Cimmerian Rage(47)

After coming to Taur’s rescue, during his first week as an outcast, Kern had suggested it to both Liam Chieftain and Maev. That the two villages—so often rivals, but both facing the same enemy now—combine their strength (and their stores) to weather out the unnaturally long winter and fend off the deadly Vanir raids. Maev had taken a huge chance in that discussion, offering to challenge Cul. As Burok Bear-slayer’s daughter, her voice would be heeded, she promised. And when Kern’s band of warriors left, it had seemed that Taur was firmly considering such an alliance.

Apparently, it had gone much further.

The Gaudic lodge hall was made to resemble something of what the Taurin had learned in fending off raid after raid. A breastwork of earth and stone had been piled up around the lodge, with a tangle of sharpened poles set in the breastwork to stick out at all angles, making any charge against the lodge a dangerous and costly one. There was one gate, solidly built and reinforced with posts set deep in the earth. And behind the defenses, some V-shaped walls where warriors could hunker down in some protection, popping up or to the side long enough to fire arrows at anyone trying to breach the breastworks, then ducking back.

Good, solid work. Certainly it must have given even Grimnir pause, as the giant-kin threw away lives in vain attempts to breach the walls.

A pile of Vanir corpses lay off to one side, with two of the larger, frost-haired Ymirish thrown atop. The Gaudic defense had claimed its share of blood, and the metallic, spoiled smell was strong.

Too strong, in fact, to come from the stacked bodies. And beneath was a bitter, latrine odor. A slaughter pit’s odor.

He knew that it came from the ransacked lodge hall. Knew what he would find inside.

No one else had ventured close, though the breastworks gate had been ripped aside and the lodge hall entry stood open. One of the doors was missing. The other bumped back against the wall as a cutting breeze gusted through the village ruins. A slow and irregular thump, like a dying heartbeat.

Strom, Valerus, and Niuss walked up, their horses tethered back away from the slaughter. The Aquilonians wore identical expressions of obvious disgust and horror.

“Senseless,” Strom said, breaking the uneasy silence that had gripped the Cimmerians. “Like carrion jackals throwing up on what they can’t eat, to spoil it.”

Kern suspected it went deeper than that. Grimnir had proven time and again that he was not beneath such a massacre. The Aquilonians, in their time at Conarch, had not witnessed such willful destruction until these last few days.

But Kern’s warrior band had. Maran and Gaud were not the first dead villages they’d walked through.

“Anyone?” he asked Hydallan, who waited nearby with his son and a handful of others.

The veteran hawked and spat to one side, as if clearing a foul taste. “Nay.” He shook his head. Drops of rainwater fell off the brim of the old tracker’s peaked cap. “A-waitin’ for you.”

Kern stared up into the sky a moment, letting the brittle-cold drizzle wash his face clean of any show of weakness. Not in front of “the pack.” Not if he wanted to keep them focused, now, in the most desperate of times. He waited, letting the rain beat back the warming rage that flushed his face and crawled angry, biting hornets across his scalp. Violet sparks of power lit off behind his eyes, nearly blinding him with a sudden and intense ache that stabbed into his brain. But he tightened down against any incoherent madness as well. This was not the time.

Then, scrubbing the water away with a rough-callused hand, he nodded and strode forward for the ruined gate and the lodge hall compound.

A dozen clansmen followed.

How the Vanir finally broke their siege of the lodge hall was clear enough. Fire arrows had scorched the walls but failed to catch. The pile of bodies outside the breastworks proved that Cul—or someone—had set a solid-enough defense. But a little war craft ingenuity went a long way. Kern stopped just inside the gate to study the near side of the lodge, where two giant lengths of timber rested up against the half-caved-in wall. Young watchtower trees, stripped of most of their thick branches and hauled in from several leagues away by his guess. Six times as tall as a man. By foul sorcery or superhuman strength the two timbers had been stood up on one side of the lodge hall defense, and then let go to tip and fall over the spiked palisade, earthworks, and all.

A bridge.

He could easily picture in his head the Vanir raiders, whipped into a frenzy by Grimnir and the Ymirish, climbing onto the thick boles and racing a quick gauntlet of arrows and spear thrusts to make it over the deadly breastworks, then leaping down into the compound.

Heard them all yelling their savage battle cries . . .