by David Drake
“That’s the last of the hunters,” Sith said. “The men fishing in the Ice River arrived in the night. Now Frothi can hold his council.”
Though Bearn averted his eyes, the hunters were looking at Corylus with interest. He waved. Hercules knew what they thought of the gesture, but at least it was better than standing like a prisoner tied to a post for archery practice.
“Is Frothi calling a council because of Odd’s death?” he asked.
Sith looked at him. “Frothi is calling the council to deal with you, Corylus,” she said. “Since he’s afraid to face you alone.”
Corylus turned. As he’d expected, Frothi was glaring at his back. The chief spoke sidelong to Todinn, who held a horn hollowed from a section of mammoth tusk. He lifted it and blatted with far less music than the hairy elephants managed when they called to one another. People quit their tasks and rose from where they were sitting.
“Come,” said Sith, touching his arm as she joined the movement down into the shallow crater. “You faced down Frothi yesterday. Perhaps you can do so again.”
“Sith?” he said. People were eyeing the two of them, not hostilely but certainly without any sign of fellow feeling. Again he had the feeling that he was being led into the arena to entertain the citizenry. “Would the men fishing on the river have buried Odd if I hadn’t? Or brought his body back to you? Ah, to the tribe, I mean.”
“Odd went to the Isle of Dreams,” Sith said. “No one but a wizard would have dared to do that, Corylus. Our people don’t fish that part of the river.”
She looked at him. “You went to Odd, or he drew you to him,” she said. “Like called to like.”
The bowl was several hundred feet across; the gentle slope of the sides made it a natural amphitheater. The grass of the interior was shorter and obviously less diverse than that of the surrounding prairie.
Corylus thought the air had a tinge of sulfur, but that could have been a trick his mind was playing on him. After living in the shadow of Vesuvius, he knew a volcano even when it must have long been dormant—and he knew the bite of a volcano’s breath.
Corylus held the hornbeam staff in his right hand and let the fingertips of his left run along the smooth wood. He felt a cool, sturdy woman gazing through his eyes from a vast distance. The staff must be very old.
Sith intended to go to the middle of the arc of spectators, facing Frothi and his three henchmen. Nemastes stood with them, but he kept slightly back from the men of the tribe. His hulking servant squatted on the ground well behind him. The Stolo was worrying a rack of reindeer ribs; at regular intervals a crackling announced that he had just crushed more of the bone between his great molars.
Corylus deliberately took Sith with him to the right end, where the old women had been relegated. For him to succeed, the whole tribe had to be able to see him. A place on one end of the arc was the best way of achieving that.
The tribe was assembled. Todinn raised his ivory horn again. Before he could sound it, Corylus cried, “People of the tribe! I come to you for justice! I ask you to make over to me the flute which Odd gave me but which Frothi unjustly holds!”
There was general consternation: folk gasped or muttered to one another. Todinn paused with his lips on the trumpet, then lowered it. He looked at Frothi, but the chief was too consumed by anger at Corylus to notice anyone else at the moment.
“The goods of my brother Odd are mine—if Odd is really dead!” Frothi said. In sudden decision, he reached under the pegged closure of his deerskin shirt and came out with a curved black bone a foot long. He waved it over his head.
At first Corylus thought the instrument was made from the bone of a man’s calf, though the color puzzled him. The joint on the upper end was wrong for a human, though: it was more like that of a lizard which walked with its legs splayed out.
Frothi swept the crowd with his eyes, but his henchmen and Nemastes were staring at the stranger. The Stolo dropped the remaining ribs and glared also, hunching forward. He bared his teeth again; Corylus thought he heard a rasping growl, like that of an agitated lion.
“Odd is certainly dead, Frothi,” Corylus said. “As I who buried him know, and as you know for better reason yet.”
The acoustics of the bowl were excellent. Spectators on the far end edged forward from the slope so that they could look at the speaker, but their faces weren’t scrunched up in frustration at not being able to make out his words.
