Read The Dragon Hammer (Wulf's Saga Book 1) Online
Authors: Tony Daniel
Tags: #Fables, #Legends, #Action & Adventure, #Juvenile Fiction, #Norse, #Fantasy & Magic, #General, #Myths
The Dragon Hammer (Wulf's Saga Book 1) (15 page)
Chapter Eighteen:
The Flight
Then the duke turned his attention to the birds. He held out his arm, and the bald eagle leaped from its perch and, with two flaps, flew over and landed on the duke’s gauntlet.
Wulf backed away, giving his father plenty of room. This eagle was a female. They were almost one third larger than the males. Duke Otto looked at the bird, then turned to Wulf. “I think it’s time,” he said. “I want you to slip her today, Wulfgang.”
Slipping was the word for releasing the bird. To slip also meant that you were in charge of that bird during the flight. You had to watch it, follow it, and, when it struck prey, rush to the scene and help it finish off the kill.
Wulf gulped. He’d never flown a bird larger than a falcon. He’d brought his favorite of the owls in the mews, Nagel.
Finn came up beside Wulf and took Nagel from his arm.
“You can slip them both, m’lord,” the hunt master said. “The owl with the eagle at the same time. We’ve been training them together.”
Wulf was surprised. He’d read about this being done in an old hawking codex in the library, but he’d never seen it.
“What for?”
“Forests, where those sharp eagle eyes don’t help so much. You need ears to hear the rustles and bustles below the branches, and that owl is the eagle’s ears,” Finn replied. “It was tried out west in the pine forests, and worked. So your father said he’d like to see if we could match or even outdo those western eaglers.”
Finn unhooded Nagel.
With an expert flick of his wrist, he set her to flight. Nagel flew to a nearby tree limb and sat watching.
“Now let’s get you ready for the big one,” he said.
Finn returned and pulled off Wulf’s small gauntlet, suitable for owling. He helped Wulf into the larger, thicker gauntlet that was needed for slipping an eagle.
The land dropped quickly from this ridge between the rolling mountain peaks and a wide forest below down the slopes of the Dragonbacks. There were clumps of pines and cedars with their evergreen needles, but mostly the woods were filled with bare trees with a haze of green buds.
“I have a report from a herder I know from way back. Buffalo man,” Finn continued. “There’s a wolf pack that has strayed from the west valley where they belong. They have been feeding on the spring buffalo calves.”
“We’re going to hunt wolves today,” said the duke. He clapped his hands and smiled.
Wulf was excited despite himself. “I always wanted to see that.”
“You are going to be
doing
it,” Duke Otto said, and nodded toward the eagle. He held up his arm with the bird on it. Wulf lifted his own gauntleted arm. His father reached over and, with a turn of his wrist, set the bald eagle onto Wulf’s outstretched forearm. “Don’t worry. This girl is a wolf hunter.”
The bird was light, as were all birds of prey. But she was close to a half stone, which was much more than a falcon or an owl. Wulf knew he should easily be able to hold her up with one arm, but he couldn’t help moving his left hand under his elbow to steady himself. The eagle just
looked
heavy.
“Are you sure about this, Father?” Wulf said.
“Very sure,” said the duke.
Finn turned from gazing down into the valley. “The brushbeaters have stirred something, Your Excellency,” he said. “Looks to be at least a fox.”
Duke Otto nodded toward Wulf. “All right then. Get ready.”
“Yes, sir,” Wulf replied. He turned his attention to the eagle. She eyed him with a blank, emotionless stare.
“Does she have a name?” he said to the hunt master.
Finn looked at the bird as if he were sizing her up and only now thinking of a name for her. “Blitz,” he replied.
The eagle did not respond to hearing her name. Most hunting birds could not care less what humans called them.
I’m just a walking tree that gives you food, right, Blitz?
Birds were not pets. They did not love you. They did not care if you loved them. You also couldn’t get them to do anything by yelling at them or being mean. They did not understand human emotions at all. Nope, what they wanted, really all they wanted, was to hunt and to get fed for doing it. As long as you remembered those simple things about hunting with birds, you could get along with them. And if you could ever teach yourself to
think
like them, you could use them in really deadly ways.
But hawk, falcon, owl, eagle, or even from time to time a vulture, the basics of falconry were the same, and those Wulf knew from years of practice.
The eagle blinked, turned her white head toward the sky. After a moment, she opened her curved, sharp beak and let out a loud cry.
