Splinter Of The Mind's Eye

Chapter Three

A Minor Squabble in Another Land and Time

T wenty-three warriors stalked through falling snow, their shoulders downed with white. Ice stiffened the mustaches of those who had them. Towering pines loomed ahead, but here ancient oaks surrounded them like a convocation of gnarled, antlered frost giants squatting, dreaming of blood and fire. Snow masked the altar stone where the priests of the Old Gods had ripped the hearts from screaming virgins. Two boys, Bragi and Haaken, turtled their heads against their shoulders and hurried past.

The trailbreakers fought the deep, soft new snow in iron silence. An arctic wind drove frozen daggers through the heaviest clothing.

Bragi and Haaken had just begun to sport scraggly beards. Some of their companions had winter-white hair. Harald the Half had no shield arm. Yet each man wore the horn helm. Old and young, they were warriors.

They had a cause.

The wind moaned, winging the sad call of a wolf. Bragi shuddered. Some of his companions would be wolf meat soon.

His father Ragnar raised a hand. They stopped. "Smoke," said the man known across Trolledyngja as the Wolf of Draukenbring.

The odor drifted thinly from among the pines. They were near Thane Hjarlma's longhouse. As one, they sat on their hams to rest.

Minutes sped.

"Time," Ragnar said. He was also called Mad Ragnar, a crazy killer known for a thousand miles.

Men checked shields and weapons. Ragnar chose groups to go right and left.

Ragnar's son Bragi, his foster son Haaken and his friend Bjorn conferred with him briefly. The boys bore clay pots containing carefully nurtured coals. And within them the boys nursed grudges. Their father had ordered them to stay out of the fighting.

Ragnar muttered words of caution and encouragement. "Haaken, you go with Bjorn and Sven. Bragi, stay with me."

The last half mile was the slowest. Bragi kept remembering friendlier visits. And, last summer, spirited, clandestine tumbles with the Thane's daughter Inger. But now the old King was dead. The succession was in contest.

Hjarlma had declared for the Pretender. His strength had overawed most of his neighbors. Only Ragnar, Mad Ragnar, had remained visibly loyal to the Old House.

The civil war was shredding the tapestry of Trolledyngjan society. Friend slew friend. Ragnar's own father served the Pretender. Families that had been at each other's throats for generations now stood shoulder to shoulder in the battle line.

Every spring in Bragi's memory his father had gone reeving with Hjarlma. Sailing gunwale to gunwale, their dragonships had scourged the southern coasts. They had saved one another's lives. They had celebrated shared wealth. And, in the same chains, they had shared the despair of imprisonment by the Itaskian King.

Now they sought to murder one another, driven by the bitter blood-thirst only politics can generate.

The news had come south on rumor's lightning wings: the Pretender had taken Tonderhofn. The Old House was collapsing.

Hjarlma's men would be celebrating. But the raiders moved carefully. Hjarlma's men had wives, children, and slaves who would be sober.

They penetrated the trenches and stockades. They passed the outbuildings. Fifty feet from the longhouse itself Bragi turned his back into the wind. He dropped dried moss and tree bark into his jar, blew gently. His father and several warriors held out their torches. Others quietly splashed the longhouse with oil.

A man would be stationed at each window. The best fighters would hold the doorway. They would slaughter the drunken rebels as they tried to escape. The Old House's cause, here beneath the brooding, glacier-clawed northern slopes of the Kratchnodian Mountains, would revive at the eleventh hour.

That was Mad Ragnar's plan. It was as bold and ferocious a stroke as ever plotted by the Wolf.

It should have worked.

But Hjarlma was expecting them.

It was a great slaughter anyway. Hjarlma had gotten his warning only seconds before the blow fell. His people were still confused, still trying to shake the mead and find their weapons.

Fire whipped through axed-in windows.

"Stay put!" Ragnar growled at Bragi. "To me!" he thundered at the others.

"Yai! It's Ragnar!" one of Hjarlma's men wailed.

The blond giant attacked with sword in one hand, axe in the other. Not for nothing was he called Mad Ragnar. He went into insane killing rages, became an unstoppable killing machine. It was whispered that his wife, the witch Helga, had spelled him invincible.

Three, four, five of the drunkards fell for each of Ragnar's men. And still he could not win. The odds were too terrible.

The fire had become a liability. Without it driving them to save their families, Hjarlma's men might have surrendered.

Bragi went looking for Haaken.

Haaken's thoughts paralleled his own. He had secured a sword already. They had not been allowed to bring their own. Ragnar had not wanted them getting dangerous ideas.

"What now?" Haaken asked.

"Father won't run. Not yet."

"How did they know?"

"A traitor. Hjarlma must have bought somebody from Draukenbring. Here!"

A rebel, nearly disemboweled, crawled toward them. "Cover me while I get his sword."

They did what had to be done. And felt ghastly afterward.

"Who sold out?"

"I don't know. Or how. But we'll find out."

Then they became too busy to speculate. Several rebels, who had crawled out a window no longer held against them, stumbled their way.