“Odd is my brother!” Frothi said. His face had gone pale, then flushed again. “If he lives, I’ll give the flute to him on his return. If he in truth is dead, the flute is mine by right of kinship.”
“Aye, Frothi,” called a man unseen in the crowd. The words were spoken toward the slope, but the echo was clearly audible. “Your wife is his widow!”
There was laughter. Frothi’s eyes became unfocused, and the flute in his hand trembled with rage.
“People of the tribe!” Corylus said. “I buried Odd’s body. For that duty, his spirit gave the flute to me. Do you doubt me, Frothi?”
He pointed his left arm toward the chieftain. Pitching his voice so that everyone in the bowl could hear him, he said, “Then call Odd from his tomb! Call him here, and he’ll repeat the gift his spirit made to me! And perhaps, Frothi, your brother will do another thing as well. Call him and see!”
Corylus wondered what would happen if the chief did call his bluff by summoning Odd. Nothing, probably. Odd was certainly dead, and the sun this morning was too bright to be dimmed by phantoms. But though Odd had been buried, his vengeance was nevertheless alive—especially in the eyes of Sith as she looked at her husband.
Frothi’s henchmen exchanged concerned glances. Bearn leaned close to his chief and whispered something that Corylus couldn’t overhear.
Nemastes stepped between the two tribesmen, thrusting them apart by the force of his personality. “No!” he said. He held the ivory talisman in his fist under Bearn’s nose. “You must not give the flute to this stranger!”
Bearn held javelins and a throwing stick in his left hand. He snatched one of the flint-pointed darts with his right and raised it as if to stab.
Nemastes muttered something which sent the henchman staggering back. There was a general cry of anger and dismay from the assembly. Women snatched their younger offspring and scrambled back, while the men fitted javelins into the knuckles of their throwing sticks. The Stolo stepped in front of his master, growling openly.
“My people!” Frothi said, raising both his hands empty. He’d slipped the flute back out of sight within his shirt.
Nemastes tried to whisper in his ear. The chief shook him angrily away. He doesn’t like the foreign wizard giving orders either, Corylus thought with a smile.
“My people!” Frothi repeated. “I will give the flute to this stranger—if you and the gods desire it!”
Corylus stepped forward, holding his open left hand out. The stick was in his right hand, vertical at his side. It can’t end so easily!
But maybe it was going to. Nemastes retreated, though he held the talisman up. Was he preparing to call the ancient wizard from out of the ivory again? The Stolo, whining uncertainly, backed with him.
“A moment, stranger!” Frothi said. “My people—the gods must state their will, must they not? The stranger must undergo a trial!”
Corylus felt as though he were running on ice. So long as he set his feet squarely each time, he would be all right. If he lost his balance by even a hair, however, he’d go down and never rise again.
“What trial do you propose, brother of Odd who was drowned?” Corylus said. He wished that Pandareus could see him now, using rhetorical training in a contest that probably meant his life. His enunciation was perfect, and he projected his voice so that it filled the bowl.
“You say that my brother drowned in the Ice River, stranger?” Frothi said. He’d regained his composure. “Is that so?”
“Yes,” said Corylus. Sith was at his side, trembling like a cold flame. “A
nd his body is buried on the river’s bank even now.”
“Will you fill a cup with water from the river at the place where Odd was drowned, then?” Frothi said. “If you do that, I will give you the flute. Do you agree to the trial, stranger?”
“It’s a trick!” Sith whispered. Corylus brushed her aside in irritation, lost in the moment. Of course it’s a trick! But it’s the only way.
“I accept your trial, Frothi!” he said. “But be sure of this: when I have completed that trial, the flute is mine as your brother wished. Justice and your own people will make sure of that, and I will make sure of it too.”
“Very good!” said the chief triumphantly. “You know where the river is, you say—so here is the cup. We’re standing in it, stranger! Fill this cup in the plain from the Ice River!”
The spectators hooted with approval. By playing a clever trick on a stranger, Frothi had won the tribe’s renewed support. Bearn slapped the chief on the back; Todinn and Gram hugged him from the other side.
