A Cavern of Black Ice (62 page)

Bannen. They had once sworn oaths to
Blackbail, had fought beside the Hail chief at the battle of Mare's
Rock, yet that almost wasn't important. It was where they
lay
that counted. The Banhold pushed far into Blackhail's southern reach.
Take it, and Bludd would have a base for attacking the Hail Wolf
himself. Vaylo had thought long on this and knew that an attack upon
Blackhail would be better coming from the south, not the east. Gnash
could not be bested; the Gnashhold was crammed with Dhoonesmen and
its roundhouse was as good as a fort. Bannen, though… Bannen
was something else. Bannen could be taken. Blackhail and Dhoone would
be expecting the Dog Lord to strike west, take Gnash or Dregg. They
would not think he would move south instead. Bannen herself would not
be expecting an attack; her doors would not be barred, her livestock
would be afield, and the foot-thick layer of sod that lay over her
roundhouse could be doused and set alight.

Vaylo arched low in the saddle, letting
the wind stream his braids behind him. Once he had Bannen, he could
begin taking Blackhail's sworn clans. Scarpe first. The Hail Wolf's
birthclan. No one would weep to see them taken. Dregg next, though
the Dreggsmen were hard-bred warriors and Vaylo knew they would give
him a fight. Orrl last. Vaylo had respect for Orrl; like Bludd, they
knew what it was like to live on the far edge.

"Do you mean to outrun your army,
Bludd chief?" Vaylo looked around to see Drybone pulling
alongside him on his gray. In the fading light he looked little like
a clansman, and Vaylo found himself wondering why his Trenchland
mother had sent him away. Surely he would have fit in well enough in
Hell's Town?

The Dog Lord managed a grim smile.
"What's the matter, Dry, frightened I'll get to Bannen ahead of
you?"

Drybone shook his head. "Just
worried about an ambush, that's all."

"Cautious as ever."

"Tell me you haven't thought of it
yourself."

Vaylo could not. There was
always
chance of an ambush. "Open ground between here and Bannen. We'll
be there before the moon peaks."

"We're close to Gnash, Scarpe,
Dregg… even Ganmiddich. The middle clans are all pressed
close."

With a small pull on the reins, Vaylo
slowed his horse. He knew better than to trade words with Cluff
Drybannock. It was close to dark now, the sun sinking in a red sky.
The dying wind smelled of cold things from the north, of frozen lakes
and ice fields and glaciers. Vaylo tasted old memories in his mouth,
and the old desires rose with them. Looking into the blackness beyond
the setting sun, he said, "Sometimes I wish I could just ride
away, Dry. Head north and never come back."

"Join the Maimed Men?"

Vaylo laughed. "It wouldn't be the
worst thing. I swear I thought of it a thousand times when I was a
boy. To have the badlands and the entire Want as my ranging ground,
to ride with storms against my back and the Gods Lights in my face
and a hard frost beneath me."

"And to lose two ears, three
fingers, and a nose to the 'bite?"

It was true enough. The Maimed Men were
an unhoused, unnamed clan who wandered the farthest reaches of the
badlands. It was said that no man or woman among them was whole, that
all had lost limbs or appendages to the frost. It was also said that
the Maimed Men had come into being the year Morrow was wiped out by
Dhoone and that many who rode their ranks could trace their ancestry
back to the Lost Clan. Vaylo didn't know the truth of it. As a child
he had started north to join them a dozen times. He was a bastard,
and his father wished he had never been born, and everyone knew the
Maimed Men accepted traitors, exiles, and bastards.

Suddenly sober, Vaylo said, "We'll
ride at trot to Bannen."

Two thousand men slowed to Drybone's
shouted order. Drybone himself moved back into the ranks; he was
seldom comfortable riding at the head of a line.

Vaylo rode south and then west as the
terrain demanded. The moon rose, half of it, and silver light ran
upon the snow. Vaylo kept his mind in the now as he rode, determined
not to think of another night similar to this one, of another ride
upon the white.

The northeastern border of the Banhold
was formed by a giant stand of black spruce, each tree as tall as
thirty men. There were streams to be forded and ancient glacier
tracks to circumvent and pale stone ruins where the horses feared to
tread. As they neared the trap rock cliffs that protected the
Banhouse, Vaylo sent six men forward as scouts.

Only one came back.

The man, a little red-haired bowman
from Broddic, had taken a quarrel to the meat of his upper arm—clean
through the stewed-leather munnion he was wearing. Vaylo called a
halt, and all his sons and warlords and the warlords of his sworn
clans gathered in a great circle around the bowman.

