The open space between the pines was empty, nothing but muddy scrapes on the ground, half covered by snow, to show anyone had ever been there. But something shiny hung from a tree branch about chest-high. Aerling lifted it from the place it had caught, then brought it back to show the other two. It was a necklace of some kind, a piece of pale blue crystal about the size of a finger, carved crudely in the shape of a woman. Its slender chain was broken. Porto guessed that it had caught on the branch as one of the Norns had retreated from a skirmish. He leaned nearer and saw that what had at first appeared plain and even crude was instead beautifully simple: each angle was perfectly shaped, and the closer he looked the less he could make out what it was supposed to be.
Aerling held his hand out, proffering the necklace. “You saw it, Southerner. It’s yours.”
Porto’s first desire was to step back. Although in some ways the thing was beautiful—how brightly it would glimmer against Sida’s breast when he brought it home to her!—it was alien, too; just looking at it filled him with a sudden, fierce pain of homesickness.
Someone shouted in alarm from beyond the trees, a ragged, rising cry that ended abruptly. Even as Porto and his two companions turned from side to side, trying to judge the direction it had come from, another voice shrieked out a single word: “Hunë!”
It took Porto a moment to understand, but then terror came: it was a Rimmersgard word he had heard before and always to his sorrow. Giant. It meant giant.
A terrible crash, loud as thunder but far closer, then suddenly trees were falling everywhere around them. A moment later, even as Kolbjorn turned and dashed out of the clearing, Porto realized that the trees were all falling from one direction, and that Kolbjorn had sensibly, if not bravely, gone the other way. Porto had only a moment to lament his own slow reflexes, then something hurtled out of the mass of broken, sagging trees and landed at Aerling’s feet. It was the headless corpse of Dragi, recognizable only by the boots the old soldier always cared for so lovingly.
More trees fell, making the ground jump; one of them nearly crushed Porto, but he threw himself to one side. Then the monster emerged out of the fog, striding over the felled trunks, sweeping smaller trees out of its path as if they were reeds.
Porto had seen giants before, when the troops had crossed over into the Nornfells, and he had watched from a grateful distance as the Rimmersmen had killed them, usually by sheer force of numbers. A dozen or more soldiers would pierce the huge beasts with arrows then keep them at bay with long spears until they finally fell bleeding to the ground, where they could be finished. But he had never seen one so close, and it all but stopped his heart.
The monstrous creature was half again the height of a man, with long arms and a face as ugly and full of rage as a demon’s from another world. Its shaggy fur was as white as the snow itself, which meant it was still young, and unlike those Porto had seen in battle, it did not wear the leather harness that the Norns put on those who fought for them. As the giant pulled itself loose from the last fallen tree and advanced on Aerling, it bared its huge, yellow fangs. The stench of rotting flesh made Porto gag even as he stumbled back.
But Aerling was wedged between two fallen trees, branches tangling him from all sides. The Mountain Goat leader tried to work his bow free and could not, so he let go of it and pulled his sword instead. The giant growled, a rumble Porto could feel deep in the bones of his chest, then slapped at Aerling with a hand the size of a serving platter. The Rimmersman lunged at the massive paw and managed to sink his blade into the creature’s wrist, but the heavy hand knocked him loose from the trees that had held him. Aerling flew half a dozen steps across the clearing and landed like a mealsack among the broken trunks.
Porto’s blood was thundering so loudly in his brain that he could not think. He wanted to pray, wanted to tell his wife goodbye, but all he could see was that red, dripping mouth and the creature’s deep-set eyes as it moved toward him, splintering fallen wood beneath its feet. Porto turned and ran. Snagged by branches, stumbling across toppled trees, his retreat seemed impossibly, fatally slow, but he dared not look back. At last he reached the center of the clearing where Aerling lay motionless, only a few steps away from the edge of the outcrop they had climbed. Porto knew that if he jumped off the stony shelf the giant would be on him before he could rise, and that would be the end.
