* * *
Orman Bregin’s son considered himself lucky to be alive. He’d grown up outside Curl beneath the cold shadow of the Iceblood Holdings. Hardscrabble farming on rocky land was the sum of what he knew. He and all his relatives and neighbours, all the Curl townsfolk. Lowlanders, he knew he and his neighbours were called among the tall Greathalls of the high slopes, as they in turn scornfully named the coastal kingdoms. Those high forests and mountain valleys leading up to the Salt range were forbidden; the Iceblood clans guarded their holdings jealously and warred constantly among themselves over their boundaries. All trespassers, lowlanders such as he, were simply killed out of hand.
Of course, for generations he and his had been at war as well, trying to oust the damned Icebloods and wipe them from the face of the land.
And he and his were winning. Leastways that was what he heard from the benches of the White Hart. The townships were all steadily growing, and their local baron, P’tar Longarm, Baron Longarm, sat strong in his long hall.
At least, that was so before the last raid. Orman had almost joined that one. Most of his friends had. Longarm himself had led it. Nearly fifty armed men and women had set out to track down the Icebloods and burn their Greathalls to the ground.
Only twelve returned. Longarm was among them, though sorely wounded. None of Orman’s friends returned. There was much muted talk then round the White Hart of Iceblood magic. How they moved like ghosts through the woods and fought like cowards, attacking out of the night only to flee and disappear like will-o’-the-wisps.
The baron kept to his hall now and people named him Shortarm. Orman figured there’d be a new ruler soon enough. So it always was. Once the local king, or queen, or baron, weakened and could no longer hold what he had taken, others arose to take it from him.
Maybe King Ronal the Bastard out of Mantle town. Orman had heard Ronal crossed Hangman creek and cut a new settlement out of the tall pines of the Bain Holding. He also heard that Ronal kept the head of the Iceblood Shia Bain pickled in a jar at his table.
Once more, Orman congratulated himself on still being alive. Then over these last few seasons word had come spreading from town to town of rich gold strikes high up the river valleys of the Salt range – far into the Iceblood Holdings.
At first everyone he knew had been dismissive of it all. The lake to the south was called the Gold Sea and no doubt that was the cause of all the stir. The oldsters claimed it had happened before: some idiotic foreigner caught sight of that name on some old dusty map somewhere and before you knew it damned fools arrived thinking they just had to reach out to gather up great handfuls of the stuff.
But then came tales of foreigners arriving in the south. Just a trickle at first. A few tow-headed ignoramuses easily done away with. Then bands of them. Some even pushing upland, ignoring all the warnings. A few of them reappeared only as heads tossed across streams or left on stakes next to forest trails.
Now word was of shiploads arriving in the lowlander kingdoms. Two new towns had sprung up overnight along the shores of the Sea of Gold. He heard rumours of real warfare where the Bone Peninsula had been closed to these invaders.
Then late one night Gerrun Shortshanks came and sat down next to him among the benches of the Hart and started talking of this news of gold. Orman let him blather on for a time – too fond of his ale was Gerrun Shortshanks, with his gold earrings and felt shirts bought from traders up from the coastal kingdoms. So dismissive of the man was he that it took a while for the full significance of what he was whispering to sink in. He and the Reddin brothers heading out with Old Bear. And would he throw his lot in with them?
Any other night he would have brushed the fool’s talk aside. But the name of Old Bear gave him pause. One of the last of the high valley hunters. Seemed to come and go as he pleased from Blood Holdings. Rumours were that he’d served as a hired spear for the Heel clan years ago – back when he had both eyes. And the Reddin brothers, Keth and Kasson. They’d been among the eleven who’d returned with Longarm. Serious and quiet both of them. So quiet few knew which brother was which.
‘Why me?’ was Orman’s short answer, his forearms on the table, one to either side of his leather tankard.
Gerrun jerked his head, agreeing with the question. He took a quick sip, wiped his mouth. ‘Old Bear says he knew your father. That’s why. Says he even met you.’
Orman nodded. It was years ago. His father had been a sworn man to Longarm’s predecessor, Eusta. Eusta the Ill, she’d been known, as she’d always been sick with this or that. His father had been a borderman, had even slipped into the Blood Holdings now and then – and had taken Orman along a few times.
And had told him about the ghosts. The Iceblood Holdings were haunted, his father had explained the first night as they pressed close to their small fire. Haunted, he said, by the spirits of all the dead ancestors of the various clans: the Heel, the Bain, the Sayer, and all the others. And sometimes, his father whispered, leaning close, his great spear Boarstooth across his lap, if you listened very carefully you could hear them too.
And later he did hear them – or thought he did. Voices calling. It seemed as if the very land itself, the Iceblood Holding, was speaking to him. Now, thinking back some five years, he wondered whether he’d imagined it all. That perhaps he’d only heard things because his father had suggested it.
A joke played on an impressionable boy.
He did remember meeting Old Bear on one of those trips. The fellow had his name from the great brown shaggy hide he wore wrapped about himself, its head thrown up over his own like a hood. The rotting pelt had stunk even then – imagine how it must reek now. Unless the old fool had gotten himself a new one.
He thought he understood Bear’s real message now. He knew that his father had shown him around the lower vales of the Holdings. And he’d delivered the message all without leaving his mouthpiece, Gerrun, any the wiser.
He bought himself more time to think by taking a long slow pull at his tankard. He peered about the dark timbered hall of the White Hart. It was late; the fire was low in the stone hearth. Only the regulars remained: those few who paid for the privilege of passing the night on the floor among the straw and scavenging dogs. None was paying him and Gerrun any particular attention, so far as he could tell.
