Bones of the Dragon (22 page)

“What dragon?” Draya gasped.

“The Torgun’s dragon! Father says the dragon is helping the Torgun fight the ogres.” The boy tugged on his mother’s hands. “You must come see. The dragon is green and brown, and he flies around in a circle and then dives like an eagle.”

The two women looked at each other, the same thought coming to each.

Draya clasped her hands together. “Blessed Vindrash, thank you!” she whispered brokenly.

Fria promised to go and then shooed her son out the door, sending him back to his father.

“The Torgun have a chance now!” Draya said, almost in tears. “With Kahg to fight for them, they may yet defeat the ogres!”

And recover the Vektan Torque! Please, Vindrash, let them find the torque and bring it back! she prayed silently.

Draya realized suddenly that Fria did not share her joy. Her friend looked grim and stern. She stood with her hands on her hips, arms akimbo.

“Draya,” said Fria sharply, “don’t you realize what this means?”

Draya shook her head. She was too tired to think.

“If the Torgun defeat the ogres, what then? They lit the beacon fire asking for our help, and help did not come. The Torgun will come to Vindraholm demanding answers. They will come in anger. We may have escaped ogres only to fight the Torgun.”

Draya stared at her friend in dismay; then she groaned and sank back down onto the stool.

Blood feuds, clan wars, just what she had worked all her life to prevent. Few of the Heudjun liked Horg. Few had agreed with his decision to refuse aid to the Torgun. But he was their clansman, and he was their Chief. His honor was their honor. They might mutter against him among themselves, but they would close ranks around him and stand together to protect him.

“What can I do?” Draya asked helplessly. “I can do nothing!”

“The one thing you can do is rest. You’ll make yourself ill otherwise, and we need you. Come, lie down.”

Draya did not think she could sleep, but she was too weak to resist. Fria led her to the sleeping platform and helped her into bed. She tucked the blankets around her and stood over her, smoothing Draya’s hot forehead with her hand.

“We will ask Vindrash to help us,” Fria said softly. “The gods will not turn their backs on us now.”

Draya closed her eyes, pretending to sleep, and Fria left, going to join her family at Torval’s Rock.

When she had gone, Draya slipped out of bed and knelt in prayer. But no voice answered.

Horg pretended to be glad when people brought him the news that the Dragon Kahg had joined the fight against the ogres.

“You see there,” Horg told the warriors, who had assembled in front of his dwelling place. “All that excitement for nothing. Take off your weapons and pick up your tools. The crops won’t tend themselves.”

He shut the door and stood for long moments in the shadowy darkness of the windowless dwelling. Then he slammed his fist into one of the support beams, causing the longhouse to shudder.

“Goat-fucking sons of whores!” he swore. “Witless arseholes! I warned the godlords. ‘Capture the dragonship and set fire to it,’ I said. ‘Leave nothing but ashes floating on the water.’ The greedy bastards didn’t listen. They wanted the ship for themselves. It was that whoreson shaman. I saw the gleam in his eyes when I spoke of it.”

Horg sucked his bruised knuckles and thought things over. There was the chance that the ogres could still win the battle. Dragons weren’t invincible. They could be killed, same as any other creature. Or perhaps the dragon had arrived late, after the battle had been lost and all the Torgun were dead.

Horg brightened at the thought. He hated the Torgun, who spent the fine summer months sailing the seas in their dragonship—the ship that by rights should have been his—in search of gold and glory, fighting battles Horg refused to fight. True, such raids had gained the Torgun little these days, as Horg was continually pointing out to his disgruntled warriors. That was why he no longer led the Heudjun in raids. Their time was more profitably spent in tilling the fields and tending the cattle.

Horg heard the whispers. He knew some of his people despised him as a coward. Horg’s spies were quick to bring him the latest rumblings and seemed to relish telling him the foul things people said about him.

Horg had another reason for hating the Torgun. Skylan Ivorson, the Chief’s son, had not shown Horg the proper respect. Two years ago, the Heudjun’s dragonship had been wrecked off the coast in a storm. Many warriors had drowned, as well as the ship’s Bone Priestess. The sacred spiritbone had been lost at sea and never recovered, which meant that the Heudjun had no dragon.

