Dubh-Linn: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 2) (31 page)

  He could hear the sound of the men shouting one to the other but he could not make out the words. He tensed. If he had to go back and fight them there, he would, but he wanted to choose the ground himself.

  And then he heard them move again. The hounds set up a yelping and howling as they picked up the new trail. They pulled at leashes and sniffed the ground and bounded along, once again following Thorgrim’s scent through the woods, down trails that were hardly trails at all.

  Thorgrim ran on. He marveled at the power in his legs, the strength that he felt in his body as he raced through the woods. This might be his night to die, he knew, but he knew he would die well, and he would not die alone.

  The trees opened up in a small meadow, one hundred rods across, and beyond it a steep and wooded hill, like a natural wall. The starlight illuminated the open ground, but still Thorgrim was surprised at how clearly he could see in the dark night. He bounded across the field. The hounds were close, he could hear them, but he could not see them and so he knew they could not see him. He reached the far side of the meadow. A small stand of oaks backed up against the steep ground and he plunged into it. There was little underbrush, and the trees stood some distance apart. The hill behind was eroded away so it formed a sheer face, like an earthen wall. This was good. This was the place to stop and fight. Thorgrim knew he would not find better.

  He pulled to a stop and turned. His breath was coming hard and fast but he did not feel winded. He could see the hounds and men emerge from the trees on the far side of the field. Three torches cast a strange, undulating light on the scene. The hounds straining at their leashes, howling and baying and standing on hind legs as they pulled at their collars. They knew he was there, and they were desperate to get at him. And he was ready to let them come.

  The men were talking again, but still Thorgrim could not make out the words. He saw arms pointing in his direction. There seemed to be some sort of discussion. And then the men holding the leashes stepped forward and grabbed the collars of the hounds and jerked the leashes free. With a great howling and baying and barking the pack took off like stags across the open ground, tongues lolling out of mouths as they whipped across the meadow. Thorgrim watched them come. He waited. He was ready.

Odin’s wife, the earth,

I clad in a cloak of blood.

                           Egil’s Saga

Donnel was not happy about this, any of it, and had not been for some time. Morrigan had charged him with leading the search for Thorgrim and whoever else was with him. He was no stranger to this sort of thing, but he knew little of dogs and less of battle. He felt like a man riding a bull, thinking he was in control, knowing in the back of his mind that he really was not.

  The master of the hounds and his four men had brought the dogs into camp, straining on their leashes. Thorgrim’s bedding and his cloak, left behind in the tent, were shoved in their noses. It was all they needed. A quick swing around the edge of the camp allowed them to pick up the scent of the escaping fin gall, and they were off.

  Donnel had no doubt that the hounds were following a band of men, half a dozen, by his guess. He had been tracking lost sheep through every kind of countryside since he was a little boy, and he knew well how to read a trail. Indeed, he was often called upon by other sheep herders to find lost animals when they could not. And so, even though he could not say for certain that they were following Thorgrim, he knew the dogs were on the scent of men.

  They came to the woods where the escaping band had entered. In the light of the torches Donnel could see the broken branches where they had entered the tree line and various patches of disturbed earth where they had apparently fallen to the ground before standing again and moving on.

  “The hounds are on their trail, this way,” the master said, his arm pulled out straight by the straining animals on his leash, as if he was pointing down the trail. Donnel looked around him. Their war party consisted of himself and Patrick, the master of the hounds and his men, and five men-at-arms whom Morrigan had sent with them. They did not know how many of the fin gall they were tracking, but however many there were they would likely be deathly ill, and if they were not, the dogs could do most of the work of subduing them.

  Still, Donnel wanted more than anything to send the men-at-arms in first, right behind the dog handlers. Though he and Patrick had engaged in a bit of weapons training since coming to Tara, they were not fighting men, not by any means, and certainly not men to take on the fin gall. But he was also the leader of this little expedition, and that meant he had to lead, so he took his place right behind the master of the hounds. “Very well,” he said with as much authority as he could gather, “Let them take up the trail.”

  The small group plunged on through the wood, the torches casting weird, frightening shadows. Donnel cursed the dogs and their howling and yelping. He wanted to hear, to let his ears tell him what was out there. Eyes, even with torches to aid them, were all but useless in the thick woods. But they did not dare let the dogs off their leads, not yet. They would disappear into the forest and the men would have no hope of keeping up with them.

