Trakkar

“Look at them up there, Durguurd. They know what power is.”1

It was a mountain sheeted by snowy pines that shone in the morning sunlight from the east. Glamored by its beauty, they had not considered how black it could be beneath the canopy, under the icy flesh. Durguurd felt sweat soaking his hair, but he was so cold.2

“This valley is not ours. They can come down on us as they please, from anywhere. It must be exhilirating.”3

Anger drove him; he was covered in blood and could not stop. They had come down, indeed. They had spent weeks watching from the mountaintops, their hunched and hairy forms seen waiting there at sunset. Black goblins before the dying twilight. They had been talked about, especially by Soth, who wanted to destroy them. Nothing had been done.4

“We could have that power you know, but the others are too frightened. Not me, Durguurd. I will have it.”5

Soth had exhaled a thick cloud of foggy breath, and fixed him with those unbelievable eyes of his. Nothing but the sunless winter sky was as grey and dead as Soth’s stony eyes. Looking at them forced one to imagine lying in the snow with a mortal wound, gaze fixed upon the motionless clouds as life let go.6

“Their mountains will not be a stronghold, then. They will be a grave.”7

Low, guttural cries of rage echoed back and forth amid the pines, battle yelps in a hideous tongue spoken with monstrous depth, as much in the nose as the throat. Voices the mountain itself might use. They came from everywhere, sources invisible; perhaps it was the mountain.8

Durguurd’s legs and chest burned. He thought he might have run halfway up the mountain without stopping. The red mane around his face bounced and clung together, filled with chunks of ice and blood. The hands on his spear and axe were so cold they stung.9

“Do you know what I’ll do then? I’ll kill every one of them, and pour their blood into honey for their precious bears to drink.”10

Snow and sticks exploded from a false thicket, followed by a raging, screaming beast wielding a club. The blue-eyed men of the mountains were strong, but the men of the valleys were swift. Durguurd rolled through the icy needles and struck, first with spear and then with axe; blood flowed from the hairy ribs and shoulder, thick and black in this place that banished light.11

Durguurd ran on, warmed by the blood of the dying.12

“The others think I want to go too far,” Soth had run his hand along the jagged edge of his stone axe. Durguurd had avoided the look of his cursed eyes, but felt it. He felt it again as he charged up the mountain.13

“We shall see.”14

More guttural screams rained from the rocks above; they carried a cry, which Durguurd’s ears shaped, “Gnai-mul!” Boulders tumbled down the mountainside, stones no man of the valley could ever dislodge. Durguurd leapt between them, near oblivious. More cries, closer, loud enough to shake snow from the shivering needles. A wall of foliage dropped at his side, and a beastly arm swung a club for Durguurd’s head. He slid on one knee along the ice and plunged his spear into the belly of the mountain man. More blood. Another came at him from uphill; this he dispatched by throwing his axe to split the monster’s ribs.15

A new scream fell from the invisible heights; this he recognized. He claimed his weapons in bloody, freezing hands and continued upward. Several beasts ran ahead and did not turn to face him. Did they fear him? This man they had watched from above as vultures? The cry came again, repeated several times: “Gnai-mul!” or “Grai-mul!” It was difficult to understand. Something in their plan had gone wrong.16

Soth in his zeal had killed at least three in the village. Other lucky few painted their spears with the blood of two or three. Durguurd had only started killing when he followed the one with the screaming woman over its shoulder, running up the mountain. His sister had hidden well with Ura; they did not worry him. Only Issa worried him now.17

Two more charged from caves concealed by webs of icy needles. Durguurd doubled round a leaning pine to brain the larger of the two with his axe. The snow again made his ally; he slid past the furry, scowling creature and hamstrung him with his flint knife. He got to his feet and carried on past the bleeding dead and screaming crippled. Remorse was no aid.18

He saw others in their hiding places, but they did not move. One perched high on a rock that could have killed him with ease turned and fled. Always there was the scant-discernible call: “Gnai-mul!” It filled the woods above as the beasts retreated to warn their friends.19

Durguurd came with blinking surprise into the impossible brightness of a treeless ridge near the mountain top. Miles off beyond the ridge that ringed his beloved vally, there stood countless further icy peaks, teeth of the earth vying to swallow the sky. Shimmering glaciers wider than the swift-flowing rivers sat wedged between the peaks, reflecting violet, white and blue from the sun that had burned away the ashen grey clouds of winter.20

He looked down at himself in this new white light. The furry pelts that adorned his body bore spatters of brightest red blood, just as his bare arms and hands. Pine needles clung to his clothes and hair. Chunks of ice white and red alike pulled at his tangled mane.21

