David Drake - Balefires

Her thighs were sticky with blood, some of it from the brambles.

She was in a tiny room when she awakened. Outside, a mastiff growled. It had a low rumble, penetrating without being loud, that could terrify in a way that the frenzied barking of lesser beasts could not. The hour was long past sundown, but odor alone told Lena that she had been thrust into an empty kennel with the mastiffs on guard at the opening. Unlike Karl's human retainers, the great dogs could be depended on to keep all others away from what was, for now, the Ritter's property alone.

Lena squirmed to the doorway. A horse-huge mastiff lay across it. The beast's head was raised and one of the dog handlers, well aware of the brute's capabilities, was scuttling away across the muddy courtyard. Only the casks of strong ale, broached for the Ritter's triumph, had given the man courage to approach as closely as he had.

Awakened by the intruder, the brindled dog turned to lick its own flanks. Lena froze, but moonlight on her hair drew the broad muzzle into the opening. The eyes were calm and dark-pupiled, larger than a man's. The mastiff 's tongue flapped against Lena's temple like a soft rag, sponging at the blood caked there.

Fearfully-no present kindness would erase memory of Kue-meh's last moment of life-Lena brushed her fingers across the dog's forehead, then caressed the upthrust ears. Power burred again in the dog's thorax, but it now was rich with delight. The head gave back, directed by the girl's proddings where it could not have been forced, and let her worm out into the open.

The courtyard was empty of all but the two dogs and a squalor which even the gentle moon limned clearly. The second, fawn-colored, mastiff whined and nuzzled Lena wetly. There was a faint murmuring from the other kennels, wattled domes little different in design from the huts of the peasants. No man or other dog appeared to try the wrath of the killer who now supported the girl on either side.

Her hands absorbing strength from the skin folded over the dogs' withers, Lena made her way to the wall. Behind her, the tower of the keep climbed seventy feet from the ground. No lights gleamed through its arrow-slits. The drink that had enspirited one man had crumpled all his fellows. Even perfect success could only briefly have counteracted the exertion required to gain it, and the Ritter's ale-sodden feast had done for the stay-at-homes as well. Three crossbowmen snored away their guard on the tower, and the occasional sounds from beyond the low wall to the inner court came from the fowl arid pigs of the humans quartered there. The snorts of the horses sharing the outer courtyard with Lena and the dogs were muted. Seven had been ridden to death during the morning or had been swallowed in the Forest beyond later recall by the exhausted hunters.

Lena touched the stones of the curtain wall, massive gray blocks more of nature than of man. She was beyond strength or weakness now, as inanimate as the limestone in which her hands found natural holds. The larger, brindled mastiff raised itself to its full height on the wall and licked the sole of her foot. Then she was over, sliding down the face of the wall and beginning to run the instant she touched the rocky soil below. This time there was no pursuit.

She followed the trail broken by the day's long hunt, knowing the confused scents would hinder the dogs if they were loosed on her. As she passed them, her hands plucked off berries and the pale, tender shoots of budding spruce. Once, in splashing across a rill, she paused for three quick gulps and a mouthful that she absorbed over the next minutes rather than swallowing. Her pace was not particularly swift, but it was as regular as a machine's.

The forest floor paid little mind to dawn or darkness, but the needles of sunlight piercing to the loam were nearly vertical when Lena reached the scene of death and capture. Kort lay huddled, flies black on the raw wounds which crows had already enlarged. Three of the birds croaked angrily from the limb to which Lena's intrusion had sent them, pacing from side to side and hunching their pinions.

Kue-meh's face, undisturbed by the fangs of the pack, bore a look of peculiar kindliness and peace. It was the face with which she had greeted Lena seven years before, less resigned than willing to accept. Lena looked away. It was not that for which she had returned.

"Coo-ee?" she called softly.

The Forest grew very silent. Even the crows left off their grumblings.

"Coo-ee?" the girl repeated. The bushes parted as she knew they must, and Chi, then Faal, stood timidly before her. Gurgling sounds that were partly tears and partly words of a language even older than that of the woods folk, Lena threw herself into their arms. She hugged their smooth, furred bodies like the shades of her lost innocence. At last she thrust them back to arm's length. Wiping her face free of the mingled tears, she said, "We must go now, very quickly. There are places in the Forest so far away from here that the Others will never come. They will never find us again."

She spoke and led the way into the Forest without a glance behind her. Chi followed at once. Faal, a picture of his father now in all but the gray that had tinged Kort's fur, hesitated. As yet he lacked the consciousness of strength that would let him unconcernedly follow into the unknown. But in a moment he ran to catch the females and, as he shambled on at Lena's side, his fingers began caressing the tawny gold of her hair.

The Barrow Troll

When I was very young my family was given a run of a 1938 children's magazine called Jack and Jill. The last feature in each issue was a serial, and one of those serials was an adaptation of "Beowulf."

I have no idea who did that version (I'm not even sure that I was able to read myself at the time; it may have been something my parents read to me), but it was really excellent. I didn't appreciate how good it was until much later. In the adaptation there's reference to the warriors' shields of yellow linden, a vividly realistic detail that I've remembered all my life since.

Twenty-odd years ago while I was plotting what became my first novel, I did a close reading of "Beowulf" in a literal translation. The shields of yellow linden weren't there. They must have been added by the adaptor to anchor the story in physical reality-which doesn't mean familiar reality, but rather something concrete that the reader can put his mental hands around even if he doesn't precisely understand its purpose. That was an important lesson for me.

And for those of you who wonder (as I did), "linden" is the common continental name for trees Americans call basswood. They're generally called lime trees in Britain.

Besides "Beowulf" I read and reread The Age of Fable, Bulfinch's retelling of Norse myth in a series of connected stories. (I had no idea how hard it would be to do that until I tried the same thing many years later in the Northworld trilogy.) Then I read translations of the "Eddas," the Icelandic originals from which Bulfinch had worked And finally I came to the Icelandic sagas themselves. I found their style and outlook very similar to my own. The narration is terse. Although the tales are fiction or at least fictionalized, there's a real attempt to keep the action realistic: even supernatural events are described in a realistic fashion.

Also the sagas contain a great deal of humor, but it's understated and frequently black beyond modern imagination. (For example, the posse hunting Gunnar arrives at his house. One of their number goes to the door to scout the situation. Gunnar stabs him with a spear. The scout walks back to his fellows who ask, "Is Gunnar home?" "I don't know," the scout replies, "but his spear is." And drops dead.)

Incidentally, my taste for that sort of joke is one of the reasons folks often think there's no humor at all in my fiction. They're wrong, but they're probably happier people for not understanding.