Wulf got ready to make the slip. He lifted his arm and called out, “Go, Blitz!” The bird spread her broad brown wings and instantly knew what to do. She lofted up with the movement of Wulf’s lifted arm. And then the weight was gone and the eagle was in the sky. She dipped for a bit, then found what she was looking for. It was an updraft air current, and she used it to glide higher and higher.
“Look at her soar,” the duke commented. “Finn and I slipped her with a vulture for a while so she could learn the tricks of saving strength and using currents. Then we trained her with the owl, your little owl, as a matter of fact.”
The duke had spent more and more time at hunting and riding since his mental failing started. It was like he was going through a second childhood. He left a lot of the day-to-day business of the mark to Otto, Wulf’s oldest brother.
Blitz swooped around behind Wulf, his father, and the rest of the hunting party, gathered speed, and then zoomed over their heads. Then he saw the little owl, Nagel, flying just behind the eagle, letting herself be pulled along in the wake of the eagle’s passing through the air.
That’s smart
,
Wulf thought.
There was no way the owl could keep up with the eagle on her own, but this way she let the eagle do most of the work. And it was very powerful work. He had felt the wind from the eagle’s wings as she passed over his head.
And then Blitz and Nagel were soaring down the mountainside and into the valley below them. The biggest thing Wulf had seen bald eagles hunt was foxes.
“So she’s really trained for wolves?” he asked.
“Aye, Finn and I think so,” his father replied. “Tell him, Finn.”
The faun did not look pleased that he had to speak, but he seemed to realize the duke wanted to tell his son about it himself but couldn’t find the words.
“You’ll remember her from when she was young, m’lord,” Finn said. “We started her on foxes with a make-eagle, a training bird, but she never cared much for them foxes. So we tried the vulture and then the owl with her. She took to the owl. But when we showed her a dead wolf one day she went wild. After that, it was all wolf training for that one.”
Wulf wondered how they’d done it. Probably with skin lures or carcasses pulled behind a horse. And then they would have set her on captured, live wolves when they could get their hands on one.
“And can she take down even a big one?”
“She can,” the hunt master replied. “She has. Undersized so far and in a field, not a forest. But I reckon she could down a big male if the time and place were right.”
Wulf and the duke watched the bird soar until she became a speck in the distance. “This is a huge slip. There must be a league of forest down there she is hunting. Aren’t you afraid we’ll lose her, Father?”
The truth was, he was more worried about losing the little owl. Nagel had always seemed like a good-luck charm to him. He would miss her if she disappeared into the forest. This sometimes happened even with the best-trained birds.
“She’s always come back,” his father replied. “And when she doesn’t, she’s made her kill, right, Finn?”
“That’s right, Your Excellency.”
“She’ll be waiting for us to find her and lure her off the carcass with some fishies.”
He stood silently beside his father for a while. Blitz soared one direction and then another, finding updrafts to keep her from having to flap too often, always scanning the landscape below her. The owl followed behind. If Nagel dropped too far back, the eagle slowed or doubled back to let her catch up.
Duke Otto pointed into the valley at the eagle. “She’s seen something.”
The eagle swooped in awesome curves back and forth—and then she came up short in one of her wide curves and suddenly headed in a straight line toward the west, away from the morning sun. She was a wheeling speck below. “Now let’s find out if she can make her kill.”
They watched as the bird shot across the treetops at her fastest speed, wings flapping in huge swooshes. But then, when she came over a clump of pine trees, she seemed to lose her way. She flew around in tight, overlapping circles.
“Ah, she’s lost it,” said the duke. He seemed very disappointed.
But Wulf was watching closely. A tiny speck rose from the trees below. It might have been a blowing leaf, but it rose up and up. It banked into a beautiful curve, and that was when he knew it was the little owl. She was practically blind in the daylight, but she still had her sensitive ears. She knew where the wolf was. And she was showing the eagle.
Something stirred in the hardwood saplings at the edge of the pines. Something was passing through the trees that was big enough to move them.
Then he saw the wolves.
There were gray-and-white splotches in the lighter gray of the bare forest below. But now that he’d picked them out, he could easily follow them.
“There!” cried Wulf. “Nagel has heard the wolves.”
“Who?” said Duke Otto. “What are you talking about?”
“The owl,” Wulf replied. “She hears them. Now, there it is! See the trees move?”
“Where?” The duke stared to where he was pointing. After a moment he chuckled. “Yes, yes. I see them. And so does my eagle!”
The eagle had followed the owl and spotted the wolves now. There was one that was hanging back from the pack.