  The branches whipped their faces and grabbed their clothes as they tumbled after the frenetic dogs, deeper into the woods. He heard Patrick muttering a prayer to the Blessed Virgin and would have loved to do the same, but he did not think the men-at-arms would take it well. They did not seem to him a very pious bunch.

  They came at last to a place where the trees opened up a bit and the dogs stopped their headlong pursuit, milling about, sniffing the brush, whining. Donnel stopped before he ran into the master of the hounds, who had also stopped.

  “What is it?” Donnel asked.

  “Stream,” the master said, jerking his chin in the direction of a small stream that crossed the trail just ahead of them. “Dogs lost the scent.”

  “Do you think they took to the stream, might be walking in it?” Donnel asked. It would have been a smart move if they suspected their pursuers would have dogs.

  “Don’t know,” the master of the hounds said, and just then one of the dogs took up his baying again, not the confused whimper of the dogs searching for the scent, but the confident call of a hound on the trail. The others converged on it and soon they, too were baying loudly and once more dragging their handlers though the trees.

  The chase seemed to Donnel to go on for a long time, and he was a little surprised that men as sick as these - for he assumed they were as bad off as those they had found in camp - had managed to drag themselves so far. He wondered if perhaps they had split up, because the few glimpses of the trail that he saw in the light of the torches did not look to him like the track of half a dozen sick men staggering along. It looked, indeed, more like an animal’s track than that of a man.

 
Stupid dogs, they’ve likely picked up the scent of a fox or some such
, Donnel thought, but he kept his mouth shut. The master of the hounds knew his business.

  The trees grew thinner as they plunged on, then yielded to open ground, a meadow of some size that ended in a stand of trees and a steep hillside. Donnel could clearly see the parted grass where someone or something had passed over the ground not long before them. The trail ran straight and true like the frozen wake of a ship right to the trees at the far side of the field.

  The dogs seemed to have lost their minds. They were barking and howling and straining at the leads, but there seemed to Donnel’s inexpert ear something odd about the sound, some note to their chorus that was a little off key.

  “Are the hounds all right?” he asked the master. “Is there something wrong?”

  “They’re fine, fine. Nothing wrong, nothing wrong,” the master said but his tone, too, seemed to belie the words. “Shall we let ‘em go, eh? Let ‘em soften up them fin gall sons of whores a bit?”

  Donnel looked at Patrick, but his younger brother just looked frightened. He looked at the men-at-arms who looked tense but unafraid. One of them gave Donnel a small nod. “Very well, master, let ‘em go!” Donnel said.

  The handlers pulled the leashes short and deftly released the knots from the collars. Each dog as it was freed shot away like an arrow from a bowstring, bolting across the grass that was belly high to them, charging for the stand of oaks and whatever lay within. The last of them was released and the handlers, the master of the hounds, Donnel, Patrick and the men-at-arms charged off in their wake, racing across the open ground, ready to drag the dogs off the bleeding, shrieking Northmen, bind them and march them back.

  They were half way across the field when they saw, in the light cast from the torches, the last of the hounds disappear into the stand of trees. The barking and howling and snarling was terrific, a great chaos of sound. The men came panting to the edge of the wood and stopped, weapons drawn, and listened.

  The hounds were in a fury, their barking filled the night. And then suddenly the cry of a wounded animal, a mortally wounded hound, pierced through the sound of the others, and that was followed by another. Donnel caught the master of the hound’s eye. The man looked frightened.

  “Voices,” Patrick said, almost too soft to hear. “There are no voices, no one’s crying out. Are we sure they’ve caught the fin gall?”

  “They’ve caught the damned, bloody fin gall!” the master snapped. “The dogs ain’t stupid, they can follow a scent.” Another cry of pain was cut short in the middle, just stopped, like a flame snuffed out. The barking was noticeably diminished, as if the number of dogs had been cut in half, but it was still loud, and under it a deep throated snarling and the snapping of jaws.

