Karluk · Kelgrim’s Territory, Frost Fang Highlands
1715
Borgün gave him eighty men. It was more than Karluk had asked for and far fewer than he could have taken.
“You can take three hundred men,” Borgün said the night before they rode.
They sat at the edge of the common fire. The late-spring dark came slowly now and the stream below the camp had been roaring with snowmelt for a month. Pine smoke drifted between the tents. Karluk drew his thumb along his bowstring feeling for the wax.
“I could.”
“Half the young men here would follow you.” Borgün watched the fires. More people gathered around them now than a month ago. “For six weeks they’ve heard about the man who brought his wife home. Every boy wants to be beside you when you do something again.”
“Three hundred men would make this a war.”
“They would make a statement.”
“One I’d have to answer. Every tribe between us and the Frost Fang Peaks would think that Bearclaw is expanding.”
“Let them.”
Karluk looked up. “The Uhrs would.”
Wood cracked in the nearest fire. Borgün said nothing.
“By midsummer they’ll be scouting our fires. You’d have four new enemies just for settling my grievance.” Karluk went back to the string. “Eighty will serve.”
Borgün gave him a look Karluk was seeing more often. “You’ve thought this through, haven’t you?”
“Since I was nine.”
After fourteen years he still knew where the trail would bend. They came down through the eastern pass at dawn and Karluk recognized the ridgeline before the camp was in sight. The ground crumbled along the inside of the turn past the outcrop. Forty yards off the path lay a spring that ran all through the winter. He had carried water from it until the bucket handles wore his small hands raw. The smell of dung fires drifted up from below. He had braced for this return but once he passed the outcrop he felt nothing.
Rulf rode his horse alongside. “You’ve gone quiet.”
“I’m usually quiet.”
“Usually the men can bear it.” Rulf spat into the frost. “Say something. The boys behind us are starting to get nervous.”
Karluk glanced back then raised his voice. “The spring past that outcrop runs clean even in the dry months. Fill your waterskins there.”
The order passed down the line and Rulf eased his horse back into place. Kelgrim’s camp held roughly two hundred and twenty people, perhaps ninety men who could fight. Rulf and the two younger hunters had spent four days scouting before Karluk ever asked Borgün for riders. When the riders rode out of the pass, sixty men came down to the flat with weapons drawn. Karluk halted his riders a hundred yards off and let them form a line.
Neither side charged. Men stared at the ranks across from them thinking of going first. After ten minutes, Kelgrim came out with a man at either shoulder and a long-hafted axe in his hand. He was past fifty now and looked smaller than the man Karluk remembered. The bulk under his bearskin had gone soft.
Karluk barely looked at him. The man at Kelgrim’s right was unremarkable. He stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt and one middle finger was missing at the second knuckle. Karluk’s breathing did not change.
Fourteen years of watching men’s hands.
The man shifted his weight bored with the delay. Karluk had imagined finding him through more winters than he cared to count. He had never pictured it like this, with the man waiting for someone else to finish talking.
“You’ve grown,” Kelgrim called.
“You’ve aged.”
“I remember Ysolde’s scrawny boy who couldn’t hold a bow steady.” Kelgrim spread his hands toward his men. “Now he comes with eighty borrowed Bearclaw swords to complain about what his father lost fairly.”
“If it had been fair, you’d have said his name.”
A spear shifted in the line behind Kelgrim. Karluk rode a few lengths forward and handed Rulf his reins as he swung down. He covered the rest of the ground on foot, watching the armed men beyond their chieftain. Up close, the finger stump was smooth and pale. Its owner had lived with it long enough to stop hiding it.
“I’ve come for one man!” Karluk told the line. “Stand aside, and you walk away. There are eighty riders behind me. How many of you will die before he joins you?”
“Don’t listen to him!” Kelgrim snapped.
“Six weeks ago he sent men to take my wife.” Karluk spoke over him. “They seized her at her hide frame while I was checking traps. He had his mark cut into the wood so I would know who it was.”
He found the eyes of a spearman near the center. “Your chieftain waited somewhere warm. Is he worth it?”
For a while, only the horses moved. The spearman lowered his weapon and stepped back. Others followed until barely twenty were left beside Kelgrim. Those who stayed glanced at the men who had gone. The man with the missing finger stayed where he was. He watched Karluk without a flicker of recognition.
He doesn’t know me.
Kelgrim’s voice climbed. “Cowards!”
“They’ve made their choice,” Karluk said and drew his sword. “You should have done the same.”
Kelgrim came at him fast for a heavy man, the axe already rising. Karluk stepped in to meet it and the ground gave way under his leading foot. Packed earth crumbled into gravel. His knee struck hard and the fall dragged his sword arm wide just as the axe came down at his skull.
He caught it on his blade. The force of it threw him onto his side and his sword hand went numb. Kelgrim’s boot drove into his ribs. Something gave under the heel with a wet pop. Karluk rolled clear into a crouch, choking on dirt and blood. His next breath stabbed so deep that his sight blurred.
Earth. Kelgrim was working the ground under him. He came on behind the axe. Karluk gave ground, lifting his weight off each foot the moment his footing shifted. Twice more the earth broke open where he had just stood.
