Some of the Gradi peeled off toward the villages. "They'll steal the animals and burn the huts," Gerin said mournfully.
"Let's make 'em thoughtful about the keep," Van answered. "They haven't got the strength to coop us up in here, though they don't know that yet, either. We'll give 'em one set of lumps, then another."
The Gradi started shooting fire arrows at Fox Keep. A good many of the logs of the palisade, though, were still painted with the gunk Siglorel Shelofas' son had used to keep Balamung the Trokm? from burning the keep with magic fire during the chaos after the werenight. Even all these years later, flames would not catch on them.
Elabonians on the walkway shot back at the Gradi. A couple of the big, burly men out on the grass crumpled. One of them thrashed about, clutching at his shoulder. The other lay very still; the arrow must have found a vital spot.
"Ladders! Ladders!" The cry came from two sides of the palisade at once. One of the ladders peeked over the top of the log fence only a few yards from where Gerin stood. He rushed toward it, and reached it at the same moment as a Gradi swarmed up and tried to scramble onto the walkway.
The raider bawled something at him in an unintelligible language?and swung his axe through a deadly arc. But the Fox ducked under the stroke and thrust the point of his sword through the Gradi's throat before the fellow could fully protect himself with his shield.
The Gradi had eyes bright and blue as a lightning bolt. They went wide in horror and shock. The heavy axe dropped from his hand. He clutched at the spurting wound as he slipped and slid down the ladder. Cries of dismay from below said he was fouling the men behind him.
Gerin leaned forward and shoved at the top of the ladder with all his strength. Two arrows whipped past his head; the fletching on one of them brushed his cheek as it flew past. He ducked away, fast as he could. The Gradi on the bottom part of the ladder shouted as it leaned away from the wall and toppled over with a crash. He looked again. Three or four of them were writhing at the bottom of the ditch. If he had any luck, they'd broken bones.
The cry of "Ladders!" rose again and again, now from all four sides of the square palisade. Three of the ladders went over faster and more easily than the one Gerin toppled?his men had remembered the forked poles kept on the walkway against just such an emergency. At the fourth one, though, around the far side of Castle Fox from Gerin, cries of alarm and the clash of metal against shields and metal against metal said the Gradi had gained a lodgement. Elabonian warriors rushed toward the fighting to hold them in check.
Down in the courtyard, trying to reach the drawbridge through chaos, came Rihwin the Fox and most of his horse-riders. "Let down the bridge!" Gerin yelled to the gate crew. He had to shout several times to gain the crew's attention, and several more to make them believe him. With a squeal of chains, the bridge fell.
The Gradi outside Fox Keep roared in triumph when the drawbridge came down. Maybe they thought their own folk were opening it, to let them into the keep. If they did, they discovered their mistake in short order. A few of them started over the bridge. Rihwin, leading his riders out, skewered the leading Gradi on his spear. His followers rode down the others, trampling them or knocking them into the ditch around the palisade. The shouts of triumph turned to shouts of alarm.
Rihwin and his horsemen smashed through the Gradi who swarmed near the drawbridge and then galloped off toward the stragglers who'd decided to plunder the peasant village. Some they rode down, some they shot with arrows, some they speared. Had the Gradi stuck together in a tight formation, they might have been able to fight back. Instead, they scattered. A running man was no match for a man aboard a speeding horse.
With the riders gone, the Gradi tried once more to rush in over the drawbridge. Gerin's men met them at the gate, slashing with swords, thrusting with spears, and putting their bodies between the invaders and the courtyard.
Gerin hurried down to the yard to help drive away the Gradi. And, step by step, he and his men did exactly that, forcing their bigger foes back across the drawbridge and then gaining the grass on the far side.
That seemed to discomfit the Gradi. Instead of sweeping all before them, here they were swept instead. Gerin pointed toward the Niffet. "Get torches!" he cried. "We'll burn the bastards' boats and see if they can swim home!" His vassals roared in fierce approval. As he'd hoped, some of the Gradi understood Elabonian. They yelled in alarm. Some of them, at first a trickle and then a great flow, began streaming away from Fox Keep and toward the great river.
