Cimmerian Rage(4)

Garret Blackpatch was fortunate to have his remaining eye at all after tangling with Grimnir’s saber-toothed cats. Three weeks after the fact, the three angry stripes torn down the right side of his face were still crusted over with scabs and a bit red around the edges. The ruined socket hid behind a packing of boiled cloth and a wide, black, leather patch.

For his part, Kern staked small spears of beef next to a small pit ringed with blocky pieces of shale. It took him almost as much time to start the small campfire with flint and steel as it did for Ossian to find handholds, scale back up the cliff face, and run himself off the escarpment. The flames ate up soft tinder and crackled into a spread of dry, brown pine needles. They were licking along the first few sticks of deadwood when the Taurin warrior stomped into camp, brushing past Kern.

“No blades,” Kern warned.

Ossian grunted and pushed by after the others.

Reave and Aodh crouched down near Garret, their backs toward the building fire as they examined a shaggy, gray blanket of mountain ram fur. Oblivious. Discussing who had the better claim with a minimum of shoving. Reave had size between the two men, and with his black, brushy beard and coarse hair was a fairly shaggy beast himself. But Aodh, even with salt-and-pepper hair telling his age, was nobody’s victim. So they argued.

Garret, on the other side of the two, facing back toward Kern and Ossian, saw the other warrior coming. Kern noticed the exaggerated widening around his left eye and the hint of a mischievous gleam in their cold, blue depths. But Garret said nothing, dropping his gaze. Letting Ossian approach, tap Reave on the shoulder, and, when the large man looked around, slug him right in the jaw.

Leave it to Ossian to go right after the biggest opponent first.

With a shout Aodh rose from the ground, putting his shoulder into Ossian’s gut and driving the other man backward. Hard. They staggered through Kern’s fire pit, stuffing out the flames under Aodh’s leather boot.

Kern rocked back, away from the small explosion of acrid smoke and sparks, watching as the two wrestled back and forth, kicking apart his circle of stones, knocking over the spears of meat. Neither man with a clear advantage. Then Ossian doubled his hands together into one huge fist, and brought it down on the back of Aodh’s neck.

Aodh sagged to his knees, then splayed out over the ground on the next stunning blow.

But with a roar of savage delight, Reave waded back into the fight. He caught up Ossian from behind in a great bear hug, trapping the man’s arms at his side and lifting him bodily from the ground.

Ossian’s feet lashed back in mule kicks, beating at Reave’s muscular thighs, searching for the groin. But Reave was too canny a fighter. He turned his hips away, then, with a twisting throw, hurled Ossian in a spinning fall that smashed him into the ground and rolled him into a heap back near Garret Blackpatch.

He lay there a moment, too stunned to pick himself up, while Aodh shook his own head clear and Reave spit out some blood and rubbed at his bruised jaw. Then Ossian flopped himself onto his back and bellowed a great, full-chested laugh at the blue sky overhead.

Reave chuckled and Aodh, still on hands and knees, beat a fist at the ground, too dizzy to laugh but joining in as he could. Garret smiled thinly, then winced. His ruined eye pained him worse on bright days, for some reason. The shaman had said it would be because his left was now working twice as hard.

“Did I miss something?”

Daol strolled back into the clearing, his bow in one hand and a pair of pheasant held by the feet in the other. He dropped the scrawny birds on the ground next to Kern. Eighteen summers and still filling into his manhood, there was no better hunter Kern had ever met than Daol. And if there was ever a better tracker, it could only be Daol’s father, Hydallan.

The younger man also knew very well what had happened. His air of innocence was laid on just a bit too thick.

“An argument,” Kern said, encouraging the fire back to life. He nodded at the birds. “That was fast.”

“Hunting is good up here.”

It was. For all kinds of prey.

Spring’s return had been very late, the winter-of-no-end threatening Cimmerian clans with starvation as well as their facing the usual raids mounted by northern invaders. Kern recalled how close their home village of Gaud had come to ruin. Scraping the bottom of the food pits. Their new chieftain, Cul, encouraging the old and the weak to offer up their own lives so that the village, the clan, would endure. Such a waste.

But with the sun’s return, and the snowmelt, game was plentiful and very active as animals made up for lost months. Some said it was the recent defeat of Grimnir’s army that finally ended the long freeze. Most scoffed, but Kern was not so certain anymore. Cimmerians were not usually so superstitious, but how could the question not be raised in the minds of those who had witnessed the unnatural powers of Grimnir’s sorcerers?