"They know we're coming,"
said the bowman, still atop his horse. "And there's more than
just Bannen."

"Cawdo!" shouted the Dog Lord
to the Bludd healer who was far back in the ranks. "Come forward
and see to this man." Then to the bowman. "Who else is
present, and in what numbers?"

The bowman swallowed. His face was
ghastly pale. "I saw Dhoonesmen… I'm not sure of their
numbers. They were waiting below the cliff, quiet as the dead. What I
saw had spears." He grimaced as the healer bade him slide from
the horse. "A Blackhail bowman—"

"
Blackhail
?" The
words fell like ice from the Dog Lord's mouth. A ripple of quiet,
made up of held breaths and unmoving limbs, spread through the
company of two thousand men. Suddenly it did not matter how the
ambush had come into being, who among the Bludd-sworn clans had given
word to Bannen. It mattered only that Hailsmen stood in the valley
below.

Cawdo Salt pressed hard fingers into
the bowman's arm as he snapped the arrow shaft near the base. Wood
broke with a sickening crack. The bowman swooned, but Cawdo held him
firm. Vaylo could not take his eyes off the man's blood, black and
shiny in the moonlight.

"How many Hailsmen did you see?"
he heard himself ask.

"Not many. Less than two hundred.
Mostly it's Bannen and Dhoone."

Cawdo held a flask to the man's lips
and bade him drink.

Pushing away the flask, the bowman
said, "They've taken the best positions at the neck of the
valley, along the rise, behind the Banhouse. All high ground except
the cliff is theirs. We'd have to ride through the bottleneck of the
valley to reach them."

The Dog Lord nodded. "Drink, man,"
he murmured. Cawdo Salt had a silver-bladed knife in his hand, and
Vaylo knew the healer was readying himself to cut out the arrowhead.

"We must turn back," Drybone
said in a strange voice. "We don't know their numbers. They're
well entrenched in their positions, they know the ground, and they
haven't just come off a five-hour ride."

"We strike now, bastard,"
Pengo Bludd hissed. "There's Hailsmen in that valley, and I for
one don't care whether they hold all the ground between here and the
Night Sea. I'd ride through wildfires and ice storms just to place my
hammer into a single Hailish skull."

Not one muscle in Cluff Drybannock's
face changed as Pengo spoke, yet Vaylo saw the anger in his eyes. He
was probably the only one among two thousand who did.

"We can split up," Thrago
said, his hammerman's chains rustling as he kicked his mount forward.
"Take the cliff from two sides. Have the Broddic archers cover
us as we go down."

Pengo was quick to nod, one of his
black braids falling loose from his helmet as he did so. "And we
can send a troop of spearmen wide to attack the rear."

"Aye," agreed the HalfBludd
warlord, "and post another west to flank them."

"And hold two hundred pikesmen in
reserve—

"
Enough
!" roared the
Dog Lord. "We will not split ourselves a dozen times over, like
a leg of pork carved at table. We are Bludd and Bludd-sworn, and we
are the Stone Gods' chosen, and we will not ride like cravens to this
or any other fight. Pengo. You will take a hundred men only and ride
wide. Take up position a league south of the Ban-house, ready to
cover a retreat if needed."

Pengo glowered. "You said we would
not ride like cravens. Yet you talk of retreat in the same breath."

"It's one thing to act bravely,
another thing entirely to act like a fool. There is danger here. As
Cluff Drybannock said, there is much unknown to us. I will not lead
men into this battle without being sure I have a way out." As he
spoke, Vaylo was aware of Drybone, sitting his horse at the far
edge of the circle, watching him with Sull-blue eyes. I
know you
are right, Dry
, he wanted to say.
This is not a wise thing
to do, but sometimes we must do things out of rage, not wisdom. If
you were wholly clan, you would know that. But you are not, and I
would have you no other way
. Instead he said, "Dry, I want
you and your swordsmen with me."

Drybone nodded.

It would have to do. There was no time
for anything more. While Cawdo Salt cut a cross into the Broddic
bowman's arm, turning the circular wound into something larger that
could be more easily stitched, the Dog Lord and his warlords planned
their strike. They settled on riding for an extra ten leagues and
approaching the valley from the west, not the northeast as expected:
Strike hard and fast and work their way south toward Pengo's
position.

A second silent strategy lay beneath
the spoken one, and fifteen hundred Bluddsmen knew it: Kill every
Hailsman in sight.

