Treasures of Fantasy - Margaret Weis [77]
Bjorn grabbed hold of his brother’s blanket and gave it a tug, rolling Erdmun out onto the deck. The others laughed and yawned and grimaced at the pain and stretched. Aylaen rose and went off alone to perform her ablutions.
“Repairing the ship is a good plan,” Sigurd said. “I was going to give the order myself.”
“Of course you were,” said Skylan.
Clouds rolled in, obscuring the sun. Morning dawned cool, gray, and drizzly. The villa that stood on the hilltop was blotted out by the mist rising from the river. Sigurd stood on the deck, gazing northward.
“I think about my two sons,” he said suddenly. “They are of an age to stand in the shield wall. I was training them for war. They are good boys, but they are not ready. And now who will teach them?”
He sighed deeply and shook his head.
Skylan was startled. The dour Sigurd was never one to share his feelings. Sigurd saw Skylan’s sympathetic look and the older man’s expression hardened. He was clearly sorry he had spoken.
“I am the one in charge,” he said harshly. “You will follow my orders, not give orders of your own.”
Skylan shrugged. Sigurd seemed disappointed that Skylan had given way so easily. Perhaps he was hungering for a fight. Perhaps, like Skylan, he felt the need to lash out.
“I am Chief. I drew first blood. Someday, you must accept that,” Sigurd said.
“Someday,” Skylan said, and then he grinned. “But not this day.” He looked at Sigurd and, to his astonishment, Sigurd grinned back.
The first task of the Torgun would be to reattach the dragonhead prow. The Legate’s carpenters had failed, but they did not know this ship. Skylan and Sigurd and Aki, who had worked for some time as a carpenter and shipbuilder, studied the prow and discussed ways to mount it.
The prow had been carved from a single piece of wood. The break was clean, as though the beast’s neck had snapped off at the shoulders. Aki conceived the idea of carving a peg into the bottom of the “neck,” drilling a hole into the “shoulders,” and then fitting the peg into the hole.
This would be a temporary repair. When they returned to their homeland, they would build a new ship to honor the Dragon Kahg. When Erdmun said something about the dragon being dead, Sigurd set him to scrubbing the decks.
The soldiers had hauled away the sea chest containing the weapons, but they had left behind the tools. The Torgun set to work. Aylaen brought food: bread (soggy from the rain), goat cheese, and the olives that were a part of every meal.
At about midday, with the work on the prow going slowly, Sigurd decreed they should stop. They needed to keep in training for the day when they would have to fight.
The Vindrasi warriors did not generally train as a unit, not like the Southlanders, as Skylan had learned from talking to Zahakis. Skylan had listened with considerable skepticism to the Tribune explaining how he drilled his soldiers, taught them to march and fight in formations that could wheel and shift upon the battlefield to match the flow of the action. He talked of siege towers filled with men rolling up to the walls of great cities, machines that could hurl globs of fire.
He had thought Zahakis was making most of this up until he had seen the city of Sinaria and the wall that surrounded it and the walls within the walls that guarded the palace and the Temple. He had watched Zahakis’s soldiers march in lockstep, performing complicated maneuvers, showing off their skills in the parade. At one point they had closed ranks to form a compact square. Those on the outside of the square locked their shields together, while those in the center raised their shields over their heads, forming what Zahakis called the “turtle.”
“Protects from spears and arrows,” Zahakis had explained, and Skylan had watched and marveled.
Skylan took his place alongside Bjorn and waited to hear what Sigurd had planned. Since the Torgun had no weapons and could not practice