The Tempering of Men (25 page)

“Don't worry,” Vethulf had said. “They won't eat anything we ask them not to.”

And you ask us not to eat so many things,
Kjaran had said—or rather, he'd imagined a brief list of all the many things Vethulf had asked him not to eat over the years, with a somewhat aggrieved sense about them.

But a few moments later, Kjaran and Hlothor had chased and killed a foolish young squirrel between them, and divided it neatly in two. It made about one snap of the jaws apiece, without a speck of blood wasted.

Haukr looked even more impressed.

They reached Othstathr at midmorning, and the whole croft turned out to greet them, from a tottering grandfather who would die abed to a babe so new she was still swaddled up into a package that seemed too small for a child to fit in.

Othstathr was tiny; Vethulf was hard-pressed even to call it a village. It had a baker but no smith, and there were only four houses all together, clustered around a center green. Stockade stretched from cottage-wall to cottage-wall, a man-high wall of lath and withy washed white with lime. It would not stop a troll, or a bandit, or a bear—but it might turn back a wild wolf or boar, and it no doubt gave the villagers some small feeling of security to herd their flocks through the gates at night and draw the latchstrings in.

He strode forward, following Haukr while seeming to lead him, toward the headman. Vethulf introduced himself and heard the man's name in return. Guthbrandr—God's Brand—which Vethulf chose to regard as a good omen.

Guthbrandr was a spare, sparse-bearded man with gnarled hands and nails that ridged and curved like clubs over the tips of his fingers. He clasped Vethulf's forearm strongly, however. “Thank Othinn you've come.”

“We are pleased to serve,” Vethulf said, stepping back.

Guthbrandr gestured broadly. “Will you be wanting to leave immediately?”

Vethulf glanced at the sky. There was not enough light left even to consider seeking out a wyvern in unfamiliar country. He had fought enough trolls in the dark to understand the necessity for it—but the wyvern would be out of its den for the night, hunting, and though wolves could track it, it would be better to lie in wait for the thing when it returned. And wyverns were stupid in daylight—stupid and ever so fractionally slower.

“We'll go before first light,” he said, trying not to think too much about the pull across his shoulder and the heat and throb of swollen flesh he felt with every breath. “It would be kind if your women would have a breakfast for us upon our return.”

“They can have it before,” Guthbrandr said. “They're used to waking early.”

“We won't eat before battle,” Vethulf said. He didn't want to shatter the naïveté of this man—a man grown but no warrior. “It's best for a wounded man if he hasn't eaten.”

“Oh.” Vethulf could see Guthbrandr absorbing the implications. The man might be naïve, but not stupid. “I see. Perhaps I should show you your beds, then.”

“We thank you,” Vethulf said, and looked neither at Haukr, bouncing with excitement, nor the three wolfcarls and their wolves arrayed behind him.

*   *   *

They turned someone out of a bed—several someones, Vethulf knew, for these cottages were too cramped to offer guest quarters, and the wolfcarls (divided into pairs) were given the best beds, at ground level, near the hearth. Which meant fathers and mothers had been displaced to the lofts and the children and grandchildren most likely to the stables.

He hoped that old man had a bed by the fire.

The season was past the white nights of high summer but only just—the sun seemed to dip below the horizon and roll along beneath it for an hour or two before lunging again to the sky like a fish to a lure. Still, even a brief rest would serve them, and Vethulf would rather fight beside men and wolves who had caught a catnap between adventures than those who had had no rest at all.

He knew the temperature must be dropping outside, because the doors and window were sealed against the depredations of the mosquitoes and biting flies of summertime, but the cottage did not grow too hot and close. He slept beside his old acquaintance Throttolfr on a straw-tick mattress—luxury to a wolfcarl, though Franangford was a modern heall and offered more in the way of comforts and amenities than a longhouse—across the few short hours of sunset and night until the silence of the cold hours and the pain in his shoulder woke him.

He rose and padded across the cottage's one great ground-floor room, beneath the head-high lofts, to the door that led to the square court between houses.

He pulled the latchstring and opened it a hair's-breadth before the knock. Across the threshold, a young woman faced him. She had a pinched face and a smock of plain homespun. Her ash-colored hair hung straight from a fillet across her brow, the color blurring into her dress in the gloaming.

