An Empire Unacquainted With Defeat (12 page)

"But . . . ."

"You will know what to do when the time comes."

"But . . . ." He found himself talking to Ainjar's back. And Sköl had started climbing the mountain. He ran to catch up, his sword clanking.

Sköl did not camp with sundown.
Huldre
-folk were at home with night. But he did slow for Svale's sake.

They heard children and women crying as they neared the hump. The weeping came from a patch of deep darkness. Then there was evil laughter and the sounds of terrible horns, followed by a clatter and clank like a whole kitchen of pots and pans rattling together. Sköl guided Svale into hiding behind some ragged bushes.

A full orange moon rose. Sköl waited as patiently as the mountain. Svale tried not to fidget and scratch. His sword scraped against something every time he twitched.

The pots and pans noise got louder.

Suddenly, from the patch of darkness, a stream of horsemen galloped, all troll-huge and dark. The horses were bigger than any Svale had ever seen. Their eyes burned red. Their breath came in tongues of fire. Their hooves rang like thunder and struck fountains of sparks before, with a blast of horns, the Terrible Host stampeded across the sky like a flight of snow geese trails bits of fire.

Sköl touched Svale's arm, pointed.

Crossing the moon was something Svale had thought less probable than the return of the
Oskorei.

"
Linnorm
," he murmured. The great northern dragon.

Astride it, vast cloak flapping, a rod of fire in one hand, was a man. "The Dragon King," Svale whispered, awed. He hadn't ever believed those old stories.

Wings beating with the sounds of gongs, the dragon raced after the Terrible Host. In moments, over westward peaks, there were rumbles and flashes as if a sudden, savage storm had rolled in off the sea.

Sköl pointed toward the cave. Shaking, Svale followed him inside.

The dark veil parted. They could see by torches burning within. Svale understood. Silver and iron were the banes of magic.

Echoed weeping drew them deeper into the earth, to a great cavern that was furnished like a castle's interior.

The missing wives and children were chained to its walls, weeping like lost souls. The stewpots of the
Oskorei
were deep.

Troll women, slaves of the Terrible Host, tended fires and their masters' housekeeping.

Svale spied Frigga sleeping in the lap of a woman from Aalmo.

He had bad habits, but he was not stupid. He did not run to the child. He knew the troll women would seize him and shove him into a cook pot. His old sword would not scratch their stony hides.

They were a problem.

Svale had a thought. It must be near dawn outside.

All trolldom resented what Hatchet-Face Svien had done to their cousin on Hifjell.

"Halvor laughed when the white cock crowed," Svale shouted. "But Hatchet-Face runs like the wind." The trolls dropped their work. Svale scampered back up the tunnel, singing as he went.

Sköl turned toward the wall. He became invisible.
Huldre
-folk can vanish anywhere. The trolls rushed past without seeing him at all.

Svale ran. His blisters became big as eggs. His legs grew heavy. But he ran all the way to the cave entrance, then down into Dark Wood. The troll women were so angry they chased him till Old Sun rose and turned them to stone.

Leading them away was the bravest thing Svale had ever done.

Climbing Thunder Mountain and descending to its heart again was the hardest. Day was almost done when, on feet that were coals of pain, Svale penetrated the dark veil again. It was fully dark when, with Sköl and the prisoners, he came out again. He was cheerful despite his misery, and undaunted by the journey yet to be made homeward.

He and Sköl found their way blocked by a dark rider on a dark horse. The chieftain of the
oskoreien.
His armor was badly battered, his mount was wounded in a dozen places, but both were alive and angry. Smoke trailed from the stallion's nostrils. The King of the
oskoreien
's eyes were ruby coals behind his slitted visor.

The prisoners shrieked and fled into the cavern.

Sköl gripped his spear and braced himself.

Svale started to run but found his Frigga looking his way from the cave's mouth. He could not flee before her very eyes. He turned and readied his sword.

Their enemy drew a great black blade. Bloody fires flickered along its edge. And by that token they knew the Dragon King had been slain.

