Stepping up to each torch, the shaman dug into a tiny sack for a pinch of gritty powder, which he sprinkled over the flames.
Dull flames licked up suddenly bright and savage, throwing off a cleaner, yellow-flame light.
Nodding to Mogh and the black-skinned Shemite ahead of him, Kern stepped toward the wall to intercept the shaman. He waited between a pair of the hanging brands, wanting no part of the suspicious powder. After facing the dark, unnatural powers of a Ymirish sorcerer, he preferred to keep his distance.
The shaman seemed to understand that. The elderly man pulled the drawstrings on his small bag and tucked it away into a pouch on the front of his kilt as he walked up to Kern, then waited.
“You saved the boy’s life,” Kern said without preamble. Though it wasn’t fair to call him a boy anymore. Not when he had several kills. “Ehmish. You helped Wallach, and Old Finn.”
“It surprises you?” The shaman’s voice was paper thin. A harsh whisper. But it carried. “That I look after yours as well as ours?”
Kern felt lesser for admitting it, but he nodded. “It is nay what I expected.” As close as he’d come to an apology, and at the same time, thanking the venerable clansman.
“That can be said about many things, Kern Wolf-Eye. And many men.”
It gave him something more to think about, at least. He nodded again at the elder, stepped back, and turned away for Ros-Crana and her rough court.
The newly made chieftain watched him with wary eyes, fathomless blue depths like a twilight summer sky. She sat like a leader; the only warrior at this fire with a seat, back straight and hands resting easily on her thighs. Everyone else crouched, sat, or sprawled upon the rush-strewn floor. Only her two guards stood—above and behind her, their hands never far from truce-bonded swords tied with cords so thin they could break them with a simple draw.
For all of their leader’s calm presence, however, this part of the grand hall was no more or less serious—and certainly no less raucous—than the rest of the lodge. Men and women pulled each other aside for quick tests of strength or to share a quick but boisterous tale from the winter-of-no-end. In one corner, a head-butting competition looked to be about to end with both men staggering, ready to fall. Kern also saw Mogh, hovering just outside of the circle, tugging on the long hairs of his wispy moustache and talking with an older woman wearing a widow’s braid—tied down the right side of her head, leaving her left ear bared as an invitation for whispered conversation. She seemed interested.
The fireside was not much for quiet talk, though. It was loud and confident, with half of the rough-made circle listening to a not-half-bad tale from the adventures of Conan. Kern stepped up behind a man with a bandage wrapped around his head and covering half of his face as well, and crouched. Closer to the crackling fire, he shrugged back the edges of his gray wolf cloak, letting the warmth play against his bared chest. A reddish-orange flicker glowed deep down inside the silver bracers he wore on each muscular arm.
The fire trapped inside the polished metal was another illusion. The same as when his skin brightened with a pink flush he did not truly feel.
Unnatural.
He shivered, and saw Ros-Crana flinch her gaze away.
“Of course,” the storyteller continued, “Conan would not allow any Cimmerian, no warriors of Crom, to be taken by Vanir slavers. Even ones who had spurned his company. For a night and a day, he followed, chewing on carrion left behind at a raider camp, running without rest, and finally catching them in the foothills below tall, white-capped mountains.”
A tale that began to sound familiar to Kern, who shifted in his place. A Callaughnan clansman staggered over with his large hands cradling half a dozen fresh tankards, which he handed out at random. Kern drove the broken spear into the ground next to him, point first, and grabbed for one of the large metal cups.
He took a long pull at the bitter ale, washing a sour taste out of his mouth.
“Against so many Vanir, Conan worried he could not stand. So he tricked them by tying torches into the tops of some saplings, setting them blazing and bobbing to look like a line of men on the path.
“Then he crept back to the raider camp and waited for half of the warriors to leave, thinking they had found some new game to hunt. Slipping in through the shadows, Conan freed first one slave, then another, arming them with daggers and clubs and rocks, and setting them at the raiders who had imprisoned them while he hunted down the great Ymirish who led the Vanir.”
Very, very familiar. And not at all believable as told when one knew that Conan had been made king of Aquilonia years before the Ymirish first showed themselves among the northern raiders of Vanaheim. Tied to a throne, it was unlikely the great Cimmerian warrior would ever return to his native land. And less likely he would be received any better . . . any better . . .