Gerin looked southward. He wished Rihwin would come galloping back and hit the invaders while they were in disorder. It was probably too much to ask for, but-
No sooner had he wished for it than Rihwin, at the head of most of his riders, charged down on the Gradi. Every once in a while, Rihwin did something right, and, when he did, it was as magnificent as any of his failures. As he'd predicted and as he'd proved by the village, foot soldiers had enormous trouble standing against onrushing horses with armored men on top of them. Neither he nor Gerin had imagined how much alarm the horses would create in a foe. The Gradi were seeing mounted men for the first time, and did not like what they saw.
Neat as you please, Rihwin snatched a torch out of the hand of a running Elabonian and urged his horse ahead until the animal seemed to be all but flying over the ground. He darted past the Gradi as if their rawhide boots had been nailed to the grass and flung the torch into one of the war galleys.
They still had men aboard their ships, to protect them if something went wrong with the attack on Fox Keep. Gerin expected one of those men to douse the torch before the ship caught. But Rihwin's spirit was rewarded with a gift of luck. The torch must have landed in a bucket of pitch or something equally inflammable, for a great pillar of black smoke rose from the galley.
The Gradi howled as if they were being burned. Gerin's men, for their part, howled too, but with fierce joy in their voices. Not all the Gradi gave way to despair, though. A big fellow turned and slashed at the Fox with his axe. Gerin turned the blow with his shield, and felt it all the way up his arm to his shoulder. He knew he had to be careful; the axehead, if it squarely met the facing of the shield, was liable to bite straight through and into his arm.
He thrust at the invader with his sword. The Gradi also got his shield up in time to block the stroke, although he seemed cautious and tentative in meeting a left-handed swordsman.
Clank! A rock the size of a man's fist bounced off the side of the Gradi's helmet. He staggered. His blue, blue eyes suddenly looked distant, his face blank, as if he were drunk. Taking advantage of a stunned man was anything but sporting. The Fox cut him down without a qualm.
"Well done, Father!"
Gerin whirled around. There stood Duren, a helm on his head, a shield on his arm, a sword in his hand?his right hand, for he hadn't taken after his father there. The blade had blood on it.
"Get back to the keep," Gerin snapped. "You've no business here."
"Who says I haven't?" his son retorted. "Who do you think threw that rock at the Gradi? You'd still be fighting him if I hadn't."
Gerin started to shout at Duren, but closed his mouth with a snap before angry words came out. If his son was big enough to do a man's job on the battlefield-and evidently he was-how could the Fox order him back like a boy? The plain truth was, he couldn't.
"Be careful," he said gruffly, and then, "come on."
A pig darted across the field, squealing and threatening with its tushes anyone who came near. Gerin wondered whether some Gradi had hoped to take it away as loot, or whether they'd simply broken the pen confining it to let it run wild. It headed off toward the woods. If one of the villagers didn't track it down there pretty soon, it would be a wild animal again; the difference between domestic swine and wild boars wasn't great.
As the Gradi neared their galleys, they found a shield wall, behind which the men not fighting pushed the surviving ships back into the Niffet and began boarding them. The warriors of the shield wa
ll refused to give ground, but fought in place till they were killed. Their stubborn resistance let most of their comrades escape.
The torches the Elabonians flung at the galleys fell short and died, hissing, in the Niffet. A couple of archers had fire arrows ready to shoot. Most of those missed, too, but one stuck in the timbers at the stern of a ship. Gerin's men cheered at that. The Fox hoped the Gradi wouldn't note the little fire till it had grown into a big one. A bend of the Niffet carried the raiders out of sight before he could find out.
Wearily, he turned and looked back toward Fox Keep. The meadows his chariotry had been churning into a rutted mess now had bodies scattered over them. Some of his men were methodically going from one Gradi on the ground to the next, making sure those bodies were dead ones.
"Take prisoners!" he shouted.
"Why?" Drungo Drago's son shouted back. He was about to smash in the head of a fair-skinned Gradi down with an arrow through the thigh.
