Evening the Tenth — The Bull Below, the Wolf-Kings' Cellar, and the Grey Horn of the West

Draw close. Aye, closer — the fire's gone to embers and I've no coin to feed it, so we'll warm ourselves on other men's blood.

You there, the one who's been nursing that same cup since the muezzin's last cry. Fill it or give it to a man who's thirsty. Hjalti sings tonight.

Two nights past I told you of the thing in the reeds that would not stay dead, and of the small deaths that came crawling after. Some of you went home and slept badly. Good. That is the price of listening. But that tale is told, and I do not sell the same meat twice.

Hear now what came after.

The Cellar Under the Cold Hills

Far in the north and west, where the rock goes grey as a drowned man's lip and the wind has teeth, there is a hole in the world. Men do not call it anything. Men who find it do not come back to name it.

The Cimmerian went down into it.

Think on that a moment. You would not. I would not — and I have gone into places that would curdle the milk in your mother. But this one, this Strabo, with the shoulders on him like a barn door and that grim cross of blackened iron hanging at his throat, he looked at that dark and he did not weigh it. Cimmerians reckon a doorway is a doorway. Their god sits up on his grey mountain and gives them strength at birth and never another blessed thing, and so they spend it. That is the whole creed. That is all of it.

The stair went down wet.

Down there the air was thick and warm as the inside of a mouth, and there was a smell — dung and old straw and something under it, something sweet gone rotten. He heard it before he saw it. A snort. A great bellows-snort in the black, and then the scrape of a hoof the size of a shield-boss dragging on stone.

The bull came out of the dark at him like a landslide with horns on.

I have seen bulls. You have seen bulls — you have run from them at the water-holes when they came to drink and you were slow about moving. Put that beast from your head. This one had lived where no sun came and grown into the shape of the dark: black-hided, humped at the shoulder like a boulder under a blanket, horns swept out wide and yellowed and notched where they had broken other men's bones. Its eyes were small. Its eyes were red as a smith's coals when the bellows blow.

It hit him.

I do not say it charged and he stepped aside, because he did not. His breath went out of him in one grunt and his ribs sang and his back met the wall and stayed there a moment while his legs argued about whether they were still legs. There was a wetness on his side. He did not look at it. Looking at a wound is how a man learns to be afraid of it.

He came off that wall with his shoulder down and his blade going up under the beast's jaw where the hide runs thin.

They tore up that cellar for a long while. The bull knocked him off his feet twice and he got up twice, and the third time it tried he was not where he had been — he had gone in, in past the horns, close as a lover, close as a man cutting a purse, and there is a place on a bull where the great vein runs and Strabo Nagi knows exactly where it is.

The blood came out of it hot enough to steam.

And then a sound like a wall falling, and the bull was down with its legs still running in the air, and the Cimmerian stood over it with his chest heaving and his hair stuck flat to his skull, and he was — laughing? No. Not laughing. But something in his face had loosened. A man who has been wondering all week whether he is still a man, and now he knows.

He cut the beast up where it lay. Every good thing off it — hide, horn, sinew, the meat. He does not leave a kill to rot, that one. Waste is a kind of insult, and he does not insult a thing that fought him well.

The Wolf That Wore a Crown

But he was not done under those hills. No, no — sit down, the night is young and the wine is not.

Deeper still, past where the bull had bled out, the passage ran on, and the walls stopped being walls and started being dens. Bones underfoot. Not bones scattered — bones piled, sorted the way a man sorts firewood, the long ones with the long ones. Something down there had a sense of order. That is worse than a beast. A beast makes a mess.

And out of the side-holes came the small ones first.

Wolves — but not the wolves of your grandfather's stories, not the lean grey ones that follow the caravans and take the weak lamb. These ran wrong. They ran with their shoulders too high and their haunches too low, and now and again one would rise up on its hind legs to see over the bone-piles, and stand there a heartbeat too long, and you would think: that is a man's way of standing.