“Lord Wolfjarl,” she said, in soft hesitation. “I was sent to rouse you.”

“Thank you,” Vethulf said, quelling the grumpiness of pain, hunger, and short sleep. “Where is Haukr, to guide us?”

She gave Vethulf a look that betrayed unsuspected wit. “He,” she said, “is eating breakfast. I am sent to inquire as well if you and your wolfcarls will accept at the very least a breakfast draught?”

The thought of rich ale tempted him, but he shook his head. Better to be hungry and sober. “But if you will have breakfast laid in against our return, I shall be most grateful.”

She nodded, and he thought maybe that upward glance through lashes was an attempt at flirtation. What must it be like to come to womanhood in such a place as this, with at most two or three young men to choose between?

For a moment, he pitied her. But it was her life, and her wyrd, and she would make of it the best she could, like anyone. Like Vethulf himself.

“I'll get my weapons,” he said.

*   *   *

They gathered in Haukr's father's house. The old man, it turned out, was the lad's great-grandfather, and though his hand shook, he saw them off with a father's blessing. Vethulf bore it in silence and tried not to fidget noticeably.

Afterwards, in a gray dark unbroken by torches, the wolves and Haukr led them through morning's mist and up the high fell. Haukr walked forward, the four wolves around him. Vethulf was sure the boy did not know that they flanked him as they would a cub on its first hunt.

Behind the boy and the wolves, the men walked single file, picking their way along a rough, tussocked path strewn with treacherous stones. It would be easy to turn an ankle here or slip and tumble down the precipitous slope.

They had not been climbing long when they broke above the fog. Coiling tendrils grasped at Vethulf's ankles and tattered when he pulled free. Djurgeirr ranged ahead, Kjaran beside him, and between them the wolfcarls had a sense of how the path twisted and what lay beyond each ridge. The morning grew brighter as they gained altitude, and it was only a little before sunrise when they began again to descend.

Reykr was the youngest wolf, his senses keenest. He was a smoke-brown with a pale fawn chest and points. Each hair of his coat was banded along its length so that pale shadows rippled through the dark fur-tips when he planted his feet and arched his neck up to sniff deeply, the first to scent the wyvern. His recognition rippled through the pack-sense. Serpent-musk, leaf mold, old blood and bone.

A thrill ran through every wolf and man of the threat. Teeth showed behind curled lips; hands fell to the hafts of axes and warhammers. Scarred old Hlothor huffed two or three times, drawing the air in deep, and then sneezed. Ulfvaldr shifted from foot to foot, boot leather creaking. Like his wolf, Ulfvaldr was young—but seasoned by the trellwars he had none of Guthbrandr's naïveté.

“Haukr,” Vethulf said, “wait here.”

The boy nodded and stepped off the path to let the men go by. “It's two rises on.”

“We can find it from here.” The wolves, in fact, were straining forward, hackles high and tails curled aggressively, ready for war.

And war it was. They did not move like wolves on the hunt—slinking, stiff-legged, like stormclouds drifting. Rather, they went in as the teeth of an angry pack, ready to drive the interloper from their territory or kill it if they must. Their excitement was a contagion, filling the wolfcarls as well and giving Vethulf's hand the trembles as he unlimbered his axe and made a few experimental swishes.

Nevertheless, when they crested that second rise—moving now in a scuttling crouch—and finally laid eyes upon the crevice in the rocks, Vethulf breathed out in relief. The ghost-white shed skin twined through the shrubs on every side, bunched up in places and torn in others, and the rocks of the cave mouth were papered with scraped-off scales.

But the cave was not large, not by the standards of wyverns.

Ulfmundr, who had the most experience with wyverns, thought so, too, because he whispered harshly, “God of wolves, it's not a big one.”

“Big enough,” Vethulf answered, gesturing to the skin. The skins stretched when shed, though, so the wyvern itself might be as little as two-thirds the length. Still and all, adequate. More than adequate.

“Is it in the lair?” Throttolfr asked. He wasn't a big man, but Vethulf knew him as an implacable fighter. His hair was sandy and his beard sandy-red. The scars of a troll's claws tracked through it on the left side of his face, three thready bald patches running parallel.