The longhouse burned briskly. Women, children and slaves screamed inside. Ragnar's men fell back before the weight of their panic.

In a brief exchange, from ambush, Bragi and Haaken slew three men and sent a fourth fleeing into the pines. They received their own first man-wounds.

"Half of us are down," Bragi observed, after studying the main action. "Bors. Rafnir. Tor. Tryggva. Both Haralds. Where's Bjorn?"

Ragnar, roaring and laughing, stood out of the fray like a cave bear beset by hounds. Bodies lay heaped around him.

"We've got to help."

"How?" Haaken was no thinker. He was a follower and doer. A strong-backed, stolid, steadfast lad.

Bragi had all of his mother's intellect and a little of his father's crazy courage. But the situation had rattled him. He did not know what to do. He wanted to run. He did not. With a bellow imitative of Ragnar's, he charged. Fate had made his decision for him.

He had discovered what had become of Bjorn. Ragnar's lieutenant was charging him from behind.

No warning could reach Ragnar's blood-drugged brain. All Bragi could do was race Bjorn to his prey.

He lost the footrace, but prevented the traitor's blow from being fatal. Bjorn's deflected blade entered Ragnar's back kidney high. Ragnar howled and whirled. A wild blow from the haft of his axe bowled Bjorn into a snowdrift.

Then the Wolf's knees buckled.

The rebels whooped, attacking with renewed ferocity. Bragi and Haaken became too busy to avenge their father.

Then twenty rebels wailed.

Ragnar surged to his feet. He roared like one of the great trolls of the high Kratchnodians.

There was a lull as the combatants eyed one another.

The pain had opened the veil across Ragnar's sanity. "A crown has been lost here tonight," he muttered. "Treason always begets more treason. There's nothing more we can do. Gather the wounded."

For a while the rebels licked their wounds and fought the fire. But the raiders, burdened with wounded, gained only a few miles head start.

Nils Stromberg went down and could not get up again. His sons, Thorkel and Olaf, refused to leave him behind. Ragnar bellowed at all three, and lost the argument. They stayed, their faces turned toward the glow of the burning longhouse. No man could deny another his choice of deaths.

Lank Lars Greyhame went next. Then Thake One Hand. Six miles south of Hjarlma's stead, Anders Miklasson slipped down an icy bank into the creek they were following. He went under the ice and drowned before the others could chop through.

He would have frozen anyway. It was that cold, and the others dared not pause to light a fire.

"One by one," Ragnar growled as they piled stones in a crude cairn. "Soon there won't be enough of us left to drive off the wolves."

He did not mean Hjarlma's men. A pack was trailing them. The leader already had made a sally at Jarl Kinson, who kept lagging.

Bragi was exhausted. His wounds, though minor, nagged him like the agonies of a flensing knife in the hand of a master executioner. But he kept silent. He could do no less than his father, whose injury was much greater.

Bragi, Haaken, Ragnar and five more lived to see the dawn. They evaded Hjarlma and drove the wolves off. Ragnar went to ground in a cave. He sent Bragi and Haaken to scout the nearby forest. The searchers passed near the boys, but without slowing.

Bragi watched them go, Bjorn, the Thane and fifteen healthy, angry warriors. They were not searching. They were talking about waiting for Ragnar at Draukenbring.

"Hjarlma's not stupid," Ragnar said when he received the news. "Why chase the Wolf all over the woods when you know he has to return to his lair?"

"Mother—"

"She'll be all right. Hjarlma's scared to death of her."

Bragi tried reading behind his father's beard. The man spoke softly, tautly, as if he were in great pain.

"The war is over now," Ragnar told him. "Understand that. The Pretender has won. The Old House is in eclipse. There's no more reason to fight. Only a fool would."

Bragi got the message. He wasn't to waste his life pursuing a lost cause.

He had had fifteen years of practice reading the wisdom behind Ragnar's terse observations.

"They'll abandon him as quickly as they flocked to him. Eventually. They say... " A shudder wracked his massive frame. "They say there's a demand for Trolledyngjans in the south. Over the mountains. Beyond the lands of the bowmen. Past the reeving kingdoms. There's war a-brewing. Bold lads, bright lads, might do well while awaiting a restoration."

Itaskia was the lands of the bowmen. The reeving kingdoms were the necklace of city states hugging the coast down to Simballawein. For half a dozen generations the Trolledyngjan dragonships had gone out when the ice broke at Tonderhofn and Torshofn, to run the gauntlet of the Tongues of Fire and plunder the eastern littoral.

"Under the shingle pine, beside the upper spring. The northwest side. An old, broken hearthstone marks it. You'll find the things you'll need. Take the copper amulet to a man called Yalmar at the Red Hart Inn in Itaskia the City."

"Mother—"

"Can take care of herself, I said. She won't be happy, but she'll manage. I only regret that I won't be able to send her home."

Bragi finally understood. His father was dying. Ragnar had known for a long time.

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 side 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.