Silver and iron. Not even the lord of the
Oskorei
's magic could withstand that combination. Svale's old sword rang and reeled beneath the enemy's strokes, yet shattered that black, haunted blade. The shards scattered across the mountainside, starting small fires where they fell. Sköl stabbed with his spear. It squealed through a chink in battered dark armor. The lord of the
Oskorei
roared, clutched his side. Lightning and thunder ripped across the night. A sudden, hard rain began to fall. The great black stallion reared, screamed, then galloped into the sky, trailing fire as he carried his master to the safety of his ice castle beneath the midnight sun.

Lightning and thunder continued to rip the night. The rain squelched the fires on Thunder Mountain.

Svale and Sköl laughed and hugged one another, and congratulated one another on how brave they were, and in small soft voices each admitted that he was lying, that he had been scared to death. It made a bond of brotherhood, that shared fear.

Then they called their people out of the mountain and Sköl guided them home.

Svale Skar returned to Alstahaug a changed man. His neighbors did not want to believe his story, but could not help themselves. He no longer started trouble. Neither did he drink to excess, brag, nor treat his family unkindly. It seemed that, in the crucible of his adventure, he had learned to appreciate things of real value.

He pursued no new adventures, though now he no longer feared Dark Wood. He became a quiet man and wise chieftain who, once each year, went to Hifjell Mountain where he and Sköl would join in a journey to a cairn the Hidden People had built for Ainjar and Freki.

After the great storm-battle in the sky the night the two raided Thunder Mountain the
huldre
-folk had found the old man and dog mysteriously slain in the forest.

Only Svale and Sköl and, perhaps the
huldre
wise, suspect whom Ainjar and Freki really were.

Never again did the Terrible Host rage through the mountains and valleys of Tröndelag, though the old folks say you can still hear the devil drumbeats of fiery hooves and the wail of evil horns from the snowfields and glaciers of the far north. They say that when the northern lights are dancing the King of the
Oskorei
is remembering and breathing fire.

This story appeared in the May 1978 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. It was the first of a series of novelettes about the crew of
Vengeful Dragon
. At one time I attempted to cobble them together into a fix-up novel but there were no takers. The story was well-received critically and garnered a number of Nebula Award recommendations.

It seemed we had been aboard the
Vengeful D.
forever, madly galloping the coasts from Simballawein to The Tongues of Fire. We looked toward land with the lust of stallions for mares beyond a twelve-foot fence. But our barrier was far less visible. It consisted solely of Colgrave's will.

"Going to the Clouds of Heaven next time I hit Portsmouth," said Little Mica, bending over his needle. He was forever patching sail. "Best damned cathouse on the coast. Best damned cats. Going to make them think Old Goat God himself has arrived." He giggled.

It was Subject Number One with Little Mica. It was with most of us. I had never met a sailor who was not drunk or horny. He would be both if he had his feet on dry land

"Runt like you couldn't satisfy a dwarf's grandmother," Student remarked from behind the inevitable book. They dueled with insults awhile. There was little else to do. We were running before a steady breeze.

During the exchange Student's eyes never left his book.

It was one we had taken off a Daimiellian two-master months earlier. We were due to take another vessel soon. (Maybe The One. I hoped. I prayed. Colgrave had vowed to remain at sea till he found her.) Our stores were running low. There was mold down to the heart of the bread. Maggots were growing in the salt pork, which had gotten wet in a recent storm. There was no fruit to fight the scurvy. And we were down to our last barrel of grog. One lousy barrel would not last me long.

I had no stomach for a beach raid just there, much as I wanted to feel earth and grass beneath my soles. We were a half-dozen leagues north of Cape Blood, off Itaskian coasts. Those were shores Trolledyngjans habitually plundered. And it was their season for hell raising. Coast watchers were, likely, considering us with cold, hard eyes at that moment.

"Sail ho!"

Men scrambled, clearing the decks. I glanced up. As usual, Lank Tor, our chief boatswain, was in the crow's nest. He was as crazy as the Old Man.

Colgrave stalked from his cabin. As always, he was armed and clothed as if about to present himself at court. The boatswain's cry, like a warlock's incantation, had conjured him to the weather decks. "Where away?" He would not go below till we had caught her. Or she shook us.
That
seldom happened.