A great roar came up behind him; he ducked beneath the mighty fall of a club that thudded onto the snowy earth. Wild eyes the shade of a blue sky seen through ice stared wide from within a mane of matted red locks. Symbols painted in blue and yellow stained the warrior’s greasy face. The furry man of the mountains was not chilled by the cold; he stood bare-chested in shin-deep snow, foggy breath roaring in endless fury as he lifted his club for another blow. In the sunlight the mountain men were an abomination for valley eyes to behold, not least for how very real they were. Silhouettes against the fading sun could not give justice to such ferocity: so true, so familiar.22

Durguurd rolled backwards, and hefted his spear. The adversary knew what was coming, and risked his life anyway; he charged. Durguurd’s back and shoulder muscles tightened, and snapped to action. With a raspy, violent cry from the throat of the valley man, the spear sailed through the breathtaking air and lodged deep in the monster’s gut. The beasts could not throw their spears, and so feared the men of the valleys for their ability to kill from afar.23

The mountain man in war paint fell to his huge knees in the snow. Blood washed his hands where he clutched the shaft of the spear. Still his hating stare, still monstrous growl. One hand plunged into the snow to support him now, blood still flowing. Durguurd found he could not look away.24

Those eyes, the eyes of a wild and unyeilding people, bore into Durguurd from behind the matted orange locks that fell over the perishing creature’s malformed face. He growled the word himself before falling into the snow.25

“Gnai-mul!”26

The scream came again. Durguurd left his spear in the keeping of his dying foe to follow Issa’s weakening voice. It rang from a painted cave, where deer and bison adorned the smoke-stained walls. The animals were rendered poorly by the standards of the valley men. Their almost-childish simplicity made them a thing of horror, of revulsion. Bear skulls, revered by mountain people, stood on stakes all round the aperture, sheeted in ice and shining in the sun.27

And there, beneath the grip of a filthy and wild-eyed beast, was Issa.28

Soth had said, with an icy breath, “For all that I hate them, I think that when the battle comes my spear will not end up the bloodiest.”29

30

The people of the valley had finished taking stock of the damage and death by nightfall. Corpses were buried, watches assigned, and meals nervously eaten by those with the stomach for it. Durguurd’s sister Suila sat by a fire with her own man, holding her niece: the infant Ura. They did not eat or talk. They watched the fire, they listened to the weeping and murmuring. There had been no silhouettes on the mountains at sunset, but joy was still scarce.31

A cry was raised on the north side of the village, and every man in the camp leapt up. Even those wounded hours earlier took to their weapons. Each summoned fire to his eyes, until they heard the cause for alert.32

“Durguurd!”33

At this, all who could walk were on their feet. The women closest to the scene screamed. Tears flowed anew, and it was soon known that yet another hole must be dug from the earth.34

Durguurd wandered out of the forest covered in blood and ice, pine needles clinging to hair and pelts. In his arms lay Issa, his woman, limp and without life. Suila cried out sobbing, clutching the infant to her chest. Only one person dared to approache Durguurd with inquiry.35

Soth’s chilling eyes could not unnerve the bloodied warrior any longer; they instead were filled with reverance.36

“How many did you slay, my friend?”37

The red-maned valley man focused on Soth’s face for a moment, then turned to the body of his wife where he had laid her on the ground for the shaman to prepare for burial. Durguurd asked the wizened old man a question.38

“Sha,” he said, “they kept calling out at my approach; some turned and fled at the word they spoke. Do you know their tongue?”39

“I do,” the snowy-haird shaman answered, his one remaining eye stern in its evaluation of Durguurd. “What was the word?”40

“Something like ‘Gnai-mul’.”41

The shaman continued his blessing of Issa’s body. He only answered when he had finished, and the weeping women concealed his words from all but the ears of Durguurd and Soth.42

The shaman said, “Blood-Tracker.”43

Durguurd looked at the blood on his body, and down again to his dead woman. He looked to his crying sister, and to his newborn daughter wrapped so tightly against the cold. He never looked at Soth, but addressed him just the same.44

“Take the mountain, Soth. It’s yours.”45

Soth’s slow smile and dark-eyed departure imparted to all who witnessed it an unnerved feeling of fatal victory, and that perhaps what Durguurd had just said would return someday with graver fates aligned for all. For the moment, however, the valley people were content to return to their fires and resume their mourning.46

Durguurd went to his sister, and took the inant Ura from her arms. The blood on his pelt would not bother the child; she didn’t know what it was just yet. But he had shed it for her.47

Father carried his daughter to the thatched hut he had shared with Issa. He blocked out the light with a pelt and held his only issue to his chest as she cried. Frigid gusts of night air blew in through holes in the hut, so Durguurd wrapped himself and his daughter in what had been Issa’s favorite pelt; her smell still clung to every hair, and pained her family more even as they indulged in it. Until sleep stole them both away from pain, Durguurd sat with Ura beside the freezing firepit and wept among the ashes.48