“I don't think so,” Vethulf said. Kjaran told him the scent was rank but cold, and no fresher in the lair than in the little vale that fronted it.

This cave would not be a cavern, Vethulf thought. This high, it would be a crevice comprised of jumbled stones, not river-worn deep and muddy. Which was good news, because they would have neither to pursue the wyvern through measureless tunnels, nor to worry that it might enter or exit its lair through another opening and ambush them.

There was no chance of the wolves and men ambushing it. Wyverns had dim eyesight when dazzled by day, but their sense of smell did not suffer when exposed to sunlight. It would know the threat awaited it long before it came in sight. The consolation—if you could call it that—was that wyverns were territorial and if it felt its lair threatened, it would not quietly move on. Nor would it wait for the interlopers to do the same.

The fact that it could smell them, however, did not mean it was smart for anyone to stand up and present a silhouette along the ridgeline. So the wolfcarls waited crouched behind gorse and alongside boulders, and the wolves lay flat, heads on paws, in a relaxed crouch from which they could rise in an instant, fighting.

Vethulf measured the sky. A molten thread of gold spilled across the eastern horizon. The first rays of the sun glowed on the topmost stones of the summit behind him.

It would not now be long.

Their warning was the crackle of grass pressed flat, the rasp of something rough against stone. The wyvern traveled belly-flat, gliding along a tunnel of grass long since adapted to its passage. Its hind legs were hinged up alongside the cylinder of its body, the stubby vestigial wings folded tight.

Vethulf was relieved to see that he'd been right: it was not a large one. The wyvern's triangular head was neither longer nor thicker than his torso. Its dappled scales of lichen-green and stone-gray would vanish among the rocks when it lay still, the scattered colors breaking up its outline and fooling all but the most observant eye. In motion, though, it was unmistakable.

Vethulf felt the tension of the pack around him. His booted toes dug into the earth; he balanced lightly in his crouch, his shield dragging on his stiff, hot shoulder even when he rested one edge on the ground. Then, without any signal but the sense of his threatbrothers that they, too, were ready, he sprang down the slope.

His strides stretched long on the downhill, the heavy axe as light and quick in his hand as if it had a will of its own and merely pulled his hand behind it. Beside him ran Kjaran; strung out in a line abreast were Ulfmundr and Hlothor, Throttolfr and Djurgeirr, Ulfvaldr and Reykr.

They made, between them, a terrible noise.

From the first thumping of feet, the wyvern set its taloned feet and rose from the grass with a thunder and display of thrashing wings. If the hide of the thing was indistinguishable from the rocks and mosses among which it lived, the wings made up for it. They could not carry the wyvern in flight, but between the finger-bones the leather blazed cobalt-blue, eyed with white and purple so bright it was nearly pink. With each beat the sun flashed through them, and Vethulf was hard-pressed to remember that it was only a display and keep running.

The head was far more dangerous, and so Vethulf ran straight for it. This was his threat, and Kjaran had made him the leader of it. The greatest risk was his.

Wolves and men encircled the wyvern as Vethulf lunged toward its head, dancing in and out again. He feinted with his shield—a punch at its throat—and felt the injured shoulder protest. On every side, wolves snarled, men shouted, axes whipped through air with a whistle almost like the clangor of bells.

The wyvern fought in near-silence, after the manner of its kind. Its head hammered down at him, rows upon rows of fangs ripping the sod where he had stood a moment before.

Even through the shield, that blow would have broken his arm if it had landed. But it had missed and in missing left the wyvern's neck for a moment extended. Vethulf stepped in and, with the weight of his body behind it, swung the axe.

The wyvern hissed as its head snapped back. Vethulf would have missed and that was all, except by ill luck the inexperienced Reykr struck the wyvern at just that moment on the opposite shoulder. The lashing beast staggered; Vethulf heard the grunted cry as its tail struck either Throttolfr or his shield, and though Vethulf threw himself backward and raised his own shield, one of the wings slammed him against the ground, the talons—tiny things compared to its teeth but sharp nevertheless—raking across his chest.