He let Kelgrim chase him. A heavy man could not swing an axe and work the ground at the same time for long. The chieftain’s breath grew ragged. Each time he hauled the axe back into guard, the head hung a little lower. The next swing went wide.
Karluk stepped inside the haft and smashed his pommel into Kelgrim’s mouth. Teeth broke against his knuckles. He followed the stagger and struck again. This time the brow split to the bone.
Blood poured into Kelgrim’s right eye. His elbow cracked against Karluk’s jaw and snapped his head aside. Karluk stayed close. He seized the rising haft and wrenched it wide. His sword went through Kelgrim’s thigh to the hilt. When he ripped it free, the muscle tore with it.
Kelgrim went down. Blood pumped from the wound and soaked the dirt beneath his leg. He tried to speak through his ruined mouth. Karluk heard only a thick, bubbling complaint.
Every breath ground against his broken ribs. He stood over Kelgrim and waited for the relief he had promised himself for fourteen years. Kelgrim lay in the dirt. That was all.
“My father’s name was Torvun!” Karluk’s voice carried across the silent flat. “You sent men to our door. One of his own let them in and they killed him in his own home!”
He stopped to drag in a shallow breath. “Four men held my mother down afterward. They raped her and left her alive.”
Kelgrim’s good eye followed the sword.
“I heard them from under the floorboards. I was nine!”
He had never spoken of it before. Now every man on the flat knew, and the wind felt no different against his face. “Say his name!”
Kelgrim spat blood. A broken chuckle came after it.
Karluk cut his throat with one stroke. The body shuddered under the bearskin and blood spread into the grass. Karluk’s sword hung heavy in his hand. The man with the missing finger was ten feet away and had not drawn a weapon. His chieftain’s death seemed to have disappointed him more than it frightened him.
Karluk walked up to him. “You!”
The man frowned and looked confused. He had forgotten.
“I don’t know what you’re—”
Karluk slashed his throat. The man dropped to his knees with both hands clamped over the wound, air whistling wet between his fingers. Karluk kicked him onto his back. The sword fell into the dirt as he pulled his knife.
The knife pinned the man’s shoulder and his hand clawed at Karluk’s wrist. He twisted the blade free and drove it in under the ribs. It grated along the bone. He stabbed him until the man’s hand loosened. He kept stabbing after the body stopped fighting him, bent over it with blood slicking his grip. No one got near him.
When he finally stopped, he stayed on his knees with one hand pressed flat against the dead man’s chest. His ribs rasped with every breath. He rose into a silence that had spread across both lines. The men who had lowered their spears were watching his knife. Yassa stood the closest. At some point during the killing he had left the riders and walked out onto the flat. He said nothing.
It was four days before the camp was ready to move and Karluk found every one of them harder than the fight. More than two hundred people were left and the men who had stood with Kelgrim waited to find out what would happen to them. Out past the sentries, the goats bleated for hay just as they had the morning before. Karluk had thought about the killing for fourteen years. He had never thought about what would happen afterward.
“Split them,” Rulf advised on the second evening. “Bring the fighters into Bearclaw and split the families among the nearer camps.”
Dung smoke drifted across the council fire. Karluk shifted to spare his ribs. “You’d have me take ninety men that don’t trust me?”
“You need fighters.”
“And their families would be strangers eating someone else’s grain. What happens when there isn’t enough?”
Rulf held his gaze. “It’s how conquered tribes are dealt with.”
A woman passed the nearest sentry with a waterskin hugged to her chest. She kept her eyes down until she reached her tent where two children watched through the flap.
“Within a year, half of them would be dead or gone,” Karluk said. “Their children would remember who scattered them.”
“Then what do you propose?”
“They come together. Every household keeps its tent and the men keep their weapons.”
“Even the ones who stood against us?”
“They stayed with their chieftain when stepping back would have saved them. I’d rather earn that kind of loyalty than waste it.”
“And the men who left him?”
“They took my offer.” Karluk eased himself upright. “I won’t punish them for believing me.”
Yassa was listening from the other side of the fire. “I’ve fought alongside some of those men,” he said. “Two of them broke my nose wrestling six years ago and I still think well of them.”
Rulf glanced at him. “That speaks for your temper more than their loyalty.”
“Take my word for it. Serving the wrong chieftain doesn’t make a man worthless.”
Karluk looked at him. “Introduce me to them.”
“When you can breathe without wincing. They’ll think you’re afraid of them.”
Karluk almost smiled. No one mentioned the second man in council. For all four days, that silence held.
On the second night, Yassa found him out past the fires. The camp had calmed down though children still waited for their mothers inside the tents. Two hundred and nineteen people would sleep under Bearclaw’s protection that night. Karluk counted them himself.
Yassa approached him and held out a waterskin. “You’ve been out here for a while.”
“I’ve been thinking.” Karluk took the waterskin.
“That usually ends badly.”
Karluk drank. It smelled of sour grain and tasted worse. “The families,” he said.
Yassa leaned against a tethering post. “Is that why you’ve been out here in the dark?”
“Part of it.”
