The Tempering of Men (13 page)

“And I'll be on my belly, not my feet.”

Lying prone on the smooth stone, he scooted forward, inching by rippling his body like a snake. It was only perhaps twice the length of his body to where Kari had fallen through, but it was a long and arduous crawl for a tired, frantic man on bruised knees. Especially when he did not dare press his knees, feet, hands, or elbows to the stone to push himself forward.

With every wriggle, Brokkolfr felt as if the thunder of his heart alone were enough to break through. He imagined he felt the stone creak and settle, heard the crackle where the thin shelf of stone laid over the water might be breaking away from the supporting walls. He reached out slowly and felt the back of Kari's wet hand, the viperlike quickness with which Kari flipped that hand over and grasped Brokkolfr's wrist, the strength with which he clung.

“Brokkolfr!” Kari whispered hoarsely, his voice almost lost in the rasp of his own breathing and Brokkolfr's. He jerked his chin to the side. Pointing with his head, because he could not point with his hands.

Brokkolfr turned slowly left, scanning the dark recesses of the cave. And there, at the farthest reaches of the torchlight, found the glitter of not one but two pairs of eyes in the dark.

EIGHT

The days went by in hands, and the farther south they traveled, the greener the land became. Skjaldwulf, Ulfhoss, Frithulf, Geirulfr, north-bred all, were as round-eyed as babies, and Randulfr spent half the day with a smile tucked at the corners of his mouth. The wolves were uninterested in trees and bushes, but Mar shared with Skjaldwulf his satisfaction in the rabbits and ground squirrels they caught and devoured. All five wolves became sleek and smug, and Mar, Afi, Kothran, and Dyrver were courting Ingrun assiduously with choice tidbits. They were forming their own tiny pack, and Skjaldwulf wished Isolfr were here to tell the story. He himself could communicate very well with Mar, and he could feel the pack-sense, but he couldn't find the patterns of it the way Isolfr could.

The wolfcarls agreed that Freyvithr would have made a good threatbrother—high praise and well earned. Freyvithr took a fair share of the work when they camped at night and when they broke camp in the morning, neither complaining nor seeming to feel that his status as godsman entitled him to special treatment. He asked questions—endless questions—and listened to the answers, both plaguing Skjaldwulf for his store of eddas and lore and begging Frithulf to talk about the Iskryne campaign. Freyvithr had taken pains to learn the name of each wolf and something of their various personalities, and when he found that otherwise silent and suspicious wolfcarls would happily talk for hours about their wolves, he settled in to learn about konigenwolves and lineages and the web of relationships between the wolves of Franangford and the other heallan of the North.

Adalbrikt did his best, but he was not Freyvithr. Even Frithulf's wicked tongue and Ulfhoss' seemingly endless hoard of filthy jokes could not entirely rid him of his awe for the wolfcarls, and he treated the wolves as if they might eat him at any moment. Skjaldwulf had barely prevented himself from passing on Mar's comment that rabbits tasted better and were more fun to run.

The night they spent in Arakensberg—the most southerly wolfheall that lay on their line of march—did not help. In truth, Skjaldwulf would have been just as pleased to have avoided Arakensberg; he had never had any fondness for the wolfjarl Ulfsvith, and the few things Vethulf had said had not changed his mind. Geirulfr had not seemed any too pleased to meet his former wolfjarl again, either, although Skjaldwulf did note that other members of the Arakensbergthreat gave the young wolfcarl a warm and happy welcome.

It had been an uncomfortable night all around—the Arakensberg konigenwolf disliked having Ingrun in her territory, and Ulfsvith's brother seemed inclined to take Mar as a threat to his power. And Adalbrikt, who had stayed in the village of Franangford except for a couple of brief forays to the wolfheall, had reeked so strongly of tension and fear that Skjaldwulf could nearly smell it himself. He was positively grateful to bid Arakensberg farewell, and he heard Geirulfr humming under his breath as they set out. Freyvithr was visibly making mental notes, and Skjaldwulf expected there would be a number of questions later. He found he didn't mind.

