He hadn’t left Daol behind. Wouldn’t have left any of his warriors. His wolves.
And he knew now that at least one of his wolves hadn’t abandoned him. Not yet.
Frostpaw stood back on the ridgeline from which he’d come down. The dire wolf’s golden eyes followed Kern. Just as he hoped the rest of his pack might be following the animal’s tracks.
As the forest swallowed him up, the wolf howled. Its troubled call was lost inside a long peal of thunder, and even if it hadn’t been, Kern would not have recognized its fear. Its pain at a worrisome scent.
And not one of Kern’s guards had noticed, either, that the simple length of strong rope that had been bound about his hands ever so tightly lay on the back side of the ridge.
Burned into two separate pieces and still smoldering.
20
THE GALLA CAMPSITE wasn’t more than a league farther on, nestled right up against the mountain’s hard snow line, set within a stand of tall ponderosa pine. Canvas tents were pitched by throwing a tarp over a strong rope tied between two trees. A few hastily erected lean-tos were likewise built, thatching a sloped roof with a thick pile of evergreen branches. Deep fire pits were carefully dug away from any trees, and lined with rocks. A few cooking fires bled wisps of gray smoke into the mountain air.
Kern smelled the woodsmoke from several hundred paces.
Stomping into their campsite, he surrendered Daol to people with suspicious frowns but ready hands. It was difficult this time, putting his anger aside. All he could think about was the rough treatment of being hauled up the cliff face, the bruises and burns around his neck, and the delay in reaching the far side of the pass.
Everyone seemed to be avoiding him, treating him with a wary glance if at all, so he spent a few moments simply standing among them, face set in a dark glower. He counted a dozen women and two or three clan elders who had been waiting for the hunting parties to return. Few children or older youths—three or four that he saw. So only a small measure of the strength of their clan, then.
Spread throughout the mountains in numerous roving tribes, the Galla had never been counted and not even they likely knew their total strength. They kept to themselves, fought among themselves, and never stayed in one place very long. The nomadic clan had little patience for crops and preferred to roam after the larger herds of mountain animals. Shag-backed elk and ram. This tribe had trapped and hobbled three large gray geese, which saluted Kern’s arrival with braying honks, and kept a pack of four or five goats as well. Eggs and milk, he guessed. The goats had tangled themselves up in the trees, bleating, pulling at the end of long spider silk ropes which, miraculously, they did not try to chew.
Within a short time of roaming the campsite, he knew the reason why.
“Sp’der scent,” a young girl told him, when she saw him inspecting the line. She had trailed behind Kern for some time, always staying three wary paces away. Close enough to study the strange man, but not so close that she couldn’t run if threatened. “You A’sir?”
It took him a moment to realize she meant Aesir. One of the golden-haired icemen from the northeast land of Asgard. Above the Eiglophians, sharing a border with Vanaheim but, for several decades since, friendly to Cimmeria.
Frowning, he shook his head. His hair was lighter than most Cimmerians ever saw, except those living north of the lake country, who mingled blood with the warriors of Asgard. It was a measure of their remote life that they had not come into contact with the Ymirish. Kern hoped it would stay that way.
He doubted it.
They had allowed him free run of their camp, while Daol was seen to by the tribe’s healer. Kern had been barred from the leader’s tent, though he never strayed too far from it. The large dwelling had been made by hanging canvas sheets between a square growth of trees, with a lean-to ceiling to keep the rain and snows off. Their standard, different for every tribe of the far-flung Clan Galla, hung on a post outside of a large slit cut into one canvas wall. Not unsurprising, perhaps, it consisted of a half dozen ebony mandibles, pulled from the giant mountain spiders.
Now that he was here, Kern was just as eager to learn what ransom his captors would demand, and to get Daol back to the others and off these Crom-cursed mountains. But waiting was all they had given him to do. So he stomped among the trees, glared at the children, and wrestled with the idea of simply making his break for it, to come back with swords bared and a bloodlust to quench.
Except that he wasn’t going to do it. Could not leave Daol alone. Had no stomach for the kind of mindless slaughter already visited on Cimmeria by Grimnir’s brood and their Vanir allies.
But Crom curse him if he would stand around meek as one of their roped goats as well! He had waited as long as he was willing.