mankiller bent to cloth yard shafts. The eye was a slender target and girded in the edges of the helm. But the foreign jarl's horse was nervous—it knew the wolves were there, if the men were innocent—and the foreign jarl must both rein it and gesture to his men.

You could armor over the top of an arm. But there was very little that could armor the softness beneath it and still allow the freedom of movement necessary to swing a sword. And Skjaldwulf, the hunter, knew that in any animal's body the heart lay behind the upper arm in a direct line.

Man was just another animal.

It was strange, Skjaldwulf thought, to put his sights on the life of a man. For all the fighting he had done, for all the wars his long life had encompassed, he'd never murdered before. There was no man-price in war; there was no crime in what he was about to do. But it felt momentous still.

His fingertips tingled from the bowstring as he waited his shot. The light crept down the tree trunks. Mar breathed like a black ghost beside him. The foreign jarl gestured.

Skjaldwulf let the bow pull the arrow from its rest across his fingertips.

It arched softly as it flew, the arrow silent, the twang of the bowstring loud. The thump as the shaft found its target was loud also, and in the silence that followed Skjaldwulf nocked another arrow. He'd have time, he thought, for one more before the soldiers were on him—

The ones searching the clearing turned; the shield wall, however, stood without a ripple. And then the foreign jarl windmilled and toppled, two hands of willow shaft and raven feathers still protruding under his arm as he fell to his knees, slumping over the front balustrade of his peculiar dogcart.

The horse might have bolted—and wouldn't that be fun?—but an alert soldier grabbed the reins below the bit and started pulling the frightened animal forward. Around him, soldiers were falling back, joining shields, linking up to the group. The teamster vaulted from the wagon seat and ran to join them.

Skjaldwulf, who had expected a full frontal attack, was taken aback by the retreat. He loosed another arrow as Adalbrikt ran forward, wailing and waving his sword like a berserk, and then Skjaldwulf, too, was moving.

His axe in his hand, he stepped out from behind the tree. Frithulf and Randulfr were shoulder to shoulder across the clearing; Geirulfr blocked the path ahead, and Ulfhoss quietly moved to block the path behind, Freyvithr with him. Mar was still back in the trees; through him, Skjaldwulf could feel the other wolves. He got a quick, strong flash of a horse herd, the mares circling to protect the foals. That wasn't from Mar; Mar didn't know any more about horses than Skjaldwulf did. Afi, maybe. Arakensberg was proud of their horses. There was a second strong flash, this time of what it felt like when a horse hoof connected solidly with a leaping wolf-body, and at the same time a spear jabbed out of the shield-square the foreign soldiers had made and ran Adalbrikt through.

Skjaldwulf dared not shut his eyes, but he felt the urge all the way down to his guts. He'd seen too many young men die, and although he knew some wolfcarls would tell him Adalbrikt was just one more, he couldn't feel it that way, couldn't feel anything but pain and anger at the loss.

Adalbrikt lurched back and dragged the spear away from the foreign soldier. If there had been fewer of them, and more lightly armed, that might even have been helpful, though not worth the life spattering bright red onto the dead leaves.

A death worthy of a warrior, a death that would assure his place in the afterworld, if songs and sagas could be believed. Everything dies, and maybe it was better to die of a spear in the gut than rot away.

Skjaldwulf was too old—or perhaps old enough—to argue it either way.

Skjaldwulf looked across at Frithulf, who grimaced in answer—an expression made grotesque by his scars, but Skjaldwulf knew what he meant. Even if all six of them charged the foreign soldiers—
herd,
said the pack-sense—at once, the shield wall and spears left the advantage with the defenders. They could all die spitted like pigs.
A four-sided shield wall,
Skjaldwulf thought with reluctant admiration. It would never have worked against trolls, who had the size, and the numbers, to throw themselves against a shield wall until they bore it down beneath them, but it was a clever tactic against men on foot. Bows no use, axes no use unless you got right up close to them, and by then you'd already be dead.

They had to lure or provoke the soldiers into breaking their square, or they'd be stuck here in a standoff until somebody ran out of food. Skjaldwulf was racking his brains for something that might serve against soldiers as disciplined as these when Dyrver came out of the trees to stand next to Ulfhoss.

Dyrver was young—anxious and impatient—and it was a mistake none of the older wolves would have made, but Skjaldwulf was reminded that occasionally making a mistake could be the best thing to do. A soldier in the shield-square caught sight of Dyrver—a dark gray wolf, with light greenish-yellow eyes, not particularly large as trellwolves went, utterly unremarkable to Skjaldwulf's way of thinking—and screamed. Not surprise, not excitement: Skjaldwulf had heard men dying beneath the hooves of the trell-smiths, and he knew a scream of terror when he heard one.

As Skjaldwulf half-crouched, chest heaving, sidling left to cover the gap left by Adalbrikt's fall, he sought out the eyes of the men he knew best. His gaze crossed Frithulf's, and he knew Frithulf was calling Kothran just as he called Mar—as Geirulfr was calling Afi and Randulfr calling Ingrun. And Skjaldwulf was pleased to see that Ulfhoss had the sense to hand off his great-knife to Freyvithr. If the godsman was trained as a soldier, well—now was the time for him to use it.

Now why would a well-trained, well-disciplined soldier scream at the sight of a wolf? Skjaldwolf remembered something Randulfr had said more than once—that the foreign raiders feared trellwolves like nothing else and thought them demons.

A wild babble rose in the foreign soldiers' strange tongue: it could be prayer, or arguments among men suddenly robbed of their commander.

