Free Dubh-Linn: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 2) by James L. Nelson Page B

of men sparking cooking fires or collapsed in exhaustion or tending to their wounded or moaning their lives away. He walked clear of them all, toward the distant town of Cloyne where he could see a few fires already burning. He sat, cross-legged, staring out toward the town. He was not alone, he realized; he sensed a presence behind. He turned to see Starri Deathless sit in the grass as well, fifteen feet away. Starri did not speak, he did not look at Thorgrim. He just sat.
      Normally, Thorgrim would not tolerate the near presence of another when the black mood was on him. Sure, at times he might find himself on shipboard, or crowded in a small house in foul weather, and at those time there would be men near, but they would keep their distance, and that made it tolerable. Never, never had someone deliberately tried to keep company with Thorgrim at such a time.
      But somehow Starri, he found, was like a seamless piece of the whole thing, his presence neither an irritant nor a comfort, like an evening when the temperature is perfectly moderate, as if there was no temperature at all. Thorgrim turned away without a word and looked back into the distance and the fading light.
      The gray evening yielded slowly to dark night, and Thorgrim sat and stared out into the distance, and then into the blackness, which was punctuated by only a few bright and undulating spots of light, camp fires or torches in the far off town. He felt the blackness welling up in him. His thoughts were an incoherent jumble, there were no words in his head, at least none in any language known to man, no motion in his body; he was all mood and feeling and instinct.
      And then, sometime later, though he had no sense of time passing, he was running, moving swiftly along the grassy hills, keeping to the dark places. He felt strong and lithe. The wound in his chest gave him no pain. The monastery of Cloyne was ahead, and the little town that clustered around it. The air was rich with smells he had not noticed before; hearth fires, cooked meat, men and women (he could differentiate the smells now), fresh turned earth, moldering straw on the dirt floors of the home. Fear.
      He came in closer, not afraid, he had no fear, but wary of the places where men lived. The night was overcast, but not black. The dirt walls of the ring fort were near, blocking out the dull light overhead. The walls were crowned with a fringe of sharpened pikes shaped from small trees, making an overhang on which an attacking army would be caught up and slaughtered as they went over the wall. The dark tower rose up from the unseen monastery like some mythical giant, keeping its ceaseless watch over the countryside.
      There were voices coming from the ringfort now. The words made no sense, but he could feel the tones. There was anger, and more fear. There were men moving, a lot of men. He could smell horses and hear their hooves on the soft ground. He could hear weapons clattering. A worn, bare patch of ground that might have been construed as a road circled the walls. Thorgrim steered clear of that, and instead slipped into a shallow gully that paralleled the ringfort and there he moved silently through the shadows.
      At length he came to a place where he could see the regular walls of the ringfort broken by massive wooden doors, twenty feet wide, as high as the walls and just as impenetrable. On either side of the doors, standing atop the walls, were armed men with torches, and fires burning on the ground approaching the gate, so that no one, not even Thorgrim Night Wolf, could approach unseen.
      And as he watched, the gate swung open and a column of men emerged, moving in some semblance of regular order. Thorgrim tensed, moved farther back into the shadow. Voices called out and others replied and Thorgrim could sense the anger in the strange words. This meant something, this was important, these armed men sallying out from the ringfort, but he did not know what it signified.