Horg and several of his cronies had gone to the Torgun to demand that
Norgaard give him the
Venjekar
. During the meeting, the whelp Skylan had stated that it was his belief the gods had sent the storm to deliberately wreck the Heudjun dragonship as a punishment for their cowardice. That rash statement had angered the Heudjun and had almost resulted in war.

Norgaard had reprimanded his obstreperous son and insisted that Skylan apologize. Skylan had done so, though to Horg’s mind the young man hadn’t really been sincere. Horg had confidently expected Norgaard to hand over the dragonship, for the Torgun Chief was a broken old man who dared deny his Chief of Chiefs nothing.

Norgaard had refused, however, much to Horg’s ire. He was Chief of Chiefs. He deserved a dragonship. He deserved to have a dragon serve him. Horg had been angry enough to fight, but at the thought, his stomach curled up in a tight little ball. He decided that he would send his men on a raid to steal the
Venjekar
. The damn dragon, Kahg, had thwarted that plan.

Horg had waited for his revenge, biding his time until he could find a way to inflict harm on the Torgun and, especially, on Skylan.

Horg was a gambler. He believed in luck, not in the gods. He considered himself lucky. He attributed his rise as Chief of Chiefs to luck. His marriage to that cow, Draya, had not been lucky, but a gambler could always find ways to explain away a bad fall of the dragonbones.

The ogres had come to Horg as a lucky throw of the dragonbones. Horg had been dallying with one of his women in a secluded part of the beach when he had seen the ogres’ ships sailing under a flag of truce, heading for Vindraholm. He had been tempted to wait until they reached the city, where he would meet them surrounded by his warriors. Some god had whispered to him that he should meet with them alone, and he had rowed out to intercept them.

The ogres had given him the news that the Vindrasi gods were dead, defeated in a great battle. The godlords declared that the Vindrasi must worship the Gods of Raj and pay them tribute. Horg had been proud of his own cleverness. He had made a pact with the ogre godlords. The ogres would leave the Heudjun and the other clans in peace. In return he had given them a moldy old dragonbone and the Torgun. As to worshipping the Gods of Raj, Horg had been as happy to pray to them as to any other gods. Faith was all a lot of horseshit anyway.

But luck had turned on him.

His plans should have worked! Horg couldn’t understand how it had all gone awry. First his meddling bitch of a wife had discovered he no longer had the Vektan Torque. He’d dealt with her. He’d seen the fear in her eyes when he’d threatened to tell the people that her beloved gods were dead. She would never dare betray him.

Just as he thought he was safe, now this. What would happen to him if the Torgun survived the battle? They would be puzzled that their plea for aid had been ignored. Their first thought would be that the ogres had already attacked and defeated the Heudjun. They would sail over to investigate and find the Heudjun squatting comfortably over their cook fires.

That was always presuming they didn’t know the ogres had taken the Vektan Torque. If they did . . .

Horg broke out in a cold sweat and began to feverishly calculate how fast the Torgun could reach Vindraholm. The day was fine. The sea was calm. The battle had taken place at dawn. . . .

He sent men to the shore with orders to keep watch. He filled a mug with cider and paced his lodging, waiting for news.

The day passed. Night fell. No ships were sighted, and Horg’s hopes revived. The Torgun must have been slaughtered. Otherwise they would have been here by now, howling with rage and threatening to rip off his head.

Horg was in such good spirits that he summoned his latest concubine to come to him, rather than sneak off to meet her. He was Chief of Chiefs. He could have any woman he wanted. Let Draya come home to find him taking his pleasure. He’d be glad to let her watch. She would see for herself that some women enjoyed being in the arms of a strong, powerful man such as himself.

He drank more cider and more after that.

T
he Torgun were eager to confront Horg, but even the enraged Skylan realized that they could not immediately leap into their ships and sail off to what might be war with their fellow clansmen. The Torgun owed a debt to their dead, whose souls were waiting, impatient to commence their journey to join Torval in the Hall of Heroes. In addition to honoring the dead, the Torgun had to make repairs to their dragonship. Norgaard meant to arrive on his clansmen’s shores in full dignity and might.

The number of dead was surprisingly few. Most had died in the initial clash, when the ogres had crashed headlong into the Torgun shield-wall
and left it in shambles. Fighting one on one, warrior to warrior, the Torgun had discovered, like Skylan, that ogres were relatively unskilled with their weapons. Bjorn had survived with only a cracked head.

