not look back, but his heart was heavy as he reached the trees. Of the three thousand people in the first valley more than two thousand had followed him. Many of the rest still stood arguing in Center Field; others were returning to their homes.
It was at that moment that a ring of blazing torches flared up on the eastern skyline.
Cambil, who was almost home, stopped and stared. The eastern mountainside was alive with armed men. His eyes scanned them. At the center on a black horse sat a man in heavy armor and horned helm. Cambil recognized the Aenir lord and cursed him.
“May the Gods preserve us,” whispered Agwaine, who had run to join his father.
Cambil turned to him. “Get away from here. Now! Join Caswallon. Tell him I am sorry.”
“Not without you, Father.”
Cambil slapped his face viciously. “Am I not Hunt Lord? Obey me. Look after your sister.”
On the hill above Asbidag raised his arm and the Aenir charged, filling the night air with strident screams that pushed their hatred before them like an invisible wall. It struck Cambil to the heart and he blanched. “Get away!” he yelled, pushing Agwaine from him.
Agwaine fell back a step. There were so many things he wanted to say. But his father had drawn his sword and was running into the valley toward the Aenir. Agwaine turned away and ran toward the west, tears filling his eyes.
In Center Field hundreds of stragglers drew swords ready to charge to the aid of their beleaguered kin, but Caswallon’s war horn stopped them. “You can do nothing for them!” he yelled in desperation. “Join us!”
The valley beyond was filled with Aenir warriors. Fires sprang up in the nearby houses. The clansmen in the Center Field were torn between their desire to aid their comrades and their need to protect their wives and children beside them. The more immediate love tie took hold and the crowd surged up the hillside.
Cambil raced down the slope, sword in hand, blinking away the tears of shame filling his eyes. Memories forced their pictures to his mind-unkind, ugly pictures. Maggrig, calling him a fool at the Games. Taliesen’s eyes radiating contempt. And, way back, the cruelest of all, his father, Padris, telling him he wasn’t fit to clean Caswallon’s cloak.
His feet pounded on the grass-covered slope. The Aenir force had swung ponderously around, like a giant horseshoe, to begin the encirclement of the defenders who waited, grim-faced, swords in hand.
Cambil increased his speed. Another hundred paces and he could die among the people he loved, the people he had betrayed with his stupidity. At least the enemy had not yet seen the exodus led by Caswallon.
Breathless and near to exhaustion, Cambil joined the circle, standing beside the councilor Tesk. “I am so… sorry,” said the Hunt Lord.
Tesk shrugged. “We all make mistakes, Cambil, my lad. But be warned-I might not vote for you again.” The older man gently pushed Cambil back into the circle. “Get your breath back and join me in a little while.”
Grinning, Tesk shifted his shield into place, transferring his gaze to the screaming horde almost upon them. He could see their faces now, feel their bloodlust strike him like a malignant breeze.
“The stars are out, Farlain!” he yelled. “It’s a fine night for dying.”
The Aenir broke upon them like waves upon a rock, and the slaughter began. But at first it was the flashing blades of the Farlain that ripped and tore at the enemy, and many were the screams of the Aenir wounded and dying as they fell beneath the boots of their comrades.
Cambil forced himself alongside Tesk and all fear left the Hunt Lord. Doubts fled, shredding like summer clouds. He was calm at last and the noise of the battle receded from him. A strange sense of detachment came upon him and he seemed to be watching himself cutting and slaying, and he heard the laughter from his own lips as if from a stranger.
All his life he had known the inner pain of uncertainty. Inadequacy hugged him like a shadow. Now he was free. An axe clove his chest, but there was no pain. He killed the axeman, and two others, before his legs gave way and he fell. He rolled to his back, feeling the warmth of life draining from the wound.
He had finally succeeded, he knew that now. Without his sacrifice Caswallon would never have had the time to escape.
“I did something right, Father,” he whispered.
“Bowmen to me!” shouted Caswallon. Beside him the silver-haired warrior, Leofas, stood with his sons Layne and Lennox. “Leofas, lead the clan toward Attafoss. Throw out a wide screen of scouts, for before long the Aenir will be hunting us. Go now!”
The clan began to move on into the trees, just as the sun cleared the eastern peaks. Many were the backward glances at the small knot of fighting men ringed by the enemy, and the eyes that saw them burned with guilt and shame.
Three hundred bowmen grouped themselves around Caswallon. Each bore two quivers containing forty shafts. They spread out along the timberline, screened by bushes, thick gorse, and heather.
As the light strengthened Caswallon watched the last gallant struggle of the encircled clansmen. He could see Cambil in with them, battling bravely, and some of the women had taken up swords and daggers. And then it was over. The sword ring fell apart and the Aenir swarmed over them, hacking and slashing, until at last there was no movement from the defenders.
Asbidag rode down the valley and removed his helm. He summoned his captains.
Caswallon could not hear the commands he issued, but he could guess, for the eyes of the Aenir turned west and the army took up its weapons and ran toward the mountainside.
“Do not shoot until I do,” he called to the hidden archers. Caswallon notched a shaft to the string as the Aenir spread out along the foot of the slope. They advanced cautiously, many of them lifting the face guards of their helms the better to see the enemy. Caswallon grinned. He singled out a lean, wolfish warrior at the center of the advancing line. At fifty paces he stood, in plain sight of the Aenir, and drew back on the string. The shaft hissed through the air, hammering home in the forehead of the lead warrior.
The Aenir charged…
Into a black-shafted wall of death. Hundreds fell within a few paces, and the charge faltered and failed, the enemy warriors sprinting back out of bowshot.
Caswallon walked out into the open and sat down. Laying his bow beside him he opened his hip pouch, removing a hunk of dark bread. This he began to eat, staring down at the milling warriors.
Stung by the silent taunt of his presence, they charged once more. Calmly Caswallon replaced the bread in his pouch, notched an arrow to his bow, loosed the shaft, and grinned as it brought down a stocky warrior in full cry, the arrow jutting from his chest.
The Aenir raced headlong into a second storm of shafts that culled their ranks and halted them. Caswallon, still shooting carefully, eased his way back into the bushes, out of sight. The Aenir fled once more, leaving a mound of their dead behind them.
A young archer named Onic crept through the gorse to where Caswallon knelt. “We’ve all but exhausted our shafts,” he whispered.
“Pass the word to fall back,” said Caswallon.
In the valley Asbidag walked among the bodies, stopping to stare down at Cambil’s mutilated corpse. “Remove the head and set it on a spear by his house,” he told his son Tostig. The Aenir lord unbuckled his breastplate, handing it to a grim-faced warrior beside him. Then he looked around him, eyes raking the timber and the gaunt snow-covered peaks in the distance.
“I like this place,” he said. “It has a good feeling to it.”
“But most of the Farlain escaped, Father,” said Tostig.
“Escaped? To where? All that’s out there is wilderness. By tonight Drada will be here, having finished off the Haesten. Ongist will be harrying the Pallides, driving the survivors west into our arms. Once they are destroyed we will take our men into the wilderness and finish the task-that’s if Barsa doesn’t do it before we arrive.”
“Barsa?”
“He is already in the west with two thousand forest-trained warriors from the south. They call themselves Timber Wolves, and by Vatan they’re a match for any motley ragbag of stinking clansmen.”
“We took no women,” complained Tostig. “Most of the young ones killed themselves. Bitches!”
“Drada will bring women. Do not fret.”
