The Fire in His Hands Read online

Tears gathered at the corners of Bragi’s eyes. But Haaken and Soren were watching. He had to impress them with his self-control. Especially Haaken, on whose good opinion he depended more than he could admit.

  “Prepare well,” said Ragnar. “The high passes will be bitter this time of year.”

  “What about Bjorn?” Haaken demanded. The bastard child that Mad Ragnar had found in the forest, abandoned to the wolves, was not too proud to reveal his feelings.

  “Ragnar, you’ve treated me as your own son. Even in lean years, when there was too little for those of your own blood. I’ve always honored and obeyed as I would a birth-father. And in this, too, I must obey. But not while Bjorn Backstabber lives. Though my bones be scattered by wolves, though my soul be damned to run with the Wild Hunt, I won’t leave while Bjorn’s treachery goes unrepaid.”

  It was a proud oath, a bold oath. Everyone agreed it was worthy of a son of the Wolf. Ragnar and Bragi stared. Soren nodded his admiration. For Haaken, terse to the point of virtual non-communication, a speech of this length amounted to a total baring of the soul. He seldom said as many words in an entire day.

  “I haven’t forgotten Bjorn. It’s his face, smiling, pretending friendship while he took Hjarlma’s pay, here in my mind’s eye, that keeps me going. He’ll die before I do, Haaken. He’ll be the torchbearer lighting my path to Hell. Ah. I can see the agony in his eyes. I can smell the fear in him. I can hear him when he urges Hjarlma to hurry and establish the Draukenbring trap. The Wolf lives. He knows the Wolf. And his cubs. He knows that his doom stalks him now.

  “We’ll leave in the morning, after we’ve buried old Sven.”

  Bragi started. He had thought that the old warrior was sleeping.

  “A sad end for you, friend of my father,” Ragnar muttered to the dead man.

  Sven had served the family since the childhood of Bragi’s grandfather. He had been friends with the old man for forty years. And then they had parted with blows.

  “Maybe they’ll be reconciled in the Hall of Heroes,” Bragi murmured.

  Sven had been a sturdy fighter who had taught Ragnar his weapons and had followed him in his southern ventures. More recently, he had been weapon master to Bragi and Haaken. He would be missed and mourned. Even beyond the enemy banners.

  “How did Bjorn warn them?” Haaken asked.

  “We’ll find out,” Ragnar promised. “You boys rest. It’ll be hard going. Some of us aren’t going to make it.”

  Six of them reached Draukenbring.

  Ragnar gave the steading a wide berth, leading them on into the mountains. Then he brought them home from the south, down a knee of the peak they called Kamer Strotheide. It was a pathway so difficult even Hjarlma and Bjorn would not think to watch it.

  Hjarlma was waiting. They could see his sentries from the mountain.

  Bragi looked down only long enough to assure himself that Hjarlma had indulged in no destruction.

  His mother’s witchcraft was held in great dread.

  He did not understand why. She was as compassionate, understanding and loving a woman as any he knew.

  Slipping and sliding, they descended to a vale where, in summer, Draukenbring’s cattle grazed. They then traveled by wood and ravine toward the longhouse. They halted in the steading’s woodlot, a hundred yards from the nearest outbuilding. There they awaited darkness and grew miserably cold.

  The inactivity told on Ragnar most. He got stiff.

  Bragi worried. His father had grown so pale...

  His mind remained a whirl of hope and despair. Ragnar believed he was dying. Yet he went on and on and on, apparently driven by pure will.

  It darkened. Ragnar said, “Bragi, the smokehouse. In the middle of the floor, under the sawdust. A metal ring. Pull up on it. The tunnel leads to the house. Don’t waste time. I’ll send Soren in a minute.”

  Sword ready, Bragi ran to the smokehouse, stirred through greasy sawdust.

  The ring was the handle of a trapdoor. Beneath, a ladder descended into a tunnel. He shook his head. He had known nothing about it. Ragnar had secrets he kept even from his own. He should have been called Fox, not Wolf.

  Soren slipped into the smokehouse. Bragi explained. Then Haaken, Sigurd and Sturla followed. But Ragnar did not come. Sturla brought the Wolf’s final instructions.