Vaylo led the main body west. The
ground shook beneath the Bludd host, and the night wakened to their
calls. Screams and terrible low bellows, Stone Gods named and named
again, wolf howls, and desperate low keening thickened the air like
smoke. Vaylo pulled his hammer from its sling and whirled it high
above his head. Three stone of lead, limewood, and steel, yet it
moved like a goddess in his hand. The bloodlust was upon him, and for
the first time in eleven days and eleven nights, he allowed his mind
to settle in the place where he kept his losses.

Seventeen grandchildren dead.

When he descended to the valley floor
and the Dhoone host rose to meet him, he saw fear in their gray blue
eyes. His hammer smashed into a iron-helmed skull, unhorsing the
first foe that he met. Sword blades licked him like cold fire. All
around, black spruces bent and rippled in the quickening wind.
Torches circling the Banhouse burned red, but the half-moon stole
their glory, turning the fields of snow blue. Vaylo smelled resin and
sword metal and the stench of his own fear. Ahead he saw the Dhoone
foreguard and the wing of spearmen that flanked them. The Bloody Blue
Thistle had been raised above the black dome of the Banhouse, and the
standard blew straight and true and to the south.

Blackhail arrows rained from the sky,
their shafts black as night, their arrowheads bound to their
nocks by cords of silver wire. Vaylo swatted them from the air with
his hammer, furious that the men who sent them were out of sight. The
Dhoone foreguard felt his wrath as he rode upon them, howling like
the Dog Lord that he was. Ranks of mounted Dhoone swordsmen closed
around him, yet any man who drew within hammer range received a kiss
of lead and steel for his trouble.

Dhoone steel screeching against his
armor, braids lashing against his back, Vaylo screamed for Blackhail
to take the field.

At his back Cluff Drybannock killed men
with a cool efficiency that Vaylo found mildly disturbing. Dry's
longsword was sharp and heavy, and its double-edged blade could
pierce all but the thickest plate. He was deadly silent as he fought,
his face unmoved by fear or anger, his eyes always looking two moves
ahead.

With Drybone at his back, Vaylo felt
safe to push farther into the Dhoone line. To the east, he saw the
first of the Bannen swordsmen moving to cut off the Bludd rearguard.
The Bansmen were dressed in cloaks of gray leather trimmed with moose
felt, and their swords were things of clannish beauty, the steel
burned with acid until it shone black. The Bansmen sang a slow
metered deathsong as they marched down the slope, wailing about some
ancient battle where the Wolf River ran with blood.

The deathsong drove the Dog Lord to
distraction, and he prayed that some hawk-eyed bowman would put an
arrow through the head singer's tongue. Vaylo was choked by
Dhoonesmen, tantalized by brief glimpses of Hailsmen on the far edges
of his reach. His hammerman's chains rattled in fury as he swung his
hammer in ever widening circles. His throat was hoarse from
screaming. Dead men rode past him, slumped over their horses' necks,
blood oozing from cracks in their plate. A piece of
a
man's
face was glued to his hammerhead, yet he could spare no moment to
pick it away.

This battle was madness,
madness
,
yet he had no choice but to keep moving forward. A lance shattered
against his breastplate, sending splinters flying into his eyes and
knocking him sideways in the saddle. When a hand reached over to
steady him, he didn't need to glance over his shoulder to know who it
was.

Mist began rolling north from the Wolf
River, and soon the snow-fields were a sinking ground of scattered
forces and unhorsed men.

Vaylo's shoulder ached with a deep and
terrible pain, yet he kept his hammer swinging in spite of it. There
were Bludd swordsmen ahead of him now, hacking at Dhoone spears.
Vaylo saw one man with a spear rammed so far down his throat that he
had been impaled upon his fallen horse.
An axman from Clan Gray
,
the Dog Lord thought with a small shudder.
Truly, they are the
cursed clan
.

Finally they broke the Dhoone line…
and Vaylo did not fool himself for one instant that it was his doing.
Yes, he had rage and a hammer that never stopped. But it was Drybone
and his crew, going one-on-one against the Dhoonesmen, that saved the
day. Cluff Drybannock came alive in moonlight. His movements had a
grace that all other clansmen lacked, and once he found his rhythm he
could strike or unhorse a Dhoonesman with every blow. When the mist
came and Vaylo was hard-pressed to see ten feet ahead of the Dog
Horse's neck, it was Drybone who forced a path in the whiteness,
Drybone who stood upon his stirrups and murmured, "There's a
break in the Dhoone line to the west." Vaylo looked and squinted
but could see nothing but the arses of Bluddsmen's horses.