So. The Old Bear was pulling together a party to make a strike for the gold fields. Why a party, though? The veteran mountain man could pick it up by himself, surely. Maybe he already had collected some few nuggets here and there over the years … He must’ve found a rich bed – one worth digging up.
Then it came to him: Old Bear was expecting competition. He was betting that soon, perhaps by the end of this coming season, what with spring arriving, these hillsides would be crawling with lowlander and outlander fortune-hunters, raiders and outright thieves. All fighting over the claims or the sifted nuggets and dust itself.
Best to get in early before the rush arrived, then. And he and the Reddin brothers and Old Bear had all walked the Iceblood Holdings before – no coincidence, that. All of them but for Shortshanks here. Or was that so? He studied the man covertly while eyeing the mostly empty benches of the White Hart. Never short of coin for ale was Gerrun Shortshanks, though he worked no plot of land nor laboured for others. And what of his gold earrings? The thick band of twisted gold at his wrist? Thinking of it now, how came he to such wealth? Perhaps this man Gerrun was no stranger to certain high streams in the vales where it was said a few days’ panning could set a man up for years.
He cleared his throat into his fist and murmured, low, ‘All right. Where’s the meet?’
Gerrun smiled and took a deep drink. He wiped the foam from his moustache. ‘Know you the camp up towards Antler Rock? Over Pine Bridge?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tomorrow, then.’
He nodded and finished off his ale. As he rose, Gerrun signed to Ost, the innkeep, for another.
It was a long chilly walk through the night back to his uncle’s holding where he and his mother lived now after being taken in on the death of his father. A light icy rain fell. The snow was hard beneath his boots, the slush frozen with the night’s cold. Above, the Great Ice Bridge once more spanned the night sky, glittering and forbidding. It had been obscured of late, what with the passing of the Foreigner, or Trespasser, as some named it. People had sworn it foretold the end of the Icebloods. But no such blessing followed. As he walked the path of frozen mud he wondered whether in time it would come to be seen as a portent of this gold fever and the crushing of the Icebloods beneath the boots of a horde of outlanders … if enough really did reach this far north. In that sense perhaps it truly was an omen – of whatever came to pass.
He pushed open the door to the draughty outbuilding his uncle had grudgingly given over to them and crossed to the chest against the rear wall. He cleared away the piled litter of day to day life: the wood shavings, the old bits of burlap, wool, jute and linen his mother sewed and darned to make clothes; a wooden bowl he’d carved, now clattering with buttons, hooks, awls and needles, all carved by him from bone and antler. He opened the chest and pulled out his father’s leathers, rolled up and bound together with belts.
The strong scent of his father wafted over him then: animal fat and smoke together with pine sap and earth. The smell of the high forest.
‘You are leaving,’ came the voice of his mother behind him. He turned. She lay beneath piled blankets. Her long grey hair caught the moonlight that brightened their one window of stretched sheepskin.
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘I see. Where will you go?’
He squeezed the heavy leather shirt and trousers in his hands, cleared his throat. ‘Down to the coastal kingdoms. Perhaps I’ll join with Ronal the Bastard.’
After a long silence she said, ‘Take Boarstooth.’
He straightened, surprised. Boarstooth was his father’s spear. It hung now over the stone hearth of his uncle’s hall. ‘Jal has claimed it.’
‘I did not agree to that. But I said nothing at the time. You were too young.’ Her eyes, glittering in the faint light, shifted in the direction of the hall. ‘Go now. They will all be abed.’
He rose, slipped an arm through a belt and adjusted the roll on his back. Inside, he knew, would be the tall moccasins that his father always wore bound with leather strips up to his knees. His mother rose as well. In her long white shift she glowed like a ghost and Orman felt a shiver of premonition of her death. She met him at the door, said, ‘Go quietly.’
‘Like Father,’ he answered and she smiled, though it was tinged with sadness. A cold chill of wetness brushed his cheek as she kissed him. ‘Goodbye.’
None of his uncle’s household, his cousins or their hired men-at-arms, challenged him as he climbed the hill to the longhouse and entered. The hounds greeted him eagerly, nosing his hands for treats. He stroked them all and shushed them as he crossed to the wide stone fireplace with its mantel of chiselled river stones. Reaching up, he lifted the spear from its wooden rests. The thick ash haft and the broad leaf-shaped head, unique in being struck from some unfamiliar stone, felt lighter than the last time he’d held it: at his father’s funeral pyre.
He was halfway across the hall when a woman’s voice commanded: ‘Orman! That is not yours to take.’ He turned. Raina, Jal’s wife, stood wrapped in a blanket at the door to their sleeping chamber.
‘It comes to me from my father.’
‘That is for Jal to decide.’
‘I claim it as my father’s bequest.’
Raina turned to the sleeping chamber. ‘Jal! Rouse yourself, you great oaf! Your nephew is an ungrateful thief!’
He did not wait for the household to bestir itself. Raina’s screeching shouts followed him down the hillside. ‘Orman! We name you thief! None will harbour you! Outlaw! You will be hunted down like the dog you are!’
He broke into a run then, making for the woods. His breath plumed and Boarstooth felt as light as a willow branch in his hand. The blade of creamy brown stone seemed to sing as it sliced the cold night air.
Ahead rose forested hillside heaped above hillside up on to slope and ridge, climbing to the broad shoulders of the Salt Mountains. Their snowcapped heights glowed dark silver in the moonlight, home to the leagues upon leagues of the Iceblood Holdings. This wild country beckoned to him now – a near infinity of possibilities, it seemed, his for the taking. A promise made by his father years ago.