He set his back foot, dodged a swipe from a huge, hairy hand, and swung at the thing’s legs, but he caught his sword on the spiky branch of a fallen tree and barely creased the giant’s fur. In a heartbeat, the beast had lurched forward and snatched him up into the air. Porto’s sword fell from his fingers as the breath whistled out of him.
Yellow teeth grimaced only inches from his face. Tiny eyes peered out at him from under the bony shelf of the monster’s brow, and in that moment of ultimate, dreamlike terror, he could see something looking back at him, a mocking intelligence in the giant’s inhuman gaze that was almost worse than anything else.
Then the creature’s hot, putrid breath blasted him as it let out a sudden, deafening roar. Porto was flung to the side so hard he bounced, the world turning up and down, whirling around him until it seemed almost like a dream. At last he stopped rolling and lay flat. Airless, he gasped and choked, struggling to fill his burning lungs and to rise before the monster seized him again. But the giant was doing some kind of bizarre dance and seemed not even to notice him; instead it whirled in place, flailing its huge arms and roaring so loudly that the branches on the remaining trees shook and rattled.
Something was dangling from the giant’s neck, though Porto could make little sense of any of it. His air was out, his sight was going black, and no matter what he did he could not seem to suck anything into his straining chest. Still, he could not help thinking that it looked almost like the giant’s throat was pulsing blood.
Another shape joined the dance, tiny, slender, and swift. It was Kolbjorn, and he held a long, crooked spear in his hand. As a little air began to creep back into Porto’s starving lungs, and his vision cleared, he saw that the thing wagging in the monster’s gorge was also a crude spear. As the monster spun and contorted, trying to dislodge that weapon, Kolbjorn kept stabbing at him with his other spear. The young Vestiman had not run away after all, but had found fallen branches and hastily carved the ends into sharp points.
Porto could not leave Kolbjorn to fight and die alone. He pulled himself up onto his hands and knees but could barely feel his limbs, and still could not breathe deeply enough to snuff the spangles of light floating before his eyes. Something inside him was cracked, broken. He crawled to his sword, narrowly avoiding the giant’s ponderous feet as the beast finally dislodged the makeshift spear and turned to face the attacker.
Porto curled his hand around his sword hilt and kept crawling forward. Kolbjorn thrust again, and this time his spear went high into the giant’s belly, but was stopped from sinking in too far by a cross-branch left on the shaft. Now Kolbjorn could only hold grimly onto the end of his weapon as the giant tried to reach him, the broken branch like the haft on a boar spear. Then the monster reached down and snapped the spear in half with a twist of its massive hand. Red blood was blooming in the white fur where the spear had entered, but only a trickle compared to the larger wound in its throat.
As the giant lurched toward Kolbjorn, its roars now ragged at the edges with fury and pain, it turned its back on Porto. He heaved himself onto his feet and staggered toward it. His chest seemed to be on fire, but he set his feet as well as he could and swung his sword through a hard, flat arc into the back of the creature’s leg just above the knee. The giant staggered, then threw back its head and howled, and in the monster’s moment of inattention Kolbjorn snatched up the spear that had first wounded the creature’s neck and drove it as hard as he could into the hairy white stomach. The roar changed pitch once more, growing higher and even angrier, but as the creature staggered toward Kolbjorn with arms sp
read, yet another shape rose from the broken trunks.
Porto had thought Aerling killed by the giant’s terrible blow, but now the leader of the Mountain Goats climbed unsteadily onto his feet, supporting himself on a fallen tree, then stepped under the giant’s reaching arms to ram his own sword into the creature’s groin. The iron blade was yanked from Aerling’s hand as the giant staggered backward, but blood now fountained from the monster’s inner thigh.
Growling, moaning, the creature raised both arms above its head, as though in its rage it wished to pull down the whole wide sky. It took a single step toward Aerling, spraying blood over the broken trees and snow, then it tottered, took another step, and fell.