  A hound burst from the underbrush, bounding away in full retreat. Its head, its chest, its forelegs appeared and then it stopped in midflight, grabbed by something unseen in the brush and dragged howling in panic back into the trees. They heard the animal’s desperate cry and then it stopped, as suddenly as the last.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph…” Donnel uttered. His hand, unbidden, made the sign of the cross and he saw he was not the only one to do so.

  It was hard to separate out the sounds, but it did not seem as if there were more than two dogs still fighting. A whimper, a crunching sound like a foot on dried twigs, and then there was one.

  The men outside the tree line took a step back. The torches were held a little higher. Donnel wiped his palms, wet with perspiration, on his mail shirt, a useless gesture. They heard a cracking of the brush, something coming through the undergrowth, moving slowly. Swords scraped out of sheaths. The last of the hounds staggered into the open, limping, its flanks a mass of blood. It made a whimpering noise and fell over dead in the grass.

  For a few seconds no one moved. All eyes were on the dog, which was all but torn apart. Then, as one, they turned and fled back across the field.

  It was not an orderly retreat but a panicked route, a mindless, terror induced race for the dubious safety of the far tree line. They plunged through the grass, stumbled on unseen obstacles, pushed each other out of the way in their flight. When they reached the trees they continued on ten feet or so, until they were fully away from the open ground. Then they stopped, heaved for breath, let the trembling subside and the humiliation set in.

  Donnel was the first to react, and his reaction surprised even him. He straightened, took a step forward and shoved the master of the hounds hard, sending him stumbling. “You stupid son of a bitch!” he hissed. “Your damned dogs were on the trail of a wolf or a bear or some damnable thing! Those were not the fin gall in there!”

  The master of the hounds straightened and took on a defensive look. “You don’t know that. I seen men take on hounds. Man who’s quick with a sword, he can stand his ground against dogs. Those were my dogs was killed there!” That last he said as if just then realizing the great loss he had suffered, and his expression changed as he spoke the words.

  Donnel turned away. He did not want to engage the man any more. “See here,” he said to the others, “back at the stream, when the hounds took off on this trail, I could see on the other side of the water that men had passed there. If the dogs didn’t take off after a wolf, then mayhap the fin gall fooled us. Anyway, we go back and we follow the trail across the stream.”

  The others grunted their agreement. Donnel grabbed one of the torches and headed back into the woods, back the way they had come. He moved quickly down the trail, well blazed by the passage of the men and the half-wild dogs. He felt a sense of relief to be leaving behind whatever it was that killed the dogs, and a sense of dread to be leading the way back into the forest, with the fin gall waiting at the other end.

  They came at last to the edge of the stream. Donnel held the torch aloft and examined the far side. He could see where the low growth had been trampled, branches broken or swept aside. He could even see the print of a leather shoe in the soft ground. He stepped closer to Patrick and the men-at-arms, who were right behind him. The master of the hounds and his men, now having nothing to do, were hanging toward the back of the column.

  “Whatever trail the damned dogs were on, I say the fin gall went that way.” He spoke just above a whisper and pointed across the stream into the blackness of the woods. He swallowed hard, braced himself to say the rest of what he had to say in an even and commanding tone. “We go after them. Let us draw our weapons now. We don’t know how far off they are, how many or what shape they are in. My guess is half a dozen and I think they’ll be near dead with the sickness Morrigan gave them, but let’s be on our guard.”

  The others just nodded. No one had anything to add. Donnel pulled his sword and the others did the same. The dog handlers had knives, and they drew those, though they looked even less certain about all of this than Donnel felt.

  Donnel turned and stepped into the stream, cold water filling his shoe. Two steps and he was across and moving along the trail of the fin gall, which was as easy to follow as if it had been a road. These men were not trying to hide their escape, and Donnel hoped it was because they were too sick to do so. Had he been alone, he would have been able to move silently enough that he could have heard all the sounds of the forest, and his quarry as well. But, with the exception of Patrick, the stumbling fools behind him were making as much noise as an army on the march.

  He held up his hand and the column stopped and he listened close. Nothing. There was no sound that he could hear, save for the soft gurgling of the stream they had left behind and the wind in the branches. He continued on, taking his steps slowly and softly, and the men behind him did the same, but it was a pointless gesture, with the shaking of the mail shirts and the various thumping and cracking and stumbling sounds they made.