“I warned you!” Sith said, her voice an angry rustle like a viper in dry leaves.
The only face that wasn’t filled with cheerful delight was that of Nemastes. The wizard eyed Frothi with a mixture of fear and anger. He turned when he felt the glance of Corylus and fled up the slope toward the camp.
“I’ll be back to claim my flute, Frothi!” Corylus said. “And it may be that your brother will return with me!”
Corylus had no idea of how he could succeed in filling the crater from the river miles to the north, so the look on the chieftain’s face might be the only triumph he got out of this business. That was a real triumph, though.
ALPHENA WAS HUNGRY. Maron had found them plenty of fruit to eat on the way, but nothing really felt like food in her stomach except bread.
The faun had killed and eaten several small animals as they went along too. He’d offered Alphena a piece of something she’d decided was a bird, but he’d laughed when she asked if he was going to cook it first. She certainly didn’t know how to build a fire.
It had to be a bird, because women didn’t have wings and no real woman was only six inches high. Still, Alphena wasn’t sure she’d have been able to eat that meat even if it was cooked, and she really wished that Maron hadn’t sucked the bones clean with such loud enthusiasm as they paced along.
“What’s that ahead of us?” Hedia asked. “It’s a building, isn’t it?”
An hour ago they’d come out of the forest; now they were on grassland. The loamy soil was easier to walk on than stones hidden in the leaf mold of the forest, but Alphena didn’t care one way or another: her army-pattern boots protected her feet from any surface. Her stepmother wore light sandals and was probably glad of the change, though.
“That?” said the faun. “Oh, that’s a tomb—a wizard’s tomb, they say, but I don’t know anybody who saw it built. Nobody really knows.”
He laughed. “You won’t find a chamber with feather mattresses for you to sleep on, Hedia,” he added. “Nor banquet table for you with all manner of cooked meats, girlie. Cooked! Cooking drives out all the flavor!”
“I don’t care about meat,” Alphena muttered. “I’d just like a round of wheat bread and a little oil to dip it into.”
The faun had already faced front again. “And I don’t like to be called ‘girlie,’” she said, though she knew he wouldn’t pay any attention even if he had heard her.
She’d thought the slope-sided structure ahead was a natural formation, like the cliffs of Capri. It was at least two hundred feet in diameter, too large to seem artificial at a first glance.
When Alphena shaded her eyes with her hand, though, she saw that it was built almost vertically of stone blocks from the mounded earth at the bottom to at least fifty feet above, where the slope slanted back sharply. The face of the structure was carved with a molding like a door in the middle. In the center was a cross with a loop instead of the top upright.
“That’s an ankh on the door,” said Hedia in surprise. “You say it’s a tomb? Was the person buried there Egyptian—or a priest of Isis, perhaps?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Maron. “A wizard was all I heard.”
“That can’t be a door, can it?” Alphena said. “Isn’t it too big?”
“No, you’re right,” Hedia agreed. “It must just be decoration. The real entrance would be in the mound, probably hidden.”
“Why would anyone want to go inside a building anyway?” the faun said in grumpy disdain. “We’ll stop in the palm grove, though. There’s a well, and you can have some dates if you like.”
He grinned over his shoulder to Alphena. “And you, girlie? Sometimes there’s mice in the palm groves. Delicious little things, and you can hear them calling for their mommies as you swallow them down. Would you like me to catch a few for you?”
“No thank you, Master Maron,” Alphena said stiffly. He was mocking her. She wanted to make him beg forgiveness at the point of her sword, but that wasn’t a very practical way to deal with a guide. The alternative was to be primly ladylike.
Hedia turned to Alphena and nodded approval; Alphena found herself smiling in response. Hedia had probably been surprised to learn that the deportment teachers she’d provided to Alphena had actually had an impact.
Palms and a scattering of succulents with tough gray skins grew near the base of the tomb. The grove was to the right of the mound as they approached; Alphena couldn’t say south or east, because there was no sun, just the uniform illumination above.
