Then Hakon ran at the door and beat it in with his axe, which was no light hatchet of Pictish style but a real battle-chopper, such as armored knights use to smash open each other’s crayfish-shells. At the same instant, others of us burst in the shutters and poured arrows into the room, striking down some. And others applied their torches to the roof, to set the cabin on fire. But the roof was made of overlapping slabs of bark, which was damp from recent rains and so did not kindle in so lively a fashion as we should have liked.
Thrown into confusion, those inside made no attempt to hold the cabin. The candles were upset and went out, but the fire lent a dim glow, by which the rangers continued to shoot into the room.
Valerian and his pack then rushed the door, colliding head-on with Hakon and a knot of rangers, including myself, as we burst in. Some we struck down at the outset; but in an instant they were mingled with us in a grunting, snarling grapple, inside the cabin and out.
I found myself in close embrace with a burly, bareheaded Gunderman in a mail shirt. No doubt he had doffed his helmet against the heat of the cabin and had forgotten to put it on again in his haste. In his right hand he held a short sword; I, in mine, a war-axe. Each grasped the other’s right wrist with his left hand. We strained and sweated and grunted, reeling and scamping about as each strove to wrest his weapon-arm loose for a fatal blow. At last I hooked my leg behind his and sent him sprawling, with me on top of him. In the fall he lost his grip on my wrist but somehow got his hand on the haft of my hatchet and wrenched it loose when my grip was momentarily loosened.
The Gunderman’s first blow with the hatchet glanced from my shoulder, his aim having been disturbed by the foot of one of the battlers, who unwittingly trod on some lower part of his frame. My own free hand happened upon a half-buried stone, about the size of an apple. And I tore it out of the ground and smote my man on the forehead even as he was striking up at me again with my own hatchet.
Feeling his muscles slacken, I took the stone in both hands and brought it down with all my strength upon his skull. I heard the bone crunch, and the man gave one jerk and lay still.
I scrambled to my feet to plunge back into the fray …and lo, there was no more fray. Bodies lay here and there …some of theirs and some of ours …but the surviving Gundermen, renegades, and Picts were, all fleeing into the woods. I saw the backs of several as they fled and heard the whistle of an arrow that one of the surviving rangers sent after them, but what of the haste of the archer and the uncertainty of the light, I do not think the shaft found its mark.
The rascals still much outnumbered us and, had they tried, could have wiped out Hakon’s party; but the surprise and their lack of organization prevented this.
Had Hakon been a craftier war-leader, he would have had us bar the door against the foe’s escape, while fire and arrows did our work for us, instead of helping their flight by breaking it open. But it was ever his way to come to grips with his foe as quickly as might be, without giving much thought to the long-term strategy of the case.
Those rangers who were still on their feet stood panting until someone shouted:
“The cabin! Valerian is there!”
I whirled to see, framed in the doorway no more than a spear’s length away, Lord Valerian and his leman. Even as hands leaped to weapons, Kwarada laughed a shrill witch-laugh and hurled something on the ground. It burst with a bright flame that, going out, left our vision so full of colored spots that we could discern naught in the darkness. And it gave out a foul smoke that veiled the door of the cabin and sent us reeling back, coughing and sputtering as if we had been ducked in Lynx Creek. By the time we could see and breathe again, the pair had vanished.
Hakon moved among his men, taking stock. Two had been slain and two wounded, one in the arm and one in the leg. We had brought down seven of the foe …mostly with our arrows through the windows at the outset …and of these several were still alive, but not for long. Some of Valerian’s men, too, carried wounds away with them. The ranger with the wounded leg was obliged to stay where he was, with his wound bound up, until friends came to carry him back to the village. When the arm of the other wounded ranger had been tied up, Hakon told him:
“Hasten back to Schondara and warn Dirk that the invasion is coming. Tell him to get the people and their movable goods into the fort and to send a squad hither to fetch Karlus home. We are for Ghost Swamp to do what we can. If we return not to Schondara, let them prepare for the worst.”
The ranger nodded and set off at a jog-trot. And Hakon, the two unwounded rangers, and I prepared to follow Valerian and his people. I would have waited for reinforcements; but Hakon, lashed on by the feeling that he had caused Valerian’s escape from the gaol, would brook no delay. We made sure each was well armed; I took the sword of the Gunderman I had slain and replaced the bow I had lost in my flight from the Picts by one that had belonged to a fallen ranger.
Luckily, Hakon and one of the rangers knew the way, having scouted as far as the swamp before; and the stars gave us enough light to keep from falling into holes or getting lost. Soon the roof of leaves again closed over our heads, and we crossed Lynx Creek and plunged into the wilderness.
We walked single file, making no noise other than the occasional snap of a twig or rustle of a branch, such as even a Pict will make when moving at night. A trail of sorts led southwest from the hut, but it had become overgrown until it could scarcely be told from a deer trail.
We went soberly, each absorbed in his own thoughts; for it was no holiday jaunt that we were undertaking. Pictland is a fearsome country at best, full of savage men and equally savage beasts, such as wolves, panthers, and the giant serpents of which I have spoken. And there are said to be other beasts, too, that have vanished from other parts of the earth, such as the great saber-toothed cat, and a beast of the elephant kind. I had never seen an elephant, but my brother once visited Tarantia and beheld such a beast in the menagerie of King Numedides, on a day when the king let the common people walk through his gardens. Now and then, the Picts would bring an ivory tusk from one of these beasts to some trader in the Westermarck.
Even less pleasant neighbors are the swamp-demons, or forest-devils as some call them. These cluster in places like Ghost Swamp. In the daytime they vanished —no man knows whither— but at night they appear, thick as bats, and howl like damned souls in Hell. Nor is howling all they do; more than one borderer has had his throat slashed from ear to ear by the sweep of a swamp-demon’s claws, when he ventured too near one of their infernal assemblies. It was a measure of the power of the Wizard of the Swamp that he dwelt in the midst of one of their favorite haunts.
After a while, we came to Tullian’s Creek, named for a Schohiran settler who lost his head to a Pictish war-party. Tullian’s Creek forms the boundary between Schohira and the Pictish lands. At least, so said the last treaty between the savages and the governor of Schohira, though little heed to the treaty any man of either race paid when he thought that something he desired lay beyond the border.
We crossed Tullian’s Creek, hopping from rock to rock. Beyond the creek, Hakon halted to confer in whispers with the ranger who knew the way. And after some peering about and pushing branches aside, they found a fork in the trail and took the left-hand path, bearing further to the south and hence toward Ghost Swamp. Hakon cautioned us to move more silently, yet at the same time urged us to greater speed.
“We are fain not to be caught near the Pictish camp by the coming of dawn,” he whispered.
Even to the canniest woodsman, speed and silence are opposed qualities; the more a man strives for one, the less he can achieve of the other. Nonetheless, we jogged along that trail at a good pace, dodging branches and avoiding dead sticks as best we could.