Dinekki’s bony fingers were steady as they touched the bandage, gently tugging at a knot behind Moreen’s ear. The shaman elder painstakingly unwound the strands of gauze, until the last coils of the bandage fell away.
Moreen immediately turned toward the window with a smile on her face. “The daylight-I can see it!”
Kerrick tried not to show the shock he felt. Moreen’s right eyelid was swollen shut and surrounded by a purple bruise. Her left eye gleamed beneath wounded skin.
But Moreen was laughing, turning from the window to the old woman. “I see you Dinekki-you saved my eye! Feather, and Kerrick! You’ve never looked so good, any of you!”
“That’s what we need to know. Now, close up and let me wash you off, then a little more of the poultice and a few more days with the bandage.
Moreen nodded, and the shaman dipped a sponge in the steaming water and started, very gently, to wash the chiefwoman’s ravaged face. An hour later a fresh bandage was in place, and-aided by a draught of Dinekki’s spirits-Moreen slept deeply, without movement or dreaming.
Kerrick went to get a loaf of bread from the kitchen and brought the meager sustenance back to her room. He took his place beside the bed and watched her sleep through the pale daylight of the midnight sun.
Moreen felt a bizarre contentment as she slowly recovered. Her strength seemed to increase every day, as did the clarity of her vision. She took a certain amount of pleasure from the black eye patch, a piece of soft sealskin, that she had taken to wearing over her scarred eye socket.
A week after her bandaging was removed she rose from the bed, took Kerrick’s arm, clutched it tightly as he led her through the room and down the hallway. It was the sight of the shattered gatehouse that brought back her memory of helplessness, the horror and doom of the ogre attack. She stood with Kerrick on one of the high ramparts of the keep and looked across the courtyard to the place where her citadel had been so cruelly invaded and nearly conquered.
The gap between the towers had been mostly sealed off with a pile of stones, leaving only a path wide enough for a single file of people to pass into and out of Brackenrock. She knew that Bruni had dispatched work parties to the timber groves to the east of the citadel, along the shore of the White Bear Sea. They were using oxen to haul lumber up the mountain, and by the end of the summer there would be more than enough to repair the gates.
She had been reassured, countless times, that her instinctive order to evacuate had saved at least fifty men and women in the towers and on the walls, as well as many Highlanders and Kerrick. Those in the courtyard had been spared the full brunt of the horrific explosion wrought by the ogres.
Though one tower still stood, it was neither occupied nor functional. The explosion had ripped out stairways and doors, cracking support beams and loosing cornerstones. Both towers would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.
“We need to be vigilant, more vigilant even than before,” Kerrick told her, but she could tell by the look in his eyes that he shared her apprehension about any future attack. “I don’t know…” he concluded weakly.
They were wending their way around the citadel wall, looking over the damage. They descended to a low wall that marked off a quarter of barracks and exercise yards, then climbed a steep stairway overlooking the courtyard. Moreen still had not regained her strength, but she was determined to keep active, to show her people that she was recovering, that she was the Lady of Brackenrock again.
She found herself back where she had been injured, looking over a drop of eight or ten feet into a tangled well of rocks and splintered timbers. Her vision was now almost flat, but even she could perceive the menacing depths of this black hole. She couldn’t imagine being trapped down there, buried by debris. “Such terrible force….”
“Your goddess was watching over you. There’s no other explanation,” Kerrick said sincerely.
“What if they come back?” Moreen said, gazing out at the blue sea. With an irritated sigh, she adjusted the patch that covered her empty socket. Moreen still wasn’t used to wearing the leather flap, and Kerrick too was getting accustomed to Moreen’s permanent eye patch.
“Why, if they come back, we’ll fight them again,” declared the elf boldly, “and defeat them again. “We know that they hold the Axe of Gonnas in awe-we can use that to our advantage.”
“Unless they blow the axe, and all of Brackenrock, to pieces,” Moreen replied bitterly. “No, we need some better plan.”
“What?” Kerrick asked hopefully.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
16
The ogre captain Broadnose stepped cautiously across the marshy bottomland. From concealment atop a nearby elevation, he had watched sheep crossing here earlier in the day and knew that, while wet, the ground was traversable.
A day earlier, the ogres had spotted the village from the crest of the ridge on the opposite side of the stream. It was a typical village of the Whitemoor, barely two dozen huts, surrounded by a few ragged corrals, with a tangle of drying racks stretching upstream and down. The racks were draped with skins, and a small fish house across a tributary creek belched smoke and smelled of trout. The ogres had studied the place and waited until now, when the hour was after midnight and most of the humans were asleep.
Light still suffused the valley, and thus the raiders had been happy to discover this swampy approach route. They were concealed by an overhang of the riverbank. A bend in the stream blocked their view of the settlement-at least, until the attackers crept up behind the first drying racks.
“We spread out, remember. Hit fast. Every man you see gets killed, cut his head off. We’ll pile up the bodies later. If a woman shows some spunk, kill her too. Some of these Arktos females are real fighters. And kill the babies-that’s important, that’ll make a statement. If a few of the kids and women manage to run off… well, chase ’em a bit for show, but then let ’em get away and spread the word.”
The ogres nodded. They had been following the same plan for several weeks, raiding other villages, so they were primed.
“Spears first-then we get to hacking and slashing,” the burly commander reminded his raiders. They looked at him, tusks bared, broad faces dour and fierce. Satisfied, Broadnose uttered a roar that split the peace of the pastoral vale like an axe blade slicing through a loaf of bread.
His warriors bellowed in kind, and the mass of ogres burst upon the village at a full run, sweeping the racks aside, trampling the partially cured pelts. A large guard dog came charging toward Broadnose, barking, fangs bared, and the ogre leader felled the creature with a powerful thrust of his spear. Next he drew his great sword, swinging it into a bunch of racks, smashing them into kindling.
A human emerged from one of the huts and threw a javelin, the barbed point piercing the thigh of a young ogre. The stricken raider went down with a howl, and Broadnose smashed through a line of racks to confront the brazen human. The man now held a steel-bladed tomahawk, and he slashed the weapon hard enough that the ogre had to pull up short. A single crushing down-swipe of his great sword put an end to the skirmish, however, and the sub-captain moved on. He sought living targets-he would leave the mess of decapitation to his less imaginative followers.
Another Arktos man, a warrior dressed in a heavy leather shirt, carrying a shield and sword, darted from a hut to stab a passing ogre in the flank. Strangely, there were very few humans rushing out of the other dwellings, and all those they encountered seemed to he well-armed warriors. A quick glance showed three ogres lying dying or already dead around the central plaza. Broadnose frowned-this was two more than they had lost in their past five raids combined, and this raid, it seemed, was far from over.