Porto crawled toward it, his thoughts so disordered he could not even remember where he was or how such a madness had come to be. As he climbed onto the creature’s back he could still feel its hitching breath. The feeling of the huge, warm thing beneath him was so disgusting, so maddening, that Porto plunged his sword into its back, then pulled it out despite the shrieking pain of his own ribs and rammed it into the giant’s back over and over until the pain finally took all his senses away.
The afternoon had all but gone by the time they had found what was left of the other Mountain Goats and buried them in the clearing near the blood-matted body of the Hunë. Dragi’s head had rolled or been flung a hundred paces down the mountainside. When they found it, the old soldier’s face wore an expression closer to surprise than fear.
“A head for a head,” said Aerling, and began to hack through the giant’s shaggy neck, a butchery that took a long time. Porto knew he would never forget the noise it made. Then the last of the Mountain Goats stumbled back down the mountain as the gray day waned, Aerling carrying the monster’s heavy, bloody head cradled against his chest as though it were something precious.
The duke’s army had already begun their withdrawal from the gate for the parley, but several sentries rushed toward Porto and the rest when they appeared out of the heights of the mountain. Porto simply stood and stared at the faces around them and the bustle of activity across the camp as though he had never been there before.
The sentries escorted them back to the remains of the camp with no little ceremony, and a crowd soon formed around them. He and Aerling and Kolbjorn could muster only a few words for their comrades, but Aerling’s bloody trophy quickly made the main details clear. Porto met his second nearly mythical creature of the day only a short time later, when Duke Isgrimnur himself came to see them. The duke was almost as tall as Porto but twice his girth, and although Isgrimnur was clearly distracted by the approaching parley, he clasped each Mountain Goat’s hand and thanked them.
“By God, you have done a hero’s work today, each of you,” he said. “If that thing had come down from the mountain and caught me and the others unarmed at the parley . . .” He shook his head. “But look at you, wounded and still bleeding! God’s Suffering, why hasn’t anyone seen to these men?” He called for a surgeon.
Porto watched the duke and the others as though from the bottom of a deep well. He could hear what was said but it seemed mostly nonsense, and his thoughts kept wandering away.
“Why do you stand so, fellow?” Isgrimnur demanded of him. “Oh, aye, you’re the Perdruin-man. What is your name—is it Porto? Here, what are you hiding under that cloak?”
“Nothing,” said Porto, finding his tongue at last. “My ribs, I think . . . might be broken.”
“Can you kneel?” Isgrimnur asked him, but Porto did not understand his meaning, nor much of anything else. “See, Sludig? He’s almost dead on his feet, the poor devil,” the duke fumed. “Frayja’s Garters, where is that surgeon?”
“His Grace wants you to kneel if you can,” said Isgrimnur’s yellow-bearded lieutenant, not unkindly.
Will they put us to death? Porto wondered, and at that moment it did not seem a strange thing. He felt as though he and Aerling and Kolbjorn were all steeped in blood and destruction, that they had become something apart from all these ordinary soldiers—something terrible.
Young Kolbjorn looked up at the duke. The young man’s gaze was distant and almost sleepy, his hands red with dried blood. “It killed Dragi. Tore his head off.”
“I heard, lad,” said Isgrimnur, “and I am sorrier than you can guess. But you have done a brave thing, the three of you.”
“We were six when we went up,” said Aerling, still clutching the giant’s head like a treasured heirloom.
“And we will say prayers for your brave brothers tonight, I promise,” the duke said. “But I have the authority of the king and queen of all the High Ward, and you will be knights for this.”
Porto tried to lower himself to his knees, but the pain was so fierce in his chest that he swayed.
“Sludig, help that man,” the duke said, and the yellow-bearded one clasped a strong hand around Porto’s arm and let him down slowly.
Isgrimnur began to speak words that Porto could only partly hear, because a red noise was rising in his skull that seemed loud as a rushing river. He heard the names of King Seoman and Queen Miriamele and wondered why he did not entirely remember who they were. In his weary mind he imagined them as Isgrimnur’s masters, monarchs of the far north sitting on thrones of ice, both swaddled in furs and jewels.