And with them, hyena-things. Two breeds, and the skald has looked at both and wishes he had not. One spotted like a leopard drowned in mud, one striped down the flank like a tiger that lost the argument, and both of them built the same: that low sloped back, the shoulders bunched, the head too big for the neck it rides on. They do not howl. They laugh. And it is not the laugh of a beast. It is the sound your uncle makes when he has drunk too much and is about to say the cruel true thing he has been saving all year.

They came at him in a ring, and a ring is how a clever thing kills.

He put his back to a bone-pile and let them come.

I will not pretend it was pretty. There is a moment in a fight against many when a man stops swinging like a warrior and starts swinging like a woodcutter — no art, no name to the strokes, just the hips turning and the edge going where the noise is. Something took his forearm and worried it and he broke its skull against the stone with his other fist. Something else opened his thigh. He kept his feet. That is the whole of it, that is the entire secret of the man: he keeps his feet. Crom gives strength and nothing else, and strength is only worth what it is worth when you are standing on it.

And then the big one came.

It walked.

I want you to sit with that, all of you, before I go on. It walked out of the dark on two legs like a man walks, and it was taller than a man, and its head was a wolf's head — long jaw, ears laid flat, the muzzle wrinkled back off teeth as long as your finger. Grey fur going silver at the throat. And hands. Hands with the fingers wrong, too long, tipped in black hooks, and they opened and closed while it looked at him, the way a man cracks his knuckles before a task he intends to enjoy.

Its eyes were not an animal's eyes. That is what he told the one who told me. Animal eyes are empty and honest. These ones considered him.

It came fast.

He met it standing.

The first blow it landed took him across the chest and put four red furrows through leather and skin both, and he felt his own heartbeat in the wounds before he felt the pain — that is how it goes, the body reports late. The second blow he did not let land. He got inside its reach where the long arms are useless, and he hammered the pommel into its snout until the cartilage went, and the thing screamed, and by all the gods the scream was half a wolf's and half a woman's, and every hair on him stood up and he kept hitting it anyway.

That is the part I sing for coin, friends. Not the strength. Any ox has strength. It is that his hair stood up on his neck and his hands did not stop.

They went down together into the bones. It bit into his shoulder and would not let go, and he found the place under its jaw where the pulse jumped, and he pushed the iron in and turned it.

The weight of it got heavy on him slow. That is how you know a big thing is truly dying — it gets heavier.

He crawled out from under it. Sat a while in the dark with his back against the wall and the two of them there together, the dead king of wolves and the living son of the grey hills, breathing and not-breathing in the same cold room.

Then he got up and made a torch and went and found the rest.

The Man in the Ropes

Now here is the sweet part of the night, and you will let me have it, because a saga that is all blood is a meal that is all salt.

Somewhere in the middle west, where the ground opens out and the grass runs yellow, there was a man staked out in the sun.

He was of the Black Hand — you know the breed, sea-thieves off the western water, all of them liars and half of them good company. Sully, his name was. Or the name he gave, which for a corsair is nearly the same thing. Someone had bound his wrists with wet leather and left him to let the sun do the tightening, which is a slow patient cruelty and the mark of small men.

Strabo came out of the grass and stood over him.

And Sully — sunburnt, cracked-lipped, three days from the end of himself — squinted up at this enormous scarred Cimmerian and got ready to die. You can see it happen. A man's face goes quiet and he stops bargaining.

The knife came down.

It cut the leather.

Hear me on this, all of you, because there are men in this city who would have done otherwise and you drink beside them: Strabo Nagi has worn the rope himself. He has felt the wet leather shrink. There is a mark on that man from a cross he was hung upon in the desert and it has not faded and it will not, and something in him will not walk past a bound man. He does not count what a freed man is worth. He cuts, and then he holds out the waterskin, and then — this is the whole of it — he turns his back and walks on, and does not look to see if you follow.

Sully followed.