I peered to seaward. There were always squalls off Cape Blood. That day was no exception, though the storm was playing coy, lying on the horizon instead of embracing the coast. Prey ships liked to duck in to escape. The rocky shoreline offered no hope better than drowning amidst wreckage and thundering surf.

"On the bow!" Tor shouted. "Just round the point and making the landward tack."

"Ah-ha-ha-ha," the Old Man roared, slapping his good thigh.

His face had been destroyed by fire. The whole left side was a grotesque lava flow of scar tissue. His left cheekbone showed an inch-square iceberg tip of bare bone.

"We've got her. Had her before we ever saw her."

Cape Blood was a long, jagged, desolate finger of rock diddling the ocean across the paths of cold northern and warm southern currents. If the ship
were
round the point and on a landward tack, she was almost certainly caught. We had a strong breeze astern. She would have to shift sail for a long seaward tack, coming toward us, piling onto the rocks round the headland. That turn, and bending on sail, would take time too.

"Shift your course a point to starboard," Colgrave roared at the helmsman. Toke, our First Officer, so summarily relieved of his watch, shrugged and went to watch Hengis and Fat Poppo, who had the chip log over the side.

"Making eight knots," he announced a moment later. The Old Man eyed the sails. But there was no way we could spread more canvas. With a breeze like the one we had we always ran hell-bent, hoping to catch somebody napping.

"She's seen us," Tor shouted. "Starting to come around. Oh! A three-master. Caravel-rigged." We were a caravel ourselves, a stubby, pot-bellied vessel high in the bows and stern.

The Old Man's face brightened. Glowed. The ship we were hunting was a caravel. Maybe this was The One.

That was what we called her aboard
Vengeful Dragon
. No one knew her true name, though she had several given her by other sailors.
The Ghost Ship. The Hell Ship. The Phantom Reaver.
Like that.

"What colors?" Colgrave demanded.

Tor did not answer. We were not that close. Colgrave realized it and did not ask again.

I did not know if the phantom were real or not. The story had run the western coast almost since the beginning of sea trade, changing to fit the times. It told of a ghost ship crewed by dead men damned to sail forever, pirating, never to set foot on land, never to see Heaven or Hell, till they had redeemed themselves for especially hideous crimes. The nature of their sins had never been defined.

We had been hunting her for a long time, pirating ourselves while we pursued the search. Someday we would find her. Colgrave was too stubborn to quit till he had settled his old score. Or till we, like so many other crews who had met her, fed the fish while she went on to her next kill.

The Old Man's grievance involved the fire that had ruined his face, withered his left arm, and left him with a rolling limp, like a fat galleon in a heavy ground swell. The phantom, like so many pirates, always fired her prey when she finished with them. Colgrave, somehow, had survived such a burning.

His entire family, though, had gone down with the vessel.

The Captain, apparently, had been a rich man. Swearing he would find The One, he had purchased the
Vengeful Dragon
. Or so the story went, as it had been told to us.

None of us knew how he had gotten rich in the first place. All we knew about him was that he had a terrible temper, that he compensated for his disfigurement by dressing richly, that he was a genius as a pirate, and that he was absolutely insane.

How long had we been prowling those coasts? It seemed an age to me. But they had not caught us yet, not the Itaskian Navy, or the witch-mastered corsairs of the Red Isles, or the longshipmen of Trolledyngja, nor the warships of the many coastal city-states. No. We caught them, like spiders who hunted spiders. And we continued our endless hunt.

Always we hunted. For the three-master caravel with the deadman crew.

"Steward!" Colgrave called. "Half pint for all hands." The Old Man seldom spoke at less than a bellow.

Old Barley flashed a sloppy salute and went looking for the key to the grog locker. That was my cue. Grog had been scarce lately. I shuffled off to be first in line.

From behind his book Student remarked to Little Mica, "Must be rough to be a wino on the
Vengeful D."

I threw him a daggers look. He did not glance up. He never did. He was not interested in observing the results of his razor-tongued comments.