Cimmerian Rage(59)
... Cimmerians!
A tight-lipped smile edged over Kern’s lips. He did have one last idea. A resource he had not yet used at Gaud, with the fighting hand to hand along the village paths. But if he could get them close in, against an unprepared enemy ...
An idea sparked in the dark corners of his mind. They did not have much time, but perhaps just enough.
Kern found Gard waiting nearby, squinting into the nearby forest. The pale welt scars on his face were the only reminder left of what the Cruaidhi protector had come through. His eyes were clear and bright, and a calm, cold blue.
“Gard,” Kern said, getting the man’s attention.
“Find me Strom and Valerus.”
15
SWORD IN HAND, bronze-faced shield tucked in tight against his left side, Kern splashed through a stream of muddy runoff right behind Nahud’r as the two men fought their way through the forest, back toward Gaud. His breath loud in his own ears. The taste of blood in the back of his throat.
Splashes of cold water soaked into the fur lining of his boots, his kilt, and dribbled icy touches over his bared legs. A warm sweat mixed with the blood trickling down from a gash near his hairline, stinging at the corner of his right eye, staining his upper lip with a salty taste. All around him he heard the crashing of bodies shoving through heavy brush, bodies that might have been his friends, and might not.
The shouts and curses in the nasal, Nordheimir language that chased after them suggested not.
They had not waited in Gaud. Kern hadn’t wanted to surrender the advantage that being the aggressor provided. Instead, his pack had ghosted through the forest that most of them grew up in, knew so well that every tree, every stack of thorny brush, was as familiar as the cold and lifeless homes, which were all that was left of their village. They pressed north to meet the nearest band of Vanir raiders, laying an ambush alongside a sunken streambed with new-flowering bellberry brush to cloak them and charging out like vengeful spirits to cut down the first half dozen raiders, who had run ahead of their own war host.
With two warriors to their one the slaughter was bloody, and brief.
That advantage hadn’t lasted long as more raiders charged forward under the call of their leader’s blasting horn, shouts of “Ymir-egh” on their lips. Yells and curses turned into the desperate grunts of pitched battle, torn apart by the occasional shout of pain. Kern, Nahud’r, and Reave held the center of the Cimmerian line for another desperate moment, while Ehmish was sent scurrying, to pass the order to fall back on Gaud. Then they, too, turned and fled, falling back toward the village, and a second line of defense.
For his size and bulk, Reave was as fleet-footed as a mountain ram, bounding over fallen logs and pounding up hillsides as if nothing could stand in his way. Kern and Nahud’r had kept up with him, until the dark-skinned Shemite slipped in a muddy patch and sprawled across the forest floor in a graceless slide.
Kern recovered the man’s dropped scimitar.
Nahud’r scrambled back to his feet.
Both men ran.
The call of Vanir horns, of raiders on the hunt, rolled and echoed all around them now, answered from at least two different directions by horns and by the maddened howling of a wolf. Kern’s wolf. Finally, he caught fresh glimpses of wattle-and-daub walls barely showing through the tangled branches of a pair of ancient cedar.
An arrow whistled over Kern’s shoulder, embedding itself in the meaty tree just ahead.
And from behind one of the trees, Daol stepped out, war bow strung with a hunting arrow and already drawing a bead on the raiders chasing after Kern and Nahud’r. With an easy breath he loosed the taut string and sliced the long shaft barely a hand breadth over Kern’s head. A blood-choked scream turned Kern’s attention behind him for a quick glance. In time to see a tall, flame-haired Vanir clutch at the arrow that transfixed his throat before he tumbled to the ground with a dying gargle.
Kern smiled wolfishly, bidding the fallen raider to eternal darkness and cold flame. The thought warmed him, if only for a moment.
Daol stepped back behind the cedar as Kern and Nahud’r ducked beneath a low-slung branch and also swung into the tree’s protective shadow. Reave rested back against the red bark of the second tree, gulping down large breaths of air, greatsword resting tip forward into the earth as he rubbed at the raw wound in his shoulder. His upper lip was swollen and split, and blood stained his teeth. Pushing away from the cedar, he led the small group out from under the spreading branches and into the cleared land that led down into Gaud.
“Sure and you got their attention,” the large man said with a feral grin.
Ashul and Desagrena, the band’s two women, ran in from the tree line a stone’s throw around to the west. As a group they fell back between two mud-walled hovels. Found Ehmish and Garret Blackpatch already crouched by the stone foundation of one building. Ehmish shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Garret, with at least three times the younger man’s years, leaned back against the wall, conserving his strength.