But it was the Dragon Kahg who had saved the day. The Torgun honored the dragon and sang songs in praise of him.

The Dragon Kahg generally disliked such displays, and he would ordinarily have left immediately after the battle. He felt some small remorse for having initially ignored the Bone Priestess’s desperate prayers, however, and the dragon deigned to graciously receive the Torgun’s homage. He did not stay long, for he had to report the disastrous loss of the Vektan Torque to the dragon elders. Kahg planned to return that night. He intended on being present when the Torgun confronted Horg. The dragon was keenly interested to hear what Horg had to say for himself.

The Torgun reverently carried the bodies of their dead to the beach. Warriors who had died in battle were placed in boats with their weapons, their armor, and their shields, along with food and ale to sustain them through the long journey. The boats would then be set ablaze, the bodies cremated.

The women had already started to come down from the hiding places in the hills, some to hear the news that they were now widows. The women brought sad tidings themselves. Norgaard’s wife, Sonja, had lost her baby, a little boy. He’d been born too early to survive outside his mother’s womb. Sonja herself was now fighting for her life in a cave in the hills. She was too ill to be moved.

“I am sorry, Father,” said Skylan, resting his hand gently on the older man’s arm. “If there is anything I can do—”

Norgaard had lost men close to him this day. He had lost his hope for the future, and he might yet lose the young woman who brought joy into his life. He had been told by the Bone Priestess that the gods were themselves fighting for their survival. He had watched the ogres sail off with the sacred Vektan Torque.

His eyes were red with tears, yet a flicker of flame blazed in the blue depths.

Norgaard gripped his son’s hand with crushing strength. “I will make Horg pay!” he vowed. “I swear to Torval! I will call for the Vutmana!”

Skylan gaped. He was about to say, Father, don’t be ridiculous! when Garn leaned close to whisper, “Tread softly!”

Skylan took his friend’s counsel and closed his mouth on his hasty words. Norgaard was serious. He was determined, resolved to challenge Horg to a fight to the death.

Perhaps the old man wanted to die in battle and this was a way to do it. Or
perhaps grief and anger had acted as flint and tinder to rekindle a fire in the old man’s belly.

Whatever the reason, it was Norgaard’s right, as Chief, to challenge Horg, the Chief of Chiefs, in the Vutmana.

Dating back to the days of the great Clan Chief Thorgunnd and his legendary war against the Clan Chief Krega, the Vutmana was an institution created by the Bone Priestesses as a means of ending the ceaseless feuds between the clans. In those days, clans had gone to war and men had lost their lives over the theft of a chicken. With the Vutmana, one man could challenge another to fight to resolve the issue. The Vutmana could be made by any warrior against another, but only a Chief could challenge the Chief of Chiefs; the winning combatant could then claim the right to be Chief of Chiefs.

Skylan drew Garn to one side. “What do we do, my friend? A hog has more right to be Chief of Chiefs than Horg. Yet, how can Norgaard fight him? Horg is a big man, strong as an ogre. Norgaard is a cripple.”

“Torval judges the Vutmana,” Garn reminded him. “The god must be furious at Horg’s treachery.”

“That is true,” Skylan conceded, “but sometimes Hevis plays cruel jokes on both men and gods. Hevis might devise some trick to allow Horg to win.”

Garn admitted that was true. Hevis, God of Deceit and Trickery, was always plucking at the thread of a man’s wyrd, seeking to unravel it.

“Skylan,” said Garn suddenly. “There is a way.” He spoke quietly in his friend’s ear.

Skylan regarded him dubiously. “Are you certain?”

Garn smiled and said dryly, “Unlike you, I stay awake during the annual recital of the Chief’s Law.”

Skylan’s eyes shone with fierce joy. He embraced Garn. “You have given me a great gift, my brother.”

Skylan drew his sword, which was red with ogre blood, and walked over to stand before his father. Skylan knelt down on one knee. He thrust the blade into the ground in front of him.

“Revered Father,” said Skylan. He spoke humbly, and he was sincere in his humility, for he could see the raw grief and terrible anger in his father’s face. “Your honorable wounds, which are a testament to your skill and valor, give you the right to select a warrior to fight the Vutmana in your place. If the Heudjun agree to the challenge, give me the privilege. Let me fight Horg for you. I will make you Chief of Chiefs!”