The sky had been growing dimmer for some time, though. She wondered if there would be stars or a moon when it became darker still.
“Something’s moving in the palm trees,” Hedia said. Her voice was clear, but she sounded more as if she were bored than sounding a warning.
“Is there, now?” the faun said, taking the long club off his right shoulder. He sauntered forward; his body was more obviously taut than it had been. “Well, we’ll see them off, won’t we?”
Alphena stopped uncertainly; she drew her sword. She willed herself to see the movement that Hedia had noticed, but in truth she saw nothing but faint shade and the succulents.
“Come, Daughter,” Hedia said. “We don’t want to crowd him, but we don’t want to be too far away either. In case something has circled behind us.”
Alphena jerked her head around. There was nothing behind them. The sky seemed noticeably darker. She wished they could have a fire.
“All right,” she said, nervous and frustrated. She had the sword, which she was well trained to use. Even so, she felt comforted that Hedia was with her.
What could Hedia do if another sphinx attacked them? Alphena grinned despite herself. Like as not, Hedia would figure something out.
A woman came toward them out of the grove. Though the sky was the pale violet shade of early evening, her eyes flickered like emeralds.
“She’s not human!” Alphena said.
“No, she’s not,” said Hedia in a grimly ironic tone. “She’s far too attractive to be human.”
“Well,” said Maron, his voice huskier than it had been a moment before, “at any rate, she doesn’t look hostile.”
The woman—the nymph—was tall and slender except for large breasts which didn’t sag the way they should. Her hair was probably black, but it seemed to catch highlights from the sky. She smiled at Maron, but the only sound she made was the whisper of her feet on the sand.
“It may be a trick!” said Alphena.
The faun laughed and continued walking toward the nymph. He twirled his club out at his side, making dips and curlicues with it. He must be remarkably dexterous when you considered that his baton was merely a length of sapling which didn’t even have the bark smoothed off.
“Well, it could be!” Alphena muttered angrily.
“I suppose it could,” said Hedia, taking her arm. “But I don’t believe it any more than Maron does. That sort doesn’t have room in their tiny brains for anything as complicated as tre
achery.”
Alphena looked at her in surprise. “You’ve met these, these, before?” she said.
“Only the human variety,” Hedia said drily. “I doubt there’s much difference, though. Come, let’s find the well.”
“Look at her!” Alphena said. “She’s holding him by the cock! She’s leading him!”
“Yes,” said Hedia. “Ordinarily I’ve heard that statement used figuratively, though in this place it may be more common than it is in Carce. Or even in Baiae.”
She tugged Alphena’s arm gently. The faun and the nymph had sunk out of sight behind a screen of succulents at the edge of the grove.
“We’ll be better for a drink of water,” Hedia said. “I don’t think Maron will be ready to leave for some while. He has a great deal of stamina, that one—I suspect.”
Alphena followed her stepmother into the palms twenty feet away from where the other pair had vanished. She didn’t look in that direction, but she couldn’t help hearing Maron wheezing like steam escaping from under the lid of a pot.
Three more nymphs drifted from the direction of the tomb. They were headed for where the faun and their sister lay. They can’t see him! Do they smell him?
Alphena blushed, realizing that they probably did smell him. Smell them.
“Here, dear,” Hedia said. “There’s no well curb, but the water seems clean enough. I’ll watch while you dip some up in your hand, shall we?”
Alphena knelt abruptly. She wondered if her cheeks would cool if she sank her face in the pool.
HEDIA WAS ANGRY, which in itself irritated and angered her. She didn’t usually feel this way, not because she was—she smiled at the thought—unusually equable, but because she ordinarily either solved problems immediately or just as quickly moved them out of her life.
“Haw!” Maron snorted from nearby in the darkness. “Haw! Haw!”
“What’s he doing?” Alphena asked plaintively. “I mean, he can’t be, can he? How many times would that be?”