Skjaldwulf and Mar were the oldest, the most experienced, and Mar was Viradechtis' chosen consort; the risk was theirs to take.

Skjaldwulf paced forward, slowly, Mar at his side. The shield-square wavered. Mar, with a sense of the dramatic that Skjaldwulf would never have expected from him, drew his lips back and let a chest-shaking growl out between his teeth. From the other side Ingrun and Kothran howled in hackle-raising harmony.

Perhaps if the foreign jarl had been among them, shouting commands and encouragement, the soldiers' discipline would have prevailed. But Skjaldwulf's first shot had removed that strength. The shield-square buckled and collapsed as the men on the near side fell back, breaking away from the advancing wolf.

The foreign soldiers routed and ran.

Fighting men was not like fighting trolls. It was both easier and uglier: easier because he could predict what a man would do when it was never quite possible to be certain of a troll, uglier because every time his opponent did what he expected, he was reminded he was fighting a man like himself.

The wolves bewildered the foreign soldiers. They fell back against the wagon and regrouped, except the one Kothran hamstrung and the one Ingrun pulled down. But their shield wall was broken, and several of them had thrown their spears away to run. Wolves circled them, seeming to understand as instinctually as they hunted elk or trolls how to hunt men. And the men of the threat had their bows still.

Skjaldwulf and his threat were about a third of the way into their butchers' work when Afi called in the pack-sense,
More strangers! More! More! More!
That explained what this little band of soldiers was doing out here by themselves: they were meeting another band of soldiers. A larger band—Afi's urgency could not be mistaken.

Fall back!
Skjaldwulf said into the pack-sense.
Fall away!
Luck and cunning had given them the upper hand, but they'd never be able to keep it. Better to disengage, get to Siglufjordhur, regroup. Although, he was thinking as they began cautiously to retreat, if the foreign soldiers
were
as terrified of trellwolves as they seemed, perhaps the five from Franangford would be worth more than a mere show of support to Randulfr's brother.

But for now they must disengage, and disengage quickly. Skjaldwulf fell back, a fighting retreat, Mar circling behind him. He felt his threatbrothers and their wolves withdrawing, too, and wished they had a moment to drag Adalbrikt from the field.

At least Othinn would welcome him. Or possibly Freya, Skjaldwulf thought, realizing that Freyvithr crouched over Adalbrikt's body, fearless in the midst of combat.

Skjaldwulf expected the beleaguered foreign soldiers to accept their reprieve, to regroup and live another day. But the soldier he had been fighting, instead of pulling back with his shieldbrothers, lunged forward. Skjaldwulf blocked the blow on his axe haft, tried to brace himself to throw the man off, and his foot skidded on the wet, dead leaves.

He fell. Falling, he tried to tell Mar to run, and then there was a brilliant flash of blackness behind his eyes and the clearing dissolved into gray, into black, into nothing.

NINE

Something scraped in the shadows; something rustled. Brokkolfr lifted his head, careful not to push with his elbows, and craned his neck to see better.

There was, predictably, a shape behind each set of eyes, a shape dull and dark in color, like a hunched lump of stone—but they showed up as crooked silhouettes against the pale limestone behind. The torchlight wavered over something with the nap of cloth, something with the shimmer of metal. Kari's torch had gone into the water. Brokkolfr's flickered fitfully against the stone where he had thrust it, and Brokkolfr knew it would soon gutter out.

“Svartalfar,” Brokkolfr said, aware of the relief coloring his voice and embarrassed by it. He sounded so damned young sometimes, and Kari was—well, not exactly older. But more worldly. “Maybe they'll help pull you out.”

“I wouldn't count on it,” Kari said softly. “Come on, Brokkolfr. I can't feel my feet.”

Indeed, as Brokkolfr edged slowly backward—and the two svartalfar watched silently, leaning on their staffs, the torchlight catching an occasional glint off their jewelry—the puddle of water that oozed from Kari's clothes and soaked Brokkolfr's frontside was frigid enough to make him shiver and curse under his breath. As for Kari, well, his teeth were rattling, and Brokkolfr didn't think it was with fear.

“How can this water be so cold when the other water is steaming?”

“Different stream?” Kari stammered. Once Brokkolfr had Kari's hips over the edge—tricky work, as it wanted to snag and crumble—he managed to drag his own feet out, and then the two men inchwormed back the way they had come.

“Or maybe it flows in cold, and gets heated up somehow,” Brokkolfr offered. It was strange, chatting casually with Kari while the svartalfar watched like statues, but the traverse took a while. When they had regained the edge—and Brokkolfr's torch—Kari tried to stand, yelped, and sank back. He muttered a curse under his breath. “I was hoping I'd been wrong about that.”

Brokkolfr looked, a quick, wincing glance, and saw Kari's foot hanging at the wrong angle from his leg. It was bad, then, and he had to focus himself consciously on the immediate problem instead of the babbling chorus of future worries.

“I don't know if I can get you out of here on my own,” Brokkolfr said, thinking of the scrambling they'd had to do to get this far.

“I don't think you can,” Kari said. He looked across the cavern to the svartalfar. “I guess we'll have to see if they'll help.”

“You didn't think they would.”

“The svartalfar are funny about things like that. They've got rules, and they want to negotiate everything out ahead of time. I remember Tin's jarls just about swallowed their tongues when they realized we'd gone and killed the trellqueen for them without even
asking.
Help me up.”

Brokkolfr wanted to tell him to take his wet clothes off now, before they killed him—but he supposed that even if the water was chill, the air in the cave was warm enough that it would be a few moments before Kari was in dire trouble.