Glen Cook - The Fire In His Hands

“Half of us are down,” Bragi observed, after studying the main action. “Bors. Rafnir. Tor. Tryggva. Both Haralds. Where’s Bjorn?”

Ragnar, roaring and laughing, stood out of the fray like a cave bear beset by hounds. Bodies lay heaped around him.

“We’ve got to help.”

“How?” Haaken was no thinker. He was a follower and doer. A strong-backed, stolid, steadfast lad.

Bragi had all of his mother’s intellect and a little of his father’s crazy courage. But the situation had rattled him. He did not know what to do. He wanted to run. He did not. With a bellow imitative of Ragnar’s, he charged. Fate had made his decision for him.

He had discovered what had become of Bjorn. Ragnar’s lieutenant was charging him from behind.

No warning could reach Ragnar’s blood-drugged brain. All Bragi could do was race Bjorn to his prey.

He lost the footrace, but prevented the traitor’s blow from being fatal. Bjorn’s deflected blade entered Ragnar’s back kidney high. Ragnar howled and whirled. A wild blow from the haft of his axe bowled Bjorn into a snowdrift.

Then the Wolf’s knees buckled.

The rebels whooped, attacking with renewed ferocity. Bragi and Haaken became too busy to avenge their father.

Then twenty rebels wailed.

Ragnar surged to his feet. He roared like one of the great trolls of the high Kratchnodians.

There was a lull as the combatants eyed one another.

The pain had opened the veil across Ragnar’s sanity. “A crown has been lost here tonight,” he muttered. “Treason always begets more treason. There’s nothing more we can do. Gather the wounded.”

For a while the rebels licked their wounds and fought the fire. But the raiders, burdened with wounded, gained only a few miles head start.

Nils Stromberg went down and could not get up again. His sons, Thorkel and Olaf, refused to leave him behind. Ragnar bellowed at all three, and lost the argument. They stayed, their faces turned toward the glow of the burning longhouse. No man could deny another his choice of deaths.

Lank Lars Greyhame went next. Then Thake One Hand. Six miles south of Hjarlma’s stead, Anders Miklasson slipped down an icy bank into the creek they were following. He went under the ice and drowned before the others could chop through.

He would have frozen anyway. It was that cold, and the others dared not pause to light a fire.

“One by one,” Ragnar growled as they piled stones in a crude cairn. “Soon there won’t be enough of us left to drive off the wolves.”

He did not mean Hjarlma’s men. A pack was trailing them. The leader already had made a sally at Jarl Kinson, who kept lagging.

Bragi was exhausted. His wounds, though minor, nagged him like the agonies of a flensing knife in the hand of a master executioner. But he kept silent. He could do no less than his father, whose injury was much greater.

Bragi, Haaken, Ragnar and five more lived to see the dawn. They evaded Hjarlma and drove the wolves off. Ragnar went to ground in a cave. He sent Bragi and Haaken to scout the nearby forest. The searchers passed near the boys, but without slowing.

Bragi watched them go, Bjorn, the Thane and fifteen healthy, angry warriors. They were not searching. They were talking about waiting for Ragnar at Draukenbring.

“Hjarlma’s not stupid,” Ragnar said when he received the news. “Why chase the Wolf all over the woods when you know he has to return to his lair?”

“Mother —”

“She’ll be all right. Hjarlma’s scared to death of her.”

Bragi tried reading behind his father’s beard. The man spoke softly, tautly, as if he were in great pain.

“The war is over now,” Ragnar told him. “Understand that. The Pretender has won. The Old House is in eclipse. There’s no more reason to fight. Only a fool would.”

Bragi got the message. He wasn’t to waste his life pursuing a lost cause.

He had had fifteen years of practice reading the wisdom behind Ragnar’s terse observations.

“They’ll abandon him as quickly as they flocked to him. Eventually. They say...” A shudder wracked his massive frame. “They say there’s a demand for Trolledyngjans in the south. Over the mountains. Beyond the lands of the bowmen. Past the reeving kingdoms. There’s war a-brewing. Bold lads, bright lads, might do well while awaiting a restoration.”

Itaskia was the lands of the bowmen. The reeving kingdoms were the necklace of city states hugging the coast down to Simballawein. For half a dozen generations the Trolledyngjan dragonships had gone out when the ice broke at Tonderhofn and Torshofn, to run the gauntlet of the Tongues of Fire and plunder the eastern littoral.

“Under the shingle pine, beside the upper spring. The northwest side. An old, broken hearthstone marks it. You’ll find the things you’ll need. Take the copper amulet to a man called Yalmar at the Red Hart Inn in Itaskia the City.”

“Mother —”

“Can take care of herself, I said. She won’t be happy, but she’ll manage. I only regret that I won’t be able to send her home.”

Bragi finally understood. His father was dying. Ragnar had known for a long time.

Tears gathered at the corners of Bragi’s eyes. But Haaken and Soren were watching. He had to impress them with his self-control. Especially Haaken, on whose good opinion he depended more than he could admit.

“Prepare well,” said Ragnar. “The high passes will be bitter this time of year.”

“What about Bjorn?” Haaken demanded. The bastard child that Mad Ragnar had found in the forest, abandoned to the wolves, was not too proud to reveal his feelings.

“Ragnar, you’ve treated me as your own son. Even in lean years, when there was too little for those of your own blood. I’ve always honored and obeyed as I would a birth-father. And in this, too, I must obey. But not while Bjorn Backstabber lives. Though my bones be scattered by wolves, though my soul be damned to run with the Wild Hunt, I won’t leave while Bjorn’s treachery goes unrepaid.”

It was a proud oath, a bold oath. Everyone agreed it was worthy of a son of the Wolf. Ragnar and Bragi stared. Soren nodded his admiration. For Haaken, terse to the point of virtual non-communication, a speech of this length amounted to a total baring of the soul. He seldom said as many words in an entire day.

“I haven’t forgotten Bjorn. It’s his face, smiling, pretending friendship while he took Hjarlma’s pay, here in my mind’s eye, that keeps me going. He’ll die before I do, Haaken. He’ll be the torchbearer lighting my path to Hell. Ah. I can see the agony in his eyes. I can smell the fear in him. I can hear him when he urges Hjarlma to hurry and establish the Draukenbring trap. The Wolf lives. He knows the Wolf. And his cubs. He knows that his doom stalks him now.

“We’ll leave in the morning, after we’ve buried old Sven.”

Bragi started. He had thought that the old warrior was sleeping.

“A sad end for you, friend of my father,” Ragnar muttered to the dead man.

Sven had served the family since the childhood of Bragi’s grandfather. He had been friends with the old man for forty years. And then they had parted with blows.

“Maybe they’ll be reconciled in the Hall of Heroes,” Bragi murmured.

Sven had been a sturdy fighter who had taught Ragnar his weapons and had followed him in his southern ventures. More recently, he had been weapon master to Bragi and Haaken. He would be missed and mourned. Even beyond the enemy banners.

“How did Bjorn warn them?” Haaken asked.

“We’ll find out,” Ragnar promised. “You boys rest. It’ll be hard going. Some of us aren’t going to make it.”

Six of them reached Draukenbring.

Ragnar gave the steading a wide berth, leading them on into the mountains. Then he brought them home from the south, down a knee of the peak they called Kamer Strotheide. It was a pathway so difficult even Hjarlma and Bjorn would not think to watch it.