Something touched him. It was Isgrimnur’s great sword Kvalnir, and it moved gently from one side of his head to the other, tapping each shoulder. “Then I name you champions of the High Ward,” the duke said, “and lay on you the charges of knighthood. Arise, Sir Aerling, Sir Kolbjorn, Sir Porto.”
But Porto could not manage to get up until the yellow-bearded one named Sludig helped him. He felt like a newborn colt, his legs shuddering sticks that could barely hold his weight. The duke was already being called away to other duties. A surgeon had arrived, his pack full of linen bandages and salves.
Aerling was still clutching the giant’s bloody head and would not let anyone take it from him.
Is it an honor, his wife had demanded, or does your master mean to see you killed?
Even now, as he approached the crowd waiting at the ancient gatehouse, Viyeki could not guess at the true answer. He had not admitted to Khimabu that he had probably destroyed any chance of succeeding Yaarike as magister. Viyeki had the courage to face the Northman hordes—just barely—but not enough to admit his foolishness to his wife. As it was, she had bidden farewell to him at the door of their house stone-faced and dry-eyed, as though she had already been widowed for many seasons.
General Suno’ku was at the gatehouse before them, pacing back and forth, a display of impatience and vigor seldom seen among the impassive Hikeda’ya. She did not wear her white armor, but only what was called a house uniform of the same color, as if she did not fear the barbs of the enemy at all. As usual, Viyeki was torn between his admiration of her spirit and concern for her stubborn, heedless bravery. As the day had worn on and this hour had come ever closer, he had found himself hoping that something would arise to change the plan. It was not a fear of being injured or killed he felt, but a sort of deeper, more formless dread, like a man in the wilderness watching an approaching storm as it turned the skies black.
You’re a fool, he told himself. Nothing will happen today. The Northmen will give their terms, and we will take them back to our masters. There will be no great deeds. Suno’ku has sworn to abide by the council’s will, and whatever else she may be—however uncommon she may be in our dark, quiet world—she is no traitor.
Viyeki joined the other two legates, rune-faced Nijika of the Singers’ order and a thin, small-statured Celebrant named Yayano of the Pointing Finger, kin to Zuniyabe and a powerful noble in his own right. Together, they followed Suno’ku through the echoing gatehouse. The general seemed to want to waste no time. Before they had even reached the gates—which were heavily patched and barricaded on the inside, the hasty work of High Foreman Naji’s crew of Buil
ders—Suno’ku was already signaling to the guards to open them. As the bars and bolts were drawn from the sally-gate and the Sacrifice guards moved into close order to prevent mortal trickery, Viyeki and the other legates all stood silently. At last the pulleys creaked, the heavy witchwood timbers groaned, and the tall but narrow salley-gate swung open.
Even under dim twilight, it seemed bizarre to see the sky again. Viyeki had been back inside Nakkiga long enough to regain the feeling that stone above his head was the natural order of things. The great gray expanse of clouds outside the mountain seemed almost too vast to bear, as if something monstrous had torn off the top of the world. The rocky slopes on either side of the gate seemed to stretch out forever.
A dozen Northmen waited in the no-man’s-land beyond the gates, behind and a bit to the side of their great ram, which had been left in place—as a reminder, Viyeki did not doubt. He turned to look back at the gates and saw the great dints in their stony timbers, as well as all the places the metal bracings had buckled under the repeated pounding. Most of the ornamentation had long since been smashed into fragments. The gates now looked, not like the symbol of power and protection they had always been, but like something old and frail and long forgotten. Seeing the damage made Viyeki’s guts churn, and he turned to discover what expression Suno’ku wore. But if she had seen what he had, the general had not stopped to dwell on it; she faced the mortals squarely and began to walk toward them.
“But there are only supposed to be four,” said Yayano. “Four of them, four of us!”
“The others are merely guards. They will make sure we have not brought weapons,” Suno’ku called sharply over her shoulder. “By the Garden that made you, show the mortals no fear!”