“Then how?” the storyteller asked, frowning heavily.
Kern should not have been worried. His friend did not mean to put him into an awkward spot. Nahud’r shrugged, and settled back. “Conan. He spin around this . . . Ymirish. After ice, it fall out from belly. Drive his sword through back of other warrior, and pin him to tree. Still alive. Free daughter, and she . . .” Here the words failed Nahud’r, so he simply made a slashing gesture across his own lap. Most every man around the fire winced and not a few of the women laughed hard and hungry for more. He shrugged again.
“They leave him there to die in snow. Painful.”
The storyteller liked the addition, and nodded. “Could be,” he admitted. “I only know as much as I heard.”
One warrior clapped Nahud’r roughly on the back, and another pressed a tankard of ale on him, which the Shemite accepted but passed on to the next man in line without drinking. For a moment, a warming blanket of camaraderie fell over the rough council, with clansmen laughing and making more than a few crude references to the Ymirish’s loss of manhood. It was as if untold numbers of Cimmerians had not died over the winter, and another hundred or more in the fighting to throw off Grimnir’s chokehold on the northwest territory. A fireside celebration to welcome a good hunt, a good battle, or even the rise of a new chieftain.
To celebrate simply being alive, Kern decided. Even though the battle was not won yet. Only the first skirmish.
Another of Kern’s men also had that same general feeling, as it turned out.
“Seems we could use Conan—and more men like him—about now,” Mogh said, speaking up from the outskirts of the gathering. He had the Callaughnan woman wrapped up in an embrace from behind, hands around her waist and head bent over to her left shoulder. But now he straightened, gathering her in at his side even though she shifted uncomfortably to be the sudden attention of a full third of the lodge.
Rudely spoken, certainly. But honest. Kern watched as Ros-Crana’s guards and a few nearby Callaughnan considered Mogh’s words, chewing them over with a sour expression, as if they’d bitten into spoiled meat.
“You think more of the Ymirish should be treated so?” Ros-Crana asked after a sharp glance in Kern’s direction.
Blaming him for the outburst? As if he’d planned for it? But Kern could not have planned for the second show of support.
“If he does not think it, he should. We all should.”
A voice Kern recognized, rising up from the warrior sitting cross-legged in front of him. Deep and strong, despite the bandaged face that made him look so weakened, Gard Foehammer was not to be confused with anyone else Kern had ever met. A confident warrior, protector of Clan Cruaidh . . .
And blinded, by foul sorceries in the battle against Grimnir’s war host. It surprised Kern that the once-proud warrior had been abandoned by Sláine Longtooth. Was now living on the mercy of Clan Callaugh.
“We should be wishing that kind of end on all Vanir who raid into Cimmeria. On Grimnir the Terror, himself!” Gard rocked forward, coming up into a crouch as he leaned first to the left, then back around to those on his right. His hidden gaze caused a few to glance away. “Wherever that creature of Ymir has holed up, you can be certain he is not feasting or telling stories around his fires. He is building up strength. He will not forget the defeat we handed him on the plateaus above Conarch.”
A younger man, barely more than a youth and reminding Kern very much of Ehmish, scoffed. “Let him remember. And when he comes, we do it to him again!”
Kern doubted the younger warrior had been a part of that last, desperate stand.
Most of Ros-Crana’s men had been, though. “I saw Grimnir take a blade through the heart,” one of them said. “By Crom, I swear the creature took wounds would have killed any three men. And he went over that cliff, at the end, and still he survives.”
“How do you fight such thing?” another asked.
More spoke up, arguing about what they had seen, or thought to see, or what the clans should do about it next. There were not a few suspicious glances shot at Kern, who had gone over that cliff face as well, pulling the giant-kin war leader with him, ready to take the frost-born northerner with him into death.
But the Cimmerian had caught a ledge partway down, and lived. Battered and bloodied, and with a great deal of skin scraped away from his hide, but nothing broken. The blind chance of fortune.
“I saw it,” one of the Aquilonian horsemen said, raising his voice to be heard above the din. He spoke well in Cimmerian. “I saw it pull the sword from its chest.”
Kern remembered the man, who had fallen from his horse in the thick of the fighting and whom he had helped rescue. The Aquilonian wore the same chain-mail shirt he’d worn in battle, but without his helm. His sandy-brown hair hung in tight ringlets over his ears. His eyes, muddy green like pond water, were quick and alive.