R. Salvatore - The Ancient

“They saw our fire,” Bikelbrin reasoned. Pergwick and Ruggirs glanced at each other with obvious concern, something the other two didn’t miss.

On Mcwigik’s orders, they made a cairn of the heated stones and each sat against it facing in a different direction.

“Ye hold yer place,” Mcwigik said repeatedly as the howling circled them and the two younger powries appeared as if they would break and run. Every now and then a darker shadow slipped past one or another’s field of view, or starlight shining eyes stared at them from not so far away.

“Ye think we’ve the weapons to beat them?” Bikelbrin asked his friend candidly.

“I got me Prag’s axe, and that’ll put a dent in a wolf’s skull,” Mcwigik answered.

Pergwick jumped up suddenly and backed a step, which sent him tumbling over the cairn atop Ruggirs, who similarly scrambled to his feet. Mcwigik was about to scold them, but as he turned he saw the cause of the younger powrie’s concern. Not five feet from the cairn, teeth bared, eyes shining, stood a large canine creature.

Mcwigik came past the tumbled two fast and yelled at the wolf, pumping his arm threateningly.

The wolf snapped and barked sharply, and Mcwigik found himself falling back over the other two, who both screamed as the wolf advanced.

But then it yelped as a rock pegged it on the flank, and it ran off.

“I ain’t for fighting that!” Pergwick cried.

“So we seen,” said Bikelbrin, the rock-thrower.

“Mcwigik fell, too!” Pergwick protested.

“Yach, he just caught me by surprise, he did,” Mcwigik said, brushing himself off as if that motion might polish up a bit of his lost dignity. “Ain’t fought one in a hundred years and more!”

“A record ye’re not to keep for long,” Bikelbrin remarked, stepping up beside him, another rock in hand. “The beastie ain’t gone far.”

More howling ensued, as if on cue.

The four spent many hours on the edge of their wits, jumping at every sound, but no wolves came that close again, though the howls and growls showed that the hungry canines were never far.

And if that wasn’t bad enough for the tired and cold group, the rocks cooled long before the night had even reached its midway point, and the wind from the west didn’t catch any of Mithranidoon’s heated mist.

Gradually, they all drifted off to sleep, but so late into the night that the blazing dawnslight awakened them less than an hour after Pergwick, the last to find slumber, had closed his eyes. Even Bikelbrin, who had been the first to manage sleep, hadn’t realized three hours of it.

They all looked to Mcwigik, the chief conspirator in this breakout from Mithranidoon. He certainly didn’t appear as boisterous and determined as he had the previous morning when he had led them to the boat and off their island home.

“What’re ye thinking?” asked Bikelbrin.

“And how many days’re ye saying it’s to take us to find the Mirianic?” Pergwick dared interject, drawing a glare from Bikelbrin, though-surprisingly-Mcwigik didn’t react at all to the question.

“A month to two, he said,” Ruggirs answered. “And each night’s to get colder and longer, aye?”

“Not so,” Bikelbrin replied. “It ain’t like that.”

“But generally so,” said Pergwick, and Bikelbrin had to concede that point.

“More than a month or two,” Ruggirs said.

“But what are ye knowing about it?” Bikelbrin demanded. “Ye never been!”

“But I’m knowing that me toes are hurting, and so’re yers,” the younger dwarf argued. “And hurtin’ toes’re meaning slower steps, and slower steps’re meaning more steps and more days, and I’m not for thinking…”

“We’re going back,” said Mcwigik, and all three looked at him in surprise.

“We ain’t to make it,” the chief conspirator said, looking directly at Bikelbrin and shaking his head, his face a mask of disappointment. “We ain’t the tools, the weapons, or the clothes. If them wolves don’t eat us alive, they’ll tear the skin from our frozen bones to be sure.”

“The lake’s not so bad,” said Ruggirs, but no one paid him any heed.

“I’m wanting the smell o’ the Mirianic in me nose as much as any powrie alive, don’t ye doubt,” Mcwigik went on. “But I’m thinking we’re dead long before we near the place.”

“If we even know where it is,” Pergwick dared interject, and so downtrodden was Mcwigik, and so surprised by the sudden turn was Bikelbrin, that neither argued a point that would have brought them both to fury only a day before.

So they gathered their supplies and turned back to the north, and found their boat shortly after sunset. They returned to the powrie island without any ruckus, without any questions, but a few of the dwarfs who had known their plans did offer a superior I-telled-ye-so smirk.

The bitter defeat stayed with Mcwigik for many weeks.

Consequences

Brother Giavno grimaced against the line of fiery pain coming from a deep gash across the meat of his upper arm. He had only avoided the brunt of the hurled spear at the last instant, so close a call that it had poignantly reminded Giavno of his mortality, had pulled him from the battle for a few troublesome seconds as he pondered eternity. With great effort and determination, though, the monk had stubbornly held on to the large rock he had carried this far up the chapel’s stairs. He stumbled through the upper room’s open door and across the small bridge that led to the parapet of the outer wall. Before him monks cried out frantic instructions and scrambled to and fro, trying to avoid the near-constant rain of rocks and spears and other missiles that flew up from below.

Over to the side of the bridge, a pair of brothers worked desperately to dislodge a ladder, the top rung and the tips of its posts visible above the wall. Giavno shuffled as fast as his burden would allow, and didn’t even pause to confirm when he arrived, just threw his back against the wall immediately below the ladder posts, then heaved the rock up to his shoulder, and over farther, until it dropped from the wall and tumbled down, guided in its fall by the ladder.

He heard a shout of warning from below, followed by a scream of surprise fast turning to a howl of pain, followed by a crash. Then he dared stand, and turned to look out and regard his work.

A wave of nausea rolled over him, but, as with the pain in his arm, he gritted his teeth and pushed through it. One man lay on the ground, squirming in pain, his legs obviously shattered and his back probably so. He couldn’t have been far from the top when Giavno’s rock went over, and the more than twenty-foot fall had not been kind.

Kinder than the rock, however, which the lead climber had apparently eluded, but the spotter, or second climber, had not, taking it squarely on the head.

She, too, lay on the ground, but she wasn’t squirming, her head split open and her brains splattered about the base of the ladder.

Giavno swallowed hard. This was his first confirmed kill and a woman at that (though Giavno understood that these barbarian women could fight as well as any man he had ever known in the southland). Given the ferocity and determination of the barbarian attack, this first kill would not be Giavno’s last.

“Pull it up! Pull it up!” Giavno ordered the other two monks, for the falling rock and falling barbarians had scattered the attackers momentarily. He began to haul, and the others, emboldened by his courage, dared stand up and grab at the sides, hoisting the ladder straight from the ground.

Down below, barbarians rushed back in. One tall man leaped high and managed to grab onto the bottom rungs, and his weight halted the monks’ progress.