This was what the eagle had been waiting for. Soon she was after it.
“A lone wolf,” said the duke. “Or maybe a leader, out hunting. They will do that at times.”
The eagle drew closer to the shaking below her.
The little speck that was the owl disappeared again into the foliage.
Closer—
And then, with a loud cry that even they heard at what had to be nearly a half league away, the eagle dove into the trees.
She disappeared.
The running movement stopped.
“She’s got it!” Duke Otto called out.
Or it’s got her
,
Wulf thought.
Chapter Nineteen:
The Woods
He called himself Steel. That was his Legionnaire name, a professional name that meant he was part of the Gray Goose Legion. This was the thousand-man regiment of paid soldiers working directly for the von Krehennest family of Sandhaven. Unlike the normal levies and bands, they had professional ranks. Sergeant. Lance captain. Lance commander. Captain. They called themselves Nesties.
Many Nesties were mercenaries, men who had traveled from or been driven out of other kingdoms and principalities. Some even came from across the ocean. The one thing they had in common was that they were all very good at what they did. They were dangerous killers. They usually preferred bills and poleaxes to swords, although they were experts with swords, as well. When ordered to kill, they
never
gave quarter to an enemy until that enemy lay unmoving in a pool of his own blood.
At least, that was the idea. For Steel, the Legion was a way to get ahead for his family. He and his brother were city rats. They were the sons of a silversmith who worked in Krehennest. They had been fairly well-to-do until a plague had taken Steel’s mother and two sisters. After that his father had retreated into himself. His business fell apart. He spent his savings on wine. Soon they lived in poverty. Then the silversmith died and there was absolutely nothing left for Steel or his brother.
Except.
They did have their father’s brother. He was a teamster who also supplied horses to the Nesties. He recommended Steel and his brother to the Legion’s recruiter. The brothers had joined together. Since they could read and write, they’d come in as officer cadets and camp errand boys.
Over the next fifteen years, they both had done well. His brother, whose Legionnaire’s name was Rask, which meant “swift” in the Tidewater dialect of Kaltish, had risen to the highest rank of all. He was the commander of the elite faction of the Legion called the Hundred. Steel had only risen to lance captain, but that was all right. Besides, he had almost saved up the fifteen hundred thalers he needed to buy his next rank. The rich officers could depend on their families for the money. For Rask and Steel, it had taken years of looting and raiding to the south to get together the silver they needed.
To go viking against the Romans was the reason the Nesties really existed. They were there to protect the sons of nobles who had to make their mark in combat. But those young men of privilege could never, ever be killed by a Roman gladius. The Nesties were there to do the dying for them.
This expedition against the Mark of Shenandoah might be enough. He had eleven hundred saved. If he could get back home with loot or, even better, with an indentured servant to sell, he might raise the four hundred extra thalers he needed to buy lance commander.
Only that wasn’t going to happen.
Steel was dying. He hated the feeling. It wasn’t going to be death in combat. It wasn’t even a sickness he could name.
He simply felt his will to live leaking away.
It had started when the dark thing had arrived at the castle.
The thing was shaped like a man, but it had a vulture-shaped head. It smelled of death. And it was coal black from head to foot.
Instead of ordering it killed, King Siggi had welcomed it.
Only the Nesties knew, and they were sworn to follow their king’s orders and to keep their king’s secrets.
They’d been ordered to eat the bloody, black Roman bread.
The thing that smelled of death came into their minds.
Now they took their orders from the black thing.
For some, this had come easily. A transfer of allegiance.
Maybe it was because he had been too devoted to Siggi. Maybe it was because there was something physically different or wrong with him. When the black thing had moved in and taken control, something was snuffed out in Steel.
There was no fire inside.
His plans to make a life for himself, to marry Silke Leeuwenhoek and start a family? Gone. Instead of asking her father for her hand as they’d planned, Steel had gone out drinking that night. Alone.
Silke had been bewildered and heartbroken. She had moved on.
He didn’t know how to tell her that he felt like a burned lump of charcoal inside. That he was crumbling away.
The only thing keeping him going was the harsh will of the dark thing. There was hierarchy and order. He had always liked that about the Legion, especially after the way he’d grown up on the streets. He became the bloodservant of his section commander, that commander answered to his captain, and the captain answered to Prince Trigvi. The prince belonged to the black thing.
Then the will of the black thing had suddenly disappeared.
It was replaced by the mind-thought commands of Prince Trigvi alone.