  The tunnel was low and dark. Once Bragi placed a hand onto something furry that squealed and wriggled away. He was to remember that passage as the worst of the homeward journey.

  The tunnel ended behind the wall of the ale cellar, its head masked by a huge keg that had to be rolled aside. It was a keg Ragnar had always refused to tap, claiming he was saving it for a special occasion.

  The cellar stair led up to a larder where vegetables and meats hung from beams, out of the reach of rodents. Bragi crept up. Someone, cursing, entered the room over his head. He froze.

  The abuse was directed at Bragi’s mother, Helga. She was not cooperating with Hjarlma’s men. They, after the hardships they had faced in the forests, were put out because she refused to do their cooking.

  Bragi listened closely. His mother’s voice betrayed no fear. But nothing ever disturbed her visibly. She was always the same sedate, gracious, sometimes imperious lady. Before outsiders.

  Even with the family she seldom showed anything but tenderness and love.

  “Banditry doesn’t become you, Snorri. A civilized man, even in the house of his enemy, behaves courteously. Would Ragnar plunder Hjarlma?” She was overhead now.

  Bragi could not repress a grin. Damned right Ragnar would plunder Hjarlma. Down to the last cracked iron pot. But Snorri grumbled an apology and stamped away.

  The trap rose while the doeskin larder curtain still swayed from Snorri’s passage. “You can come up,” Helga whispered. “Be quick. You’ve only got a minute.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Ssh. Hurry up. Hjarlma, Bjorn and three others are by the big fireplace. They’ve been drinking and grumbling because your father has taken so long.” Her face darkened when Haaken closed the trap. Bragi had watched her hope die by degrees as each man came up. “Three more are sleeping in the loft. Hjarlma sent the rest out to look for your camp. He expects you to come in just before dawn.”

  The others prepared to charge. She touched Bragi, then Haaken. “Be careful. Don’t lose me everything.”

  Helga was rare in many ways, not the least of which was that she had borne only one child in a land where women were always pregnant.

  She held Bragi a moment. “Did he die well?”

  He hated the misdirection. “Stabbed in the back. By Bjorn.”

  Emotion distorted her features momentarily. And in that instant Bragi glimpsed what others feared. The fires of Hell shone through her eyes.

  “Go!” she ordered.

  Heart pounding, Bragi led the charge. Fifteen feet separated him from his enemies. Three rebels had no chance to defend themselves. But Hjarlma was as quick as death and Bjorn only a split second slower. The Thane rose like a killer whale from the deeps, dumped a table in Bragi’s path, hurled himself to where Ragnar’s battle trophies hung. He seized an axe.

  Regaining his feet, Bragi realized that the surprise was spent. Hjarlma and Bjorn were ready to fight. Haaken, Sigurd and Soren were already in the loft. That left only himself and Sturla Ormsson, a man well past his prime, to face two of Trolledyngja’s most wicked fighters.

  “The cub’s as mad as his sire,” Hjarlma observed, turning a swordstroke with ease. “Don’t get yourself killed, boy. Inger would never forgive me.” His remark was a sad commentary on the nature of Man. Had the Old King not died unexpectedly, Hjarlma would have become Bragi’s father-in-law. The arrangements had been made last summer.

  Don’t think, Bragi told himself. Don’t listen. Old Sven and his father had beaten those lessons into him with blunted swords. Don’t talk back. Either remain absolutely silent or, as Ragnar did, bellow a lot.

  Hjarlma knew Ragnar’s style well. They had fought si
de by side too many times. He handled it easily in the Wolf’s son.

  Bragi entertained no illusions. The Thane was bigger, stronger, craftier and had far more experience than he. His sole goal became to survive till Haaken had finished in the loft.

  Sturla had the same idea, but Bjorn was too quick for him. The traitor’s blade broke through his guard. He staggered back.

  Two pairs of ice-blue eyes stared into Bragi’s own.

  “Kill the pup,” Bjorn growled. His fear was plain to hear.

  As stately as one of the caravels the longships pursued down the southern coasts, Helga glided between them.

  “Stand aside, witch woman.”

  Helga locked gazes with the Thane. Her lips moved without speaking Hjarlma did not back down, but neither did he press. She turned to Bjorn. The traitor went pale, could not meet her terrible eyes.