Freyvithr might have made a wolfcarl, if he'd come to it before the goddess chose him; Adalbrikt never would. But he was anxious to please, and he was very good with the ponies. The farther south they got, the more Skjaldwulf appreciated those ponies—not for their strength, although they were sturdy and patient beasts, but because they served as a marker of respectability. The people the travelers met along the roads and when they passed through villages, like Adalbrikt found the wolfcarls alarming, even if the wolves were nowhere in sight. Skjaldwulf supposed he could see their point. Wolfcarls were warriors, and they looked it, even those who did not have Frithulf's scars. These southern folk were farmers, craftsmen; none of them had ever seen a troll, nor had their parents or their parents' parents. Skjaldwulf wondered how far back he'd have to go to find the last time trolls had come within a hundred miles of the southern sea. Maybe the archives at Hergilsberg could answer that question, too.

But the ponies seemed to reassure villagers and wayfarers, even more than Freyvithr's tattoos and medallion. Skjaldwulf wasn't sure why—bandits and murderers could certainly have ponies just as much as honest people—but he wasn't about to argue with it. Anything that made a fight less likely was a blessing. It was one reason why, even now in a region peaceful and wealthy enough to have inns, they continued to camp beside the road. There were a number of other reasons, but most of them boiled down to the same thing: staying out of any situation that might turn into a fight. Isolfr wasn't the only one who worried about teaching the wolfheallan to interact with wolfless men, and vice versa.

They had camped one night under a tree so vast that Skjaldwulf was tempted to think it must be a child of Yggdrasil, and now in the soft gray before sunrise, he was sitting on one of its massive gnarled roots, his back braced against the trunk, watching the other men sleep and listening in the pack-sense to Mar and Kothran playing a hunting game; it was far more complicated and subtle than the games puppies played but very much a development of the same thing. He hadn't known adult wolves would play like that—except with puppies—but Mar had shown him the explanation, in pictures and scents and things that were not quite words: here where all the rabbits were fat and slow, and with their brothers to cook and keep some of the meat from their kills, they did not need to hunt every day in order to have enough to eat, and they did not want to hunt if they did not need to. The smell-taste of
rotted meat
was clear enough to convince even Skjaldwulf's dull senses. But the wolves needed the feelings of hunting: the chase and the sharpness and the exertion. Skjaldwulf didn't think he understood that part entirely, but well enough to see that the game gave them the feelings they needed without wasting fat rabbits that might—Mar said, almost primly—be needed later.

Skjaldwulf was wondering, half idly, if wild wolves thought like that or if wolves bonded to men changed just as did men bonded to wolves, when something shot through the pack-sense,
bright
and
loud
and completely, utterly unfamiliar.

Frithulf and Geirulfr both went from sound sleep to bewildered defensive crouches. Ulfhoss, whose pack-sense was not as strong, grunted but did not wake. Randulfr, who had been building up the fire from where it had been banked overnight, yelped and swore.

Skjaldwulf, on his feet and trying to figure out what was going on, could feel all five wolves converging on the campsite at a dead run. It was Afi and Ingrun who had raised the alarm; they were south and east of the camp, the direction they'd been intending to travel today.
Strangers,
said Afi and Ingrun through the pack-sense, and Skjaldwulf got a jumble of image-scent-sound: men and horses, metal and leather, and all of it wrong.

Wrong how?
Skjaldwulf asked, and the wolves gave him another jumble of answers. The leather smelled wrong. The horses were too tall. The men were skin-like-earth, not skin-like-snow. They were carrying blankets on sticks. They had manes like horses.

Most of it didn't make any sense, but one thing was clear. “I think,” Skjaldwulf said to his werthreat, “that we've found the raiders.”

“Or they've found us,” said Frithulf.

*   *   *

Wolfcarls did not habitually ride to battle, and anyway these shaggy hard-hooved ponies—two bay and one dun—were pack animals from the swish of their tails to the moth-eaten fringe under each throat. Adalbrikt led them deeper into the woods, well out of sight, and there made them fast. He returned at a soft run while Skjaldwulf was picking the ground on which they'd fight. Adalbrikt might be afraid of wolves, but there was nothing wrong with his woodcraft.

The wolves could not tell Skjaldwulf if the invaders had bows, or estimate their numbers beyond a general sense of a group of men more than twice as large as the number of wolfcarls. But at least Ingrun could reach out into the pack-mind and give such information as they had. If they fell, at least Arakensberg would share what little they knew.