"So we can squeeze answers out of them," Gerin told him. "You need to be a patient man to go around questioning corpses." Drungo stared at him, then decided it was a joke and laughed. Had Gerin been the Gradi writhing on the ground in front of him, he didn't think he would have found that laugh pleasing to the ear.
His own men had taken hurts, too. Parol Chickpea, who was a good enough warrior to have lived through a lot of fights but not good enough to come through them unscathed, was binding up a cut on his shield arm. One of the northerners' axes must have hacked right through the shield, as had almost happened to Gerin.
Schild Stoutstaff was hobbling around, using his spear as a stick. When Gerin asked how he was, he gritted his teeth and answered, "I expect I'll heal. The cut runs up and down" — he pointed to his calf- "not straight across. If I'd got it that way, the bastard would have hamstrung me."
"Go back to the keep and have them wash it out with ale," Gerin told him. "It'll burn like fire, but it makes the wound less likely to rot."
"I'll do that, lord prince," Schild said. "You're clever about those things, I can't deny." He limped back toward the castle, blood soaking the bandage he'd ripped from his tunic and trickling down his heel onto the grass.
Gerin headed back to Fox Keep at a pace no better than Schild's. Not only was he weary past belief, almost past comprehension, but he also wanted a closer look at the damage his holding and his army had suffered. Hagop son of Hovan, his neighbor to the east, whose holding had acknowledged his suzerainty since not long after the werenight, crouched by a corpse that looked like him-maybe a younger brother, maybe a son. He did not look up as the Fox walked by.
The thump of hooves on turf made Gerin turn his head. Rihwin the Fox was having a little trouble controlling his horse, which might not have cared for the stink of blood so thick in the air even human nostrils could smell it. The animal kept rolling its eyes and trying to sidestep, almost as if it were skipping. It snorted, and looked for a moment as if it would rear, but Rihwin, leaning forward and speaking to it in a coaxing voice, persuaded it to keep all four feet on the ground.
"By Dyaus All-Father, my fellow Fox, you couldn't have done that better if we'd done nothing but practice it for the past year," Gerin told him. He turned and pointed back toward the war galley Rihwin had fired, which still crackled and burned and sent a great cloud of smoke into the sky. "And that-that was better than I'd dared hope."
"It did work rather well, didn't it?" Rihwin said. "We were here, we were there, with almost no time between being one place and the other. And wherever we were, the Gradi gave way before us, though they have a name for ferocity." He looked back at the carnage on the field and shook his head. "So much happened so fast. Astonishing, lord prince."
It wasn't done happening yet, either. Not quite all the Gradi had been flushed out of the village south of Fox Keep. There was fighting on the winding lanes that ran through the huts of the village. Gerin watched a couple of raiders flee into the forest with Elabonians pounding after them. "If the troopers don't get them, the serfs likely will," he said. "If they don't have ambushes set already, I miss my guess. And they know those woods the way they know the feel of their wives' backsides in their hands."
"Or maybe the backsides of their neighbors' wives," Rihwin said.
"If they're at all like you, that's probably the way of it," Gerin agreed.
Rihwin glared, then started to laugh. "That barb has too much truth in it for me to deny."
"Hasn't stopped you before," Gerin said, which got him another glare.
Back at Fox Keep, the men on the palisade raised a cheer when they recognized their overlord. "We beat the bastards back," one of them shouted, and in a moment they all took up the cry. The ditch around the palisade was full of dead Gradi. A few live men were trapped down there, too. They'd leaped in to try to swarm up the scaling ladders, only to find that those went down almost as fast as they went up.
Gerin looked with some curiosity from them to his troopers who peered over the top of the palisade to watch them. "I'd have expected you to have finished them by now," he called to his men.
"If you want us to, we will, lord prince," Bevander Bevon's son called back. "Your wife said you'd be likely to want them alive for questioning, and when the lady Selatre says something, we know it's best to listen to her."