He hated marching on Shenandoah. They were allies. It wasn’t right. His mother had come from Shenandoah, from Kohlsted. He felt like he was marching against his own people.
Now they were going west to do
what
? To avenge Prince Gunnar, and get paid a blood price, yes. That was fair.
But once they had started out, the blood price had seemed less and less of the purpose of Prince Trigvi.
Instead of settling the blood feud, he had made it worse.
Near the border, they came upon Adelbert von Dunstig and his band. It could hardly be called a company, much less an army. Fifty men-at-arms and Adelbert had traveled east to offer terms. Gunnar was dead. Now there was a huge amount of silver and a vast eastern territory for a blood-price settlement.
Soon after Adelbert had entered Trigvi’s war tent to talk with the prince, the Legion itself had been ordered to attack the men of the mark, and to leave none of them alive. Even if they’d wanted to, they couldn’t have avoided killing. They were not the prince’s men-at-arms anymore. They had become the prince’s bloodservants.
His slaves.
The fifty men of Shenandoah hadn’t stood much of a chance against a thousand. Only one man, a crazed and deadly fighter, had escaped, and it wasn’t the duke’s son.
Adelbert was captured. The rumor was that Trigvi had cut Adelbert’s throat and sent his severed head home to King Siggi as a trophy.
It isn’t supposed to be this way, Steel thought. Shenandoah is our
ally
. They are Kaltemen. Why are we marching against her?
He wanted to talk to his brother about this, but Rask was not along on this march.
He had left with the black thing, six months ago. Rask and the Hundred had ridden out of the Krehennest castle garrison one night. The dark thing was leading them. They had vanished in the night.
Steel felt truly alone without his brother. He wanted to be fighting Tiberians, raiding colonies, patrolling the Chesapeake. Those were the things Nesties were
supposed
to do. The things they were good at.
Instead they were well inside the Mark of Shenandoah’s boundary, marching through Dornstadt Pass.
His master’s will was gone. The black thing’s hatred. The black thing’s drive. Gone.
Now he only had Trigvi as a master. His mind-command wasn’t enough after the crushing will of the black thing.
Steel thought about killing himself every day. He planned how he might do it. But the last spark inside him that hadn’t been put out by the black thing and the bloody bread wouldn’t
quite
let him do it.
So he’d rode onward.
Steel’s entire company was passing around a case of the runs. Steel was over his, but his men were constantly ducking into the woods, or squatting down wherever they found themselves if they had to. Some had cut out the back of their trousers, their butts covered only by their tabard, so they could squat sooner. A couple were trying remedies such as eating sand from the bottom of rainwater puddles or even plugging themselves with wine corks. Steel highly doubted either was effective, but he let them go ahead, since it eased some of the boredom of the westward march.
They’d stopped for the night. Steel ordered his men to make a quick road camp with tarps, but no tents. While they were doing that, he’d told his sergeant he was going to scout for a stream for the wagon teams. The sergeant nodded glumly and started spacing his men in the driest place he could find.
Steel slipped into the woods. He rode a ways and did not find a stream. Then he rode a ways farther. He stopped his horse, and they stood still.
He was about to rein his horse back, in fact part of him thought he
was
turning the horse around, but he didn’t. He lightly kicked his heels into the horse’s sides and rode farther. This time he didn’t stop. He rode into the night. Soon the horse began to stumble because it couldn’t see. They were following no path. Steel got off and led the horse forward.
He stopped at dawn beside a stream and ate some hard bread while the horse guzzled water. Nearby was a meadow with some grass that had survived the winter. He would let the horse graze.
This was where he would die.
His true master was gone. He had nothing left inside.
Maybe this blankness inside was a sickness that only struck one in a thousand who ate the ater-cake. It didn’t seem to affect the others like it did him.
That was his bad luck.
He was no longer a Nestie. He wasn’t Steel anymore.
He was once again Alvis Torsson.
And Alvis Torsson was dead tired.
Alvis slept.
He dreamed of his mother. It was nothing special. She was telling him to mind his muddy boots after he’d come in from playing. He hadn’t had such a dream in a long time. He couldn’t really remember what she had looked like anymore.
But here she was. Telling him to wake up, company was coming!
Alvis Torsson did awake—and found himself surrounded by four bears.
They stood on two legs and carried wicked looking halberds. So not bears.
Bear men.
Steel reached for his sword. One of the bear men stepped forward. It? He? It turned its halberd sideways and slapped the flat surface down on top of Steel’s head.
Darkness.
This time Steel slept a much deeper sleep with no dreams.