“And the rest?”
Karluk watched a woman tie her tent flap shut. In the better part of a year Yassa had never once pressured him or made him regret answering. “My father ate with the men who betrayed him,” he said. “Afterward, they served the man who had him killed and went home to raise their own children.”
He passed the waterskin back. “Nobody bothered to think about Torvun’s children.”
Yassa drank and offered no pity. Then Yassa rubbed his thumb along the stitching of the waterskin. “Have you heard what the men are saying?”
“What?”
“Some think the people you spared will betray you.”
“They may.” Karluk looked toward the fire. “And the others?”
Yassa was quiet for a moment. “They’re talking about the man you killed after Kelgrim. They’re uneasy.”
Karluk waited.
“No one said you were in the wrong. But some of them didn’t know you had that in you.”
Beyond the tents, a sentry called softly to the man coming to relieve him. Karluk listened to their footsteps until they parted. “Is there a better decision?”
“No,” Yassa said. “Here’s what I think. You’re still counting the people who can’t fight for you. Most men would have gathered the fighters and separated the families.” Yassa glanced at him. “That’s what I would have done.”
“I didn’t ask for yours.”
“You would have.”
He held out the skin again. When Karluk reached for it, Yassa kept his grip on it. “I’ve lived in Bearclaw all my life. Borgün knew me before I could reach a stirrup and I’d cross a flooded river for him.”
“I know.”
“There are maybe four people here I’d trust. For six months I’ve been trying to figure out why you’re one of them.”
“Have you?”
“No. You’re not even from here.” Yassa let go of the skin. “It’s been irritating.”
Karluk looked down at the drink. A breath escaped him that was almost a laugh. He looked up.
Yassa pushed himself away from the post. “If you came out here for some quiet and because you think whatever is in your head has to stay there, you should not have to carry it yourself simply because you can.”
Karluk’s ribs tightened.
Yassa reached out and tapped him on the shoulder. “Next time, come find me, brother, and I’ll stay.” He walked back toward the fires before Karluk could answer.
No one outside his own blood had ever called him brother. Karluk stood with the skin hanging from his hand. For most of his life being alone had been something Karluk knew how to survive. He had never considered that surviving and being alone were not the same thing. By the time the last tent went dark Karluk could still hear Yassa’s words.
Frost covered the high pass on the way home. Men breathed on their fingers to work stiff leather through the buckles. At one point, Yassa took Karluk’s reins and cinched a loose bridle strap with one bare hand. “You southerners ought to grow thicker hides.”
“Lend me yours.”
“You’d complain about the fit.”
Karluk thanked him and took the reins back.
They reached Bearclaw ground on the ninth day after the fight. Behind the eighty riders came two hundred and seventeen people. Two had stayed in the valley. One was an old woman, Kelgrim’s aunt or some close relation. She refused to leave and said she would rather die at her own hearth than eat Bearclaw meat. A boy offered to stay with her. Karluk left them enough grain for the winter and two goats. He made no further argument though some of his men seemed to expect one.
Borgün came out to meet the riders before they reached the camp. He watched the families walking beside their herds and saw that Kelgrim’s men still had their weapons. “You gave them their weapons back?”
“They never surrendered them.”
“You’ve brought men into my territory! Men who stood against you nine days ago!”
Karluk dismounted and caught his breath as pain clamped down on his side. “Twenty stood with Kelgrim. The rest stepped aside when I asked.” He steadied himself against the saddle. “They’ll camp on the eastern flat.”
“The eastern flat?”
“It’s open ground and defensible around the rest. If I had to watch men I did not trust, that is where I would put them.”
Borgün looked at the newcomers again.
“I won’t begin by treating them like prisoners,” Karluk said. “That doesn’t mean I’ll be foolish enough to leave them unwatched.”
“And when autumn comes? When we move to the winter ground, you’ll have two hundred and seventeen more people expecting room under those roofs.”
“Then we build. There’s timber on the north slope and four more months before the weather turns.”
“You’ve thought about the roofs?”
“And the grain.” Karluk handed off his reins. “The grazing is harder. I’m missing ground somewhere. Those animals will strip the eastern pasture too quickly so I’ll need someone who knows the winter ranges.”
Borgün’s mouth twitched. “Ten months ago you came to my fire and told me what you were worth. I thought I’d gained a bowman.” He watched a family lower a bundle of tent poles into the grass. “Maybe I ought to reconsider it one day.”
“I killed a man for what he did to my father. That isn’t a talent.” His voice stayed flat.
“Any fool with enough hatred can kill.” Borgün turned toward the camp. “You brought his whole tribe back. You had every excuse to leave those families in the valley.”
Karluk watched him go. “They would have died.”
“I know,” Borgün said walking toward the camp without turning around.
Karluk’s ribs ached. He had no answer.
Yassa stood a few yards away grinning. He waved. Karluk returned the gesture and looked toward the eastern flat. Smoke was rising over the new tents. Kelgrim’s people were kindling their own fires with their weapons still beside them. Tomorrow they would look to him for guidance and expect him to know what came next. Karluk realized the thought weighed heavier than the sword beside him.