  Haaken jumped from the loft, snatched a spear from a far wall. Soren and Sigurd came down by the ladder, but nearly as fast.

  “Time has run out,” Hjarlma observed laconically. “We have to go.” He directed Bjorn to the door. “Should’ve expected them to slip the picket.” He whipped his axe past Helga, struck the sword from Bragi’s hand, creased the youth’s cheek on the backstroke. “Be more civil when I return, boy. Or be gone.”

  Bragi sighed as the wings of death withdrew. Hjarlma had done all he dared because of old friendship.

  The fear of Ragnar haunted Bjorn’s eyes throughout the encounter. He kept looking round as if expecting the Wolf to materialize out of fireplace smoke. He was eager to flee. He and Hjarlma plunged into the night, where the snow had begun to fall again.

  Helga started tending Bragi’s cheek and berating him for not having killed Bjorn.

  “Bjorn hasn’t escaped the storm yet,” Bragi told her.

  Haaken, Soren and Sigurd lingered near the doorway. They kept it open a crack. The women, children and old folks of the stead, who had done their best to remain invisible during the skirmish, tended Sturla or wept softly for those who had not returned.

  There was no joy in Ragnar’s longhouse, only the numbness that follows disaster.

  Draukenbring had come to the end of its years, but the realization of that fact had not yet struck home. The survivors faced uprooting, diaspora and persecution by the Pretender’s adherents.

  The falling snow muted the cries and clanging of weapons, but not completely. “There,” Bragi told his mother. One of his father’s howling war cries had torn the belly out of the night.

  Ragnar soon staggered through the doorway, bloody from chin to knee. Much was his own. He had his stomach opened by an axe stroke.

  With a peal of mad laughter he held Bjorn’s head high, like a lantern in the night. Bjorn’s horror remained fixed on his features.

  Ragnar mouthed one of his battle cries, then collapsed.

  Bragi, Haaken and Helga were beside him instantly. But it was too late. His will had, finally, broken.

  Helga plucked at the ice in his hair and beard, ran fingers lightly over his face. A tear dribbled down her cheek. Bragi and Haaken withdrew. Even in her loss the plunder-bride from the south could not shed her pride, could not reveal the real depth of her feelings.

  Bragi and Haaken crowded the main fire, and shared their misery.

  The funeral was managed in haste. It was an expediency, unworthy of the dead man, rushed because Hjarlma would return. It should have been a warrior’s funeral with pyres and ricks, following a week of mourning and ritual.

  Instead, Bragi, Haaken, Sigurd and Soren carried Ragnar up Kamer Strotheide, above the tree-and summer snow-lines, and placed him, seated upright, in a stone cairn facing both Draukenbring and the more distant Tonderhofn.

  “Someday,” Bragi promised as he and Haaken placed the last stone. “Someday we’ll come back and do it right.”

  “Someday,” Haaken agreed.

  It would be a long tomorrow, they knew.

  They shed their tears, alone together there, then went down the mountain to begin the new life.

  “This is how he managed it,” said Helga, while watching her sons chop at the frozen earth by the broken hearthstone. She held a golden bracelet, slim but ornately wrought. “It’s half of a pair. Hjarlma wore the other. Each reacted to the other’s approach. When Bjorn drew close, Hjarlma realized that Ragnar was coming.”

  Bragi grunted. He did not care now.

  “I think I hit it,” Haaken said.

  Bragi started digging with his hands. He soon exposed a small chest.

  Sigurd and Soren arrived with the packs. The four surviving warriors would go south from the shingle pine.

  The chest proved to be shallow and light. It was not locked. Little lay within. A small bag of southern coins, another of gemstones, an ornate dagger, a small parchment scroll on which a crude map had been inscribed hastily. And a copper amulet.

  “You keep the valuables,” Bragi told his mother.

  “No. Ragnar had his reasons for keeping these things together. And of treasure he left me plenty elsewhere.”

  Bragi considered. His father had been secretive. The forest round Draukenbring might be filled with pots of gold. “All right.” He pushed the things into his pack.

  Then came the moment he had dreaded, the time to take the first southward step. He stared at his mother. She stared at him. Haaken stared at the ground.

  The cord was hard to cut.

  For the first time in memory Helga revealed her feelings in public — though she did not exactly go to pieces.