Sully still follows. And a second time, further along, when the corsair got himself taken again — for he is a man who finds trouble the way a low place finds rain — the Cimmerian went and got him back, and never said a word about it, which is worse than saying something. Sully talks now of a debt. The Cimmerian does not know what he means. In the grey hills a man is either standing beside you or he is not, and there is no ledger.

Grim folk, the Cimmerians. But I would rather be freed by one than feasted by a lord of Aquilonia, and I have been both, and only one of them left me my teeth.

The Grey Horn of the West

And then the plains, where the heat sits on the world like a hand.

There is a beast out there — grey as wet ash, hide hanging in plates like a wall built badly, small stupid eyes set too far back to see anything worth seeing. It goes about on legs like pillars and it carries one great horn on its nose, and the horn is not for show. I have seen what those things do to a horse. There is not enough left of the horse to bury.

He met the common ones first. Learned them. Learned that they cannot turn, that they commit like a drunk swinging at a door, that a man quick on his feet can live in the space beside them where the eye does not reach.

Then he found their king.

Old. Scarred across the shoulder-plates where a lion had tried its luck and lost. Bigger than a hut. When it moved you felt it in the soles of your feet before you heard it, a deep drumming in the ground, and the birds went up off the grass in a sheet.

It came.

He waited.

He waited longer than any of you would have waited — long enough to hear the breath sawing in that great chest, long enough to count the flies on its hide — and then he went sideways at the last instant and the horn went past his belly close enough to open his shirt, and the whole grey mountain of it thundered by and had to stop, and turning is the thing it cannot do.

He was on its flank before it finished the turn. And off again. And back.

Four times. Or six. He does not remember and I do not care to invent it. He fought it the way the tide fights a cliff — no single blow that means anything, and then all at once the cliff is gone.

It knelt before it fell. That is what they say. The great horned king went down on its forelegs first, like a thing kneeling, and it made a sound like a horn blown badly in a far valley, and then the rest of it came down and the dust went up and hung there a long time in the flat white light.

He did not stand on it. He does not do that. He sat down beside it in its shadow, because it was the only shadow, and shared it with the thing he'd killed.

Then he took the horn, and the hide, and what meat he could carry, and went off to make the things a man makes: the harder blade, the better strap, the wall that stands. He is building, out there. Every dead king becomes a nail in a house. That is not a thing our songs usually mention, but it is true, and the true things wear better.

What Else Walks Out There

He has been seeing new shapes in the west, and I'll name them quick before the wine's gone, so that when you meet one you'll know how to run.

There are things that look like rocks until they open. Boulder-backed, slow, with a beak like a smith's tongs — and this breed shot through with silver, so that when the sun catches it you think you've found a fortune, and then the fortune stands up. Men have died reaching for that shine.

And scorpions. Not the honest ones that live in your boot. Big ones — one breed the size of a dog, one the size of a dog's worst dream, and both with that flat armoured back and the tail carried up over like a question nobody wants answered. He crushed the small ones underfoot. The large ones he treated with respect, and lived, which is the only review a scorpion ever gets.

Coda

So. Two more kings under his hand, and a wolf that walked like a man, and a corsair pulled twice out of the ropes and following at his shoulder like a dog that has decided.

He does not tell this. That is the whole reason I am fed. Cimmerians do not sing of themselves — Crom keeps no hall, hangs no shields, remembers no names — and so a man like that would go into the dust with everything he did going in after him, and no one the wiser, and the world one story poorer. I will not have it. I have a bad eye and a good throat and I know which one earns.

He is out there now, past the yellow grass, walking west with a freed corsair beside him and a house going up behind him stone by stone.

But hear this and take it home with you: when he came up out of that cellar under the cold hills, he had killed the wolf that walked on two legs — and there were tracks going down. Deeper. Bigger. The stride longer than the dead king's stride.

Something down there made that thing afraid.

Ale, and I'll tell you next time whether he went to find out.

You know he did.