The choice of ground was limited. Wolves ran faster than men marched but not so much faster as that, and there would be no hiding the smell of their fire. But the forest giant under whose gray branches they had slept had shaded out a good-sized clear space underneath, and on its east side the wood grew thick with smaller trees and scrub. Across the road, on its sunny side, young oaks had filled up the open space with low branches, heavily leaved now as spring progressed into summer.

They would set their ambush there. Either the enemy would march past, in which case the wolfcarls would have their flank, or they would come into the shaded confines of the clearing and the wolves would fall on them from all sides.

Wolves understood hunting from ambush.

Skjaldwulf found the waiting harder, but he was long inured to patience and made a discipline of it, even when it came with difficulty. He breathed shallowly, straining his ears but straining even more into the pack-sense, for Mar and the other wolves would hear and smell the strangers long before the wolfcarls and wolfless men.

The leafy forest loam lay wet against Skjaldwulf's breast and cheek. The birds boasted loud as vikings in a mead-hall as the slow day brightened, coils of mist fingering down the slope to eddy across the road and deposit another layer of water-jewels on the velvet cushions of the mosses. The treetips sparked golden; soon the sun's rays would filter between their branches and burn off whatever mist was not absorbed by thirsty leaves. Skjaldwulf hoped the strangers would arrive before that happened, for the mist was to the wolves' advantage.

Adalbrikt dropped quietly into the leaves beside Skjaldwulf, his sword already in his hand and reached out crosswise before him. He no longer seemed to regard Mar, stretched out on Skjaldwulf's other side, with fear.

“They're disciplined,” Adalbrikt said. “To be on the march this early.”

“Very disciplined, for a raiding party,” Skjaldwulf answered in low tones.

And now the youngest wolves could make out the march of feet and the jingle of harness. What they told Mar, he shared with Skjaldwulf. And it was strange.

The invaders moved at a trot, like a hunting wolfcarl. But they trotted in unison, their feet hitting the ground at the same instant, like men in a shield wall or rowers in a dragonship moving with a drummer to strike the beat. Mar's ears pricked, too, his hot breaths panting back from the ground to move Skjaldwulf's beard against his face.

That was like an army and not like bandits or vikings.

“Soon,” Skjaldwulf said, for the benefit of Adalbrikt. “Soon.”

The wolfless man's breath bated, and he flattened himself into the shadow of a laurel branch.

The soldiers—they were soldiers, no mistaking it, and soldiers such as Skjaldwulf had never seen—crested a little rise in the road and came into view.

They were a dozen in number, jogging three abreast and four deep along the road, crowded on each side by boughs and fronds of which they took no notice. They were dressed identically, like a rich man's children, and they were swarthy-skinned, though not black like svartalfar—as if they had been burned dark by some stronger foreign sun.

Their kit, too, spoke to him of climes too warm to imagine—boots made of straps wound round their feet, woven like strainer-baskets with gaps between. Bare legs that rose and fell like the shaft of a treadle, linen shirttails or tunics flapping beneath armor skirts studded with bronze. They wore breastplates—they
ran
in breastplates—of hammered bronze and helms stiff with crests of horsehair, which gave Skjaldwulf a favorable impression of their fitness.

Each of them carried a large rectangular shield across his back and was armed with daggers, a spear (held high, two or three of them snapped with banners), and a shortsword thrust through his belt. They were a brave sight in red and bronze, bright cloaks furling in the breeze of their own movement.

Skjaldwulf would have liked to get a better look at the blades of those swords, but from his glimpses of the tangs, he imagined steel or iron. Not bronze, anyway.

Of the two, iron would be better.

Behind the soldiers followed what Skjaldwulf took to be a foreign jarl, drawn behind a bay pony in a weird two-wheeled dogcart that he rode standing. Behind
him
came a larger cart, this one laden with the spoils of their foray. No raiding party carried that much baggage, and the cramped wicker cages of chickens and the way the grain sacks bulged suggested to Skjaldwulf that these soldiers came in advance of a larger force and were here to provision. The cart squeezed along the track as if force of will alone made it fit. Had Skjaldwulf been the driver, he would have been tempted to grease it to help it squeak through.