  She pulled Haaken to her, held him for nearly two minutes, whispering. Bragi caught the sparkling of a tear. She brushed it away irritably as she released her foster son. Embarrassed, Bragi looked away. But there was no evading emotion. Sigurd and Soren were, once again, parting with their own families.

  His mother’s embrace engulfed him. She held him tighter than he had thought possible. She had always seemed so small and frail.

  “Be careful,” she said. And what less banal was there to say? At such a parting, probably forever, there were no words to convey true feelings. Language was the tool of commerce, not love.

  “And take care of Haaken. Bring him home.” No doubt she had told Haaken the same thing. She pulled away, unclasped a locket she had worn for as long as Bragi could remember. She fastened it round his neck. “If you have no other hope, take this to the House of Bastanos in the Street of the Dolls in Hellin Daimiel. Give it to the concierge, as an introduction to the lord of that house. He’ll send it inside. One of the partners will come to question you. Tell him:

  ‘Elhabe an dantice, elhabe an cawine.

  Ci hibde clarice, elhabe an savan.

  Ci magden trebil, elhabe din bachel.’

  He’ll understand.”

  She made him repeat the verse till she was sure he had memorized it.

  “Good. No more can be done. Just don’t trust anyone you don’t have to. And come home as soon as you can. I’ll be here waiting.”

  She kissed him. In public. She had not done that since he had been a toddler. Then she kissed Haaken. She had never done that at all. Before either could react, she ordered, “Now go. While you can. Before we look more foolish than we already do.”

  Bragi shouldered his pack and started toward Kamer Strotheide. Their way led round its knee. Sometimes he looked up toward Ragnar’s cairn. Only once did he look back.

  The women and children and old people were abandoning the steading that had been home to generations. Most would flee to relatives elsewhere. A lot of people were on the move during these times of trouble. They should be able to disappear and elude the spite of the Pretender’s men.

  He wondered where his mother would go...

  Forever afterward he wished that, like Haaken, he had refused to look. He could, then, have remembered Draukenbring as a place alive, as a last hope and refuge quietly awaiting him in the northland.

  Chapter Four

  A Clash of Sabers

  Nassef looked
back once. Heat waves made the bowl of Al Rhemish a tent city writhing beneath dancing ghosts. A muted roar echoed from the valley. He smiled. “Karim,” he called gently.

  A hard-looking man whose face had been scarred by the pox joined him. “Sir?”

  “Go back down there. Visit our people. The ones who met us when we came in. Tell them to keep the riots going. Tell them I need an extended distraction. And tell them to pick five hundred willing warriors and send them after us. In small groups, so they’re not noticed leaving. Understand?”

  “Yes.” Karim smiled. He was missing two front teeth. Another was broken at an angle. He was an old rogue. He had seen his battles. Even his gray-speckled beard seemed war torn.

  Nassef watched Karim descend the stony slope. The former bandit was one of their more valuable converts. Nassef was sure Karim’s value would increase as the struggle widened and became more bitter.

  He swung his mount and trotted after his sister and brother-in-law.

  El Murid’s party consisted of almost fifty people. Most were bodyguards, his white-robed Invincibles, who had been guaranteed a place in Paradise if they died in El Murid’s behalf.

  They made Nassef uneasy. They had eyes madder than those of their prophet. They were fanatically devoted. El Murid had had to bend the full might of his will to keep them from storming the Royal Compound after the trial.

  Nassef assumed his post at El Murid’s right hand. “It went better than we hoped,” he said. “The boy’s attack was a godsend.”

  “Indeed it was. To tell the truth, Nassef, I was reluctant to do it your way. But only the intercession of the Lord Himself could have made it so easy. Only He could have brought about an attack so timely.”

  “I’m sorry about the ankle. Does it bother you much?”

  “It pains me terribly. But I can endure it. Yassir gave me an herbal for the pain, and bound it. If I stay off it, I’ll be good as new before long.”

  “During that farce of a trial... For a minute I thought you were going to give in.”

  “For a minute I did. I’m as subject as anyone else to the wiles of the Evil One. But I found my strength, and the lapse made the outcome sweeter. You see how the Lord moves us to His will? We do His work even when we think we’re turning our backs on Him.”