In fact, if there was one good thing to be said of the battlefield, it lacked the sense of horror that seemed to follow the Vanir raiders and their Ymirish masters. Perhaps this one had been too evenly matched for one side or the other to gain an overwhelming advantage, and it was simple butchery for hate’s sake. But even as he thought it, looked for the signs of it, Kern had a deepening suspicion that something was not quite right. That he had overlooked a telltale sign, and it was lurking on the battlefield . . .
Waiting to stand up and club him senseless.
What was wrong here? He stopped and turned a slow circle. Brow furrowed.
Aodh noticed. Strong, stalwart Aodh, who had not had much to say since Gaud, especially to Kern Wolf-Eye. But his grief and the previous night’s outburst notwithstanding, he obviously noticed Kern’s consternation, and it set him immediately on his guard. Hand on sword. Eyes sweeping the near horizons while Kern looked at the nearby corpses.
“Kern?”
He circled again. “Something . . .”
Finally, he had to push it out of his mind, weighing it on the side of his midnight jitters. The aching head. The pounding of his blood that never seemed to quiet these days.
He let it go before his shortened temper threatened to get the better of him once again.
The others scattered out, though he gave no order. Didn’t have to. To survive, his warriors had learned how to scavenge off the dead, like carrion birds themselves. Now they walked among the dead, looking for weapons better than they already had, a piece of clothing or a warmer blanket. Always, always for food.
No reason to look for survivors. The flies, the odor that was strong enough to leave a rancid taste burning at the back of his throat . . . they were days too late for any kind of rescue. Any help.
Or for much in the way of salvaged gear. The field had been picked over fairly well. Sacks dumped out. Clothing sliced open. One side or the other had used horses, too—either as pack animals or chargers. There were several carcasses, field butchered for the biggest hanks of meat. Well, some Lachiesh clans were known to tame wild horses, and after watching the Aquilonians, Kern could appreciate, at least, the value of good horsemen.
Though it confused him, a moment later, to see what looked like a horseman’s lance run through the back of a dark-haired Cimmerian. A crust of blood stained the man’s lips, and Kern all but tasted its metallic taste far back in his throat as well as he imagined that the hand guiding the lance had been a clansman as well. Imagined it.
Knew it.
A mistake. In the night or predawn gloom, this could happen. A charger running down his own man. Maybe one that ran in too close among a good-sized target of Vanir swordsmen.
But then . . . where were the Vanir?
That, he suddenly realized, was what the itching thought nagging at the back of his mind had been. There were nay flame-haired Vanir raiders littered across this field!
Not one that he’d seen. And the Vanir did not collect their dead. They stripped them as they would an enemy corpse, plundering their own, and moved on. While Kern’s group had, with an advantage, often come out of a bloody fight without loss of life, the size of this one—fifteen . . . twenty men laid out for the crows—argued against the thought.
Which was when the sinking sensation dropped down through his stomach. Left him reeling from one corpse to the next, looking for any sign of the northern raiders, or their Ymirish masters, and remembering all the while the caution of the Galla chieftain. That Kern would not like what he found.
Aodh looked over, never having wandered far. And Nahud’r paused in his search into the bottom of a leather sack. Both men looked askance at the other, and at Kern.
“Tell me,” Kern said, his voice thick and heavy.
He stood in the middle of the death ground, surrounded by bodies, and did not want to believe that such trouble was happening. Now of all times.
“Tell me that this battle was nay Cimmerian,” he said. “On both sides.”
24
NO PROVING IT was or wasn’t, but Kern knew. He knew. Two Cimmerian clans, large ones by the looks of things, had gone to war. A feud, spilling over from raids and thieving, and into bloody conflict.
The echoes of that battle hung with him through the night and most of the next day, and might have plagued him further if the real threat to Cimmeria had not made itself felt again. No burned-out huts. No abused corpses. He had nearly forgotten the danger of Vanaheim.
But as early twilight fell over Murrogh Forest a host of insects swarmed in the sudden coolness, drawn by body heat and fresh blood. Kern, sword bared but held easily, pushed his way through the drooping branches of an old willow. The ground squelched underfoot. Marshy. Smelling of rotted wood and stale water. And something else he tasted on the very edge of the heady odors.