That might have been because the warriors respected Selatre's own good sense, or because they still felt awe for the god who had spoken through her and wondered whether Biton might still inform her thoughts. Gerin sometimes wondered that himself. He said, "She's right, of course." However she did it, she knew him almost better than he knew himself. Walking up to the edge of the ditch, he called down to the Gradi, "Surrender and you'll live."
For a moment, the big men down in there did not respond. He wondered if they knew Elabonian. Then one of them said, "We live, you make us slaves?"
"Well, of course," Gerin answered. "What else am I going to do with you? Give you a barony? Turn out my peasants so you can have a farm?"
"You make us slaves, what we do?" the Gradi asked.
"Whatever I tell you to do," the Fox snapped. "If you're a slave, that's the end of the stick you're holding. If I put you in the mines to grub out copper or tin, you do that. And if I have you walking a water wheel, you walk it and thank the gods you're alive to do the walking."
"My gods, Voldar and comrades, they ashamed if I do these things," the raider replied. Drawing a dagger from a sheath on his belt, he muttered something in his own guttural language and plunged the knife into his chest. He tried to cry out, but blood pouring from his mouth and nose drowned his words. Slowly, he crumpled.
As if watching him inspired them, the rest of the Gradi also slew themselves-except for two who slew each other, each ramming his knife into the other's throat at the same instant. "Voldar!" each cried the moment before his end came.
"Father!" Duren said, gulping. He'd come through his first battle fine-better than Gerin had, at about the same age-but this…
"I've never seen anything like it in all my life," the Fox said. He was sickened, too. Facing death on the field was one thing. If you were a warrior, that was what you did, not least so you could reap the rewards of triumph. But to embrace death as if it were a lover… you had to be mad to do that, he thought.
"Is Voldar their chief god?" Duren asked, seeking, as men will, an explanation for the inexplicable.
"I don't know," Gerin said. "Too much about the Gradi I don't know. Van went through their country; maybe he can tell us something of what gods they have." Something else occurred to him. He raised his voice to a great shout: "Bind the prisoners well. Don't let them harm themselves."
From the palisade, Bevander said, "None of the warriors who made it up to the walkway by that one ladder yielded. They all fell fighting."
"That, at least, doesn't surprise me," Gerin answered. "Their blood was up, and so was ours. Even if they had tried to surrender, we might have slain them out of hand. This, though-" He pointed down into the ditch, th
en shook his head. The most articulate man in the northlands save perhaps Rihwin, he was speechless in the face of the self-murdered Gradi.
He looked over the battlefield till he spotted Van of the Strong Arm. He waved to him, but the outlander did not see. The Fox turned to Duren. "Go fetch Van here. Because he went through the country of the Gradi, he's two ahead of anyone else around."
"Aye, Father." Duren loped off. Gerin looked at him with a small stir of jealousy for his son's limber youth. He could feel himself stiffening up already; for the next couple of days he'd be hobbling around like an old man.
Van came trotting back with the Fox's son. If he felt any twinges, he didn't let on. "They killed themselves?" he called to Gerin. "That's the tale the lad here tells."
"See for yourself." Gerin pointed down into the ditch. "Some of them called on Voldar as they did it. Is he their chief god?"
"She-goddess," Van answered. "She's cold as ice, any way you care to take that. They love her madly, the Gradi do, though they know she doesn't love them." He shrugged. "If they didn't love her, they say, the land they live in would be bleaker yet, though how that could be, I tell you, is past anything my poor wits can fathom. But she's that kind of goddess. If I were one of hers, I'd not want to make her angry at me, and that's for true."
"Surrendering after you've lost a fight would anger her?" the Fox asked.
"So it would, to hear the Gradi tell it." Van frowned. "Or so I thought I heard it, not knowing their tongue any too well, and so I remember it, not having been in the Gradi country for going on twenty years now."
"As I told Duren, you may not know much, but whatever you do know puts you ahead of everyone else here," Gerin told him. "Do you still remember any of what you learned of their speech?"
Van's frowned deepened. "A few words come back, no more-no surprise, when for so long I've used Elabonian and a bit of the Trokm- tongue and none of the rest of the languages I once knew."
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